by Weldon, Fay
The names on the school register changed, as the community outside changed. The ordinary Alans and Lindas and Michaels and Annes were sprinkled with Saffrons and Ishtars, Sebs and Felixes. The old stone villages were infilled with bungalows and housing estates: the farm cottages no longer housed farm workers – they’d been replaced long ago by tractors and the machinery of intensive farming – and who had to live on the spot any more? – but had been bought up by wealthy incomers from the cities, or let by farmers to hippy-style households – a safe enough thing to do, because the DHSS paid the rent – and in the meantime house prices went up, and up, and up – but who could blame the farmers? They had to survive somehow: no one wanted them to produce food any more. There was more than enough in the world, it seemed – all those people starved in undeveloped countries not for lack of food but because of someone else’s duty to make a profit or be politically in the right. The waves washed right back to East Bradley’s door, and changed the names on the school roll.
And the parents seemed to divide these days into the rich and the poor. New Volvos drove up to the school gates while from the school bus limped children who were wearing someone else’s shoes, because the parents couldn’t afford new; and the school fund was depleted paying the transport fares of children whose parents had to pay but wouldn’t, and there were two small children who walked almost six miles every day on their own along an arterial road – little Ellen Bryce and Kelly Rice – and slept or wept all day in lessons. They were both from one-parent families: one mother out to work, the other in need of psychiatric help – or so Miss Jakes said. Miss Walters said Mrs Rice should pull herself together.
It was just about the prettiest school in Somerset: a low stone building next to a twelfth-century church, surrounded by fields: and there was an old oak in the playground, towering above the churchyard yews, which was reputed to be seven hundred years old. Ishtar and Seb, Saffron and Felix played tag around it, along with Alan and Linda, Michael and Anne, and little Cleopatra, too, black as night. When she was older the boys wouldn’t go out with her, everyone knew. Though girls, later on, would vie to go out with her big brother Joseph. Okay, even stylish, for a girl to be seen with a black boy: all wrong for a boy to be seen with a black girl. Cleo got called names sometimes – nigger or black bitch – but Joseph didn’t. But then Cleo was a tearful, meek little thing, and everyone liked Joseph, who was big, confident and good at football.
Miss Jakes talked about the problems of racism, which was seen in the staff room as absurd, and Miss Walters, whose brother was a police sergeant in Bristol, said the minorities had only themselves to blame, there was bound to be trouble: not quite ‘why don’t they go back to where they came from’, but almost. There was an extraordinary occasion when a Mrs Havelock, a single parent who had come down from London and made a nuisance of herself on the PTA, and wore jeans and had fuzzy hair, demanded that Urdu be taught as a second language, as it was in Camden. Urdu, taught in London? Compulsory? The world was going mad. The world would have to be kept away from East Bradley, Mr Rossiter was the more determined, and the PTA must be allowed to talk, but not to act: let it confine itself to making money. Urdu!
Anyway, the day Mrs Windsor said you could tell the mothers by the children, the world came right up to East Bradley Junior School’s door, and nothing was ever the same again. It came in the form of the Zambezi Boys: a band: a world-famous band, not quite rock, not quite reggae, all the way from Zimbabwe, once Rhodesia. A big yellow van, with ‘Zambezi Boys’ written on it, and some notes of music and a palm tree or two, stopped outside the school one Friday afternoon when the children were rehearsing their end-of-year concert. The driver, a small black man wearing dark shiny glasses, hopped out and asked Miss Jakes for directions. They were on their way to Taunton; they had taken a short cut: now they were lost. Miss Jakes pointed the way. The sound of Class 3’s ‘I am a Snowdrop’ drifted through the open windows. Back got the driver into the van. The van would not start. Various members of the band – there were six of them, their leader a massive young man in a yellow gown even brighter than the van – got out, kicked it, or fiddled with the engine, or stood around discussing the matter – just like anyone else, as Miss Walters later remarked – and then asked to come in to call the AA. (Rebecca Ruddle, the AA man’s daughter, was in 6A, and the only child in the school ever to have been in trouble with the police.) Which they did, from the school office. And then of course they had to wait for Rebecca Ruddle’s dad. And the sensible place to wait was lined up against the back wall of the school hall while 2A sang, and the head boy, Harry Young, tentatively turned up the sound equipment – borrowed from Currys, whose daughter Melanie was in 3B – to make their tiny, timorous voices carry – and the children stopped paying attention to 2A’s ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’ and turned their heads to see these extraordinary, brilliantly gowned men (men in dresses) who all of a sudden were standing there. And then – no one quite knew how it happened, though afterwards someone said it was Mrs Windsor of all people who set it in motion – the Zambezi Boys were carrying their instruments in and setting them up, and giving a performance to the children and staff of East Bradley School. They, who could fill Wembley, not to mention Bristol’s Colston Hall, they for whom the young of the world yearned and would empty their pockets (and other people’s as well, no doubt, the way the world is now), played for the children of East Bradley School! And when the parents arrived, because when the time came to collect the children the Zambezi Boys were still playing, they got out of their Volvos and 2CVs and Austin Travellers, leaving them parked any old how, and peered through the windows, and the villagers did the same, because the beat was so loud and strong and extraordinary it had brought them all out of their houses. For Harry Young, usually bright and clean and tidy and responsible, got so carried away that he turned the sound system up, up, up, right up (and those drums and the synthesizer – or was it an African piano? – were loud, very loud, even by themselves). The crows rose and cawed for miles around, the heads of the sheep turned, and cows paused in their grazing, as the beat of Africa, so different from Somerset’s slow, heavy heartbeat, escaped out of East Bradley School’s hall. Look, Mr Rossiter was furious! But what could he do?
One (slow), two (slow), three-four-five (quick), the beat went, simple but not simple, somehow interlaced and interwoven. The children tapped their feet: the children shook their shoulders: the children looked at their teachers: their teachers were tapping too (but who could help it?) and then all were clapping, because the man in the yellow gown up on the platform was clapping his hands above his head – one, two, three-four-five – faster, faster, faster, now they were clapping on their own, and he was singing, what was it about? Sometimes in a strange language, sometimes in English, about brotherhood, freedom, jubilation, exultation – and Mrs Windsor was on her feet – dancing, Mrs Windsor! Which of the children was the first to move? Why, all agreed later it was little Kelly Rice who didn’t have much to lose, who just didn’t seem to care about Mr Rossiter – anyway, one of them was on her feet, jigging about, dancing, and then all the children followed, out of their seats, dancing, clapping, laughing – one, two, three-four-five – and the band roared its approval, and the great firm drumbeats and the laughing crash of the hi-hat got into the bloodstream, and Miss Walters (ever prudent) actually pushed chairs out of the way so no one hurt themselves, and took off her tight shoes to dance the better, and Miss Jakes just gave up and laughed and danced herself silly, and the parents stopped peering in at the windows and came in without so much as a by-your-leave and joined in, including Mrs – or what did she call herself? – Ms Havelock (even that seemed okay; let everyone do what they wanted: perhaps these singing, leaping men were speaking Urdu, in which case every word and not every tenth word they chanted or sang made sense), and Darren Gorren, the bus driver no one liked because he’d have no talking on his bus (not even whispering), came in and smiled and caught Miss Robinson of 4B by the hand and da
nced with her, and amongst the children friends danced with enemies, and enemies with friends, and the retired General Godden who put stones up on his patch of green to stop the parents clipping it with their tyres actually hopped about as best he could and his single strand of long white hair rose and fell to the beat; and look, on every fourth beat the man in the yellow gown leapt into the air, higher, higher, was it possible? He seemed held in the air, actually poised in the sheer energy of the music and the dance, somewhere near the ceiling, suspended by the animation and will of the Somerset children, old-style, new-style – up, up, stay-stay-stay – and as he stayed the church bell actually rang – dong, dong, just twice, on the beat – the vicar later said it must have been the vibration (thank you, Currys, for your technological assistance, thank you, Harry Young, for your act of grace, thank you, Zambezi Boys, for your wonderful performance) – and then Rebecca Ruddle’s father the AA man finally turned up, and wondered what was going on, was everyone mad, and saw his daughter dancing and laughing and for some reason the shame of her disgrace was washed away (she’d broken into a Taunton pub with a group of older boys and stolen some cigarettes and had had to appear in the Juvenile Court), and he felt more cheerful than he had for months, and when he tried the Zambezi Boys’ van the motor simply started – why it hadn’t before he couldn’t make out.
And as the engine started, the music stopped. The dancing, the cheering, the stamping died. And then little Ishtar Heddle flung herself against the door, arms outstretched.
‘Don’t go,’ she cried. ‘More! More!’ ‘More, more,’ commanded the children, roaring and stamping – how could such little things make such a noise? – and the Zambezi Boys obeyed. The great obeyed the little. The beat began again, as if it had merely been waiting for the order: the guitar thrummed, the synthesizer sang, and down from the platform leapt the man in the yellow gown and grabbed poor flustered helpless Mr Rossiter by the hands and made him dance – made Mr Rossiter dance! – and dance he did, and as he danced his arthritis, or whatever it was that made his limbs so stiff, seemed to fall away, and Mr Rossiter smiled and stopped counting the children who wore trainers and planning his individual letters to parents – because didn’t trainers make less noise than the clump, clump, clump-clump-clump of the properly black-booted children? – and he beamed at the staff, and he beamed at the children, and even at the parents, even at Ms Havelock, who was, even as she danced, quite startled. Then, as suddenly as it began, it stopped.
‘Peace, exultation, jubilation’, cried the young man in the yellow gown who could be sustained in mid-air by the energy of his being, ‘to the brotherhood of man!’
‘And the sisterhood!’ cried Ms Havelock. ‘Don’t forget the sisterhood.’ And they were gone. The Zambezi Boys were gone.
And after that nothing was quite the same, if only that Scott Hockney in Infants never dirtied his pants again – perhaps a miracle, or just because he’d jigged about so much he got some kind of control over his muscles – so the other children would play with him (and Mrs Windsor reported he could remember that the mysterious t-h-e spelt the extraordinary ‘the’ from the next Monday right through to the next Friday and for ever thereafter). And Ms Havelock took to going miles out of her way each day to take and fetch Kelly and Ellen in her 2CV instead of saying that to do so was system-bolstering and a child or two would have to die before the under-three-mile-no-free-transport system was reformed. And Neal Hodder’s Dad, who’d also danced, decided on the whole he’d better not crop-spray the field behind the school in spite of the stuff’s being officially specified safe; and everyone wore trainers ever after, they being so much better for dancing, and no one kept their Kit-Kats and crisps to themselves at break, as had lately been their habit (for the greed and self-interest of governments is as catching as measles), but began to share them with the limping children off the bus, who no longer limped because trainers can be cheap and interchangeable – was not this the brotherhood, not to mention the sisterhood, of man, not to mention woman? And the dinner ladies cooked a little better and with more charity, so the children ate up better; and at the first sign of trouble there’d be a kind of thrumming of fingers on desks – one, two, three-four-five – and the trouble evaporated; and if Mr Rossiter felt his anxiety and irritation returning, and began to express it, there’d be a kind of dancing note thrumming on the floor as the children fell into step – one, two, three-four-five – on the stairs and down the corridors, and he’d hold his tongue, and just nod, and smile, and not a word had to be said; and little Cleo put her hand in Miss Walters’, who let it stay there, and even put her up for the Class Achievement Award, and the wastepaper basket in the Infants somehow got lost and was never found again. One, two, three-four-five.
Nothing was ever the same again after the Zambezi Boys came to East Bradley by mistake, on their way to Taunton, and brought with them in their yellow van the good things of the wider world – exultation, jubilation, joy, the throb of the universe – and in their easy generosity passed them on. Such things happen. That was the day the world came to Somerset, and couldn’t be kept out.
As Told to Miss Jacobs
A Gentle Tonic Effect
‘What did you say your name was?’ asked Morna Casey. ‘Miss Jacobs? Just a miss? Not a doctor or anything? Well, chacun à son goût. But tell me, do you need planning permission, or can anyone just set up in their front room and start in the shrinking business?’
Morna Casey frowned at what she thought might be a hangnail, and looked at her little gold watch with the link chain, and waited for Miss Jacobs’ reply, which did not come.
‘I have very little time for people who go to therapists,’ added Morna Casey. ‘I’m sorry, but there it is. It’s so sort of self-absorbed, don’t you think? I can’t stand people who make a fuss about nothing. If it wasn’t that my dreams were interfering with my work I wouldn’t be here.’
Still no response came from Miss Jacobs: she did not even lift her pencil from the little round mahogany table at her side.
‘You charge quite a lot’, observed Morna Casey, ‘for someone who says so little and takes no notes. But if you can get away with it, good for you. I suppose on the whole people are just mentally lazy: they employ analysts to think about them rather than do it themselves.’
Morna Casey waited. Presently Miss Jacobs spoke. She said, ‘This first consultation is free. Then we will see whether it is worth both our whiles embarking on a course of treatment.’
‘I don’t know why,’ said Morna Casey, ‘but you remind me of the owl in Squirrel Nutkin.’
A slight smile glimmered over Miss Jacobs’ lips. Morna Casey noticed, of course she did. She had declined to lie down on the leather couch, with her head at Miss Jacobs’ end, as patients were expected to do.
‘I suppose’, acknowledged Morna Casey, ‘it’s because I feel like Squirrel Nutkin, dancing up and down in front of wise old owl, making jokes and being rude. But you won’t get to gobble me up: I’m too quick and fast for the likes of you.’
Morna Casey was a willowy blonde in her late thirties: elegantly turned out, executive style. Her eyes were wide and sexy, and her teeth white, even and capped. She wore a lot of gold jewellery of the kind you can buy in Duty Free shops at major airports. Her skirt was short and her legs were long and her heels were high.
‘I went to see a doctor,’ said Morna Casey, ‘which is a thing I hardly ever do – I can’t stand all that poking and fussing about. But the nightmares kept waking me up; and if you’re going to do a good job of work it’s imperative to have a good night’s sleep. I’ve always insisted on my beauty sleep – when Rider was a baby I used ear plugs: he soon learned to sleep through.’
Rider was Morna Casey’s son. He was seventeen and active in the school potholing club.
Morna Casey leaned forward so that her shapely bosom glowed pink beneath her thin white tailored shirt. She wore the kind of bra which lets the nipples show through. ‘The fool of a doctor gave me sleeping p
ills, and though I quadrupled the dose it still didn’t stop me waking up screaming once or twice a night. And Hector wasn’t much help. But then he never is.’
Hector was Morna Casey’s husband. He was head of market research at the advertising agency where Morna worked. She was a PR executive for Maltman Ltd, a firm which originally sold whisky but had lately diversified into pharmaceuticals.
‘Helping simply isn’t Hector’s forte,’ said Morna Casey. ‘You ask what is? A word too crude for your ears, Miss Jacobs, probably beyond your understanding; that’s what Hector’s forte is. I first set eyes on Hector in a pub one night, eighteen years ago: I said to my then husband, “Who’s that man with the big nose?” and Hector followed us home that night and we haven’t been apart since.’
Miss Jacobs looked quite startled, or perhaps Morna Casey thought she did.
‘People say “Didn’t your husband mind?” and I reply, “Well, he didn’t like it much but what could he do?”’ said Morna Casey. ‘He moved out, which suited me and Hector very well. It was a nice house: we bought him out. Hector’s one of the most boring people I know: he has no conversation apart from statistics and a very limited mind, but he suits me okay. And I suit him: he doesn’t understand a word I say. When I tell him about the dreams, all he says is, “Well, what’s so terrible about dreaming that?” It was the doctor who suggested I came to see you: doctors do that, don’t they? If they’re stumped they say it’s stress. Well, of course I’m stressed: I’ve always been stressed: I have a difficult and demanding job. But I haven’t always had the dreams. I told the doctor I was perfectly capable of analysing myself thank you very much and he said he didn’t doubt it but a therapist might save me some time, and time was money, which is true enough, and that’s the reason I’m here. At least all you do is poke about in my head and not between my legs.’
