by Maeve Haran
‘But you’ve always been amazing with your pupils!’ Sal defended indignantly. ‘Do you remember, years before the Internet, you made tapes up with you and Gaby speaking French to one another? Your pupils loved them!’
Claudia blanched. The deputy head had actually produced one of these twenty-year-old anachronisms during their interview and had had the gall to hold it up and ask in a sugary tone, ‘Of course you probably think the old ways are best, don’t you, Claudia?’
Claudia had wanted to snap that she was perfectly au fait with modern teaching methods, thank you very much. But the truth was she was beginning to feel defeated. For the first time, since those heady days of the photograph, she had started to feel old. And it wasn’t the fault of memory loss or the war with grey hair.
It was technology.
Jean-Paul Sartre might say hell was other people, but he’d never been to an Apple store on a busy Saturday, only to be told you needed an appointment to talk to a ‘genius’, one of a thousand identikit geeky youths, before you could ask a simple question.
Nor had he to contend with the horrors of the ‘managed learning environment’ where pupils and even their parents could go online and access their school work from home. Even the tech-savviest staff found it a nightmare to operate. As if that weren’t enough, now teachers were expected to identify their pupils’ weaknesses using some hideous software developed by a ten-year-old!
‘Snotty cow,’ Ella’s angry voice echoed through The Grecian Grove in Claudia’s defence. ‘You’re far better at technology than I am. I still think an iPad is something made by Optrex. What are you going to do about it?’
‘Actually,’ Claudia realized the truth for the first time herself, ‘I might even resign.’
‘Claudia, no!’ Laura was shocked. ‘But you love teaching and you’re really good at it!’
‘Am I? Seriously, girls, the bastards think we’re has-beens. Drooly Dooley even said, “If it’s any consolation, Claudia, a lot of the older teachers are struggling with the system.”’
‘Bollocks!’ protested Sal, emptying her glass.
‘Anyway, another school would snap you up!’ Laura, always the positive one in the group, happily married for twenty-five years and a great believer in the virtues of the institution, was attempting to answer Claudia’s question. ‘You’re a wonderful teacher. You’d find something else useful to do. Funny, it only seems the blink of an eye since we first met. We should just keep calm and carry on. It’ll only be another blink till we’re ninety.’
‘Except that this blink will be punctuated by arthritis, memory loss and absence of bladder control,’ Sal pointed out laconically. ‘And anyway, you should fight back! Don’t take ageism lying down. We’re not old yet. Not even middle-aged.’
Maybe because she was the one who most needed to earn her living, Sal was fighting ageing the hardest. She had declared war on body fat, laughter lines and any clothing in baggy linen. The dress she wore today was black gabardine, strictly sculpted and teamed with high heels. Ella had given up on anything but flatties years ago, and Claudia was wearing trainers so that she could walk to the tube.
She liked to walk to work on school days. But would there be any more school to walk to? Claudia asked herself glumly, as she poured out the last of the resin-flavoured Greek wine into their glasses.
‘You’d definitely find another teaching job,’ Laura comforted, with all the encouraging optimism of someone who didn’t really need to work.
‘Would I?’ Despite the jeans, Claudia felt suddenly old. Who would want to employ a teacher on a high pay-scale who wouldn’t see sixty again?
‘Come on, Clo,’ Ella encouraged. ‘You’re the dangerous radical in our midst. You were in Paris in ’sixty-eight throwing paving stones! You can’t just give up because some snotty jobsworth is trying to sideline you!’
Claudia sipped her wine and winced. The trouble was she wasn’t sure she wanted to fight back. She was beginning to feel tired. She looked around at her friends. ‘A toast.’ Claudia raised her glass. ‘To us. It was bloody amazing while it lasted.’
‘I’ll drink to that,’ Sal seconded. ‘But it isn’t over yet!’
‘Oh, come on, Sal, admit it.’ Ella shook her head. ‘We’re not middle-aged, we’re ancient.’
‘No we’re not. There’s no such thing as old any more. We’re YAHs –Young At Hearts. Or maybe we’re SWATs.’
‘I thought that was a valley in Pakistan,’ Claudia giggled.
‘Or some kind of police unit,’ seconded Ella.
Sal ignored them. ‘Still Working At Sixty.’
‘If we are still working,’ Claudia sighed. ‘Or in your case, Sal, maybe it’s SOTs. Still Out There at Sixty.’
‘That makes me sound like an ageing cougar with a drink problem!’
‘And your point is . . . ?’ Ella teased.
‘Now, now,’ Laura admonished. ‘Don’t gang up on Sal.’
‘The thing is, we’re just not old like people have been old in the past,’ persisted Sal. ‘At my age my mother looked like the Queen – with a curly perm and twinsets. I wear jeans and shop at H&M!’
‘It’s true we all look nothing like our mothers did,’ Laura conceded. ‘The only way you can tell a woman’s age these days is to look at her husband!’
‘The thing is we may be old but we don’t feel old,’ Sal insisted, ‘that’s what makes us different. We’re the baby boomers, the Me Generation. We’ve always ripped up the rules and done it our way. Ageing isn’t inevitable any more, it’s a choice! And I, for one, am not choosing it.’
‘I don’t know.’ Ella stretched out the arm in which she got occasional twinges of rheumatism. ‘Sometimes I do feel old.’
‘Nonsense! We’ll never be old. We’re the Woodstock generation! What was that Joni Mitchell song?’ Sal delved into the recesses of her memory. ‘You know, the one about being stardust and needing to get back to the Garden?’
‘Yes,’ Ella raised her glass. ‘Let’s just hope the Garden’s wheelchair accessible.’
On the tube home Claudia got out her phone and set it to calculator. Yes, she was tech-savvy enough to do that, thank you, even though her daughter Gaby said she only used her phone to send nags-by-text. She roughly added up their major outgoings. If she gave up now it would damage her pension. She couldn’t help smiling at Ella’s jibe about her throwing paving stones in 1968, when here she was agonizing about pensions. What would the young Claudia have thought of that?
But then she’d only been an accidental anarchist. In fact, she’d really been an au pair, only seventeen, trying to improve her French before A levels, staying with a well-heeled family in the smart sixteenth arrondissement. That’s when she met Thierry, best friend of the family’s son. It had been Thierry, darkly good-looking with black horn-rimmed specs and an intellectual air, who had persuaded her, on her rare day off, to come and see what the students were doing.
Claudia, from safe suburban Surrey, had been entranced by the heady air of revolution, the witty graffiti daubed on the elegant buildings: Be realistic, demand the impossible, I am a Marxist, Groucho Tendency, and even more by the alluringly radical Thierry himself.
It had all been so daring and exciting. She had joined hands with Thierry and his clean-cut friends in their corduroy jackets and short haircuts, not at all the standard image of revolting students, to block the Paris streets so that the hated flics couldn’t pass. She had ridden on his shoulders – like girls now did at music festivals – in the Latin Quarter with hundreds of thousands of others demanding sexual liberation and an end to paternalism.
It all seemed a far cry from today.
She went back to her calculations. How would they survive without her salary? Badly. At this rate, if she gave up teaching, she’d have to get a job in B&Q like all the other oldies! The most infuriating thing was that Claudia knew she was good at her job. She could enthuse her students and she was popular too. But it was true that she didn’t use new technolo
gy as much as Peter Dooley did. She wondered if she was being a Luddite. No, she reminded herself, I’m bloody good at what I do. And what if she did give up? She could always coach pupils at a crammer.
But what Ella had said was true; she was still a bit of a boat-rocker and she hated privilege that could be bought by rich parents. If I give up, I’m bound to pick up some work, she told herself. But, deep down, Claudia knew that no matter how good she was, her age was beginning to tell against her.
By the time she got home, the brief respite from her problems brought on by wine and friendship had evaporated. She walked up their garden path, noticing that the light was on in the sitting room and that, unusually, her husband Don – also a teacher, in his case of politics – was sitting at the computer underneath the cheese plant, another feisty survivor from the Sixties. The height of fashion in 1969, cheese plants were as quaint as aspidistras now, but Claudia felt an inexplicable loyalty to it and refused to chuck it out.
She had spent most of last night moaning to him about the deputy head. In contrast to her own gloomy mood, Don seemed unusually cheery, which amazed her since recently he had been depressed about his own job. Tonight he seemed a different person.
‘Hello, love.’ He grinned at her, suddenly boyish. ‘I think I may have found the answer to our problems!’
Somewhere deep inside, alarm bells rang. This wasn’t like Don. She was always the one who got things organized, made the decisions, rang the changes. Don had always been impractical, disorganized, totally disinterested in anything remotely useful. He was usually far more caught up with how to make the electoral system come alive to bored and phone-fixated teenagers than whether the roof was leaking or where they could get a better rate of interest on their modest savings. These things he left to ‘Clever Claudia’.
Their daughter Gaby had followed his example and always turned to her mother, not her father, for loans, advice and late-night lifts.
‘OK,’ Claudia took off her coat and hung it in the hall cupboard. ‘So what is the answer to our problems?’
‘We’ll look into retiring. It’ll only be a couple of years early. They always used to be asking for volunteers among the older teachers. We cost more. They can easily replace us with some kid straight out of teacher training, then we can sell this place and downsize to Surrey, near your parents, and live on the income from our investment.’ His eyes shone like an early-day evangelist with a new parable to preach. ‘You could keep chickens!’
Claudia shuddered. She’d always said retiring was something you did before going to bed, not with the rest of your life. On the other hand, could she stomach Drooly Dooley easing her out of her own department?
She could think of a number of extremely rude French slang expressions to describe the little toad, much ruder than those on the Internet, of which pauvre mec was by some way the tamest. What if she protested to Stephen, the head teacher? He was almost her own age. Would that mean he would support her or take his deputy’s part? Claudia knew she had a bit of a reputation for arguing. No doubt Stephen would remember it. Besides, the days of mass early retirement for teachers was long gone. Too expensive and too many teachers, worn out by classroom confrontation, had already opted for it. Still, they might be open to negotiation . . .
She’d have to make herself more troublesome.
One thing she knew. She didn’t feel ready to bury herself in the sticks. ‘But I don’t want to keep bloody chickens! And I don’t want to move to bloody Surrey!’
‘It’s only twenty miles down the motorway,’ Don placated, his eyes still shining dangerously and his missionary zeal undimmed. ‘Half an hour on the train, max.’
‘What about me?’ demanded a voice quivering with outrage. ‘Surrey is the home of the living dead.’ Gaby, their daughter, stood in the doorway, her face ashen at the prospect of a rural retreat.
Claudia, who’d grown up there, quite agreed.
Gaby, at twenty-eight, still lived at home. Claudia loved having her. Her daughter was terrific fun and often filled the kitchen with her friends. But she also worried that Gaby really ought to be finding a job that paid enough for her to be able to move out. Gaby’s response was that due to the greedy depredations of the generation above she was too broke, but Claudia sometimes feared it was because she wasn’t a sticker. She had a perfectly good degree in geography but had thrown herself, in swift succession, into being an actress, a waitress, the receptionist for a vet, a call-centre operative, a circus performer (only two weeks at that), and an art gallery assistant. Recently she had decided she wanted to be an architect. Claudia and Don had exchanged glances and not mentioned the extremely lengthy training. Currently, she was at least working for one, albeit in a very junior capacity.
‘We could help you with the rent on a flat,’ her father announced, as if the solution were obvious.
Gaby brightened perceptibly while Claudia wondered if Don had lost his mind. ‘Somewhere in Shoreditch, maybe? Or Hoxton?’ Gaby named perhaps the two hippest areas in the now-fashionable East End.
‘I’m not sure about that,’ Don began.
‘Neither am I,’ Claudia agreed waspishly. ‘More like in Penge on what our income will be if I leave. But that’s because this whole idea of moving is ludicrous.’
‘Why?’ Don stood his ground for once.
‘My job is here. I like London.’
‘But as you say yourself, you may not want to go on with your job. What happens if Dooley gets Head of Department?’
Claudia ignored this hideous prospect. ‘What about the culture on our doorstep?’ she protested. ‘Theatres, galleries, restaurants?’
‘You never consume the culture. You’re always saying theatre tickets are priced so only Russian oligarchs can afford them.’
‘Art galleries, then.’
‘When did you last go to an art gallery?’
Claudia moved guiltily onwards, conscious that, living in the middle of one of the world’s great cities, she rarely consumed its cultural delights. ‘And then there’re my friends! I couldn’t move twenty miles from The Grecian Grove!’
‘Don’t you think you’re being a little selfish?’ Don demanded.
‘Don’t you think you are?’ Claudia flashed back. ‘You’ve never even mentioned moving before and now it’s all my fault because I don’t want to live in the fake country.’
‘Surrey isn’t the fake country. Anyway, we could move to the real country. It’d probably be cheaper.’
‘And even further from my friends!’
‘Yes,’ Don was getting uncharacteristically angry now, ‘it’s always about the coven, isn’t it? The most important thing in your life.’
‘How dare you call them the coven?’
‘Hubble bubble, gossip, gossip. Sal bitching about her colleagues. Ella moaning about the son-in-law from hell, Laura judging every man by whether he’s left his wife yet.’
Despite herself, Claudia giggled at the accuracy of his description.
‘Thank God for that,’ Gaby breathed. ‘I thought you two were heading for the divorce court rather than the far reaches of the M25. You never fight.’
‘Anyway, what about your friends?’ Claudia asked Don. ‘You’d miss your Wednesdays at the Bull as much as I’d pine for my wine bar.’ Each Wednesday Don met up with his three buddies to moan about their head teachers, Ofsted and the state of British education. But friendship, it seemed, wasn’t hardwired into men as it was into women.
‘Cup of tea?’ offered Don as if it might provide the healing power of the Holy Grail. ‘Redbush?’
Claudia nodded. ‘The vanilla one.’
‘I know, the vanilla one.’
She kissed Gaby and went upstairs. He knew her so well, all her likes and dislikes over thirty years. They were bonded by all the tiny choices they’d made, each a brick in the citadel of their marriage. But citadels could lock you in as well as repel invaders.
Claudia undressed quickly and slipped into bed, her nerves still on
edge.
Don appeared bearing tea, then disappeared into the bathroom.
Two minutes later he slipped naked into bed, the usual signal for their lovemaking. ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have sprung it on you like that. It was really unfair.’
‘Telling me.’
He began to kiss her breast. Claudia stiffened, and not with sexual anticipation. How could men think you could use sex to say sorry, when women needed you to say sorry, and mean it, before they could even consider wanting sex?
Ella got off the bus and walked along the towpath where the Grand Union Canal met up with the Thames. It was a moonlit night and a wide path of silver illuminated the water, vaguely swathed in mist, which reminded her of one of the holy pictures she had collected as a child at her convent school. These holy pictures often featured the effect of light on water as a symbol of supernatural peace. But Ella didn’t feel peaceful tonight. It was one of those nights when she missed Laurence.
Any religious faith she’d had had long deserted her. It might have been a help, she supposed, when Laurence had died so suddenly, without her even being able to say goodbye, a random statistic on the News, an unlucky victim of a rare train crash. The safest form of travel. Ha. Or maybe, if she’d had faith, she might have lost it at the unfair nature of his death, away on a day’s business, standing in for a colleague, not even his own client.
She thought of Claudia, and Claudia’s question. What were they all going to do with the rest of their lives? It was a good question. Work, she knew, had saved her then.
It had only been her job that had got her through the grief when Laurence died. Without work to go to she would have pulled the duvet over her head and never got out of bed again.
Of course, she’d had to be strong for her daughters, but they were grown-up now, thirty-two and thirty, no longer living at home. In fact, another reason Ella had had to be strong was to prevent Julia, her eldest and bossiest daughter, swooping down on her and treating her like a small child incapable of deciding anything for itself.
Cory, her younger daughter, had been harder to console because the last time she’d seen her dad they’d quarrelled over some silly matter, and she couldn’t believe she’d never see him again so they could make it up.