Thus, I am bright-eyed and bushy-tailed on Monday morning, as I watch Nadia jump into my Mercedes in the car park at work. She looks a little less bright-eyed than me, but then she does have a hyperactive child at home. I doubt there will be much in the way of being bright-eyed for the next ten years or so.
‘All set then?’ Nadia says, as she pops her seat belt on.
‘Just about. I’m glad I’ve got you with me. You can help me fight off The Sticky Things if they get too overexcited.’
Nadia rolls her eyes. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever met a woman in her thirties with such an aversion to children. They’re really not that bad, Ellie.’
‘Yeah, well, you would say that. You went and got one of them.’
‘I didn’t order Ayesha off Amazon, Ellie,’ she says in an exasperated tone, giving me a playful slap on the arm.
Technically I am Nadia’s boss, but the fact that she completely ignores this at every given opportunity is a source of great comfort to me.
‘Probably just as well; you’re not allowed to return things to Amazon if they get sticky.’
I have met little Ayesha on more than one occasion, and she’s a gorgeous little giggly tumble of fun, if I’m being honest. But I only see her when Nadia presents her at the office – usually on her best behaviour, and after she’s been well fed and watered.
I know what they’re like behind closed doors. I’ve done my research.
Speaking of which . . .
‘You had a chance to read through the questions I put together?’ I ask Nadia, as I drive us away from the office.
‘Yep. Looking forward to hearing what answers we get.’
I snort. ‘Not so sure I am. I don’t mention Fortnite once. Keeping them interested is going to be a nightmare.’
Nadia doesn’t choose to answer that. I’m not surprised. People with kids don’t tend to like it when I’m cynical about them, which is more than fair enough, I suppose. I’m much the same when people are dismissive of Chris Hemsworth’s acting abilities.
The man is a powerhouse of both comedic and dramatic talent, goddamn it, and I will hear nothing to the contrary!
Anyway . . .
Sean Cooke more than makes up for his sister’s cynicism about the next generation. He’s dedicated to his job in a way that almost justifies the long working hours and small pay packet he has to endure.
Sean was born to be a teacher. He looked good in a corduroy jacket at a very early age. And my rather strong command of the English language is just as much down to him as it is to our parents. Sean would hand down all of his books to me to read, and would cheerfully help me with my homework when I needed it. In many ways, I was my brother’s first pupil. I’m amazed he wasn’t put off for life.
He’s waiting for us both at the school’s main entrance, with an enthusiastic smile on his face. Today’s dark-green corduroy jacket goes very well with the black jumper, and I see he’s got a new pair of his favourite black horn-rimmed glasses. Sean looked extremely awkward and geeky when we were teenagers, but at the age of thirty-nine, he has reached the point when his fashion sense is exactly in the right place. He pulls off ‘nerd cool’ in a way that makes me insanely jealous. There’s something so effortless and comfortable about my brother that feels completely alien to me – as if he’s absolutely known his place in the world for decades now, while I’m still floundering around, trying to figure out what the hell I’m doing.
‘Hi, sis!’ he calls out as we approach. It’s genuinely lovely to hear him be so happy to see me. If I’m not careful, I might get a bit emotional.
‘Morning, Sean,’ I reply, and give him a hug. He smells of cornflakes and classrooms. Neither are unpleasant. ‘This is my colleague Nadia Hall. She’s going to be taking care of the recording for me, while I speak to your pupils.’
‘Hello!’ Nadia says, and shakes Sean’s hand.
‘Nice to meet you, Nadia. Thanks for coming along to help my sister out today.’ He grins. ‘I’ve seen her around large groups of children before . . . it’s not a pretty sight. I’m sure she appreciates the backup.’
‘Oh, very funny,’ I say, rolling my eyes. ‘I’m not that bad.’
Sean looks at Nadia. ‘Is she still calling them The Sticky Things?’
Nadia nods solemnly. ‘Yes. Yes she is.’
He looks back at me. ‘Eleanor Cooke, you are incorrigible.’
‘Incorrigible’ is a word Sean taught me the meaning of when I was so young, I had no business knowing what it was.
‘Shall we just get into your classroom?’ I suggest, before he breaks out the family albums, in order to really embarrass me in front of my work colleague.
‘Why not?’ he replies with a smile. ‘I’ll get you both inside and set up, before the horde descends.’ He looks at his watch. ‘We’ve got about fifteen minutes before class is due to start. Follow me.’
Sean leads us into the school, and down a long corridor to his classroom. Once inside, we sit down in the corner, and await the onslaught.
Thus far I haven’t touched anything that actually qualifies as sticky, but I’m sure that time is not far away.
I’m ashamed to say that my heart rate increases a little as Sean lets the long queue of schoolchildren into the classroom as the clock strikes 9 a.m. I think it’s the way they’re all looking at me – like I’m an interloper in their world. Which is exactly what I am, of course.
How the hell am I going to be able to communicate with them for an hour? They’re so strange and alien to everything I know. I’ve never played Fortnite, can only pick maybe two or three Kardashians out of a line-up, and would rather eat the dust under my microwave than go to Nando’s.
Sean has no such problems, naturally. He is as at home here as I am on the couch, wrapped in a duvet, watching old episodes of Friends.
‘Good morning, class,’ he says to them. ‘Today we have some very special guests in, who have come to talk to you about a very, very important subject that I’m sure you’re all very interested in chatting about.’
Lot of verys in that sentence, you’ll notice. Sean is evidently trying to underline the significance of this session, so they don’t all drift off into their own little worlds in the space of two minutes.
Sean’s introduction earns us a whole gamut of looks from our sticky crowd. Most of them look curious, a few look downright suspicious (they’ll do well in life), a couple seem a little scared, and one is picking his nose and looking out of the window.
I asked Sean not to tell the kids too much about what we’re going to be asking them this morning. I want to be the one to do that, so I can say the right things in the right way. There’s a dark art to effective market research that requires a pretty specific methodology when it comes to how you talk to your targets, and I want to make sure we get this as right as we possibly can. The lack of decent data I’m predicting we get must not be blamed on poor interview technique.
Sean says my name, along with Nadia’s, and steps back to allow me to come forward and begin.
Eeep.
I stand up on legs that are far shakier than they should be. These are kids, for crying out loud. Why do I feel so nervous?
Perhaps because children are experts in the unvarnished truth. They’ve not had time to develop all of those social skills that let adults lie and dissemble their way through life, so as not to offend anyone accidentally – not unless they’re on social media, that is, where everyone returns to the playground as soon as they start to write a tweet.
‘Hello,’ I say.
A few of them wave back and say ‘hello’ in return. I mark which ones they are. I’m more likely to get opinions out of the extroverts than I am the quiet ones.
I look over to Nadia, who has set up her smartphone to record everything that’s said, and is also taking notes. She gives me a nod.
I look down at my question sheet at the first one on the list, which quite simply asks the children if they know what climate change is.
‘So, I have a question for you all,’ I say to them, trying to maintain a friendly smile and light tone to my voice – these things are important. ‘Who knows what climate change is?’
Every. Single. Hand. Goes. Up.
Jesus Christ.
‘Er . . . well, that’s . . . good,’ I fumble, my grip on the question sheet tightening somewhat.
I did ask them the right question, didn’t I?
I mean, I did ask them if they knew what climate change is, and not what Minecraft is, didn’t I?
They can’t all know what climate change is. That’s just silly.
They’re eleven.
I glance over at Sean, who is standing with his arms crossed and a slightly smug expression on his face. He unfolds one arm and gestures for me to carry on, with a slowly waved hand. The floor is mine, whether I like it or not.
I’m flummoxed, to be honest. I had it in my head that it was going to be a struggle just to get this lot to engage with me about the environment, and had tailored my questions to that end. But the sea of hands suggests that I have read the room about as badly as I possibly could. I wasn’t banking on enthusiasm. I have nowhere to go with enthusiasm.
‘Um . . . well, let me just see what the best thing to ask you all about it would be . . .’ I tell them, frantically searching down my list of questions to see if there’s one that’s appropriate.
Oh, here’s one that should do the trick. It’s one of the last, and I wasn’t expecting any of them to know what the hell I was talking about. I threw it in more as a baseline for the end of the session, to let me know levels of ignorance.
‘Hands up if you can tell me anything about the effects of climate change on biodiversity?’
That should do it. There’s no way any eleven-year-old can—
Fuck me, that’s at least a dozen hands up.
I have to lean back against Sean’s desk.
I lift a finger, and point it at the boy who was picking his nose. ‘Yes, you?’
He looks momentarily shocked that I’ve singled him out for special favour, but rallies magnificently and sits up to respond. ‘Biodiversity is what we call all the different animals living together, and we keep doing things that make those animals go extinct,’ he tells me, seemingly very confident that he’s right. ‘That means there’s less of them, so less biodiversity.’
He’s eleven. He knows what biodiversity is.
I didn’t even know what biology was at the age of eleven.
‘That’s . . . that’s right. What’s your name?’
‘Aiden.’
‘Well, thank you, Aiden.’
Aiden beams at me with the smile of someone who knows he has done good. He’s done more than that though; he’s forcing me to re-evaluate this entire bloody thing, the nose-picking little horror.
I try another question – this one about CO2 levels in the Earth’s atmosphere.
Yep, some of the little sods know about that too. A girl called Olivia tells me all about how she understands that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, and it heats up the planet. She does this while constantly twirling a long strand of copper hair that I find myself insanely jealous of. I’m almost as jealous of her knowledge of CO2 levels, if I’m being brutally honest.
I decide I might as well plough on with some of the more broad, open questions, given that I took ages deciding on what they should be – as, if I don’t, this session will be coming to a very abrupt end. I have nothing else prepared.
They all know about plastic pollution. There’s a visceral anger in some of their eyes about that one.
And the anger is replaced by sadness when I mention what’s happening to animals across the planet. There’s a palpable sense among these kids that something is being lost. Something very important.
One girl called Summer – who recently immigrated to the UK from Sydney – spends a good five minutes telling me all about how her family watched their next-door neighbour’s house burn down in a bushfire, and how she and her mum raised four hundred and twenty-seven dollars and sixty-three cents to help take care of the poor burned koalas.
Summer’s look of devastation when she talks about all of this cuts me to the quick.
One after another, each of my carefully constructed questions is responded to with more knowledge and insight than I was ever prepared for. I expected to come here to talk to a bunch of switched-off preteens who just want to be on their smartphones – and instead I’m having to handle a classroom of mini experts.
It only takes half an hour to rattle through everything I’ve prepared, such is the volume of knowledge they all have. I’ve woefully underestimated their understanding of climate change, and it fucking shows.
Bloody hell.
There’s every possibility that, on some aspects of the subject, they know more than I do.
I didn’t have a clue that butterflies had virtually disappeared across the whole of California – but Eric does.
Eric is an eleven-year-old boy who is called Eric in this day and age. This is probably all I need to tell you about him.
And Shelly knows that a third of the Amazon rainforest will be gone in the next couple of decades. She tells me this with wide eyes and a horrified expression.
Every one of them knows who Greta Thunberg is, in the same way I knew who Posh Spice was at their age.
It’s remarkable.
‘Er . . . okay. That’s . . . all the questions I . . . I have,’ I again fumble, looking at the clock with some dismay. I promised Sean I’d keep them occupied for the whole lesson, and here I am done with thirty minutes to spare.
In desperation, I look over at my brother, who has been watching all of this silently but with a permanently unsurprised expression on his face.
Not for the first time in my life – and it definitely won’t be the last – I am looking to Sean to jump in and save my bacon.
He sees my hopeless look and immediately steps forward. ‘Guys, why don’t you all spend a few minutes thinking about what you’ve been talking about, and maybe come up with some questions you would like to ask Ellie?’
What?
That’s not how this works!
I ask the questions. They answer. That’s the way market research goes! Not the other way around!
But Sean has bought me a break in proceedings. I have to be grateful to him for that.
As his class drops into the silence of thought about what they might want to ask (oh God) my brother comes to stand next to me, as Nadia does the same.
‘They’re a bloody clever bunch!’ she says, with some surprise.
‘Yes, they are,’ Sean agrees, smiling.
‘Well done, bruv,’ I tell him. ‘You’ve done a great job of teaching them about the environment.’ I scowl a little. ‘You could have warned me though. I could have prepared my questions better.’
Sean looks baffled. ‘What? You think this was me?’
‘Yeah, of course.’
‘You’re kidding, aren’t you? I don’t have time to teach them about climate change . . . not beyond whatever basic stuff we might stumble over in the curriculum, anyway. I certainly can’t get into the kinds of in-depth stuff they’ve been talking to you about.’
‘Then how do they know all of it?’
Sean fishes into his pocket . . . and pulls out his smartphone. He waves it at me. ‘They’re not stupid, Ellie. They can see what’s going on around them, and they can find out about it for themselves whenever they want to. All I can really do is make sure they’re not just taking what
they see online at face value.’ He looks at the class for a moment. His expression is indecipherable. ‘Sometimes, I think that’s the best thing I can teach them – never believe anything you see until you’ve dug a little deeper.’
‘That’s a bit heavy for eleven-year-olds, isn’t it?’ Nadia replies, looking a bit disturbed.
Sean nods. ‘We live in a heavy world.’
The grave look on my brother’s face is almost as shocking as the depth of knowledge that’s been arrayed in front of me this morning. Sean is an optimist at heart. I’m the one who’s supposed to be the cynic. Hearing him talk like this is quite dismaying – especially when it’s about the children he teaches, and the world we’ve created for them.
Sean gives his class another couple of minutes to think of some questions, before bringing their attention back to him. ‘So, anyone thought of a question to ask Miss Cooke?’ he says.
Once again, every hand in the room shoots up – as does my heart rate.
I’m about to be put on the spot – and I have a feeling I’m woefully inadequate for the task.
‘Aiden? What would you like to ask?’ Sean enquires.
Ah. The nose-picker. Surely the nose-picker will go easy on me.
‘Do you think we should all stop eating meat?’ he asks me, the nose remaining clear of finger throughout, thankfully.
‘Well . . . um . . . I guess it’s important to . . . to . . .’
What the hell do I say? Even though I’m doing meat-free Mondays, a Sunday roast is never something I turn down. But about ten minutes ago, Sadie at the back of the class – her of the neat hair and prim expression – was telling me all about how awful it is for the animals before they get killed. How do I stand here and say it’s fine to eat meat, when these kids have a more-than-passable working knowledge (at eleven!) of what goes into getting that meat on to the table?
‘. . . make your own decisions about it,’ I eventually say, taking the coward’s way out. I can almost see Mordred’s beard shaking with disappointment and fury at my cop-out of an answer.
Going Green Page 16