by Kate Clanchy
Inside, the Catholic ethos and everything that goes with it – retreats, mass confessions, chapel, communal mass – are strong as ever. But the ‘ethos’ has not saved this school in the way it saved Acrostic High, perhaps because the ‘ethos’ was never the point in the first place, for either school. Acrostic High and many like it used Christianity to select its intake rather than to educate all the children. When Christ said, ‘Suffer the little children,’ he meant specifically the noisy, difficult ones who were being kept from the feast, not the baptized ones whose parents rang bells. Christ did not impose admission criteria; that is the work of man; and as men, voters, citizens, liberal humanists, people who believe in civic values and human rights, as ethical humans, we should make them fair.
About Prayer
Emily, Priya, and Kamal
Shakila asks me, ‘Are you a Christian then, Miss?’
‘No,’ I say, ‘but it’s OK, you’re safe with me, I’m a totally moral person.’
Shakila giggles. ‘I know,’ she says, ‘but what’s your religion?’
‘Nothing,’ I say. ‘Humanism. No, wait a minute. Poetry. People. People saying poems. There you go.’
‘OK, Miss,’ says Shakila, smiling.
Dear Christian Emily, dear Muslim Priya, I do not scorn your faith. I do not scorn prayer, either. Schools are full of young people seeking to identify with something, so saying words together can be very powerful. I visited a transcendental meditation school once. No one had learned yogic flying, yet, but the meditation at the beginning of lessons certainly made everyone calm. The prayers of all good people are good is what Jim Burden’s grandfather tells Jim in My Antonia, one of my favourite books about migration, as they watch Bohemian Mr Shimerda cross himself beneath their Protestant Christmas tree.
I don’t think prayers have to be addressed to God, though, and definitely not to an established god. For example, in our school, Mr B induced a calm and prayerful atmosphere in 10E, that notorious zoo of a class, by teaching everyone to knit. I sometimes wonder if we could do the same across our whole school by issuing cotton reels and making French knitting compulsory after lunch. I already like our school motto: Be the best you can be. It may be a bit naive, but it is about us, and our personal responsibility, not God. The French knitting could be too, and we could murmur a personal affirmation as we wound the wool, something about being kind to each other, and allowing each other each day our daily differences, and forgiving small injuries as we ourselves would like to be forgiven, please, thank you, amen, bro. We have the motto and a shield on the school badge at present, but if the French knitting thing took off, we could easily add a bobbin.
And then our glorious, confounding, multicultural registers could be their own prayers.
Osama, Mohamed, Jesus, Hope,
Khatun, Swostika, Imam, Priest,
Guarang, Shiney, Digweed, Hare,
Awad, Mukahang, Zola, Mo.
Kristos, Noor, Alkaida, Lunch.
Fantasia, Bingy, Ulfat, Bird,
Urban, Allport, Garlick, Woods,
Princess, Zuleika, August, Best.
Timothy, Winter, Lord,
Amen.
Kamal’s Paris
The Monday after the Paris attacks I have my Year 10s. They are a noisy little group at the best of times, but this morning they are impossible. Kara and Jade are curled in their corner of the table, whispering about something. Izzat crouches over his paper, drills a hole in it with his pen, and yells, ‘Get off me, man, get off!’ in his loud, gravelly voice when plump Mo sits down harmlessly beside him and tries to unpack his bag.
They’re a funny pair: Izzat so small and square and Afghan with his big nose and premature moustache; Mo so rounded and mellow and Pakistani with his long-lashed eyes and soft glossy hair. On a good morning, the two of them will clasp hands in greeting and stand still a moment: the manners of a long-lost bazaar. Today, Mo answers Izzat’s yells with a long flow of resentful muttering, like a merchant justifying his price. Now, they both appeal for support to Kamal, who has loped in late, laid his bag in the very middle of the table and himself out across his chair at maximum length, which is, alarmingly, six foot two plus three inches of afro. Kamal is Moroccan, and has a cool, difficult reputation in school. But he likes poetry, and for me, after a couple of jokes, he is usually both responsive and responsible. Not today.
‘Man,’ he says, ‘oh man. I can’t stop thinking about it.’
‘He means the attacks,’ says Mo, who makes knowing Kamal’s thoughts his business. ‘Miss! We ain’t talked about anything else all weekend.’
‘Been mad,’ confirms Kamal, running his fingers through his afro. ‘Crazy. Like, listening to the news all night.’
‘Man!’ says Izzat, incredibly loudly, banging his fist on the table. Jade looks up from her chat. Kara squeals.
‘Like,’ says Kamal, ‘man. That’s what people think Muslim means.’ All three boys are Muslim, but different kinds. Mo is a mild sort of Shia, like many northern Pakistanis, Kamal a Moroccan madhab, which is a traditional, law-abiding sort of Sunni, and Izzat an Afghan Sunni, the religion of the Taliban.
‘Yeah,’ says Mo, ‘that’s the worst bit.’
‘No man, the dead people is the worst bit,’ says Izzat, ‘and their families,’ he adds, with feeling. He lost his dad in Afghanistan, I quickly remember. And a brother, I think. He despises the Taliban.
‘Man,’ says Mo, respectfully.
‘Bro,’ says Kamal. ‘Oh man.’
‘We ain’t like that,’ says Izzat. ‘Miss. It ain’t Muslim to kill people. It ain’t the law. It’s like the worst thing you can do. You know that, yeah?’
‘It’s totally, totally against the Koran,’ says Mo, shaking his head.
‘But people are going to think that about us, man,’ says Kamal. ‘Like, I’m a terrorist? Man. Like at the airport? The way they look at you. Man! I ain’t never going there again. Like, never mind the airport. I ain’t going to a concert. Or a club. I ain’t never getting on the bus again.’
At this point, Kara unexpectedly bursts into tears, and the boys all look at her. ‘That’s terrible,’ she squeals. ‘Terrible, he can’t get on a bus because people are like prejudiced! Everyone is!’
The boys pass hankies, thump her on the back. Kara howls more. Kara is plump, brown, shiny-haired, sentimental. I suspect she looks like the boys’ mums. They are certainly enjoying the crying. Jade sighs, wrinkles her nose, looks at me meaningfully. She’s right: this could go on for hours. My lesson plan is already a goner. Out the window.
I look round the room. It contains Muslims from five countries, one Hindu, a Filipino fundamentalist Christian, one transgender kid, two mixed race girls of no faith, two white kids, a Pole, and the full range of human skin colour. Fabulous.
‘Not much prejudice in here,’ I say. ‘We could write a poem about it? Maybe? About Paris?’
So we do, and this is Kamal’s. Subsequently, it becomes famous in the school and Kamal reads it from the podium at assembly, stepping down to many high-fives and cries of ‘Man,’ and ‘You said it, bro.’
Bloody Paris
I heard the echo of the screams
of the innocent, of the witnesses,
of the bloody gruesome corpses.
The echo of blame.
The echo of ISIS.
Are they Muslims, that was an echo.
All Muslims are terrorists, that also was an echo.
Peace has no echo,
so there will never be silence.
Peace is universal and blood shouldn’t be.
It probably has more abstract nouns and vague thinking than I would generally allow, but I think of this as a prayer, rather than a poem, so I make allowances. It’s a prayer to multiculturalism; to Izzat and Mo and their friendship, all the more real for their disputes; to Kamal and his talent; and to Kara’s muddled, sentimental, beautiful tears. Amen. As-salamu alaikum, wa alaikum salam. The prayers of all good people are good. (Mr Shim
erda killed himself, in My Antonia, because he missed his country so.) Our Father. Bro. O, Man.
About Poverty, Art, and How to Choose a School
Cheyenne, Darren, My Son, and Scarlett
What, demands Cheyenne, did I get my kids for Christmas?
Cheyenne and I are sitting on a sofa, eating breakfast. It’s an Art Therapy project, an experiment for me, and I am not comfortable. I’m missing my protective desk, my pile of poems, my pens, but sofas is how they do things in here. ‘Because I bet,’ continues Cheyenne, ‘I bet it was something really rubbish. People like you always get your kids rubbish things for Christmas. Book tokens.’
I pull a cushion onto my lap. I raise an eyebrow. I take a large bite of apple. Cheyenne is concentrated on the few morsels of chocolate croissant, snaffling up the scraps with small chapped hands.
‘Do you know,’ says Cheyenne, ‘what I got for Christmas?’ And I say, what an odd conversation, this is June.
‘A BlackBerry,’ says Cheyenne. ‘Yeah. And a pair of boots, and an Xbox, and £200. All of that from my dad. And a pair of jeans, and a Burberry shirt. And a big box of make-up. Dior. So much stuff, he didn’t even wrap it, it was in a big black bag. Like, plummph.’ She gestures with her hands, the scale of the thing – right in the middle of the lounge.
‘Right,’ I say, as neutrally as I can. Kids quite often do tell you what they got for Christmas or birthdays, about their stuff, but usually small kids, at the end of the lesson, confidingly. Not fifteen-year-olds, not like this.
Cheyenne says: ‘You didn’t get your kids anything like that, did you? What did you get them?’
How does Cheyenne know I have kids? My back is up. If this were a classroom, I could just tell her she was inappropriate. If this were the Inclusion Unit, Miss B would do it. Here, I have to answer because we’re on the damn sofa. I can’t even remember what gifts I bought. ‘Bikes,’ I say eventually, ‘this year, for the little ones.’ Then, remembering the hunt for the right sort: ‘Yes, bikes. Second hand. From eBay.’
EBay! Cheyenne’s scorn is enormous. For the rest of the project, over several weeks, she starts each session by asking me if I got my kids something good yet, something new.
Then I notice Cheyenne in my sons’ playground. Perhaps she has been there all the time: one of the teenagers who hang out on the benches and smoke and look at each other’s phones. ‘Hello, Miss,’ she says in her deep hoarse voice, smiling her small smile. ‘What about them scooters then, they new?’
So now Cheyenne knows where I live. Though she has probably always sort of known, in the same way I know where she lives: just ten minutes away from me, on the council estate. If she is a regular in our park, she must often walk through the narrow gap in the notorious ‘Berlin Wall’ that separates the estate from the local conservation area and our block of pretty, privately owned Victorian houses. The wall is notorious because it is so ugly – fifteen foot of seventies brick – and because it has no other purpose than to separate the rich from the poor.
Of course, as a nice liberal person, I disapprove of this wall. On the other hand, I rarely go through the gap myself. I speed up, in fact, when I am obliged to cycle through the estate. Not that it’s ugly; on a sunny day, with a glow on its interlocking crescents of brick houses and front gardens, it reminds me of my childhood Ladybird books, the ones which showed 1960s family life in Technicolor: Father in a short-sleeved shirt, Mother in a buttoned yellow dress, a dog to walk in the bright green park. Aspiration, circa 1959.
Or Utopia, circa 1901: the recreation ground, the large, purpose-built, deco-style primary school, the (disused) library; this is what Booth and Rowntree and the great Victorian social reformers wanted for working people. I imagine explaining to them why these spacious, solid houses now mean ‘poor’ and the narrow, poorly built Victorian streets they deplored currently mean ‘rich’.
Mr Booth, Mr Rowntree, it is hard to say, but, if you live here, easy to know. Rich people drive past the estate shopping centre to the Waitrose a mile away; only poor people use the Spar, where the prices, oddly, are higher. Everyone rich knows not to walk their dog in the recreation ground; everyone poor knows this shit pool is theirs. Only the poor send their kids through the pretty deco gate of the spacious council estate primary school, because everyone rich knows the results are bad. There’s a faith school for rich people – Victorian, poky, successful, and overcrowded – just down the road.
Mr B, Mr R, you spent so much time recording your society, had so much faith in writing it down. If you wrote down the council estate, now, you would record that here, there are families that have not worked for three generations, since the car plant closed; and that the contrast between my children’s and Cheyenne’s prospects in life is of proportions you still recognize: of nineteenth-century, Princess and Match Girl size. Nevertheless, Cheyenne’s boast about Christmas presents is not a tragic fantasy, and she is not lying about her BlackBerry or her Burberry shirt, for this is poverty in the twenty-first century, and it’s complicated.
For a start, the breadline, or, rather, the lack of one. There is a great deal of work in our town, work which continued even in the depths of the 2008 recession; we have two universities, three huge hospitals, bio-tech, publishing, tourism, and even some heavy industry. Because the car plant that closed to such disastrous effect thirty years ago in a blaze of strikes and violence actually quietly reopened shortly afterwards. It is now much more successful than it ever was, but is also smaller, foreign owned, and staffed by robots and a tiny number of highly skilled engineers supplemented by agency workers on minimum wage or lower. The hospitals, bio-tech, and other industries divide on the same lines: a small number of highly paid, highly skilled jobs; a larger number of agency workers doing menial jobs on semi-legal rates. The unions are broken, and there is no incentive for anyone to raise the bottom level of pay because the town benefits from a steady flow of young immigrants willing to accept any wage, and also from part-time workers subsidized by state tax credits.
Housing is rather similar: our small brick house is now worth three times what we paid for it because the large number of very rich people in town, including many who commute daily to London, has forced up house prices to near-London levels. Private rents have risen in tandem, to the point where we all assume, in school, that a thirty-year-old teacher will live like a student in a single room. The social housing in the city is available only to the very poorest, such as Cheyenne’s family, and is being continually chipped away by the Right to Buy.
All of this means it is very difficult for Cheyenne’s mother, for example, to step out of living on benefits. She has three children and receives benefits and tax credits for them; in order to have more real income than she currently receives from the state, especially in housing benefit, she would have to earn more than £50,000 a year. She can’t do this, because she has no education, so the smartest way for her to pay for her children’s needs is either to be unemployed, or, better, to do a legal, part-time job and claim tax credits, and subsidize it with an illegal job, of which there are many in the city, on the side. If Cheyenne’s absent father, meanwhile, were to move back in, and get a legal job, or even start making regular declared parental payments, the family would undoubtedly be poorer; he can give his family much more by staying out, working illegally, and contributing uncounted sums of cash and stuff in black bags.
Cheyenne almost certainly does have more consumer goods than my children, in the same way that she has more calories and less nutrition; more cash and less financial security. In the estate, too, she may well have a larger bedroom in a bigger house; but already she has far less chance of ever owning a home of her own. It is sharp of her to have noticed my kids in the park, with their hand-me-down trousers and large vocabularies, and chosen them to envy. It shows that she has noticed that something is amiss here, that they have something she does not; that my second-hand bicycle has a quality which makes it a rich person’s present, while her own black bag of goods
is a poor gift, and that she and her father have somehow been palmed off with something, a lie about value and status, choice and freedom, and the way things work.
And I fear that Cheyenne has decided that I, in my worn tweed jacket, with my dubious, in-between, first-name status, am the ideal person to explain this conundrum, or, at least, make the injustice explicit so she can liberate some of her anger about it. For Cheyenne has taken to tracking me round school, and she really does have ‘anger issues’; I hear about them all the time. Her outbursts are famous because they are so pungent and so personal. Mostly, I notice, they are targeted at women, and have something to do with what their kids have.
The year I meet Cheyenne, all three of my children are at the C of E primary school she didn’t go to, the most middle-class one in the area. It is full of the children of people like me: highly educated, often freelance, living on relatively low incomes. Therapists, yoga teachers, editors, academics: all tucked into small houses with over-stuffed cupboards and wonky IKEA kitchens. Most of them, like me, went to private schools ourselves, because, when we were children in the seventies and eighties, most middle-class children did, and most middle-class parents could afford to send them. Now, in the noughties, we send our children to state schools; partly because we are left-leaning, and partly because private schools have become vastly more expensive, well beyond the reach of teachers and academics, let alone writers and yoga teachers. It is part of our surprising disinheritance; brought up in large houses by parents who taught us to look to a more equal society, we find ourselves living in cupboards, with a new class of the super-rich lording it over us. Still, we cling to our education and our politics; we are nice lefties yet.