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Pastoral Care<\/strong><\/p>\n Dry, scaly Mr. Jenkins, history teacher <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Robert Nisbet<\/strong> wrote short stories for over 30 years, with seven collections published. He now writes poetry, teaches a few English literature classes for Swansea University and reports on football for local newspapers and radio.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Pastoral Care Dry, scaly Mr. Jenkins, history teacher doubling as pterodactyl, had just that one shrivelled slab of advice (over and bloody over, Form One, Form Two, Form Three). In the army, boys, twenty men will jump to attention when one man blows a whistle. Boys. In life be the man who […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4462","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-prose-poetry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4462","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4462"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4462\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4465,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4462\/revisions\/4465"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4462"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4462"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4462"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\ndoubling as pterodactyl,
\nhad just that one shrivelled slab of advice
\n(over and bloody over, Form One, Form Two, Form Three).
\nIn the army, boys, twenty men will jump to attention
\nwhen one man blows a whistle.
\nBoys. In life be the man who blows the whistle.
\nHe was a sad old sod of course
\nbut we were cynics at thirteen
\nand this was 1958 (there wasn\u2019t the respect in those days).
\nAnd in about Form Five, we got this plan.
\nDry Mr. Jenkins was courting Arnold\u2019s auntie
\n(after her sweetshop, we didn\u2019t doubt)
\nand Russ found in his father\u2019s amdram trunk
\na bleeding great police whistle.
\nYou\u2019ll see the plan, we\u2019d get the right moment,
\nbe under Auntie Mona\u2019s bed and
\nBe the man who blows the whistle.
\nNever did it of course, we might have killed
\nthe poor old bugger. So Jinksy\u2019s advice
\nsort of lay around.
\nNow we blow
\nall sorts of whistles. We\u2019re tax inspectors,
\nmanage Co-ops. One probation officer.
\nThe Bishop of Stroud and West.
\nBy hell though,
\nwe still think of that whistle going off,
\nunder Auntie Mona\u2019s bed.<\/p>\n