Mrs Saferi's Books

For our 1978 Christmas play most classes at Woodham Burn Juniors were doing quickie nativities or naff pantomimes, as usual. Not Mrs Saferi. She had us lot doing a specially shortened – ‘abridged’, she explained - version of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt.

I, like most of our class, was a troll. We had to cut up old clothes and lumber about menacingly, brandishing percussion instruments. Vicki G was cast as a slimy character called The Crooked One, rolling about on the floor swathed in bubble-wrap and noisily tempting the hero. Mr Robson the headmaster came to our dress rehearsal and told us solemnly that The Crooked One would probably have to stand up and not wriggle on the floor so much, if she wanted to be seen from the back of the school hall.

The Christmas concert was a big do. Mr Robson used a microphone and did a whole comedy routine. We could tell he was showing off to the parents, who became quite rowdy. There was a huge raffle for hampers and he produced tickets out of the hat with quite a flourish. We’d all donated tins and comestibles and they were in boxes decorated with multi-coloured cellophane and bows. Mrs O’Connor the school secretary had been on with making those for hours. Everyone wanted to win one. We didn’t.

And we were all trolls, our whole class. We were all over-excited, being in school when it was dark outside, and the place was noisy with grown-ups and their laughter, and Christmas was coming. Only a few people said that our show, out of each class’s, was the least Christmassy. But we didn’t care. It had been a special production, quite unlike the rest. It was all Mrs Saferi’s idea.

Mrs Saferi looked like Barbra Streisand and she wore a poncho. She had us singing Melanie’s, ‘Look What They’ve Done to My Song, Ma.’ All of class Six belting this out. She had travelled as a student and lived on a kibbutz. She had us singing Kum-by-ya in assembly. She had been Miss Longstaff when we first knew her, but she had married an Italian man during one school holiday. We all stared at her. She was one of the most exotic people we had ever seen in Aycliffe, and that was saying something.

She used to walk home along the Burn with a whole gang of kids around her, singing like we were all in the Sound of Music together, if the Sound of Music had been set on a council estate in the North East. She lived on our estate. None of the other teachers lived anywhere near us, on the Agnew estates.

At the end of one summer term she did this brilliant thing. We were all queueing to leave the classroom and she had made up little parcels of sweets for us to take home. Teachers often did that. When it came to my turn she handed me something else – a brown paper parcel. She explained that the books it contained had been her favourites back when she was my age, back in the Sixties. These were her actual copies. They weren’t for keeps, of course. They were for me to look after during the six weeks’ summer holiday. The long summer holidays on the blackhouses estate in Aycliffe, the year the tarmac melted on the winding roads, and they built the doomed boating lake near our street.

I went home with a bundle of Puffins – Five Children and It, Voyage of the Dawn Treader, The Borrowers Afield and Worzel Gummidge and Saucy Nancy. She knew that I was a real reader. She knew I had books of my own and that I was in the town library. But she particularly wanted me to have these books she had loved. Maybe she thought I spent too much time reading Terrance Dicks and Doctor Who?

Funny thing – though some of the other kids laughed, like I’d been given extra homework – I never felt like that. I felt like I’d been trusted with something for a few weeks, like I’d been asked to take home and care for the class guinea pig or something. I also had to make sure that I read the books properly and carefully and was ready to answer any questions she might have about them, to test me out. But she never did. When I gave her them back that September she just smiled and took the books and put them in her bag.

They were all summery books. I’ve been rereading various children’s books this summer, including some of the above. Some of the best begin with going off on holiday. Arriving somewhere new, not home, and starting an adventure. I always liked wintry books that begin that way, too. It was a massive gift, that lend from Mrs Saferi. I wonder if she knew at the time it was such a big deal.