by Kate Clanchy
When my littlest child was three, he sat on my lap to read our new library book: Borka: The Adventures of a Goose with No Feathers. He listened contentedly as Borka was hatched with the eponymous genetic deficiency, smiled when she had a compensatory jumper knitted for her. But winter was coming, and migration, and you cannot fly in a woolly jumper, so, in a double-page spread, Borka’s family flew away. At this, my son let out a scalded howl. He leapt from my knee and cast himself to the floor. They left her behind, he howled. They left her behind.
I tried to console him. I flipped forward in the book, told him how Borka gets a boyfriend and a boat ride and nice individual identity, she’s the heroine, damn it, she gets a book to herself . . . But I could have wept myself, looking at the picture of the small goose and its ascending siblings. How had such a work been stacked in a public library, let alone warmly recommended for children? Had the author, publisher, librarians, all forgotten how it felt: the backs turned in a playground, the adults’ coats moving off down the lane, the beat of wings overhead?
I remembered. I remember. When I was a child, as Frank O’Hara puts it in ‘Autobiographia Literaria’, ‘I played by myself in a / corner of the schoolyard / all alone.’ And was changed and marked for life, like all writers.
But I don’t think it’s just writers and artists who feel like this. Not to be left behind, never to be the one dressed differently, acting differently, feathered differently, never, never to be excluded: for children, that is a primary drive. It is connected to the inbuilt Darwinian drive to walk with your tribe, stay with your kind, and it is stronger in a seven-year-old than the fear of death.
Conversely, children will do anything to be included, anything from wearing school uniform to marching with political youth groups; anything from joining in the inter-house litter-pick to beating up their dearest friend. The time when you were cruellest, or when your schoolfellows were, probably has something to do with that need to be included, to have the right feathers – remember?
Schools remember. They run on the powerful forces of exclusion and inclusion, and always have; that is what houses, prefects, old boys, rugby clubs – and their converse, Goths and Columbine – are all about. Now we no longer hit children, in fact, exclusion is our central punishment, and comes in different sorts and under different names, regulated, as it needs to be, by the law: internal exclusion, fixed term exclusion, and the ultimate, permanent exclusion, or as teachers call it, rhyming pleasingly with pox, PEX. It’s a verb: I PEX, you PEX him, he got PEXed.
As a teacher, and parent, I knew this. I also knew how exclusion from school correlates strongly with wider social exclusion, both for children and the adults they become. Nevertheless, when I looked up from Borka to find I was being offered a job in the Inclusion Unit of our local school, working for a new charity, my first thought was that the unit’s name was funny because, like ‘Mental Health’ and ‘Anger Management’, it mostly meant the opposite. This was the Exclusion Unit, really: the place where they put the kids they threw out of classes because they couldn’t contain them.
And who on earth, I wondered, would be excluded from that school, the one already at the bottom of the local pecking order, the one already filled with the socially excluded, with refugees and migrants? I thought I might like to find out. I thought I had had enough of sitting at home, like Frank O’Hara, writing my poems. I thought that the students in the unit, the Excluded, might be a glamorous crew, something like the kids in the movie Freedom Writers. I thought, I fear, that I could do them good.
Kylie’s Baby
And so it happens that one morning in January, I make my way through dirty snow to a low, batten-boarded building at the edge of the school grounds. Inside, it’s cosy, over-heated, smelling of toast, and here is Miss B, bustling towards me in a new, crackling dress: ‘Miss! We’re having a rough morning, how are you? Happy New Year!’
It’s break time, and the girls are huddled round the heater, attempting to dry the ballet slippers in which they have walked to school. Anorexic Clarice has spread hands thin and veiny as leaves on the copper radiator cover. ‘Ooh,’ she murmurs to herself, like a grandmother, clutching her sweatshirt to her hollow chest. ‘Ooh, I never did.’
Kylie begs as I pass, ‘Miss, I’ve dropped my shoe, get it out for us?’ She can’t reach down the back because she is so tiny; her leopard-skin pump is a size three. And she can’t get a ruler, and give the thing a poke, because such enterprise is beyond her.
I get the shoe out. The girls murmur, gratefully, complainingly, resettle themselves around the radiator. They are far from the multi-racial, glamorous kids I had pictured. They are all white, for a start, though most of the kids in the neighbouring school are brown, and none of them, except spooky, platinum Angel, who rarely turns up in any case, is pretty. It isn’t their features; it’s because they don’t look well. Often, they don’t even look young; Simon has premature wrinkles on his forehead, Dave a middle-aged belly. This morning, their skin papery from the cold and their dyed hair thrust in clips, the girls could be middle-aged too, mothers queuing defeated and harmless in the Co-op.
But they are not harmless. Each one of these kids has the power to end learning in any mainstream class at any time, and each of their powers, as always in a gathering of superheroes, is different. Gentle Tom, when asked to write, may put his head on the table and start to hum like a blue whale. Gigantic Dave, who is so quiet, mostly, careful of his outsize hands as puppies, can turn suddenly, terrifyingly violent. Damage, it says on his report. Damage of desks, chairs, doors, other kids. Kylie will ignore you, root through her extra-large handbag for lipstick and start putting it on as if she were a bus passenger and you a faraway stop. If you ask for her attention she may laugh in your face: outraged, astonished laughter, as if you’d requested a snog. Vikki will announce a disability at high pitch, like a train’s hooter: Them’s scissors, I can’t use scissors, I can’t, Miss, too hard. Doesn’t work well out of comfort zone it says on Vikki’s report sheet, but her comfort zone seems passing small.
The Excluded are particularly ruffled and exhausted this morning because Miss B has induced them to take the exam for a GCSE module in Science. Exams are not the Excluded’s thing; they have long records in avoiding them (Simon), walking out of them (Vikki), sleeping in them (Kylie), and throwing chairs at them (Dave). For Tom, who is severely dyslexic, the paper was as terrifying as dropping off a cliff, and now he is collapsed in a corner, drawing a picture in biro of an unhappy small boy standing by a large teacher’s desk. It’s very good; I especially like the boy’s meticulously foreshortened feet, twisting in dumb despair.
Dave is beside Tom, watching, glass-blue eyes vacant, head in those enormous hands. Simon is in a different corner, twitching over his iPod, pulling the headphones in and out of his ears. Vikki was late, she just can’t help herself, and is still finishing the paper in the outer lobby under the eye of Mrs N, the kind and motherly teaching assistant. Every time Vikki sighs, or drops her fluffy pen, or starts drilling through the page with it, Mrs N meets her eye, and shakes her head. There is some doubt if Vikki will finish, as she never has before. Nevertheless, Miss B gets out the chocolate, to celebrate. After all, the rest took the exam. They all sat there, all through.
It’s worth celebrating; according to the report sheets I was shown at the start of the project, the Excluded were scheduled to get Gs this year. Today, several of them will have reached C grades, and Simon, who is smart as paint, at least a B. This is down to Miss B; I have watched her teach Science, clear and exact and demanding. And watched her do a number of other things too: tackle Social Services over the phone; talk down Dave, determined to leave the IU and smash something; phone Vikki, in the Co-op buying fags, and persuade her, for the fiftieth time, that it is worth coming into school. Miss B’s degree is in Psychology, though what she does for the Excluded is not theoretical, but cognitive and practical. She chivvies these unpromising children, chides them, cheers them. She mops up, phones up, bandages, so
rts. She creates unbending routines. She endlessly produces toast. She is without stint, without limit, without grudge; she is utterly reliable. Patience is often thought to be a passive quality, but Miss B’s is active, intellectual, passionate, and remarkable. And it works, this super-concentrated mothering: the Excluded’s comfort zone has already grown, before my wondering eyes, to encompass scissors, paper, desks, the IU, some adults, me. This does seem to have a long-lasting effect, too. Most days, one of Miss B’s graduates calls by, to tell her how they’re doing in college or sixth form, to get a dose of her still-ready affirmation.
No, here in the IU it’s me who does the Freudian stuff, though that was hardly the original intention. I’m supposed to be leading a writing project, one with notebooks, and an internal e-group for editing fiction in progress. What they do want to do, with almost embarrassing simplicity, is write about themselves, and whatever Hilary Swank ideas I may have had at the start, this makes me uneasy. I am nervous of the moments of revelation. I feel unqualified; I feel embarrassed; I become aware of my greedy, writerly curiosity.
Nevertheless, here they are, and here am I, and there is no point in studying the sonnet, here. So, after a few duff sessions, we have come up with a system. I read them something aloud – they love, like little children, to be read to – and in the brief peace afterwards, they write things down; a version of what we’ve read, usually, something in a strong rhetorical frame that makes their hesitant thoughts sound grand and fine. Then Miss B and I gather up the scribbles and file them, affirming as loudly and firmly as possible as we go. We have to do this; otherwise, they will destroy their work, because all of them, for all their bluster, have low self-esteem. In the same way that they cannot sit exams, get to school on time, or shift from radiators, the Excluded are unable to redraft their own work because that would involve reading it, and, as they wrote it, they know it is not worth doing so. So, each week I type and arrange their pieces nicely on an A3 sheet. I take their names off. That way, when we read them, they can see past their own unworthiness, and notice that their work is good.
Today, the story is a Julie Orringer one called ‘Note to Sixth-Grade Self’. It’s quite long, which will be restful for them after that exam, and I think they’ll like the setting too – in America, in a high school, where soap opera teenage-hood happens. We’ll listen to the story, and maybe Simon will tell us some more about his childhood, that savage nearby hinterland full of dens and fires. Of all the Excluded, Simon interests me most. He is so bright and mercurial, and so full of stories
But Simon isn’t talking today, let alone leaning back in his chair and telling us spellbinding stories of arrest and arson. He isn’t in affirmation mood, either, when he urges the others on in their work, weeps at their testimony, and writes himself ringing prompts to resist ‘peer pressure’ and to move on and get qualifications and a job. He has dragged himself to the central table, but he is still plugging the earphones in and out, dumping his head in his hands. Eventually, he goes out to the lobby and sits with Mrs N. Tom starts another drawing, asking dutiful permission first. The others, though, are writing like mad, except the ones who are crying, because I’ve really overdone it this time. Julie Orringer hit a hell of a nerve, or maybe it was Simon’s head, or maybe even the exam, but something is loose in the room, something dark.
Dave is writing to his ten-year-old, tortured, probably autistic self, about to throw a chair at a teacher. ‘Throw harder,’ he writes. ‘Think about it. Aim.’ This is light relief: elsewhere, the Excluded are remembering being shut in cupboards, knife attacks, sexual assaults, and over and over, abuse by their parents; abuse which ranges from simple neglect and abandonment, through complicated excluding and scapegoating, all the way to sexual abuse and prostitution and outright criminal violence. The accounts have the poor spelling, incontinent exclamation marks, and the artless detail of truth: ‘I slid down the stairs on my bum, so they wouldn’t hear me.’ ‘You could see the blood on the carpets, in track marks like a car.’ ‘It was the big knife out the draw in the kitchen.’ ‘He was my mum’s friend, I know him all my life.’
However unglamorous these kids, the stories on the crumpled bits of A4 are stark and clear as any Hollywood movie. Here, in black and white, is the liberal creed about children: no one is bad, though many are sad, and a few are mad. Dave acts like a cornered dog because he has been kicked like a dog; Vikki’s comfort zone is small because she has been comforted so little. Kylie laughs at you when you ask her to be a normal girl because she knows she comes from a socially despised family. Clarice controls her world through starving her body because her body has been taken out of her control.
That children only do as they are done to, and generally less; that children can escape the legacy of their parents, and change: this is the founding myth of the IU, and, walking round the classroom, poring over writing, removing apostrophes, passing the tissues, I believe it. Certainly, nothing the Excluded have done, no bit of ‘damage’ to desk, carpet, or person, is anything compared to the damage done to them. For lack of something better to say, I repeat this to them. All of them are trying to do better, are doing better, are capable of kindness, too. As a group, they are strikingly nice – as Miss B often comments – to each other, much more so than most children in their circumstances.
Kylie is still writing. This is unusual; normally, if she writes anything at all it is dashed off in a few lines. Today, she hands me a full A4 sheet of paper. ‘Letter to my baby at sixteen weeks.’ ‘Young mom’s are not slag’s! There pregnancies are just as exciting as older mom’s!’ Ah. I scan the page. The abortion refused, the ultrasound picture framed . . . And is the father taking responsibility? ‘He’s in the lobby,’ says Kylie, thumbing at Simon, slumped under his raincoat, murmuring to Mrs N, looking every one of his fifteen muddled years. ‘He’s being really good.’
I meet Miss B’s eyes across the room. ‘Miss!’ I say, and, over Kylie’s head, make the internationally understood hand signal of pregnancy.
‘Miss,’ she replies, and makes the international sign for utter despair.
I walk home, through slush which somehow seems much colder. I get under the duvet, worry that literature has had this result, put the radio on. The World at One. And here is the news about two young brothers from a Black Country town who attacked, tortured, and nearly killed two other boys, aged nine and eleven. Up in court today, sentenced. The boys, the most cursory of journalistic searches reveals, come from a family that has been workless since the pit closed, from violent and missing parents and grandparents, from a home without boundaries.
The poor we have always with us, as Jesus said, but now, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, we are beginning to focus on a particular sort of poor: families like the Black Country one, or the one shown in the TV series Shameless. Post-industrial families, thrown out of the traditional jobs that had both sustained them and enslaved them; caught in a cycle of poverty and deprivation; unable to find their way. Not the working classes any more, but non-working, the under-class: the Excluded.
Kylie’s family, like the Black Country brothers’ family, has been fatherless and workless for three generations, since not the pit but the car plant closed. She and her six siblings were born to a single, very young mother, and have several different fathers, none of whom currently lives with the family. Three of the six children are now mothers themselves, and all the babies live at home with the grandmother. Kylie’s baby will live there too: a third or perhaps fourth generation of fatherlessness and hopelessness, of desperately narrow horizons and the inability to get one’s own shoe from behind the radiator. Should we – the state, the law – do something about this? If so, what, and how?
The debate on the radio is about how many chances Social Services had to intervene with the brothers’ family, and why they failed. The call is for forcible fostering, compulsory infant adoption. Perhaps that is what the Excluded’s stories are begging for: someone to take them away before the thin
g with the knife, someone to get them out of that damn cupboard under the stairs, the one we find ourselves in, in the IU, session after session. Perhaps that is what would break the cycle. Compulsory adoption. Before they are three years old. At birth. An earlier intervention.
But the state hasn’t intervened yet with Angel-the-rarely-present, due to have a baby at Easter with her much older boyfriend, so I cannot see that it will intervene with Kylie. Angel is neglected to the point that when she had a medical emergency before Christmas, only Miss B and Mrs N went up to see her at the hospital, and then they had to make a second run to bring her clean underwear, because her mother wouldn’t do it. ‘No pants,’ said Miss B, making another note in another file, emailing another social worker. ‘Can you imagine?’ Angel is surely on drugs, even I can see that, and her boyfriend is probably her pimp, and she has written me only one piece in all this time, three lines: black burnt house / on the hill / dad.
And I can’t think that the state ought to intervene with Kylie, either. Taking away a child is a desperate cruelty, an extreme punishment, and Kylie is not a criminal. Nor will she give the baby up willingly, because that takes either personal disaster or a sort of mass cultural shaming, the Magdalen Laundry, and we don’t believe in that any more. As Kylie so movingly put it in her essay: Young mom’s are not slag’s.
In relation to Angel, Kylie is well set up, a good enough mother. And she seems entirely pleased with the pregnancy, whatever Miss B and I might think. And why not? Simon is definitely the pick of the IU. Meagre though her benefits will be, they will constitute a larger contribution to the family budget than any other she is capable of getting, certainly short term. And she doesn’t do long term, because she has not been shown how. Aged only sixteen, she will join the adults of her family, with an income as good as her sisters’. She will meet all her family expectations as firmly as a surgeon’s son getting his place at medical school; most of us do not want more than that. And if she is conscious, as of course she is, that those expectations are different from those of the society around her, what of it? That will only make her feel more inadequate in the world, only turn her further in on her tribe.