Lucky, this point in time and space
Is chosen as my working-place
W. H. AUDEN
My multicultural school – the one I teach in, the one my children go to – is the opposite of exclusive. Our town, like many in the south-east of England, has had huge influxes of migrants in the last twenty years – from the British Commonwealth, from the EU, and, most recently, from the crisis across the Middle East – and now our school includes, it seems, the whole world: students from Nepal and Brazil, Somalia and Lithuania, Portugal and the Philippines, Afghanistan and Australia, and everywhere in between. Pakistani and white British students make up substantial minorities, but there is no majority group.
This makes for innumerable cross-race friendships and for a particularly respectful atmosphere, a careful, decorous gentleness that comes from no one knowing quite what’s what, from everyone being dependent on the kindness of strangers. It makes for beautiful scenes: a row of girls under the willow tree, their skin colours varying from black Somali to white Polish with every shade of brown in between, laughing and gossiping together; a boy called Mohammed from Syria throwing the basketball to a boy from Brazil and shouting his name – ‘Jesus, Jesus! Catch!’; our motley choir, representing all the nations of the globe, singing ‘All You Need Is Love’; Jonathon, six foot five inches tall with a slow, resonant African accent, concluding the vote of thanks at a speaking competition with the words, ‘And I wish to thank too this school for making me welcome and giving me shelter. Truly, you are kind in this country. Hand on heart’ – and his hand was on his heart – ‘I am thankful for this school in this country.’
Hand on heart, I am thankful too. But a school full of migrants, refugees, and difference also throws up questions about nations and belonging, and these are some of them.
It’s Sports Day, and Shakila slips from the shade behind the library, blinking in the sun. ‘Miss!’
I wonder again what Shakila does to her hijab, and why it seems to sit fuller and higher than the other girls’ – a Mother Superior hijab, or one from a Vermeer. It can’t be starched. Maybe it’s draped over twisted horns of hair, like Carrie Fisher’s in Star Wars. That would go with her furry eyebrows, her slanting, sparking black eyes, her general, Mongolian ferocity.
‘Miss!’ cries Shakila. ‘I won the 400 metres!’
‘You did? Isn’t it Ramadan? Aren’t you fasting?’
Shakila nods. ‘I still won. And Miss! I’m coming to Poetry Group. After the hurdles. Here. Poem.’
She hands me a sheet of A4, and dashes back onto the playing field. It is twenty-eight degrees and getting hotter. Under her rugby shirt and long trousers, Shakila grows thin.
The poem, though, is very fine: a variation on a theme I gave the group last week, contrasting the morning adhan from the mosque in her native Afghanistan with the morning alarm of her new life in England. I’m more interested, though, in the writing on the other side of the sheet, which she has crossed out with a single line so the whole text is still visible and begging to be read. It’s about a man sweating, and a scarf and a backpack and suspicious minds – so when, because of Sports Day, just Lily, Priya, and Shakila turn up to Poetry Group, I ask her about it.
‘Oh,’ she says, ‘I was trying to write, you know, about terrorists.’
‘What about terrorists?’
‘But I couldn’t make it work. Miss! It was too hard.’
‘Terrorists here? In this country?’
I’m assuming the poem is a protest against suspicion of Muslims in Britain. I’m aware there is a group of Afghans in the neighbourhood now. The local cafe has a new name and a map of Afghanistan on the wall, and an invitation to order a whole sheep, twenty-four hours in advance. I got into a discussion with the cook about the poet Rumi. He looked just like Shakila, come to think of it, so maybe—
‘No, Miss,’ says Shakila, eyes snapping, ivory fingers blossoming in scorn. ‘In England? There are no terrorists in England.’
‘She’s from Afghanistan,’ says Lily, ‘she means the Taliban.’
Lily is an alternative type, a Goth with heavy eyeliner who always knocks about with the black girls; nevertheless, I assume this is a white stereotype, and I am about to correct her when Shakila nods, more vehement than ever.
‘Miss! I am Hazara people.’
‘Like The Kite Runner,’ says Lily, glancing at me smugly.
‘I don’t know,’ says Shakila.
‘It’s a book,’ I say, ‘about Afghanistan. It’s on the A Level, isn’t it, Lily?’
‘The Taliban,’ says Shakila, ‘hate us. When my mum went to get our visa, Miss, the bus was bombed – not her bus, but the one in front. Miss! I thought she would never come home.’
‘But,’ says Lily, ‘I thought you was Muslim?’ She offers me a Monster Munch. Usually, at Poetry Group, Shakila brings us cherries and strawberries, shining like the roses in her cheeks. She and Priya are pale today.
‘I am Muslim,’ says Shakila, ‘I am Shia.’
‘What’s that?’ asks Lily. I raise an eyebrow. Clearly, this wasn’t in The Kite Runner.
‘A different kind of Muslim,’ I supply. ‘Like Protestant and Catholic.’
‘The Taliban hate the Shia,’ says Shakila flatly. ‘They kill us, all the time.’
Priya leans across the table. Her hijab is soft, striped, and biblical like in a nativity play, her teeth in braces, her face, as so often, full of delicate feeling. She is from Bangladesh, originally: a Sunni.
‘Miss!’ she says, but she is talking to Shakila. ‘When I found out about that, when I learned that there are other kinds of Muslim, I didn’t believe it. I said to my teacher in the mosque, this is not true, how can this be?’
‘There is only one Koran,’ says Shakila. ‘There is only one Allah.’
Priya says: ‘Miss! Don’t laugh. When I was a little girl I thought the television was true. I mean, the black and white. I thought the past was black and white, Miss, I thought England was black and white. When I found out about Shia and Sunni, it was like that for me – I mean, when I found I was wrong.’
‘You should write that down,’ says Lily, ‘this is Poetry Group. How old was you when you came here, Priya?’
‘Six.’
‘Me, I was fourteen,’ says Shakila.
‘Sunni, Shia, there is no difference really,’ says Priya. ‘Just – some prayers. Wait – do you whip yourselves?’
‘No!’ snorts Shakila. ‘I mean, not really. It is a – thingy. A symbol.’ She leans her hijab to Priya’s hijab, puts her hands across the table. ‘You know,’ she says, ‘in my country, they caught this terrorist, this bomber, they put him on television, he said he was doing it for the Taliban, but he didn’t know anything, he did not know –’ and she breaks into Arabic, sharp and triumphant – ‘As-salamu alaikum.’
‘Wa alaikumus-salam wa rahmatullah,’ chimes in Priya, and both girls bow their heads.
‘What’s that?’ asks Lily, and Shakila gazes at her.
‘A salutation,’ she says, ‘a Muslim says it to a Muslim. Everyone knows that.’
‘Except the Taliban fighter didn’t know it,’ I say. ‘Or not with a gun to his head.’
‘But,’ says Lily, ‘this bloke, the Taliban bloke on the telly, was he the same as in this poem?’
‘No,’ says Shakila, ‘this was another one.’
Priya raises her head. ‘How can a Muslim hate another Muslim? Miss! It is terrible, Miss.’
‘A real terrorist?’ says Lily. ‘In your poem? Like, you met him?’
‘Yes!’ says Shakila. ‘I saw him on the street – in the market – and I had this feeling, he is wrong. He is sweating, he wears all these clothes . . .’
‘What clothes?’
‘Like, you know, jacket, big thingy. Scarf, big trousers. It is hot, it is summer – I had a feeling, run away, run away from this guy. I catch my friend’s hand. We run.’
‘Yes,’ says Lily, ‘but was he real? A real terrorist?’
‘Yes,’ says Shakila, ‘real. I ran, I screamed, I ran, everyone ran. There was an explosion. I was hiding, behind a thingy. Wall. He was in a bomb. He exploded. You heard it. Boom.’
And then the bell rings for a long time, and we flinch from its noise.
Priya says, ‘You need a frame. For your poem. Miss. Give her a frame.’
A frame. They have learned my mantra. A frame, I say every week. Try this poem-shape, this form, this bit of rhetoric, this frame. Never: tell me about . . . Certainly not: unload your trauma. And still, they tell me these terrible things.
‘Yes,’ says Shakila, ‘a frame. How shall I say it, Miss?’
I haven’t the slightest idea. Shakila folds her hands on her bag, waits.
‘That,’ says Lily, ‘was a really good discussion. I reckon we should have filmed it. Like for RE? I have to go.’
And she goes. So does Priya, leaving me to search my mind for the right frame for a poem about recognizing a terrorist in the market place and then running away.
Shakila says, ‘Miss! You know, bombs. Miss, the worst thing is, they cut you. They cut off bits of you, Miss, like your feet, your leg! And when the bomb goes off, Miss, those . . . thingies?’
‘Body parts?’ I suggest, automatically.
‘Yes!’ Shakila’s eyes brighten as they do when she sights a really fine piece of vocabulary. ‘Body parts. Body parts, they land in the town around.’
‘Did that happen in that bomb?’ I ask. ‘The bomb in your poem. Did you see that?’
‘Miss,’ she says, ‘there was a head. A whole head.’
‘His head?’ I ask. ‘The terrorist’s?’
‘Just,’ she says, ‘you know, a head.’
‘Right,’ I say. I look at the sunlight coming in the slats of the blinds and I suggest that the interrogative mood might be good for poems like this, and short lines probably, and regular stanzas. A ballad, perhaps, or a set of instructions. How to recognize a terrorist. Shakila says she will send me the poem, by email.
And she leaves. I sit and stare, listen to the roar of the children finding their classrooms, the silence as the doors close and the register is taken. This is an orderly school, I remind myself. A just one. A safe one. As Lily said, it is beautiful to see Shakila and Priya extend hands across the table. More people should know.
Then I think I will go to the staffroom and find someone to tell. There will be someone there, someone to listen and to counter with some equally horrifying tale, and we will rehearse all the interventions available, all the help school extends, which is good help, the best available anywhere, the best anyone can do. We will remind each other this is why we work here, why our school does so well. Our multicultural intake, our refugee pupils, so motivated, so very often brilliant, so, in the modern parlance, vibrant.
But it won’t do any good. Here in my ears is the sound of a bomb, a homemade one, a glass and fertilizer one, in a small town in Afghanistan, and it sounds like the school bell. And here on the desk, disguised as a sheet of A4 paper, is a head cut off at the neck, its eyes shut, its bloodstains minimal, its skin greenish, like John the Baptist on a plate. Shakila’s head, in its elaborate hijab, for how else am I to picture the Hazara people – Persian speakers, lovers of the poet Rumi, eaters of apricots, guardians of the Buddhas of Bamiyan – other than as my dear, my swift-running Shakila? Does she feel the lighter of it, I wonder, now it is me who has to carry the head home? Or will it be equally heavy, however often it is passed, just as much a head? Well, we can find out. Shakila’s head: the weight of it, the warmth, the cheekbones, the brains. Here you are. Catch.
Aadil is supposed to be helping on Open Evening, but he has arrived late with a bleeding nose. This is not picturesque, so I am hiding him in the empty staffroom and handing him cotton wool and paper towels from the medical bay. I am also trying to work out if he has been in a fight. I can’t quite believe he has. Aadil always seems so grand: a tall Somali boy with a deep, African voice, and the almost aristocratically calm manner that sometimes goes with being extremely good-looking.
‘I hit him first,’ he says, before I can ask.
‘Who?’ I ask.
‘Cumar,’ he says.
‘Cumar? You hit Cumar?’ Now I’m really baffled. Cumar, as far as I am concerned, is super-nice; not as spectacularly clever as Aadil, perhaps, but bright and helpful and always opening doors for you.
‘I thought you guys were from the same country?’ I say.
Aadil sighs. Then he looks at me: a long appraising look.
‘Is that how we look to you, Miss?’ he says. ‘Really?’
I think again. Cumar is long and slender as many of the Somali kids are, with a thin nose, narrow skull, and very dark, almost black skin. Aadil is more muscular and square-set, with chocolate-coloured skin, a broad-based nose, and rounded head. Very different, now I think about it. About as widely different, in fact, as I, with my Nordic height and Celtic colouring, am from a petite, olive-skinned, Mediterranean woman.
‘Aren’t you both Somali?’ I ask. ‘You told me you were Somali.’
‘Miss,’ said Aadil, ‘I’m mixed. Like . . . Kenya–Somali mix. My mum and dad, they’re from different . . .’ He hesitates. He won’t say the word ‘tribe’; we’ve talked about that. ‘They’re from different groups. It’s all mixed up, there, Somali and Kenyan? My mum – she looks like me. My brothers – they look like my dad. They look like Cumar. I look different. I look Kenyan. Cumar says I look Kenyan.’ And his nose starts bleeding again and he reaches for the paper towel.
‘If you’re Kenyan don’t you get asylum?’ I ask.
Inside the paper towel, Aadil shakes his head.
‘What about your story?’ I ask, because Aadil has written me a beautiful memoir of witnessing and escaping Kenyan government violence as a four-year-old.
Aadil raises his head. ‘Miss! That’s all true.’
I know, instinctively, that it is. Of course it is. People on every border, deep into every country, are mixed heritage. The Kenyan border will be no different.
‘Is Cumar from the border too?’ I ask.
‘Yes,’ he says, ‘Somali–Kenya border. Like me.’
So Cumar has identified Aadil, because he looks different, with his family’s persecutors, who were Kenyan-looking. Probably, he hates Aadil more because he is so close to him, because they ought to be friends. I think for a minute, proceed carefully. I know that Aadil’s papers, like those of so many of my students, are still in process.
‘Are you worried,’ I ask, ‘that you might not get your papers if they think you’re Kenyan?’
Aadil takes a long time to reply. His shoulders are shaking. At last he says: ‘I’m worried my whole family won’t get their papers if they think I look Kenyan.’
I can’t pat his back; he’s a boy. I look at the heaving paper towel. I rack my brains for something comforting to say.
At last I try: ‘Look, don’t worry too much. Cumar, he’s totally not the British government, you know. People like me, that’s who’s in government. And what did I just show you? You look Somali to me. I’ve got no idea. Most of us – white people, English people – you look the same to us. We’ve got no idea.’
Aadil has the grace to put down the towel, and to smile.
One of the things Aadil and Shakila teach me is how white I am. To these young refugees, or to the son of a Lithuanian hospital porter or the daughter of a Bengali warehouse worker, I am a super-empowered, incredibly lucky member of the world’s ruling class; someone whose ‘papers’ – the visa, passport, work permit, the possession or lack of which very often dominates their family destiny – are perfect, wholly intact. They sum it up in one word: ‘English’, and I never correct them.
But I am Scottish, really, not English. Scottish by birth and Scottish by upbringing: a tiny difference which has had a surprisingly strong impact on my sense of self. Sometimes, too, talking to kids about the byzantine workings of the Home Office, I remember my own applications for ‘papers’. Because the fact is, mine are not perfect, and I did not emigrate from Scotland; I was asked to leave. This is my story.
I went to school in Glasgow and then in Edinburgh in two almost entirely white schools, monocultures, like Blastmuir High School. The effect of this seemed to be to highlight small differences: for example, I was white and Scottish born, but because I had an English father, and an Irish (Catholic) name, I was often counted among my peers as English. When I was little, I worried about this a good deal, and especially about my voice which was deemed to be very English indeed. I dreaded opening my mouth in front of new people, and often tried to avoid talking altogether, because I had a second weakness, which was bursting readily into tears.
But all things pass. I decided, as I was so English, to go to university down south, in Oxford. Once I got there and met the sons of London barristers and the daughters of cabinet ministers, I realized I was not English and posh at all, but Scottish, and squarely middle-class. As I trained as a teacher in Oxford, then worked in London, I even began to feel I wanted to go back permanently to Edinburgh: where I had friends; where I was writing, already, occasional pieces for the Scotsman; which was, after all, my native city. I wanted to live there, not in London, and to teach in the schools in Broughton and Leith I had been frightened of as a girl. They looked to me then – they were, they are – strong, splendid comprehensives, better funded than the schools of the south.
Scottish educational institutions were stronger too. Then, as now, Scottish teachers were more firmly regulated than their English counterparts; they could not apply for jobs at schools independently but were recruited and allocated by the local authority, and they had to be registered by the General Teaching Council for Scotland. The GTC ensured, for example, that teachers of French had spent time in France; that everyone had O Level Maths; that all teachers had degrees. I thought this was a good thing, especially as I was smugly sure I had all the right qualifications and experience. I filled in all the forms, and though nine months later I had only been provisionally registered, I resigned my English job and moved north. My provisional registration would let me work in short-term cover jobs, and thus I arrived in Blastmuir, and met Callum and his classmates.
Two years after my original application to the GTC, though, my application was still open. Supply teaching is always rough and I was getting tired of it; I have a memory of removing a child from my class by the headphones of her Walkman. By now it was spring, new job season in schools, but without registration I could not apply for any permanent ones. On the supply circuit, I met another English-qualified teacher who had been waiting three years for permanent registration, then another, then one who had been waiting for five. I met a Canadian who had been waiting for nine. In fact, I couldn’t find any teacher qualified outside Scotland who was permanently registered with the GTC. Why wasn’t it happening for us? It couldn’t be because we were under-qualified, for Canadian teachers are probably the world’s most thoroughly trained; and it wasn’t because we were unable to teach Scottish exams, for we were teaching them already, in our temporary positions. It felt as if it was because we weren’t Scottish, or in my case, not Scottish enough. All of us had written many letters about our applications, but to little effect. No rule was being broken: if you looked at the GTC small print I could see that there was no mandatory time scale for the registration of outsiders; it was always ‘discretionary’. In schools, no one seemed to think there was anything wrong with this practice: ‘It’s natural folk will want the local person,’ said one head teacher, and another: ‘You can’t expect to go ahead of someone who’s stayed in Scotland,’ while a head of department opined that I might do better with Official X because: ‘He kicks with the left foot and you’ve a Catholic name.’ The year was 1991.
Perhaps I should have taken her advice. Instead, being young and easily outraged, I wrote a piece about the whole thing for the Scotsman, quoting my Canadian friend’s story as well as my own. The results were surprising. Within a week, the Scotsman published an article from the GTC saying that English teachers could easily register in Scotland, and a suddenly unfriendly editor refused both the letter and article I offered in reply. Then, and I swear I am not making this up, a senior official of the GTC rang me up at home in the middle of the afternoon and said, not only that I would never be registered, but that I would never again work in any state school in Scotland. He did not leave his name; perhaps he was merely a stray bigot in the GTC building with a free afternoon. But he had access to my file and my phone number and I certainly believed it was true.
I didn’t know what to do. I had a fantasy of self-educating in law and taking the GTC to the courts of the European Union. But that would have taken years, and most probably would not have worked anyway; Scotland qualifies as a region when it comes to specialisms like the GTC, and so is not subject to the laws that apply to nations. I interviewed for a private school, but halfway through, after the Head of Department had shown me classrooms that reminded me of the ones I had been a pupil in and told me they studied Muriel Spark only with the lower sets, I burst into tears and ran away.
At the very last minute, I saw the job in Essex. I was interviewed in a prefab hut, so new was the college. They asked me how I would teach Antony and Cleopatra, and I told them. Nobody asked me anything about where I came from, or where I’d lived, only what I had learned and what I could do. It was bliss. So I went back to live in London and worked alongside Jamaican and Zoroastrian and Irish teachers in a thriving, dynamic, growing college. No one thought about my national identity, and I tried not to, either. The question which had carried so much weight in my childhood – are you really Scottish? – seemed settled: I wasn’t. I married an English man, I had English children, I was fine with it, I always said.
And I am fine. I am better than fine, as Aadil and Shakila constantly remind me. Nevertheless, I miss my country in underground ways, like a covered river running through a town. The Scottish voice, the Scottish hills, my sea, my islands, my precipitous city: they spout up without warning in my dreams and in my fiction and poetry. The independence debate of the last decade fascinates me and alienates me, for I can imagine a Scottish government only as a giant GTC: bureaucratic, anti-English, rejecting anyone with outside experience, asking what foot I kick with. Still, all these years later, thinking about my papers can make me cry. But I suppose the experience gave me some solidarity with Aadil and Shakila, and perhaps some small insight into what institutional racism might feel like. It must be a little similar to the dumbfounding mixture of disgrace and rage I felt when I was told that it was ‘natural’ that folk would prefer the local person; that I couldn’t expect to go ahead of someone who belonged in Scotland, when I looked around and felt that everyone agreed. And now at least when my students tangle with the awful bureaucracy of visa applications, I have had a small experience of having the wrong ‘papers’ and of being judged by where I had been, rather than what I could do, or, as Dr King once put it, by the ‘content of my character’.