Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me

by Kate Clanchy

  The new head decrees choirs (you cannot say that she does not believe in the arts) and I watch Miss B integrate Darren in hers, and witness him actually come back into school, after hours, for a concert. He stands next to Andrew, a tall Ghanaian boy, and the two of them step forward together to sing the bottom notes in ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, to wild applause.

  But afterwards, leaving the building, I hear him nag at Emily and her violin. ‘Doesn’t it bother you?’ I ask. She tucks her little instrument into its furry nest. ‘He can’t play it, can he?’ she says, and clicks shut the case, and picks up the handle, and smiles.

  Our school doesn’t have an orchestra. The good comp does, and the private schools drip with grand pianos. If my son went to the private school he could play in chamber groups. But if he went to my school, he could carry his French horn in for his lesson, as Emily does her violin, and then there would be a French horn in the school corridor, it would exist. That’s a patrimony, a gift, as Emily’s fiddle is a gift to the school – as Emily is in general, and the brainy twins too: asking the penetrating questions in every lesson, never failing in good manners and intelligent, tempered enthusiasm, always getting the teacher’s joke, hauling up the grade point average, constantly raising the bloody tone. Maybe I should be thinking of what my son could bring to the school, as well as what he could take, about his patrimony as well as his entitlement. After all, looking at Cheyenne, he has had quite a lot of stuff, and quite a lot of luck, already.

  I am standing in the English corridor, waiting for the bell to ring. I’m early, as I often am. I like listening to the sounds of the lessons: Year 10, I surmise. Here is Miss A, telling Set 1 about racism in Of Mice and Men in her elegant, clear, unafraid sentences, so much the most interesting thing they will hear all day; Miss B’s room rumbling with happy giggles as Set 3 act out the scene with Curley’s wife. Miss T’s is nearly silent except for the click of her heels. Then there is a disruption, and a door is flung open, and the immense Darren flings himself out of her classroom. He leans against a wall, puts his hands flat against it, and shakes.

  He seems to shake the building. He seems to shake the air. I have never seen anything quite like it. I remember what Miss B told me: that Darren comes from a family where all the older men are in prison, that he was witness to the murder of a child when he was only five years old himself. That must be what makes anger like this: an emotion big as weather.

  After a while, I ask him if he is all right. After all, I do know him. We ate toast on a sofa together. For a minute, I think he will hit me, then he puts his hands in his pockets. ‘Yeah,’ he says, ‘yeah, Miss.’ He gestures down the corridor. ‘I am all right. I got anger issues, Miss.’

  Then the bell rings, and, as the other kids come belting out of the classrooms, the noise rising like water, he goes back in. Through the glass pane of the door I see him sit down, and Miss T put a paper on the desk in front of him, and his head bend to the desk. A test – probably for GCSE, probably Steinbeck. Miss T, and the school, and Steinbeck, and Darren himself, are going to face down his anger, anger big as Cheyenne’s anger, bigger, and he will probably write down how much he likes the book, and the scenes about hopelessness, poverty, tenderness, and violence, because probably, he does.

  Later, I help Miss A take a display down from her wall, and she shows me a piece Cheyenne wrote for her, a response to World War I poems, a letter from a woman left behind. It says all the usual things, the mixture of cliché and anachronism – but she has written each word carefully, in ink pen, and scorched the paper, to make it look old, and painted a watercolour poppy in the corner, quite well. And in the middle, between ‘Sammy says you are a great role model’ and ‘Love you forever’ is the line, ‘I think of you in the slow dusk, and all down the street the women pull down their blinds.’ None of the other pieces of work has this borrowing from Owen, so I think Cheyenne might have liked his poem, really.

  And if she liked that, then perhaps she might have liked the golden castle, really. Perhaps she even liked the poem she so scorned, the Edwin Morgan one, which, come to think of it, was about Christmas, and presents. About a trio of young people coming down the street with a new guitar, happy in their lives, full of love: Orphean sprig! Melting baby! Warm Chihuahua! / The vale of tears is powerless before you. I wonder what it is like to see that castle or to read that poem when you come, in fact, from the vale of tears and will be going back there in the evening. And perhaps, I think, perhaps – it is a chilly little thought, because I never liked her, never gave her a genuine smile, not as Miss B did, never believed in her intellectual potential, not as Miss A did – perhaps Cheyenne actually liked me. Perhaps her rage at Edwin Morgan, the young writer, the castle, my children’s parcels, was the measure not of her hate, but of her love.

  ‘Your school doesn’t have a ski trip,’ says one of the mothers at my primary. ‘The other comprehensive has a ski trip. I do think that’s important, a ski trip.’

  This is crazy talk. But choosing a school is making all the Year 6 parents crazy. Of course it is. This is the most political choice we will ever make, far beyond voting, and it involves our children, whom we love beyond reason. It makes it worse that the terror of what we are doing has made passive-aggressive hypocrites of us all. The parents who are sending their kids to private school are telling everyone who will listen that it is because of their child’s special needs: because he/she is so good/bad at Maths, so good/bad at socialization, so terribly in the middle that no one will notice him/her, and we the parents who do not have the money to consider private school are agreeing with them loudly about their child’s weakness, and deploring them afterwards, and cheering secretly when they fail the entrance exam, which, most satisfactorily, some of them do.

  One of my friends even cuts another from her social circle when she announces their intention to send their son to private school. I quite admire this but don’t do it myself; I listen to the separate rants instead. The private-school husband is furious; he says that anyone could send their child privately, it’s like taking out another mortgage, and it’s a highly moral thing to do because you are saving the state money. But you are buying a slice of unfair privilege, I fail to say. But your parents are paying, I don’t remark. And anyway, my son loves your son, I definitely don’t say. Your son expands my child’s world with his funniness and social confidence and brains, and you and your wife run the orchestra, and help him with his French horn. You are taking something away from the community when you withdraw your child, I don’t say. Your patrimony, his patrimony. And you’re hurting my boy. (Never say that.) Don’t take anything away from my child, no one says. Because that would be crazy, and they will, anyway.

  Not that these parents would have picked my school even if they were picking a state school. No one in the primary is choosing my school; the place is epically, record-breakingly under-subscribed, and the reason seems to be ski trips, or rather, what underlies the ski trip: class. I turn to the only parent I know who stands outside the English class system. Mamie is from Alabama, and, as she puts it, black folks don’t ski. Her son is my son’s most fluent and confident friend, and her husband used to be a teacher; together, we can do this. With this family, my husband and I take a careful tour of the school. We talk to Miss A and Miss B, and the new head, who impresses us. We look at the library. We read the school newsletter, not about a ski trip but another of Mr H’s wheezes: ‘Chanelle and Rabiah enjoy the River Windrush’, with a marvellous picture of a round girl in a hijab and a rounder girl without, grinning ear to ear in the mud.

  Mamie likes the school: the ethnic mix, the Head’s commitment, the firm discipline, the go-ahead attitude. Her husband appraises the timetabling and the staff system and sees that it is good. My husband sees a place where books are loved and his child will be cared for. And so we make our joint decision: our sons are going to their nearest local school. Shockwaves rock our tiny community. No one, I am told later, talked about anything else in the playground
for a full three weeks.

  Are we moral grandstanding? Taking risks with our children’s future? Just being crazy? It feels like all those things. My son at eleven is blond and angelic, Mamie’s son curly-haired and preternaturally handsome, and this, from a short story written by their classmate a few years later, is how they appear to the rest of them when they enter their new school gates:

  Louis and Richard entered the school grounds at the same time. They did not know anyone from the school. We knew them though. We looked at their leather bags and their ironed shirts, and we saw their sheltered childhoods and their days spent inside. We looked at their shining hair and their polished shoes, and their eager faces, and saw the equally eager looks of their parents, as they looked at the average grades for the school, and the false advertisements claiming that the school was a ‘peaceful learning environment’ and that ‘your children will survive the first day’. They had no idea. Louis and Richard trotted into the building, like pigs into a slaughterhouse.

  Cheyenne, a few years later, some texts from Miss T:

  On the bus . . . and guess who’s behind me –

  Cheyenne.

  Has she recognized you?

  Boom ah Boom – the devil may say. Boom ah Boom –

  you left any way.

  Excuse me?

  Cheyenne’s music. Very loud.

  Ah. You going to say hi?

  I don’t think so – too scary.

  How does she look?

  Like Banquo’s ghost.

  Eyeliner run? Hair bleach?

  No. Like the saddest, angriest person in the world.

  Like she wants to destroy the world. Like the world

  deserves it.

  My son, a few years later.

  He’s just fine. So is Mamie’s son. Their year group was so small and so wildly mixed that being middle-class counted as just another odd minority identity, and they were never bullied. The boy who wrote the story, an exceptionally bright, mathsy, oddball Pole, was their dearest friend, and they all mooched about together through Year 11, the tall, sardonic ones. Even the French horn was a hit; my son played it with the bass guitar, Emily’s fiddle, and a chorus of girls in the House Music contest and won. Afterwards, several people admiringly asked how you turned it on.

  As for their brains (for they were both very clever boys), they were for the most part sweetly, naively admired. Before GCSE Maths, my son was passed round his class to hug, ‘so the smarts would rub off’. In the classroom, true, things did not go always as fast as they might like, so they learned to read for themselves and ask for more. In Music, my son had lots of private instrument lessons. And as for the exam results, they did exactly as well as they ought to have for such well-supported, able lads; as well, in fact, as such kids statistically almost always do, whatever school they go to. For my son, this meant a full hand of A* GCSE grades, and it is hard to do better than that.

  What they received at school: those grades, a special card from Faroq entitling them to free minicab rides in exchange for all the help in Maths, the ability to knit, an acquaintanceship with kids from every corner of the globe, and the confidence that if they walked across any rough park in town, late at night, and were approached by a hooded gang, it would probably just be Mo and Izzat, saying hi. What they gave: their own oddity in the rich mix of the school, their Maths coaching, their articulate voices in class, their academic demands, their parents’ informed labour, their high grades to spike the stats, their evident wellness and cheer to act as advertisement for other parents, their part as pioneers in a huge change that saw the school, in the four years before my younger children went too, become the popular comp, the over-subscribed one, the one it was safe to go to with your French horn.

  And one other thing they got: the knowledge that they had something to give – a patrimony – as well as something to take, from the communities they joined. They were very lucky.

  Darren, a few years later.

  We attend a school performance of Bugsy Malone.

  I like musicals. I like the simplicity of the form, the clarity of the storytelling, the way that populism, the steady demands of the peanut gallery, has smoothed them to lozenges, sweet in the mouth, easy to swallow. If there is a Wall between low art and high art then the musical is the gate.

  And so is the school play. Nothing is a more powerful tool for building a community, nothing enables and frames and excites children more than an ensemble piece of theatre. The first artistic writing of my own I ever dared to do was to cut Oklahoma! into a shape that could fit a cast of girls, and the ancient Music teacher’s son, aged forty-two, singing Curly. It was great. No lyric poem I have completed has made me happier than cutting A Midsummer Night’s Dream down to the right size for Year 6, and magically halving and doubling the Mechanicals’ lines to create a troupe of female players. When children step forward to sing, I cry, even if I don’t know the child, even if it’s just ‘Happy Birthday’.

  This musical suits me perfectly. A scratch performance, all ensemble and no stars, all vim and few costumes, wobbling flats, last-minute cast changes, a stand-out performance from a small black boy who rarely speaks, day to day. My son is on the piano, conscientiously plinking. His lines have been cut because no one could persuade him to speak audibly, but his ability to string notes together is widely admired. My husband and I, meanwhile, are not quite the only white people in the audience, but we are the only tall white people, the only ones in collars. Sitting next to us are two women in vest tops and leggings, with orange hair and broken noses, and vast, tattooed arms. It is hard to say their age, or if one is older than the other, but the small, shaven-headed children they have with them call one ‘Mum’ and one ‘Nan’. Three songs into the play, our row of seats shakes and Darren, who seems to have grown to six foot five, wobbles in. So this is his family; this, not the trilby hats and splurge guns on stage, is what a criminal’s family looks like: a gangster’s moll, a murderer’s unlucky son.

  ‘Hello,’ I say, ‘hello, Darren. Well done on your GCSEs.’ Because he got five, mostly thanks to Miss B, though he rent the school nearly in two and set a new record for the hammer throw in the process. He has a job with the council, caretaking. It’s a miracle.

  He nods acknowledgement. ‘I come to see Scarlett,’ he says, indicating the stage. His sister, two sisters down. She’s doing surprisingly well, as is the sister older than her. Neither of them seems as vulnerable, or as angry, as Darren. Perhaps, I think – because he has put on more weight, his bulky arms overshadowing my seat – perhaps he is the shock absorber of the family, and it is he who has allowed Scarlett to get this far, to play Smokey Priscilla in a flapper dress, glittery headband pulled down over her ears. She is a knock-kneed, hollow-hipped, pale little creature, not well named. Her lines are inaudible, but she likes to dance, her arms round her friends. At the end of the song, her family don’t seem to know how to clap. They look around, puzzled and anxious, as if they will be told off.

  ‘She’s very good,’ I tell the mother. ‘Scarlett, she’s great in that part.’ And the mother blushes like a girl. I tell her that is my son, at the piano, and then she says he is amazing for his years. And we both clap for the encore and go our separate ways. And that is the best we can manage. I think we’re doing well.

  About Prizes

  Phillip and Tanya

  I am having coffee with Jeannie when texts start to come in from Miss T. She has moved schools but has not lost the habit of confiding her outrage on educational issues. She is particularly articulate when irritated.

  Prizes: reads the text. There is an English prize here, for Year 11. I want it to go to Phillip, because he is top in English. Everyone else wants to give it to Tanya, ‘because she has really turned it around this year’. I am not making this up. T.

  I show this text to Jeannie, who laughs her head off. Her daughter is exceptionally good at Maths, but each year her school prize goes to someone who has ‘made progress’.

  �
��Which really devalues the prize,’ observes Jeannie. ‘Because, you know, in Maths everyone knows your marks. It’s numbers! There are the Maths Challenges and all that, and Annie is always top by a yard. So the kid who did get the Maths prize over Annie knows that he is really just getting a pat on the head. They know it’s Annie’s prize, really. To say nothing of the unabashed, total, shameful sexism round the whole thing. Cos it’s always a boy – it’s like they are correcting some injury done to the collective male pride.’

  ‘Ping,’ says my phone. Miss T is clearly having a rough meeting. Phillip, texts Miss T, has white skin and bulbous eyes and has two listening-to-Miss expressions. One with his head back and a finger pressed in each eye; one with his head down, writing frantically in his spidery handwriting. I love Phillip. But they say he can’t have the prize because everyone already knows he’s good. How do I explain?

  This makes Jeannie cross. ‘Teachers underestimate how hard it is to be clever,’ she says. ‘Annie never said so, but it’s tough. She goes to school every day as the nerdy girl with spots. She works bloody hard, on her own, mostly. She pays a price. She’s never going to get the popularity prize. Where’s her Maths prize?’

  My son, too. He went all the way through school hardworking and modest, especially about his accelerated ability in Maths. He never boasted, he always helped his neighbour, he did the work and more work and accepted his nerdy status and laughed about it and he wanted the Maths prize very much in compensation. Fortunately, he mostly got it, but the times he failed to hurt him surprisingly much, however much I told him, much as I knew he understood, about his less lucky classmates. ‘It’s called the Maths Prize,’ he says. ‘Not the Nice Prize. Or the Turnaround Prize. I can’t turn around, I’m going in the right direction already.’

  ‘Last week,’ says Jeannie, ‘George came back from school really upset.’ (George is Annie’s much younger brother.) ‘They had these places in the carnival float, and Miss F said they were behaviour prizes, for the best behaviour in the next three weeks. So George has been splitting himself. There was this science challenge and he baked the solar system! Nearly destroyed the kitchen. But George is always good, so he couldn’t, you know . . .’