The Northern Clemency

by Philip Hensher

  Inside the building, they made their way somehow to the headmaster’s office. He contributed nothing to this, allowing his mother to make the enquiries, follow the signs, and only when they were sitting on two out of the line of five chairs, the kind lady remaining behind her desk, did he realize that he could not rely on his mother to lead him round his new school from now on. But waiting there, his main concern was for her: in her clothes, the tight smile which was in her mouth but not her eyes, there was something he ought to be able to console. He wanted to tell her that it would be all right, not altogether knowing that himself. But now the headmaster himself was coming down the corridor, buoyant from his assembly; down there, a daunting flood of children, all of whom he would shortly have to come to terms with, all of whom knew exactly where they were going.

  The headmaster was affable; the secretary on the way out smiled kindly; a kiss had come from nowhere; and suddenly he was walking by the side of a teacher who, apparently, he had been introduced to, who, apparently, was now his teacher. His mother was gone. It had been her kiss. Once, when he was much smaller, he had in a moment of confusion in a classroom said, “Mummy …” before realizing that he was addressing his teacher. He went clammy, as if he had already done it again, as his first act in a new school.

  “Quiet, now,” the teacher said, coming into a room. It was full of children; they fell silent and looked at him. It was a terrible moment. The teacher had an extraordinary voice. She talked, too, in that strange way, as she went on to explain who he was, where he came from—London, it produced giggles across the classroom—and assigned a boy to show him round; she talked in that way where “castle” sounded like “cattle,” a blunt and, to Francis, not very friendly-sounding manner of speech. He was surprised and ashamed on her behalf: he had not thought that a teacher, a person in charge, would speak in the ordinary way everywhere.

  The boy he was supposed to sit next to shoved up roughly, and turned his face deliberately away from Francis, placing his hand against it so that Francis could not see anything of him. He was a naughty boy, you could see that straight away; he started hissing and sniggering to two other boys, naughty boys too, across the aisle, who leant forward and examined Francis from a safe, contemptuous distance, their lips curling like crimped pastry. He thought about his friends; they might be sitting at this exact moment, hundreds of miles away, in that sensible classroom, not just-built but old and solid, and there might be—his heart leapt to think of it—an empty chair there now, and perhaps a new person, someone a little like him, being guided to it.

  The lesson started, but no one had taken out any books: they were just sitting there. Francis had been dreading that; he thought that he might be the only one without the books, and though everyone would notice no one would help. He had imagined he would go through his whole life in this school without books and, which he had anticipated and accepted, without friends. But there were no books. He placed his pens and pencil, the ruler and rubber on the table; he had brought them with him. He could not understand what sort of lesson this was. The teacher was just talking, and in a moment he listened. It was a while before her words started to make sense. She was talking about the government. He did not know what sort of lesson that could be part of. From time to time she asked a question, and nobody put their hands up so she answered it herself. Some of those questions Francis knew the answers to, but he didn’t put his hand up. It was like a party you weren’t sure you were meant to be at and he kept quiet, though it was painful for him not to be able to put his hand up to answer a question he could answer. The boy next to him went on talking to the boys over the aisle, and there was a sort of malice in the hiss, which was directed at Francis.

  “Michael,” the teacher said abruptly. That was the boy’s name, which Francis hadn’t taken in, and the boy straightened up, lowered his hand from his face, and gave Francis a poisonous look, as if he had betrayed him. There was a smell as if of boiled peas from the boy; it was shocking, he was sitting next to a bad boy who wasn’t even clean. “Do you want to tell the class the name of the prime minister?”

  “Don’t know,” Michael said eventually, full of scorn at being asked something so stupid.

  “Perhaps our new boy knows,” the teacher said, quite gently.

  “It’s Mr. Wilson,” Francis said. He hardly knew how to pretend not to know.

  “Very good,” the teacher said, enunciating with surprise in her voice, as if talking to an idiot. Francis felt himself getting a little cross. “And how long has he been prime minister?”

  “He was prime minister before,” Francis said. “But there was a general election this year and he became it again. He’s Labour. I thought the Conservatives were going to come first, but they didn’t.”

  “Very good,” the teacher said, now really surprised. “Quite a lot of people thought, like—like our new friend from London here”—a wave, a giggle, but why?—“that the Conservatives were going to win. Now, who can explain to me what a general election is?”

  The lesson went on, but Francis felt he shouldn’t have said anything, should have said, “Don’t know, Miss,” and swapped what he possessed for something he might have, popularity and the quality of being ordinary. Once the attention of the teacher went elsewhere, the naughty boys on the other side of the aisle said, “Kick him,” quite loudly, and Michael, the boy he was sitting next to, gave him a hard angry shove. Francis did not know how to respond, and blushingly rearranged his pens and pencils, his ruler and rubber. In time, the lesson came to an end; it was interrupted—and it had only really been a speech by the teacher, diversifying into reminiscence of a life led partly, it seemed, in Africa—by a bell that, so unexpectedly, was exactly the same as the bells in the school in London. The class got up, their chairs screeching on the floor, and the teacher, too, screeching for them to sit down until they were given permission to go. But half the class were already through the door, and she only wanted to say one more sentence before they were dismissed.

  It was playtime. The boy he had been assigned to had disappeared and, anyway, Francis would not follow that boy: he knew well what would happen if he tried to make friends, having said in clear London tones who the prime minister now was. He didn’t know what to do or where to go, but he followed them anyway, and was soon in the playground. It was already full, and excited with noise.

  All of a sudden, a boy was by his side, addressing him.

  “Do you see that girl?” the boy said. Francis recognized him slowly. He must be in his class, he supposed; but there was some familiarity apart from that.

  “Yes,” he said, though he did not know which girl the boy meant.

  “I think she’s so beautiful,” the boy said. He was a strange boy: his voice was not ecstatic but robotic, as if he was producing an interesting fact. “Venus was the Roman goddess of beauty so I call her Venus.”

  Francis did not know what to say to this. The boy was looking away from him across the playground. It seemed that he hadn’t actually been talking to Francis at all, not specifically. His buck-toothed face was flushed, his hair stuck down against his pink forehead. He called out, “Venus, Venus, my love, my love,” and ran away towards the girls. At this they scattered, giving little screams, running off in twos and threes, severally. Francis was alone again; he stared at the concrete in furious amazement. He was alone again.

  Francis concentrated very hard on walking round the complete edge of the playground. He pretended that the narrow stone edging to the asphalt square was a tightrope, suspended hundreds of feet above the ground, and he balanced on it carefully, placing one foot in front of another. That was a game you could play on your own and, after a few moments, he forgot almost everything. With arms spread out like wings, he really was walking a tightrope, forgetting whether it was a good game or just something to make yourself look occupied. He was three-quarters of the way round the square when he hit a flight of steps, interrupting its clear progress. On it there was a group of boys and girls
mixed up together. He dropped his arms.

  “Were you talking to that Timothy?” a boy said, addressing Francis.

  “He just came up to me,” Francis said. “He said he was in love with a girl called Venus and then he ran off again.”

  “He calls me that,” a girl said. Francis wouldn’t have recognized her: she seemed ordinary, not an object of devotion. “I wish he’d stop, it’s stupid, I hate him, he’s mental.”

  “Where do you come from?” one of the girls said. “You’re in our class.”

  She rhymed it with “lass,” but it wasn’t unfriendly, her tone. “I come from London,” Francis said.

  “She’s thick, that Barker,” another girl said. “You’ve got put in the worst class you could be put in. They put people there for punishment, she’s that boring.”

  “‘When I was in Africa,’” a boy said. “She should talk to that Timothy, he’s always on about snakes when he’s not calling you Venus.”

  “I’m called Andrea, really,” the girl said. “I don’t know where he got Venus from. I’m going to tell my mum if he carries on.”

  “She’s always saying that,” the boy said. He raised his voice into a dull shriek. “‘When I was in Africa.’”

  “Aye,” they chorused appreciatively. It was a party trick of this boy’s, you could see, the shrieking imitation of, who?, Miss Barker’s voice and her usual sentence. “‘When I was in Africa.’ What’s London like?”

  “It’s all right,” Francis said. “We lived outside London, really.”

  “I’ve been to London,” a girl said.

  “You never,” one of the boys said. “You’re a right liar, you.”

  The consensus of the group was that it was obviously a lie, to claim to have been to London. But Francis was surprised: he thought everyone, always, had been to London. It wasn’t anything to lie about.

  “You don’t want to sit with that Michael,” a boy said.

  “He smells a bit,” Francis said.

  They all laughed; one of the boys clutched his sides, and pretended to roll about on the ground. “You’re a right one,” a girl said. “But it’s true, he’s got a right pong. Miss Barker, she always puts people next to him who can’t refuse, it’s like a punishment, and you have to sit next to him for an hour. She doesn’t mind people who pong. It comes of living in Africa. ‘When I was in Africa—’”

  “Well, you’ve only had the miserable torment of sitting next to Smelly Michael for an hour,” a sensible-looking boy, in neatly pressed trousers and a short-sleeved grey shirt with a sleeveless home-knitted sweater, said. “You can come and sit next to me, if you like. I’ve not got anyone sitting next to me because Neil Thwaite’s in hospital. He’s got something wrong with his blood.”

  “I heard he’s going to die,” a girl said.

  “No, he’s not,” the boy said. “I saw him in the hospital, he’s bored. But he’s in hospital a while, so you can sit next to me.”

  “She told me to sit next to that smelly boy,” Francis said. “At my school in London, you had to sit where you were told and then you stayed there all year. I didn’t mind. I was next to Robert who was my friend. But won’t I get in trouble if I move?”

  “No, no,” they shouted.

  “Anyway,” the boy said, “if she asks, you say, ‘I can’t sit next to that Michael because I’m allergic to the smell he puts out, it makes me sick and I can’t answer questions and my hand wobbles when I write.’ That Michael, his family, they live in a maisonette, they’re right poor. You can sit where you like, so come and sit next to me.”

  “He didn’t know who the prime minister was,” a girl said. “I’m Sally, and that’s Paul, and that’s the other Paul, and—”

  “He was going to be kept back a year because he doesn’t know anything,” Paul—Francis’s new neighbour—said. “But his mum came down and she shouted and they let him go up anyway, but he knows nowt.”

  “He knows—”

  “He knows nowt,” the other Paul, the impressionist, the playground raconteur said. “Don’t you know what ‘nowt’ means?”

  Soon, that vocabulary, like the shared and tender vocabulary of friendship, was clarified, and Francis was tenderly aware that if he had walked out of that classroom with near-tears of fright and isolation, he had walked back in surrounded by six immediate friends, and his near-tears were from a different source. They were the last back in, and Francis felt that a wave of shy surprise and interest went through the rest of the class, admiring and envying the bold step that that mixed and sophisticated group had taken in befriending the boy from London without waiting to see what the general view was. Francis felt full of pride at the step he had taken here.

  The game began every day at half twelve, once they’d finished their doled-out lunch, bolted it down. Sometimes, too, at half ten and quickly at the quarter-past-two playtime as well, till the luxurious expanse of the game they could play at dinnertime to the point of stitches in their sides seemed almost improbable next to the swift trailer of its morning, its afternoon versions. Francis was absorbed here, both anonymous and accepted, whether a blank member of a playtime cadre, or a person with conspicuous friends, but in either case protected.

  At break—that was what they called playtime, whether a more serious or just a more Sheffield word—the game began again, returning to the beginning and each time, somehow, getting a little bit further. It was as if with each attempt they had got a little closer to its essential heart, to some prize it concealed, like a team of adventurers taking turns to whittle at some initially unpromising and rude block. Inside there was some prize.

  That was it, the allure of the game. Though there was not and could not be any real prize, it seemed far more like a formal, famous game, the sort you played under gracious adult supervision at a celebration, a birthday party, and yet infinitely more violent and exciting. It did not seem like a playground enterprise of shamefaced silliness, of rhymes and stomping that no adult could be allowed to hear, but like a brilliant expansive entertainment with printed rules, played in your best clothes, but with the dazzling promise of unconstrained fury, too. It was a game that should have been put away for best occasions, and was played, irresistibly, every day.

  But outside the game and its allotted hours, his social standing was obscure. He felt himself good at the game through something barely commented on by others or previously noticed by him: his height and swiftness. He had grown up into this scale and, in London, the moment to observe any change or the disproportion had never presented itself. But to arrive here in such a state, taller than anyone else in the class and faster too, as the game proved, made him obvious to them and to himself. In the playground, and to his immediately acquired circle, that was something fine, dangerous, admired; outside it, it seemed to make him only conspicuous.

  One day, during PE, Miss Barker set them a race in the playground, a relay race between four teams. Each runner was to touch a marked-out point at the middle of each straight border; Miss Barker marked them, and those were the rules. The first runners from each team set off, and ran along the border of the whole playground. It seemed that they had not understood, and when it came to Francis’s turn, third in his team, he set off directly, running only between points, carving a small diamond like the points in a game of rounders. He was not stopped, and got home twice as fast as the other teams; the other runners in his team followed his example, and the others, doggedly, to their longer route. He had done the right thing, it turned out, but his height and swiftness, as well as this spirit of enterprise, had marked him out.

  A few weeks after arriving, at the beginning of a lesson, as they were sitting down red-faced and busy after morning playtime, Miss Barker came into the classroom. The fourth years had been in the classroom before then, and on the board was an abandoned impatient tangle of x and y, the obscure and useless corners of the alphabet, mixed incredibly with numbers, some normal-sized, some shrunk and sent to the top of a letter like a scratch on the
forehead, symbols poetically abstruse and, for the moment, as blank as the hieroglyphs of a kingdom disinterred from the sand; a frail language occasionally glimpsed about the school that it seemed impossible he, or any of them, should ever comprehend or, like French, converse in and, looking at it, he brought a measure of wilful ignorance even of those fragments he could have understood. Miss Barker sighed, sagged. “Francis,” she said, her eyes not quite alighting where she spoke, “could you come and clean the blackboard before we start?” She had not quite addressed him by name until then, not since she had introduced him to the class, but Francis was up quickly and taking the board rubber from her somewhat unwilling grasp. “Yes—all right then,” she said oddly, with a half-smile to his side that he didn’t understand, and let him do the task, slowly and seriously. It was the first task he’d been asked to undertake in front of the whole class, by name; now they couldn’t go on calling him “new kid.” There was a sort of buzz in the room. When he had finished, he went back to his seat. The two girls behind him were scowling at him, and as he sat down, one of them—yes, her name was Frances, wasn’t it?—kicked his chair hard.

  “She di’n’t mean you,” the girl said, not lowering her voice, and Miss Barker, before embarking on another of her unplanned and circuitous “lectures,” an improvised and loose chain of her morning’s happenstance thoughts, was pleased to say, “Well, Frances …” she paused like a skilled comedian awaiting what indeed came, an appreciative laugh … “I’m sure you can do it next time. If our new friend from London will let you.” As if he had no right to his own name, and she’d politely forgotten it out of good taste. The class laughed, and not at the old woman. Francis felt heat in his face.