I’m ambivalent about school. On a personal level, I achieved good outcomes from my long ago schooldays, but this was more by dint of my capacity for obedience than any genuine nurturing of my intellect and creativity. (I’m always pleasantly surprised when children these days claim to enjoy school.) On a political level, the view that mass education can be used to weaken working-class culture sits alongside the genuine enthusiasm for learning I’ve witnessed in places where a school place can’t be taken for granted.
How does this translate into my reading and writing? As a child, I lapped up Enid Blyton’s boarding school stories, although the settings were worlds away from my own experience. The junior equivalent of the country-house genre, St Clare’s, Malory Towers and the like served merely as the backdrop for schoolgirl adventures. And that’s the thing with school stories, the experience is so near universal, it’s difficult to untangle the school aspect from the fact of being a child. When I wrote my bite-size memoir, School at Seven, it was more about friendship betrayed than education. Of my short fiction, school provides the setting for the hormone-heavy story of adolescence, Kinky Norm, and frames the parent-child conflict in both Jessica’s Navel and Elementary Mechanics. The epistolary Bathroom Suite is more about inequality than school refusal.
School isn’t only about children, of course. In my anthologised story, A House for the Wazungu, Albert Lumumba is a teacher, as were Margaret and Gerald in The Merry Widow before they retired. In Melanie’s Last Tune, Miss Grainger is a music teacher working from home. I might have created other fictional teachers that have slipped my memory: given that we’ve all been on the receiving end, teaching seems an easy option when we’re fumbling to find a job we can foist on our characters in an attempt to bring them to life. Yet in doing so, lacking the depth of experience displayed on Norah Colvin’s lively blog, I risk tripping myself up in the way I see other writers doing in my series on fictional psychologists and therapists.
As for novels about teachers, it doesn’t get much better than Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, but another favourite of mine is The English Teacher from RK Narayanan’s Malgudi series. I also loved the thoughtful primary school teacher, Katie, in Linda Huber’s The Cold Cold Sea and the disillusioned English teacher, Lawrence, and his son, RE teacher, Lewis, in Alison Moore’s He Wants. And let’s not forget that the much loved literary governess, Jane Eyre, also spends a short time teaching in a school.
In introducing her latest flash fiction challenge, Charli Mills writes eloquently about historic school buildings now abandoned. You can’t get more abandoned than the field that was once the site of Jane Eyre’s school. Yet throughout Britain many school buildings dating back to the 1870s remain in use, the date of construction set in stone above the door, a monument to the 1870 Education Act when elementary education became compulsory. These schools often had separate entrances for boys and girls, a restriction that troubled the protagonist of my unpublished novel, Sugar and Snails. Here’s the 99-word version:
Twin stone staircases led to a wooden door, the numbers 1873 embossed above, grand as the entrance to a castle. At school I’d learn to read, and never have to go without a story. I’d mount those steps like a fairytale princess, entering one day by the left side, the next the right.
I didn't realise the letters above the stairs spelt BOYS on one side and GIRLS on the other. That my mother would laugh, plead, then slap me on the legs and hoist me up like a sack of coal when I raced towards the wrong one.
Twin stone staircases led to a wooden door, the numbers 1873 embossed above, grand as the entrance to a castle. At school I’d learn to read, and never have to go without a story. I’d mount those steps like a fairytale princess, entering one day by the left side, the next the right.
I didn't realise the letters above the stairs spelt BOYS on one side and GIRLS on the other. That my mother would laugh, plead, then slap me on the legs and hoist me up like a sack of coal when I raced towards the wrong one.
| | Nowadays, children don’t just learn to read and to write their own stories, but to analyse how stories work. I was most surprised the first time a child contacted me to enquire about one of my stories he was studying for a school project. Of course, I was flattered but also a little uneasy: stories that feature child protagonists aren’t necessarily suitable for children to read. But as I’m neither an educationalist nor a children’s writer, I left that for others to judge. |
(When I tried submitting one such story, The Ruler in My Head, to a website specifically for stories for children, I got a clear “no”. The editor was most generous in suggesting changes to make it accessible for younger readers, but I chose to seek publication elsewhere.) Then, last year I received an email from a concerned father about his eleven-year-old son being assigned Mummy and Me by his teacher. While related in the simple language of a young child, this story is far from a cosy read and, although I’m aware of a couple of preteen children having appreciated it, I wrote it with an adult readership in mind. I’m still not sure what to make of this and would welcome your thoughts.
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