Someone's Wife

by Linda Burgess

  He has the wistful manner of someone who would have been a wonderful teacher if only the class had listened to him. I like him, though it’s tinged with pity, as I can’t help but imagine how the ruthless young might have treated him. My occasional kind smile pays off. At the end of the year, when he’s returned to teachers’ college after his annual breakdown, caused by his inability to get other people—someone, anyone, please!—to care as much as he does about charts, he’s alone in the social studies departmental office when the senior mistress of the school I’ve applied to for a teaching job phones to get a personal opinion. Miss Paterson later tells me that his opinion of me and my teaching was glowing. I have the glorious opportunity to become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

  His opinion is pretty much based on a lesson he came to see me give. I’m on section at St Margaret’s College in Christchurch. The teachers wear gowns. It’s a private school and I’m in front of what’s reputed to be the naughtiest 4th Form. My social studies lecturer sits discreetly at the back of the room, taking notes. There are about 20 in the class and I find them lively, not naughty. There aren’t that many of them, for a start, and most of them know their parents are paying an extortionate amount for their education, which vaguely obliges them to pay at least some attention. They like me because I’m half the age of most of their teachers, have long fair hair, and wear knee-high red suede boots and midi skirts. I have John Lennon glasses which don’t even pretend to flatter my sturdy rectangular face, but they are fashionable.

  And I pay scant regard to the syllabus. If anyone has told me I’m meant to, it’s when my mind is elsewhere. I assume their regular teacher has given me some sort of instruction on content. I’m doing a lesson on China—perhaps it’s their next topic—and, to introduce it, I get them to climb on their chairs and jump off at the count of three. They do. THUD. The room rocks as it won’t do again till that awful day in 2011. I tell them that country’s population is so large it’s literally unimaginable. If all the people in China jumped simultaneously, the world would fly off its axis. I still have no idea if this is true, but at that time it’s pretty much the only thing I know about China. The lecturer is grinning. The girls are mine.

  In our last term of Senior English, our lecturer in that subject sets us all a task: we’re to choose a playwright, novelist or poet, research them and their work, and present our findings in a seminar to our class. He then settles down for a quiet read for the next 10 weeks.

  As we leave class to commence our task, we are all buzzing with what a total waste of time this is. We know how to research: this is what we’ve spent our years at university doing. What we don’t know is how to teach literature.

  Often last to do anything—my surname starts with a letter that hovers near the end of the alphabet—I’m chosen to present the second or third seminar: perhaps the lecturer has had that flash of imagination teachers have when they decide that just this once they’ll reverse the normal order. I get up. I address the other dozen or so students in my class, but most of all I address the lecturer. I tell him that we have all found this a waste of our time. I say we would all rather have been discussing teaching techniques.

  He’s not happy, but he is the sort of man who knows that lowering one’s voice can do the job better than shouting. He’s a decent chap. He comes to the front of the class and politely asks the others if this is in fact true. Is this how we feel? His tone suggests he’s being entirely reasonable, that he will happily take on board anything The Group says. He certainly doesn’t even hint at reminding us that shortly he will be giving us the grade that we will be using to land ourselves a job.

  His eyes meander over our small group before he eyeballs the most pliable student. The one who weeks earlier has to be calmed down after the panic attack she suffers when she’s giving a mock lesson to her well-behaved, virtually grownup classmates. He inquiringly raises his eyebrows. She pales. She reminds herself to breathe. Slowly. She blushes. She says, in a rush, that this wasn’t true of her. She stops short—just—of calling him Sir: at teachers’ college we’re on first-name terms.

  One after the other they say, No no, it isn’t a waste of time. They say, in fact, they have found the task most useful. Allowing himself just a brief smirk in my direction, he returns to his position at the back of the classroom.

  I suspect that day I’m the only one who’s learnt something valuable: if you’re a whistle-blower, expect the other whistles you were counting on to be pushed somewhere near the bottom of their owners’ satchels.

  Perhaps several of us learnt something else: if you’re in the Us team, go for the weakest link.

  I think I chose Robert Browning. I always liked ‘My Last Duchess’.

  The most beneficial time at teachers’ college is spent in the classrooms of those who are, in a variety of ways, fabulous teachers. Although my subject of choice is English, and it’s a subject I adore, by chance the two who stand out both teach the social sciences. At St Margaret’s there is an inspirational history and geography teacher whose command of her subject is impressive. She is also, improbably in a conservative Anglican school, fervently and openly anti-apartheid. She is the three things our social studies lecturer has advised us to be: Fair, Firm and Friendly. The girls are endlessly asking Daphne Jameson to be their godmother. As for me, I just want her to be my mother, or, at the very least, my best friend.

  There’s also a terrifying English teacher who sits at the back of her 7th Form English class while I give a lesson on Eliot’s The Waste Land. At the end of the lesson she remarks drily that Miss Todd’s understanding of religion appears to owe more to Paradise Lost than the Bible. There’s an obsequious titter.

  She’s right of course.

  I go on section to James Hargest College in Invercargill: I choose it only because Robert is in Invercargill, having a year out of university between his BSc and Masters. He’s teaching—no experience, no training necessary, high rugby profile a distinct advantage—at Boys’ High.

  Two things I remember. There’s a social studies teacher who sits nonchalantly on his desk—we’ve been advised not to do this, particularly us girls—and apparently just chats to his class. Tom Ryder’s so interesting that they join keenly in with the discussion. It seems to be uncontrolled, to be going all over the place, led by them as much as by him, but with minutes to go, he hands out a gestetnered sheet smelling delectably of addictive chemicals. He reads it through with the class, and it contains everything they have talked about in an orderly list. The rest of the lesson is spent with them sticking the page quietly into their social studies books.

  How did he know what they were going to say? Decades later, when I’m seething quietly at the back of a room, partaking in a Palmerston North Branding Exercise, I find myself in the same situation. A spontaneous conversation. Brain-storming it’s called by then. At the end of the morning session the branding expert flips over his whiteboard, and already written on it are the things we’ve just said. I think back through our discussion. I dislike him and think branding is madness. I spend the afternoon suggesting irrelevant things that he can’t possibly have thought of, that won’t be already smugly sitting on his whiteboard. I suggest ‘Palmerston North, Slogan Free City’ as a possible brand. He dislikes me.

  But in 1970 I sit in the staffroom at James Hargest, reading. It’s the end of the year, 5th and 7th Formers have left for exams, and the school doesn’t know what to do with student teachers. So I’ve been asked to read through Othello with the 6th Form, those who’ve been accredited with their UE, as they’ll be studying it the next year. I give the part of Iago to a boy whose sense of humour has already endeared him to me. He gives Iago an irony, a wit, a depth that older actors would covet. I remember his name because he’s so funny; a few years later, most of New Zealand know who Jon Gadsby is, too.

  But I’m still there, and I’m in the staffroom, reading. Weeks earlier, walking through the long narrow bookshop in Christchurch with my friend Jeanette, I have
discovered, thanks to her recommendation, a wonderful writer called Margaret Drabble. The principal wanders in and engages me in conversation. He’s a reader himself and clearly believes I’m using my down time usefully.

  I muddle imply and infer. He corrects me carefully, yet not patronisingly. I never misuse those words again.

  7.

  GIRL

  ONE

  In which I meet a very troubled girl

  She sits at the back of the room, leaning back on her chair to just before the point at which it will skid from under her. Her expression is its usual combination of sneering and dissociation. There’s a calculated blankness. Characteristically, she’s making it clear that nothing I have to say is of the remotest interest to her.

  Last period on a grey and windy day. Wind turns the mad even madder. The room is muggy, airless; when the wind comes from this direction it causes papers to skitter crazily, so the windows along that side are closed. One day there’s an earthquake and I say, Get under your desks, and they do, and one of the desks collapses on one of the stouter girls. We all laugh. It’s the relief. But Nature is cruel. We are cruel.

  The prefab is on the edge of the school, its only advantage being that when the students are near to rebellion, others won’t hear. In the other half of my prefab, divided by a resource room of sorts, a young teacher from England, two years older than I am, who glides across the school grounds in the gown she earned when she got her MA from Oxford, is running a marginally quieter ship. She’s so blatantly brainy that the head of English immediately assigns her senior classes. Her only junior class is 4L, and yes, L does stand for Latin.

  Being obviously pliable, I’ve got 3M. In theory the school is non-streamed, or that’s what the parents are told. Oddly, given that this is the case, the classes are always listed in the same order: 3L, 3G (German, the girls in these two classes do two languages), then we have 3F, R, E and N. French. Coming up behind those girls are 3C (they do shorthand typing), then O and M. Just typing. Then 3B. Though no one says, I suspect it just means Bottom. 3M is a mixture: girls who want to learn but who for various reasons have never quite managed it; those who could if they gave a stuff; and the anxiously disinherited. They are the ones who just wish the class would be quiet so they could sit and colour in the map the teacher has given them.

  The school is non-streamed but that doesn’t stop a bumptious school inspector coming in and saying loudly, ‘This is a bottom stream, I believe?’ I say, so the girls can hear me as well as him, ‘We don’t have streaming at Girls’ High.’ But who am I kidding? There’s no one in the room who doesn’t know exactly where she’s ranked.

  We’re all afraid of Shirley. She’s a lone wolf. She’s not needy. She’s not an abandoned kitten: there’s not a sweet little thing waiting to get out if you show her some kindness. She just has a tragic inability to do anything that might remotely improve her own lot. She’s steadfastly bad. This is unusual.

  Recently I tell my friend Carol, who’s been a guidance counsellor, and who taught with me at Girls’ High all those years ago, that I’m writing about Shirley, and she remembers her too. I say, she was sort of … evil. Wasn’t she? And Carol says with even-handed kindness that she thinks damaged is a better word than evil.

  What was I teaching that day? It’s irrelevant, anyway—but it’s something that could, however loosely, be linked to the only thing in the world that I know Shirley loves: marching.

  I ask Shirley to show us her moves.

  And then she’s up and marching. Marching, that paramilitary sport that small towns around the country excel in. Only in New Zealand. Girls in matching regimental gear parading in tight formation around any field that has a grandstand. The field that’s used for rugby, for Arthur Lydiard when he comes to town to sell his dream, for Evening Runs, and for Marching. Marching: the oddest thing, yet an ideal sport in that it in no way requires you to be sporty. It’s all in wearing the right gear, and the timing. Just paying attention.

  She’s up the aisle between the desks and she turns smartly. Stops. Back straight, and it’s left right left right. Arms keeping perfect time. Stamp STAMP. TURN. She’s off again, to the back of the class, another smart turn and she’s coming crisply towards me. Left right left right. STAMP.

  What next? All I know is that nothing—absolutely nothing—changes between us.

  I’m appointed to my job at Girls’ High by Mrs Mayhew, a fine educationalist who I’ve liked enormously at our one meeting. But it turns out she’s leaving as I’m beginning. She’s replaced as headmistress by Mrs Thompson—and yes, in my early years of teaching I’ve never called anyone older than 35 by their first name—who’s a slender, elegant woman who leaves the school for a couple of hours once a week to have her hair done. She has wonderful hair, the sort that a Kennedy matriarch might have. Prematurely white, and no doubt a joy to coif, it’s an immaculately immobile helmet. Thirty years later I see her in the distance, she has her back to me, but I’d know that hair anywhere. She has no children of her own. She tends to believe that nothing sorts a girl out better than providing her with a pony.

  There are always some girls who like teachers, and if there’s time a group from 3M hang around after class for a chat. Perhaps they have no one else to talk to. In 1971, guidance counsellors have yet to be invented, and for an inexperienced 22-year-old it’s very difficult to know what, from the things the girls tell me, should be shared with those who matter. Will I be spilling their beans? Or—it’s possible—do they actually want me to tell someone? A handful of girls from 3M tell me, a little hesitantly, that a group of girls from their year—the only one they name is Shirley, who has of course left the minute the bell rings—are going out to the military camp at Linton in the weekends to spend time with some of the boys who work there. It’s up to me—in a roundabout way—to advise the 13-year-old girls in my care for a few hours a week to tell whoever the girls are who are going to Linton not to do anything—um—foolish, and to tell them, as carefully as possible, that what they may be getting up to is actually illegal. At 13 I’d been reading a bit of Agatha Christie, a lot of Georgette Heyer, My Friend Flicka and Mazo de la Roche’s Jalna books. By their age I’d only recently learnt that babies don’t come out of belly buttons. I’m out of my depth. But I pass on some of what I know to Miss Paterson. Senior mistress. Head of history.

  Who knows, we say, what’s going on at home?

  She passes it on to Mrs Thompson.

  Because Shirley is causing trouble in a variety of ways, the decision’s made to call in her mother to discuss her behaviour. As Shirley’s form teacher, and because I’ve hinted at serious problems, I’m invited too. Not that I’m there to actually say anything. I’m at the distant corner of a triangle, already advised by Mrs Thompson that I’m there only to look and learn.

  Shirley’s mother is a small, hunted-looking woman who scuttles sideways rather than walks into the room. I feel an instant, profound pity for her: this woman has to spend hours on end with Shirley, not just 50 minutes four times a week. She stands clutching her handbag as Mrs Thompson invites her to sit. ‘Do take a seat,’ says Mrs Thompson, as if she’s taking tea with the vicar’s wife. Mrs Thompson explains to Shirley’s mother that, unlike most girls of Shirley’s age who spend their after-school hours rising to the trot or swotting at the desk in their pink bedroom, Shirley is buggering off to Linton to partake in the unmentionable with males old enough to know better. Mrs Thompson suggests that Shirley’s mother has a word.

  Two of us in that room cannot imagine ever having a word with Shirley.

  Then Shirley’s mother, who has been taking in what she knows already—that her daughter who’s not much more than a child is off the rails in an unchangeable, tragic way—that beaten, lost, defeated woman, says something unforgettable. ‘Thompson?’ she says. ‘Does that have a silent p? As in swimming pool?’

  Miss Paterson, never married, has her wits about her. She’s short and solid with naturally crimped thick grey ha
ir. She has a benign, slightly surprised pink face. She’s a little like a very grounded Janet Frame and she wears tweed skirts and pastel twinsets, with thick stockings the colour the Queen wears, and sensible lace-up shoes. After Mrs Thompson’s unsuccessful attempt to set both Shirley and her family straight, it’s the pragmatic Miss Paterson who decides that she can’t live with her conscience if she allows Shirley to continue down this terrifying path totally unrestrained. Shirley’s called from social studies, and when the bell goes for lunch she’s still gone.

  Sitting in the staffroom with my pie—the tuckshop sells the authentic sort, and occasionally when the weather’s chilly, and the girls have been more draining than usual, a hot pie really does the trick—I see a shaken Miss Paterson wander in through the staffroom door. She looks like she needs more than a pie, but as usual she has solid homemade sandwiches wrapped in greaseproof paper. She flops down beside me.

  She says she knows she’s a spinster, but she also feels reasonably worldly wise. She has always felt that she’s pretty much unshockable. She is, after all, widely read. She says she has spoken to Shirley about the risks a young woman takes if she’s having unprotected sex. Shirley, she says, has attempted to reassure her. And in so doing, she has added to Miss Paterson’s body of knowledge.

  Shirley, she says, has just taught her about oral sex.