Dick Jones' Patteran Pages

READWRITEPOEM : 107

Light shining in from beyond our shabby old world, or light to be found within it already?

This poem is now in its third draft.

For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can't readily accept the God formula, the big answers don't remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command or faith a dictum. I am my own God. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.
Charles Bukowski

CREDO

I believe at the root
in breath as a first
principle. Breath –

the intake, the delivery -
is our signature
onto the air.

Next I believe
in the business
of seeing and hearing,

the processes of light
and sound whereby
we inhabit the cracks

and corners of the earth –
the guarded scrutiny
of strangers, the ear

cocked in a waiting room.
Incidental revelations,
accidental wisdoms.

As for mortality,
the cricket ticking
in the long grass

is timepiece enough
for me. Wound up
by the sun,

his spring uncoils
at night and
he dreams in black.

But, as a final article
of faith, I believe in
the heartbeat certainty

of two adjacent hands
on the parapet of
a bridge somewhere

touching, finger to finger,
and breath quickening
to mingle, and this

causing the sun to rise
and the moon to wax
and all the tides to run.

INKLINGS 8 - Christmas Dance

Thin snow floats in the honeyed light from the Ballroom window.  A vixen shrieks from within the spinney across the field.  It speaks of knives and violence. Shivering, you step away from the long window and peer into the night. This is your soundtrack rather than the dull pulse of Roy Orbison’s Running Scared that has the Christmas Party couples on the crowded floor sliding into each other’s arms for a slow dance.  Teachers move swiftly through the lolling throng, some humorous, some affronted as they prise the couples apart.  There, at the epicentre, Kingcup and her, slung together like drowning creatures. He has his face buried in her white-blonde hair; she’s smiling, eyes closed. Such pain, this time in the throat. Because that’s where (as you read once and cherished) the tears are brewed. 

And it was you who set it up. You carried the note she wrote in Assignment Time – a stubby pencil gripped tight; she let you watch her trail the looping letters across the lined paper. ‘…I just want to know where I stand cos I really like you and I know you thought I did but not in that way…’ Secretly you despise the barren language, the tiny hearts dotting each ‘i’, the doe-eyed cartoon princess faces in the margin and the fact that he’ll read only romance into it.  She asks you does it sound right and you say yes, yes, it does. Will you wait, she wants to know, while he reads it and then will you bring the reply and leave it on the Girls’ Landing just before lights out, under the mop bucket by the banisters.  Yes, you will.  She touches your hand with her fingertips and tilts her head in that way she has. Appalled, you wonder if she has any sense of how you feel. No, surely not. She likes you but not in that way. It’s like you’re her brother.  She only has sisters; she’s so glad she’s got a brother now who she can talk to.  Catlike, she stretches her legs out under the table and pulls her skirt up to her thighs.  Her legs are bare and downy; she wears white ankle socks.  A shudder goes through her and you know she’s thinking of him. She glances at you sideways and smiles thinly.

You try to tough it out in the Ballroom. You sit with Jeppy and watch the Sixth Formers jiving. He reckons that Dalia isn’t wearing any knickers and every time she spins away from Paddy Brassington and her skirt whirls up around her waist, Jeppy ducks down like he ‘s tying his shoe.  But you can’t concentrate, either on Dalia’s state of undress or the music. (Doddy Bell is spinning the discs and he slips in some raw rock’n’roll – Gene Vincent singing Who Slapped John?) Because they’re not in the Ballroom. Everyone else is there – all of the 4th and 5th Form, and Roger was taking a register.  You know where they are because Kingcup told you last night after lights out.  The five of you lay in your beds letting the day fall away. Jeppy was under the bedclothes trying to tune into Radio Luxembourg. Remus and Eddie were lying across their beds, sharing the narrow light of a pencil torch. Remus was shuffling his stamps around while Eddie studied his football programmes.  Kingcup was on the top bunk; you were on the bottom.  You knew he was lying on his back with his hands under his head. The bunk creaked as he stretched luxuriously. “Yeah”, he murmured. “Ten minutes in the locker room before the dance starts. We won’t be missed until Rog does the register and we’ll be in by then...” The dorm was still, each one alone with his thoughts.

The snow thickens – big, flat, white shapes, yellowing in the window light.  It begins to settle on the low stone wall at the edge of the terrace. You despise everything about Kingcup.  His cow-eyes.  His weird, looping walk. The way he smokes a fag, with the tip pointed into his palm.  His Adam Faith hairstyle.  That he has kissed properly; that he has been kissed back. You shamble across the gravel and stretch out full length along the wall.  Maybe the patina of snow shrouding you by the second and the cold damp seeping through your clothes will shrive you, make you whole again. Your face crumples and tears start, refracting the filtered light, making of the world a dream place. Let them find me here tomorrow in my white winding sheet…

READWRITEPOEM PROMPT : 106

LIGHT

Some mornings I lie half awake
waiting for the slow secret
of light to be revealed.

From rumour
into palpable fact,
the proposition of light

is merciless: the great affirmative
blades its arrival
into walls and ceiling.

Light like a voice
talks in corners,
disputes with darkness.

Light besieges the house;
a million photon breaths
liberate the windows.

In love with light,
called out of black sleep,
I rise into its clamour.

BIRTHDAY BOY DICK JONES GRITS HIS TEETH, LAYS BAH-HUMBUGGERY ASIDE AND BELLOWS FROM THE ROOFTOPS SO ALL HIS FRIENDS WILL HEAR...

INKLINGS 7 - HEADING NORTH

Kings Cross Station in September. Bars of yellow light from the skylights in the great curved roof, falling through steam. The London – Leeds express. The doors in the long maroon carriages stand wide open, concave against the gentle swell of their sides.  Parents and porters heft bags and suitcases up from the platform into the Wennington School carriage. Kids clamber past them either way, shouting and gesticulating. Others wedge their faces into the small open spaces of the window quarterlights.

You and Jeppy head down the platform towards the locomotive. It’s a green 4-6-0, the white-painted lamps positioned at either side of the buffer bar indicating that it’s a passenger express. Back in the cab, the fireman is wiping the water glass with a dirty rag. Wisps of steam curl around the cab roof. The driver glances at his watch and then leans out of the cab to check it against the platform clock. Jeppy hits your arm and races back towards the school carriage. Momentarily breathless with exhilaration, you follow him, skidding to a halt in front of Mum and Dad who are standing patient guard by your overnight bag. Mum smiles uncertainly and brushes a tear away with a knuckle. Only as the train jolts forward and the tableau of your parents slides out of view of the window do you feel a corresponding frisson of isolation and loss.

...

As the train speeds across the bleak fens north of Peterborough, you play poker with Jeppy, Kingcup and Bridgey. You win 1/10d and Jeppy and you lurch along the corridors towards the buffet car, pausing only to straddle the rocking concertina doorways connecting each of the carriages on the way. As you push your way into position with legs and back you can see through the gaps between the footplate to a blur of sleepers racing past. You buy two iced buns, cramming them in whole to see who can finish his first. And then, still hysterical, you lean out of the drop-down window in the carriage door, shrieking into the gouts of steam and motes of soot streaming back from the labouring locomotive.

...

Within the close confinement of the carriage, the rhythmic hammering of the wheels, the spectral blur of the passing landscape, time arrests. You are strung, weightless, between worlds, the plunging momentum of your life suspended. All you sense in moments of repose is a rightness abandoned, a certainty challenged and the cataract ahead that must be embraced. To sink into its current for a while before you might swim is the means whereby we flourish. This you know as a dumb, wordless truth.  For all that, you know that, as before, there will be times of confusion and despair. There is, even here and now where intuition and guesswork over reason and experience guide you, a strength at the core.

...

NOTES:
4-6-0 : The locomotive’s wheel alignment – a bogie of four wheels and six driving wheels.
Water glass : Pressure gauge.
1/10d : One shilling and tenpence (approximately 15p.)

SNOW AGAIN

 

 

 

READWRITEPOEM : PROMPT 105

ON FRATTON MOOR

A winter night, all still, no moon.
I step outside and close the door.
Trees shift and breathe like sleepers. Soon
last lights will falter. Fratton Moor

and the long horizon will conspire
in the dark while the crouching house behind
is a dolmen, barrow-still, entire
of itself. Here, staring hard, I’m blind

in the shadow’s heart.  No rowan tree,
no casting hand before my eyes.
The moor moves like an inland sea
tugged and sucked within the sky’s

black tide. This is oblivion.
Yet even here where arching night
prevails, the high meridian
dissolves: bleak ice, the acid light

of stars drips down through history,
a message – more an alien trace.
I cannot read the mystery
script. I drown in time and place.

BABY TALK

Whilst marshalling some of the material that I posted back in the early days of the Salon-hosted Patteran Pages into a new folder, I came across the following. It’s undated and untitled and I can’t locate it online, but it must have been one of my very first posts. It comes, then, from a time when late retiring and late rising and only the cat making his languid demands were still fresh in memory. Now, through the simplest of deeds, we had let slip the loose routines of the selfish life and must meet our responsibilities.

Seven years on from this meditation on early parenting, the same hopes and fears prevail, only now to a factor of three. And those memories of the freewheeling life a deux that took us from Cornwall to Galway to the Côte d'Azur to New York belong to two other people who, faintly familiar, grin back at us from photographs.

It is bland and banal, trite and trivial to state it – but when a baby comes into your life everything changes, changes utterly.  The mellow days of quixotic decisions made to drive the hour into London just to go to Aldo’s in Greek Street, Soho for a pasta, or to drive the hour into Cambridge to go to the market because there’s a stall there where you can buy caraway seed bread are gone.  They seem faintly preposterous memories, flippant, almost irresponsible.  Instead we sit in the living room and watch Reuben spinning around the parquet floor in his babywalker.  We chuckle indulgently as he tugs CDs out of the rack and sucks them.  We make farting sounds with our lips. We sing nonsense songs in unnaturally high voices. We engage him in burbling conversation like comedy maniacs, pulling hideous faces and dispensing spittle.  And then when he falls asleep we sit nonplussed, lost for activity.  So we talk about him, cataloguing the day’s events so far and solemnly agreeing that he is unusually gifted and beautiful and that we (and he) are uniquely fortunate.

So we are strengthened by Reuben’s presence in the world and his grinning excitement in the morning at the possibilities of the day before him eclipses all worries and concerns.  But he makes us more vulnerable too.  His absolute innocence in a world that seems at times so unremittingly dark is frightening.  Those liberal, tolerant, compassionate perceptions of human weakness as part of the broad pattern – the individual deviancy of the predator, the callous violence of the gang, the calculated savagery of the warmonger – harden into a desire to protect.  The baby’s unalloyed joy, its utter devotion, even its unassuagable grief seem to arise from a purity of experience that is at once both intense beyond measure and yet terribly fragile.  Watching Reuben I am acutely conscious of just how hostile and unaccommodating to the child so much of human territory is now.  It seems at times dominated by the forcing onto children of adult conceptions of sexuality, the transformation of education into arid schooling, the exposure of childhood to the most conspicuous failures of parents to make of the world something beautiful and strong.

But for all these late night fears neither of us would exchange what is now for what was then.  Emphatically not one to reach for scripture or the utterances of popular sages, I do find myself drawn back to Kahlil Gibran’s words on parental responsibility – that wonderful phrasing of the notion of loving someone so much that you set them free.

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit,
Not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you,
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness.

LIFE AND TIMES...

My poem Credere has just been published by qarrtsiluni. Kinda seasonal.

...

Ears and eyes:

I've discovered a wonderful new band. They're called Mumford and Son and they sound like this.

I'm a third of the way through The Children's Book by A.S. Byatt. For me she stands alone amongst British novelists. Her enormous erudition, the forensic detail of her settings, the richness of her description provide a lavish context for her teeming characters and within a page I'm utterly absorbed in her world.  Maybe those who seek narrative above all other considerations should steer clear because her concern is entirely with the thoughts and deeds of her massive casts of protagonists and the ideas that drive them. As within a Chekhov play, their journey becomes our journey and we travel with them to the end and beyond.

These qualities put me very much in mind of that great renegade and iconoclast John Cowper Powys. Now something of a neglected figure within the panoply of 20th century novelists, in his (very long) time he was seen as sharing the stage with such luminaries as Joyce, Hardy and Dostoyevksy. I'm by no means an uncritical reader of Powys' extraordinary novels (the heights are astral, the depths abysmal), but with his preoccupation with the natural world, the mystical elements of the Matter of Britain, psychology, sexuality and the power of the imagination, it seems to me that he's long overdue for critical reevaluation.

Then again maybe his time has come and gone and few contemporary readers would have the patience to tackle his serpentine sentences and arcane vocabulary. No such equivocation concerning that contemporary novelist of the Big Idea, A.S. Byatt, and I commend to you without reservation The Children's Book.

PHYSICS FOR BEGINNERS

I was never strong in the sciences at school. Romantically and phenomenonologically, they excited me greatly. The notion of cause and effect, the connectedness between biological, physical and chemical events, the manner in which phenomena presented themselves fascinated me intellectually and entranced me aesthetically. But their containment within the bloodless context of scholastic requirements bored me as much as it seemed to bore my unadventurous teachers and, in early adolescence, I drifted away towards the arts.

Oddly enough, however, I can recall now entire sequences of data from the very examination syllabi that had me writing passionate poems under cover of unread textbooks in science lessons. The other evening I was able to put several friends off a carefully prepared dinner by relating the life cycle of the tapeworm. And during a holiday visit to the Centre for Alternative Technology at Machynlleth in Powys, I startled Emma (only briefly: she switched off early in the lecture) with an explanation of the physics of the water driven cable railway that carries visitors up to the exhibits.

Clearly, then, much of my original absorption with the sciences as singularity and spectacle has remained in place, in spite of the best efforts of the education system to render them sterile and me devoid of passion and engagement.

So I present the following extended anecdote in the spirit of barely schooled, primitively amateur interest, seeing in the conflict between the protagonist’s unblinkered initiative and the scholars’ hidebound conservatism something of my own – and countless others’ – educational deprivation.

...

The story concerns a question in a physics degree exam at the University of Copenhagen: Describe how to determine the height of a skyscraper with a barometer.  One student replied:  You tie a long piece of string to the neck of the barometer and then lower the barometer from the roof of the skyscraper to the ground. The length of the string plus the length of the barometer will equal the height of the building. 

This apparently flippant answer so incensed the examiner that the student was failed immediately. The student appealed on the grounds that his answer was indisputably correct, and the university – cornered by the irrefutable logic of the claim - appointed an independent arbiter to decide the case. The arbiter judged that the answer was indeed correct, with the caveat that it did not display any discernible knowledge of physics.

To resolve the problem it was decided to call the student in and allow him six minutes in which to provide a verbal answer that showed at least a minimal familiarity with the basic principles of physics. For five minutes the student sat in silence, forehead creased in thought.  Impatient and increasingly irritated with the student, the arbiter reminded him that time was running out, to which the student replied that he had several entirely relevant answers, but couldn’t make up his mind which to use. On being advised somewhat waspishly to hurry up, the student replied as follows:

Firstly, you could take the barometer up to the roof of the skyscraper, drop it over the edge, and measure the time it takes to reach the ground. The height of the building can then be worked out from the formula H = 0.5g x t squared. But bad luck on the barometer. 

Or if the sun is shining you could measure the height of the barometer, then set it on end and measure the length of its shadow. Then you measure the length of the skyscraper’s shadow, and thereafter it is a simple matter of proportional arithmetic to work out the height of the skyscraper.

But if you wanted to be highly scientific about it, you could tie a short piece of string to the barometer and swing it like a pendulum, first at ground level and then on the roof of the skyscraper. The height is worked out by the difference in the gravitational restoring force T = 2 pi sq. root (l / g). 

Or if the skyscraper has an outside emergency staircase, it would be easier to walk up it and mark off the height of the skyscraper in barometer lengths, then add them up.  If you merely wanted to be tediously orthodox about it, of course, you could use the barometer to measure the air pressure on the roof of the skyscraper and on the ground, and convert the difference in millibars into feet to give the height of the building. 

But since we are constantly being exhorted to exercise independence of mind and apply scientific methods, undoubtedly the best way would be to knock on the janitor’s door and say to him, ‘If you would like a brand new barometer, I will give you this one if you tell me the height of this skyscraper’.

The student was Niels Bohr, the only Dane to win the Nobel Prize for Physics.

INKLINGS 6. IRMA WOOD – 1908 : 2003* 

Here, across another table,
by another window, this, the down-
side of your own half-century
you’re looking out over autumn fields,
heavy with the news.  The motif is gold
and red – the riches, even in the curl and fall,
of a life that burned up to the last.
 
Her birthday supper. Autumn,
just like now. Twilight. 
The fragrance, sweet and sad,
of burning leaves. The tiny goblin song
from beechwood glowing in the black-iron range.
School’s out.
Here, the boarders,
round the kitchen table,
knees on chairs, fists
bunched under chins,
observing her like naturalists. 
Candlelight – just the one –
its image doubled in her glasses.
Their unthinking love
ticking like a clock
that will never run down. 
                                     
“How old are you now?” you ask.  
(You have no notion. You’re 12:
beyond your sprig of years,
the trees grow high and wide,
topless and secret.)
“I’m 50”, she announces. 
“Half a century today”.
 
You are appalled:
so close, so very close to death.
With the snuffing of that candle,
shadows will gather,
as they have before. 
Silently you weep
and she reads the tears,
each one, and rises
and holds you into
her warmth and darkness.

*John Wood’s wife Irma – materfamilias of the New Sherwood boarders - died in her sleep on August 25th 2003 at the age of 95. 

LIFE AND TIMES IN THE LAND CALLED HOLLYWOOD*

Hollywood is another country. They do things differently there.

IF staying in a haunted house, women should investigate any strange noises wearing their most revealing underwear.

IF being chased through town, you can usually take cover in a passing St Patrick's Day parade at any time of the year.

ALL beds have special L-shaped top sheets that reach up to armpit level on a woman but only waist level on the man lying beside her.

ALL grocery shopping bags contain at least one stick of French bread.

ONCE applied, lipstick will never rub off - even while scuba diving.

THE ventilation system of a building is a perfect hiding place. No one will think of looking for you in there and you can travel to any other part of the building without difficulty.

YOU'RE likely to survive any battle in any war unless you make the mistake of showing someone a picture of your sweetheart back home.

THE Eiffel Tower can be seen from any window of any building in Paris.

PEOPLE on TV never finish their drinks.

A MAN will show no pain while taking the most ferocious beating but will wince when a woman tries to clean his wounds.

THE chief of police is always black.
 
WHEN paying for a taxi, never look at your wallet as you take out a note, just grab one at random and hand it over. It will always be the exact fare.

IF you lose a hand, it will cause the stump of your arm to grow by 15cm.

KITCHENS don't have light switches. When entering a kitchen at night, you should open the fridge door and use that light instead.

DURING all police investigations, it will be necessary to visit a strip club at least once.

CARS and trucks that crash will almost always burst into flames.

WEARING a singlet or stripping to the waist can make a man invulnerable to bullets.

A SINGLE match will be sufficient to light up a room the size of a football stadium.

IF a killer is lurking in your house, it's easy to find him. Just relax and run a bath - even if it's the middle of the afternoon.

MEDIEVAL peasants had perfect teeth, except for witches, soothsayers and general crones who have none. .

ALTHOUGH in the 21st century it is possible to fire weapons at an object out of visual range, people of the 23rd century will have lost this technology.

ALL single women have a portable cat that is carried under the left arm and stroked when answering the door.

EVEN when driving down a perfectly straight road, it is necessary to turn the steering wheel vigorously from left to right every few moments.

ONE man shooting at 20 men has a better chance of killing them all than 20 men firing at one.
 
MOST people keep a scrapbook of newspaper cuttings - especially if any of their family or friends has died in a strange boating accident.
 
IT does not matter if you are heavily outnumbered in a fight involving martial arts - your enemies will wait patiently to attack you one by one by dancing around in a threatening manner until you have knocked out their predecessor.
 
DURING a very emotional confrontation, instead of facing the person you are speaking to, it is customary to stand behind them and talk to their back.

WHEN you turn out the light to go to bed, everything in your bedroom will still be clearly visible, just slightly bluish.

WHEN they are alone, all foreigners prefer to speak English to each other, sometimes fluently, at either timed favouring the appropriate national accent.

ACTION heroes never face charges for manslaughter or criminal damage despite laying entire cities to waste.

IF there is a deranged killer on the loose, this will coincide with a thunderstorm that has brought down all the power and phone lines in the vicinity.

YOU can always find a chainsaw whenever you're likely to need one.

HAVING a job of any kind will make all fathers forget their son's eighth
birthday.

MANY musical instruments, especially wind instruments and accordions, can be played without moving the fingers.

ALL bombs are fitted with electronic timing devices with large red digital readouts so you know exactly when they're going to go off.
 
IT is always possible to park directly outside the building you are
visiting.

MAKEUP can safely be worn to bed without smudging.

A DETECTIVE can only solve a case once he has been suspended from duty.
 
IF you decide to start dancing in the street, everyone you bump into will know all the steps.

*Found material.

INKLINGS 5. – TO SHERWOOD

JOHN WOOD

Dad takes the day off work and you climb past the tipping front seat into the back of the red Morris Minor. Mum, in smart Jaeger frock and new perm, sits in the front. At first the landscape is familiar – roads and avenues lined with bulky semi-detached mock Tudor houses, privet hedges, sculpted shrubs and green baize lawns. This is your territory, safe, secure and familiar as a chanted rhyme. Tiny landmarks tick each turning in the old narrative: the street name loosened from its wooden supports; the peeling ad for Sharp’s toffees on a neglected billboard; the pub sign with the wall-eyed red lion forever dancing westwards; the electricity sub-station behind its barred metal fence.

Beyond the Worcester Park roundabout, you’re in an alien land of unfamiliar shop fronts, a castellated church tower behind a shrill sign – Christ is coming. Are you ready?, a car showroom displaying the new Austin Somerset, a railway station hosting a shuffling tank engine behind a line of trucks. There’s fear now. Familiar settings but seen through the veil of a dream. Somewhere within this tilted landscape is the school you are to visit. Gates will loom suddenly and behind them red brick walls binding steel framed windows and scuffed swing-doors. Behind them the rush and blunder of uniformed bodies and, moving amongst them, teachers, booming and gesticulating. 

A crooked lane off a main road. A ramshackle fence flanking a scruffy two-acre paddock. Then a square wooden board like an estate agent’s sign bearing the words New Sherwood School – 5 to 18. Immediately beyond it, two high spiked gates, anchored open, letting onto a short unmadeup drive. To the right, a spreading oak tree with a tractor tyre hanging to just above ground level on a long rope. To the left a long, slate-roofed house with a scuffed front door and whitewash flaking from its walls.

Dad parks the car on a patch of cinders and gravel under the oak tree and the three of you clamber out onto the uneven ground. There is the scent of new mown grass and from behind the big house the sound of children’s voices. All is still, suspended in the moment. Then the front door opens and a tall man with thick black hair and a full beard steps out. He is wearing an open necked shirt, a kilt, knee socks and sandals.  He greets you in a soft Highland Scots accent, telling you his name – John Wood – and asking for yours. Then he guides you towards an open area beneath a huge beech. There is a small, round swimming pool painted blue, a climbing frame and a pair of cartwheels horizontally attached to posts as primitive roundabouts. John lifts himself up onto the edge of one of them and, with a leg resting on the ground, gently moves himself from side to side as he talks. He ignores Mum and Dad and addresses only you, asking questions in a quiet voice and listening with absolute attention to your answers. He wants to know why you are unhappy at your present school. What is it that scares you? Who are your friends? Which teachers do you like and why? What would you like school to be like? What would make school bearable?

At first your answers are brief and vague. You shrug a lot. You look up into the branches of an overhanging beech, squinting against the light between the leaves and think of home. But tears fill your eyes. Here are things that you have never allowed to rise to the surface, even when at your most wretched with Mum and Dad either side of you on the sofa, baffled and helpless. What would make school bearable? For there to be no long pipeline corridors full of jostling queues or tumbling two-way animal traffic; no echoing rooms with blockboard floors and high narrow windows, their quarterlights tipped open to the outside world; no senseless violence in corners of the playground – moments choking against a forearm squeezing your windpipe; no barked commands for hands on heads in the dining room because the babel voices have reached crescendo; no swirling compound signature odour of chalkdust, flower-and-water paste, boiled and steaming food, warm tar, pencil shavings, wet vaporous clothing after rain, baking dust rising from gurgling radiators. No dread before, no fear within. No suffocating sense of sinking deep and drowning, each and every day...

The sun is warm. You breathe deep. Mum and Dad are watching you, heads on one side, smiling. John asks: “Do you think you might like to come here?” You look around the untidy campus – an overgrown tennis court, a long rectangular sandpit, two old caravans in the lee of a high brick wall, a ramshackle gabled workshop, trees and bushes. You think that - perhaps, maybe - you might.    

You may open your papers and begin to write...

I first posted the account below to my Salon blog in 2004 when I was still teaching. It sprung vividly to mind again last week shortly after a fraught five minutes in a supermarket queue. I was in line behind two 30-something mums shopping together. Each wore the artfully distressed White Stuff/Fat Face jeans and tops that represent middle class boho Hitchin and as they unloaded their cargo of multi-seed bread, Moroccan humus and organic Orkney salmon, they were chattering animatedly.
“What you’ve got to ask yourself, Fliss”, Tamsin was saying, “is are they pushing him hard enough?”
Across the Dorset cereals and Fairtrade bananas, Fliss looked anxious.
“I mean”, Tamsin went on, “half-an-hour’s reading and a spot of homework’s all very well, but how’s that going to get him through his STATS?”
“Well, he is only five...”, Fliss ventured.

“Get real, Fliss”, Tamsin snapped. “That’s how it is nowadays. It’s not like when we were at school and no one gave a toss.”

...

I had to invigilate the last 20 minutes of a 16+ mock (practise) exam this afternoon.  An unsettling experience.  50 or more 16-year-olds behind small desks, a scattered few bent over answer papers, the rest in various seated states ranging from bored indolence to incipient rebellion.  Taking their cue from one authentically unhinged youth at the front who had been refused a toilet break by an earlier invigilator, arms were shooting up in the air across the hall.  Within a minute or so of my arrival it looked like a Nuremberg rally.  My colleague piously reiterated the refusal. I suggested sotto voce that a blanket denial would create more disruption than a staggered granting of toilet visits, particularly to girls. 

As proved to be the case.  Most work ceased and the last ten minutes of the exam were given over to an increasingly difficult holding operation as a sense of empowerment crackled around the desks like electricity.  When the exam ended the exodus was more a stampede of released hostages than the orderly quitting of a place of learning by the scholars of tomorrow. 

As we collected up the papers I reflected on this collective indifference to the haloed formality of the examination.  There was no sense of a year-group solemnly preparing for the rite of passage that our summer GCSE exams have comprised for so long.  The greater number of these kids genuinely didn’t give a damn; only some residual recognition of teacher authority and a set of weary old protocols held them behind those desks. 

Three of them were girls in my current production, then deep into rehearsal and receiving total commitment from its dedicated cast.  M., who was so anxious to sign up for whatever production came next, was a protagonist amongst those protesting against the toilet ban.  She simply put her pen down and tilted her chair indolently back on two legs with her hand in the air.  She was on my colleague’s side of the hall so I had no direct contact with her, but I could see muted but animated debate going on.  When I see her tomorrow, being a frank soul she will declare her sense of grievance robustly.  I may keep my counsel or I may venture a few observations.  What I shall restrain for the sake of a quiet life is my wholehearted agreement with her concerning the officious nonsense of a refusal to allow a teenage student access to a lavatory during a long exam.

What I shall restrain because the implications of pursuing it are too overwhelming is my conviction that written examinations are a dishonest, outmoded, practically suspect, largely arbitrary, lazy and cynical waste of time.  The notion that a course pursued in some depth for two years can be examined successfully during a single 3-hour session has always seemed to me fundamentally absurd.  So absurd, in fact, that the contemplation of the entire edifice of the examination system from the boards that administer them to the teachers who supervise them always has me feeling like the boy who saw the king in the altogether.  No teacher I know has any faith in their efficacy as educational processes.  And yet year after year we stage this elaborate scholastic Olympic Games, conniving with each other to convince kids that the various events really have meaning and significance and colluding with the exam boards in coaching our students over the hurdles, round the track and up to the long jump. 

So part of me sympathised entirely with this group of kids for whom the last few vestiges of phony respect for the old systems is falling away.  Sadly, they have no alternatives and their rebellion is more one of the nihilistic moment than one informed by some new ideology.  Sadly, no one in the corridors of power will listen to those of us who do have alternatives because education as a fount of radicalism is viewed with the deepest of suspicion.  Come the day – as likely as not a hot, sunny one in June – the kids will file into the hall and, dry-mouthed with apprehension, they will submit themselves to the ritual.  And we shall pace up and down the hall looking grave but really pondering England’s chances against the Australians in the latest test series or composing shopping lists for the supermarket visit after school.  ‘Twas ever thus and ever more shall be so in the great farce called Educating Children for Tomorrow’s World…

...

If we value independence, if we are disturbed by the growing conformity of knowledge, of values, of attitudes, which our present system induces, then we may wish to set up conditions of learning which make for uniqueness, for self-direction, and for self-initiated learning.
CARL ROGERS

Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.
PAULO FREIRE

In tune with the Inklings posts, I’m putting up a fourth (and final?) draft of a poem written originally in the early ‘80s when my parents sold up the family home in suburban Kingston-upon-Thames and moved to France.

 

LEAVING HOME AGAIN

Today the cupboards, the switchback
stairs, the ignored corners are smoky
with ghosts. I’m trapped in doorways
in a mess of memories. Voices

swallowed by their own echoes,
call out names like spells in the
empty hall and the dead arrive.
These are the hero drinkers,

party dancers, fumy demons
of my parents’ days; these the
avatars of my dark age. They
populate the corridors, the fathomless

rooms of childhood, dressed in
pipesmoke tweed and flannel,
carnival skirts and cannibal lipstick.
Where once I slipped like a minnow

in between legs, eye-level with fags
and wedding rings; where once my
fish voice swam in the mill-race
of their laughter, now I watch brief

dust rise from bare boards and listen
to the ticking of a house settling onto
its bones. It's warmer by half outside
than in, here across the prairies

and pastures of my history where still
the unturned earth inters the cadavers
of my tiny armies and the borderline
of apple trees and privet,  uncut roses

and hibiscus seal off my secret nation
from the future. The house behind recedes,
half-hearth, half-dream and as I lift
the latch and let the street lap

at the lawn’s edge, a window ripples
and stills - one of the old gods, powerless now,
but enduring. I pass through
the time-lock, leaving home again.