ON LONELINESS

SHE buries her face in her books in class. Students around her giggle about boys in their old primary school. They take photos of themselves when the teacher is distracted. She continues with her work. She feels a strange sort of bond with her teacher. She can sense that her teacher cares about her, even if it is in some fairly insignificant way. In class, the students are seated at round tables. It must be a new kind of learning. There are six girls at most of the tables. One table has eight students. Her table has two. She has something in common with this other student. This one, also, comes to the school without a familiar peer from her primary school. The rub, though, is that they are both shy. Too shy to talk. Suddenly there are two more students coming over to balance things up. They are from the noisy table of eight. See, the teacher is thinking of her. She knows it is an opportunity to shed some loneliness, to discover an unlikely kindred spirit. To have somebody to communicate with, even to conspire with or giggle about boys from the old primary school with, and secretly take photos. However, all her flimsy dreams are dashed when she sees the downcast look of the girls approaching. They hate this. They are scornful of having to move. The look on their face says it. Anger and utter contempt for having to move, and embarrassment and disdain for having to sit with her, the girl who buries her face in her books.

HE waits for the bell so he can trudge off to class. The office he has been allocated is dull and suffocating. Almost everyone is female. He has nothing in common with the other men. The women gossip and talk about their night out and their dinners. Sometimes there is nauseating, artificial laughter. The classroom is his sanctuary. The students smile at him. It is the first smile he has received since leaving his children at home at the beginning of the day. He feels there may be some genuine interest. They ask him about mobile phones. His ignorance of this subject amuses them. He seems of another world entirely. They tease him about Instagram and they queue up to show him the new applications they have discovered, ones that are buzzing around the schoolyard.

SHE waits for the bell so she can trudge off to lunch. All the girls from the entire school sit around in small groups, talk, laugh insanely, cross their legs and play with their mobile phones. At primary school she was attached, like an afterthought, to a large group that tolerated her weirdness. It was somewhere safe to go each day, and it mattered to her less and less that it was manufactured by a kind teacher. At this school, the high school, there are new rules and new cliques, and she hasn’t worked them out yet. A pale, undernourished girl has smiled at her a couple of times on the first few days, and each morning she thought she might seek her out more and more. But then, a week and a half into her new environment, the pale girl has found a place, and now their eyes never met. What to do each day. There is the beautiful library. Keeping busy by filling her water bottle. Speaking to the teacher on yard duty. She soon becomes worried that her solitariness will be noticed, and an uncomfortable primary school pattern will emerge. She thinks she might have Asperger’s.

HE sits in the staffroom alone at lunch, eating simple sandwiches, and trying not to feel odd and look odd, amidst the swarming buzz of teachers interacting with each all around him. He picks up threads of conversations, and sometimes the earnest discussions sound important and meaningful. ‘Don’t forget we need to arrange a time for the guest speaker’, or ‘Have you had time to go over the curriculum that we discussed at the meeting?’ Then there are other snippets of a more personal nature that make him feel downcast and solitary, and alien, like he might have Asperger’s. ‘How is your daughter getting on in her new job?’ ‘When does Marcie get out of hospital?’ ‘Are the kittens you bought at Christmas showing any signs of improvement?’ He feels floored by all of this. It makes him feel sick to the stomach. He cannot find any appetite for his food. He wants to let out a scream. He knows nothing about any of these people, and yet, they know so much about each other. He waits for the bell so he can trudge off to class.

EVERYBODY files in. The high pitched chatter of people who have just met. She finds her seat at the round table nearest the window. Everyone sits at the same seat each day. She likes this. It is one of the only things she likes about school. She knows this teacher better than all the others. She loves his bearded, serene face. She loves the vulnerability. She knows she is the only one who can sense it. Yes, his voice booms out sometimes, especially when he is reading. And yes, he strides around the room purposefully, checking hand writing and checking books. But she catches his face at other times, and she sees it is sometimes pained. The mouth pursed, the eyes glazed, the brow furrowed. She yearns to touch his hand.

THE bell goes. He dismisses them quickly, with a strong sense of relief. His mind’s not right, like the insane man in that Robert Lowell poem about skunks. He feels the class didn’t go particularly well. He felt more vulnerable than usual. And now he has to face the challenge of going back to his office. Suddenly he is filled with dread. He had a panic attack at the dentist recently, and now he feels something similar coming on. It’s these walls. He feels like they are closing in. He longs to rush outside and breathe in the air through to his lungs. He is glad the students have left. But then he sees her. The quiet girl who has had trouble making friends. She has, for some reason, decided to linger behind. He glances up at her, looking at her behind a valley of tears. It is excruciating but he cannot help it. Then her face puckers up, and she is crying too. Her hand is on his shoulder, and together their cries reverberate around the otherwise empty classroom.

A true third person account of teaching in Nottinghamshire, mildly censored

George had been at the hellish school for three days now. The only pleasant thing about each school day was the lovely drive. Every morning he would depart from his Nottingham home at 8 o’clock and slip the Nick Cave cassette on in his car. The music was buoyant, with bold, pulsating rhythms: The music not only woke him up; it also seemed to instil in him some confidence, some Dutch courage he needed to just simply arrive at his destination. The drive was thirty minutes and the pretty roads wended their way through tiny villages, some with friendly post offices and proud little community churches. It was winter and the fields were green and usually wet with rain. Every day so far on the same bend he would see black birds all in a row alight from a wire fence. Relaxed and nodding with the music he would greet cows and sheep with a toot from his horn. School children from various district schools were always waiting by the side of one of the narrow roads, holding an umbrella and text messaging at the same time. He didn’t quite have the courage to toot them as well, although he always wanted to.



The lovely uplifting drive ended each day at the black, sombre school gates. The English co-ordinator this particular day smiled at him, grateful it seemed that he was back for the third day now. A silent understanding between them as if to say ‘we appreciate the fact that that you’re hanging in’. She was diminutive and  looked, George had told his wife, just like the malevolent dwarf in the Julie Christie film ‘Don’t Look Now’. As was the pattern so far there was very little chatter in the staff room. Tired mouths sipping coffee. Looks of resignation. Foot weary soldiers who know they are about to lose yet another battle.

George crept away to his form room and saw several students in the corridor leaning against furniture, talking loudly. Unlike other schools he’d taught in, he couldn’t find any art work or posters on the cream- coloured walls. A couple of empty glass display cabinets and a student’s yearly planner on the floor. As he arrived at Room 41 to place his key in the lock he noticed that for the second day running somebody had forced pencil shavings and bits of paper in the lock. It took several minutes to dig it all out. He wondered who had done this and why. What was the point? At least this time there wasn’t saliva on the door handle as well.
Time stretched inexorably towards 9 o’clock. The form meeting with the year 11’s passed without too much trouble. George even had some banter with a girl he called ‘Polly Page’ because she looked like Polly Page. ‘The calm before the storm’ he prophesied to himself. Soon, outside the door, the day’s first class announced itself with a loud thud against the wall, someone rummaging for last place with some obnoxious shouting and swearing.

This was a Year 10 English class that George spent some of the night worrying about. He hadn’t done any photocopying, yet he knew some of the students wouldn’t have their anthologies. They ‘filed in’ in an ugly mass. After setting some comprehension work that only about half the class had bothered listening to, George left them to it, interjecting now and then with an unassertive ‘Get back to your work!’ and ‘A bit quieter so we can all think!’

George knew this had little effect, and he now spent several minutes tuning into some conversations. He couldn’t believe his ears. Courtney and her friends were compiling a list of boys’ names and drawing bar graphs. Noise he could tolerate, however obscenity offended something deep in his consciousness. He lurched forward and yelled at the group and told them to continue with the set work. His voice, louder and more urgent this time, drew a few furtive glances in the first rows, and only amusement at the back.

Nevertheless this surprisingly settled things down somewhat. In a one- hour lesson, only half an hour remained. George contemplated asking for quiet to see, as a class together, whether or not they could co-operate enough to discuss the first answers. Then, suddenly, the mood of the classroom changed.
Courtney decided to yell a question at one of the girls she disliked near the back of the room. It was loud, insistent, and received a huge reaction. ‘Charlotte, is it true you….’ His temperament inflamed, George dealt with it quickly. ‘Ok, get out! I’m sick of your disgusting conversations. Your behaviour isn’t good enough for my room. Out now and shut the door after you!’

Courtney did go, arching her spine and walking haughtily towards the door. As she passed George she looked at him steadfastly and repeated a further obscenity. George simply uttered ‘charming’ and to his surprise there was no more than a snigger floating across the floor. It was clear that some sort of mutual moral code had been broken, and over twenty people at that moment agreed that Courtney had to go.
Only a few days here, and already George knew that things were done by telephone at this school. He rang the Deputy Head, Mr P, who had shown him around at the beginning of the week. ‘Yes, yes, I know Courtney, I’ll speak to her myself’.

In the ‘palatial’ surrounds of the staffroom George was delivered the sobering news from seasoned staff members: ‘Forget it. The girls at this school, and especially the pretty ones like Courtney, have Mr P wrapped around their little finger. She’ll say ‘now would I speak like that Mr P?’ and he’ll say ‘Well I hope not, Courtney, that doesn’t sound like you’, and she’ll say ‘Now Mr P you know I’m always a good little girl’ and he’ll say ‘Well I hope I don’t hear any more stories about you upsetting your teachers..’
In the circumstances George felt it might be better approaching the Head of Year 10. He didn’t want the little vixen in his class again without an apology. He told Mr P that this was his preferred option, and it was all sorted out, albeit rather haphazardly. “Oh, alright, I’ll take your class then, but I can only give you fifteen minutes!”

George met the Year 10 Head in rather unfortunate circumstances in the corridor near her office some twenty minutes later. “Are you the teacher that I’ve been told I’m having a meeting with period five? Well thanks very much, that’s my only spare for the entire day.”

Her office was, to put it simply, a mess. The school had in place a system in which teachers would make a report about student misconduct on either blue or pink forms: blue was for the more mild transgressions, and pink was used for more serious classroom breaches of discipline. George had filled in a pink form for the incident with Courtney earlier. There were a few blue forms scattered on top of the Head’s filing cabinet. For the pink forms, there was a large pile. George estimated about forty or fifty. Books about accounting and legal studies were lying on the dirty shagpile floor, and a spectacular poster advertising Cumbria was wrinkled and coming away from the wall. A cheap desktop calendar displayed ‘June 30’ which was a Friday about three months ago.

The Head, herself, was hardly a sight to inspire. Greasy hair. Tired, bulging eyes. A grimace as she got up to stand beside her desk. And a large mass of fat circling her waist making a wobbling ring. George would feel several emotions whilst he was inside the Head’s office. The first of these was pity.
“Take a look at me. What do you see?”
“Sorry?”
“I’m fat, aren’t I? Look at me. Do you think I’m happy in this job? Do you know how much work I’ve got to do? I won’t even get to have my lunch today. This job’s driving me crazy. Can you tell I’ve let everything go?”

George began to tell the Head she should resign, that it isn’t worth it, when Courtney knocked on the door.
The interview wasn’t going very well- Courtney had her back to George much of the time as the Head asked for assurances of better behaviour. These assurances were so pathetic that George decided he must be firm. He wanted Courtney to sign a statement stipulating that she would only talk in George’s room if she was asked to- by George. After all George ‘couldn’t be confident about what might come out of Courtney’s mouth’. Furthermore, if she broke this necessary rule, George would have no choice but to tell her she must leave.

It seemed that both The Head and Courtney were so anxious for this meeting to end that within a minute or two the form was signed and the meeting was over. As unsatisfactory as the meeting was, Courtney didn’t come to George’s class again after this. So in a sense there was a positive outcome. Not long after George received a blunt letter from Courtney’s mother telling him he was ‘spineless’, or words to that effect. For four more weeks George and Nick Cave made the trip every weekday morning and evening. Then it all came to an end when another window opened in Gloucestershire, which offered a much sunnier and all ‘round more pleasant vista.