Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me

by Kate Clanchy

  The final film was smooth, and clever, and deeply silly, and altogether more than the sum of its parts. The exam board, who must have been short on laughs that year, commented that they had never seen anything quite like it, and gave it an A. That was the first A of any kind that Paul had ever got in school, and when he found out in September, he and Tony went out and bought me a large box of Roses chocolates, and we all sat a while in my late summer classroom, sucking on strawberry creams.

  The boys weren’t coming back to school; they had both, they said, got jobs in Marks & Spencer. I made no attempt, despite the A, to persuade either of them to reconsider and do A Levels. Tony had never had academic pretensions; and it was hard to imagine a better venue for Paul and his curious portfolio of talents than a large shop, where he could sail the escalators, approve shirts, and tighten trousers, where he could focus forever, indefatigably, on the frivolous. Besides, Paul seemed so happy. He regaled me with the tale of his holiday: how he and Tony had got jobs by the seaside and bought an ancient car and driven it to Le Touquet, where it broke, terminally, so they’d had to hitch home. How they stayed up later and later each night until they became nocturnal animals, and only communicated with their parents by Post-it note, left on the fridge.

  ‘Haven’t seen them for weeks, have we, Tone?’ said Paul.

  It was the image of the yellow Post-it, trembling on the fridge, which let me know that the boys were lovers, probably had been for months, hiding in plain sight in this hostile environment. I was filled with admiration; without politics, without adult help, and seemingly without damage, these boys had defeated the rigid prohibitions that surrounded them. Like the children of Blastmuir, they were fluid, really. Like Tony’s Plasticine letters, they had magically poured themselves through the bars and re-formed in the shape of their happiness; hopped into an ancient, uninsured car and driven off forever. Rage against Essex would almost certainly come later; rage was deserved. For now, they had M&S, and the beach at Le Touquet.

  ‘Look,’ said the normally silent Tony, stretching out a leg with a camp, brightly laced Doc Marten at the end of it. ‘My boots. They’re exactly the same as Paul’s.’

  ‘Yes?’ I said. Their turned-up jeans were identical too.

  ‘But,’ said Tony, ‘we wasn’t together when we bought them! We was in two different shops at the same time and we bought the same boots!’

  ‘Telepathy,’ said Paul. ‘You see, Kate?’ And I agreed that telepathy was what it must be.

  Liam’s Club

  ‘Gay’. Four years into working at my college – I stayed there seven years, I loved my boss and my colleagues – ‘gay’ had become my shorthand for all the interdictions of Essex, and I hated it with a far-from-academic passion. ‘Gay’ was the reason only girls could study English Literature, and boys who liked words had to take English Language and Media Studies. ‘Gay’ was the threat that stopped boys studying foreign languages. (The Head of French really was gay, perhaps a double-edged sword.) ‘Gay’ stopped us reading Carol Ann Duffy; ‘gay’ made parents complain on parents’ evening that I was disturbing their child’s mind. ‘Gay’ stopped boys coming to Poetry Group; ‘gay’ stopped poetry full stop. ‘Gay’ was the dam in the stream, the opposite of fluid, the opposite of thought, and it made teaching English A Level in particular very hard because when it comes right down to it, all great literature is subversive.

  And damn it, I’d always wanted to teach A Level English Literature. Actually, I’d always wanted to study an A Level; I did Scottish Higher, in a class of twenty-five sitting in iron forms in alphabetical order. A Level, I believed, was the opposite: a lounging, japing, delightful sort of course. Not in Essex. A Levels were designed in the 1950s for grammar schools, for at most 10 per cent of the school population, a pre-university course. Despite alterations, this was not suitable for our college; for the 50 per cent or so of the school population who’d got a C or B grade at GCSE, who sat waiting for enlightenment in classes of twenty or more. There was no lounging involved, just heaps of marking and a lot of C grades.

  Perhaps, I thought, sourly, perhaps japing and lounging still occurred in the famous grammar school half a mile down the road, the school that sucked up all the bright middle-class kids in the area, leaving us with the resentful leftovers. Perhaps in the grammar school, in the proper conditions, among ten bright pupils sitting round the library table of a sunny afternoon, Othello was still fun. In our place, with the 90 per cent of the population who cannot see the point of literary criticism, it was uphill all the way.

  ‘Kids – why does Iago hate Othello? Doesn’t he love him, a little? “He hath a daily beauty in his life that makes me ugly” . . . Don’t we all sometimes hate people as well as love them, desire as well as like our friends . . .’ What I meant was, please relax your judgements, just for a moment. Please. Let yourselves think. But it was impossible. The kids doing re-sit GCSE, I found, were more open-minded, probably because they were less successful at Essex life, and therefore had less to protect. I started to teach more and more GCSE; the year of Tony and Paul, I opted for it as my entire timetable.

  And then I met Jane and Liam. They appeared side by side at the back of my only English Literature class: a thin boy with lively eyes and a long mouth; a smooth, blonde girl with lowered lashes. They had both come from one of our roughest feeder schools, and though Liam sometimes raised his eyes and grinned at one of my jokes, they seemed to have acquired there the art of keeping their heads down. They only answered questions when I directly named them; otherwise they discussed each point of the lesson between themselves, in a practised, discreet whisper.

  When I took their first essays in, I learned why they were undercover. Jane was clever to a point that must have made daily difficulties for her: clever in the marshalled, exact, mercilessly perceptive way particularly threatening in a girl. Liam was even more of an outlier. He had adult, italic handwriting, and an adult, cool tone; a voice sprang from his pages, a funny, knowing one. And while Jane’s essay was a perfect digest of what she had been taught, plus a few thoughtful observations of her own – the very pattern of an A grade – Liam’s was almost perversely his own: an odd, elegant, original argument about Jane Eyre, ornamented with such strange, yet deftly plucked and trimmed quotations, that I wondered if he had been secretly attending an entirely different set of lessons.

  Nevertheless, two bright students actually ready for A Level: a miracle. I set out to cultivate them as bright A Level students are traditionally cultivated: the lending of books, the suggesting of outings, the casual chatting at the end of class. This immediately misfired. Jane found my friendliness suspicious, perhaps patronizing. She was, I slowly discovered, very much a working-class girl, very close to her single mother and her extended family. Jane had applied to the grammar school at eleven, but because the school operated a nakedly snobbish system of interviewing the parents, rather than the child, she had been denied a place. Since then, Jane and her mother had less faith in teachers, and her cleverness had become a secret project for the two of them. Together, carefully, they were working out how Jane might go to university, which no member of their family had ever done, and how she might even study English, a subject which seemed of no practical use. They were doing fine, as they would just about allow me to affirm. They did not want any other help.

  As for Liam, he was simply unclubbable. He refused to do even the few things I inveigled Jane into – not for him the extra project, the Cambridge trip, the theatre visit. He dropped out of Maths. He never, after that first effort, handed in work on time or on topic. In the second year of A Levels, Jane visited several universities, applied, was accepted; while Liam refused even to fill in a UCAS form. Nevertheless, I persisted, setting an extra, ironical Liam question at the bottom of every worksheet, making special little Liam cracks in class, leaving out piles of books to be picked up: the Morse code, underwater signals of the oddball to the oddball, one writerly mind to the other. It worked: he did get cleverer an
d cleverer; he did write more and more fluent and lengthy and eccentric essays, full of perceptions that made me laugh out loud; he really was the best and funniest literary critic I’d ever taught, the best I was ever going to teach. He made my lessons worth planning, my job worth doing. And slowly, in his last year, he did start hanging around at the end of lessons, A4 file clutched to his chest, and he did start chatting from one side of his long mouth, and I did find out where he came from.

  Liam wasn’t a grammar school reject; his parents weren’t organized or aspirational enough to have even applied. They had split up lengthily and painfully in his early teens, leaving him, an only child, very much to his own devices. All his bookishness – and he read passionately – was his own invention, an irregular breadcrumb trail traced through libraries and schoolteachers. He had taken to the Essex life of new clothes and nightclubs early, then abandoned it. Now, he spent his time with other lost children, particularly a girl called Meredith with whom I assumed he was in love, in an alternative Essex of empty houses and rotting swimming pools, small-time criminals and night-time parks; like misfits from an American movie; like Damon Albarn out of Blur, with whom he was naturally obsessed; like Jarvis Cocker and A Different Class, album of the year, which, as Liam said, was ‘just like you, Kate, ain’t it, slumming it down here’. Thanks for that, Liam.

  Even a very alternative Essex, though, didn’t seem like the place to spend what I persisted in calling a gap year, and Liam seemed sure was the rest of his life. What was wrong with the boy? He didn’t, unlike Jane, have a cherished place in a cherished family to lose. His critique of Essex and its values was far more developed than mine. He yearned, it seemed, for travel. Why didn’t he take the simple escape route so cheaply available to him, and apply to university – if not Cambridge, then at least London, just down the road? Why couldn’t he knuckle down to study? What was holding him back?

  ‘Ain’t you guessed?’ said Liam. It was after the school end-of-term do, after all the exams. Teachers and eighteen-year-old students grandly ordering pints in a terrible Essex pub. ‘Seriously, don’t you know?’

  He was truly disappointed. ‘You,’ he said furiously, ‘you lent me Tales of the City. Do you know how much I loved those books?’

  ‘That was for the Dickens project,’ I said feebly. Though it had really been for my anti-Essex project. I’d thought of Armistead Maupin as the most metropolitan and hopeful text a young person was likely to actually read.

  ‘They are so gay,’ said Liam accusingly.

  And, of course, they are. And so, of course, was Liam. I had made another mistake with ‘gay’, just as I had in Blastmuir. This time, I had been determined that a literary, ironical, and artistic boy, a desperate romantic with delicate perceptions and tender feelings, could be just as heterosexual as the next. Besides, Liam wasn’t camp in the least.

  ‘Sorry, Liam,’ I said, ‘really sorry. You’re with girls all the time.’

  ‘Girls,’ said Liam, ‘are nicer. But I fancy boys.’ And he started to talk fluently, fluidly, his reserve finally gone, the mature, funny voice of the essays at last inhabiting the skinny boy. He was determined to come out, but it was terrifying. This was the battle that had taken up all his energy while Jane worked out if she could go to university. This was why he had distanced himself from Jane, his academic twin since primary school. This was the concern that had taken his focus: who to tell, what they might say, and what might happen. So far, he hadn’t told his friends, nor his parents, nor Jane – just his underworld friends, the strange Meredith, and now, me.

  It was late, and we stared at each other across the emptying pub. The students were off somewhere they could drink more: the Essex nightclubs, most likely. ‘What should we do?’ I asked. ‘To celebrate your coming out?’

  Liam took a breath. He said, ‘Do you know any gay clubs?’

  I didn’t, really. My friend Colette had taken me to a couple of lesbian bars in Islington, but I didn’t think that was what he had in mind.

  ‘Don’t you,’ he said, ‘even know G-A-Y?’ And I did. Everyone knew that one.

  ‘OK,’ said Liam, ‘we’ll go there for a drink.’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘I can’t do that.’

  ‘Why not,’ said Liam. ‘Really, why? I’m eighteen.’

  ‘I’m your teacher,’ I said weakly. ‘It’s not right.’

  ‘You’re not my teacher any more,’ said Liam firmly.

  I was, though. That was our relationship. I couldn’t take him to a gay nightclub. Any nightclub.

  ‘Kate,’ said Liam. ‘You actually have to. Because no one in Essex knows where it is.’

  And that was also true, then. It was the early nineties, and we navigated London using A–Z Maps and the listings at the back of Time Out magazine. It was intimidating to a university-educated twenty-something on a good day. Then there weren’t smartphones and satellite maps. There weren’t YouTube videos and websites. So Liam had no map. Essex had set its face against Soho and everything it meant, and I was the only person in Liam’s world who could guide him there.

  ‘Now?’ I said, quailing.

  ‘Now,’ said Liam. ‘Don’t panic. I’m only going to go in, and have a little dance, and come out again.’

  So we got on the tube, and sat opposite each other all the wobbling way into London, grinning from time to time. I guided Liam through the dark streets of London to G-A-Y and paid his entrance fee. He was shaking, and I pointed this out.

  ‘Are you surprised?’ he said. ‘I ain’t done this before.’

  Inside it was roaring, smoky and dark, with men in tight T-shirts dancing close together. I made my way to a bar and got two plastic cups of beer. Liam disappeared into the crowd, and I felt a new kind of pain, a physical, chesty anxiety that I was not to experience again until I watched my own children walk along ledges or cross a busy road. What would happen to Liam among all those strong bodies? What would happen to his body? He was too young to understand you only got one. Fortunately, it was only twenty minutes or so before he came back out of the crowd and grasped his beer.

  ‘Liam,’ I said, ‘I love you. You have to promise me to always use a condom and never get AIDS.’

  He snorted. ‘Kate,’ he said, ‘I’ve had my little dance. We can go now.’ And then he drank his beer, and we went out.

  ‘Was it the right club?’ I asked, steering him to the tube.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Thanks. I’ll find it again.’

  Akash’s Play

  We are a hundred miles from the pub in Essex. Liam is in Italy, hitched to a European aristocrat; Jane is Head of English in a school in Kent. We are in a school with thirty-two languages and no majority culture. My students still use ‘gay’ as a pejorative term, meaning weak or old-fashioned, but not often, and it has none of the bite of the newer coinage ‘moist’. And now we have invented smartphones, Facebook, Twitter, Grindr, and Tinder, and our sexual identity has gone to live there: glittering, flexible, self-conscious. Are we all ‘fluid’ now? Perhaps. It is commonplace to proclaim oneself transsexual. And to actually be gay, especially if you are as pretty as Kristen Stewart, is positively fashionable. A couple of kids have even changed gender, a decision so deliciously of the moment, so furiously defended by righteous students against non-existent opposition from staff that I worry only that they won’t feel the freedom to change back if they feel the need.

  We are in the library, reading Akash’s play. His hero, Hari, is coming out, which still seems to be a fairly big deal. In fact, Hari has been stuck at ‘Mum, I’ve got something to tell you . . . I’m—’ for the last fifteen drafts. Otherwise, the play, Gods in Nepal, is evolving rapidly. It started as a version of Tony Kushner’s play about AIDS, Angels in America, with the Buddha and Ganesh wandering around a deconstructed country. Since then, Akash has read a load of Brecht, and it has become a metatheatrical production with shades of Mother Courage. On the stage, there are to be three visible levels. The gods are in the Gods, talking over e
veryone’s heads in sonnets, while the higher-caste Nepalese people, including a nasty man and his wife, are stuck on a precarious middle tier, desperate trying to maintain themselves and their property against threats coming from the gods above, and also from the peasants below. Hari, a Nepalese boy living in England, arrives on a plane with his mother, who is also the nasty man’s discarded concubine, and wanders all three levels, partly in pursuit of a gorgeous Nepalese peasant boy. At the end of the play, the gods, getting fed up with everyone, destroy all the tiers in an earthquake, and in the resulting chaos, Hari has a first kiss and loses his mother. At the very end, on the phone, he has to tell his mother something; he has to say: ‘Mum, I’m . . .’

  It ought to be easy. But then, Akash himself didn’t actually say those words. He did not, himself, so much come out as bloom into a thousand petals. He was thirteen when he handed me his flagrant and exciting story ‘Pastel Wings’, and he handed his beloved German teacher a copy at the same time. Not that we were very surprised.