They Mistook the School Inspector for a Book Salesman

The school at Krka, in Slovenia, stands just below the church, on the lane down to the source of the river. In the early 1970s it ran in two shifts, because there were more children than rooms.

On sports day this meant a sports day in two parts. The morning children were finishing theirs on the field. The afternoon children had not yet arrived. A young teacher in her first post, whose class was the afternoon one, had twenty minutes free, and had gone to the kitchen, where the cook made her a coffee.

In a small school the kitchen is the real staff room. It is warm, it overlooks the lane, and the cook knows everything before the head does.

There was a knock at the kitchen door. A well-built man stood on the step with a large leather bag and asked, politely, where everyone was.

The two women looked at the bag and reached the same conclusion at the same moment. Those years had a well-known species of visitor: the travelling book agent, who toured village schools with samples in a bag exactly like that one.

So they told him, warmly and in detail, that he had picked the wrong day. Everyone was outside. The afternoon class was not even here yet. Nobody would have time to look at books. He would do much better to come back another time.

He went back up the lane with his bag.

The next morning the head came into the kitchen with the face of someone who has had a phone call. The visitor had been the district’s chief school inspector, who had come, unannounced, to see the school at work.

He had come to inspect the school, and the school had politely declined to be sold anything.

The confidence of this takes my breath away, and I am in no position to judge. In Madrid I once kept a man waiting on the doorstep for ten minutes while I explained, through the intercom, that we already had a satellite dish, did not want to change electricity supplier and were not interested in God. He was the school’s new head of year, making a welcome visit to new families. He had a box of biscuits.

I opened the door eventually. He was very gracious about it. The middle one was in his form for three years, and at every parents’ evening he asked, with a straight face, whether we had changed electricity supplier yet.

We have not. We still have the biscuit tin. It now holds the household’s spare keys, and on bad days I take it out and look at it, the way the teacher at Krka, years later, still went to the school window on her walks and looked in at her old classroom.

She did not say whether she glanced at the kitchen door. I would have kept the door locked.