8:50am Saturday 16th January 2010
By Matt Clark
IT’S the start of a new term at Ragley-on-the-Forest School. Head teacher Jack Sheffield has to deal with a parent on the warpath over the school photograph, and somehow persuade his young charges not to chuck sticks up into the conker trees in front of the school.
Vera, the school secretary, is struggling to get to grips with a new-fangled electric typewriter, while Ruby celebrates ten years as the school cleaner, and the village panto throws up some unusual problems.
Yes, former North Yorkshire headteacher turned author Jack Sheffield is back with another nostalgic look at rural life in his new book, Village Teacher.
This is the fourth in his Teacher series, set in the fictional Ragley-on-the-Forest, an amalgam of Huby, Sutton-on-the-Forest and Easingwold.
Jack spent 37 years teaching and lecturing in Yorkshire and when he retired six years ago, he was finally able to fulfill a promise made to his late mother: to publish the collection of stories written during his time as a teacher.
He said: “I have always enjoyed writing short stories. My books are compilations of the academic year and each chapter is a short story about a particular day; many were written 25 years ago.
“I wrote my first novel, Teacher Teacher, and took it to the Winchester writers’ conference. An agent there said she thought it had potential and as it turns out all the publishing houses wanted it. I was given a two-book deal and the first was published in 2007.”
Teacher Teacher became an instant best seller and was Waterstone’s book of the year.
Mister Teacher and Dear Teacher followed to similar acclaim, and to date the series has sold more than 100,000 copies.
“They are all gentle, humorous and nostalgic tales with a feel-good factor. Most of them are true, like the time I needed a skeleton to help me teach a health education project. “One of the parents worked as a nurse and said she could get me one. So on a dark November night I drove to York Hospital. I wandered in and heard her say, ‘Can you bring out Elvis the pelvis?’ She turned to me and said ‘He’s very popular at parties you know.’ “I had hoped for something that would fit on my desk but a nurse wheeled out a trolley with a long chrome pole. Attached to it was this 5’6” skeleton.
“I only had a Morris Minor at the time and there was not enough room to put ‘Elvis’ in the boot. So I had to put him in the passenger seat.
“His head tilted as if he was saying something. Goodness knows what people thought as I drove out of the hospital.”
Jack Sheffield was head teacher at Huby School between 1977-83 and then at Huntington before becoming a senior lecturer for primary school teachers.
He moved to Hampshire two years ago, but maintains his ties with York.
“It’s a terrific place and I spent most of my career in York. I still use the central library for research, particularly to find newspaper articles on microfiche.”
Jack has been contracted to write a further two books and while his second career as an author may have taken off, once a school teacher, always a school teacher.
“I write each week day with breaks for morning playtime, lunch and afternoon playtime. Old habits die hard,” he said.
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