Everything Has to Go...

‘Everything has to go,’ I was told.

‘She’s going to put brand new furniture all the way throughout the school.’

It sounded good.

This was the Chinese whisper I had on the last day of the spring term. Stickers were placed on all the old tables and chairs. Contents of moveable cupboards and shelves were entombed in large green boxes. It was exhausting, but it was done.

‘I’m not,’ said Katie the Wise. ‘We don’t know what we are going to get in their place,’ she said as she looked at my mountain of green boxes arranged like the Himalayas in the middle of my classroom.

‘We are all getting new furniture,’ I was reassured by my classroom assistant moments later. ‘That’s what I was told.’

I took heart from my classroom assistant’s words, after all she was one of the governors in the school, so she should know; and stuck the ‘Remove’ labels onto my teacher’s desk and numerous other shelving units.

Niggles like worms have since wriggled through my head: I’ve been unable to sleep.

Katie the Wise’s words replayed in the small hours. I began to have second thoughts about two of the shelving units I’d put ‘Remove’ labels on. I would rescue them!

Tuesday was the day for the grand furniture swap.

I decided I would get there early and rip the labels off two units that I’d decided to save. However, a whole week of sleepless nights had taken its toll and I was late waking up and getting to school.

The blue furniture removal vans were parked outside the school. The head teacher and the caretaker were talking to one of the removal men. I side stepped them and rushed down to my classroom.

Everything had gone.

My heart sank; though ever the optimist I set to to help. The floor needed hoovering before the brand new furniture arrived. I swept my classroom, Katie the Wise’s classroom and Chris’ classroom.

The men brought a tall shelf unit into the room followed by a larger shelf unit. There were not new. They were dirty and covered in work that had been done by former pupils in whose presence they had once stood. I set to and began to clean them up, extracting staples and backing paper, Velcro strips, broken staples and resistant sellotape. They were bulky and would not fit neatly under the windows as the other shelves had done.

The head appeared and said that she was not happy with the units that she’s been sent to replace our drawer units. They were apparently worse than what we were sending them; so she had decided to send them all back; together with our original ones.

‘We’ll have to order new ones,’ she said. ‘The teachers can order on Monday’s training day. Still these are better aren’t they,’ she said looking at a shelving unit that was in Chris’ room. Apparently, the last child to see the unit had gone mad with a green ink stamp. ‘That will wash off won’t it,’ she said to the caretaker.

I had battled with a similar stamp from the demon green bookcase stamper earlier and knew that it would not.

‘Are the shelves coming later?’ I asked innocently.

‘No they are here,’ she reached down to the bottom of the unit and lifted up one of the shelves. ‘It will go just here,’ she said and placed it on the supports near the top of the unit. It wobbled dangerously. ‘Oh, is one of the supports missing?’ She asked.

The caretaker nodded.

‘Well, you can easily fix that,’ she said to the caretaker. ‘Right I’m off now. The tables and chairs are coming in the next load,’ she said, walking past all the computers that were in the ‘wet area’, past the chaos in every classroom, past the electrician who was sorting out the new computer suite, past the chairs and old furniture that were now stacked in the yard, past the caretaker’s exhausted face; and home she went.

There were some new teacher’s desks in the hall. I asked about them conscious of the empty space in my room. To my horror I discovered that they were not for the teachers but for the office. The teachers were not going to get new desks. It seems that nobody else had stuck a ‘Remove’ sticker on their desk. I began to panic.

Katie the wise had been right.

Luckily, I found my old desk still in the yard, and grabbing a trolley I managed to wheel it back towards the school; heaving it over the school’s Victorian steps. Of my original shelving units there was no sign. However, there were two other shelving units that I could rescue.

As fast as the men were removing furniture from the school I, like a manic squirrel, was struggling to carry things back in, much to their annoyance.

All that I now needed were tables and chairs for the children.

The lorry returned and was steadily unloaded.

The men like strange blue-backed beetles crawled through the school shedding their carapace of ‘new’ hideous blue tables in different classrooms. ‘Hideous Blues’ came in various sizes enough to replenish all but one classroom: mine.

The removal man was surly. ‘What are you going to do?’ He demanded as if I was in charge of the whole operation.

The caretaker later told me that she had warned the head that the order was insufficient, and that a whole classroom would be short of tables and chairs. The removal man had apparently told her the same thing.

I stared at them guppy style, opening and closing my mouth like a fish gasping for air. I had no words.

Katie the wise had been right.

The caretaker rang the Head who simply replied, ‘Salvage some.’

Outside the better tables had already gone. Only small tables remained.

‘So which chairs do you want?’ demanded the exasperated removal man as I wondered if I could squeeze a seven year old under a table intended for someone in reception.

‘Which chairs do you want?’ he insisted impatiently, as if I was an indecisive shopper. ‘Red tipped or brown?’

‘Red tipped’ turned out to be the grey ones that had been removed earlier from my room. I settled for the brown; and the very disgruntled men began to wheel thirty chairs back into the school.

Then I was again searching for tables to rescue.

Luckily, the old computer suites’ tables were still in the school. They were big and bulky and really too high for Year Three; but the brown chairs would give the children some hope of occasionally reaching the tops of their desks.

Hobson’s choice!

We heaved these leviathans into the room where they stood lumpy and rectangular in shape.

Gone is any possibility of arranging imaginative geometrical furniture patterns.

They were filthy, and I wiped them down.

The furniture men had gone.

I unpacked as much as I could from the green boxes. Stacked the six remaining boxes that were now impossible to unpack into a corner and surveyed my classroom’s new look. I’d been at school for six and a half hours, had had no lunch, and was exhausted and every muscle was aching. The removal man’s last searing comments about, ‘A lack of organisation,’ were still ringing through my ears.

Still, ever the optimist, as I looked at my classroom I had to look on the bright side.
We had definitely not won in the game of musical chairs; but now the room would seat the offspring of giants quite comfortably!