Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me E-Book

Kate Clanchy

• Herausgeber: Swift Press
• Kategorie: Bildung
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Seitenzahl: 372

Beschreibung

With a new afterword. 'The best book on teachers and children and writing that I've ever read. No-one has said better so much of what so badly needs saying' - Philip Pullman Kate Clanchy wants to change the world and thinks school is an excellent place to do it. She invites you to meet some of the kids she has taught in her thirty-year career. Join her as she explains everything about sex to a classroom of thirteen-year-olds. As she works in the school 'Inclusion Unit', trying to improve the fortunes of kids excluded from regular lessons because of their terrifying power to end learning in an instant. Or as she nurtures her multicultural poetry group, full of migrants and refugees, watches them find their voice and produce work of heartbreaking brilliance. While Clanchy doesn't deny stinging humiliations or hide painful accidents, she celebrates this most creative, passionate and practically useful of jobs. Teaching today is all too often demeaned, diminished and drastically under-resourced. Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me will show you why it shouldn't be.  Winner of the Orwell Prize for Political Writing 2020

Leseprobe

For my colleagues: Trish and Emma, Nikki, Steve and Frank, Janet, Cathy, Dee and Annabella, and all the others.

Contents

IntroductionAbout Love, Sex, and the Limits of EmbarrassmentCallum, Paul, Liam, Akash, Emmanuel, and JavelCallum’s Dog • Paul’s Boots • Liam’s Club • Akash’s Play • Javel’s Rose and Emmanuel’s TrousersAbout ExclusionKylie, Royar, and SimonKylie’s Baby • Royar’s Firecracker • Simon’s ChildAbout Nations, Papers, and Where We BelongShakila, Aadil, and MeShakila’s Head • Aadil’s Blood • My PapersAbout Writing, Secrets, and Being ForeignRizia, Farah, Rabeya, and AminaRizia’s Canoe • Farah’s Secret • Rabeya’s Poem • Amina’s Birthday • Rabeya’s PoemsAbout the HijabImani’s ArgumentAbout UniformElsa, Connor, and SairaBecause of Elsa • Because of Connor • Because of the Poor Table • Because of SairaOn the Church in SchoolsTess, Jude, and Oldest OneAbout PrayerEmily, Rabeya, and KamalKamal’s ParisAbout Poverty, Art, and How to Choose a SchoolCheyenne, Darren, My Son, and ScarlettAbout PrizesPhillip and TanyaAbout Selection: Sets and Streams, Grammars and NotJez and Oldest OneJez’s Joke • Oldest One’s Not-Grammar SchoolAbout Teaching EnglishMichael and AllenThe Ineffable Genius of Michael Egbe • Allen’s SmithyAbout Being Out of PlaceSofia and Me, Janie and ChrisSofia’s Spelling • Chris and Janie’s CodeAbout Being WellLianne, Danielle, Kristell, Courtney, and DawudLianne’s Biscuit and Courtney’s Dance • Dawud’s SisterAbout What I Think I Am DoingJason, Aimee, Heya, and ShakilaJason’s Skull • Aimee’s Control • Heya’s PoemAfterwordAcknowledgementsPraise for Kate ClanchyAlso by Kate Clanchy

‌Introduction

Thirty years ago, just after I graduated, I started training to be a teacher. As far as I remember, it was because I wanted to change the world, and a state school seemed the best place to start. Certainly, it wasn’t a compromise or a stopgap career: I had no thought of being a writer, then.

Soon I was much too busy to write even if I had thought of it. Teacher training is hard, a crash course not so much in the study of education, but in the experience of school: in the taking of the register and the movement of chairs from room to room; in the flooding sounds of corridor and stairs; in the educational seasons, from the tempering heat of exam week to the crazy cosiness of Christmas; and above all in the terrifying confidence trick that is classroom discipline. It’s a bodily experience, like learning to be a beekeeper, or an acrobat: a series of stinging humiliations and painful accidents and occasional sublime flights which leave, you either crippled or changed. If you are changed, you are changed for life: your immune system will no longer raise hives when adolescents mock you; you may stand at the door of a noisy classroom with all the calm of a high-wire walker, poised to quell the noise with a twirl of your pole.

Now, I can still confidently tell rowdy adolescents to behave on the bus; still enter a classroom and look at the back row in the indefinable, teacherly way that brings quiet. I still want to change the world and think that school is an excellent place to do it. I have never got tired of classrooms, and have always, except when my children were very young, been employed in some capacity in a state school. Soon after I got my second teaching post, though, I also started to write in my spare time and holidays. A few years later, I began selling some journalism and cut down on my teaching hours; and when I was thirty, I published my first book. Suddenly I found that if I introduced myself in my new guise as a writer I’d be asked what I wrote about, and how, and listened to with a care that seemed exaggerated, even silly. I realized I was accustomed, when I talked about my work, to hardly being listened to at all.

Because everyone tells schoolteachers their jobs: everyone from politicians in parliament and journalists in newspapers to parents at the school concert and pensioners on the bus. The telling ranges from the minutely pedagogical – how we should set, mark, and test; to the philosophical and psychological – how to punish and reward; all the way to the religious – church schools, mindfulness; and politicized issues, such as the reintroduction of grammar schools. The tellings come in the form of laws, political manifestos, editorials, crazed comments in online forums, and – amazingly often – a conversation with someone you have just met. Partly, this happens because people are so interested in schools – most of us were formed there, many of us have children there – but it is also because people feel free to set about a teacher in a way they never would a doctor or a lawyer.

For teachers have a lower social standing than other professionals. This isn’t just because we are paid less, as I found out when I entered the even less well remunerated, but far more prestigious, profession of writing. And it isn’t just because of the messy, practical nature of teachers’ work, either: laymen do not tell a vet how to go about birthing calves, or a gynaecologist where to poke. It may be because so many teachers are women; or perhaps because we work with poor children; and it is certainly because so few of us are posh ourselves (teaching has always been the profession of first resort for graduates from working-class backgrounds). It’s because of gender and class prejudice, because, in short, most teachers are Miss, as working-class pupils call their female teachers in England.

Miss: I have heard so many professional people express distaste for that name, but never a working teacher. Usually, the grounds are sexism, but real children in real schools don’t use ‘Miss’ with any less (or more) respect than ‘Sir’. Miss grates only on the ears of those who have never heard it used well: as it grated on me, as a middle-class Scot, thirty years ago. No longer: Miss is the name I put on like a coat when I go into school; Miss is the shoes I stand in when I call out the kids in the corridor for running or shouting; Miss is my cloak of protection when I ask a weeping child what is wrong; Miss is the name I give another teacher in my classroom, in the way co-parents refer to each other as ‘Mum’ or ‘Dad’. Miss seems to me a beautiful name, because it has been offered to me so often with love.

I would like more people to understand what Miss means, and to listen to teachers. Parts of this book, therefore, are a sort of telling-back: long-stewed accounts of how teachers actually do tackle the apostrophe; of how we exclude and include; of the place of religion in schools; of how the many political changes of the last decades have played out in the classroom; of what a demanding, intellectual, highly skilled profession teaching can be. These confident answers, though, are short and few, because mostly what I have found in school is not certainty, but more questions. Complex questions, very often, about identity, nationality, art, and money, but offered very personally: questions embodied in children.

These questions, and the piercing moments when they were presented to me, make up the bulk of this book. It is structured around them: first around the child and the dilemma she brings, then in a wider grouping of related topics, and finally, loosely, around the course of my thirty years in schools, because it is me, not the children, learning the lessons here. I am in each story, clearly delineated, so that you will know what sort of person is doing the listening and filtering, and, I hope, be able to put my views aside and see the kids more clearly. I want to show you us, children and teachers, ‘Kids’ and ‘Miss’, both in groups, as if in a long school corridor, and then close in, so you can see the stuff we have brought with us from home, so you can hear some of the things we say.

These are not biographies: they are partial views of young people absorbed in their circumstances, on the move, on the cusp, on the turn. But, even in a snapshot, children have the right to privacy just as adults do; and, more strongly than adults, the right to leave their old selves behind them. So, even where the stories are the most admiring, and when individuals positively wanted to be identified, I have detached these accounts from their original names, times, and places. Some stories need more privacy, and I have provided that with occasional very extensive blurring of identity. I have quoted one or two poems, and named two poets, from the anthology of my students’ poems, England: Poems from a School, and used, with express permission, one real name from my past; other than that, no named individual here should be identified as any particular living person. I hope, however, that offence would not be given even if a general identification were made, because I have included nobody, teacher or pupil, about whom I could not write with love.

There is so much to love in school. I am writing this in September, school’s New Year. I am snug in my study, writing: I would rather be in school. Teaching has taken me a long journey out of my class, and my nation; it takes me, every time I go in, out of myself. Today, the corridors are full of the young, of new pupils, and of old pupils renewed. Things have happened to them over the summer: they are different, experimental people, full of themselves, eager to tell me about it. The register is fresh with names; the exercise books are crunched open at the spine, the pages blank and smooth as Larkin’s spring leaves. ‌Begin afresh, they seem to say. afresh, afresh. I fall for it, every year. You come too.

‌About Love, Sex, and the Limits of Embarrassment

‌Callum, Paul, Liam, Akash, Emmanuel, and Javel

‌Callum’s Dog

To begin at the very beginning, with sperm and egg, with condoms and cucumbers, with ghastly line drawings of urethras and sperm ducts, and me, just starting out as a teacher. To go all the way back to the very early nineties, and to a small town on the east coast of Scotland. The Tories had been in power since way before I could vote, and Section 28, which notoriously forbade the ‘promoting’ of homosexuality in schools, was still law. These were the just-post-Thatcher years, and the mining industry in Scotland was a warm corpse, a popped boil, its raw red bings and destroyed communities disfiguring the central belt. They were the Trainspotting years, when drugs were rampant in the estates of Edinburgh, hundreds had died of infected needles, and thousands more were infected with HIV.

And so, one fine day, the High Heejuns, as the powers that be are called in Scotland, looked at this toxic list of miseries, and decided that Something Must be Done, and, as usual, that the Something would probably be easiest and cheapest done in schools. Education, then and now, is far more centralized in Scotland than in England, so it was not long before books, schemes of work, and acetate illustrations for that then-cutting-edge piece of classroom equipment, the overhead projector, were on their way to Blastmuir High School, where I had a temporary job, and to the muggins in charge of the target group of thirteen-year-olds: me.

Lord, how young I was – twenty-four, and in my fluffy-haired photos I look even younger. My Second Years, though, still looked like children to me, even though they were entering their teens: all of them so short, so hunched in their wee anoraks. My eye was tuned in to the multi-cultural London pupils I’d taught the year before, and who seemed, in my memory to be stylish, metropolitan and brightly different from each other. These winter-coloured, mouse-haired children, so pale and so freckly, with their muttering, sibilant names – Fraser, Struan, Susan, Fiona, Catriona – confounded me. I was having difficulty telling them apart.

Or in teaching them, really. It wasn’t that I couldn’t keep them quiet – on the contrary, if I was stern and cold, they were easy to bid – it was that I couldn’t get them to talk. In London, I had become used to vocal children, from talking cultures. My lessons, there, turned always on acting out and making up – if there wasn’t a chance to divide into small groups and perform a scene, preferably with a dance and original song included, my London pupils saw it as an hour wasted.

In Blastmuir, these lessons failed spectacularly. ‘How?’ the Blastmuir kids begged, if I asked them to interpret four lines of Macbeth. ‘Act it out how?’ And, if I forced the issue, they would come to the front, stand in a row and read the lines in a very fast monotone, to their socks. They didn’t dance, here. They knew no songs. My London students had spent their lunchtimes plaiting each other’s hair, Blastmuir kids didn’t touch. Instead, small boys paced the corridors alone with outsize bags; outside class, boys and girls stood in ranks, backs to opposite walls, as if at an eighteenth-century dance. The older boys played football, aggressively, out on the muddy field with those vast sports bags as goalposts, or walked to the chip shop down the long straight high street in groups of four. And if the older girls applied each other’s bright blue eyeshadow, or adjusted the pink stripes of blusher on one another’s freckly cheeks, or added more hairspray to their pale and rigid hair, they must have done so secretly, in the steel toilets, behind the bashed Formica walls, for I never saw it happen.

Even in the staffroom, teachers sat in divided rows, in high-backed chairs permanently dented by particular bottoms. Staff busied themselves rather than talk. One teacher explained to me that the stitching in her hand was a patchwork Christmas tree: they were such popular gifts that she had to start each Easter to have enough to give away at Christmas. ‘Och,’ sighed a melancholy lady who proved to be the Head of French, ‘och, I can’t abide an orange. It’s such a messy froot.’ And I longed for an orange, suddenly, in that green and khaki Nescafé-smelling room where we were stitching for Christmas, if only to prove this was 1992, and not the war.

Blastmuir kids, I decided, were better than my London students at just two things: spelling ‘wh’ sounds, for they had a strong, hooting ‘h’ in their speech that made ‘where’ and ‘which’ entirely different from ‘were’ and ‘witch’; and keeping a straight face while hissing deadly insults at each other from half-closed mouths. This I learned to cultivate: maybe Blastmuir kids wouldn’t make things up, but they loved a formal debate. I found that with a little push you could create a literary argument: for example, between Macduff and Macbeth. Across the classroom, they hissed and hooted Scandinavian syllables at each other, flyting in the style of Thor and Odin: ‘Macbeth, you cannae be king. You’re no the right sort. Youse is a scaffie wee schemie, so youse are.’

‘Scaffie’ meant grubby, uncared for; and ‘schemie’ one who lived in a council housing scheme, as opposed to your ‘ain hoose’. This was an important distinction to my Blastmuir students, one always visible to them however invisible it might be to me, and often raised in class. ‘Schemie’ was a grave insult, but it had nothing on the comeback: ‘Macduff, youse and Banquo is gayboys and youse know it.’ For ‘gay’ was Blastmuir’s biggest word: its enforcer word; the category into which no one would put themselves. It didn’t mean homosexual, exactly, or not just that: it meant foreign, citified; it meant dancing, touching; it meant making things up; it meant verboten, un-Scottish, haram.

‘Gay’ also meant, I suppose, in origin: ‘unwilling to go down the pit’; ‘too soft to go down the pit’; ‘his mother doesn’t want him to go down the pit’; ‘believes he can avoid going down the pit just by being clever’; and, ultimately, ‘sensitive in a way that terrifies his parents because they remember all too well how much it hurts’. But I didn’t understand that, then. Even though I had grown up only a few miles away, in Edinburgh, I knew nothing about mining towns: nothing of how proud and macho a culture has to be, how strongly enforced, how rigorously starved of other possibilities, if generations of men are to be pushed down into the hot dark to work themselves to death. Nothing, either, of the demands that mining families must place on their children to honour their father’s extreme sacrifice: nothing, really, about Blastmuir. I only knew the town after the mine and its work, money, dignity, and purpose had been withdrawn. I knew the brittle husk of culture it left behind, and how to despise it.

But at least my ignorance meant I didn’t worry too much about the AIDS book and the acetates from the council.Anti-gay prejudice, I airily assumed, was something everyone would grow out of, really, quite soon; and anyway, the book and the lessons would probably not even connect to the kids’ anti-‘gay’ prejudices, because the acetates really were all about bodies, not the wider, cultural meaning of ‘gay’. I had taught bodies and Sex Ed before without difficulty, even the cucumber and condom bit, and to less docile children. Explaining the workings of HIV, I reckoned, would probably be an easy lesson, with everyone at once fairly interested and too embarrassed to talk.

Besides, the AIDS book was well chosen, and the kids were enthusiastic as we read it cosily round the class: a sunny, funny Australian novel about a little boy whose mum is ill, and who falls into conversation with a nice man in the hospital. Until we got to the well-placed twist; that is, when of course we realized that the nice man has AIDS, that’s why he’s in the hospital, and that all his kindly wisdom about mortality comes from a personal source. Page 78. I had it ready marked. I had one of the council-prepared acetates on the overhead projector, which I had booked in advance and even plugged in. The acetate had ‘AIDS’ in big letters on the top. Page 77. Here we go. I swivelled to switch on the machine. It roared cheerfully.

But when I turned back around, I realized that the front row had closed their books, and put them away from them on the desks. ‘Hey,’ I said. ‘We’re not finished yet. Keep your bookmarks in.’ But the children behind them had closed their books too. They weren’t rioting, or even giggling: just refusing to read the book.

Then a wee girl said, ‘Mrs Clanchy,’ (they don’t say ‘Miss’ in Scotland; sometimes the children even called me ‘Mrs McClanchy’ as if ‘Mc’ were part of a teacher’s title too), ‘Mrs Clanchy, we cannae read this. We dinnae want to catch AIDS.’ So I turned off the overhead projector, and tried to talk to them about it.

It took me a while to credit it wasn’t a nasty joke: they genuinely thought the book might infect them. It took me longer to take in that I had been much too right about the use of the term ‘gay’. Not only did the kids use the word independently of any connection with homosexuality, most of them believed that homosexuality did not exist as a bodily phenomenon at all. They thought it was just a badness, an idea of infective evil. And it took me all the way till the end of the lesson to realize that in that room of thirteen-year-olds, only one or two were confident even of the mechanics of sex; and most of my way home on the bus to believe it. Dear God, I thought, as we swung into Edinburgh. Oh dear.

Because then I also remembered that I had promised that I would explain everything, next lesson. Everything about sex, that is, all of it, to all of Blastmuir. I had said that anyone in the class who had a question about sex should write it down anonymously and put it in a box on my desk beforehand, and I, Kate, currently disguised as Mrs McClanchy, would tell them the answer. And then, perhaps, I would be arrested, and deported back to London. Or staked out on a bing to be pecked to death by crows. Or die of shame, whichever was quicker.

Why did I say that? Where did I get that idea? I can’t remember. I can only suppose that this was a tactic suggested to me in training sometime; or maybe even on the dreaded council advice sheet. I remember I did not sleep the following night. I remember wearing a smart jacket into the lesson, as if that would defend me. I remember the fear of going into that rigid classroom. I remember it every time people ask me now, when I am about to address a large hall, if I am not afraid; or, when I write about my life, if I am not embarrassed. I remember it, because in relation to that hour, I have never been afraid or embarrassed since.

But look, the kids were eager, quiet, already in their seats, a pile of slips in the box on the desk. They fell silent as I picked the first question out. It was, ‘What do gay people actually do for sex?’ and I took a breath, and, cautiously, as if I were setting foot for the first time on ice of unknown thickness, said sex was the same whatever you did and whoever you did it with. It was about touching and feeling and also feelings, and people did all sorts of things.

Then I looked round the room and saw that the kids were carefully not looking at each other, but at me. No one had sniggered. And so, as if putting another skate on the ice and feeling the bowl of the lake wobble beneath my feet, I set off, finding purchase for my blade. I said the words ‘clitoris’, ‘penis’ and ‘erection’ in a single brief paragraph. Schoosh, schoosh. I’m a good skater; I learned when I was young. I can go backwards as easily as forwards and brake on a sixpence.

I said ‘orgasm’. Someone laughed, but it was a nice laugh. Aye, said someone else, aye, I see.

I picked the next question from the pile: what happens if you are having sex and you want to have a pee? I drew on the board. I made sure they knew the difference between vagina and urethra. I explained what a foreskin was, and that it was possible to have sex while menstruating and that you could use a tampon even if you were a virgin and that everyone masturbates and has wet dreams. Mostly, though, the questions were not about juices, but about love: could anybody love; could gay people love; could you change, later on? I only had to say the words aloud, and say yes.

The sun came in through the seventies windows and warmed us all. The stiff children of Blastmuir eased back from their desks or leant cheerfully across them. Eyes met mine which had never done so before, small Scottish mouths hung open, eager for more information to be spooned in. I felt as if I were in a different classroom: as if we had travelled through the looking glass to a new country, the one beyond embarrassment.

In fact, all children will behave perfectly, I believe, if they want to know something very much, about sex or anything else, and an adult sincerely sets out to tell them. And most humans, whatever prejudices they avow, will set them aside when difference is made real in a person. (If, that is, they are not afraid.) But I didn’t know that then: that was when I learned it.

At the end of the lesson, Callum came up to me. Callum, in a class of undersized, underdeveloped children, by far the least tall, the least developed. Callum with the heavy eyelids, the lopsided face, the slack jaw.

‘Mrs McClanchy?’ said Callum.

‘Yes?’

‘Whit wis the name for men and men?’

‘That was homosexuality, Callum.’

‘Aye. And whit wis the name for women and men?’

‘That’s heterosexuality, Callum.’

‘Aye. Well, when I grow up, I’m no’ going to have either o’ them. Ah think Ah’ll just have a big dog.’

No one said ‘fluid’ then – gender-fluid, fluid identity – but fluid is a good word for that afternoon. The room seemed liquid, lacking in barriers. And fluid was what those children were, behind their stern names and rigid codes. Changeable, molten, and warm as any child; waiting for a mould, hoping there would be space for the swelling, shrinking and unknowable quantity of themselves. For Callum, that space needed to include the possibility of living on his own, and that was as important to him as the possibility, for surely one child in that class, and very probably more, of falling in love with someone of your own sex. So, I didn’t say that would be bestiality, Callum, though the thought flickered across my mind. I said yes, yes, Callum, you could do that. A dog would be very nice. That, Callum, would be grand.

‌Paul’s Boots

After Blastmuir, I went to work in its (distorting) mirror-image, its English opposite, the Essex conurbation to the east of London; a place which had grown as fast as Blastmuir had shrunk, whose industries – finance, construction, services – were as thriving and Thatcherite as Blastmuir’s mines were redundant and Old Labour. Gavin & Stacey, the ascendency of Nigel Farage, and above all the television series TOWIE, have now made this bit of Essex, with its nightclubs and vajazzles, nationally famous. Then, it was not; though its ferociously strong consumerist culture was every bit as distinctive.

My college was brand new: the first sixth-form college in an area where kids had traditionally left school at sixteen. But most of this area was new – or at least post-war. The nearest town looked like a Middle American city: mall-centred, concrete, with long streets lined with semis. The kids looked Middle American too: plump and handsome and tow-headed; better set up than the Blastmuir kids, and much more showily dressed. Boys here wore pink – pastel polo shirts, buttoned up to the neck, very clean – and had pierced ears and sometimes noses, and one lad, a Prince Albert ring (at least, he passed round the receipt). Girls had sprayed hair and full make-up and push-up bras, and both sexes wore multiple gold chains round their necks, often with letters spelling out their names; and several rings on both hands, chunky gold ones, diamond chip ones, and ones with initial letters deep set, as if ready for the delivery of an ‘Essex kiss’.

Also, miniature solitaires, for engagements were commonplace. So was sex. Those were the years of the Essex girl joke: How does an Essex girl put out the light after sex? She closes the car door. How can you tell if an Essex girl has had an orgasm? She drops her chips. The kids told these jokes cheerfully, with pride and aplomb, and though they surely weren’t all having sex in cars most nights, they certainly went regularly to the local nightclubs and talked freely about it; it was an approved-of, almost compulsory activity, something you did with your friends and cousins and even your mum. Many of these sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds had long-standing boyfriends and girlfriends, and brought them home to stay with their parents. The generation gap, in general, was narrow and blurred: parents turned up to parents’ evenings and enrolment events wearing the same brash jewellery and sportswear as their children, and, in the face of reports and university forms, displayed much the same mixture of ostentatious indifference and chronic anxiety.

In fact, this was one of our big problems. School, in the sixties and seventies, hadn’t done much for the Essex parents. They’d been bundled in secondary moderns and early comprehensives and mostly offered nothing after the age of sixteen. Now, it was hard to persuade their children that it could do something for them. For these were kids who did not want to rebel against their parents: it was too comfy at home. One of our favourite texts was Willy Russell’s Stags and Hens, a funny, soppy play about working-class Liverpudlians in a nightclub. The dialect was unfamiliar, but the set-up – rigidly divided genders from a loving but limited working-class culture, stuck forever in a nightclub – made perfect sense to our students. The only problem came with the denouement, when the heroine makes the decision to leave her home and possible marriage for a more adventurous life. Even at the supposedly rebellious age of seventeen, even when the heroine was being offered a rock star, our students generally thought she should stay at home and marry, just as, when we were studying the War Poets, they still thought conscription was a good idea.

So that made literary discussion hard. Also, I kept coming up against strange blanks, walls of absolute ignorance such as who Adam and Eve might be, and what was the Garden of Eden. My A Level class thought Queen Victoria was ‘the one with the red hair and the pearls’. When I read Herbert’s ‘The Flower’ with them I was driven to uproot and bring in a daffodil, just to show them what a root was, and a stem. More than that, though, and more than any other kids I’ve taught before or since, they didn’t want to enquire about books, or relate them to themselves. Teaching Othello to Asian and Turkish girls in North London had been easy because they knew what racism was and what an honour code meant: the play opened them to talking about their home cultures and often to criticizing them. In Essex, whether the text was Orwell or Thomas Hardy, the students refused to relate them to their families; yet all of them must have come to this town from somewhere else within a couple of generations, whether from fields like Hardy or cities like Orwell.

At first, when I started out with classes here, I tried my favourite introductory game: asking the students where their name came from. In Blastmuir, it often yielded a close, proud family history: there, children were still named for relatives, and boys after their mother’s maiden name. In North London, this gave you an instant cultural history of the child: the Hindu horoscope that had been calculated for them, or, from a Nigerian girl: ‘I am the last of seven children, and my name means “Enough”.’ By the sixth form, the same students were often eager to supply detailed family histories of migration, recently from Uganda, further back from Italy, Poland, Serbia, Ireland, and, very importantly when we were studying Daniel Deronda and when Oliver! was the nation’s favourite school play, from layers of pogroms in Russia, the Ukraine, and Nazi Germany.

Here in Essex, there were many of the same names – Lobregllio, Abrams, O’Riordin, Capstick, Katz – but, here, no one wanted to claim the heritage or the stories, even when we read Farrukh Dhondy and Judith Kerr and went on a trip up London’s Brick Lane. The few mixed-race kids were even more aggressively shut down, rejecting any kind of ancestor, Caribbean or otherwise. ‘I’m normal, Miss,’ all the kids would say. ‘Normal.’

But what did they think normal was? I asked my tutor group what percentage of the population of the UK they thought was non-white. About 75 per cent, they replied, firmly, without hesitation. Why did they think that? It’s what you see, they said. Did they? How could they, when they were so white?

It was only slowly, over years spent travelling back from college to my home in Spitalfields, that I saw what they meant. As you left their part of Essex and went west into London through Dagenham and Tower Hamlets, people became more and more mixed. Beyond Walthamstow, people really were 75 per cent of colour, and came from all over the world. When my Essex students went anywhere, they went the same way as me: west, the direction of their parents’ commute; and so the land to the west, the wildly mixed East End of London, was what they thought constituted the rest of England. The East End was also the place their parents had left, or, often, perceived themselves to have been displaced from by new immigrants, or to have worked their way out of using their grit and endurance: in all these stories, white Essex figured as the Promised Land.

So urban Essex really was like America: a new, colonial country, and like all new cultures, it was self-conscious and brittle. Several of my students probably were just two generations out of Spitalfields or Stepney, seven from a potato famine or a pogrom, but their families didn’t want to remember that, not anymore, because then they wouldn’t belong in Essex, wouldn’t fit in its narrow ‘normal’. There could be nothing gender-fluid about such a ‘normal’ either, for all the bling, pizzazz and pink inherited from the Cockney markets; any deviance was threatening. There was nothing slipshod here, nothing worn-in or grubby; the whole place was as stiff as new shoes. And so, for all the sexual precocity, ‘gay’ was as much of an enforcing word here as ever it was in Blastmuir, and if it did not include male ornamentation, it still definitely covered theatre and singing. It had a special geographical sense too, which coincided with the prevailing racial prejudice: inner London and its activities, except ‘The City’, where many aspired to work, was ‘gay’.

Paul, then, was an oddity, and a refreshment. He was taking a Drama qualification with GCSEs in German and Media Studies on the side. He was tall and slender with floppy, dark-red hair and sleepy eyes. He wore cashmere jumpers, turned-up trousers, and a single earring, and slinked about, curling up on desks and tables like a cat. If you said, ‘Good morning,’ he would roll his eyes and say, ‘Good? if you say so,’ and pout, for he was dedicated entirely to camp (school of John Inman, not Susan Sontag).

At first, I assumed this knowing manner meant he was also ironical and clever, and that the re-sit GCSEs were some sort of mistake; but, as I got to know him, this proved not to be the case. Paul was expert at catching my tone, and giving me an encouraging wink, but his punctuation was poor and his essays no better than anyone else’s. He hadn’t read anything and didn’t intend to. He didn’t know the cultural references that went with his sophisticated manner, neither Stonewall nor Spartacus. He was resolutely non-political: Section 28, the gathering point for almost all gay activism then, seemed to mean nothing to him at all.

Paul knew one thing, though, and that was how to keep himself safe. Somehow, in the Essex world, there was a place for camp just as there was a place for pink: a small one. Paul was considered hilarious, and his camp remarks were roared at even when they had scarcely any content. Bizarrely enough, he was not considered ‘gay’, and was welcomed in all social groups – though he did seem to slip in and out of them, making his jokes, then disappearing before anyone could tire of him. He went, it seemed, to the nightclubs with the rest of them, for his dancing was legendary, and somehow, so well had he established the myth of himself, nobody thought it strange that he always danced alone.

‌He knew musicals, too, both from watching them on videos and going to the West End. He induced the Drama teacher to put on Cabaret, with which he was particularly obsessed, and dominated the stage as the Master of Ceremonies, pouncing and posing: Life is a cabaret, old chum. Come to the cabaret. The three-day run of the play was evidently an ecstatic experience for him; he was pale and exalted in all lessons and handed in no work for a month.

‘Is that what you really want to do, Paul?’ I asked. ‘Theatre?’

‘Oh no,’ he said. ‘No. I just like that musical. I wanted to do that. Not the real thing.’ And his Drama teacher, surprisingly – since Cabaret was the best show the college had ever put on – agreed. Paul had, she said, no range at all, no capacity to read or explore a play, and not much of a voice; he could just dance, quite well, and be camp, amazingly well. Paul was no David Bowie, or Boy George, though his non-conformity probably came from the same source.

After the play, Paul turned his attention to Media Studies. This was mostly coursework (a viable system in those far-off, pre-internet days) and it ended with a major project. Before Photoshop, pre-YouTube, such projects were daft, amateur, and creative: hand-painted advertising campaigns for imaginary perfumes; laboriously typed newspapers. The college video camera, though, was most in demand. Stop motion animations advertising ice creams were popular, as were ‘promo’ videos in the style of MTV. Videos were supposed to last a maximum of ten minutes. Paul, though, declared he wanted to make a horror film.

He recruited a cameraman and sidekick, the pale and silent Tony. He created a script. The film, he declared, would ‘explore the genre of horror by performing it’, and it would star an aluminium trolley from the science department, the college lift, and a good deal of tomato ketchup. In a series of low, long shots influenced by The Shining, the trolley would sweep the college corridors, looking for victims. In the style of The Birds, it would hypnotize a blonde girl into the lift using tweeting noises (Tony, on a water-filled plastic bird whistle). The doors would close, and more sinister bubbling noises would be heard, and then, in a reference to Carrie, the lift would be opened and found to be covered with blood. Finally, the trolley, still aiming low, would be chased down the corridors in Hammer House of Horror style by the ever-useful Tony – armed with a water pistol – and apprehended.

Making something as ambitious as this took weeks and required much pre-booking of the camera. I got fond of the boys, though, through the process. Tony had ideas and patience of his own, and, unlike Paul, always listened to what I suggested. He painstakingly made a set of stop motion credits for the film, in which Plasticine blood leaked through bars and formed itself into letters: Night of the Killer Trolley. The letters got up on their feet and ran away. He pushed Paul into actually writing the project’s compulsory accompanying commentary, and got it to passable length and depth – though Paul did insist on writing it in pink ink and sprinkling it with references to ‘friends of Dorothy’. As for Paul himself, I could not but admire his tenacity; he was prepared to spend three hours getting a single trolley shot right. And his good nature was steel-plated, ocean-going: Five in the evening? Six? ‘No problem, Kate, you know you want to be here really. I’m your very favourite student.’ By then, he probably was.

The final film was smooth, and clever, and deeply silly, and altogether more than the sum of its parts. The exam board, who must have been short on laughs that year, commented that they had never seen anything quite like it, and gave it an A. That was the first A of any kind that Paul had ever got in school, and when he found out in September, he and Tony went out and bought me a large box of Roses chocolates, and we all sat a while in my late summer classroom, sucking on strawberry creams.

The boys weren’t coming back to school; they had both, they said, got jobs in Marks & Spencer. I made no attempt, despite the A, to persuade either of them to reconsider and do A Levels. Tony had never had academic pretensions; and it was hard to imagine a better venue for Paul and his curious portfolio of talents than a large shop, where he could sail the escalators, approve shirts, and tighten trousers, where he could focus forever, indefatigably, on the frivolous. Besides, Paul seemed so happy. He regaled me with the tale of his holiday: how he and Tony had got jobs by the seaside and bought an ancient car and driven it to Le Touquet, where it broke, terminally, so they’d had to hitch home. How they stayed up later and later each night until they became nocturnal animals, and only communicated with their parents by Post-it note, left on the fridge.

‘Haven’t seen them for weeks, have we, Tone?’ said Paul.

It was the image of the yellow Post-it, trembling on the fridge, which let me know that the boys were lovers, probably had been for months, hiding in plain sight in this hostile environment. I was filled with admiration; without politics, without adult help, and seemingly without damage, these boys had defeated the rigid prohibitions that surrounded them. Like the children of Blastmuir, they were fluid, really. Like Tony’s Plasticine letters, they had magically poured themselves through the bars and re-formed in the shape of their happiness; hopped into an ancient, uninsured car and driven off forever. Rage against Essex would almost certainly come later; rage was deserved. For now, they had M&S, and the beach at Le Touquet.

‘Look,’ said the normally silent Tony, stretching out a leg with a camp, brightly laced Doc Marten at the end of it. ‘My boots. They’re exactly the same as Paul’s.’

‘Yes?’ I said. Their turned-up jeans were identical too.

‘But,’ said Tony, ‘we wasn’t together when we bought them! We was in two different shops at the same time and we bought the same boots!’

‘Telepathy,’ said Paul. ‘You see, Kate?’ And I agreed that telepathy was what it must be.

‌Liam’s Club

‘Gay’. Four years into working at my college – I stayed there seven years, I loved my boss and my colleagues – ‘gay’ had become my shorthand for all the interdictions of Essex, and I hated it with a far-from-academic passion. ‘Gay’ was the reason only girls could study English Literature, and boys who liked words had to take English Language and Media Studies. ‘Gay’ was the threat that stopped boys studying foreign languages. (The Head of French really was gay, perhaps a double-edged sword.) ‘Gay’ stopped us reading Carol Ann Duffy; ‘gay’ made parents complain on parents’ evening that I was disturbing their child’s mind. ‘Gay’ stopped boys coming to Poetry Group; ‘gay’ stopped poetry full stop. ‘Gay’ was the dam in the stream, the opposite of fluid, the opposite of thought, and it made teaching English A Level in particular very hard because when it comes right down to it, all great literature is subversive.

And damn it, I’d always wanted to teach A Level English Literature. Actually, I’d always wanted to study an A Level; I did Scottish Higher, in a class of twenty-five sitting in iron forms in alphabetical order. A Level, I believed, was the opposite: a lounging, japing, delightful sort of course. Not in Essex. A Levels were designed in the 1950s for grammar schools, for at most 10 per cent of the school population, a pre-university course. Despite alterations, this was not suitable for our college; for the 50 per cent or so of the school population who’d got a C or B grade at GCSE, who sat waiting for enlightenment in classes of twenty or more. There was no lounging involved, just heaps of marking and a lot of C grades.

Perhaps, I thought, sourly, perhaps japing and lounging still occurred in the famous grammar school half a mile down the road, the school that sucked up all the bright middle-class kids in the area, leaving us with the resentful leftovers. Perhaps in the grammar school, in the proper conditions, among ten bright pupils sitting round the library table of a sunny afternoon, Othello was still fun. In our place, with the 90 per cent of the population who cannot see the point of literary criticism, it was uphill all the way.

‘Kids – why does Iago hate Othello? Doesn’t he love him, a little? “He hath a daily beauty in his life that makes me ugly”… Don’t we all sometimes hate people as well as love them, desire as well as like our friends…’ What I meant was, please relax your judgements, just for a moment. Please. Let yourselves think. But it was impossible. The kids doing re-sit GCSE, I found, were more open-minded, probably because they were less successful at Essex life, and therefore had less to protect. I started to teach more and more GCSE; the year of Tony and Paul, I opted for it as my entire timetable.