Ann Jennings: a Prelude

She arrived in 1965.

That was the year the worst of the worst Third Form boys hurled ninja star knives at the wooden doors behind the Manual Arts block. The best of the worst had a different entertainment – humming in the Music class to annoy Lurch, and blaming the noise on machines in the metalwork room. That was also the year of Smiley Walker, driven to distraction by a rat released in his French class, and Doc Dalziel, who faced down insolence with his own inane chatter, and just didn’t care.

And then there was Ann Jennings. A greying, neatly parcelled woman in early middle age, she had a squarish face with strong but feminine features and a steady, serious expression. She kept this air of quiet control when speaking to her students. Her nickname of Ma was evidence of her success in keeping order without arousing contempt.

I first encountered Ma Jennings that year, through my role in the School Play, an eighteenth century romp directed by Chris Ellis.  On the evening of the performance, Ma briskly rubbed stage makeup onto my face with a stern motherly gaze. The play was a riotous success, with risqué lines too silly to offend anyone other than Mrs Bong.

The following year we had Macbeth for Shakespeare and all classes were presented with Ma’s notes on the play. ‘Darkness, we may fairly say blackness, pervades the atmosphere of this play’. The notes told us how Shakespeare used images of disorder in the natural world to convey the evil of killing the good king, quoting such lines as ‘I heard the owl scream and the crickets cry’.

Well might she have mentioned the unnatural. For, there she was, one rainy day in the awful gloom of the canteen area, standing next to the wall, dressed in a leather skirt that showed her knees, and a red jacket, and white boots. She exhaled once, and returned our smirking gaze without blinking. And then we looked away. For there was only one boy in our year who had really had a root, and that was ‘with some slut’. The rest of us were still uneasy at the idea that girls of our own age might like sex, let alone the shocking thought that women of our mother’s age might like it as well. 

Paul Feldman