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.
Nice leftie middle-class parents are in theory an asset to a school because they bring high expectations and because their children are usually quick to learn and easy to teach. With any luck, we might become governors, start an after-school club, help. I do see parents like this, but in our primary school we are also often fusspots, uselessly at loggerheads with the teachers. We fuss because our expectations are unsettled. We don’t have personal experience of large classes, multiculturalism, dinner money, and it disconcerts us. We want a school like we went to ourselves, but not: more sport, but no exclusion from sport; more languages, more selection, more setting, yet also more equality.
The more time I spend in the Inclusion Unit, the harder I find it to sympathize when my fellow primary parents murmur about special needs – why is their child not deemed to have any, when he is so very good at maths – and about behaviour, for though their children are scruffy, and swear, they still don’t want them sitting next to the one with real meltdowns, the one who hits. They fuss about ‘cultural exclusion’ in a C of E assembly, yet band tightly together and never ask a child in hijab home for tea. I hate it, above all, when they mutter about the teachers, who are not as educated as they are, have not read enough, use language coarsely, are not of their class. ‘It must have been nice for you to have a clever person like me to teach,’ I hear Isaac observe to the faithful and hard-working Mrs D as he leaves for private school.
And now Oldest One is in Year 6, choosing a secondary school, and we fussy parents are working ourselves into a frenzy over the choice. Where shall we send our delicate, clever, between-class sprogs? Which school should be so lucky as to receive them? Where indeed? The line-up, as I see it, hasn’t changed much since I was a trainee teacher here, twenty-five years previously. There are the private schools: two highly academic; two less so but sporty; two to pick up the sensitive ones; one for those who can’t spell. They are famously successful, most of these schools, and in our rich little city many children go to them – about a quarter of the children who live inside the ring road. But they are unaffordable, and seem too, to both my husband and I, to be unrecognizable as the sort of school we went to – repulsively pressured, in fact, and horribly socially exclusive.
Then there are the state schools, impoverished already, of course, by the loss of that 25 per cent. There is the famously good comp, and the good comp, both defended by a thicket of estate agents’ boards – but we live too far away to get into either of them. Near us is the Catholic school, the decent comp, and, nearest of all, my school, the one with Cheyenne and the Inclusion Unit, with Miss B and Miss T and Miss A and its bright, brand-new head – the school I am already beginning to love. But: ‘You couldn’t send him there,’ said my nearest neighbour. ‘So cute, and with his little French horn. Might as well put a sign saying “Hit me” round his neck. The problem,’ she went on, ‘is that that school has become a sort of bin. All the really bad kids at our school?’ (She has good children at the good comp.) ‘They send them down there.’
Alas, poor Oldest One, by virtue of age pioneer of the family: my bookish, quiet, beautiful boy. He must walk first, with his wide eyes wide, into adolescence, into a school where the kids are full height, where they have bosoms and beards; just as he has obediently walked first, with careful, stilted steps, into every nursery, drop-in centre, park, friendship. Now he must also go, the first of his family on either side for a thousand generations, as Neil Kinnock said of the Kinnocks, to a state secondary. Can we really add to that that he must go to the least desired school in the neighbourhood, the one on the wrong side of the Wall? The choosing year, I often seem to find myself in school standing at the bottom of a staircase listening to the harsh noise of descending teenagers and looking for my son’s peers.
Because if I believe that the class divide is bad and that schooling is a vital chance to dissolve it, if I deplore the Wall, then I should send my son here, to our local school. But: ‘This isn’t a comprehensive school,’ says Miss B, kind and frank and frustrated. ‘It doesn’t have a top. You can look at the stats, cut them any way you like. We don’t get the middle-classes. We don’t get the brighter kids.’ She speaks only the truth. Nationally, about 40 per cent of pupils at the end of the final year of primary school are Level 5 in Maths and English, cleverer than expected. In our school’s intake, it is fewer than 10 per cent. Nationally, 20 per cent are Level 3, that is, not at the ‘expected level’, not really ready for secondary; for us, it is 40 per cent. My son is Level 6.
On paper, I remind myself, on paper: many of our students arrive late, have hidden qualities, blossom. Here, lumbering down the stairs with an enormous school bag, is Mattias, the strangely brilliant Hungarian, behind him some serious-looking Poles. And here is Emily, the pastor’s daughter, my very favourite student, with her precious violin, the only one for miles. She looks OK. And, here, actually, are the famously brainy Year 9 twins, chatting to each other, carrying briefcases, neatly combed. I know their mother. She is from my side of the Wall and believes you should send your child to the local school, no compromises. Her boys look fine. But there’re two of them: a portable peer group. What if my son came alone, without a single primary school friend? Already, I know that one best friend is going to a private school; another to a state school outside the ring road, three bus rides away, a good school, a white school.
Though this is a class divide, not a racial one. I don’t fear the Somali and Ghanaian and Afghan kids thundering past me in hijabs and dishdashas and diamanté baseball caps – and I don’t believe my middle-class friends do, either. In England, social classes fear each other more than racial groups do, because that is where the history is, the abuse. I fear Darren, looming out from behind Mo and Imam. Darren from the Art Project. Darren, also from the estate. Enormous Darren with his belly and huge hands and huge shout and his eyes darting everywhere for offence. Darren with the father and older, even larger, brother in prison.
And I fear Cheyenne, popping up beside me again, asking about my children, asking about my shoes. Cheyenne and her mean mouth, leaking insults at Emily, who doesn’t seem to hear. I fear Cheyenne and the class hate she carries with her. I know she has a point, and it’s not her fault; on the other hand, it isn’t my kid’s fault, either.
If the problem, as Cheyenne points out, is not actual money but habits of mind, not access to school but the wish to learn, what should we do about it? How do we, as a school or as a nation, educate Cheyenne, get her to adopt middle-class habits such as reading, homework, and long-term ambition, without alienating her from her family? How do you induce her to go through the difficulties and deferred gratifications of studying when everyone around her would say that did not work for them?
There are a lot of suggestions around, for this is the late noughties, and the educational plight of disadvantaged children is beginning to be clarified as their underperformance emerges, unchanging and solid as a rock, from the new, swirling floods of computerized school data. Mossbourne Academy in Hackney has just released its first, stunning set of GCSE results and the papers are full of the remarkable effects of strict uniform, silent corridors, and – this seems to pique every journalist’s attention – silent ping pong at the beginning of the day, on a motley bunch of Hackney kids. (Actually, Mossbourne did a lot of nurture groups and reading recovery too, but that doesn’t make the headlines.) The latest thinking is: merciless challenge, rigid boundaries, drastically raised expectations.
A wave of new academies is breaking across the country in a foam of shiny, man-made blazers, this being the easiest part of the Mossbourne recipe to imitate. Miss B goes for an interview in one of them and tells the new head about the IU. He leans back in his new leather chair and says, ‘Touchy feely understanding? What about a bit of challenge?’ It takes three years for this delightful individual’s school to fail its Ofsted and for him to be ignominiously sacked, but longer for his words to leave Miss B, for her standards were always high and always challenging. It’s just that the IU acknowledged that for some kids, very simple things were challenging.
Miss T, though, Cheyenne’s English teacher, is Mossbourne in her own diminutive, high-heeled person. She is as famous through the school as Miss B, though they are regarded as rather opposite phenomena. Miss B teaches the whole person, then her subject; Miss T is resolutely only interested in English Literature. Miss B understands everything about the students’ background and always bears it in mind; Miss T proceeds as if that background did not exist. Miss B is warm, jokey, and available all hours; Miss T is glamorous and terrifying, and delivers her elegant, exhausting lessons in a classroom laid out in rows, dishing out detentions for yawning. Students run to Miss B in tears; but stagger out of Miss T’s classroom as the bell rings, clutching their foreheads as if some fundamental rearrangement had taken place. Both Miss B and Miss T, interestingly, are working-class girls who misbehaved at school. Both are living proof that there is not one single path to being an excellent teacher, getting extraordinary results, or being very loved – neither silent ping pong nor nurture groups. Both get on with me, but not with each other, like the opposing magnets they are.
But they are both keen on my new lunchtime Poetry Group; Miss B for the personal development, and Miss T for the literature. And both suggest it to Cheyenne, and Cheyenne comes, comes regularly, and interrupts the cosy camaraderie I was beginning to establish, by staring at us all impassively with one pencilled eyebrow raised, rarely writing anything at all. What is she even doing there?
Perhaps, says Miss B, perhaps Cheyenne just wants to come on the trip. Because we’ve booked a day out of school, at a literary festival. Trips, Miss B has taught me, are a huge deal for a kid like Cheyenne. Because here is an effect of deprivation that is far worse than generally imagined: poor children don’t travel. Over the years I work at our school, I take several into the historic city centre who have never been there before, though it is only twenty minutes away on the bus. It is as if there are real walls round the edge of the council estate, with checkpoints. Cheyenne has never, she confides during a lesson on Thomas Hardy, been on a train.
Miss B took the IU out frequently, taking advantage of every free offer going. Once, we took the kids to Somerset House in London, and somehow I got left in the top gallery, the one that’s like a sumptuous sitting room, with Vikki and Dave. Vikki was keen on the images of ladies in hats; Dave was in thrall to the surfaces of the oil paintings, the clear slicks of colour without so much as a brush mark. Together, they sat on a red plush seat and held hands, in a room filled with the floating light of the Thames, and looked at their reflections in the gilt-framed mirror. It felt like a moment of joy and expansion, a whole new idea, the sudden abolition of the Wall.
On the other hand, I remember taking my Essex students to Cambridge, their visible unease among the beautiful buildings I thought would attract them. ‘They was too much for us, Kate,’ said Zoe, who I thought ought to apply to King’s, ‘you can feel them looking down on you.’ Super-brainy Zoe, who explained to me that the reason she was finding it difficult to plan for university was because she had never met anyone, other than teachers, who had actually been there. Zoe, who refused to apply to Cambridge, and went, despite my warnings of green wellies, to Exeter, and rang me from a pay phone the first week saying help, all the girls here have been abroad, and none of them can cook. Lovely Zoe, who always had a point.
But, says Miss B, looking at the festival invite, with kids like Cheyenne you have to be resilient.
Miss T says, with kids like Cheyenne you must offer them the best. The very best. Like Shakespeare.
And I say, OK.
And so we put Cheyenne’s name on the list, pass it under the raised eyebrows of her form teacher and the Deputy Head, and indeed, on the festival bus, our hearts swell with pride when we turn the corner of the road and show Cheyenne our destination: a real, a top-drawer, an honestly Jacobean castle, golden as a fresh-baked cake on its very own shimmering silver plate of a moat. And what does she think of that! She chews a lock of hair, her eyes blacker than ever. ‘Nah,’ she says. ‘That ain’t beautiful. Why did you say it was going to be beautiful? It ain’t beautiful at all.’
Worse, when she is there, Cheyenne and some other students disrupt a session with a young writer, a beautiful and clever young woman who has given up her time to talk pro bono to disadvantaged children about her witty, clever, top-drawer, silver-plate book. I speak to the writer afterwards, tearful by the moat, and try to console her, but I can see that I am not succeeding. She has been humiliated, ripped into like a young teacher in training. Cheyenne has sprayed her with the full force of her class hatred, and she can’t wipe it off. She won’t give up her time again.
So is the castle beautiful, as it seemed to Miss B, or just an embodiment of money, privilege, and exclusion, as it seemed to Cheyenne? Is King’s College Chapel beautiful or ‘just looking down on us’, as it seemed to Zoe? And if they aren’t, is even poetry beautiful, as it seems to me; or Shakespeare an essential good, as it seems to Miss T; or classical music a spiritual force, as it seems to be already, so powerfully, to my son?
I am not a relativist. I believe the castle is essentially beautiful; not for the rich family that lives in it, but for its shape, its placement in the landscape, its stonework, its mullions, its gardens – each of which represents hundreds and thousands of acts and thoughts of men who were not rich; each of which is a work of art. I believe in poetry and Shakespeare in the same way some people believe in God. I take Bach, by extension, on trust. Cheyenne does not disturb that belief essentially – but she has put her chapped finger with its elaborate nail extension once again squarely on one of my self-doubts: whether I am a posh do-gooder, a Victorian lady on a mission who has not noticed that her message is obscured by her person, and the injustices of class which she embodies.
Sometimes, I can see that question on the faces of the school staff too. If I want to work among them, I should be more like them: more a teacher than a writer. I should be like Miss A, who graduated from Cambridge thirty years ago and has done nothing ever since except teach uncompromisingly excellent lessons; she has shown more children the beauty of poetry than any visiting writer ever could. I should be more like Mr H, the geography teacher, who takes minibus after minibus out of school to show children in hijabs the beautiful and ancient things of the English countryside – the White Horse, Stonehenge, Durdle Door – with the same indefatigable patience that he later uses to swim the Channel, backstroke. Above all, if I want to show Cheyenne that I see her as equal to my children, I should send my child to school alongside her, however afraid I might be.
Miss T says: it isn’t treating Cheyenne as an equal if you make exceptions for her. That’s a double standard, a low expectation. If she behaved badly on that trip, you should report it.
So I make a report of Cheyenne to her form teacher. Miss C listens and nods. She is an extremely patient woman and Cheyenne takes up a lot of her time. Cheyenne, she says, is particularly difficult right now because she isn’t well. The problem, well, one of the problems, is her teeth. The molars on both sides of her mouth are so profoundly rotted and infected that they have to be removed under general anaesthetic. She has to have, at fifteen years old, false teeth. In fact, Cheyenne is going into hospital next week and will be absent for Poetry Group, if that is any consolation to me.
It isn’t much of a consolation to me. It isn’t much consolation to her form teacher, either; you can tell by the way she is whispering, her eyes down. She is a mother, I am a mother, and we both have our hands over our mouths. We are holding down the thought: what sort of mother did that? Never took her daughter to the dentist, not once, never brushed her teeth? Because Cheyenne has been entitled to free dental care since the day she was born, just as she has been entitled to free swimming pool entry, and library books, and never used those, either.
Oh, Mr Booth, Mr Rowntree, poverty has survived every reform you could have imagined, and a few you couldn’t. Poverty is stronger than plumbing, stronger than medicine, stronger than art. Poverty is stamped through Cheyenne like letters in a stick of rock, manifesting itself in her rotting, nineteenth-century mouth.
The teeth absence lasts much longer than a week, and Cheyenne comes back to Poetry Group just once, for the session before Christmas. She upsets everyone by pouring contempt on the Edwin Morgan poem I have brought in to show them – that ain’t good, that’s stupid, you can’t see that, no, no you can’t understand it, it’s shit ain’t it. Then, when I try to smooth things over by showing her a typed-up version of one of her own poems, she becomes apoplectic because I have changed ‘was’ to ‘were’. She accepts nothing I have to say about the subjunctive. She shouts. I give her her work and ask her to leave, which, surprisingly, she does.
And soon after that, she leaves school and goes to live in a nearby town with the dad of the black bag. In the staffroom, my colleagues recount pleasant conversations they have had with her, say that really, she was on the turn, on the verge of making a breakthrough. They seem genuinely regretful. Not me. I find the spaces between buildings easier to cross, now there is no risk of Cheyenne leaping in front of me, or shouting quotes from my Wikipedia page after me in her deep hoarse voice. I find it easier to see my son here.
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.