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...
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.
