Class 4 Stopped Dancing to Work Out Who Went Wrong

The same article is otherwise lyrical. It promises a heartfelt week of prancing and cavorting around the pole, and links the maypole to the World Tree and, for Class 4, to Yggdrasil, the tree Odin hangs from for three days to win the knowledge of the runes.

Three days on a tree to learn the alphabet. Our Year 2 do phonics.

I run the maypole at our primary school’s May fair, which means I store the pole in our garage, where it lies across both bikes, and every year I explain over-and-under to twenty-four seven-year-olds who then do something else. A parent writing on a craft blog says she enjoys the tangled feet and imperfect patterns of children’s May dancing. She is a better person than me. I have a laminated diagram.

This year Class 4 thinking reached us. On the third circuit one boy stopped, looked up and announced that somebody had gone under instead of over. Two girls stopped to check. The rest piled into them. Within a minute I had eleven forensic analysts, one boy crying because he was being blamed, and the top of the pole wrapped like a present for someone the wrapper does not like.

At St Oswald’s in York, where he started around 1948, John Clegg remembers that a maypole ribbon tore at the school fête, and the highlight of the day was Mr Clegg, the headmaster and John’s father, shinning up the pole to mend it. That is leadership. Some schools have a headmaster who will go up the pole. We have me, and the stepladder from the caretaker’s cupboard.

I went up. I unpicked it from the top, saying over, under, over out loud, while twenty-four children below stopped dancing entirely to analyse where I was going wrong.

The newsletter that went home on Friday said the highlight of the fair was a parent being helped down by the caretaker.