Pauline retired in September 2018.
She had stayed at Eastbrook after I moved to Millbrook, so we had spent fourteen years comparing school offices rather than sharing one. The problems differed in detail and remained recognisable.
There was a retirement lunch with former colleagues, current staff and several people who said they would keep in touch. Pauline listened to this with the expression of someone who had processed enough school forms to know the difference between intention and evidence.
I gave her a framed photograph from our Eastbrook years. She looked at it and said, ‘We were younger than the parents.’
‘Some of them.’
‘Most of them.’
She was right.
Pauline had worked through handwritten registers, carbon copies, fax machines, email and several computer systems that had each been introduced as the final answer. At the lunch, somebody praised her ability to adapt.
‘There wasn’t a choice,’ she told me later.
Janet Hargreaves had retired from Millbrook three years earlier. Her leaving had made me think about retirement for a week. Pauline’s made me think about it for longer.
I was fifty-five and still working full time. I knew the job. I liked being the person who could answer a question without needing to look surprised first. I also knew how often I came home tired and how carefully I planned longer days around my knees.
Pauline asked when I intended to stop.
‘I don’t know.’
‘That means not yet.’
‘Probably.’
She said she was looking forward to choosing when to get up. Two weeks later she rang at half past eight in the morning because she had already been awake for three hours and had run out of things to do before the shops opened.
We began meeting for lunch once a month. At first, Pauline spoke about Eastbrook and asked who had taken over her work. Later, the school occupied less of the conversation.
I still took calls from Millbrook during our lunches if the number appeared on my phone. Pauline watched me do this twice.
On the third occasion, she said, ‘They will leave a message.’
I let it ring.
The message was about a delivery that had already arrived.