Mrs Rook’s dame school

Text 1: Learning my letters, by Ann Whitlock

An original autobiography written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

I learned my letters at a dame school kept by Mrs Rook in the front room of her cottage. There were perhaps fourteen of us, seated on two benches and an upturned crate, and she taught us while she knitted stockings for sale, never once looking down at her needles. Her only book was a battered primer with its cover tied on by tape, so we took turns to hold it while the rest repeated each line after the reader. Whenever the clicking stopped, we knew some child had been caught whispering. Payment was twopence a week, though I remember that the miller’s boy paid in potatoes. I left knowing how to read a chapter aloud and how to sit absolutely still.

Give one phrase that shows Mrs Rook earned money in another way while she was teaching.