How to Kill Your Husband (and other handy household hints), Kathy Lette [books to read to increase intelligence .txt] 📗

of living in London, but was quietly having a panic attack. I began making inventive promises to God about all the charitable acts I would perform if only I was able to make it back to the Science Museum in time.

When the bus lumbered into Baker Street, I hopped off, literally, and doddered into the underground once more. Two changes and I’d be there. As I waited and waited for a tube, with more and more delays announced, I began to think of career alternatives; jobs as a chicken de-sexer or armpit sniffer for deodorant testing clearly beckoned.

At South Kensington station, I kangarooed all the way to the museum. By the time I lumbered into the foyer, there was no sign of my class. I shuffled about a bit, pain oozing from me in rancid sweat, frantically crying out the name of my fellow teacher, ‘Lucy? Lucy!!’ My T-shirt had been torn in the race, I was covered in grass stains from the fall, my hair was knotty and dishevelled, I was jigging around on one foot, bra-less boobs bouncing, and the security guards seemed to be looking at me in an over-attentive manner. When I pushed ahead of the line to ask whether North Primrose Primary School had left the premises, I was told to wait my turn or go to hell.

Since I was limping from a very painful and swollen ankle, mid-heart attack and three-quarters of an hour late for the coach back to school, at this juncture hell actually seemed like the better destination.

One £40 cab fare later, I was back at Primrose Hill. While stuck in traffic, I’d prepared my defence. I would plead mental unfitness and retire early on a pension. To back up my claim, I’d put mosquito netting around my staffroom chair and only play bongo music.

As it happened, I was getting plenty of practice at jungle warfare. The only way to sneak into the school was to sidle, back to the wall, underneath the security camera and then crawl on my belly commando-style past Scroope’s office window.

It was three o’clock when my covert operations concluded with a successful infiltration of the first floor and a Geronimotype entrance through the side window into Lucy’s classroom, where she was entertaining my pupils as well as her own. Not being a ‘chalk and talker’, Lucy whispered that as she’d covered my rear so well I owed her a beer. Exhausted with relief, I slunk into my classroom to retrieve the register – and stopped dead with shock, gorgonised to the spot by her steely stare.

‘And where, may one ask, have you been?’ Perdita Pendal moved into my path faster than the Pentagon Rapid Response Force, and with just as much dedication to passive diplomacy. ‘Do you know the penalty for leaving your class on an excursion?’ When Perdita talked, her thin, lacquered lips looked to me like two pink worms wrestling. ‘I believe it is a sackable offence.’

Thousands of illegal immigrants, possibly packing Anthrax, are setting up terror cells around England, and can the security forces find them? No. One and a half hours late back from a school excursion and Perdita was on to me. Why she isn’t on Scotland Yard’s anti-terror pay-roll remains a mystery. I closed the door behind me and prepared to grovel.

‘Look, it was an emergency. The kids were fine. On excursions you’re supposed to have a one to ten parent-child ratio, right? Well, I made sure there was a one to six ratio, by drafting in extra parents. And Lucy was there. It was a family crisis. Nobody needs to know. I mean, everything’s worked out fine.’

‘Hasn’t it just,’ she said, with the demeanour of a Victorian governess.

‘Perdita, I’m begging you. Please don’t tell Scroope. I’ll do all your playground duty for the rest of the year, if you just don’t say anything.’ I had gravel rash on my knees from grovelling, but persevered. ‘Have some compassion. Some teacherly loyalty. Some sisterly solidarity?’ I begged. But Perdita had the compassion of a Medellin drug cartel.

‘Duty before friendship,’ she replied ominously. Her crisp tone told me that it was pointless pleading.

At four o’clock when the kids exploded out of the door for home, I saw Scroope in the quadrangle. His face was rigid, his mouth pinched up like a rectum straining for a bowel movement. ‘My office,’ he ordered.

Dragging my hurt foot towards my doom, I wondered if it might help to tell him about much worse things that had happened on school excursions. A friend of mine from college had taken her Year Six girls camping in the New Forest, where they went mushrooming . . . only they turned out to be magic mushrooms. Her entire class were in Intensive Care for a day, hallucinating. It gave a very literal meaning to ‘school trip’ . . . But I changed my mind when I saw his eyes at close range. I looked around for a weapon to protect myself, wondering desperately if perhaps I could set his laser printer to ‘Stun’? My Headmaster’s moods ranged from obnoxious to Satanic. And that was on a good day. His rage, when it came, was tornadic.

‘YOU LEFT YOUR CLASS?!!!’

For the next half an hour, he just went off, like Hurricane Katrina, words pouring out of him instead of rain. He was apoplectic with rage about breaches of Health and Safety. The cords of his neck stood out like cables as he screamed about the risks, the dangers and hazards, the possible outcomes of such a reckless act. I was irresponsible, immoral, immature . . . If it were up to him, he said, he would sack me on the spot. Yes, teachers had to receive three written warnings before they could be fired. But this was so serious that he was going to take it before the Board of Governors and ask them to consider dismissing me immediately.

I should have stood up for myself, but now I simply wondered how I could ever have thought I would