STEPHEN LEWIS chats to Jack Linley, the one-time head teacher of Huby primary school who looks set to become the new Gervase Phinn.

A GENTLY humorous book about the goings on at a North Yorkshire primary school back in the 1970s that's full of larger-than-life Yorkshire characters.

Sounds vaguely familiar? Maybe. But Teacher Teacher! is not the latest book from the pen of local favourite Gervase Phinn. Instead, it marks the welcome debut of first-time author - and one-time primary school head teacher - Jack Linley.

Jack, who writes under the pen-name Jack Sheffield, concedes that Gervase Phinn is a "wonderful writer". But his own book is very different, he insists.

The gentle humour and observational keenness may be the same: but whereas Gervase was a school inspector who went around visiting many schools, he himself was a head teacher, and his own book is very firmly set in one village primary school.

"It is definitely written from the inside!" he says.

"A nostalgic account very firmly set in the 1970s."

Jack's fictional school, Ragley-on-the-Forest, is a thinly-disguised version of Huby CE Primary School, where he was head teacher from 1977 to 1983.

Subtitled The Alternative School Logbook, it is essentially a fictionalised account of his first year in charge at the school. Each chapter begins with a short entry from the school's official log - then goes on to relate with affectionate humour the often chaotic reality underlying the dry, factual entry.

The humour is located somewhere in the territory where Gervase Phinn meets James Heriott and the Constable books of Nicholas Rhea.

There's a wonderful gallery of village characters, from Ruby the 20-stone school caretaker to the village carrot-growing champion George Hardisty and Miss Barrington-Huntley, pompous chairwoman of the county education committee, whose peacock-feathered hat causes quite a stir in one chapter.

What really brings the book to life, however, is Jack's eye and ear for detailed observation, which enables him to make many of his characters - children included - startlingly real.

There is a lovely example of that in Chapter 1. Jack Linley's alter ego, the young school headteacher Jack Sheffield, has just finished school dinner, where he was sitting at a table with several of the younger children.

Afterwards one of them, a lisping seven-year-old by the name of Jimmy Poole, sidles up to him in his office and offers him a half-sucked gobstopper dug up from a fluff-filled corner of his pocket. Jack says he will "put it aside for later".

The passage continues:

"The opening gambit now dispensed with, Jimmy lunged in bravely.

'Thum boyth an' girlth were naughty in thchool dinner today, Mr Theffield.'

'Oh yes, what were they doing?' I asked.

'Well...you know when Mithith Granger thaid handth together, eyeth clothed?

'Yes?'

'Well, Mithter Theffield, thum of them kept their eyeth open.'

'And how did you know, Jimmy?'

'I thaw them, Mithter Theffield."'

Jimmy stands out as a perfect portrait of the little boy who has just for the first time learned the delights of being an informer: but he's only one of many characters who leap off the page.

So are these real people? And is in fact Jack Sheffield, the narrator of the book and Ragley's young and inexperienced headteacher, really the author himself?

A lot of the incidents in the book actually happened to him, he concedes: but it is not purely autobiographical. The characters have been mixed and matched a bit, incidents have been telescoped together, the village and the main characters have all been given fictionalised names - and even Jack Sheffield isn't really Jack Linley. They're a lot alike - but in the book the headteacher isn't married, for a start.

There is a reason for that - in the shape of Beth Henderson, a schoolteacher seconded to County Hall to support English and Physical Education teaching, who is the book's romantic interest. Is she, in some way, a portrait of Jack Linley's ideal woman? He grins. "She's five foot six and honey blonde...Need I go on?" he says. "She's the sort of person that Jack would like, and vice versa."

In real life, Jack is married to Elizabeth - who, ironically enough given the comparisons that are bound to be made with Gervase Phinn, is herself a school inspector. Jack himself, who has two daughters and three stepdaughters, recently retired after a successful career which saw him move on to become a lecturer in primary education at Leeds University, then a schools consultant, and finally European Communications Manager at Unilever IT.

His three years at Ragley - sorry, Huby - primary school, however, remains the best period of his life, he says.

"There was no national curriculum then, and it was so relaxed," he says. "There were so many after school activities, camping and hiking, summer fairs, fancy dress. It was a very full life. It is different in schools now. The pressures are greater on teachers and that has removed some of the enjoyment and camaraderie. I may be looking at it through rose-coloured spectacles, but I think there are too many tests and assessments, too much being put on the kids at a very early age. In those days, we were still turning out literate, numerate children - but my aim was to give them a love of learning, too!"

Teacher Teacher! by Jack Sheffield is published by Central Publishing Services priced £8.99. Jack Linley (aka Jack Sheffield) will be at Waterstones, York, at 10am tomorrow to sign copies of his book.

Updated: 09:22 Wednesday, April 07, 2004