Chalk Dust, by Rosalind Tregear
An original short story extract set in the twentieth century.
On the last afternoon of the summer term, Miss Penrose let the children out ten minutes early, which she had never done in thirty-eight years, and then stood in the doorway of the schoolroom wondering why she had done it now.
They ran across the yard towards the lane and the sea, shrieking, satchels banging, and not one of them looked back. She had not expected them to. She had told them, at prayers that morning, that she would not be their teacher in September, and Jory Curnow had put up his hand and asked whether the new teacher would have a car. That was all. She had smiled and said she believed he would.
Inside, the room smelled as it always did at the end of July: warm ink, sour milk and the dusty sweetness of chalk. She began to tidy the cupboard, then stopped, because the cupboard was no longer hers to tidy. The new man would have his own ideas. He was twenty-six and had been to a college in Exeter, and he would very likely throw away the box of shells she had collected for nature study since before the war.
She took down the register and turned its pages. So many names in her own small upright hand: Hockings and Pascoes and Rowes, fathers and then their sons, three Jory Hockings in all. Some of the names had been crossed through in 1943 and she had written beside them, in red, the word she had never been able to say aloud in class. She closed the book gently, the way one closes a door on a sleeping child.
Then she cleaned the blackboard. She did it slowly and very thoroughly, with long, even strokes, until there was not a ghost of a letter left, and the board was black and clean as a winter sea. It was, she thought, the only thing she had ever been able to finish properly.
On the windowsill a jam jar of foxgloves had begun to droop. She left it there. Someone ought to find something of hers.
How does the writer show Miss Penrose’s thoughts and feelings on her last day as a teacher?
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You must refer to the text to support your answer, using relevant subject terminology where appropriate.