Babel Tower

by A. S. Byatt

  “I live in Kennington. It isn’t too bad. I get claustrophobic in the Tube.”

  “I can walk to King’s Cross. I am fortunate. I live alone.”

  “I live with my daughter,” says Agatha, answering his question precisely. “She is four. I have to make arrangements for her when I go on these visits, and of course I worry about her. She has just started at a local nursery school.”

  “Her father?” says Alexander, who has already observed that there is no wedding ring.

  “She has no father,” says Agatha Mond. She does not elaborate. After a moment she says, “Careers for women are not easy in this country. One of the odder and more humane provisions of the British Civil Service is that women may have up to three illegitimate children, with maternity leave, and no questions asked. It is unexpected. And useful.”

  “Indeed. But your life must be very strenuous.”

  “It is not easy. But it is quite manageable. I am very fortunate to have this job.”

  They ride on in companionable silence. Alexander says, “What are our new recruits like?”

  “You must form your own judgement. Mickey Impey did begin a degree course at Liverpool, but dropped out. He performs at the Cavern and the teachers and children get very excited to hear he is coming. They ask for him to recite his poetry. I suppose no harm can come of that.”

  “And Magog?”

  “Don’t ask. He writes to the department every week, with new ideas for educational initiatives. When this committee was first mooted, he wrote suggesting himself as an obvious member. Civil servants react badly to that kind of thing. He may be quite all right. He just seemed—overwhelming. But it was not felt that we could—at the present juncture—resist any suggestion of the new Minister. It was thought better to absorb him.”

  “Now you look very official.”

  “I love the impersonal verbs. ‘It was not felt.’ So useful.”

  “Elegant and stuffy.”

  “Exactly.”

  “I don’t think you are stuffy.”

  “Oh, I have to be. I have to be. Actually, I like it.”

  When they get to Doncaster, he says, “It must be very interesting for you, to do this work, with a four-year-old child.”

  “I talk to her like a watermill. I hear so much about the need to talk, and how to talk. I exhaust her with talking.” She laughs, and then frowns. “I love her too much, because I’m on my own. I try not to talk about her but I think about her all the time.”

  Alexander thinks of saying: I have a son who thinks he is another man’s son. But he does not say it. He thinks: Here is someone to whom I might say it, one day. But maybe she thinks I am an old buffer, a has-been. Maybe she is being kind to me. He has never had to worry about this before.

  Just before York, she says, “I’ve been wanting to tell you. I once acted in a production of Astraea. It was OUDS, at Oxford. I was doing research at the time. I was Bess Throckmorton. I married Walter Raleigh. I loved it.”

  “When it was first put on,” says Alexander, “I was in love with the woman who played Bess Throckmorton.”

  She too was his type, dark, secret, smouldering.

  “I fell in love with Edmund Spenser, but it came to nothing,” says Agatha Mond. “Short and sweet, a midsummer’s night.”

  They are at York. They step out into the station. Alexander takes Agatha’s bag. As they get into the taxi, he says, “What is your daughter’s name?”

  “Saskia. She doesn’t look like her, like Rembrandt’s Saskia. She looks like me. But I always think of Saskia as complete, somehow. It’s a name of good omen.”

  They are becoming friends, Alexander feels. He is alive. Yes, he is alive.

  Their first visit is to the Star Primary School in a Leeds suburb. They are driven there from the Dean Court Hotel in York. Alexander is not able to sit next to Agatha Mond, who is having a serious discussion in the front seat with Professor Wijnnobel about the grammar evidence. Wijnnobel is too tall to fit comfortably into a minibus seat: he stoops, and inclines his large face gravely. Hans Richter sits behind Alexander, who is one of the few people he talks voluntarily to. He wears a business suit, and has well-cut grizzled grey hair and a neat, unremarkable face, with glasses. Louis Roussel sits at the back of the bus, away from Wijnnobel, to whom he is ideologically opposed. He is a little man, dark and birdlike, energetic and short-tempered. The two new members sit apart from each other and everyone else, as new members usually do. Roger Magog looks suspiciously around at the others, sussing them out, summing them up, at once self-conscious about their probable attitudes to him, and vaguely believing that his scrutinising self is invisible. Alexander wonders how he himself knows all this. Magog wears a shabby off-white polo neck under a shapeless tweed jacket, the garments of a slightly passé authenticity. His thinning hair is pale red, and his fat curly beard is dark russet.

  The Liverpool poet is very pretty, with a mane of buttercup-coloured curls, a sweet full mouth, and huge innocent blue eyes. He is wearing a collarless jacket over a bright blue shirt that intensifies his eyes. He has been very pleasant to everyone so far, helping the women up the bus step, standing aside for the older men. The other woman is Auriol Worth, the headmistress, dressed like a headmistress in a good-looking navy suit and white shirt. Her face is precise and professionally observant. She is about fifty. She looks so like a headmistress that it is hard to make anything of her. She says to Alexander, of the poet, as they wait on the pavement, “If I had that one in my class I’d keep a special eye on him.”

  The Star Primary School is called the Star because of its revolutionary architecture. The committee has come to see it because it is new and exciting. It is wholly glass-walled, and is built in the shape of a star. It is wholly open-plan: the children gather in little, impromptu-looking groups, in one or another arm of the star, bringing with them their brightly coloured bean bags, their plastic stools, their little tables. They are grouped not by age, nor by subject, but by some sort of self-directed choice of activity. A group is making coiled clay pots. Older children are helping younger ones. A group is pouring and measuring water to and from a series of plastic containers, solemnly measuring and recording the heights of the contents. Little ones are pouring. Older ones are measuring. Still older ones are making a graph of the measurements. In another arm of the star children are watching snails climb the walls of a glass tank and are drawing the horns, the mouth, the foot. Small people dart busily and loudly from open space to open space, calling out, “We urgently need a wooden spoon,” or “Mandy’s gone and done it again.” Someone is playing the recorder in one star-tip, and someone near her is banging a drum. Because there are no classroom or corridor walls the children’s work is on display on easels and noticeboards in the centre. There is a display of portraits of “My Family,” and a table with the children’s weekly newspapers displayed. There is a book corner in one aisle with a round bookcase, a lot of cushions, and a casual heap of books beside them. There is a lot of noise. It is, on the whole, purposive noise, shrill, variegated, busy, but loud. Alexander—like many of the older members of the committee—is moved by the contrast with his own schooldays. These little children, brightly clothed, free-moving, are different beings from the cowed, subservient, watchful little boy he remembers as himself. One inevitable effect on all the committee members who are not professional teachers, and even on those, like Alexander, who were and are not, is fear, the old cold terror of the school building, of power, of authority, of judgement. In places like this, that is gone. A little girl appears with a piece of bobbin knitting; she says, “Excuse me, I think I’ve dropped a stitch, it’s all gone funny, like moth-holes, I wonder if you could put it right.” He takes her darning needle, he prods at the wool. She expects his help as her right. He notes the analogy “like moth-holes.”

  All the same, he has the beginnings of a headache, from the noise. Where are the corners where a child such as he was might hide, might crouch and read? There are no hiding pla
ces. It is all open, all group life.

  Auriol Worth is talking to the headmaster, an enthusiastic young man, young for a headmaster, who is able to talk to her quite coherently about the degree to which the children select their activities and the degree to which he suggests and complicates them, whilst keeping up a running conversation with passing children and teachers, like a juggler with a stream of green and orange balls, never confusing them. “I think you’re bored with clay, Cilia, I think you should go and join in Miss Morrissey’s group, which is talking and writing about amphibians. Everyone always thinks they want to do clay, but actually you need to do a lot of things in a day.

  “Never mind, Heather. I expect Mr. Dinsdale thought you were upsetting the others. If you come to me at break I’ll explain how to measure squares and then you won’t feel left out.

  “We try to let them dictate the pace and the interest, Miss Worth, but of course we must have things difficult enough to attract and occupy the ablest.”

  “And what about peer-pressure not to attempt the difficult?”

  “Ah, there we have to be cunning. We have to disguise the difficulty.”

  “So you don’t encourage ambition, as such.”

  “We disapprove of competitiveness. We like co-operation. Everyone has his or her talent, which we try to foster.”

  “And you are not flat on your face with exhaustion at the end of the day?”

  “Often.” He laughs. “But it’s worth it.”

  Roger Magog is studying the project on “My Family.” He says to Roussel, who is passing, “How significant that all these mothers appear to be angry. ‘My Mum screming.’ ‘My Mummy shouted at me.’ All these little children draw their mothers with a big, open mouth and a stick body. Only her screaming mouth matters.”

  “Little children have a very simple scheme of human beings in their drawings,” says Roussel. “They learn bodies and hands and faces later. The older children have parents with bodies.”

  “My dad has a big stik,” says Magog. “My dad has a Big ball. He threw the big ball hard at me. It hurt.”

  “It probably did,” says Roussel.

  “Sticks and balls and dads,” says Magog. “How direct, how innocent, how clear. And the mums screaming. The modern family. Sad.”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “Oppressive. ‘Go to bed, says Mum. I wont I say I wont. You will says my mum is ther no pease. I hate bed. I want to stay up all nite.’ ”

  “Interesting,” says Wijnnobel behind him, “that e on nite. The child knows how to elongate the vowel, even in a misspelling.”

  Alexander is trying to find a group of children who will be doing what Simon Poole might at this moment be doing. He finds a writing group with a young teacher. They have their “newsbooks” and their personal dictionaries, which they carry about in little cotton bags, since there are no desks. They write and talk and take their work to the teacher, who gives them long words for their dictionaries. Alexander asks the teacher what they read, and is shown bright cards with large pictures and a line or two of text. “I read them poems,” she says. “I read them Spike Milligan and of course I read them Mickey Impey’s Naughty Poems for Bad Boys and Girls, they love that. It’s great he’s actually here.”

  “Do they learn the poems?”

  “Oh no. That would take the pleasure out of them. Learning by rote is very destructive, we know that now, they must discover things. Some learn things almost by accident, but we’d never make them. They don’t learn tables, either, we draw number-squares and they discover the relations. That way, it stays in the mind.”

  “But they learn the alphabet,” says Alexander, looking at the dictionaries.

  “Oh no. Not as such. Not by rote. They sort of assimilate it.”

  “So how do they find their way round their dictionaries?”

  “I show them. Until they know it.”

  “I used to love chanting the alphabet. Backwards and forwards both. And tables. And French verbs. A sort of pleasure. Like dancing.”

  The young woman shudders expressively.

  Mickey Impey is asked to say one of his poems. The children come out of the arms of the star. He sends two to fetch some big boxes, so he can stand up above them, so they can see. He is a natural showman. He says:

  “Children are always being told, come here, go there, do this, do that. They can’t help it, they have to. What they get told makes no sense to them, they know what they really want, but the Tellers don’t know and don’t care, do they, they just go on fixing the world to make it comfortable for themselves, to keep children quiet and nice and sweet and good. So I wrote some poems for bad children. The one I’m going to read is about some children who go off to a secret country where there are no pushers-around and find all sorts of strange creatures who want to help them take charge of their own lives. Here it is.”

  The poem was long. The peroration went:

  And the Blue Blebs

  And the Yellow Yetis

  And the Purple Prongs

  And the Green Groaners

  And the Redundant Reds

  And the Great Grey Grunters

  And the Picky Pink Pixies

  And the Orange Owls

  With the horrible Yorubas

  And the loathsome Lapps

  Come when he whistles

  When Mickey the Mad Imp whistles

  And they strangle the Grandmas

  They annihilate the Aunties

  They top-and-tail the Teachers

  And truss them in twenties

  And trepann them and toast them

  And toss them to tigers

  Who howl with delight

  And dance all the night

  In the burning bright light

  Of the fire they have made

  Of school-uniforms and books and pens and inks, and desks and chairs and blackboards and footballs and hockey sticks and chalk and dusters and chemistry kits and globes and bunsen burners

  And they dance and they prance

  They writhe and romance

  And feed till they choke

  On choc-ices and Coke.

  “He is out of date in his equipment,” murmurs Auriol Worth.

  The children roar with applause. Mickey Impey organises them into a long dancing crocodile, and they prance serpentining round the school, chanting loudly after their Piper, whose energies show no signs of flagging, though one or two little ones begin to stumble and cry. Finally Agatha pulls at his arm, and tells him the group must move on: they have other schools to visit. He does not stop immediately: she has to trot alongside, explaining. His lovely face is sulky. He calls to the children, “Do you want to stop?”

  “No,” cry most. “Yes,” cry a few.

  “They want to go on,” says Mickey Impey.

  “Well, they can’t,” says Agatha, tartly. The rest of the committee group behind her.

  “You see,” says Mickey Impey, turning to the children as he leaves, “they don’t care what you want, they don’t really let you do as you please, it’s all a trick, when they tell you you’re free to choose.”

  A wavering scream, from some of the children, as though he were a pop star, answers this.

  The Aneurin Bevan Comprehensive School in Calverley is not a shiny-bright new place like the Star Primary School. It was once the Archbishop Temple Grammar School and the Leeds Road Secondary Modern, and is now one institution on two sites. The old Grammar School is panelled and dark and echoing. The old Secondary Modern is square and shapeless, with pre-fabricated classrooms in its playground, a smell of inadequate sanitation, and exotic salty-looking fungus or chemical rash sprouting on its heating conduits. In this school there is a vigorous discussion of the problems and blessings of mixed-ability teaching. The committee are taken to a fourth-form improvised play, which centres on a family conflict between the women who make Sunday lunch and the men who want to go out to the pub and to football. Parts have been given to the less articulate to make them more
articulate, with some success—one girl cries suddenly into the hall:

  “And must I spend all my days like this, the same thing time after time, shopping and cooking and waiting till what I have cooked is cold and greasy, week after week after week, and then washing it up and saying it doesn’t matter when you come home smelly and sick, smelly and sick, is this what it is to be a human being?”

  This eloquence causes her subsequently to blush bright scarlet, and deeply embarrasses her male co-actors, who can only say, “Oh come on,” and “It’s not so bad as that,” and “Women do go on.” Magog is delighted with this moment, and congratulates the teacher on bringing out the girl’s inner conflicts. The teacher replies that that girl’s father is a vicar, and teetotal, and some imagination has gone into her performance. Alexander is bored. He remembers that school is 90 percent boredom. For the good and the bad student alike. Youth is boring, but this is not to be admitted.

  The headmaster of the Aneurin Bevan School too is a tryer and an innovator. He has a school council and runs regular school debates in the hall of the old Grammar School. He has staged a debate in honour of the committee.

  “This house believes that no good is done by the teaching of English grammar.”

  There is a hidden agenda to this: the headmaster himself, a geographer by profession, remembers his English language lessons as a boy, the parsing of sentences, the location of dependent clauses, as a form of intense torture, an exercise baffling and pointless. The school week is short, this man reasons, the school year is short, school days in toto are short, and clause analysis is a cruel waste of time. It is probable that most of his colleagues share both his feeling and his opinions. It is probable that most of the children do. Learning English grammar, even to passionate readers, is peculiarly repugnant and somehow unnatural.