For A Moment’s Peace by Alison Wassell

Could Joy and Phoebe find a way to occupy three rambunctious youngsters?

YOU do realise you don’t need to be up and dressed by seven o’clock, now you’ve retired?” Joy barely acknowledged Doug as he set down a mug of tea on her bedside table.

She was busy looking at her reflection in the mirror.

At what point would she stop looking and feeling like a teacher, with her smart blouse, tailored trousers and sensible shoes?

She slumped miserably on the bed.

“I’ll go to seed if I don’t have a routine. I knew adjusting to retirement wouldn’t be easy, but I hadn’t reckoned on being locked down as well.”

Doug sat next to her and she rested her head on his shoulder.

“We had such plans for this year. A cruise, theatre trips, city breaks, drives in the countryside . . .” Her voice trailed off in despair.

“Those things will still be there once this is over, and we’ll appreciate them all the more.” Doug’s arm around her was comforting, but his ability to look on the bright side got on Joy’s nerves.

It was all right for him. He was an old hand at this retirement lark.

“At least you have plenty of time to crack on with writing that novel.”

Doug was right, of course, but she couldn’t work up much enthusiasm.

After breakfast, Joy felt a little more positive.

“I’ll go upstairs and jot a few ideas down,” she said.

Joy sat at her desk in the study and stared at piles of school-related paperwork.

None of it mattered now. No more planning, formfilling, assessments or report writing.

With a sudden burst of energy, she swept the papers into bin liners, then tossed them in a cupboard. She’d shred them later.

All that remained on the desk were her new laptop and the spiral-bound notebooks one of her colleagues had presented her with on her last day.

“If you put me in your book, make me a villain with a conscience,” she had said.

Joy smiled fondly, remembering.

Suddenly, it seemed that the entire room was shaking.

A book called “Stress Management For Teachers” fell off the shelf and clipped her on the shoulder.

She went on to the landing.

“Doug! What on earth is going on?” she called, as though the commotion was his fault.

He came to the foot of the stairs.

“It’ll be the children next door doing their morning workout. That Joe Wicks has a lot to answer for.”

In the house next door, Phoebe threw down her pen in exasperation.

“Keep it down, you lot! I’m trying to work.”

The noise of three children under ten doing star jumps showed no sign of abating.

Phoebe stomped downstairs.

“Dad, do something! I can’t concentrate with this racket going on every morning.”

Phoebe’s father had his work spread out over the kitchen table.

He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes.

“They need to burn off energy, love. It’s hard for us all at the moment.”

This was no help to Phoebe, who stormed off back to her bedroom.

The effect was spoiled somewhat when she tripped over one of the dog’s chew toys.

“Does nobody tidy up around here?” she raged, sounding for all the world like her mother.

Her father couldn’t help laughing, which made matters worse.

It was not, Phoebe thought, going to be a good day.

Joy sat at the kitchen table, her hands wrapped around her second mug of coffee.

The urge to write had left her completely.

The children next door had concluded their exercise session and could now be heard arguing about who had drunk the last of the orange squash.

“Ted and Eileen never made this much noise,” Joy moaned.

Doug laughed.

“Ted and Eileen were ex-librarians in their eighties. They were used to being quiet.

“Besides, their bookcases must have acted as soundproofing. It’s nice to have a young family living there. They might liven us up a bit.”

Under normal circumstances Joy would have agreed. She usually liked hearing the voices of young children.

But this new family seemed particularly loud and unruly.

“You could try using your teacher voice to keep them in order. If we can hear them, they’ll be able to hear you,” Doug joked.

“I’ll be using my teacher voice on you if you don’t stop being

so cheerful,” Joy retorted.

“Sorry Mrs Bonthrone!” Roaring with laughter, Doug went into the garden.

Phoebe lay on her bed with her earphones on, listening to an audiobook.

She preferred these to music and, as she listened to the narrator’s calming voice, she began to relax.

If it weren’t for the others being a nuisance, she could get used to home schooling.

She raced through her work in the mornings, leaving the rest of the day to do as she pleased.

Best of all, there was no Sasha Hodgson following her around, laughing behind her back because she preferred books to boys.

She didn’t miss that one single bit.

Reaching the end of the chapter, she removed her earphones and sat up. She reached under the bed for a cardboard box.

Smiling in anticipation, she took out a notebook and prepared to write down the poem she had been composing in her head for days.

The door burst open. “Phoebe! Tell them! Sam and Tess won’t share their coloured pencils. All mine are blunt and the sharpener is lost.”

Phoebe snapped her notebook shut and shoved it under her pillow.

Owen was using the whiny voice he put on when things didn’t go his way. It drove her mad.

“How many times have I told you not to come into my room without knocking?”

But Owen wasn’t listening.

He peered suspiciously at the pillow she was trying to lean casually against.

“What have you got under there?” he asked, forgetting all about his pencils.

Twins Tess and Sam appeared behind him.

“She’ll have been writing in her secret book again,” Sam informed his little brother. “She thinks we don’t know.”

With a furious roar that sent her siblings running, pushing and shoving each other, Phoebe rose from the bed and slammed the door shut.

She placed a chair against it to prevent another invasion. But her concentration had been broken.

She put her earphones back in her ears and returned disconsolately to her audiobook, wondering what it would be like to be an only child.

“How’s it going?” Doug asked as he set a freshly baked scone down on Joy’s desk.

“Splendid!” Joy replied, giving him a bright smile that fooled neither of them.

It was true, though, in a way.

So far this morning she had written a shopping list, an e-mail chasing a refund for their cancelled cruise, a list of teaching resources she could possibly sell on ebay, and a letter to her great-aunt Mildred in Canada.

The weeks were slipping by, and Joy was making little progress with her masterpiece.

This writing business was a lot harder than she had anticipated.

All the wonderful ideas that had clamoured in her head for years had fallen stubbornly silent, like sulking children aggrieved at being left unattended for so long.

Joy had tried several genres: crime, romance, family saga.

Nothing was working; the words refused to flow.

She read through the last paragraph she had written, knowing exactly what her old English teacher would have said about it.

“Grammatically perfect, Joy, but lacking sparkle.”

In other words, it was just plain boring.

She took a red pen from the pot on her desk.

See me, she wrote, underlining the words three times.

Thump, thump, thump. It was a wonder those children hadn’t crashed through the bedroom floor with all that bouncing.

When they weren’t bouncing, they were shouting and squabbling.

This morning it sounded as though a small war had broken out over whose turn it was to use the laptop.

Joy sighed. She knew in her heart that the children weren’t to blame for her lack of progress.

Even so, it would be nice to have a bit of peace and quiet sometimes.

She got up to look out of the window. The days were warmer now and the perpetually angry teenager next door was sitting in a deckchair as far away from the house as it was possible to get.

To Joy’s surprise, she was reading a book.

Joy, an avid reader herself, was the kind of person who, when she saw someone buying or reading a book, couldn’t rest until she knew what it was.

This had caused her some embarrassment in the past, when she had been caught peering into the shopping trolleys of complete strangers, or craning her neck for a better view of the reading matter of fellow passengers on public transport.

Still, she had not learned her lesson.

Before she knew it, she was reaching into a drawer for Doug’s birdwatching binoculars.

“Well, I never,” she said to herself as the book came into focus.

She had been expecting to see some frothy teenage fare, but the girl was engrossed in “Anna Karenina”.

Not so engrossed, however, that she didn’t notice Joy standing at the window with the binoculars. The girl scowled. Being a competent lip reader, Joy could tell what she was saying as she stormed back to the house in a way that only a teenager could.

“I must apologise to her,” Joy said half an hour later when she had confessed to Doug.

She buried her head in her hands.

“If the roles had been reversed, I’d have been livid.”

Doug’s mouth twitched as he tried not to laugh.

“Well, now’s your chance. She’s back in her deckchair.”

Full of trepidation, Joy made her way down to the

“I do hope you didn’t think I was spying on you earlier”

bottom of her own garden and perched on the old wooden bench, which was desperately in need of a good clean.

She cleared her throat. “I do hope you didn’t think I was spying on you earlier.”

There was no sound, other than that of a page being turned from the other side of the fence. But at least the girl hadn’t walked away.

Joy pressed on. “Actually, it was your book I was spying on. It’s one of my favourites.

“I’m finding reading a wonderful escape at the moment, aren’t you?”

Despite her determination to let her neighbour suffer, Phoebe began to soften.

Anyone who loved books couldn’t be all that bad, could they?

“I’ve always loved reading,” she replied to her neighbour. “Mum and Dad say I was born with a book in my hand.”

Somehow she sensed that the woman on the other side of the fence was smiling.

Slowly, awkwardly at first, they began to chat about books they loved, about how people who didn’t read were unfathomable creatures, and how one good thing about lockdown was that there was plenty of reading time.