Pauline knew the office.
She knew the official procedures and the procedures that worked. These were related, though not always closely.
The official rule said late pupils reported to the office. Pauline knew which children would report, which would go straight to class and which parent would explain a twenty-minute delay by saying they had been ‘held up’ without identifying by what.
She knew where the spare inhalers were recorded, which teacher forgot registers and how much change to keep for dinner money. She could find a telephone number from a surname, a sibling or the fact that the father drove a blue van.
I asked how she remembered it all.
‘I’ve been here seven years.’
‘Is that the system?’
‘Mostly.’
The office had written instructions for admissions, absences and emergencies. There were no written instructions for a child arriving with a dead ladybird in a matchbox, a parent demanding to see the headteacher during assembly or a member of staff saying, ‘You haven’t seen my form, have you?’ before checking their own tray.
Pauline dealt with these without fuss.
She also knew when not to solve something immediately. A parent who rang angry at half past eight was sometimes less angry by ten. A teacher who needed a letter ‘urgently’ might not return to collect it for two days.
‘Write down when they asked,’ she told me. ‘That saves discussion later.’
This suited me.
We became friends by working beside each other. There was no point at which either of us announced it. We shared tea, covered each other’s lunch breaks and learnt the difference between the other person being busy and wanting to be left alone.
Pauline had a dry answer for most office problems, but she did not perform them for an audience. Once, after a parent supplied three different spellings of her own address on three forms, Pauline put the papers together and said, ‘At least one of them lives somewhere.’
Then she corrected the record.
By the end of that first term, I knew more of the office. I still had to ask Pauline where the spare keys were.