“If she kept us after school it was not to scold us but to help us past the hard part.”
A brief apotheosis of this book’s earlier “Fall of the Idol”, it being also about a schooldays crush on a teacher, but here the beautiful kind-hearted young female teacher’s fall is by a disease, perhaps one from sniffing sweet peas given to her by the children? I guess not as my research shows no linkage, but I wonder about a past summer’s now old circus poster on a barn and, later, her gravestone as seen through the eyes of this work’s own Just William. And the lady who tended her in the last days of the illness and now tends this grave lovingly as witnessed by the boy… I perhaps need to be held back in class to get me past the hard parts.
***
#ThatGlimpseOfTruth context here: https://nemonymousnight.wordpress.com/986-2/
The Des Lewis Gestalt Real-Time Reviews 
Just William in ‘Fall of the Idol’ by Richmal Crompton as well William Maxwell?
I have always found this story particularly intriguing. Circus Poster… I wonder… Is it like the fading illusion of teachers who seem in the classroom, out of time, somehow magical, out of time… just as — perhaps! — bright and magical circus performers can mantain an illusion inside the circus tent, but once outside the ring/room seem desaturated, mortal…
Ah!
out of time, out of time…