The school bell weighs in. Our handmade mosaic, alive just a second ago with half caught shadows, falls a little deeper into the afternoon darkness, and we gather to the call. An indignant whistle kicks up another fuss, and the tramping of feet reaches its peak. We duck and weave into scattershot bundles. Boys and girls tumbling amongst each other like sacks of joke skeletons until symmetry assembles, and lines one through five form up, leaving little alleys where heads poke out to scratch and peel at a neighbour’s name.
‘Oh! Gayboy.’
It only takes one.
‘Haha, you looked, you’re a gayboy now.’
And it only takes a shriek of the whistle before we finally make ourselves the image of cattle they want from us. And then another shriek of the whistle just to make sure. Our pennies-in-a-jar chorus is lidded and tremulous. The ministers are tall and they are watching. Frenzied, partial, dangerous, and Welsh. Though to say it now, fifteen years on from that day, it’s a little too easy to Photoshop a snapshot. Anything can change in the development. Later for the photo paper where expression sharpens up to its own malignancy.
Remade a dozen times a day, the back-then-me gets a poke from me to see what dust comes off him. Is the back-then-me seeing the same headmistress? Is the back-then-me seeing the grind she makes of her agonised face? Is the back-then-me thinking that he should feel sorry for her?
But of course, all of eight, I’m not thinking that. Or much of anything.
Or maybe I am.
She speaks:
‘Rydyn ni wedi gwneud y rheolau yn digon clir.’
Something is bound to get lost in translation, but:
‘We have made the rules clear enough,’ And the drama goes up. ‘We have made them clear enough.’ In Welsh, the stress goes somewhere else in the sentence - ‘We have told you time and again, and we have tried to let it sink in. But many of you, and many of you that I relied on to keep our language, your language, breathing...’
At some point, I don’t remember the transition, we find ourselves in the assembly hall. Newly built (circa ’96). It doubles as a sports hall; coloured gymnastics frames (red, white and green) stacked into the far wall. This is also where we go for our feed. But the tables and chairs are tucked away this afternoon. The forty of us, boys and girls, sit cross-legged on the floor, hands in our pockets. The lady speaks. Biblical as Gomorrah this time. And on with the frenzy.
‘...have turned your backs on everything these bricks were built for.’ Pause for effect. ‘I hoped that you would influence those around you to keep English out of my school.’ She holds the end-times in her hands, and puts them to her face, as if preparing for a sob. And then drops them. She takes a breath to frown. Her form is emaciate in the light of the falling day. There are windows in the ceiling. A cloud shifts in a blue sky. Years later, feeling religious, I’ll make a habit of closing my eyes to a brightness, and pretend that whatever shadow crosses it is some devil come running. Different times, peculiar influences. Little boys stay little boys.
After a while, I draw my head level again, I can see that something is happening. She is drawing individuals to their feet. Those of us still seated move in towards each other, barricaded, rounded, and facing outwards. The standing ones – their numbers a sixty forty split with ours - are directed to surround us. What happens next is this:
‘These boys and girls have kept their promise.’
Paraphrasing makes such a mad dance out of the past.
The plot thickens. The headmistress begins to direct them. Speculation on the floor abounds as to what the game is. Most of my friends are looking down at me. Scratch that. All of my friends are looking down at me. Then the strangest of things starts to happen. The standing ones. The others. They latch hands and start to circumscribe us; the seated. Walk around us. And around us. And their mantra goes:
‘Cymraeg yw iaith yr ysgol. Cymraeg yw iaith yr ysgol.’
‘Welsh is the language of the school. Welsh is the language of the school.’
Doesn’t have quite the same ring to it in English.
I think about the Not. The wood plaque they’d lanyard around my ancestor’s necks. Hundreds of years ago. An English leper bell for the Welsh. A single word of our language spoken would bring along the plaque to the speaker’s unwanted possession. It turned my ancestors on each other. They would pass it along to the next transgressor of the day. Whoever was the last to speak the forbidden would get the lashings. Every school day a new Calvary. They tell us about that, the teachers. They tell us about that a lot. It was hundreds of years ago for them too.
While I think about this, the clutching merry-go-round goes on. The cross-legged among us remain seated and unmoving. Still far away from that day, I keep a close watch on it. I keep a close watch on the back-then-me too. Maybe a face appears in the snapshot of that moment. Maybe not. Around and around and around they go. Awkward chanting, suppressed laughter. Do I remember laughing? Am I laughing? Was I laughing? It’s all a distant nowhere. It doesn’t come to an end either. It doesn’t spin to a stop. It’s all just a picture held up for a second, dropped, and picked up again. A little more grainy each time. But not sepia. Not like the history channel.
Right now, somewhere in an assembly hall, a little boy with his hands in his pockets sees a cloud in a window above, and wonders why he isn’t crying.
The Little Mermaid
Sue Kossew
The Voyage: Edited by Chandani Lokuge & David Morley Page 31
