A Moment of Madness
Well, I feel terrible about it now, obviously. I don’t know what came over me.
I suppose everything just built up over the years. We started on the same day, you know, over 20 years ago. It’s a long time to spend at the same school but it’s very rural here and I only have a bike.
From the word go she wanted nothing to do with me, stole credit for my ideas and put me down in front of colleagues to make herself look good. It was when she started wearing corporate suits to work to underline her superiority that I believe I actually began to hate her.
I remember her delight on bursting into a classroom while I was fighting a losing battle for control of 4B. “Oh, Miss Edwards, I’m sorry – I didn’t think a class this noisy could possibly have a teacher in the room.” She ducked out of the classroom door with a nasty smile and went to spread the word.
She’s deputy head now and, if I were the headmaster, I wouldn’t lie on my back for fear of pushing her knife in further. The kids hate her as well; she holds the record for inflicting detentions and you can see she’s just itching for the cane to be brought back.
It happened after a particularly long and tedious staff meeting during which she not only managed to remind the headmaster that it was one of my pupils who’d somehow managed to get drunk on a school trip to Whipsnade Zoo, but also stole my ideas for the revamping of the assembly hall. She swept out of the meeting room with a smirk, smug as a bug while I stayed in my chair, quietly fuming until everyone else had gone.
On my way out I remembered I had a whiteboard marker in my handbag and, as though it was someone else doing it and not me at all, I took it out and daubed, ‘Miss Pritchard is a…’ Well, you can use your imagination.
I felt the most dreadful remorse this morning when I came in and a terrible hullaballoo greeted me in the staff room. The headmaster was furious and determined to find the culprit. Rude graffiti concerning teachers is nothing new of course, but I’d written it very large indeed in the entrance hall and it’s the first thing you see when you walk into the school now.
Of course, no one is going to suspect me, respectable spinster of this parish. But the headmaster has the entire school in the assembly hall, sitting in silence until the culprit owns up.
I don’t know what to do.
