by Kate Clanchy
But when I turned back around, I realized that the front row had closed their books, and put them away from them on the desks. ‘Hey,’ I said. ‘We’re not finished yet. Keep your bookmarks in.’ But the children behind them had closed their books too. They weren’t rioting, or even giggling: just refusing to read the book.
Then a wee girl said, ‘Mrs Clanchy,’ (they don’t say ‘Miss’ in Scotland; sometimes the children even called me ‘Mrs McClanchy’ as if ‘Mc’ were part of a teacher’s title too), ‘Mrs Clanchy, we cannae read this. We dinnae want to catch AIDS.’ So I turned off the overhead projector, and tried to talk to them about it.
It took me a while to credit it wasn’t a nasty joke: they genuinely thought the book might infect them. It took me longer to take in that I had been much too right about the use of the term ‘gay’. Not only did the kids use the word independently of any connection with homosexuality, most of them believed that homosexuality did not exist as a bodily phenomenon at all. They thought it was just a badness, an idea of infective evil. And it took me all the way till the end of the lesson to realize that in that room of thirteen-year-olds, only one or two were confident even of the mechanics of sex; and most of my way home on the bus to believe it. Dear God, I thought, as we swung into Edinburgh. Oh dear.
Because then I also remembered that I had promised that I would explain everything, next lesson. Everything about sex, that is, all of it, to all of Blastmuir. I had said that anyone in the class who had a question about sex should write it down anonymously and put it in a box on my desk beforehand, and I, Kate, currently disguised as Mrs McClanchy, would tell them the answer. And then, perhaps, I would be arrested, and deported back to London. Or staked out on a bing to be pecked to death by crows. Or die of shame, whichever was quicker.
Why did I say that? Where did I get that idea? I can’t remember. I can only suppose that this was a tactic suggested to me in training sometime; or maybe even on the dreaded council advice sheet. I remember I did not sleep the following night. I remember wearing a smart jacket into the lesson, as if that would defend me. I remember the fear of going into that rigid classroom. I remember it every time people ask me now, when I am about to address a large hall, if I am not afraid; or, when I write about my life, if I am not embarrassed. I remember it, because in relation to that hour, I have never been afraid or embarrassed since.
But look, the kids were eager, quiet, already in their seats, a pile of slips in the box on the desk. They fell silent as I picked the first question out. It was, ‘What do gay people actually do for sex?’ and I took a breath, and, cautiously, as if I were setting foot for the first time on ice of unknown thickness, said sex was the same whatever you did and whoever you did it with. It was about touching and feeling and also feelings, and people did all sorts of things.
Then I looked round the room and saw that the kids were carefully not looking at each other, but at me. No one had sniggered. And so, as if putting another skate on the ice and feeling the bowl of the lake wobble beneath my feet, I set off, finding purchase for my blade. I said the words ‘clitoris’, ‘penis’ and ‘erection’ in a single brief paragraph. Schoosh, schoosh. I’m a good skater; I learned when I was young. I can go backwards as easily as forwards and brake on a sixpence.
I said ‘orgasm’. Someone laughed, but it was a nice laugh. Aye, said someone else, aye, I see.
I picked the next question from the pile: what happens if you are having sex and you want to have a pee? I drew on the board. I made sure they knew the difference between vagina and urethra. I explained what a foreskin was, and that it was possible to have sex while menstruating and that you could use a tampon even if you were a virgin and that everyone masturbates and has wet dreams. Mostly, though, the questions were not about juices, but about love: could anybody love; could gay people love; could you change, later on? I only had to say the words aloud, and say yes.
The sun came in through the seventies windows and warmed us all. The stiff children of Blastmuir eased back from their desks or leant cheerfully across them. Eyes met mine which had never done so before, small Scottish mouths hung open, eager for more information to be spooned in. I felt as if I were in a different classroom: as if we had travelled through the looking glass to a new country, the one beyond embarrassment.
In fact, all children will behave perfectly, I believe, if they want to know something very much, about sex or anything else, and an adult sincerely sets out to tell them. And most humans, whatever prejudices they avow, will set them aside when difference is made real in a person. (If, that is, they are not afraid.) But I didn’t know that then: that was when I learned it.
At the end of the lesson, Callum came up to me. Callum, in a class of undersized, underdeveloped children, by far the least tall, the least developed. Callum with the heavy eyelids, the lopsided face, the slack jaw.
‘Mrs McClanchy?’ said Callum.
‘Yes?’
‘Whit wis the name for men and men?’
‘That was homosexuality, Callum.’
‘Aye. And whit wis the name for women and men?’
‘That’s heterosexuality, Callum.’
‘Aye. Well, when I grow up, I’m no’ going to have either o’ them. Ah think Ah’ll just have a big dog.’
No one said ‘fluid’ then – gender-fluid, fluid identity – but fluid is a good word for that afternoon. The room seemed liquid, lacking in barriers. And fluid was what those children were, behind their stern names and rigid codes. Changeable, molten, and warm as any child; waiting for a mould, hoping there would be space for the swelling, shrinking and unknowable quantity of themselves. For Callum, that space needed to include the possibility of living on his own, and that was as important to him as the possibility, for surely one child in that class, and very probably more, of falling in love with someone of your own sex. So, I didn’t say that would be bestiality, Callum, though the thought flickered across my mind. I said yes, yes, Callum, you could do that. A dog would be very nice. That, Callum, would be grand.
Paul’s Boots
After Blastmuir, I went to work in its (distorting) mirror-image, its English opposite, the Essex conurbation to the east of London; a place which had grown as fast as Blastmuir had shrunk, whose industries – finance, construction, services – were as thriving and Thatcherite as Blastmuir’s mines were redundant and Old Labour. Gavin & Stacey, the ascendency of Nigel Farage, and above all the television series TOWIE, have now made this bit of Essex, with its nightclubs and vajazzles, nationally famous. Then, it was not; though its ferociously strong consumerist culture was every bit as distinctive.
My college was brand new: the first sixth-form college in an area where kids had traditionally left school at sixteen. But most of this area was new – or at least post-war. The nearest town looked like a Middle American city: mall-centred, concrete, with long streets lined with semis. The kids looked Middle American too: plump and handsome and tow-headed; better set up than the Blastmuir kids, and much more showily dressed. Boys here wore pink – pastel polo shirts, buttoned up to the neck, very clean – and had pierced ears and sometimes noses, and one lad, a Prince Albert ring (at least, he passed round the receipt). Girls had sprayed hair and full make-up and push-up bras, and both sexes wore multiple gold chains round their necks, often with letters spelling out their names; and several rings on both hands, chunky gold ones, diamond chip ones, and ones with initial letters deep set, as if ready for the delivery of an ‘Essex kiss’.
Also, miniature solitaires, for engagements were commonplace. So was sex. Those were the years of the Essex girl joke: How does an Essex girl put out the light after sex? She closes the car door. How can you tell if an Essex girl has had an orgasm? She drops her chips. The kids told these jokes cheerfully, with pride, and if they weren’t all having sex in cars most nights, they certainly all went regularly to the local nightclubs and talked freely about it; it was an approved-of, almost compulsory activity, something you did with your friends an
d cousins and even your mum. Many of these sixteen-and seventeen-year-olds had long-standing boyfriends and girlfriends, and brought them home to stay with their parents. The generation gap, in general, was narrow and blurred: parents turned up to parents’ evenings and enrolment events wearing the same brash jewellery and sportswear as their children, and, in the face of reports and university forms, displayed much the same mixture of ostentatious indifference and chronic anxiety.
In fact, this was one of our big problems: school had never done much – or even tried to do much – for the Essex parents; now, it was hard to persuade their children that it could do something for them. For these were kids who did not want to rebel against their parents: it was too comfy at home. One of our favourite texts was Willy Russell’s Stags and Hens, a funny, soppy play about working-class Liverpudlians in a nightclub. The dialect was unfamiliar, but the set-up – rigidly divided genders from a loving but limited working-class culture, stuck forever in a nightclub – made perfect sense to our students. The only problem came with the denouement, when the heroine makes the decision to leave her home and possible marriage for a more adventurous life. Even at the supposedly rebellious age of seventeen, even when the heroine was being offered a rock star, our students generally thought she should stay at home and marry, just as, when we were studying the War Poets, they still thought conscription was a good idea.
So that made literary discussion hard. Also, I kept coming up against strange blanks, walls of absolute ignorance such as who Adam and Eve might be, and what was the Garden of Eden. My A Level class thought Queen Victoria was ‘the one with the red hair and the pearls’. When I read Herbert’s ‘The Flower’ I was driven to uproot a daffodil, just to show them what a root was, and a stem. More than that, though, and more than any other kids I’ve taught before or since, they didn’t want to enquire about books, or relate them to themselves. Teaching Othello to Asian and Turkish girls in North London had been easy because they knew what racism was and what an honour code meant: the play opened them to talking about their home cultures and often to criticizing them. In Essex, whether the text was Orwell or Thomas Hardy, the students refused to relate them to their families; yet all of them must have come to this town from somewhere else within a couple of generations, whether from fields like Hardy or cities like Orwell.
At first, when I started out with classes here, I tried my favourite introductory game: asking the students where their name came from. In North London, this gave you an instant cultural history of the child: the Hindu horoscope that had been calculated for them, or, from a Nigerian girl: ‘My name is Osla. I am the last of seven children, and my name means “Enough”.’ In Blastmuir, it often yielded a close, proud family history: there, children were still named for relatives, and boys after their mother’s maiden name. In Essex, though, the kids fiercely denied that their names had any history or meaning at all. I was baffled when a boy with jet-black hair and eyes and a fine Ashkenazi nose named David Marks refused any Jewish heritage, or when a freckled Irish-eyed kid called O’Riordan declared he’d never heard of Dublin. The few mixed-race kids were even more aggressively shut down, rejecting any kind of ancestor, Caribbean or otherwise. ‘I’m normal, Miss,’ they’d say. ‘Normal.’
But what did they think normal was? I asked my tutor group what percentage of the population of the UK they thought was non-white. About 75 per cent, they replied, firmly, without hesitation. Why did they think that? It’s what you see, they said. Did they? How could they, when they were so white?
It was only slowly, over years spent travelling back from college to my home in Spitalfields, that I saw what they meant. As you left their part of Essex and went west into London through Dagenham and Tower Hamlets, people became more and more mixed. Beyond Walthamstow, people really were 75 per cent of colour, and came from all over the world. When my Essex students went anywhere, they went the same way as me: west, the direction of their parents’ commute; and so the land to the west, the wildly mixed East End of London, was what they thought constituted the rest of England. The East End was also the place their parents had left, or, often, perceived themselves to have been displaced from by new immigrants, or to have worked their way out of using their grit and endurance: in all these stories, white Essex figured as the Promised Land.
So urban Essex really was like America: a new, colonial country, and like all new cultures, it was self-conscious and brittle. David Marks and Sean O’Riordan probably were just two generations out of Spitalfields or Stepney, seven from a potato famine or a pogrom, but their families didn’t want to remember that, not any more, because then they wouldn’t belong in Essex, wouldn’t fit in its narrow ‘normal’. There could be nothing gender-fluid about such a ‘normal’ either, for all the bling, pizzazz and pink inherited from the Cockney markets; any deviance was threatening. There was nothing slipshod here, nothing worn-in or grubby; the whole place was as stiff as new shoes. And so, for all the sexual precocity, ‘gay’ was as much of an enforcing word here as ever it was in Blastmuir, and if it did not include male ornamentation, it still definitely covered theatre and singing. It had a special geographical sense too, which coincided with the prevailing racial prejudice: inner London and its activities, except ‘The City’, where many aspired to work, was ‘gay’.
Paul, then, was an oddity, and a refreshment. He was taking a Drama qualification with GCSEs in German and Media Studies on the side. He was tall and slender with floppy, dark-red hair and sleepy eyes. He wore cashmere jumpers, turned-up trousers, and a single earring, and slinked about, curling up on desks and tables like a cat. If you said, ‘Good morning,’ he would roll his eyes and say, ‘Good? if you say so,’ and pout, for he was dedicated entirely to camp (school of John Inman, not Susan Sontag).
At first, I assumed this knowing manner meant he was also ironical and clever, and that the re-sit GCSEs were some sort of mistake; but, as I got to know him, this proved not to be the case. Paul was expert at catching my tone, and giving me an encouraging wink, but his punctuation was poor and his essays no better than anyone else’s. He hadn’t read anything and didn’t intend to. He didn’t know the cultural references that went with his sophisticated manner, neither Stonewall nor Spartacus. He was resolutely non-political: Section 28, the gathering point for almost all gay activism then, seemed to mean nothing to him at all.
Paul knew one thing, though, and that was how to keep himself safe. Somehow, in the Essex world, there was a place for camp just as there was a place for pink: a small one. Paul was considered hilarious, and his camp remarks were roared at even when they had scarcely any content. Bizarrely enough, he was not considered ‘gay’, and was welcomed in all social groups – though he did seem to slip in and out of them, making his jokes, then disappearing before anyone could tire of him. He went, it seemed, to the nightclubs with the rest of them, for his dancing was legendary, and somehow, so well had he established the myth of himself, nobody thought it strange that he always danced alone.
He knew musicals, too, both from watching them on videos and going to the West End. He induced the Drama teacher to put on Cabaret, with which he was particularly obsessed, and dominated the stage as the Master of Ceremonies, pouncing and posing: Life is a cabaret, old chum. Come to the cabaret. The three-day run of the play was evidently an ecstatic experience for him; he was pale and exalted in all lessons and handed in no work for a month.
‘Is that what you really want to do, Paul?’ I asked. ‘Theatre?’
‘Oh no,’ he said. ‘No. I just like that musical. I wanted to do that. Not the real thing.’ And his Drama teacher, surprisingly – since Cabaret was the best show the college had ever put on – agreed. Paul had, she said, no range at all, no capacity to read or explore a play, and not much of a voice; he could just dance, quite well, and be camp, amazingly well. Paul was no David Bowie, or Boy George, though his non-conformity probably came from the same source.
After the play, Paul turned his attention to Media Studies. This
was mostly coursework (a viable system in those far-off, pre-internet days) and it ended with a major project. Before Photoshop, pre-YouTube, such projects were daft, amateur, and creative: hand-painted advertising campaigns for imaginary perfumes; laboriously typed newspapers. The college video camera, though, was most in demand. Stop motion animations advertising ice creams were popular, as were ‘promo’ videos in the style of MTV. Videos were supposed to last a maximum of ten minutes. Paul, though, declared he wanted to make a horror film.
He recruited a cameraman and sidekick, the pale and silent Tony. He created a script. The film, he declared, would ‘explore the genre of horror by performing it’, and it would star an aluminium trolley from the science department, the college lift, and a good deal of tomato ketchup. In a series of low, long shots influenced by The Shining, the trolley would sweep the college corridors, looking for victims. In the style of The Birds, it would hypnotize a blonde girl into the lift using tweeting noises (Tony, on a water-filled plastic bird whistle). The doors would close, and more sinister bubbling noises would be heard, and then, in a reference to Carrie, the lift would be opened and found to be covered with blood. Finally, the trolley, still aiming low, would be chased down the corridors in Hammer House of Horror style by the ever-useful Tony – armed with a water pistol – and apprehended.
Making something as ambitious as this took weeks and required much pre-booking of the camera. I got fond of the boys, though, through the process. Tony had ideas and patience of his own, and, unlike Paul, always listened to what I suggested. He painstakingly made a set of stop motion credits for the film, in which Plasticine blood leaked through bars and formed itself into letters: Night of the Killer Trolley. The letters got up on their feet and ran away. He pushed Paul into actually writing the project’s compulsory accompanying commentary, and got it to passable length and depth – though Paul did insist on writing it in pink ink and sprinkling it with references to ‘friends of Dorothy’. As for Paul himself, I could not but admire his tenacity; he was prepared to spend three hours getting a single trolley shot right. And his good nature was steel-plated, ocean-going: Five in the evening? Six? ‘No problem, Kate, you know you want to be here really. I’m your very favourite student.’ By then, he probably was.