text: &#x200B; Hi, thank you for taking the time to look at my writing. This is the first thing I have written for a very long time due to significant health issues. It is written for a particular purpose, the retirement of the head teacher of my children's school. He has supported me and my children through my health issues and tonight, during a rare quiet moment, the idea of writing a short story for him popped into my head. He won't retire until July so I have plenty of time to redraft and therefore would be grateful for any comments received. Thank you Not the end His hand closed around the handle of his office door. He couldn’t have guessed, if he had tried to, that it would be this moment in particular that would hurl him back to his first ever day, not just as a head teacher, but his very first day teaching. He might have thought it would happen when he woke that morning, full of expectation, relief and some anxiety about the day ahead. He might have thought it would happen in the car, the journey was always a time of quiet and a place where he could think before the ever unraveling chaos of each unpredictable day began. He might have thought it would happen as he sat at the desk in the office that had been his space for the last few years The smell of coffee in the air, surrounded by papers, folders and an egg laying chicken, waiting for the day to begin. But no, it was happening now, as his hand gave the familiar amount of pressure to allow the door to open as his final day as head teacher, his final day as teacher, began. As the memory formed, surfacing in his mind from some deep place, he recreated in an instant the smell of the building. He could see the faces of the people who had welcomed him into the school, blurry as some of them were now, 32 years on. He wondered whether any of them ever thought about how many of them he remembered. Faces or names, sometimes both. Mostly he remembered their stories. And it was with this thought that he realised, something he had known before but had perhaps forgotten, that he was a part of their stories. How much had this played a part in his decision to teach in the first place? It didn’t matter now, of course, what the reasons were. But in thinking about the reasons he chose this career, this path for his life, he was able to conjure images of the story telling, the songs, the expectant faces. He looked at them differently today. Each single face representing the hundreds of children to have come through his door. Each single face a thousand stories, a thousand bleeding knees, a thousand tears turned to first a smile and then, sometimes, some laughter. He could hold that, when he missed it. Sometimes all he could feel was the relief that this day would finally come and his time would be entirely for himself. But it was inevitable that such a large part of his life being gone would leave a vacuum. What a privilege to have such stories, such children, families and colleagues to fill that vacuum with. As for them, they looked at him differently too. Each one wondering if they would be one of the ones he remembered. If they were part of his story, like he was a part of theirs. When your story is a part of the lives of children, then even at the end, it cannot really be the end. So here is where we will leave him, at not the end of his story and at not the end of anyone else’s either.