by Alan Warner
‘It is true,’ said Mr Heine, ‘but as I have said it was a long time ago and best forgotten about. I was small and defenceless and I wore glasses. I think, Mrs Bingham, that you yourself taught in the school in those days.’
‘Sugar?’ said Mrs Bingham. ‘Yes. As it was during the war years and most of the men were away I taught Latin. My husband was deferred.’
‘Amo, amas, amat,’ said Mr Heine. ‘I remember I was in your class as well.
‘I was not a memorable child,’ he added, stirring his coffee reflectively, ‘so you probably won’t remember me either. But I do remember the strong rhymes of Pope which have greatly influenced me. And so, Mr Bingham, when I heard you were retiring I came along as quickly as my legs would carry me, without tarrying. I am sure that you chose the right profession. I myself have chosen the right profession. You, sir, though you did not know it at the time placed me in that profession.’
Mr Bingham glanced proudly at his wife.
‘I remember the particular incident very well,’ said Mr Heine. ‘You must remember that I was a lonely little boy and not good at games.
Keeping wicket was not cricket.
Bat and ball were not for me suitable at all.
And then again I was being set upon by older boys and given a drubbing every morning in the boiler room before classes commenced. The boiler room was very hot. I had a little talent in those days, not much certainly, but a small poetic talent. I wrote verses which in the general course of things I kept secret. Thus it happened one afternoon that I brought them along to show you, Mr Bingham. I don’t know whether you will remember the little incident, sir.’
‘No,’ said Mr Bingham, ‘I can’t say that I do.’
‘I admired you, sir, as a man who was very enthusiastic about poetry, especially Tennyson. That is why I showed you my poems. I remember that afternoon well. It was raining heavily and the room was indeed so gloomy that you asked one of the boys to switch on the lights. You said, “Let’s have some light on the subject, Hughes.” I can remember Hughes quite clearly, as indeed I can remember your quips and jokes. In any case Hughes switched on the lights and it was a grey day, not in May but in December, an ember of the done sun in the sky. You read one of my poems. As I say, I can’t remember it now but it was not in rhyme. “Now I will show you the difference between good poetry and bad poetry,” you said, comparing my little effort with Tennyson’s work, which was mostly in rhyme. When I left the room I was surrounded by a pack of boys led by blue-eyed fair-haired Colin. The moral of this story is that I went into advertising and therefore into rhyme. It was a revelation to me.
A revelation straight from God
That I should rhyme as I was taught.
So you can see, sir, that you are responsible for the career in which I have flourished.’
‘I don’t believe it, sir,’ said Mr Bingham furiously.
‘Don’t believe what, sir?’
‘That that ever happened. I can’t remember it.’
‘It was Mrs Gross my landlady who saw the relevant passage about you in the paper. I must go immediately, I told her. You thought he was a farmer but I knew differently. That man does not know the influence he has had on his scholars. That is why I came,’ he said simply.
‘Tell me, sir,’ he added, ‘is your son married now?’
‘Colin?’
‘The same, sir.’
‘Yes, he’s married. Why do you wish to know?’
‘For no reason, sir. Ah, I see a photograph on the mantelpiece. In colour. It is a photograph of the bridegroom and the bride.
How should we not hail the blooming bride
With her good husband at her side?
What is more calculated to stabilise a man than marriage? Alas I never married myself. I think I never had the confidence for such a beautiful institution. May I ask the name of the fortunate lady?’
‘Her name is Norah,’ said Mrs Bingham sharply. ‘Norah Mason.’
‘Well, well,’ said Mr Heine enthusiastically. ‘Norah, eh? We all remember Norah, don’t we? She was a lady of free charm and great beauty. But I must not go on. All those unseemly pranks of childhood which we should consign to the dustbins of the past. Norah Mason, eh?’ and he smiled brightly. ‘I am so happy that your son has married Norah.’
‘Look here,’ said Mr Bingham, raising his voice.
‘I hope that my felicitations, congratulations, will be in order for them too, I sincerely hope so, sir. Tell me, did your son Colin have a scar on his brow which he received as a result of having been hit on the head by a cricket ball?’
‘And what if he had?’ said Mr Bingham.
‘Merely the sign of recognition, sir, as in the Greek tragedies. My breath in these days came in short pants, sir, and I was near-sighted. I deserved all that I got. And now sir, forgetful of all that, let me say that my real purpose in coming here was to give you a small monetary gift which would come particularly from myself and not from the generality. My salary is a very comfortable one. I thought of something in the region of . . . Oh look at the time. It is nearly half-past eleven at night.
At eleven o’clock at night
The shades come out and then they fight.
I was, as I say, thinking of something in the order of . . . ’
‘Get out, sir,’ said Mr Bingham angrily. ‘Get out, sir, with your insinuations. I do not wish to hear any more.’
‘I beg your pardon,’ said Mr Heine in a wounded voice.
‘I said “Get out, sir.” It is nearly midnight. Get out.’
Mr Heine rose to his feet. ‘If that is the way you feel, sir. I only wished to bring my felicitations.’
‘We do not want your felicitations,’ said Mrs Bingham. ‘We have enough of them from others.’
‘Then I wish you both goodnight and you particularly, Mr Bingham as you leave the profession you have adorned for so long.’
‘GET OUT, sir,’ Mr Bingham shouted, the veins standing out on his forehead.
Mr Heine walked slowly to the door, seemed to wish to stop and say something else, but then changed his mind and the two left in the room heard the door being shut.
‘I think we should both go to bed, dear,’ said Mr Bingham, panting heavily.
‘Of course, dear,’ said his wife. She locked the door and said, ‘Will you put the lights out or shall I?’
‘You may put them out, dear,’ said Mr Bingham. When the lights had been switched off they stood for a while in the darkness, listening to the little noises of the night from which Mr Heine had so abruptly and outrageously come.
‘I can’t remember him. I don’t believe he was in the school at all,’ said Mrs Bingham decisively.
‘You are right, dear,’ said Mr Bingham who could make out the outline of his wife in the half-darkness. ‘You are quite right, dear.’
‘I have a good memory and I should know,’ said Mrs Bingham as they lay side by side in the bed. Mr Bingham heard the cry of the owl, throatily soft, and turned over and was soon fast asleep. His wife listened to his snoring, staring sightlessly at the objects and furniture of the bedroom which she had gathered with such persistence and passion over the years.
The Play
When he started teaching first Mark Mason was very enthusiastic, thinking that he could bring to the pupils gifts of the poetry of Wordsworth, Shakespeare and Keats. But it wasn’t going to be like that, at least not with Class 3g. 3g was a class of girls who, before the raising of the school-leaving age, were to leave at the end of their fifteenth year. Mark brought them ‘relevant’ poems and novels including Timothy Winters and Jane Eyre but quickly discovered that they had a fixed antipathy to the written word. It was not that they were undisciplined – that is to say they were not actively mischievous – but they were thrawn: he felt that there was a solid wall between himself and them and that no matter how hard he sold them Jane Eyre, by reading chapters of it aloud, and comparing for instance the food in the school refectory that Jane Eyre had to eat
with that which they themselves got in their school canteen, they were not interested. Indeed one day when he was walking down one of the aisles between two rows of desks he asked one of the girls, whose name was Lorna and who was pasty-faced and blond, what was the last book she had read, and she replied,
‘Please, sir, I never read any books.’
This answer amazed him for he could not conceive of a world where one never read any books and he was the more determined to introduce them to the activity which had given himself so much pleasure. But the more enthusiastic he became, the more eloquent his words, the more they withdrew into themselves till finally he had to admit that he was completely failing with the class. As he was very conscientious this troubled him, and not even his success with the academic classes compensated for his obvious lack of success with this particular class. He believed in any event that failure with the non-academic classes constituted failure as a teacher. He tried to do creative writing with them first by bringing in reproductions of paintings by Magritte which were intended to awaken in their minds a glimmer of the unexpectedness and strangeness of ordinary things, but they would simply look at them and point out to him their lack of resemblance to reality. He was in despair. His failure began to obsess him so much that he discussed the problem with the Head of Department who happened to be teaching Rasselas to the Sixth Form at the time with what success Mark could not gauge.
‘I suggest you make them do the work,’ said his Head of Department. ‘There comes a point where if you do not impose your personality they will take advantage of you.’
But somehow or another Mark could not impose his personality on them: they had a habit for instance of forcing him to deviate from the text he was studying with them by mentioning something that had appeared in the newspaper.
‘Sir,’ they would say, ‘did you see in the papers that there were two babies born from two wombs in the one woman.’ Mark would flush angrily and say, ‘I don’t see what this has to do with our work,’ but before he knew where he was he was in the middle of an animated discussion which was proceeding all around him about the anatomical significance of this piece of news. The fact was that he did not know how to deal with them: if they had been boys he might have threatened them with the last sanction of the belt, or at least frightened them in some way. But girls were different, one couldn’t belt girls, and certainly he couldn’t frighten this particular lot. They all wanted to be hairdressers: and one wanted to be an engineer having read in a paper that this was now a possible job for girls. He couldn’t find it in his heart to tell her that it was highly unlikely that she could do this without Highers. They fantasised a great deal about jobs and chose ones which were well beyond their scope. It seemed to him that his years in Training College hadn’t prepared him for this varied apathy and animated gossip. Sometimes one or two of them were absent and when he asked where they were was told that they were baby sitting. He dreaded the periods he had to try and teach them in, for as the year passed and autumn darkened into winter he knew that he had not taught them anything and he could not bear it.
He talked to other teachers about them, and the history man shrugged his shoulders and said that he gave them pictures to look at, for instance one showing women at the munitions during the First World War. It became clear to him that their other teachers had written them off since they would be leaving at the end of the session, anyway, and as long as they were quiet they were allowed to talk and now and again glance at the books with which they had been provided.
But Mark, whose first year this was, felt weighed down by his failure and would not admit to it. There must be something he could do with them, the failure was his fault and not theirs. Like a missionary he had come to them bearing gifts, but they refused them, turning away from them with total lack of interest. Keats, Shakespeare, even the ballads, shrivelled in front of his eyes. It was, curiously enough, Mr Morrison who gave him his most helpful advice. Mr Morrison spent most of his time making sure that his register was immaculate, first writing in the Os in pencil and then rubbing them out and re-writing them in ink. Mark had been told that during the Second World War while Hitler was advancing into France, Africa and Russia he had been insisting that his register was faultlessly kept and the names written in carefully. Morrison understood the importance of this though no one else did.
‘What you have to do with them,’ said Morrison, looking at Mark through his round glasses which were like the twin barrels of a gun, ‘is to find out what they want to do.’
‘But,’ said Mark in astonishment, ‘that would be abdicating responsibility.’
‘That’s right,’ said Morrison equably.
‘If that were carried to its conclusion,’ said Mark, but before he could finish the sentence Morrison said,
‘In teaching nothing ought to be carried to its logical conclusion.’
‘I see,’ said Mark, who didn’t. But at least Morrison had introduced a new idea into his mind which was at the time entirely empty.
‘I see,’ he said again. But he was not yet ready to go as far as Morrison had implied that he should. The following day however he asked the class for the words of ‘Paper Roses’, one of the few pop songs that he had ever heard of. For the first time he saw a glimmer of interest in their eyes, for the first time they were actually using pens. In a short while they had given him the words from memory. Then he took out a book of Burns’ poems and copied on to the board the verses of ‘My Love is Like a Red Red Rose’. He asked them to compare the two poems but found that the wall of apathy had descended again and that it was as impenetrable as before. Not completely daunted, he asked them if they would bring in a record of ‘Paper Roses’, and himself found one of ‘My Love is Like a Red Red Rose’, with Kenneth McKellar singing it. He played both songs, one after the other, on his own record player. They were happy listening to ‘Paper Roses’ but showed no interest in the other song. The discussion he had planned petered out, except that the following day a small girl with black hair and a pale face brought in a huge pile of records which she requested that he play and which he adamantly refused to do. It occurred to him that the girls simply did not have the ability to handle discussion, that in all cases where discussion was initiated it degenerated rapidly into gossip or vituperation or argument, that the concept of reason was alien to them, that in fact the long line of philosophers beginning with Plato was irrelevant to them. For a long time they brought in records now that they knew he had a record player but he refused to play any of them. Hadn’t he gone far enough by playing ‘Paper Roses’? No, he was damned if he would go the whole hog and surrender completely. And yet, he sensed that somewhere in this area of their interest was what he wanted, that from here he might find the lever which would move their world.
He noticed that their leader was a girl called Tracy, a fairly tall pleasant-looking girl to whom they all seemed to turn for response or rejection. Nor was this girl stupid: nor were any of them stupid. He knew that he must hang on to that, he must not believe that they were stupid. When they did come into the room it was as if they were searching for substance, a food which he could not provide. He began to study Tracy more and more as if she might perhaps give him the solution to his problem, but she did not appear interested enough to do so. Now and again she would hum the words of a song while engaged in combing another girl’s hair, an activity which would satisfy them for hours, and indeed some of the girls had said to him, ‘Tracy has a good voice, sir. She can sing any pop song you like.’ And Tracy had regarded him with the sublime self-confidence of one who indeed could do this. But what use would that be to him? More and more he felt himself, as it were, sliding into their world when what he had wanted was to drag them out of the darkness into his world. That was how he himself had been taught and that was how it should be. And the weeks passed and he had taught them nothing. Their jotters were blank apart from the words of pop songs and certain secret drawings of their own. Yet they were human beings, they were not stupi
d. That there was no such thing as stupidity was the faith by which he lived. In many ways they were quicker than he was, they found out more swiftly than he did the dates of examinations and holidays. They were quite reconciled to the fact that they would not be able to pass any examinations. They would say,
‘We’re the stupid ones, sir.’ And yet he would not allow them that easy option, the fault was not with them, it was with him. He had seen some of them serving in shops, in restaurants, and they were neatly dressed, good with money and polite. Indeed they seemed to like him, and that made matters worse for he felt that he did not deserve their liking. They are not fed, he quoted to himself from Lycidas, as he watched them at the checkout desks of supermarkets flashing a smile at him, placing the messages in bags much more expertly than he would have done. And indeed he felt that a question was being asked of him but not at all pressingly. At night he would read Shakespeare and think, There are some people to whom all this is closed. There are some who will never shiver as they read the lines
Absent thee from felicity awhile
and in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain
to tell my story.
If he had read those lines to them they would have thought that it was Hamlet saying farewell to a girl called Felicity, he thought wryly. He smiled for the first time in weeks. Am I taking this too seriously, he asked himself. They are not taking it seriously. Shakespeare is not necessary for hairdressing. As they endlessly combed each other’s hair he thought of the ballad of Sir Patrick Spens and the line
wi gowd kaims in their hair.
These girls were entirely sensuous, words were closed to them. They would look after babies with tenderness but they were not interested in the alien world of language.
Or was he being a male chauvinist pig? No, he had tried everything he could think of and he had still failed. The fact was that language, the written word, was their enemy, McLuhan was right after all. The day of the record player and television had transformed the secure academic world in which he had been brought up. And yet he did not wish to surrender, to get on with correction while they sat talking quietly to each other, and dreamed of the jobs which were in fact shut against them. School was simply irrelevant to them, they did not even protest, they withdrew from it gently and without fuss. They had looked at education and turned away from it. It was their indifferent gentleness that bothered him more than anything. But they also had the maturity to distinguish between himself and education, which was a large thing to do. They recognised that he had a job to do, that he wasn’t at all unlikeable and was in fact a prisoner like themselves. But they were already perming some woman’s hair in a luxurious shop.
