Pat’s last pudding, by Leanne Corrie
An original contemporary online news feature.
On Friday afternoon, at the end of her last ever lunch service, Pat Ferriday walked out of the kitchen at Millbrook Primary School to find 312 children, 40 members of staff and a brass band from the secondary school waiting for her in the playground. She put her hand over her mouth. Then she said what she has said every school day for thirty-eight years: ‘Come on, then. Plates in the rack.’
Pat, who is sixty-four, has been the school’s cook since 1988. By her own rough calculation she has served more than a million dinners, peeled ‘enough potatoes to reach Blackpool’ and made sponge and custard on every Friday except one, during the great power cut of 2009, which some former pupils still talk about with horror.
But it is not the numbers that people want to talk about. It is the names. Pat knows every child in the school, and she knows what they will and will not eat, which ones are allergic to nuts, which ones are new and frightened, and which ones are pretending they are not hungry when they are. Head teacher Sam Danjuma, who arrived at Millbrook eleven years ago, says that on his first day Pat told him more about his pupils than the whole filing cabinet did.
‘The kitchen is where children show you what’s really going on,’ Pat explains. ‘A child who stops eating is telling you something. You just have to listen.’
Over the years, the serving hatch has become something close to a confessional. Children have told Pat about new baby brothers, lost hamsters and parents who have moved out. She has kept a box of spare gloves by the ovens for winter mornings, slipped extra toast to children who arrived without breakfast and, every year, made a birthday cake for any child whose birthday falls in the summer holidays, ‘so nobody misses out’.
Many of her former pupils now have children of their own at the school. One of them, Gemma Butterfield, was in Year 2 when Pat arrived. ‘She was the first grown-up at school who made me feel safe,’ Gemma says. ‘Now she does the same for my daughter. I don’t know how Millbrook will work without her, honestly.’
Pat is having none of it. ‘Course it’ll work,’ she says briskly. ‘It’s a kitchen, not the Bank of England.’ Yet when the band strikes up and the children begin a song they have been secretly rehearsing for a month, a song whose chorus is simply her name, shouted over and over, she has to sit down on the bench by the climbing frame.
Her plans for retirement are simple: a caravan in Wales, more time with her grandchildren and, she says firmly, ‘somebody else doing the cooking for a change’. She has left her successor a folder of recipes, a list of every child’s likes and dislikes and a single piece of advice written in capital letters on the front: LEARN THEIR NAMES FIRST.
As the last children file back to class, several of them stop to hug her. One small boy hands her a drawing of a giant pudding with legs. Pat looks at it for a long time. ‘Well,’ she says eventually, ‘that’s going on the fridge.’
Pat Ferriday is described as the heart of the school. How does the writer try to show this?
You should comment on:
You must refer to the text to support your comments, using relevant subject terminology where appropriate.
120 exam-style questions on Eduqas GCSE English Language 2.1.1 Two unseen non-fiction texts, 19th and 21st century. Each one has a worked solution and a mark scheme showing where the marks go.