Archive of Our Own ^beta

I first visited Bobsville in the spring of 1987, during my teacher training. I spent a happy six weeks there teaching in the tiny school, learning the joys and challenges of teaching two dozen children of all ages together. The village is so small that it is a great surprise it has its own school; only its extreme remoteness makes the situation at all sensible. Yet the children were bright and lovely, the school pleasant and organised, and the villagers made me feel so welcome, that when I received word three years after graduation that the school was in urgent need of a teacher, I jumped at the chance to return.

The village's previous teacher, Mrs Percival, had been suddenly taken ill only three weeks into the new school year, and rushed to the nearest hospital. The mayor of the village contacted the Education Board, who contacted me (as the most recent student to have been placed there), and not two weeks later I found myself arriving in Bobsville late at night, to be escorted to the very same cottage I had occupied during my previous visit. The night was windy and wet, and the journey had been so long and tiring that I only shed my wet clothes and dried myself off before falling into bed, where I slept like a log despite the wind howling about the chimneys.

The very next day (a Friday) I started my second stint at Bobsville Primary School, to the great chagrin of the children. Though several of them remembered me fondly, they had just enjoyed a fortnight of freedom, heightened by the excitement of a crisis, and interspersed with the fun of ad hoc lessons as and when the villagers had been able to scrape together time and ideas. I gave them an hour of gentle maths to reintroduce the concept of school, then let them loose in a game of football to work off some of their energy and give myself some time to look through Mrs Percival's office.

My recollection of my placement with Mrs Percival had been of a meticulous lesson-planner, and I was not disappointed. Her filing cabinet contained plans for the autumn term and beyond, and a rummage through the classroom cabinets further revealed that all the necessary supplies had already arrived. This was a tremendous relief to me - when I say Mrs Percival was sent to the 'nearest' hospital, Bobsville is a great distance from the nearest place of any size, and consequently Mrs Percival was not in any convenient proximity to be consulted. When the children had tired themselves out at football, and we had all eaten a hearty lunch (the school had a standing weekday order with the village cafe), I was able to set the children down with copies of books appropriate to their age to spend a peaceful afternoon preparing for that term's English lessons. I felt my first day had gone well, and yet I was quite as relieved as the children to reach the end of the school day and take a weekend's rest. All in all the day had proceeded well. The older children remembered me and seemed to fall back easily into our established relastionships; the younger children were boisterous but I was another part of the excitement and they were happy to accept me. The only fly in the ointment was the absence of the oldest children I remembered from my placement. Some would have aged out of school, and I supposed one or two may have moved away, but I had many happy memories of them and was sad not to remake any of their acquaintances.

The Saturday that followed was as crisp and beautiful an autumn day as one could hope for. I rose refreshed after a good night's sleep and set out to reacquaint myself with the village. Very little had changed in the years since I had last lived here. The cafe had been renovated and was now painted pink instead of yellow, and one corner of the village green had been given over to a floral clock. Both of these decisions may have been controversial in their the time, as is the way in small villages where gossip is sparse, but the place seemed to have settled down to an appreciation of them. The village hall and St Botolph's Church both smiled down neatly on the village green, ducks still quacked animatedly in the village pond, and all seemed neat and calm. I bought a few essentials in the village shop (Mrs Sabatini remembered me and greeted me warmly) and returned home to settle down to some light school admin and an uneventful evening.

On Sunday I rose promptly to attend the service at St Botolph's (always the way to a village's heart, I find, or at least to the hearts of the village busybodies - in any case, on the path to harmony). After the service I found myself invited to tea at the mayor's house, and gladly accepted. We talked of the village and the weather, and I admired the tasteful interior remodelling the mayor's house had recently had, but primarily the conversation focussed on the school. The mayor was keen to confirm that I felt settled and capable of managing the children, and to offer her support. I assured her that Mrs Percival had left the school in a superbly organised state and that I had, I thought, everything I needed for the term ahead. I asked after Mrs Percival's health and was told she had suffered a nervous breakdown but was recovering, slowly and steadily.

'We shall want you until at least Christmas!' said the mayor.

'And shall I see the older children at Christmas?' I asked. 'I had been hoping to see them in school.'

'We have had a change since you were last here,' said the mayor, 'and the older children now go away to secondary school in Fixham Harbour. I expect you shall see them at Christmas.' But as she said this, I fancy I saw a haunted expression flit across her face.

We moved on to other topics - the weather, the village renovations, the successful summer fête - and finally onto the planned children's Christmas nativity parade. This last had apparently become a village tradition of late, and featured heavily in Mrs Percival's lesson plans. Every year the children, with adult help and guidance, planned the parade route, made costumes, and performed a small play on the village green. I was very much looking forward to working with the children on such a large project with so many learning opportunities. It seemed to me a perfect chance to engage all the children at once, regardless of their differing ages and interests, and I said as much to the mayor.

'It certainly brings the village together;' she agreed with me, "we all look on it as a celebration of the coming of spring and the start of a season of rebuilding and renewal."

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Now that the excitement was resolved, the school quickly settled back down into its routine, and the children threw themselves wholeheartedly into planning for the nativity parade. In lessons we discussed everything from the three-act structure to planning road closures (trickier than I had expected as the village, though tiny, encompassed a surprising number of roadworks), and in no time at all the classroom had accumulated a rack of part-finished costumes, a shelf of drying props, and half a dozen drafts of the play.

The playground craze that term was for construction toys; at playtime the children drove toy diggers round the sand pit, or played pretend as steam-rollers or cranes. Though small and remote, Bobsville had somehow attracted several families in the construction business, and of course many of the children were from farming families. Given all this, perhaps it was inevitable that the nativity parade developed a vehicular theme at an early stage in planning. I mentioned this to the mayor one weekend when we were both helping to tidy the village green, and she reassured me that nobody would be perturbed.

'Children are children!' she remarked with a chuckle. 'Often our parade theme may seem a little unusual but we're happy to let them have free reign. Besides, tractors and diggers are a part of our everyday lives in the countryside, it's only natural the children should want to include them.'

Indeed the village green had several vehicle-related features, from a traditional tyre swing hanging from a centuries-old tree to the decidedly un-traditional inclusion of a tremendous tractor tyre as the centrepiece of the flower clock.

Other than the slightly odd nativity theme, the autumn passed largely without incident. The only disconcerting occurence was that if I stayed at the school to mark work of an evening, I would often find my concentration broken by bright headlights shining through the classroom windows, and the sound of engines. But as the mayor had suggested, large vehicles were an ordinary facet of country life, so I did not pay them much heed, even if the tyre tracks revealed by the morning sun seemed strangely close to the school.

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As November turned to December more and more of the parade details gradually slotted into place. Costumes were finished and rehearsals rehearsed. As is traditional at every school I have ever been to, the wise men's gifts were cobbled together out of interestingly-shaped objects we had lying around, glued together and spray-painted. Frankincense was an old ball protruding from a box, and myrrh was a large spring threaded with wheel nuts. Various parents were recruited to drive parade floats; the shepherds were to arrive with their (live!) sheep in a trailer pulled by a tractor, and the three wise men on a digger, a dump truck, and a crane, to reflect the exoticism of their originating cultures. The angels were to arrive last, all arrayed on a combine harvester.

The whole enterprise was scheduled to take place on the solstice, 21st December, and as the day approached the whole village seemed to become increasingly excited. When I visited the village shop I would overhear even the more sober adults chatting animatedly about the parade. The decorations in the houses bordering the green harmonised with the children's theme; more than one front window proudly displayed a toy tractor decked in tinsel and lights. One enterprising family had even managed to make an alternating string of colourful angel-and-digger lights, which they had wound around their recently erected scaffolding.

The day of the 21st finally arrived. The school spent the morning running through rehearsals, then after lunch the various parade 'floats' arrived and the children spent a happy couple of hours decorating them with tinsel and bows. Last to arrive was the trailer of sheep, by which point it was almost time to get into costume, so I sent the kids off to start getting ready while I tied tinsel in bows around the sides of the tractor cab, out of the reach of the sheep. I swear I heard the driver refer to his vehicle as 'Travis', which reminded me to look forward to seeing the older children later. Surely they would be home for Christmas by now. Travis had been one of my favourites during my teaching placement, a sharp and intelligent kid, and I looked forward to seeing him again. I also missed Mac, a sweet queer teenager last I saw them, and a tall, shy boy known to all his friends as Lofty.

With all the children ready, I loaded them up onto the correct vehicles. First were Mary and Joseph on a quad bike (played by the two oldest children, Lizzy and Roland), followed by an assortment of shepherds in their trailer, three wise men on a vehicle each, and finally a combine harvester's worth of angels. I saw them off to parade round the village and went directly to the village green, to wait for the parade to arrive and disgorge its actors. A tinsel-adorned arch had been set up over the flower clock, to form the backdrop to the stable, and a crib just in front.

Before long the parade arrived. Mary and Joseph sat by the crib and the other children waited their turn in the wings. The parade had collected up all the villagers, and they formed themselves into a semi-circle with a view of the stage. The vehicles also joined the semi-circle. I assume their drivers wanted a good view and to stay in the warm... though I fancied I saw at least some of the children's parents in the crowd, and I couldn't see any silhouettes in the vehicle cabs.

I watched proudly as the play started. The children had turned the old story into a surprisingly good play, and the assembled crowd were extremely engaged. We proceeded through angelic and shepherdic proclamations and the wise men had arrived when things started to go awry. Each wise man in turn gave their present to Mary and Joseph, and Joseph took each through the arch in order and put them down behind the stable, in the flower clock. As he walked through the arch with the 'myrrh', the strange assemblage in his hands began to glow, and as he placed it on the floor the flower clock began to glow also, with an unearthly light whose colour I cannot describe. It fact became overwhelmingly bright, so that all I could see of the boy within it were strange movements, transformations and stretchings that surely a human body could not have managed. As the light gradually faded, what came back through the arch was no longer a boy but - impossibly - a steamroller. Never have I seen a sight so awful and unbelievable, and yet I had witnessed the change with my own eyes. My brain rebelled at the idea.

But the worst was, the villagers' expressions did not at all reflect the horror I felt. To a one they looked exultant and hopeful. They chanted, softly at first but gradually louder, 'he is come! He is come!' Roland's parents glowed with pride and love, even in the face of their son's transformation. In horror, I began to fit together all the details I had witnessed over the recent months. Was the mayor's "rebuilding" less metaphorical than I had thought? The renovations, the roadworks, the tyre tracks - could these all be aspects of a single twisted construction? What had become of the older children after all? Could Travis - the thought crept like ice down my spine - could Travis actually *be* a tractor?

In sheer terror I turned and ran - back to my house, back to the station, back to the real world. Nothing, not even a million pounds, could persuade me back to Bobsville again. And to this day, I cannot suppress a shudder whenever I pass roadworks.