by Alan Warner
The more he pondered, the more he realised that they were the key to his failure or success in education. If he failed with them then he had failed totally, a permanent mark would be left on his psyche. In some way it was necessary for him to change, but the point was, could he change to the extent that was demanded of him, and in what direction and with what purpose should he change? School for himself had been a discipline and an order but to them this discipline and order had become meaningless.
The words on the blackboard were ghostly and distant as if they belonged to another age, another universe. He recalled what Morrison had said, ‘You must find out what they want to do’, but they themselves did not know what they wanted to do, it was for him to tell them that, and till he told them that they would remain indifferent and apathetic. Sometimes he sensed that they themselves were growing tired of their lives, that they wished to prove themselves but didn’t know how to set about it. They were like lost children, irrelevantly stored in desks, and they only lighted up like street lamps in the evening or when they were working in the shops. He felt that they were the living dead, and he would have given anything to see their eyes become illuminated, become interested, for if he could find the magic formula he knew that they would become enthusiastic, they were not stupid. But how to find the magic key which would release the sleeping beauties from their sleep? He had no idea what it was and felt that in the end if he ever discovered it he would stumble over it and not be led to it by reflection or logic. And that was exactly what happened.
One morning he happened to be late coming into the room and there was Tracy swanning about in front of the class, as if she were wearing a gown, and saying some words to them he guessed in imitation of himself, while at the same time uncannily reproducing his mannerisms, leaning for instance despairingly across his desk, his chin on his hand while at the same time glaring helplessly at the class. It was like seeing himself slightly distorted in water, slightly comic, frustrated and yet angrily determined. When he opened the door there was a quick scurry and the class had arranged themselves, presenting blank dull faces as before. He pretended he had seen nothing, but knew now what he had to do. The solution had come to him as a gift from heaven, from the gods themselves, and the class sensed a new confidence and purposefulness in his voice.
‘Tracy,’ he said, ‘and Lorna.’ He paused. ‘And Helen. I want you to come out here.’
They came out to the floor looking at him uneasily. O my wooden O, he said to himself, my draughty echo help me now.
‘Listen,’ he said, ‘I’ve been thinking. It’s quite clear to me that you don’t want to do any writing, so we won’t do any writing. But I’ll tell you what we’re going to do instead. We’re going to act.’
A ripple of noise ran through the class, like the wind on an autumn day, and he saw their faces brightening. The shades of Shakespeare and Sophocles forgive me for what I am to do, he prayed.
‘We are going,’ he said, ‘to do a serial and it’s going to be called “The Rise of a Pop Star”.’ It was as if animation had returned to their blank dull faces, he could see life sparkling in their eyes, he could see interest in the way they turned to look at each other, he could hear it in the stir of movement that enlivened the room.
‘Tracy,’ he said, ‘you will be the pop star. You are coming home from school to your parents’ house. I’m afraid,’ he added, ‘that as in the reverse of the days of Shakespeare the men’s parts will have be to be acted by the girls. Tracy, you have decided to leave home. Your parents of course disapprove. But you want to be a pop star, you have always wanted to be one. They think that that is a ridiculous idea. Lorna, you will be the mother, and Helen, you will be the father.’
He was astonished by the manner in which Tracy took over, by the ingenuity with which she and the other two created the first scene in front of his eyes. The scene grew and became meaningful, all their frustrated enthusiasm was poured into it.
First of all without any prompting Tracy got her school bag and rushed into the house while Lorna, the mother, pretended to be ironing on a desk that was quickly dragged out into the middle of the floor, and Helen the father read the paper, which was his own Manchester Guardian snatched from the top of his desk.
‘Well, that’s it over,’ said Tracy, the future pop star.
‘And what are you thinking of doing with yourself now?’ said the mother, pausing from her ironing.
‘I’m going to be a pop star,’ said Tracy.
‘What’s that you said?’ – her father, laying down the paper.
‘That’s what I want to do,’ said Tracy, ‘other people have done it.’
‘What nonsense,’ said the father. ‘I thought you were going in for hairdressing.’
‘I’ve changed my mind,’ said Tracy.
‘You won’t stay in this house if you’re going to be a pop star,’ said the father. ‘I’ll tell you that for free.’
‘I don’t care whether I do or not,’ said Tracy.
‘And how are you going to be a pop star?’ said her mother.
‘I’ll go to London,’ said Tracy.
‘London. And where are you going to get your fare from?’ said the father, mockingly, picking up the paper again.
Mark could see that Tracy was thinking this over: it was a real objection. Where was her fare going to come from? She paused, her mind grappling with the problem.
‘I’ll sell my records,’ she said at last.
Her father burst out laughing. ‘You’re the first one who starts out as a pop star by selling all your records.’ And then in a sudden rage in which Mark could hear echoes of reality he shouted,
‘All right then. Bloody well go then.’
Helen glanced at Mark, but his expression remained benevolent and unchanged.
Tracy, turning at the door, said, ‘Well then, I’m going. And I’m taking the records with me.’ She suddenly seemed very thin and pale and scrawny.
‘Go on then,’ said her father.
‘That’s what I’m doing. I’m going.’ Her mother glanced from daughter to father and then back again but said nothing.
‘I’m going then,’ said Tracy, pretending to go to another room and then taking the phantom records in her arms. The father’s face was fixed and determined and then Tracy looked at the two of them for the last time and left the room. The father and mother were left alone.
‘She’ll come back soon enough,’ said the father but the mother still remained silent. Now and again the father would look at a phantom clock on a phantom mantelpiece but still Tracy did not return. The father pretended to go and lock a door and then said to his wife,
‘I think we’d better go to bed.’
And then Lorna and Helen went back to their seats while Mark thought, this was exactly how dramas began in their bareness and naivety, through which at the same time an innocent genuine feeling coursed or peered as between ragged curtains.
When the bell rang after the first scene was over he found himself thinking about Tracy wandering the streets of London, as if she were a real waif sheltering in transient doss-houses or under bridges dripping with rain. The girls became real to him in their rôles whereas they had not been real before, nor even individualistic behind their wall of apathy. That day in the staff-room he heard about Tracy’s saga and was proud and non-committal.
The next day the story continued. Tracy paced up and down the bare boards of the classroom, now and again stopping to look at ghostly billboards, advertisements. The girls had clearly been considering the next development during the interval they had been away from him, and had decided on the direction of the plot. The next scene was in fact an Attempted Seduction Scene.
Tracy was sitting disconsolately at a desk which he presumed was a table in what he presumed was a café.
‘Hello, Mark,’ she said to the man who came over to sit beside her. At this point Tracy glanced wickedly at the real Mark. The Mark in the play was the dark-haired girl who had asked for the
records and whose name was Annie.
‘Hello,’ said Annie. And then, ‘I could get you a spot, you know.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘There’s a night club where they have a singer and she’s sick. I could get you to take her place.’ He put his hands on hers and she quickly withdrew her own.
‘I mean it,’ he said. ‘If you come to my place I can introduce you to the man who owns the night club.’
Tracy searched his face with forlorn longing.
Was this another lie like the many she had experienced before? Should she, shouldn’t she? She looked tired, her shoulders were slumped.
Finally she rose from the table and said, ‘All right then.’ Together they walked about the room in search of his luxurious flat.
They found it. Willing hands dragged another desk out and set the two desks at a slight distance from each other.
The Mark of the play went over to the window-sill on which there was a large bottle which had once contained ink but was now empty. He poured wine into two phantom glasses and brought them over.
‘Where is this man then?’ said Tracy.
‘He won’t be long,’ said Mark.
Tracy accepted the drink and Annie drank as well.
After a while Annie tried to put her hand around Tracy’s waist. Mark the teacher glanced at the class: he thought that at this turn of events they would be convulsed with raucous laughter. But in fact they were staring enraptured at the two, enthralled by their performance. It occurred to him that he would never be as unselfconscious as Annie and Tracy in a million years. Such a shorn abject thing, such dialogue borrowed from television, and yet it was early drama that what he was seeing reminded him of. He had a quick vision of a flag gracing the roof of the ‘theatre’, as if the school now belonged to the early age of Elizabethanism. His poor wooden O was in fact echoing with real emotions and real situations, borrowed from the pages of subterraneous pop magazines.
Tracy stood up. ‘I am not that kind of girl,’ she said.
‘What kind of girl?’
‘That kind of girl.’
But Annie was insistent. ‘You’ll not get anything if you don’t play along with me,’ she said, and Mark could have sworn that there was an American tone to her voice.
‘Well, I’m not playing along with you,’ said Tracy. She swayed a little on her feet, almost falling against the blackboard. ‘I’m bloody well not playing along with you,’ she said. ‘And that’s final.’ With a shock of recognition Mark heard her father’s voice behind her own as one might see behind a similar painting the first original strokes.
And then she collapsed on the floor and Annie was bending over her.
‘I didn’t mean it,’ she was saying. ‘I really didn’t mean it. I’m sorry.’
But Tracy lay there motionless and pale. She was like the Lady of Shalott in her boat. The girls in the class were staring at her. Look what they have done to me, Tracy was implying. Will they not be sorry now? There was a profound silence in the room and Mark was aware of the power of drama, even here in this bare classroom with the green peeling walls, the window-pole in the corner like a disused spear. There was nothing here but the hopeless emotion of the young.
Annie raised Tracy to her feet and sat her down in a chair.
‘It’s true,’ he said, ‘it’s true that I know this man.’ He went over to the wall and pretended to dial on a phantom phone. And at that moment Tracy turned to the class and winked at them. It was a bold outrageous thing to do, thought Mark, it was as if she was saying, That faint was of course a trick, a feint, that is the sort of thing people like us have to do in order to survive: he thought he was tricking me but all the time I was tricking him. I am alive, fighting, I know exactly what I am doing. All of us are in conspiracy against this Mark. So much, thought Mark, was conveyed by that wink, so much that was essentially dramatic. It was pure instinct of genius.
The stage Mark turned away from the phone and said, ‘He says he wants to see you. He’ll give you an audition. His usual girl’s sick. She’s got . . . ’ Annie paused and tried to say ‘laryngitis’, but it came out as not quite right, and it was as if the word poked through the drama like a real error, and Mark thought of the Miracle plays in which ordinary people played Christ and Noah and Abraham with such unconscious style, as if there was no oddity in Abraham being a joiner or a miller.
‘Look, I’ll call you,’ said the stage Mark and the bell rang and the finale was postponed. In the noise and chatter in which desks and chairs were replaced Mark was again aware of the movement of life, and he was happy. Absurdly he began to see them as if for the first time, their faces real and interested, and recognised the paradox that only in the drama had he begun to know them, as if only behind such a protection, a screen, were they willing to reveal themselves. And he began to wonder whether he himself had broken through the persona of the teacher and begun to ‘act’ in the real world. Their faces were more individual, sad or happy, private, extrovert, determined, yet vulnerable. It seemed to him that he had failed to see what Shakespeare was really about, he had taken the wrong road to find him.
‘A babble of green fields,’ he thought with a smile. So that was what it meant, that Wooden O, that resonator of the transient, of the real, beyond all the marble of their books, the white In Memoriams which they could not read.
How extraordinarily curious it all was.
The final part of the play was to take place on the following day.
‘Please sir,’ said Lorna to him, as he was about to leave.
‘What is it?’
But she couldn’t put into words what she wanted to say. And it took him a long time to decipher from her broken language what it was she wanted. She and the other actresses wanted an audience. Of course, why had he not thought of that before? How could he not have realised that an audience was essential? And he promised her that he would find one.
By the next day he had found an audience which was composed of a 3A class which Miss Stewart next door was taking. She grumbled a little about the Interpretation they were missing but eventually agreed. Additional seats were taken into Mark’s room from her room and Miss Stewart sat at the back, her spectacles glittering.
Tracy pretended to knock on a door which was in fact the blackboard and then a voice invited her in. The manager of the night club pointed to a chair which stood on the ‘stage’.
‘What do you want?’
‘I want to sing, sir.’
‘I see. Many girls want to sing. I get girls in here every day. They all want to sing.’
Mark heard titters of laughter from some of the boys in 3A and fixed a ferocious glare on them. They settled down again.
‘But I know I can sing, sir,’ said Tracy. ‘I know I can.’
‘They all say that too.’ His voice suddenly rose, ‘They all bloody well say that.’
Mark saw Miss Stewart sitting straight up in her seat and then glancing at him disapprovingly. Shades of Pygmalion, he thought to himself, smiling. You would expect it from Shaw, inside inverted commas.
‘Give it to them, sock it to them,’ he pleaded silently. The virginal Miss Stewart looked sternly on.
‘Only five minutes then,’ said the night club manager, glancing at his watch. Actually there was no watch on his hand at all. ‘What song do you want to sing?’
Mark saw Lorna pushing a desk out to the floor and sitting in it. This was to be the piano, then. The absence of props bothered him and he wondered whether imagination had first begun among the poor, since they had such few material possessions. Lorna waited, her hands poised above the desk. He heard more sniggerings from the boys and this time he looked so angry that he saw one of them turning a dirty white.
The hands hovered above the desk. Then Tracy began to sing. She chose the song ‘Heartache’.
My heart, dear, is aching;
I’m feeling so blue.
Don’t give me more heartaches,
I’m pleading with
you.
It seemed to him that at that moment, as she stood there pale and thin, she was putting all her experience and desires into her song. It was a moment he thought such as it is given to few to experience. She was in fact auditioning before a phantom audience, she and the heroine of the play were the same, she was searching for recognition on the streets of London, in a school. She stood up in her vulnerability, in her purity, on a bare stage where there was no furniture of any value, of any price: on just such a stage had actors and actresses acted many years before, before the full flood of Shakespearean drama. Behind her on the blackboard were written notes about the Tragic Hero, a concept which he had been discussing with the Sixth Year.
‘The hero has a weakness and the plot of the play attacks this specific weakness.’
‘We feel a sense of waste.’
‘And yet triumph.’
Tracy’s voice, youthful and yearning and vulnerable, soared to the cracked ceiling. It was as if her frustrations were released in the song.
Don’t give me more heartaches,
I’m pleading with you.
The voice soared on and then after a long silence the bell rang.
The boys from 3A began to chatter and he thought, ‘You don’t even try. You wouldn’t have the nerve to sing like that, to be so naked.’ But another voice said to him, ‘You’re wrong. They’re the same. It is we who have made them different.’ But were they in fact the same, those who had been reduced to the nakedness, and those others who were the protected ones. He stood there trembling as if visited by a revelation which was only broken when Miss Stewart said,
