by Mike Kent
‘I haven’t really thought about it.’
‘I s’pose not. You’ve only just started. My Kathy goes to a school round ‘ere. I don’t understand ‘alf the things they do these days. This new maths and all. Marvellous, the stuff these kids ‘ave in school now. My Kathy loves it. Not like when I was at school. You got the bleedin’ cane just for talkin’’.
Her cigarette had gone out and she peeled it from her lower lip, inspecting it carefully as if she couldn’t understand why it was so short when she’d only puffed on it once.
‘Why don’t you smoke ordinary ones?’ I asked.
‘Can’t, love. They make me coff.’
‘But you cough with those.’
‘Not like I coff with the others. Coff me ‘art up with them. Mind you, I should really pack it in. Bloke two doors up died of lung cancer last week, but my old man reckons it’s the traffic smoke wot does it. Got an answer for everythin’, ‘e ‘as. We’ve been tryin’ to get the telly fixed for a week. At least when that’s on we don’t ‘ave ter sit around listenin’ to ‘im carryin’ on’.
She looked decidedly miserable and sat silently for a few moments. Then she wiped her nose on the duster and climbed out of the bath, groaning with every movement.
‘Are you goin’ to teach the little ones, love?’
‘Oh yes. Wouldn’t want to do anything else.’
‘Much nicer,’ she confided. ‘Them older kids are awful these days. I watch ‘em from me winder when they’re comin’ out of Strutton Road. A right school that is. Wonder they let ‘em on the bus. Mind you, I don’t think the teachers ‘ave got much control.’
I sensed I was about to be treated to the general public’s view of education again. ‘I shouldn’t imagine it’s easy,’ I interrupted quickly. ‘Teaching the older ones, I mean.’
‘Bloody right, love. Trouble is, the parents ain’t got much control of ‘em, neither. At least my Tracey never gave me any lip. Good girl, she was. Married now, o’course. Gone up north. ‘Avin a rough time of it, too, what with the ceilin’ and ‘er poisoned bowel an’ all.’
She gazed despondently at her duster.
‘Oh well, love, I suppose I’d better do the floor before they all come back. Don’t let me keep yer from the bath. I’ll do yer room while you’re in there. Unless you want yer back scrubbed?’
She manoeuvred herself out of the room and I turned the tap on. A trickle of rusty water ran out, which slowly developed into an intermittent flow. After two minutes, when the water showed no signs of even getting warm, I remembered that the hot water system had broken down. I abandoned the idea of a bath altogether, went into the kitchen area, and put the kettle on. As I was filling the teapot, Duggan and Gerry came up the stairs together.
‘I’m changing my subject,’ Duggan announced briefly, ushering both of us into his room. ‘The man’s impossible. I mean, I may not be the best qualified student he’s ever had, but he seemed to take great delight in disagreeing with every word I said.’
‘I know the feeling,’ I said.
‘Luckily he was called away, or I’d have been chewed up and spat out. Miss Bottle spent the rest of the time trying to calm me down. She doesn’t seem to like him at all. She has my sympathy. I suppose we’ll have to go and get some new books this afternoon. There’s some biscuits in the cupboard. How was your morning then, Gerry?’
Gerry took his tea and perched on the armchair near the window, balancing his long legs on the edge of the bed.
‘Well, not bad really. I’ve got a rather delightful old dear for geography. A Miss Pratt. Looks as if she’s been chipped out of granite. She’s in charge of all the visual aid equipment too. Cupboards full of projectors and slide tins. Might be able to use it sometime’.
‘What for?’
‘Well the college hasn’t got a film society and I thought we might have a go at starting one. We might as well start something.’
‘We might even have to start some work,’ said Duggan, pouring fresh milk into his mug. ‘I was going to have a pleasant afternoon pottering round the shops and now we’ve got to go charging around the second-hand bookshops looking for physics books. Here, have you read this?’
He lifted a paperback from his shelf and tossed it across to Gerry. ‘It’s about a guy who taught in a big comprehensive in Manchester. It makes you wonder if we should be here at all. He says it took him half the year to make his class sit down, and another six months to get them listening to him. Somehow they found out when his birthday was, and they gave him a present.’
‘Well at least that shows some kind of feeling,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ Duggan agreed. ‘The present they gave him was a box of chalks nicked from his own stock cupboard. It wasn’t even coloured chalk.’
‘But they can’t all be like that.’
‘No,’ Duggan admitted. ‘Some are worse, of course. One of the final year students told me his kids chained his leg to the table one morning on teaching practice, and they had to fetch the schoolkeeper to get the padlock off.’
Gerry’s pipe dropped several inches and he puffed nervously on it.
‘Go on!’ I said. ‘I don’t believe you.’
‘I don’t blame you.’
‘It makes you think, though,’ said Gerry, shifting his legs into a more comfortable position. ‘I mean, just how do we cope with keeping order? The kids are bound to know we’re students.’
‘Psychology, mate. I read a book on classroom discipline by a bloke who’s taught in some of the toughest schools. He listed about twenty different techniques for getting a class quiet.’
‘Like what?’ asked Gerry nervously.
‘Well once, for instance, he put his waste bin on his desk and gradually peeled strips of paper into it from a note pad. The kids came in very noisily, and he took no notice. He just carried on peeling bits of paper into the bin.’
‘And?’
‘The kids gradually noticed him and became silent. They thought he’d flipped.’
‘Well I suppose anything is worth trying,’ said Gerry. ‘I mean, you’ve got to have a few ideas in reserve.’
There was a tap at the door and Milly’s head appeared.
‘Hello treasure,’ said Duggan, giving her a suggestive grin.
‘‘Ello gorgeous. Do you want yer room done? I’ve finished all the others.’
‘Do you want us out of the way?’
‘No love,’ said Milly cheerfully, easing a bucket through the door with her foot. ‘Just cock yer legs up a bit while I get under the bed.’
‘What do you want to get under there for?’
‘The broom, darlin’. Not me.’
She thrust the broom violently between Gerry’s legs and made a great deal of noise as she banged it about under the bed. ‘‘Ere!’ she exclaimed, straining to reach the hidden dust, ‘You see that film up the Cameo this week? My old man says to me, ‘Get yer coat on and I’ll take you out. Course, ‘e only says that when it’s somethin’ ‘e wants ter see. Couldn’t get the bugger near The Sound Of Music.’
‘Don’t blame him,’ said Duggan.
‘Well, this teacher kills ‘er ‘usband by drownin’ ‘im in the bath, and then the body disappears. Then in the end the body comes back in the bath again and tries to strangle the girl. Bleedin’ scary, it was.’
‘It sounds like ‘Les Diaboliques’, said Gerry.
‘You what, love?’
‘A French film. The Fiends.’
‘It bleedin’ looked like ‘em, an’ all. ‘Didn’t dare look in the bath when I got ‘ome.’ She leant expertly on the end of the broom. It was obviously a position she was used to.
‘You haven’t found any in our bath, have you?’ asked Duggan.
‘Found any what, love?’
‘Bodies.’
‘Now don’t you go sayin’ t
hat,’ she said sternly. ‘I wouldn’t ‘ave gone anyway if Sid ‘adn’t wanted to go. Don’t worry, ‘e said, I’ll cheer you up afterwards.’
Gerry looked faintly disgusted.
‘What did he do, then? Afterwards, I mean?’ asked Duggan innocently.
Milly wiped her hands on her grimy overall. ‘I wouldn’t tell you, love,’ she grinned. ‘Not at your age. Where’s your bucket?’ Duggan slid the waste bin from under the desk with his foot.
‘There’s nothin’ in it,’ she said. ‘It’s not worth me emptyin’ it.’
‘We haven’t done anything worth throwing away yet,’ I said.
‘That don’t really surprise me, love. None of ‘em do. Till it’s too late.’
‘Would you like a mug of tea, you gorgeous creature?’ asked Duggan.
‘Okay, love, but I can’t sit down for more than a minute. If I get caught sittin’ down again I’ll get me cards.’ Gerry held out the packet of custard creams.
‘No thanks dear,’ she said. ‘They give me wind.’
She coaxed her ample body gently into the other easy chair, and sighed with relief. Carefully removing a liquorice paper from the battered packet she kept in her overalls pocket, she began to roll another cigarette. Long strands of tobacco hung limply from each end when she had finished.
‘‘Ave you got a match, love?’ she asked.
Duggan took a box from his desk drawer. ‘I don’t know how you can smoke that muck,’ he said severely. ‘Why don’t you smoke a pipe, like Gerry here? Do you more good than those things you’re smoking. At least you’d kipper your lungs more slowly.’
She lit a match and laughed.
‘I’d get me cards, love. I ‘ave enough stress coping with you buggers. It’s a wonder I don’t ‘ave a bleedin’ ‘eart attack with what goes on up ‘ere. One of ‘em was runnin’ round the corridor stark naked last term. Worried about ‘is exams, ‘e was.’
‘He was probably after you, you gorgeous thing.’ said Duggan. She gurgled with laughter, trying to avoid letting the cigarette fall from her mouth. ‘‘E’s a saucy bugger, this one, ain’t ‘e?’ she said to Gerry. He nodded seriously.
‘So when do you think they’ll get the hot water running properly?’ he asked, anxious to change the subject quickly.
‘It’s usually a day or two love. It keeps breakin’ down. Bin playin’ up ever since I’ve bin ‘ere. Well, taa for the cuppa. I’d better finish up now.’ She sighed, put the mug on the table and stood up, shaking her duster outside the door. The dust scattered and hovered in the cold morning sunlight.
‘If she spends as much time with everyone else along this corridor I’m not surprised she doesn’t get much work done,’ I said.
‘Oh well, it’s stopped us from doing any,’ Duggan replied. ‘It’s gone twelve. Let’s go and get some lunch, then Gerry can have a look at my radiator. Auntie Jean will give us a cup of tea and some cake, and then we’ll go and buy some books. I’d like to have a sporting chance with Dr Frost before he puts me in a test tube.’
JANUARY
SO, WHO’LL BE THE FIRST VOLUNTEER?
‘Right then,’ said Dr Frost severely, ‘Which of you gentlemen would care to be the first?’
He stepped down from the front bench, thrust his hands deep inside the pockets of his immaculate white laboratory coat, and walked with measured steps to the back of the room. This was a moment he always enjoyed, when he could really begin to assess the teaching potential of the students in his charge. After all, he reasoned, if they could stand up and teach a science lesson to their peers, while at the same time coping with his barrage of vitriolic asides, they could almost certainly cope on a teaching practice with twenty five bored teenagers in a London comprehensive.
There was a rumour that his own initial two years of teaching had been a baptism of fire, when his vision of imparting scientific knowledge to enthusiastic youngsters had rapidly receded, to be replaced by the cynical realisation that many of the children he taught didn’t view physics as one of life’s most desirable features. In his first year of teaching, his strong qualifications had earned him a class of ‘A’ stream boys, but after a few months he’d annoyed his head of department by stating that, if they were the cream of the year, it must have been clotted. His embittered approach, refined with more than a dash of sarcasm over the years, had been moulded like a shield to deal with all but the most troublesome youngsters. Once he’d found his feet, no class had ever given him trouble again, and he now treated his training college students with much of the contempt he’d once reserved for the teenagers in his classes.
His colleague, Doris Bottle, felt it almost immoral that he should be lecturing to students doing the primary school course when he had only ever taught secondary school children. The methods were totally different, she insisted. He descended even lower in her estimation when he refused to acknowledge any modern methods of teaching science to young children, basing his lecturing on the styles and techniques used when he had been trained himself. After all, he reasoned, he’d managed to get an honours without too much difficulty, so the methods he’d learned by couldn’t be that bad, could they? Miss Bottle regularly argued the point with him but invariably backed down, partly because he acknowledged no other view, and partly because, in the final analysis, he did happen to be in charge of the department.
It seemed amazing that three months had passed already. We had investigated and joined a number of college societies, discovered a common love of chess which we played into the small hours at least twice a week, ploughed our way through books on education, and visited London cinemas, theatres and galleries as often as our grants would allow. The only blots on this new freedom were Dr Frost’s lectures, which were organised like secondary school lessons. There was no opportunity to lose concentration for a moment. Dr Frost had an uncanny knack of knowing just when somebody had switched off, and he would bark a question or request a formula from anybody whose face showed even a momentary blankness.
During his first lecture to our group, he had given us a searching test to find out how much we knew about his subject. On the whole, the group’s corporate knowledge was decidedly small by his standards. Since there were only ten students in this group, he had temporarily taken over Miss Bottle’s sessions as well, with the intention of raising all the students to what he insisted was a minimum standard of acceptability. It wasn’t long before he also discovered that six students in the group didn’t have advanced level mathematics. Feeling that they needed an additional hour or two of maths cramming each week, he’d started a special booster group on Tuesday evenings. He was determined that the dismal results shown by last year’s group wouldn’t be repeated and woe betide any of the six who didn’t turn up.
This seemed a reasonable idea at first, but working for two extra hours on Tuesdays, a particularly full lecture day anyway, had quickly dampened our initial enthusiasm. We also found it increasingly difficult to cope with the amount of work being set for our spare time, especially since he seemed unable to accept that we had much to do in other subjects as well. Ultimately, we felt that pointing this out would be taking a risk in which the odds were decidedly unfavourable. During his teaching career, Dr Frost had never had a problem with homework collection and he had brought the same rigid insistence to his training college lecturing. He was, in fact, the only lecturer in the college to be addressed as ‘Sir’ by all his students and some of the staff as well.
Gerry had quickly discovered that his geography lecturers took a similar outlook as far as the work schedule was concerned and, apart from a few hours at weekends, there was rarely any spare time. He coped with this more readily than most, since he had a great enthusiasm for anything related to a map or a piece of land. Where others might be seen reading a detective novel after lunch, he would be gaining intense pleasure from poring over an atlas or the latest National Geographic magazine.
When Dr Frost had suddenly announced that he was finishing one of his lectures half an hour earlier than usual, it had taken our group by surprise. Were we to get an early lunch? A breathing space? Was it a sign of a more relaxed approach to us? In fact, this was an annual and regular occurrence; the Doctor was merely allowing himself enough time at the end of the lecture to explain his method of assessing our teaching potential. He had prepared a list of scientific topics, from which each student had to select one and prepare a suitable lesson for thirteen year olds. The lesson was to be tried out on the rest of the group, who would act as the class for a forty minute period.
There were tentative murmurs of objection from the six of us who were intending to teach at a primary school, but on the few occasions that Dr Frost had actually been known to acknowledge the existence of children under twelve, he had simply stated there was no harm in them learning something with a bit of meat to it.
His announcement had meant sudden and hasty revision of work we had done in the early years of secondary school. After glumly scanning the list for ten minutes, Duggan opted to attempt a lesson on the properties of heat, and I decided that mirrors might be worth a try. Fortunately, the physics laboratory carried a good stock of equipment, managed by an efficient young Irish laboratory assistant named Patrick, who had watched many students undergo the rigours of this initial teaching experience. Always sympathetic, he did his best to ensure the necessary equipment was in the right place at the right time. He also revealed that Dr Frost had suffered from stomach ulcers, and this hadn’t helped his temper or his patience. He had not been overjoyed when a member of last year’s group, whom he had previously thought to be hard of hearing, had been caught listening to the test match through an earphone disguised as a hearing aid. His displeasure at this incident had apparently caused him to lecture until well after meal time.
‘Well, gentlemen?’ he glared. ‘Not a single volunteer?’
All eyes looked towards Simon Daines, the student Duggan had first met while waiting for an initial interview with Dr Frost three months ago, and whose knowledge had impressed him even then. Though there were several talented and mildly eccentric students in the group… David Barton, a volatile student from Newcastle whose roughened hands were often oily because he enjoyed taking motor cycles to pieces and reassembling parts of them in his room, Samuel Charlton who had nine GCEs and collected telephone box numbers in his spare time… it was Daines who had rapidly come to be recognised as the cleverest of our group, probably accounting for seventy per cent of the group’s overall knowledge of physics.