by Kate Clanchy
‘We had you figured in Year 7,’ I tell him now, as I have before. ‘Me and Miss C.’
‘Outrageous,’ says Akash, as he always does. ‘How very dare you.’
But in Year 7 he was in the habit of strolling the corridor with a girl on either arm, chatting confidentially, and the Languages corridor was adorned with his fashion drawings: attenuated figures in exotic outfits, labelled with the German for leg, arm, and – because Akash always goes the extra mile – armpit and false eyelash.
‘You were quite noticeable,’ I tell him. ‘And when you won the writing competition and we met the duchess, remember? And you said you’d rather have Meryl Streep? That was also a clue.’
We could also mention the Prince songs in the corridors, the photographs – it’s not just the profile, Kate, you have to think jawline – the haircuts, the dancing. Akash can be as camp as Paul ever was, and as in love with the musical, though his tastes are more towards Sondheim.
But he has grown less so with each passing year, as if it has become less necessary to him. At sixteen, the age I met Paul, Akash is already a more sober person, with none of Paul’s self-abbreviating, fugitive quality. If we take camp to be an act of travesty or comedy, a transgressive, theatrical statement of otherness, then it’s a limited place to live, its acts necessarily brief, its best lines all replies. Kenneth Williams, say, had to live as a permanently camp person because of the times he lived in, and it’s a tragedy that Paul, as late as the nineties, was driven to that same corner by Essex and its mores. For Akash, camp is only one of the many places he can live, travesty only a tiny part of his range; he writes plays and directs them, dances, paints, writes, and is one of the cleverest kids in the school, as intellectual and eccentric as Liam ever was, in fact, though a more flowery, plangent writer. But perhaps Liam’s black humour, his razor-sharp observations, that swooping irony I liked so much, were also features of his isolation. Liam’s sexuality meant he was undercover in hostile territory; he saw so much because he was on high alert.
Akash isn’t isolated. Partly, this is because, like Paul, he is intensely socially aware and uses his camp, impossible-to-insult persona to make himself universally popular. He is all over the school prospectus, in every photograph, showing that jawline; in the corridor, he is always surrounded by friends, his hints about his sexuality and his pashes on impossible blond boys the subject of many giggles. But his friendship choices are never bounded by teen politics; if anything, it is the reverse: he seeks out all kinds of otherness and foreignness. He has a passion for languages; he speaks, besides German, his own Nepalese, passable Urdu, K-pop Korean, a smattering of Mandarin. Any child new to the school will be targeted by Akash – who are they? Where from? – and forced to divulge enough clues about their language for him to launch himself into it, grinning at his mistakes, clutching onto Indo-European and K-pop roots until he is surfing the waves of incomprehension with utter pleasure.
Akash joined my senior Poetry Group when he was just thirteen, and immediately homed in on the silent and gifted Jennifer. There should be no reason why a sixth-form girl like her should speak to a boy like him, except that he insisted on it and they were both of Asian heritage. He mobbed her with his charm; he begged to read her notebook; he tracked her home. It worked: she adopted him as a sort of little brother, and they remained devoted, and exchanged writing, for years. Conversely, when we go on a residential writing course he picks out the only child I was worried about to take under his wing. Amy is two years younger than him, desperately anxious and shy, a carer for her ill mother, and the only Afro-Caribbean girl on the trip, but after Akash has announced to everyone, frequently and loudly, that she is very special and so is her writing, we all fall into line, and not only that week: her whole school experience is transformed.
Akash’s house of friendship is large, like his play, with many tiers. Partly, this is explained by his Nepalese heritage: in Akash’s concept of family, there are many perches for big sisters and cousins. After Jennifer, several sixth-formers find this out too, and he walks the corridor with a bevy of them. There are also several spaces for aunts and uncles and kindly patrons, and here, his German teacher and I are comfortably installed. It’s spacious up here, and very relaxed. Akash knows how to be given to, and how to thank without being cloying: a rare and graceful gift. Besides, I don’t hold any of Akash’s secrets; he has never told me anything I couldn’t freely share with a roster of his teachers. When I look back on Liam’s plight, I am glad of our times, and not just for him.
As Akash writes his play, our school is at its maximum diversity – barely 20 per cent of the kids white British, and the others not from a single minority but from dozens, from all over the globe. In Blastmuir and in Essex, the school was part of a monoglot white community that knew how to be itself; here, the school is a gathering point for one of the most mixed communities ever to function on the earth. Many of the students here come from religious homes which condemn homosexuality – Polish Catholic, Pakistani Muslim, or, like Akash, Nepalese Hindu – but that does not matter, because when they come to school, the children put those values to one side. These children are not raised, like the children of Essex, to be like their parents; they are raised to outdo them. This includes speaking English and succeeding inside English culture. Our school tells them a liberal attitude to sexual identity is part of being British. Akash shows them, in his vivid personality and many triumphs, that it can be part of succeeding, too.
At least, in school. Akash’s persona here – socialite, dramaturge, de facto Head Boy – is different from his Nepalese identity. His Nepalese community all gained their British passports through soldiering; they are Gurkhas. As such, they are all warrior caste and very ambitious for their children. In this community, Akash has dubious status. It isn’t the clothes, the selfies, the elaborate haircuts – there are places for all that in his well-worn Hinduism. And he has the correct caste name – Guraung. But he does not have a father, just a lower-caste single mother, who is, like Hari’s mother in the play, effectively his father’s discarded concubine. She is barely fifteen years older than he is. In school, Akash is out and proud; at home, he does not have the words to even begin to explain to his mother what he is. Homosexuality is illegal in Nepal. All the good words for it are in English. His mother does not speak that language.
And this is the grit in Akash’s pearl, the Kryptonite in his Superkid cave. His brilliance, his kindness, and perception, and anxiety, all go back to his mother to whom he is devoted, to whom he is brother, father, son; and to his dual identity, Nepalese and English. One day, he will have to explain that he is gay, and that is an English identity. In his play, it is after the earthquake, after his mother thinks he’s dead, and on the phone, and still, he can’t say it. Mum, he says, Mum, I’m . . . This is the fifteenth draft. These are the only words that have never been changed.
Mum, Mum, I’m . . .
Nepalese? I suggest, and Akash laughs his head off, like the kid he still is.
Javel’s Rose and Emmanuel’s Trousers
I watched Bill Forsyth’s 1981 film Gregory’s Girl recently. Gregory is just a little older than I am, and his school looks as outdated as my memories of Blastmuir High: concrete panels and big windows, long corridors with hefty fire doors, miles of bleak playing field. Inside, though, the wacky, febrile atmosphere Forsyth creates is still warmly recognizable as school. The earnest PE teacher, the baking-obsessed Steve, the melancholy penguin that flip-flops down the corridors to no one’s surprise: I still know them. Gregory seems ahead of his time, what with his gay best friend, super-assertive wee sister, and adoration of the sporty Dorothy; as he himself says, ‘Modern girls, modern boys, it’s tremendous.’
Just one thing jars in Bill Forsyth’s vision, but it jars hard: the wildly outdated, over-intimate, casually sexualized relationships of the teachers to the pupils – the two moustached English teachers giggling over the juicy girls who write them poems; the middle-aged woman invitin
g the former pupil turned window cleaner to ‘come up and see me sometime’; the sweet PE teacher showing Dorothy how to catch a ball with her bum, one to one, alone in the changing room. All unimaginable now, but it was normal then, just as it was normal, a decade later in Essex, for the teachers to go to the pub at the end of the year with the Year 13s. I did that. And I took Liam to that club. I went to the pub with teachers myself as a sixth-former, and no harm came of it; nevertheless, I’m shocked now. Mores around sex have changed in schools in the last thirty years; changed unrecognizably, and, mostly, for the better.
My friend M definitely thinks so. She went to a Gregory’s Girl comprehensive in the nineties and ran away south when she was only sixteen. She agrees, no one more strongly, that the sexist and homophobic attitudes of that school and that time held her back academically and emotionally, and injured her gay brother almost irrevocably. Now, after many adventures and a late degree, she teaches in a big comprehensive in outer London, and, ironically for such a wild child, is extremely strict. Order is one of the things she feels she was deprived of as a child; intellectual stimulation is another. ‘Why shouldn’t they sit and listen?’ she says of her pupils. ‘I know so much more than them. And besides, I’m very interesting.’
She is. She is also very glamorous, with a tall, neatly turned figure, long legs always in shiny tights, and a mane of Scottish red hair. She has a fine, arch Scottish manner too, another thing she aims to teach: ‘By Year 11, one’s class should be more of an intellectual cocktail party,’ she says. Judging by her phenomenal exam results, she very often achieves this. She is not very keen on admin, but despite herself has risen to Second in Department, in charge, among other things, of the student teacher interns; a job she does with typical vigour, alternately adoring and despising the new recruits, always demanding vast efforts from them, vast as her own.
Last year, M was sent two very promising, biddable student interns, both young women, whom she nicknamed ‘The Stepford Misses’ because they were so very coiffed and created such neat lesson plans. They were dull but no trouble, she told me at Christmas. Which was why it was surprising, this summer, to have her on the phone in tears. One of her Stepford interns had written to her expressing her concern about M’s ‘potentially abusive/inappropriate relationship with a student’. M had received this email at eleven thirty at night on a Sunday at the strung-out, overheated end of the summer term, and had responded, being M, with a volley of highly articulate abuse. She thought it would go away, but instead the matter had been referred to the Deputy Head, and M had been summoned to a meeting.
I probed a little further, and this was the ‘potentially abusive/inappropriate relationship’ in question: The intern was working with M’s Year 11, a second set that M had domineered, pummelled, and loved into kids who got As and had English as a favourite subject. They all adored her. (Of course, said M.) Javel, a tall, handsome Jamaican boy, started to express this adoration by bringing her every day a red silk rose. M thanked him very much each time, then placed the rose in a vase on the windowsill, making a display for the whole class. The problem occurred when the intern came in one morning to take the register, and Javel explained, of the roses, ‘I’m flirting with Miss M.’
‘That’s not abusive,’ I said, flabbergasted, on the phone to M. ‘That’s not really flirting, either.’
‘No,’ said M.
‘And the Deputy Head can’t have thought so either,’ I added.
‘No,’ said M, still sounding doom-laden. ‘He was very polite to her, though. He went through it all point by point. Her emails, my emails.’
‘Your Sunday night email?’ I said.
‘Yes.’
‘Maybe,’ I said carefully, ‘maybe you shouldn’t have called the Stepford intern a virgin.’
‘Maybe not,’ said M, and she giggled a little, but she still wasn’t laughing in the proper M fashion, so I probed a bit more, and the story of the second Stepford intern tottered shabbily into the light.
The previous term, M had placed this student teacher in her Year 8: lovely keen little kiddies. Everything was going beautifully, even at the stage when the intern was left to teach alone. Then, suddenly, M was summoned to an urgent lunchtime meeting with the Deputy Head. The intern had gone home and was reporting assault from one of her pupils, but when M was given the name, she thought there must be a mistake, another older boy with the same name, elsewhere in the school. Because her Emmanuel was top of the class, the sweetest, swottiest boy imaginable, and one of those who, at thirteen, was still very small, still seemed to be a child.
But it was her Emmanuel, and this was the assault. At the end of the lesson, Emmanuel had stayed behind to talk to the intern about, she thought, homework. But instead, he said, ‘Miss, I love you, I think about you all the time.’ The intern had left the room at once and reported the incident to the Deputy Head. Then she left the school and was never able to return, because the event had ‘triggered’ a previous assault.
‘But,’ I said, baffled, ‘he didn’t touch her. And how scared can she have been? It’s not like he was threatening her.’
‘He had an erection,’ said M. ‘Visible in his trousers.’ She snorted. ‘It must have been a very small one. A tiny tent.’
And what happened next was . . . Emmanuel was excluded for three days for assault.
‘Oh, the reintegration meeting was terrible,’ said M. ‘The intern didn’t show up because she didn’t want to be “triggered”, Emmanuel’s dad was in total denial, nothing happened at all, he kept saying. I think he’s going to take him out of school.’
‘Emmanuel?’ I asked.
‘Just destroyed. And me, I was, I was . . .’
‘Very, very angry?’ I suggested. ‘With her?’
‘Yeah,’ said M. ‘We were all very angry. The whole department, his form teacher, the Deputy Head really – he’s a decent guy, he was only playing it by the book, doing what had to be done. Angry with her. The intern. None of us thought it should have happened. None of us knew what to do.’
‘And,’ I asked, ‘do you think that’s what made you so angry about Javel?’
‘Oh,’ said M, ‘definitely. Because I could have cleared that up in two minutes, normally. That was nothing. Javel’s quite big and grown-up. It was just a job lot of roses his uncle sold him. But Emmanuel . . . It was only love. Love happens. Poor kid. Poor little boy.’
Of course, love happens in school. Schools run on love. Love of her academic subjects and her pupils, and for the family of her school, is what gets M up every morning, what keeps her going all the way to parents’ evening or to the late-night marking of books. M’s love, like most teachers’ love – even that of Gregory’s PE teacher for his football team – is agape: the pure, parental strain. This word, like most philosophy and most Greek, has sadly disappeared from teacher training manuals.
So has ludus, and there is a lot of that sort of love in schools too. Ludus as in ludicrous: the fun, experimental, uncommitted kind of love. This is the sort that Gregory’s Girl celebrates so well – the silly, kindly cheerfulness that sends Gregory on a wild goose chase with three girls, or his little friend on a trip to Caracas. Part of a school’s job is to supply a safe setting for this kind of love: the school play, the supervised prom, the residential trip. Done properly, these occasions create happy memories for life and a million wedding videos; made safe, Midsummer Night’s Dream dazzlements can be shed in the morning, like an ass’s head.
And then, dangerously dancing among the ludus and the agape, because schools are huge buildings filled with hundreds of adolescents, is eros, physical love. Schools work to exclude this, quite properly, but always in the full and certain knowledge that they cannot wholly succeed. Some pupils, like Emmanuel and Javel, will always get the sorts of love mixed up: the teacher’s job is to strive never to do so. The teacher who, for example, builds on the ludus of the school play to seduce its star, or the fun of the ski trip to snog a sixth-former, or who forgets the
ir agape love to move in on a child who makes, like Emmanuel, a declaration, is committing a terrible crime. It is right that these crimes are now so much more often reported, but it is wrong for teachers to forget their duty to other sorts of love, and wrong to give love a bad name.
Javel probably did have some sort of erotic crush on Miss M, but he was making it into ludus, into play, each time he offered M a rose, and M was making it over into agape each time she accepted a flower and placed it in the vase as part of her lesson, part of her ‘cocktail party’, the love-filled, playful classroom that she had painstakingly created. When the first Stepford intern called that love down, of course M was outraged; the intern was ignoring her professional knowledge and delicacy, and also the principle that governs her life: her commitment to teacherly agape. There are painful racial prejudices at play here, too. Javel brought his gifts partly because he came from a courtly Jamaican tradition of respect for the teacher; but the intern was treating him, and imagining M to see him, more like a big, black sex object. Emmanuel’s home was a strict, Christian, African one, one where sex was absolutely taboo. To send Emmanuel back to such a home for sexualized behaviour was life-changing, school-destroying, for both boy and family.
M’s response to Javel was exactly right. And the correct response to Emmanuel’s declaration would have been to ignore the eros and respond with agape: to say it was lovely that he was enjoying English, and suggest he go swiftly to the library to find a new book, and to not look at all at his trousers. A teacher not capable of a sacrifice like this is not a teacher. To the pure all things are pure; to the teacher all love is agape. M knew that, and the new generation of teachers who come from a much more self-conscious sexual culture, one created in the age of the internet and the selfie, could do worse than to learn it.
About Exclusion
Kylie, Royar, and Simon