C is for COPE

It was a red bricked building with little yellow bricks making a nice, interlocking design on the corners. The roof was slated and several chimneys jutted out through openings of the one storey creation. As you walked in through the front gates, the first sight to greet your eyes was the rather strange hexagonal shaped section and to its immediate right, the main entrance which was nothing more than a normal house front door. The whole building, from the outside, bore little resemblance to a school and sat adjacent to a much larger two storey dwelling house that was designed and built using the same brick but in all my time there, was not related to the educational establishment. The school building and, I presume , the neighbouring house, had first appeared in the early nineteen hundreds to replace the original school established by the Cope family who owned the large estate in the village and provided work for many of its inhabitants and by the time I was leaving, it would only have a few more years to operate as a school.

Outside the hexagon, there was a small playground at the front that served as a safe haven for the younger children but also was the area where all classes lined up at the start of school and the end of break and lunch times when the dreaded hand bell rang. It was surrounded on two sides by a small garden area that the senior pupils regularly attended to during nature study classes and that stopped abruptly on reaching the main playground. This was a rectangular area, clearly in need of fresh tarmac but the numerous small cracks and mini potholes always added interest to the daily football games among the senior boys who honed their skills every morning before class and at other breaks, using a hairless tennis ball instead of the regulation size. At one end was the small shed that housed the coal and coke for the stoves and at the other end, on the extreme left corner, sat the block of outside toilets that was our only escape route form class during the day. These were primitive to say the least and amounted to little more than a green wooden seat covering a hole in a slab of concrete below which was a very long drop! It certainly wasn't an incentive to escape class in the middle of a cold frosty morning! Directly opposite the toilets was a small backyard that housed odds and ends and led directly into the school.

Inside the front porch were three doors that led to the classrooms and a short corridor that brought you into the hexagon. This was the cloakroom area, where coats and bags were hung but also where the cooks washed up after dinner and visiting doctors and nurses encamped when carrying out their medical inspections. So this was where I received all those early vaccinations against tetanus, diphtheria and whooping cough and came to know the hexagon as a place of refuge and also of dread. On the left of the front hall was the the door into the junior part of the school that looked out over the main playground and also doubled as the serving area for the cooks at lunch time. Every day, they would set up a couple of long tables on top of which were set a selection of containers that had arrived by van from the nearby school in Richhill as we had no kitchens on site. Everyone got their dinner and pudding at this point and then returned to their own classroom to eat it, before scraping and depositing their plates in large tubs in the hexagon.

The two other doors led to the remaining classrooms which were separated by a glass partition that could be pulled back along its rollers to make one huge room. On the night of the Christmas concert or other parent evenings, the desks were taken out and replaced with chairs, the partition was folded back and the wooden platform at the front of the senior room, on which the master's desk usually sat, was raised to about three feet off the ground by placing some of the desks underneath it.

Every classroom had a stove and a long, thin bucket full of coke beside it and in winter all the milk bottles sat in their crate to defrost. The chalkboards were of a rolling type with two or three surfaces that could be exposed for writing by pulling the board downwards and apart form a few cupboards and library containers the only other memorable object that was only in the senior room was the cane, that sometimes lay above a wooden cupboard and at other times sat beside it.

Many years have passed since those primary school years and the building has, in the intervening period, been a fashionable restaurant and is now a dwelling house, but the external fabric and character have been preserved so that essentially it still looks like the school I used to see when I walked in through the front gates. And I still go to the school every week day, this time to teach and hopefully also to learn. Though the school is no longer in the same place and most of its artifacts are now gone, one thing still remains. For in my room, at my desk is the wooden chair that my master once occupied when I was a pupil. I hope I fill it as adequately and He did.

I'm still learning from the Master, though I know I'll never fill His shoes adequately but He encourages me every day to grow to be more like Him by following the example He has set me. The apostle John writes 'God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in him. In this way, love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment, because in this world we are like him.' Jesus has left the greatest legacy in showing us how we should more holy lives in keeping with His example and His Word is full of instruction to help us. He tells us to ' go into all the world and preach the good news to all creation.' That is what the Master has handed down to each of us who believe. Are we ready to sit in His chair?