Patricia Nicol
TODAY I start a new job. It is unpaid and I am largely unqualified. But extreme times require desperate measures. At 8.45am, along with millions of parents across the country, I will be turning up to the hastily cleared kitchen table for my first day as a Covid-19 emergency supply teacher.
My pupils will be my Year 4 and Year 6 sons, aged eight and 11. My lawyer husband will be my teaching assistant and, I hope, school janitor.
At time of writing, the reality of having to squeeze this educational sideline into my self-employed schedule is still sinking in. However, I dare say by the time you read this, my pupils and I will have agreed on some kind of timetable.
Their warm, wonderful school will have emailed through some lesson plans. Then perhaps art, music, some Swingball and gardening? Maybe they can make their own lunch, as if we are some sort of progressive establishment. If they are allowed beyond our garden, we will make the street our playground.
For after-school clubs, they will want Warhammer but I’m hoping someone will sign up for Scrabble. Exclusions will depend on how many times I repeat ‘no, you cannot play video games now’ before 3pm.
Thankfully, the Easter holidays will soon be upon us. Not so thankfully, no one can say when they will end.
So my pupils know I mean business, I may cultivate a more pedagogical persona. But which home tutor to model myself on?
Should I wear grey silk, like Charlotte Bronte’s defiantly principled yet headstrong Jane Eyre, heroine of one of my all-time favourite novels? Or what about one of those dashing waistcoated getups, as sported by Saoirse Ronan as Jo March in the recent film version of Little Women?
Perhaps the tweedier twinset look adopted by glamorous MI5 officer Celia Nashe in B.W. Black’s recent The Secret Guests? She acts as the Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret’s tutor, when they are secretly evacuated to Ireland to escape the Blitz. I’m sure we will all learn lessons in the coming weeks.