THE TEACHER TAUGHT.

It served him right.

There was one thing that Francis Dunyard really respected, and that was obedience. As a schoolmaster at Yates School for the Better Boy (that is, a lower-rated pubic school where the sons of wannabe entrepreneurs and small time land-owners with a glorious past and fading future went when their parents were fed up with parenting) he demanded obedience and went out of his way to get it. The boys knew that, and they also knew that he had a secret weapon. They never saw it, but he described it in painful detail and that was enough to ensure obedience in his classes.

But it wasn’t only when he was in gainful employment that he really needed obedience. No, it was in personal relationships that he felt disrespected if he wasn’t being obeyed. Take, for instance, the time he was out in a restaurant (not expensive, his schoolmaster pay was less than he’d hoped it would be, but then his qualifications were less than his CV suggested they were) with Martha.

He had his eye on the prices and chose, for himself, a dish described in airy fairy almost French which he supposed might be some kind of fish though he really had no idea but it was the cheapest available, and by a series of vague suggestions he made sure that she knew that he wanted her to choose the same on account of the price.

But Martha knew enough French to know that he’d chosen faux vegetarian mushroom burgers and didn’t want one even if it was in a rich tomato sauce, and opted for a steak instead.

Such disobedience! He glowered at her. He made exaggerated appreciative noises when his revolting burger arrived and sneered at her only slightly overdone steak. And when the wine waiter arrived he ignored her suggestion that a nice red wine would go nicely with his mess of mushrooms and ordered a half pint of shandy instead.

By this time Martha knew the sort of man he was and asked the wine waiter for half bottle of something red and expensive and, quite loud enough to be heard throughout the restaurant, told Francis not to worry, she’d pay for it and for his shandy too, if he wanted.

Such disobedience! On their way home he told her, in no uncertain terms, what he thought of her dress (which was short and pretty and left hardly anything to the imagination) and thumped her in the stomach fairly hard in order to push the point home. She had disobeyed him, and that was a cardinal sin.

Martha considered reporting the incident to the police and decided against it. The thump in her stomach, though painful to start with, might have been administered with more force and she concluded that reporting the incident would cause her more trouble than it was worth and the best thing for her to do was forget the bully had ever existed.

“I’ll let that go this time,” she warned him from a safe distance of several paces, “but if I hear of you hitting another woman I’ll add what you’ve just done to any complaint that might be made. You’re a skinflint and a misogynist!”

Teaching in a third rate boys’ public school hadn’t armed him with a huge amount of knowledge and he was unsure what a misogynist might be and concluded it might have something to do with his trousers.

Eventually, after a catalogue of failures in which obedience was frequently being questioned he did win the heart of a young lady, though she was a little older than himself, eleven years to be candid, and it showed. But he decided when his thirtieth birthday loomed like a shadow before him that he needed a wife. A wife would be bound to obey him because she was obliged to promise to obey him. That was what he wanted to hear. To love, honour and obey him, though he didn’t know much about the love part. He’d find out, though. It might even be fun.

The young lady he found was a widow named Ethel, a name he liked because he’d had an aunt called Ethel, though she had died in strange circumstances whilst on a train with her brother (his father) going to Skegness. It had been back when he’d been a mere child and kept out of a rather nauseous loop.

This Ethel, though, was a sturdy forty year old who told him a few confusing things about herself.

To start with, “I had three kids, but I was too young really,” she said, “I landed in the club when I was sixteen and had the trio by the time I was eighteen. The last two were twins, bless ‘em. They’ve all flown the nest now, though, lovey.”

He hated being called lovey.

On another occasion she gave him incomprehensible details about an operation she’d had, in Brumpton General hospital.

“My hysterectomy was a complete success,” she told him in glowing terms. “There’s really not much of a scar and I felt so much better afterwards, and that’s a fact! And the upside is I won’t have any more ankle-biters to suck me dry!”

That left him so confused his head began to ache behind his eyes. What was a hysterectomy, and might he need one? And what in the name of goodness were ankle-biters? And how might a woman, even a tough one like Ethel seemed to be, be sucked dry?

He hated being confused, so he changed the subject..

“Then marry me,” he invited her, not because he wanted to marry her but because he couldn’t think of one other thing to suggest while he sorted out the abundance of confusing information she had provided him with.

Ankle-biters?

“I’d love nothing better than that!” she exclaimed, and she grabbed his trousers so intimately that he thought he might have a heart attack there and then. “My late husband, that’s Arthur, passed away in bed,” she informed him, “we were just warming up and suddenly out of the blue everything stopped working and he went cold. It scared me, it did. You won’t do that, will you?”

“Do what?” he asked.

“Die on me, that’s what!” she exclaimed.

He shook his head, lost for words, and shrugged, which was probably as good as words. He knew that he had no intention of dying or doing anything else that might be considered drastic.

“Soon,” she said, turning thoughtful, “I’d say we should get married soon.”

And that’s what happened. And as far as Francis was concerned the absolutely humongous bonus was the age of the vicar in the small church outside Brumpton. He was old as the hills and it hadn’t crossed his mind that there was a variation when it came to the wedding vows sworn by brides, a variation that omitted the word obey. So it was left in and Ethel vowed to obey Francis, which pleased him mightily

Francis and Ethel had a short honeymoon (half term at his school, Autumn and as chance would have it summer was well over as evidenced by a brief shower of snow. Because time was limited as well as funds, they spent three days in a boarding house near Blackpool but far enough away from its famous illuminations to be cheap, and it was there that Francis learned that obedience has a two-way function.

Their room was chilly and although it was still not long after lunch on that first day Ethel suggested they retire to bed.

“I hate the cold,” she said, “and Arthur couldn’t stand it either. Better off in bed than freezing, he’d say, so Francis, lover of mine, trews off and under the duvet!”

“Not now…” he stammered. He knew what trews were, all right, and he had no intention of taking his off in the presence of a woman, though he often did in the changing room at school when there were boys not so far away.

“You’ll do as I tell you, laddie!” she said in a threatening tone of voice, “Arthur learned that was the best way, and it is, I promise you that, or you’ll find out that I know where a man really hates being banged!”

He wasn’t going to suffer such an indignity as being lambasted in such a way by a woman. It went against just about everything he understood about order in life, and the resultant chaos when order is ignored.

So he hit her. Hard enough to hurt but not hard enough to do any permanent damage. He was, if nothing else, thoughtful. After all, it was their wedding day and this was their honeymoon.

Her reply was less considerate.

When she hit him it was both hard and damaging. Damaging enough to almost kill him because it knocked him off his feet and he landed on the well polished top edge of a chest of drawers, though that had never been her intention, and his very last coherent thought was one of sympathy for Arthur who, apparently, had been found dead in bed.

Anyway, when she described the incident it seemed it was all his fault.

“He just got frisky,” she said, winking at the policeman who was sent to investigate, “he went down like a tree being logged! Right there, on that, chest of drawers. I think it was his excitement when I suggested we rest for the afternoon. You know what men are? Of course you do: you’rte one yourself!”

It took his three days and they were on their way back home on a coach before he regained enough consciousness to look her squarely in the face through crossed eyes.

“Who are you?” he asked weakly. Then, “who am I?” he mumbled questioningly.

He never did discover the answer to either of those questions, though, when he returned to the boarding school with a headache he did manage to teach a host of boys all about the shape of Italy in a maths lesson and all about honeymoons in R.I.

© Peter Rogerson 02.05.22

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