Windfall.

We had a great interest in ghosts, prompted by a fear of being called a shitebag for turning down a dare when we were younger. In a less than spooky way, it might even have been stronger than our allegiance to playing football, or our general interest in girls and their shortcomings.

When we got to Primary Five, we were self-assured enough to realise school was a waste of our time. We pretty much knew everything we’d need to know. We could read and write and the answers to SRA were in the back of the book. Life was pretty simple.

Our teacher until then had stretched from the large hipped to the full-bust matron that dressed in navy blue. A non-stick uniform that no small hands could grip onto without feeling the wrath of a tight squeeze, a full nip, a ruler across the knuckles without even thinking about it.

We learned in a simple way that not all teachers were like that. Miss Russell’s curriculum viate was in beauty. When she wrote her name on the blackboard in white chalk, she might as well have been engraving the letters on our hearts. When she clapped her hands together to dissipate the chalk dust, we giggled away our sense of awe as if she’d performed a magic trick and the real teacher would emerge.

When she took the register in the morning I was always thrown back to the Biblical notion that ‘her voice fell gently as the rain’.

When Beaky Behan arrived late, red faced and stuttering full of excuses, she listened and smiled in a way that made me want to be late too.

The girls worked out when her birthday was by some method that boys would never be able to fathom. We chipped in our tuppences and five and ten pences—even Beaky Behan. We gathered daffodils from the Old Folk’s Home that didn’t need them, and stuck a bunch of them on her desk with a box of Dairy Milk we’d bought.

Our whole class sat quietly in their seats, bent forward as if a giant hand had pushed our necks forward as we waited for her to arrive.

When she saw the gifts on her desk, she said, ‘Oh dear!’

‘Many Happy Returns,’ we chimed.  

Holding her hands together like a petite white purse, she rocked on her heals and sniffed and cried.

Some of the other girls cried too. Ann Gallagher had to be escorted out of the class to wash her face and get a drink of cool water.

We didn’t know where Miss Russell went after school. I guess we thought she just disappeared into the ether like the other, older teachers. She only belonged to us during the nine-to-four school term. But we just knew that she’d be our teacher in Primary Six and then Primary Seven. Somehow Miss Russell would wangle it so she was also our registration teacher when we went to High School, where they stuck your head down the lavatory pan.

When we got back to school after the Easter Holiday, another teacher sat behind the desk, Miss Russell should have been sitting at. We were familiar with Miss Brown from Primary Two. But we were all grown up now

She clapped her hands together, but the old magic was gone. She explained she’d be filling in because Miss Russell wasn’t well. ‘I’d ask you to pray for her,’ she said. ‘Because God listens, in particular, to children’s prayers.’

That made sense, but if God had listened to our prayers he’d have taken Miss Brown instead.

Sometimes when my sister went to put flowers on our parent’s grave she’d cadge a lift off me. She’d pour out the rancid water and look about searching for a receptacle to carry clean water and putter about cleaning things that didn’t need cleaned.

I’d wander away along the gravel paths for a smoke, paying little attention to the longer grass. I flicked the dout towards a weathered tombstone. It fell among the daffodils growing around it.

I never told anybody I’d seen Miss Russell. Not even my sister. I was struck dumb by how young my old teacher looked.

She looked at me in the same way she’d looked at Beaky Behan when he stuttered why he was late. I wanted to apologise too. But somehow I also knew she didn’t belong to us anymore. She belonged to heaven. She always had. It was a windfall blessing that I’d seen her for the last time. Daffodils, pleasing to the eye, covered over an empty grave.