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.

This won’t do

I only remember two lectures at Adelaide University.  One was on the Yippee Bird.  It was delivered by a drunken student, and ended prematurely when the lecturer walked in.

The other was Vida’s lecture on profanity.  Everyone remembers that.  It was improper, like the Yippee Bird, but it was the only time the lecture hall was full.  The words, like the students, were all there.  Fuck, Shit and Cunt, spread out wisely.  She didn’t let the bad boys sit together.  She had us tittering to the end.  She could use words to effect. 

I was still gardening.  She recommended me to someone else, and told me what she’d said.  I was thorough, but slow.  She’d been judging my performance as a gardener, too.  I might have known.

At the new property, I had to cut a hedge.  I told her I’d never cut a hedge before. 

“Now you’re going to learn.” 

I chuckled.  It was, after all, someone else’s hedge.

The plainest of speakers, she had little time for irony.  Why say something which you don’t mean, or which is open to interpretation?  One morning, we were standing in her front garden.  Across the road, an old lady, or so she seemed to me, came out of a house.  Vida said a man lived there, and the woman often stayed the night.  We reflected for a moment, then I said: 

“No one in their right mind would think she stayed the night.”

Vida looked at me.  “Do you mean her appearance?”

I nodded.

“Graham, that’s very uncharitable of you!”

She was pleased, though.  I remember these things.  It was important for me to please her.

 

She said she sometimes wondered how tolerant she was, although I think she knew.  I replied, “You’ve always struck me as a model of toleration.”

But it wasn’t all talking and shovelling.  Vida wrote as well, academic things, and lots of letters.  She got one from a former student.  

“It’s from Tim,” she said.  “He finally married his girlfriend.  I don’t know why he still writes to me.  He always struck me as being rather dim.”

“He must be.”

“There’s no need to be offensive!”

When I wasn’t in Adelaide, I also wrote to her.  One letter she even wrote for me, my application to Oxford.  It was all her idea.  She told me to draft my own letter, then show it to her.  She knew it wouldn’t work, and as soon as she started reading it, she said, “This won’t do.”

She picked her pen up, already thinking, and wrote a letter of her own.  She did it there and then, without speaking, just wrote till it was done, in a single, flowing movement.  She only did things when she knew what she was doing.  It didn’t do my application any harm.    

All her letters had the same pure style.  When something's right, there's no need to change.  I wrote to her last year.  I hadn’t sent a letter for a very long time.  I didn’t want to be a dim Tim, or maybe I was lazy.  She replied by email. 

“I assume that you thought I was too old and doddery to cope with such things.” 

Right again.  Years ago, when a friend of hers died, Vida sorted out her stuff.  It was heartbreaking, she said, going through the old letters.   Why do people write things down? 

At the end of the email, she thanked me for remembering her.  No irony, of course.  It made me a little sad, even then.  As if I could forget.

Vida died, she passed away, she went to meet her maker.  I can’t say it more plainly.  She’s gone, and it won’t do.

A pig in a poke

“Graham’s lurking,” said Vida when she saw me at the university.  We got into a lift.  In a lift, there is no escape.  She asked me why I had bare feet on such a cold day.  I said the library was stuffy. 

“You have bare feet because the library is stuffy.  I always knew students were backward.” 

If you aren’t direct, people might not understand.  With me, the only time that Vida wasn’t direct, I didn’t understand.  It was very hot.  You know the Australian summer.  She said the boy who was staying with her had two showers a day.  I only worked it out a week ago, after thirty years.

I won a scholarship to study in Greece.  I told Vida straightaway.  

“It sounds like a pig in a poke to me.”  

I didn’t know what that meant, but it wasn’t anything very good.  I thought she was strange.  People I hardly knew were hugging me, saying it was the best thing that could happen.  I looked the phrase up last week too.  She was right.  It was a pig in a poke.    

I was a boy, and boys need to learn.  They talk too much, or too little.  She thought a library job would suit me.  She did, of course, love libraries, but I sensed a kind of disappointment.  She didn’t say it, but she wanted me to make more noise, to give opinions, or at least to have them, although she knew a boy’s opinions could be wrong, would be wrong, normally. 

Dinner with some friends of ours.  Vida was holding forth again.  I was being quiet again.  She stopped.

“What do you think, Graham?”

I moved my head a little, as if she’d woken me, and grunted, like a question.  She didn’t laugh, but I could tell that she was pleased.  Sometimes, it was the only way you could score a point off Vida, by saying nothing. 

Woe betide the person who said something stupid.  I was going to England.  She told me she had some pounds.  She was generous.  I thought she was being generous again.

“I couldn’t take that.” 

“I’m not going to give them to you, ducky!”

I mightn’t understand, but I try to look clever.  She was cross once, and said I hammed it up.  I don’t remember what it was.  I thought she didn’t understand.  I was a teenage boy for longer than most.  

Another hot day.  I was doing some gardening for her.  She picked a persimmon and gave it to me.  It was fragile and warm.  I said it felt like a little animal.

“You’re a very strange person,” she replied. 

When other people hammed it up, she didn’t always mind.  We were driving in Adelaide.  The car in front stopped.  A woman got out, lifted her dress above her head, and wiggled her hips at us like a striptease dancer, a stocky one.  I burst out laughing.  Vida looked at me as if she wondered why.  She knew the road.  Perhaps it happened all the time. 

She could ham it up herself.  In Adelaide, there used to be a Greek takeaway, the Orange Crockpot.  One day, talking to Margaret, she called it the Purple Crockpot.  I hadn’t heard her do that sort of thing.  I corrected her.  She turned to me quite savagely, “You know, Graham, that’s just par for the course!”  

I remember Margaret’s eyes, sad and sympathetic.

Sometimes, I understood.  To make a point, I forget which, Vida told me an anecdote.  She was seventeen, I think.  A woman suggested she go to the local dance.  Vida said she had no one to go with.

“That’s why you go to the bleedin’ dance!” the woman replied, quite savagely.

Vida laughed when she repeated it.  She was a teenager too.

Go to your dance, then, ducky.  I’ll lurk here a while.

Our Cat Rafaello

He came over one day from the neighbour’s place.  He just turned up.  Cats don’t tell you when they’re coming.  We didn’t know his name, but we knew it wasn’t Rafaello.  No one calls their cat Rafaello, not around here.  We called him that so, when he just turned up, he belonged to us. 

He danced on the back lawn, swiping flies and bumblebees, biting at the long grass, doing somersaults.  He jumped on our window, trying to get in.  His four paws stayed a moment on the glass.  Another moment.  It was the only time he didn’t move.  He did everything that was possible, and some things that weren’t.

He came every day for weeks until I took his photograph.  When you take a photograph, you don’t think much about it.  I must have wanted some memories.  I didn’t need them, though.  I had Rafaello. 

Posters sprang up in the street, with ‘lost’ in big letters, a telephone number and a picture of Rafaello.  They were fixed, ironically, to trees and lamp posts, things which couldn’t move.  But the picture kept his spark.  He stared at something which had moved and caught his eye, but which was now no longer there. 

An old lady owned him.  She never got Rafaello back, or whatever name she used.  We never got him back either.  We have the photograph.

A pupil once told me about her guru.  A famous man.  His picture was on the wall.  She lowered her voice and sounded reverent.  She said he could make objects disappear.  I looked impressed, but I'd done that to a living mammal.

Party animals

A young man was filmed recently in Welwyn Garden City (handsome name) swinging a Chihuahua around his head on the end of a lead.  Yippee!

Britons have mistreated animals for hundreds of years.  The last time the river Thames froze, the BBC tells us, “oxen were roasted in front of roaring fires, drink was liberally taken and dances were held. An elephant was marched across the river alongside Blackfriars Bridge.”  All on the ice.  They wanted to prove how thick it was.  It was extremely thick.

‘Health and safety’ is our mantra now, but we still put animals at risk for the sake of entertainment.  Parties billed as “wild nights out” have been held in London Zoo.  Drunken guests have “crushed butterflies, touched penguins and poured drinks on animals.”  When challenged about his interference with a rare white baboon, one young man replied, “I thought it was my girlfriend.”

Like us, animals can be dangerous.  A car with a family inside caught fire at a safari park.  They had the choice to leave the vehicle and be eaten by lions, or stay there and be burnt to death.  A witness said the lions “didn’t take their eyes off the car for a second.”  Implication: the family with big teeth wanted to eat the family with small teeth.  However, if you put two households side by side, one will often have bigger teeth than the other.  The family in the car might not have looked as scary as the one in the grass, but you never know what’s going on inside a person’s head.

“I give them thirty seconds,” said Daddy Lion.

 

“No,” said Mummy Lion. “They’ll last longer.  Are you hungry?”

Baby Lion asked, “Why don’t they get out of the car, Mummy?”

If you always think badly of a certain animal or person, it’s easy to mistreat them.  The vegetable kingdom is also mightily abused.  A man has pushed a Brussel sprout to the top of Mt Snowden.  He said he “selected a large sprout so it would not fall down a crevice in the rock.”  The safety of the sprout was the most important thing.  Remember now.  The crevices on Mt Snowden are all narrower than a large sprout.  No need to push a pumpkin up there, or a tree.

Pity the sprout, and the dung beetle.  It heaves a ball of dung that’s bigger than itself.  In London, office managers do much the same thing – push lumps of shit around all day.  However, we are now told that dung beetles get extra-terrestrial help.  Research has shown that they are guided by the stars.  Scientists “put little cardboard hats on the beetles’ heads, blocking their view of the sky.  Those beetles just rolled around and around aimlessly.”  Sounds like my graduation party.

I wasn’t fair on Brussels Man, either.  I didn’t tell you that he pushed the sprout up Mt Snowden with his nose.  He was worse off than a beetle.  They use their legs.  I’m beginning to side with humans again. Let’s get this ball of dung back on the road.

At the safari park, the car was still burning.

“Maybe they don’t know it’s on fire,” Baby Lion suggested.  “We should tell them.”

Mummy Lion shook her head.  “No, darling.  It’s not safe.  We don’t like fire any more than people do.”

Baby Lion looked at her intelligently.  Mummy Lion went on, “We’ll just wait here until they get out of the car.  Then we’ll eat them.”

Working class germs

Passengers are requested not to speak to or obscure the driver’s vision whilst the vehicle is in motion.

This sign is near the driver’s seat on London buses.  We know what the author intended, and the formal style, motion, whilst, obscure, are requested, reminds us to respect the message.  The bus company means what it says.  Well, almost.  Speak to the driver’s vision.  Some people might be able to.  It's a bit spooky, though, for the average bus.

I wonder what the company would say if I rang their helpline to point out the mistake in grammar.     

Sometimes we know what we’re doing is wrong, or stupid, but we keep doing it anyway. When I travel around London, I play word games in my head.  I start with a railway station, take the short ride, say, from Liverpool Street to St Pancreas, then move on by tube and bus to Cockfisters or Dickhead.  You can probably think up better ones.  

I got this letter from Adelaide, South Australia, from the cultured eastern suburbs.

One of the concreters has flu, according to him.  It's probably just a heavy cold, but either way we don't want to catch anything, so I had the dilemma of flu germs on the coffee mug after he'd had the coffee I made him. My husband wisely suggested finding an old mug, then throwing it away afterwards, because I didn't want it germing up the kitchen sink.  This was fine until they had to finish early and come back today, meaning another cup of coffee would need to be offered and I can't keep throwing away mugs.  I had to clean it somehow, so I stood it in the laundry trough with a little squirt of dishwashing liquid and poured boiling water all over it.  One cannot be too careful.  I dried it with a paper towel and now it's ready for his next cup of coffee on Monday.  The irony is, of course, that this cup of uncleanliness and germs is probably much cleaner now than my daily cups and dishes washed all together in the kitchen sink.

I like the scepticism, the nervous energy, the shared commitment, the regard for duty, the thrift, the creativity, and the meticulous care.  The sense of irony. 

I like the workman.  He didn’t ask if the mug was clean.

Bike sex

Seven years ago, a man in Scotland was caught having sex with a bicycle.  I missed it somehow.  It’s not a piece of news you’d forget.  A few days ago, the story popped up again on the BBC website, in the ‘most read’ section.  Thanks to the internet and our fascination with sexual content, the world is going to laugh at him forever.  Flogging a dead bike.

Most of us have experimented sexually.  Positions, people, places.  Some of us do it with animals, or corpses.  One of us, at least, with a bicycle.  But we are usually more careful, or luckier, than our Scottish friend.  Think back.  The last time you locked your bedroom door, then did something wicked, were sturdy women with mops in their hands waiting outside?

He lived in a hostel.  He must have thought he was safe in his own room, with his own bicycle.  He wasn’t outside the local school, or carrying it on the train.  (At peak times, only folded – Kama Sutra.)  It was right between his legs when the cleaners walked in.  They said they knocked.  Two ladies.  That was bad luck.  Men might have blinked.  And how many cleaners do you need for a single room? Two, obviously.  More bad luck, but convenient for the magistrate.  Two against one.  Our friend couldn’t deny it.

The BBC said he was “caught trying to have sex with his bicycle.”  He was charged with “simulating sex,” found guilty and sentenced to three months on probation.  I expect he was moving his hips in a certain way, like a bicycle pump, at the rear of the machine.   Three months’ probation for simulating sex.   What if he’d really done it?  What if he’d screwed the bells off his beloved bicycle?  They would have thrown away the key. 

For some men, a car is like a girlfriend, one you can’t get into the bedroom.  Our friend, Biceps Femoris, loved a bicycle, and he got it into his room.  He deserves a medal, or a yellow jersey.  Recently, young men in tight pants humped their two-wheelers around the English countryside.  People watched and cheered.  Women were among the crowd.  Some of them were probably cleaning ladies.  The police did nothing. 

Le Tour de France.  Apt name for an event on this side of the Channel. 

I said magistrate, but they’re not magistrates up there, are they?  They’re sheriffs.  Like Tombstone or Nottingham.  The Sheriff of Ayr proclaimed: “In almost four decades in the law I thought I had come across every perversion known to mankind, but this is a new one on me. I have never heard of a ‘cycle-sexualist.'" 

Neither have I.  Sexualist.  That’s a word in Scotland.

In the BBC report, there’s a picture of a bicycle chained to a fence.  These days, in England, at least, victims are treated with more compassion.  They are not arrested, let alone chained.  A bicycle can’t defend itself.  Its very structure invites abuse.  It is made to ride.  Town bicycle – you know what that means.  Although we are not told the gender of this machine, a barrister could twist things around to show that she brought it on herself.  As for the Sheriff, a male bike would provoke him even more, and what if it was only a few years old?

The importance of staying on green

When I was at school, there was a boy named Birdseye.  Our teacher called him Bird’s beak, Birdbrain, and so on.  I thought it was funny.  My name wasn’t Birdseye.  Or Wurm.  Sir called him Grub.   He didn’t connect the two, bird and grub.  These days, insults only come from little beaks.  Teachers get the sack. 

Home time.  I slipped out of the girls’ school and reached the bus stop, safe back in the adult world.  You’d think.  A group of girls had come through the gate behind me.  When they saw me at the bus stop, they chorused “Hallo, sir,” suggestively, the way that only teenage girls can do, but everybody understands.

“Hey, hey, hey,” said the man next to me.  He didn’t have to say it so loud.  “Male teacher at a girls’ school.  He must be gay.”

    Chigwell Row

     
            Move on.  I made it to Hainault.  It’s an outer London suburb.  I got off the train and walked towards the bus stop for Chigwell Row, which is up the hill, where it’s green, and there are lots of trees, with a church on top.  I don’t live there.  I was helping a wealthy Russian with her English. 

The bus stop is next to the station.  I was almost there when a man dropped his bag on the footpath in front of me.

“Can you pick it up for me, please?” 

It wasn’t pretty please.  I looked at him.  He was about my age.  He wasn’t drunk.  When I didn’t bend down straightaway, he carried on speaking, like someone who needed to finish a script.  But his tone was harder.

“I asked you to pick it up for me.” 

“I thought you dropped it on purpose.”

“Fuck off!”

He walked on, I walked on, we continued with our afternoon.  I wonder how long he’s been doing that, in Hainault of all places, and how he hasn’t been stabbed to death. 

It was very hot, a nice day for the beach.  I’d just got sand in the face.   The road outside Hainault station doesn’t look much like a beach, except for the litter and the bare-chested youths.  I don’t remember if Hainault made the news during the riots.  It doesn’t mean there weren’t any riots.  The youths of Hainault may have intended to riot, perhaps some of them even thought they were rioting, but people didn’t notice any difference, and it wasn’t reported.

          A child’s mother once called me a wanker.  Parents, like children, can say things teachers can’t.  In some schools you can’t even discipline the children.  I mean you’re not allowed to.  I was sent to a primary school in Hackney.  It’s London’s Wild East.  The deputy head explained their ‘traffic light’ system.  A lot of schools have it.  All the children start on green.  If they’re bad, their names are moved to yellow.  If they’re bad again, their names are moved to red.  She emphasised the importance of staying on green.  I thought she might have told the children that, not me.  The class teacher said the children never stopped talking.  I thought she might have told the children that, not me.  

           She came in later while I was teaching.  The children were completely quiet.  She was amazed.  Then she saw the traffic lights.  A lot of names on yellow and red.  She was horrified.  I was thrown out before lunch.