Pulse

It was like having a French-built nuclear power station in his chest.
“You know: it’s clean, classy, fitted by the best, haute-couture stitches even, but although everyone keeps telling me it’s quite safe, nothing’ll go wrong, I feel like it could go POOF any moment.” He flicked the POOF into the air with five chewed nails. Sheesh, I’m telling a stranger my life story. He slammed his mouth shut.
“Or ‘pof’!’” his listener arched an eyebrow “you said it’s French-built…”.
His cellophane laugh crackled at the unexpected response. Relief seeped into his jaws. ‘I like a woman who can make me smile; I might need to kiss her later...’ He corked the thought just before it popped out. 

The decision to just up and leave his life – by plane, not coffin – hadn’t been taken so much as heard coming from his easy pulse as he’d lain pinned between his palate-knifed hospital sheets. (‘My God, I’m lying on a wedding cake’ had been the first thought that cut its way through the fog and into his mind on coming to.) And it was as he’d retreated inwards to escape from the sugarscape around him that he’d suddenly realised that, for the first time ever, his blood was pumping through an unknown heart. His very core was a stranger to him yet utterly familiar. And all in the space of a heartbeat. And he’d decided there and then that if they’d replaced the broken with the new in his body, he could do the same with his soul. Keep the ‘he’ he’d always been by installing a new one.
He’d swung his half-numb legs off the bed with (he thought) new-found grace (not French grace, though – they said his new heart was from Brixton), and hauled on the fuzzy-crunchy pull-ons they’d brought him from home – they were the only things I could find, sorry mate – how ironic that these were the only pyjamas he’d ever owned, a man always unembarrassed by his nakedness now embarrassed by strident-print pull-ons. ‘Oh well, here’s to the new me.’ He rubbed the bristles protruding from his face. Topiary. He’d never had that before either. ‘Right. Sweatshirt. Grey. Well, ok, not a completely new me.’ No-one had seemed to notice him leave the hospital room. ‘Must be the damned pull-ons,’ he noted with amusement, aware that they were the kind of thing people looked away from in an attempt not to stare. ‘So. Where to?’

And now, sitting here in Business Class on the first flight out to somewhere, (‘Great, that’ll do. Never been there’) he was talking about his health – his HEALTH! In the name of…! - to this almost translucent, immaculate woman with a fringe like two wedges of shiny black paper artfully arranged on her tallow forehead. The inflight music kept time to his heartbeat as they taxied slowly. “He’s told us not to blow it cuz he knows it’s all worthwhile” ‘Nice one. Brixton again. Good sign.’ And as he looked back in from the runway, his smile flashed sunshine at the woman. “Anyway, what’s your story?”

The Story of a Song

(This was written for high level students of English - B2+. I'll get back to my Green story soon....)

The Story of a Song

I was born in May 1970 from the pen of musical legend, David Bowie, and made my first public appearance in November of the same year. Although some classify me as ‘glam rock’, I have always considered myself adaptable and perhaps difficult to pin down. Like Mr. Bowie himself, I have adopted at least four guises in my time – that is, so far; who knows what I’ll become in the future. I started life as a track on an album which, I’m proud to say, had my name, and I then had the honour of becoming the B-side of David Bowie’s massive hit ‘Space Oddity’, in the USA. This, it turned out, was only my first incarnation, sung with David’s distinctive London accent.

Shortly afterwards, he lent me to his Scottish friend Lulu, a tiny, Eurovision-song-singing lady with great popularity at the time, although hardly alternative! She turned me into a sleazy, almost cabaret-style number 3 hit in 1974, and vastly increased her street cred in the process. However, I was still keen to try new images, having learned from my creator, who has taken on various personae including Ziggy Stardust, The Thin White Duke, a clown, and others, both male and female. So, after resting for a few years, in 1993 I worked with grunge group Nirvana, one of rock history’s greatest groups, I’m told, on their album MTV Unplugged in New York. We went to number one in several countries, including the USA, the UK and Spain. 

Own photo but also available at eltpics in Music set.

Despite being part of Nirvana’s Unplugged set, I sounded remarkably similar to my original version, with, perhaps, a slightly rougher, less ‘British pop’ edge. This meant that I had now expressed myself in a London accent, a Scottish twang and the tones of the USA’s Pacific West coast, as Nirvana singer Kurt Cobain was from up in Washington, near the Canadian border with the States. Unintentionally, I had travelled extensively, as well as changing face and gender…. More recently, I changed origin, face and gender again. In 2005, a young woman called Jordis Unga, from Massachusetts in the North East of the USA performed me with great success on a TV show and then issued me in a format that was completely new to me – as a digital download. This makes my experimentation with multiple identities even more satisfactory, as I started on a vinyl album, became a vinyl single or two, later experienced life as a cassette and a CD, and finally as a download – and of course a YouTube video.

This is, of course, in line with my main interest in multiple personalities, as I sing about having ‘passed (him) upon the stair, we spoke of what and when although I wasn't there’. Nowadays, I could do that on the mobile, but back in the seventies, only a schizophrenic or split personality could talk to someone while not being there, don’t you agree? I admit, though, that I’m not totally original and have been inspired by Kafka, HP Lovecraft and a poem by William Hughes Mearns about someone who talked to a ghost he’d met on the stairs. But I’m happy with the way I am, and I seem to bring success to those who sing me and happiness to those who listen to me. Will you be one of them?

The Art of Being Different: It's not easy being green...

1 Green Days, Green Daze: Land that is lost now

Glorious. And green.

(This is the third part of a story called The Art of Being Different. The first two parts are here and here.)

There is something inherently wrong with secondary school, as it has tended to be. Just when hormones turn into internal fireworks, when a need to express an individual self clashes head-on with an absolute dependence on The Tribe, we are required to suppress all natural instincts, quash all rebellion, and sit in neat rows, accepting the unquestionable authority of a handful of sometimes questionable figures standing at the front of the room on raised platforms from which they look down on us. The idea of maturing from child to adult thus mutates into one of enforced regimentation and regulation. I suppose we do the same to plants – rather than let them grow higgledy-piggledy, we plant them in rows, water and fertilise them and bind them to canes to mature, unbending and unblemished. But that's not the only reason secondary school casts a distinctly green shadow over my past.

Secondary school. Yes... I have to admit mine was different from all but those to be found in novels and the autobiographies of, say, Stephen Fry and John Peel - but in tunics. I had sat the two-day entrance exam in the dead part of that mid-seventies winter and, having only particularly embarrassed myself in the P.E.test, I was accepted. My parents were proud, relieved (I might actually get an education at this school) and shocked. They would only have to pay part of my fees, but scrutiny of the list of uniform items to be purchased at a reputable establishment in Reading resulted in the summer holiday budget for that year being rethought. Le Continent would have to wait.

In fact, the uniform list, as a means of predicting my immediate and mid-term future, was far more revealing than a palm-reading, the Financial Times and the entire I Ching put together, and far more terrifying even than a blind dentist. Beige socks in winter, white in summer, green for Games. Regulation shoes: one pair for outdoors (two models to choose from), one pair for indoors (two models to choose from), T-bar sandals for summer (two models to ...), black hockey boots, white sports shoes. Two mint green airtex shirts and a green, pleated P.E.skirt. One dark green tunic to measure 3 inches from the floor when kneeling (believe me, they checked). A dark green, V-neck jersey. One emerald green 'girdle', a belt or sash worn around the waist and knotted like a tie. One emerald green tie, which was compulsory with the white shirt, optional with the green and white checked one (not to be worn on special occasions). There was a Mac or a cape both dark green with a baize bowler hat for winter, a white straw hat (think St Trinians) or a boater (think Eton) to be worn with the dark green blazer for summer (you could wear your blazer under your coat and over your tunic and dark green jersey for extra warmth in winter). The tunic disappeared in favour of a mint green and white nurse's uniform style dress in the warmer months. The uniform list was accompanied by a letter indicating which house we were to be in (alas, no Sorting Hat): Paget (yellow), Carrington (purple), Kensington (blue) or Ducat (orange). This was vital information for hat, swimming hat and tunic badge purchase, as the hat-band was a compulsory item and indicated your house, as did swimming hat colour and the badge embroidered on your tunic. Hogwarts, here we come. Not.

Of all the items on the uniform list, none was scarier than the garment that was to enter my school lexis as 'Abbey Nationals' - large, thick, dark green, cotton knickers. With termly, unannounced knicker-check to ensure adhesion to this particular rule. Believe it. (We soon learned to keep a pair in our gym bags and wear them over more 'appealing' underwear on PE and Games days, the most likely to hide a knicker-check ambush).

Hair had to be its natural colour - not an issue in 1975, but '76 and '77 were a different story – and short, off the shoulder or tied back. Bobbles and ribbon were to be bottle green or brown. No jewellery. Tattoos, of course, were for merchant sailors, army-types and The All Blacks only. These were the rules we were informed of before starting school and there were also regulations relating to leotards, hockey sticks, overalls, satchels, name labels, embroidered names and so on and so forth, so that, in combination with the number of items to be purchased, the subjects on the syllabus, and the distance to be travelled daily by car, train and on foot … well, I was overwhelmed before I even got there. Particularly as I didn't know anyone else who was going. My Best Out-of-School Buddy had also passed the entrance exam, but was (and is) a year younger and so would be going to the Junior School. In The Annex.

Regimented, regulated green......

The school itself occupied an old, red brick building, and it had been there for 70 years prior to my arrival. It was a labyrinth of musty corridors, high ceilings, uneven cream paint, creaky floors, stained glass windows and narrow staircases up and down, and a gallery allowed for two tiers of classrooms to lead off the side of the Old School Hall, three up, three down. Water pipes churned, radiators clunked, the stairs to the staffroom creaked wildly and the Deputy Head's office nestled in an attic-like study. The Headmistress, Miss Hardcastle (honest!) - in appearance a stand-in for the Queen, a fact which explained one of her nicknames – had a large study at the front of the school, above the front door and away from the scum and wretches that were the staff and students. When she did deign to mingle with the commoners, she protected her Chanel-like suits with a black robe, not dissimilar to that favoured by Severus Snape. She was aloof and 'ungenerous' to all alike but she did manage to keep the school in the top 2 on the 'league table'.

Beyond the nooks and crannies of the old building, housing the first two years of secondary and some of the staff, and just round the corner from Sick Bay and the Ink Fountain, the school lost some of its mothball 'odeur' and was transformed into wide, partially glassed, lino-floored corridors, and large, airy classrooms, with the building holding the language labs, language classrooms and the science labs wedged between the two classroom blocks. The science labs were filled with row upon row of wooden science benches where Bunsen burners and agar jelly in specimen dishes were part and parcel of daily lessons, along with transparent plastic protective glasses and an increased concern for hair-elastic-use. This language-and-science block marked the grey area between pre-pubescent and full-blown adolescence and we dreamt of leaving the wood, clanking pipes and leaded windows behind in favour of the shades of yellow modernity beyond The Glass Corridor (flash memory from second year – an entire class of older girls crawling on the floor in the Glass Corridor looking for our Latin teacher's missing contact lens...). The modern building also held the lunch-room with its variations on liver and onions and bacon suet, and the huge new assembly hall named after some generous parents whose name I have forgotten in the interim. Richards. Richardson. This was the vast, parquet-floored hall where Dance was scheduled once a week, and where the floors were kind, nay soothing, on the bare dancing feet, and we aspired to sing in a school opera and stand on THAT stage rather than the smaller one in the Old School Hall. Ah, dreams come true, say they do, say they do, say they do.

Back to the rules. The number of rules was overwhelming and virtually impossible to learn, short term. To speak in class, we raised a hand until invited to stand. Once standing, anything uttered had to be prefixed with the phrase “Please Miss/Mrs....., “. Dropping your pencil could set you back five minutes if your teacher was mid flow, and woe befall the girl who bent down to pick up her pencil without going through the ritual. In the corridors, no more than two abreast, no running and under no circumstances overtaking teachers or sixth formers. We didn't have to curtsey to prefects but that was probably an oversight. Exercise books were colour-coded by subject and replaced at the Stationery Cupboard (inhabited by Miss Beard, our Maths teacher) when you only had two clean pages remaining. You handed in your exercise book (which was labelled with your stationery number as well as your name and class, so I was Fiona M..., IIIW, Nº64), Miss Beard checked it for wastage, torn out pages etc, your stationery number and the subject were noted (in case you were collecting brown jotters on the side), and your form mistress brought you both your old book and the new one to afternoon registration.

Green acorns become great oaks. Sometimes.

Apart from the flood of regulation-information at the start of the year, other shocks or surprises included the subjects we were to consume, like piggy banks collecting for the future: Music, for example, was to be divided into three – History, Practice and the totally unfathomable Theory. There was Biology, Chemistry, English Language, English Literature, Maths, French, History, Geography, Art, Cookery.... over15 in total and including Latin and two mysteries: Scripture and Physics. What were Scripture and Physics? Who knew? Scripture, as it turned out, was my old pal Religion and consequently a doddle, and Physics – I remember half the class having no idea what that was – turned out to be rainbows and cannonballs, magnets and batteries. So that was alright.

In terms of teachers, my first year at The Green School was gentle. Some teachers stood out. The repressed, prim Miss Packer with her tweed skirts and twin-sets, who taught us to parse, spell and punctuate with surgical accuracy – I never saw her smile. Ever. And the word 'dictation' (and a large number of grammatical terms such as demonstrative adjective) still unfailingly bring her to mind. Miss Beard, guardian of The Stationery Cupboard and teacher of Mathematics. Slightly masculine in that sensible brown lace-ups sort of way that some women were in those days without anyone even pondering their sexuality (did we care? no), a good, caring teacher who taught us memory tricks that are still firmly embedded and who had the knack of explaining her subject in a way everyone understood (maths teachers were, without exception, brilliant at the Green School – in fact, certainly in my first year there, most teachers were). I am sure there are hundreds of women of around my age who smile when their children ask 'Mum, what's a polygon?'....

There was Miss Kendrick, a truly inspired Scripture teacher who told us to personalise our exercise books, and taught us the etymology of the days of the week. Miss Whittle, our form teacher, who had a tick we were just too young to ridicule and whose 'Ecce, in pictura est puella' and tales of stuffed dormouse at supine banquets I still remember vividly. There was Miss Wilkinson who taught us Art and Games and who was later ordained and, last I heard, reached some of the highest échelons of the Church of England, Miss Wilkinson, who reminded me of a whip-sharp willow tree, and consistently called me 'Mc-Cough-Lynn-with-an-E' but was inspiring as an Art teacher. Many faces, many names. I also remember an extremely attractive History teacher from my first year at the Green School with long, straight, fair hair which she tossed artfully, a penchant for mini skirts and a tendency to sit cross-legged on the edge of the teacher's desk up on the platform at the front of the classroom. She was quite a good teacher, I think, and taught me the difference between 'pacifically' and 'specifically' (I really WAS green...) but what would have been a schoolboy's wet dream was simply off-putting in our all-girls environment and we didn't warm to her.

Little clusters of green form

Friends were made as friends are always made, more or less the same way as sand dunes are made, shifting and reshaping as the wind pushes one way or another – but then those dunes once formed turn to rock, the rock which Petra was cut into, at least in the case of the friendships at the Green School. Initially I think we teamed up with those sitting nearest us, and as we were in alphabetical order (my class went from Latter to Reed), my first friends bore the surnames Marshall, Millington, Mills and Morton. This system was added to by the fact that half of the girls in the class had been together in the Junior School for the previous six years or so, so Mills was already friends with Manning and so on. Marshall and Millward were the tallest in the class, so that was another point in common, and then there were those who all travelled on the same train or bus, thus The Henley Set gelled. Obviously, over the year, interests, maturity, worldliness (we were 11 and 12 at this stage), background, character and other such concerns influenced and the groups congealed. The Henley Set expanded to include the wealthy, worldly girls, whose parents had trendy professions and chic friends, some were divorced and had boyfriends/girlfriends and (in my mind's eye) they drank G&Ts, walked barefoot, ate lasagne, smoked joints and played with ouija boards. These were parents who didn't just like Fleetwood Mac, the Beatles and Genesis, they KNEW George Harrison and Peter Gabriel and went to the pub with them. The girls in that group were into hair and music and being clever although they actually occupied the middle to lower half of the class in terms of results. They excelled in sport, art and music, though, or they had elder sisters who always won the school drama prize, all of which was totally cool.

We were beautiful, no matter what they say...

My little group ultimately consisted of 9 girls – 10 until Morton left school and moved house – who were nice, perhaps slightly eccentric, non-trendy and on the whole from stable backgrounds with 'regular' parents who actually got on with each other. This turned out not to be quite the case for two girls, but by the time that emerged our group was fixed. Academically, we were a bit of a mixed bag but on the whole in the upper half of the class results-wise, in some or all of our subjects. We were more naïve than some of our classmates, but we enjoyed each other's company and put up with those of us who enjoyed French skipping and cats' cradle without complaint. We didn't pick on other girls, we were not good at sport, apart from swimming and dance, and we came to be fans of Spike Milligan, reading and 'music in general', but that was later. We were slightly misshapen at that age: we had bright red hair, a big nose, wonky eyes, big teeth, huge feet, we were overweight or underweight, unusually tall or on the short side (note: none of us had ALL of these features!) – but we wore it well and I don't actually think we consciously realised that we had this in common, as I've only just realised while writing myself, but that first year at the Green School, none of my little group was average height, weight, hair colour and more or less pretty. We were all Different. And I could say we were all sharp-minded, but that was a shared characteristic of 97% of the girls in the school; whatever it was that glued us together, it worked, it stuck and I'm sure we could still get together and enjoy each other's company, these several decades later.

As I write, I wonder how, why and when it all started to go wrong. I'm not at all sure I know the answers to those questions, but go wrong it did. And Big Time. My second year of Being Green was a disaster to the extent I've been putting off.......no, AM putting off... writing about it because my memories bring back all those feelings – and my stomach turns. I got lost in my second year at secondary school, the year that made me what I am, for good and for bad. I got lost. And I'm not entirely convinced I got found again. 

Green images all taken from the Colours set at eltpics http://www.flickr.com/photos/eltpics/sets/72157630608863638/, contributed by @elt_pics, Victoria Boobyer, @AliCe_M, @ij64 and @sandymillin and used under a CC Attribution Non-Commercial licence, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/”

Through the bathroom wall

Steve looked in the mirror, and grimaced. He hated his hair in the morning; it took a comb, water and a ridiculous quantity of gel to mould it into something acceptable to the rest of Year 6. His mother used to help him, but now she worked. Every morning was the same: Steve got up when his mother called ‘Bye, love!’ and the front door banged. She had dressed, washed, cooked, kissed him awake and turned on the radio for him. And then he was alone. His breakfast was on the table; his lunch was on the microwave. His father had gone to work eight months before, and still hadn’t come home, but Mum wasn’t worried “He’ll be back. He promised”.

A movement in the mirror. A noise behind him. Steve swung round. The back of his neck felt cold, his ears were burning. He had seen something, just for a second. He picked up his deodorant, flew out of the door shouting ‘Ha!’ and pointed the spray at....no-one. He stood listening intently, breathing as silently as possible. Nothing. He looked at his feet and laughed quietly. “Stupid!”. He had always been terrified of intruders, but his father used to be there to protect him. Now he felt vulnerable. He looked at Dad’s toothbrush which was still sitting in its place.

Suddenly, a voice. “It was only me, don’t worry”. Steve jumped so high, he thought his heart had come out of his mouth. She was sitting on the edge of the bath, looking at him. Her purple eyes burned with a yellow light. “Close your mouth and follow me. We have things to do,” said......said who? Steve stared at the creature in front of him in his bathroom! She had broad shoulders, impossibly long, fluid legs, and scales, like a fish, on her arms and cheekbones. But what made her the strangest, most beautiful creature Steve had ever seen was her colour: turquoise, like tropical waters and mint ice-cream. And she was carrying a battle-axe.

‘Are you coming?’ she asked impatiently. ‘How can I argue with a huge, beautiful green woman with an axe?’ thought Steve and nodded weakly. The ‘woman’ swung round and jumped through the bathroom wall, as if it was a waterfall. As Steve stepped cautiously through the liquid tiles, he heard her voice ‘By the way, I’m your sister.’

Illustration by Roberto Miranda

The Art of Being Different: Part Two

Part two: Your wee bit hill and glen

England. School and teachers in Southern England in the 1970s. Where to start? I arrived in Bray, in South East England with four years of primary school still to go, those years stretching out (and up) in front of me like a slippery ladder to be climbed a rung at a time, with Mr Bennett and his Top Class hovering way above me. Most of the things I learned in the first two years were not on the syllabus, and began with the discovery that nearly all my classmates either sounded remarkably like the gentleman who announced the football results before tea on Saturdays, or as if they had a mouthful of gobstopper-like vowels crashing together and pulverising the consonants. Even my name was no longer familiar, becoming something akin to the noise emitted by a cat yowling in the night.

Say my name, go on, say my name...  Image by @cerirhiannon at eltpics

 Braywick, my new house of learning, was a red-brick building which had presumably been home to the village school since the early Victorian era, and so was a clutter of overspill huts and bicycle sheds by the early 1970s, with one of the original classrooms doubling as the two-sitting dinner-hall with “food” delivered by the Council in large stainless steel tins, pails and urns which was consumed with noses held to aid swallowing. I'm still unsure as to whether school lunches or school toilets were the worst aspect of the day-to-day at Braywick...

The playground was small and hampered by its makeshift classrooms, but it was on the edge of Braywick Park, with the forbidden 'Dell', and expanses of grass that doubled as the rounders pitch (God-forsaken game that could only have been invented by the English to torture poor wee, waif-like lassies like myself). The park was full of fairies, elves, witches, trolls, vikings and unicorns; there were monkeys in the monkey-puzzle trees, galloping around on the stallions that lived amongst the leaves of the horse-chestnut trees. The fairies rode on sycamore propellers and wore magnolia flowers edged with the seed fluff that came from the plane trees. You could lie in the long grass under the willow and weep, while catkins jumped down from the pussy-willow to spit at the bullies and Chipper-riders and keep them at bay.

The Chipper. A Chopper for midgets. In Scotland we'd had sensible bikes and trikes sporting the Raleigh coat of arms – a blue trike had cast me as Lieutenant Blue in neighbourhood games, and had been succeeded by a red bike (with just one stabiliser), crowning me Captain Scarlet just too late to enjoy my reign back in Mosshead Road. But here, the children had Chippers and Choppers, bright yellow or orange, with streamers on the handlebars, and they seemed to be for showing off, making ruts in the park grass or spraying gravel at rivals, rather than for playing. It didn't look promising.

It was in the park that I learned to shut up, and my awareness of being different suddenly took on Gargantuan dimensions. To this day I spend most of my time silent, then overwhelming people with incessant blah when the valve on the pressure cooker pops. I learned to be silent thanks to technology, just for the record. Our teacher, Mrs. Weatherall, was a fine teacher in true 70s style - and believe me, the 70s were far more educationally sound than the present day, as creative writing, projects and art seemed to dominate the curriculum, or at least in Mrs. W's classes (though as I write I wonder if this was her way of dealing with me, bird of a different plumage, who could already read and write well, unlike most of her charges).

Mrs. W. decided we were going to do a class project on trees, possibly inspired by an educational radio programme we listened to weekly, so she took us to the park with drawing paper, pencils and a new fangled, battery-operated box which was fitted with a handle at one end, a spring-loaded lid and a microphone, and as we walked through the park in a group, each child was invited to describe a tree to this box. My turn came as we stood under a mighty lime tree. “It looks like a spook dancing.”

Image by Diarmuid Fogarty at eltpics

Back in our hut-class, the tape was played back to eager ears and most of our delight – none of us had ever heard our own voices before – and...well. Imagine plummeting off a cliff. I can still hear it, so utterly different from my classmates' voices, starting high and rolling downhill to the inevitable bounce on “dance-sing”, every vowel foreign, every syllable drawn out. I disappeared.

Shortly afterwards, it was decided that I was in the wrong class, as my years in Scotland had armed me with literacy skills and a general knowledge that were sinking me into the mulch of boredom as I waited for my new chums to plough through their Ladybird books and sums. Consequently, I was moved up a rung, across the playground and into Hell. Or at least Purgatory. Most of my new classmates were not at all amused by my arrival, young upstart who obviously didn't know my place, hardly spoke, seriously needed to grow to be on their level and wore bobbles, rather than the more mature 'Alice band'. I was a tadpole, they were frogs – how could I possibly be as clever as them? I sat in the back corner, by the window, which quickly became my escape route from tedium and harshness, and I did manage to make a friend or two, but then there was the matter of Miss Robertson* (*name changed).

Beware.....   Image by @amandalanguage at eltpics

I had been lucky with my teachers until then, starting with my own mother and Miss Campbell and leading up to Mrs Weatherall. They had all been kind but firm, no-nonsense, wholesome, creative, supportive and calm figures. Even the colours they had worn were indicative of a professional togetherness, through pale blues and warm rusts to gentle greens and heather tones. Women who had spent Friday afternoons in the hairdresser under a heated space helmet and Sunday evenings watching The Onedin Line. Women who probably ate boiled potatoes during the week but experimented with Robert Carrier at weekends. Miss Robertson was a different kind of fish. She was young, with long, dark hair scraped back into a ponytail, large dark eyes and would have been attractive I imagine, had she not been so intensely angry. All the time. At something only she could see. Dressed in black, white and a bitter shade of green, she shrieked, she shouted, she threw pencils and chalk, and she scared the living daylights out of me. I had been moved from my new class with my new friends, including the wonderful, beautiful Ally, an American who had introduced me to the word ketchup, maple syrup, strawberry-flavoured chewing gum, Sesame Street and Catholics, to a room with bigger, disdainful children (the boys particularly scary and huge) and a screaming, almost-pretty harpy at the front. One day, while attempting to stick the peeling sticky-back plastic back onto a story card, I was lifted from my seat by my fringe and told I would spend lunch-time wiping and repairing all the story cards. I was aghast. No questions, just yank the hair and punish. My trust in teachers began to disintegrate, despite an apology after several classmates waylaid Miss R at playtime and explained to her that I had been mending not destroying. From then on, I felt on edge, in the same room as a wildcat; you never knew when it would strike. My silence deepened along with my distrust, I rarely answered questions and became accustomed to the sharpness of her tongue. When we did fun activities, interesting topics, when she tried to be friendly – which she did, particularly after a second eye operation saw me sporting an adhesive fabric eye patch on my 'good eye' once again, a patch which my classmates begged turns to rip off at 12 o'clock every day, making me instantly popular for as long as the patches lasted, at least as a play-thing – when Miss R tried to smile and show me she was indeed human, I raised an unpatched eyebrow and burrowed further into myself. Still waters.

That summer, after a year at Braywick, the council sold our school to a prep school for wealthy Chaps in grey blazers and caps, and we upped and moved, lock, stock and two smoking etcs to Oldfield County Primary, about two miles down the road on the furthest edge of Bray. Oldfield was a brand spanking new place (though spanking was not allowed) with not a hut or mature tree in sight, but kitted with an outdoor swimming-pool, a separate playground for infants, a kiln, a proper art-room, an assembly hall and kitchens. The windows were big, the reading areas book-lined and carpeted and the tables semi-hexagons to allow for a variety of groupings. There were big open-plan areas and quiet rooms, 'seed-tray racks' instead of desks, and the toilets were for humans. In this open, see-all layout, although we had class teachers – me with the dreaded Miss Robertson again – hair-pulling was eliminated from our day and shrieking was limited to lessons in the quiet room... (pause for the irony to catch). We also had lessons with the other teachers in our area, so the much-loved Mrs Weatherall came back into my life. I fell in love with art, pottery and reading, we could sit on the floor or lie on our tummies during reading time, a time for hiding in stories uninterrupted, and story-time at the end of the day with a teacher reading to us was a delight.

A happy place to be.   Image by @mkofab at eltpics

Only a few lessons were of the teacher-and-blackboard-fronted sort – generally those showing us how to do something, as information came from cards or books and was read and copied or drawn – and creativity, experiments, stories and hands-on learning dominated. We progressed at our own pace, ticking off work on a chart as we completed it, and the teachers were free to monitor and help. As I moved into Upper Juniors a year later, things changed again. All the children in the two year groups were mixed and divided between three classes, so that each had a mix of ages, instantly eliminating my 'difference' on that front. Oh joy. I spent a year with Mrs Chown, who was nice but often ill, so we had several supply teachers and teacher trainees, most of whom were either wonderfully arty, sciency, musical and innovative, or someone's mum. We drew, we wrote poems, we painted, we made things from coloured crepe and tissue paper, we wrote stories and plays, we sang, we read, and our work turned the school walls into a myriad splurge of rainbow. In assembly on Mondays, every child with a birthday that week was called to the front and the entire school sang to them; exceptionally good poems or stories were read out from time to time and to date one of my only moments of literary glory was having an exceedingly long story I'd written and illustrated read out by the Headmaster, the appropriately named Mr Bray.

School lunches were edible and cooked on site, engraving the smell of boiled cabbage and gravy on my memory forever, and on special days we had lime milkshake and shortbread as an extra. There were dinner dances, cheese and wine dos and jumble-sales for the grown-ups, and we jiggled and jumped to The Kenny, Mud, The Sweet, Showaddywaddy, Suzy Quattro, Slade and Slik at school discos and made hats and masks for competitions.

Of course, as a thin, freckly, funny-sounding kid with a squint and a tendency to silent dreaming, whose Mum cut her fringe and made her clothes despite living in Bray with neighbours such as Gerry Anderson, the Boughs, Parkinsons and Wogans, life was not all roses. Particularly as I played with brainy boys rather than any variety of girl, wrote plays rather than learn the mind-boggling complexity of French skipping, and just wasn't interested in being like the rest. But life beside the Thames had its charm and cycling home at top speed through the Fisheries, no homework, birthday parties, and playing like wild children with the few co-oddball friends I did have made up for everything else.

My last year at primary was ruled over by the stern but fair Mrs Everton (quick to point out that if anything, she was a West Ham fan), a slightly anachronistic, angular, beige-haired lady who smelled of soap and maiden aunts, and was charged with revealing to us the secrets of joined-up handwriting, cartridge pens and long division, the intricacies of the five senses and the capital cities of European countries – Paris, Rome, Bonn... Mrs Everton was not too tolerant of my tendency to live in a dream world and seemed to treat me with extra sharpness. However, it turned out there was a reason for this, and one that was going to change my whole world big-time. She had decided that I was Intelligent and that a privileged brain like mine should not go to waste at the local comprehensive, well-known only for its poor academic standards and for being all girls.

So it was decided. I was to have private classes at Mrs Everton's house to train me for the 11-Plus and the entrance exam I was destined to take, in the hope that I would attend THAT secondary school which was deemed more appropriate to my intellect. Private classes in Mrs Everton's home! With tea and biscuits and endless IQ tests, comprehension exercises and arithmetic problems. Suddenly I was a hero, brave enough to enter the dragon's lair and still turn up for school the next day! And popularity tasted good.

The winter before I left Oldfield and the care of Mrs Everton, who I'd actually grown to like and who had turned my love of stories into an addiction, taking me from The Magic Flowerpot and The Kingdom of Carbonell to the more mature The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, Elidor, Stig of the Dump and others, I took the entrance exam to a school in Reading – a promising name for a town, I thought at the time, haha. A school without boys, male teachers or freedom. A school with a green uniform, as many rules for teachers as for students, a reputation for academic excellence (as well as for lesser gifted girls whose parents could donate library buildings and assembly halls) and a Headmistress called Hardcastle.
Oh boy.

Bird of a different plumage (tho more duckling than swan, perhaps?)   Image by @naomishema at eltpics

The Art of Being Different

How did I become a teacher? I was asked this a few weeks ago and have been scratching my head while losing sleep to thought and notebooks ever since. The straight answer is: by accident. But there are those who don't believe in accidents or coincidence and, besides, a two-word story doesn't achieve much, doesn't require me to exorcise (or indeed exercise) any demons. So rather than stop at those two words, I've been wandering around the grooves in the walnut that is my mind, looking for the answer to another question: Why had I always been so adamant that I'd never EVER be a teacher?

Life is a garden, and the path we take to arrive at the present, to find our vocation, is not only sinuous and forking like some Borgesian labyrinth, but it is overhung with heavy, gnarled, lichen-covered branches waiting to whop you on the head as your ducking skills fail you. And you never know if you're going to be lucky; sometimes those bumps loosen fruit or blossom which land conveniently in your outstretched hand, but, at least in my case, more often than pears and pomegranates, I was left with big, blue bruises and bugs in my hair. Schools and teachers. Good grief.

Still. Standing up here looking down from the height of decades, I see a constant theme overshadowing the path, marking it out as the route I followed. From early on, I was given a role by those around me in cahoots with circumstances, and then went on to insist on playing that role, turning it into an art: the Art of Being Different. 

(Photo by Chiew Pang for eltpics)

Part one: Oh flower of Scotland

My time at nursery school was brief but it introduced me to Topsy and Tim, attempting to colour inside the lines, pom-pom making, the fact that not all twins are identical, and a sector of Glasgow society that watched fillums and drank milluk. Whilst my accent and I were from the West End / University areas of Glasgow, this was Drumchapel. If you were to make a film (or fillum) set in Drumchapel in the late 1960s, you'd need leaden skies and balls of tumble-weed blowing across the barren grey nothingness between dreary blocks with their colour-coded front doors and probable abandoned shopping trolleys. You'd also need a burst of Ennio Morricone at his whistling best and maybe Gene Hunt could screech through in a Hillman Hunter. Yes.

No. The truth of it is that what Drumchapel also introduced me to was dysentery, so my milluk-drinking nursery school experience was curtailed, to be replaced by a long period of quarantine and home-schooling.

Primary school was, initially, as primary school should be. Thanks to having been shut away from other children and from most adults apart from my teacher mother for five or six months, I already knew how to write passably, read well and work out how many Smarties I'd have left in my hand if I ate three orange ones. I also knew who the Beatles were (and Herman and his Hermits, for that matter), how to make collages, chocolate crispies and meatballs, the names of all the flowers and birds to be seen in our garden, I knew hundreds of stories from around the world, the few French lyrics to 'Michelle' and all the words to Lilly the Pink. Life was sweet, the future looked bright and my new school uniform was exciting in its novelty.

In fact, life was not only sweet; it was safe and normal, and centred on a large, grey stone building, a soaring island set in the middle of a seemingly vast playground, an ark which the long-dead architect had wisely thought to equip with two main entrances, the words BOYS and GIRLS in foot-high chiselled stone letters above the doorways, in order to pre-empt chaos in the cloakrooms. Thus we stood in two straight lines between the first whistle and the second, girls separated from boys and ne'er the twain should meet ’twixt playground and classroom – apart from the day we joined forces to chant We want Scooby-Doo over and over again, to the chagrin of all adults from headmaster to janitor, in protest at the announcement by the BBC that our favourite episode-long cartoon (a brand new concept then) was coming to the end of its first season.

School life consisted of mittens on elastic that ran up one coat sleeve and down the other, black slip-on gym-shoes smelling of canvas and rubber, punishment by means of the belt (never experienced but witnessed once), wobbly teeth that appeared embedded in playtime apples, and teachers who looked like teachers should and knew where sugar came from and how to weave bookmarks. The very first thing I learned at primary school was how to knot my tie, and then that the cat sat on the mat, and you do sums and timeses with rods (which are not for putting in your mouth, Janet, pet), and this is how you tie shoelaces and bows, and o'clock half past o'clock half past, and you need a short piece of string for your handmade sugar mouse (but you don't eat the string, Janet, pet) and you can mix red, blue and yellow with each other to make other colours. Oh, and squeezy bottle paint smells funny and gets stuck in hair, and play-doh tastes better than plasticine.

Fancy a taste? (Photo by Ian James for eltpics)

Other early achievements included building an Apollo moonshot from Ski yoghurt pots, washing-up liquid bottles and toilet rolls, Santa's snow-topped log cabin from corrugated paper and cottonwool, and a whole town from variety pack cereal boxes. Parents were less impressed by this last project as variety packs were more than a bit above most people's budget. Dumbartonshire in the late sixties was mince and tatties country with a bit of fish on Fridays, and a small packet of jelly tots or dolly mixtures when your maiden aunts took you to the cinema. Vietnam was – via a circuitous route – affecting the shipyards and homes were not flush. Besides, we were Presbyterian.

The second year at Bearsden Primary, the names of my classmates rang strong and true, like granite and ice: Gregor, Kenneth, Graham, Donald, Andrew, Neil, Heather, Hazel, Gail, and Lindsay, with Nicola and Charles providing an exotic, 'foreign' touch, not to mention the translucidly blond German boy whose name escapes me for now. There was change in the air; no more big doors, or even big classrooms, as, as children of the Baby Boom (the now-termed Generation X), our classroom was an overspill hut. We sat in table teams of six, each named after a species of Scottish fauna: ospreys, Golden eagles, pine martens... I have no recollection of what my animal was, but the midge would not have been inappropriate, as, thanks to my illness, I was still small, very thin and pale – 'wan' – and, oh boy, I had wonky eyes. At some point, surgery and eye-drops left me virtually blind for part of each day, so mornings in school passed in a blurry fog of bad handwriting and torment. My retreat into myself began, I was becoming 'different'. I spent what I remember of the year relieved that I was still top in reading, and utterly desperate (and desolate) to earn a coveted Ship Stamp, the maximum accolade for achievement in handwriting above even a red star, as my impaired vision reduced my handwriting to a scribble dependent on pot luck more than on anything else. In fact, as I write, the memories come creeping back, and I recall needing my stern friend Heather to put my hand on the page so the chubby black pencil coincided with the start of each printed line. Rather than that feeling of 'joining in' that my earlier memories bring to me, 'striving' seems to tint this second year. Striving to write like the others, to see like the others. I was shrinking.

And then. In the summer holidays. We moved. To England.

Part two: Your wee bit hill and glen

Immortality for a boy

I met a boy. A refugee. He said to me "Take a picture of our kite!"

His black kite made of rubbish, defiance and imagination flew higher and higher until it shared the cornflower heights with the evening moon.

I took the photograph. The boy laughed and shouted "Now I am immortal!"



He spoke English. I replied. He spoke Arabic. I felt small, locked in my ignorance. Paul translated and the heavy doors opened again. Three people. Football and Spain and where Scotland is. We shared the freedom of words and time, new experience and old.

And far above all prophets and men, the kite flew higher and higher.