The Camel Coat, by Janice Fairlie

An original short story extract set in the twentieth century.

Mam had served the dinners at Hylton Road Secondary for eleven years, so every teacher in the building had watched her ladle gravy. That was why, on the night of the parents’ evening, she wore her good camel coat, the one that came out for funerals and the Christmas pantomime, and why she spent twenty minutes at the mirror in the hall pressing her hair flat with both palms as though it had personally offended her.

‘You look nice,’ I said.

‘I look like a dinner lady in a coat,’ she said. ‘Get your shoes on.’

In the school hall the desks were set out in rows, each with a teacher behind it and two plastic chairs in front. Mam walked between them with her handbag held in front of her like a shield. Mr Pickersgill, who taught us geography, said, ‘Evening, Mrs Dunn, any chance of seconds on Thursday?’ and laughed at his own joke. Mam smiled the smile she used on the rent man and kept walking.

Miss Leatherbarrow was the last. She taught English, and she had a way of looking at parents over the top of her glasses as if they were exercise books she had not got round to marking. She said I was a pleasant girl. She said I read a great deal. Then she said that, given everything, it might be sensible for me to think about a secretarial course when I left at sixteen. ‘There is no shame in it, Mrs Dunn. Not everyone is cut out for the sixth form.’

Mam did not answer at once. She opened her handbag, took out my last essay, which I had not known she had kept, and laid it flat on the desk, smoothing it with one hand.

‘You gave her an A for this,’ she said. ‘You wrote the word exceptional at the bottom. I looked it up.’

Miss Leatherbarrow opened her mouth.

‘She’s staying on,’ Mam said. ‘Thank you for your time.’ And she stood, buttoned the camel coat to the neck and walked out of the hall without looking back, so that I had to run to catch her.

Outside, in the dark by the bike sheds, she stopped. Her hands were shaking so much that she could not get the clasp of her handbag to close. I took it from her and did it myself.

‘Don’t tell your dad I was rude to a teacher,’ she said. Then she laughed, high and unsteady, and held on to my arm all the way home.

What impressions does the writer create of the narrator’s mother? How does the writer create these impressions?

You must refer to the language and structure used in the text to support your answer, using relevant subject terminology where appropriate.