“Hands up, who can remember the day they were born?” Miss Cavani looked round the class just as she always did when asking a searching question, her eyes and eyebrows full of hope that there would be at least one person in the room who could answer. As it was early in the day, she was at her breeziest best, and she scanned the room. Class X10 were not expecting this particular question, or anything like it, though they were getting used to the way Miss Cavani asked questions you couldn’t possibly predict.
Rory put his hand up.
“Really? I mean … really?” Miss Cavani said to him.
By now, the room had started to shuffle and snigger, a few smiles flickered to and fro. The general view was that of course you can’t remember the day you’re born, and Rory, hah! Well, yeah, Rory would say something like that.
“Yeah, but you don’t remember,” Crayton said, in his usual very direct way.
“Wait your turn, please, Crayton.” Miss Cavani dived into the chat between Rory and Crayton like an agile referee.
“Yeah, but he doesn’t, Miss,” said Crayton.
Miss Cavani’s look hovered for a moment as she wondered if it was a good idea to put Crayton on a “warning” or carry on with her plan to interest Class X10 in birth. She decided to carry on and her gaze fixed again on Rory.
“Well, Rory?”
Rory was now flummoxed and flustered; he muttered something and then swallowed it before it got any further than his lips. Crayton had got him right. No one remembers the day they were born and the only reason he had put his hand up was for the usual reason he put his hand up: to say something – anything – that would secure for him a moment of approval from Miss Cavani. Why not? Almost everyone thought it felt good to get approval from Miss Cavani.
Next to Rory, Harry knew the deal here and he could choose to join the others grinning and whispering behind their hands, and he could also take part in the mockery that would erupt when Rory would say, “Well … er … actually … no, I … er … can’t … the thing is … I mean…” Or, if he paused a moment to think about it, Harry could think quickly and save him.
Harry put his hand up.
“Yes?” said Miss Cavani.
“We don’t actually remember the day we were born, but, I mean, there are films where babies are born and anyway, your parents always tell stuff about how the doctor got your dad’s name wrong or a light bulb blew, so even if you don’t remember, you kind of know about it anyway.”
“Yeah,” said Rory. And Harry heard the smallest of breaths coming from Rory: at that, Harry knew he had pulled Rory out of the fire. He glanced at Miss Cavani and Harry knew that Miss Cavani had seen what Harry had done there. Hey, it was as good as a “well done!” without a word being spoken.
The rest of the class sank back. Harry had cheated them of a small moment when they could feel superior to someone in the endless jostle of school life. A car revved outside and the voice of an angry van man or cabbie filtered into the room. Serena pushed a note towards Rasheda. Miss Cavani missed it. Sometimes even Miss Cavani missed stuff.
She missed it because she was glancing down at her lesson plan. The discussion about “birth” was not going according to the plan, but Miss Cavani was not just a teacher-teacher, she had also spent time in some kind of theatre – something that was a source of endless gossip, laughter and mystery in the school. The class had an idea that this “theatre” thing was what made her different – particularly in the way that it seemed to have given her the power to suddenly change course, switch tack, improvise. She dropped the plan.
“Stories! Harry tells us that our parents tell stories about the day we were born. True? Untrue?”
She clapped her hands. “Into your Talk Groups, and tell each other what stories your parents – or anyone, maybe not your parents – have told you about the day you were born. Go!”
The room came alive, as chairs were lugged round, people turned towards each other, the noise level rose and soon, out came stories of dads fainting, the eggs of a pigeon on the window sill outside the birthing room hatching at the same time as the birth, an emergency birth on a train, a stand-up row about naming the baby, a father who had never been seen since, a terrible moment when someone stopped breathing – was it the baby or the mother? – and on and on. If nothing else, this was a bit of a laugh. Did Harry make up that stuff about being born in a Greek restaurant?
Miss Cavani clapped her hands again.
“And you’re here! Just think, you might not have made it. Maybe some of you know sad, sad, sad stories of births that went wrong. But here’s another thought: for you to be here now, thousands of people all over the world, living before you, had to have survived that moment of coming into the world.”
A question mark raced round the class. What did she mean? Miss Cavani sensed it.
“Your parents were born. Their parents, and their parents, and their parents and their parents going back and back and back hundreds and thousands of years. All born. All survived. And many, many times in that long line, people linked to you were within a breath of being snuffed out and ending the line.”
This was too uncomfortable for Désol’é, who began to draw jagged lines on the page in front of her. Rasheda passed a note back to Serena. This time Miss Cavani spotted it but chose to ignore it.
“Imagine, over a hundred and fifty years ago, in this country, and someone in your line was really, really, really poor. Too poor to have a house, a home, a room, or even a shed to live in. No place of their own. They had to live in the …”
Here Miss Cavani did her raised eyebrow thing, hoping yet again that someone would finish her sentence.
“… in the …?”
“Odeon.”
It was Sunil. The Odeon cinema. He was quick. He loved to wait for gaps when people were talking and dive in with the unexpected. Sometimes it worked; sometimes it didn’t. This one did. He got the laughs he was looking for. Nearly everyone liked the idea his gag conjured up of people, long before films were invented, who were so poor that they somehow miraculously ended up in a cinema from the future, kipping under the seats and living off popcorn.
A frown of irritation sprouted between Miss Cavani’s eyes. Sunil had washed away a mood that had focussed just where she had wanted it: on coming into the world.
“Oh, yes, of course, Sunil,” she said, “or what about the airport? There were airports on every street corner a hundred and fifty years ago, weren’t there? Poor people used to live in the departure lounges.”
Coming from some teachers, this kind of put-down was loathed, but somehow with Miss Cavani, everyone rather liked these improvisations.
Rasheda turned to Serena, nodded and whispered, “Sarky!”
Miss Cavani heard it. “Sarky?” she asked. “Sarky? Hold that thought.”
Another of Miss Cavani’s sayings, like you could “hold” a thought! Where? How? What in? Or, her other one: where she said how “thinking on your feet” was great, as if thinking sitting down was rubbish.
“Let’s just sort this out, X10. I didn’t have in mind the Odeon cinema; I didn’t have in mind the airport. But as we’ve been doing a bit of weird time-travelling here, I’m sending you and your parents to the workhouse. Yes, the workhouse. You’ll love it. It’s like a prison for people who haven’t done anything wrong. Apart from being poor. And we all know how bad and evil it is to be poor…”
Rasheda turned to Serena again. They had promised each other they would keep count of the number of the times Miss Cavani did this sort of thing. Serena again mouthed, “Sarky!”
Miss Cavani caught it.
“Sarky? I tell you what, if you think I’m sarky, wait till you see someone being really sarky – sarcastic, that is.”
Miss Cavani stopped mid-flow.
“Or perhaps you’ll think it’s ironic rather than sarcastic. I wonder. Hmmm. Serena, you can be our expert on such things; start us off, please.”
At that, Serena, looked down at the page in front of her, paused while a plane went over, and started to read:
CLASS X10 READING COMPREHENSION
Although being born in a workhouse is not the most fortunate and enviable circumstance that can possibly befall a human being, in this particular instance, it was the best thing for Oliver Twist that could have occurred. The fact is, that there was considerable difficulty in getting Oliver to breathe – a troublesome practice, but one that is necessary to our easy existence – and for some time he lay gasping on a little flock mattress, poised between this world and the next. Now, if, during this brief period, Oliver had been surrounded by careful grandmothers, anxious aunts, experienced nurses, and doctors of profound wisdom, he would inevitably have been killed in no time. There being nobody by, however, but a pauper old woman, who was rendered rather misty by beer, and a parish surgeon who did such matters by contract; Oliver and Nature fought out the point between them. The result was, that, after a few struggles, Oliver breathed, sneezed, and proceeded to set up as loud a cry as could reasonably have been expected from a male infant who had not been possessed of a voice for much longer than three minutes and a quarter.
There was a rattling, riddling sound from the door handle of the classroom door, followed by the door itself opening.
Serena stopped.
Everyone looked towards the door. It was Mrs Buthelezi and a girl who was around the same age as the students in the class. She was small and wiry but not weak-looking. Far from it. With her strong, bright eyes, she wasn’t afraid of looking at the class, which she did without smiling. She looked up at Mrs Buthelezi who was the tallest person in the room – and she knew it. No one had a real handle on what Mrs Buthelezi’s actual job was, but she was the one who came to find you if your dad had suddenly had to go into hospital. And she was in charge of forms. If you had to fill in a form, Mrs Buthelezi had the form. Any form, any size. Today, Mrs Buthelezi’s job was to bring in a girl. And a form. She smiled at the girl and the girl looked from Mrs Buthelezi’s face to Miss Cavani’s face and then towards the class. Mrs Buthelezi smiled. She was good at smiling.
Mrs Buthelezi handed Miss Cavani the form, nodded, waved very quickly in Harry’s direction for some reason, and left.
Miss Cavani put her arm out towards the girl in a welcoming way, glanced at the form and said, “Shona!”
“All alone-a!” whispered Sunil. There he was again. In the gap. This time with one of his rhymes. He once told Crayton that one day he would be, like, the best ever at freestyling.
“Now then,” said Miss Cavani, doing her best to keep everything together (which was why she clasped and unclasped her hands), “this is Shona. Shona is new to the school, and she’s in this class. It can’t be easy coming into a new school and a new class, so let’s show our appreciation that Shona’s overcome this.”
Miss Cavani started to clap and everyone joined in.
It seemed a bit over the top. It gave the class time to take in more of what Shona looked like and what she was wearing. The style and clothes experts – like Crayton or Serena – picked up on how her trainers were cracked and not only was she still wearing the uniform of the school she had come from but also that the uniform itself was ready for the bin: like the cloth itself was tired. Was there something that Miss Cavani wasn’t saying about Shona?
“Shona, will you please sit down over there, where there’s that spare place by Harry? We’re reading a book called Oliver Twist. Harry, can you tell Shona what’s happened so far?”
Harry looked at the page and said, without looking at Shona, “There’s a boy called Oliver Twist, who’s been born. And I think an old woman is drunk. And there’s some sort of a joke going on where the person who’s written this story tells it in really grand language like it’s properly posh people. But it’s not.”
Crayton nudged Harry: “It’s in a workhouse.”
“Right, it really isn’t posh at all. It’s in a workhouse,” Harry added. “A workhouse is—”
“I know what a workhouse is,” said Shona.
“Do you? That’s good,” said Miss Cavani, “then we’ll carry on. Serena, as you were.”
And Serena carried on…
CLASS X10 READING COMPREHENSION
As Oliver gave this first proof of the free and proper action of his lungs, the patchwork coverlet that had been carelessly flung over the iron bedstead rustled; the pale face of a young woman was raised feebly from the pillow, and a faint voice imperfectly articulated the words, “Let me see the child, and die.”
The surgeon had been sitting with his face turned towards the fire: giving the palms of his hands a warm and a rub alternately. As the young woman spoke, he rose, and advancing to the bed’s head, said, with more kindness than might have been expected of him:
“Oh, you must not talk about dying yet.”
“Lor bless her dear heart, no!” interposed the nurse, hastily depositing in her pocket a green glass bottle, the contents of which she had been tasting in a corner with evident satisfaction.
The surgeon deposited the child in her arms. She imprinted her cold white lips passionately on its forehead, passed her hands over her face, gazed wildly round, shuddered, fell back – and died.
“It’s all over, Mrs Thingummy!” said the surgeon at last.
“Ah, poor dear, so it is!” said the nurse, picking up the cork of the green bottle, which had fallen out on the pillow, as she stooped to take up the child. “Poor dear!”
“You needn’t bother fetching me if the child cries, nurse,” said the surgeon, putting on his gloves with great deliberation. “It’s very likely it will be troublesome. Give it a little gruel if it is.” He put on his hat, and, pausing by the bedside on his way to the door, added, “She was a good-looking girl, too; where did she come from?”
“She was brought here last night,” replied the old woman, “She was found lying in the street. She had walked some distance, for her shoes were worn to pieces; but where she came from, or where she was going to, nobody knows.”
The surgeon leaned over the body, and raised the left hand. “The old story,” he said, shaking his head: “no wedding ring, I see. Ah! Goodnight!”
The medical gentleman walked away to dinner; and the nurse, having once more applied herself to the green bottle, sat down on a low chair before the fire, and proceeded to dress the infant.
What an excellent example of the power of dress, young Oliver Twist was! Wrapped in the blanket which had hitherto formed his only covering, he might have been the child of a nobleman or a beggar; it would have been hard for the haughtiest stranger to have guessed his proper station in society. But now that he was enveloped in old calico robes that had grown yellow in service, he was badged and ticketed, and fell into his place at once – a parish child – the orphan of a workhouse – the humble, half-starved drudge – to be cuffed and buffeted through the world – despised by all, and pitied by none.
Oliver cried lustily. If he could have known that he was an orphan, left to the tender mercies of church wardens and overseers, perhaps he would have cried the louder.
The bell for the end of the lesson rang just at the point where it said, “Oliver cried lustily” so that the thought of a baby crying and a bell ringing merged into each other. Miss Cavani indicated with her hand and fierce eyes that she wanted everyone to stay exactly where they were until Serena reached the end of the passage.
Then, when Serena pronounced the last words, Miss Cavani held up her hand and said, “Thank you, Serena. Thank you, Class X10. Remember, Oliver is left to the mercies of church wardens and overseers, but you – yes, you! – are left to the mercies of me and the rest of the staff. You’ll have to decide who has the easier life, you or Oliver. Off you go!”
In the jumble of chairs on the floor, pencil cases closing, bags being gathered, Désol’é edged towards Shona. What Miss Cavani said about being left to the mercies of others might have echoed in Shona’s mind as Désol’é said to her, “There’s, like, a new serve-yourself cafeteria thing. Come?”
Shona nodded.