Home truths

I arrived one day at a pupil’s house.  The boy’s uncle let me in, and called upstairs, “Adil, your tutor’s here.”

“Oh, shit!” floated back, softly and bitterly.  Adil is sixteen.  He’s calm and pleasant.  Too calm at times.  In one lesson, he fell asleep.  How do you wake someone who’s bigger than you?   I’ve fallen asleep too.  In my lesson.  I really have. 

Oh, shit!  I felt sorry for him when he said it.  I don’t know what his uncle felt.  He had spoken very softly, breathed more than spoken.  Not softly enough.  The walls are pretty thin out there.  I heard someone fart in the house next door. 

Adil had forgotten I was coming, but we still did the lesson.  Not all my pupils answer when I knock.  They’re home; they’re not asleep, or ill; they just don’t answer.  Once, I saw a boy through the curtains, sitting with his mother.  They were on the sofa together, so close their thighs were touching.  With a straight back, his head reached her shoulder.  They knew I was coming.  I came every week.  They had sat down to wait, and not answer. 

The sofa faced the window.  No hiding out the back for these two.  Anyone could knock.  They didn’t want to snub the wrong person.  And what if I didn’t come?  They’d want to know.  They were taking the trouble to deceive me.  It was also fun.  I could feel the anticipation through the window.  

I knocked a few more times.  I’m not sure why.  Nothing to do now but wait for me to go.  Whichever way you look at it, they were smart.  Just buy some decent curtains. 

In some families, the children take charge.  One boy kept me waiting in the snow.  This happened every lesson.   I rang the bell.  His grandmother called him to open the door.  I could hear her in the house.  I’m not sure what language it was.  It didn’t matter.  He ignored her.  Boys like it upstairs.  She didn’t come herself.  I don’t think she ever left the kitchen, and there was no one else at home.  In the meantime, I got to know the door. 

He let me in eventually, but we couldn’t start the lesson.  He disappeared.  When he came back, five minutes later, he was holding a plate of cakes in both hands, round ones in different colours, the cakes I mean, and a pile of slices.  Grandma again.

In what was left of the hour, he ate the cakes in front of me.  He always kept a piece till the end, but he ate them all.  A useful skill for a child to have.  I thought you just swallowed cake.  It’s actually quite complicated.  First, you feel it with your eyes.  Then, you use your fingers.  With Grandma’s cake, there’s no need to bite; just tease it with your lips.  Then, sit back and feel the cake inside you.  He taught me all this.  He didn’t listen.  Without the cake, there would have been no lesson.    

After a few weeks, I stopped the tuition.  I don’t normally.  Why let the pupil win?  I’d rather have the money.  When I cancelled, it wasn’t just the cake, or being left out in the snow.  It was the dumb malice I could feel inside him.

A month or so passed.  I saw him on the street, an ex-pupil now, talking to some cake enthusiasts.  Oh, shit!  None of them knew me, but they laughed when he did, and repeated the insults he shouted.  We are all ex-pupils.  It was liberating.

God, are You there?

A local Catholic girls’ school was recently infested with rats.  The girls made a fuss, understandably.  The school, understandably, defended itself, saying, in essence: ‘These are not our rats.’  It blamed the food waste generated by commercial premises next door, and complained to the council. 

The school also dismissed the girls’ “hysteria.”  The Health and Safety Officer said it was not an infestation, more a “steady trickle of visitors.”  That’s reassuring.  I’ve visited that school myself.

Councils are not normally responsible for what goes on in private schools, but these were public rats.  The council sanitised the building, and some of its inhabitants, though it took a while.  

Not everyone can wait.  In a school I visited last week, a teacher sanitised himself in front of me.  I walked into the staffroom at the end of the day.  Two teachers were standing chatting, a young man and a woman.  Without interrupting the conversation, the young man put a hand inside his bag, took out a can of deodorant, and sprayed himself twice in each armpit, on the surface of his jumper.

I suppose if you’re talking and you get the urge to spray, you won’t take your top off to do it.  And it’s not something you can hope to hide, like shingles or a fart.  Do it too quickly, and you might look embarrassed.  The young man sprayed methodically, peering at the woman all the time. 

Teenagers spray themselves and sometimes each other, even during class, in places you’d expect to find an odour, on the outside of their clothing or straight down the front of their shirts.  I’d never seen an adult do it.  The lady didn’t blink.  I don’t know what was in her mind, but I couldn’t help thinking: He’s cleansing himself of children. 

Teachers.  You have to watch them.  They won’t always sanitise themselves.  The Head of PSHE (personal, social and health education) at a local secondary school was sacked for starring in some pornographic films.  All the right experience, you'd think, but they said he'd brought the teaching profession into disrepute.  Or the porn industry.  I wonder how he viewed his different roles.  Was he moonlighting as a porn star or a teacher?  And it’s not clear who recognised him naked.  (Stop chuckling, this is serious.)  Another teacher?  A parent?  A pupil?  Someone ratted on him.  Most teachers don’t make films like that.  They don’t have the body.  

Sanitising children is just as much fun.  In the old days, when pupils said a rude word, they had to wash their mouths out with soap.  A mouth for a mouth, or something.  There are teachers in England who still like the old-time religion.  A Catholic primary school was in the news.  Like most schools, it’s got naughty children, but the Head was worried.  She wanted to teach some naughty ones a lesson.  She took them into the prayer room and said she was phoning God.  She told them to lie on the floor, face down.  It was ingenious.  Children stretching out, prostrating themselves – it felt more like an act of penance, and they made a bigger target for His wrath.  

“Hello, God.  Miss Gargoyle here, St Hairshirt’s.  Not so well, I’m afraid.  We have some bad children.  You know already.  Of course.” 

She used her cell phone to make the call.  Ingenious again.  A landline wouldn’t work.  A child knows that.

“That’s right, the ones on the floor.  Can You do something with them?  Really?  Millions of bad children?  All right, God, when You’re able to.  You know where to find them.”

The Decline of the Australian

We learn things in libraries.  Books are serious business.  Humorous books are no exception, it seems.  They're books.  They must be serious too.  We need a good reason to laugh.

In Australia, the new Russell Prize for Humour Writing was recently awarded.  Alex Byrne – not the winner, but the NSW State Librarian & Chief Executive – wrote:

‘Humour writing is not an easy genre to master, and Bernard Cohen and his fellow shortlisted authors have shown how humour is not only there to entertain us but to, perhaps more importantly, raise and promote important discussions about our contemporary culture.’

Raise, promote.  It sounds like the job I never had.  I like the perhaps more importantly.  I find it, well, humorous.  Why not send it in for the next Prize?  It could make some noise.  Sorry, Al, to pick you off like this – I say silly things too – but you did poke your snout above the shelves.  Just keep it down a bit.  You don’t need me to tell you.  I scribble fragments.  You’ve got whole libraries to be quiet in.        

Before I go on – I do go on – I’d better explain the title, The Decline of the Australian.  It doesn’t sound nice, does it?  Not if you’re Australian.  I borrowed it from the BBC – precisely the kind of behaviour that needs to be discussed.  

The BBC article explores why fewer Australians are doing unskilled jobs in London.  Either they don’t need to top up their travel money thanks to the strong Australian dollar, or they're doing professional work like accountancy, or they can’t get a UK visa in the first place, and are going to Bali instead.  One Australian writer said that young Australians have “come of age culturally” and are just not bothering to visit London.  They don’t have to prove themselves now.  No more borrowing.  They’re as good as Britain.

Confusing increased affluence with cultural maturity – that’s another thing Australians are good at.  The Chair judge, Kathryn Heyman, does not make the same mistake.  She knows we’re still screwed up, noting the ‘nervy restlessness in the Australian psyche.’  The winning entry, she goes on, gives us the ‘most elegant kick in the teeth we never knew we needed,’

There were 57 submissions for the 2015 Russell Prize.  At $66 a submission, plus 5 copies of each text in paperback, that makes … a lot of numbers.  Serious business.  The taxman could be interested if no one else.  Perhaps not even him.  The guidelines point out: The provision of the prize money may be subject to the GST.  Not sure yet?  It's that psyche again, or else a one-liner, the trotter in the teeth we weren’t expecting. 

The Chief Executive also refers to the ‘unique Australian sense of humour.’  Come on, Al, we all know where that hails from.  It’s as British as pork pies, which have VAT sometimes.  That’s UK GST, not mad pig disease.  

When he mentioned our contemporary culture, he meant, of course, Australian.  If the Russell Prize focuses on that, it may or may not inspire a sense of identity, but it will, without doubt, encourage insularity. How can culture be invigorated by placing limits on creative expression?  Let writers write, and the rest of us can say, ‘That’s real literature,’ not just ‘real Australian.’

Patrick White won the Nobel Prize for Literature.  He was Australian.  It’s a pretty big prize.  But it wasn’t big enough.  For the psyche, I mean.  Prizes are good.  Next time, though, librarians of Sydney, you might make it ‘The Russell Prize for Serious Humour Writing’ so writers who aren’t serious will know.  

Bananas

If you have visitors, and run out of things to say, flowers are useful.  They’re not as difficult as pets or babies, not for most people, anyway.  Pretty little things, they wait outside until you need them, and always nod their heads. 

My neighbour’s parents came to see him.  They don’t come too often.  They’re more like hardy annuals that push up in the spring.  Let’s have a look at the garden.  This year, they were spending a long time on one flower, a lot longer than people normally do.  They hadn’t gone mad.  There was only one flower.  The rest of the garden was bare. 

I remember it quite clearly, a tall stem, with a patch of white petals at the top, like a tiny flag, as if the earth had surrendered.

Think of a stalk and petals, and personal injury won’t be your next thought.  If you want to hit someone, you don’t use a flower.  But they can still be dangerous.  Last year, twenty-seven UK residents were poisoned by daffodils.  That’s right, people ate them, twenty-seven at least.  They’re just the ones that got sick, delicate hunter-gatherers, or poets – in short, those not immune to daffodils. 

This spring, supermarkets were advised not to put daffodils in, or adjacent to, the fresh food aisle.  It might cut down on errors, but it won’t stop a devoted self-harmer.  You can grow your own.  Well, most people can.

Supermarkets wait for you.  They watch you cross the forecourt.  You might not know the difference between a toothpick and a needle.   

As for the daffodils, blame poetry.  Where there is beauty, there is suffering.  We can hold a stalk and petals, and not know it’s a flower.  That sort of thing.  But fruit is dangerous too.  I was physically assaulted for a bunch of bananas.  Poets don’t write about bananas. 

A banana is not a flower.  You can hold it, or eat it, and still feel nothing.  But when you can’t get things, you want them.  In Greece, years ago, you couldn’t get bananas.  I brought some back from India.  I wanted to impress a few people up in the Old Town, then eat them, the bananas, I mean.  I also had a copy of The Times of India.  News print is black.  Bananas just go that way.  Like friends that bruise, they are not the best travelling companions.   

In those days, a bus ran from the airport to the centre of Salonica.  It stopped on the waterfront, near Aristotelous Square.  From there, I used to walk up the hill.  That afternoon, I’d just turned the corner into Egnatia.  I must have been holding other things as well, but I only remember the bananas.  A man gripped my arm, the one with the bananas.  His fingers felt like metal.  He wanted my bananas, but he wasn’t stealing them.  How much were they?  His voice was like his fingers.  I couldn’t move.  I’m not exaggerating.  I was back in Greece.

The skyline looked the same, and the castellation on it, like a toy at that distance, where my bananas had been going. 

Cut from a tree in India, carried on a plane to Greece, and turned into custard on the top of a hill.  Is that the sort of history you want for your bananas? 

The man with metal fingers let me go.  A passer-by said: “Leave him alone.”

I didn’t do the cooking, but I allowed it to happen.  They were my bananas.  The Old Town was full of passers-by.  No one said: Leave them alone.

The man with metal fingers should have got them. 

A girl called Gherkin

“The daughter’s name is Gherkin.” 

That’s what I thought they said.  The tuition agency was offering me a job.  The girl's name was Gurkiran, but it came out pickled cucumber on the phone.  

Teachers get things wrong.  A Year 6 class was doing some work on London landmarks.  The Tower of London, Big Ben, the usual monuments.  The Gherkin was also on the list.  Again, not the real name.  If you don’t know this building, the nickname gives some clues about its shape and colour, although the classic vegetable won’t stand up on its end.

The regular teacher, another classic vegetable, had been joking about the Gherkin with her class.  It was obvious from the notes on the board.  They’d had a brainstorming session.  The names of certain monuments were there, in random places.  Each name was in a box shaped like a potato, with little lines sticking out like toothpicks, and words or phrases which the children had supplied.  There was nothing negative until it came to Gherkin, which had things like ‘silly’ and ‘awful’ labelled on it.

The Tower of London is not very funny.  Someone might think it was, but they’d keep it to themselves.  The Gherkin is different.  It hasn’t been around so long.  It must be a silly building because it’s got a silly name.  So much for new perspectives in architecture.  

Words, like buildings, come in and out of fashion.  We no longer have brainstorms, do we, or spider diagrams?   We have the mind map.  It's meant to be inspiring, or at least not so scary.  I said ‘meant to be.’  You wouldn’t want a map of what’s in my head.  We can’t stop our thoughts, but we can clean up what we say.  You know the examples.  People are enabled now, not disabled, let alone crippled. 

The words are new, but the ideas aren’t.  Children still do their brainstorms like clouds, with little lines that stick out round the edge.  One class was doing the London Blitz.  I was monitoring their work, peering over shoulders in my irritating way.

The session was almost finished.  One boy had only done the outline of his cloud.  He hadn’t even written The Blitz inside.  It was on white paper.  The cloud was horizontal, plump and fluffy, too fluffy, even for a child's cloud.  In a pleasant voice,  I said it looked like a sheep.  Then, as there were no lines poking out, I said it looked like a legless sheep, and pressed home quickly with: “You’ve drawn a disabled sheep!”

I nearly wrote the phrase ‘thick with sleep’

I nearly wrote the phrase thick with sleep, but it came into my head too easily.  It must have been used before.  I did a Google search, and this came up, by an author rated in the book clubs:

‘At night, the house thick with sleep, she would peer out her bedroom window at the trees and sky and feel the presence of a mystery.’

It’s going to be a thriller, you can feel it.  The tickle of mystery will turn into assault, but, for the moment, you’re safe and warm.  The style is reassuring – the clichés and the flat rhythm.  There’s a good read here, you won’t be too surprised, or too upset, and you’ll be home safe and warm at the end. 

She peered out.  A woman’s point of view, and they don’t like everything.  I was sitting in the staff room at the girls’ school.  Some teachers were discussing Fifty Shades of Grey.  A young lady said it was demeaning to women, and not well-written. I’ve read enough to know that men are in it, too.  You could just as well say it was demeaning to them, or to no one.  Whether it’s well-written, how many books are?

After lunch, an even younger lady opened the book in front of me.  Year 10 Science.  Fifty Shades of Grey.  I couldn’t say no.  She had finished her work.  She wasn’t a bad girl, like those who sit on the classroom floor, smoke e-cigarettes, and don’t read at all.  I took the book from her, quite casually, looked at the page she was reading, then gave it back.  I said it was Harry Potter for adults.  She disagreed.  I meant how the volume felt in my hand, plump and shiny.  Other girls had copies, too, or a different book in the series, on the desk beside them, or in their bags.  They were doing the classwork first. 

Good girls do what Sir says.  An academic recently complained that calling teachers Sir or Miss is “depressing, sexist and gives women in schools a lower status than their male counterparts.”  The BBC quoted: ‘Sir is a knight... but Miss is ridiculous - it doesn't match Sir at all.’

In the classroom it does.  A word can have more than one meaning, and context will determine which.  In the classroom, Sir is not a knight, and Miss is not ridiculous.  I have taught in schools where the children use Sir and Madam, like a formal letter.  It’s so equal it hurts.  Let Miss teach; let her run her school, and Madam run her brothel. 

We can’t say Headmistress, either.  It means ‘top lover,’ from the male point of view.  I still prefer Miss.  Your Mrs isn’t usually your lover.  We need to look at menopause, and the expression Oh boy!  But there’s one more problem.  We can’t fix everything.  There aren’t enough words to go round.  

For some of us, there are still too many pronouns.  She peered out.  Or he, or it.  In a book club interview, a writer explained why she used the pronoun she for both male and female characters.  She had tried using he for everybody, but ‘it reinforced the idea of a masculine default, and did nothing at all to make the world seem gender-neutral or uncaring about gender.’

So she replaced one gender pronoun with another.

Bad girls

“You’ve got some strange sexual habits.”

The deputy-head spoke placidly, but I was still scared.  I must have had a guilty conscience.  When he saw my face, he apologised.  He’d just been in the girls’ toilets, I don’t remember why, and seen the graffiti.  He didn’t repeat what it was, probably something like Spaid sucks cocks.  Revenge, at least, is sweet.

That was in Australia.  Most of my blunders have a London twang.  I was monitoring some Year 10s.  I complimented a pair of girls on their behaviour.

“I like good girls.”  Pause.  “I like bad girls, too.”

It magnetised their foreheads for a second.

To take things out of the classroom – there are bad girls in the workplace as well – I’ll tell you a story about a barber I used to have.  A girl washed the customers’ hair first.  The barber never did that.

She was about sixteen.  Her arms were bare to just below the shoulder.  You don’t want sleeves getting wet.  Her T-shirt was tight, very tight, an extension, really, of her normal skin.  You don’t want clothes dangling in a client’s face. 

The girl wet my hair.  She was close enough for me to feel her body heat.  When the time came to add shampoo, she pressed herself against my shoulder.     

The barber never did that.  He was a buoyant sort.  His snipping hand had a life of its own.  No need to rest an arm on someone's head if he was tired. 

The girl was not so lucky.  To work the soap in fully, she had to prop her forearms on my brow.  Pretty arms, neatly curved.  What they felt like on my face, it’s difficult to say.  I remember wondering if my eyebrow tickled her, the skin near her pulse.   

One day, she just got tired of it.  Instead of massaging, her fingers started pulling at my hair, sharp, little tugs that hair washers don’t usually do.  It felt like revenge.  I had never spoken to her.  I didn’t know what to say. 

Girls are good at revenge.  In school, I gave a bad girl lines to write.  Two sides.  Something like I am very sorry for behaving badly. When the sheet came back, by the bottom of page two, the message had become I am not sorry, I am not sorry, I am not sorry.  It was hard not to smile.

I was sitting at the teacher’s desk.  I looked around.  A girl had drawn an arrow on the board behind me, like a diagram in Science.  The tip was pointing down at me.  The other end was labelled smelly.

The best insult, though, comes from the twelve-year-old who called out in class: “You’ve got a dick this big!”  She held up a thumb and forefinger as if she was going to pinch the air.  There wasn’t much space between them.

Insults and revenge are fine, but they don’t explain why some girls stay behind at the end of a lesson when you haven't asked them to. 

“Will you have sex with me, sir?”

A Year 9.  She had waited till everyone was gone.

“We could have so much fun.”

She emphasised the word so.  When I didn’t answer, or look at her, she went on:

“I’m undoing my belt.”  Pause.  “I’m taking my jeans off now.”

I still didn’t look.  I went to lunch instead.  I didn’t think she meant it.