Chapter 4 Two Engagements, Eighty-Two Students, and One Bringer of Joy
I carry a little photo around with me in my purse, folded up and creased and faded now. It’s from over a decade ago, when I graduated from university with a degree in history and education.
These days, it looks like an exhibit from a museum, an actual photo on an actual piece of photo paper, and I have taken copies of it digitally as well, in case my bag is ever hit by lightning or stolen by a magpie or, you know, I just lose it.
It is only a photo, a moment frozen in time, but for me it is an essential part of the puzzle of self: I am smiling, a real smile full of joy and, that rarest of beasts, pride. I had achieved what nobody expected me to achieve, including myself, and it felt good. I was wearing that cap and that gown with complete confidence because I knew I’d earned them.
At one side of me is Geoff with a G, grinning almost as much as I am. I stayed in touch with him for a few years after Baby was born, even though we both knew it was maybe a bit weird, and certainly not what he would normally do. But Geoff, I realized then and even more so now, was not normal—he was much better than that. He stuck by me for as long as I needed him; he encouraged me; he was my cheerleader. But, thankfully, without the little skirt and pom-poms.
On the other side of me is my mother, much shorter than me, made entirely of bone and sharp angles. Her hair is scraped from her face into a ponytail. She is attempting to smile, but simply looks frightened. One of her hands is blurred, and I remember her habit of constantly clenching and unclenching her fists, the way she used to dig her nails into the skin of her palm when she felt unstable. A patchwork of tiny half-moon-shaped scars was left on the creased flesh, a testament to her struggles.
She had been in prison for six months before my graduation—not her first time, but the longest spell, and it had clearly taken its toll on her in many different ways.
That day was the last time I ever saw my mum in person, which was more her choice than mine. We spoke a few times afterward, but I always got the feeling that I worried her, unsettled her somehow. I reminded her of things she didn’t want to be reminded of. It’s complicated, and sad, and sometimes I think we should start again, but I’m not even sure where she’s living now. The last time I tried to call her, the line was dead. Her illness and her addictions were so twisted up in each other that things got tougher as I got older. It was as though once she knew I was safe with Audrey, she could give herself permission to stop fighting her demons and descend into her own personal hell. I always sensed that she was relieved to stop even trying, to stop failing, to stop despairing and just to accept who and what she was.
Working with teenagers now, I see the importance of support—of having someone at home who makes sure that the clothes are washed and the food is on the table and the Wi-Fi works; that all the niggling problems of being are taken care of. The million mundane things that go on in the background of a child’s existence to ensure that they have the luxury of a boring life—the things that allow them to come into school refreshed and ready to learn.
Not everyone is lucky enough to have that, and it doesn’t always come in the traditional shapes and sizes. For some, it isn’t a mum or a dad; it’s a granny, an aunt, a sibling, or even the parents of their friends.
For me, it came from a variety of places—and I couldn’t have gotten my degree without it. Without teachers who believed in me, without Geoff, without Audrey, whom I lived with from the age of fourteen until I was eighteen, without my case worker. I got the feeling I was something of a gold star for them—a planned and completely unmessy adoption, getting through all my exams while I was the size of a house, staying in education, going to university. Afterward, I used my leaving care grant to set myself up in my own small flat and became a model citizen. I know it wasn’t the usual narrative they had to deal with.
I was proud of myself, but I also knew I owed a lot to others—and that’s one of the reasons this small, creased photograph is so precious to me. It reminds me of what I have gained, what I have lost, what I have managed to become and how. It also reminds me of why I do what I do.
It was not easy, studying for exams while I was pregnant. It was not easy enduring the whispers and the rumors and the mockery; the way my friends backed away from me as though my mistake might be contagious. The way their parents reacted; the stares as I walked to school in my elasticated skirt.
It was not easy in the aftermath of the birth, when I was unable and unwilling to open up to anybody about it, as I lay in my small single bed in the attic of Audrey’s home, a room I shared with two other children, crying myself to sleep every night and waking up every morning with stinging eyes and a low-hanging depression that was rivaled only by my determination that this would not be the end of my story.
It was not easy going to university and trying to fit in with the other students, fresh from their gap years and summer holidays and dropped off every term by loving parents in Volvos, left with hugs and cash and home-baked cakes in tins. Their lives had been lived in a reality that was a million miles away from mine, and navigating those distances was hard. I never accepted an invitation to stay with any of them during the holidays because I could never return the invitation. I couldn’t join in with their nights out at the pub or communal dinners in Italian restaurants or vacation trips to Ibiza because I had no spare cash.
I stayed in college accommodation all year round, haunting the empty corridors and filling my time with a job in a skirt factory, where my main responsibility was pulling stray strands of nylon off sewn-up fabric.
It wasn’t easy forming friendships that were nourishing enough to be real but shallow enough not to cause these worlds to collide. I’m sure I could have done it all better. I’m sure many of the people I met there would have been understanding—but I was too scared of being an object of pity, the token poor thing among a crowd of beloved sons and daughters. I kept my distance just enough to not stand out.
It wasn’t easy, but I did it. And every year, especially when I start somewhere new, I look at that photo and it fills me up—with hope, with validation, with the sure and certain knowledge that no matter how hard it might feel sometimes, teaching is an important job.
It reminds me that I have the opportunity to make an impact on young people’s lives. You never know who might need that extra help; who will carry the memory of this time on into their future with fondness and relief. Who might find our classroom a safe space in a dangerous universe; who might be inspired when they were ready to give up; who might need a distraction from painful truths.
Making a difference in someone’s life doesn’t have to be all hearts and roses and outpourings of love—I lost touch with Audrey once I moved out, apart from the odd Christmas card. It wasn’t exactly a deep, emotional relationship—but it mattered. It counted, and it helped, and it enabled me to get where I am today. Who knows which of the kids walking into this building need more than they are willing to ask for?
It is good to have it, this photo, this talisman, this reminder of why what I do matters so much. I am lucky. Some teachers, I have learned over the years, have been worn down. Eroded by the grind of ever-moving goalposts, under-resourcing, overwork, politics (both national and school level) and paperwork; it’s easy to lose sight of how important it is. Why they went into it in the first place; the way they felt when they were newly qualified and still idealistic.
But all of them—even the most battered, the most cynical, the most committed to hating it—will always have the occasional bright spark that makes them smile inside. The quiet kid who eventually opens up; the one who struggles who finally has a lightbulb moment; the difficult pupil who changes completely when you hit upon something that actually interests them.
It’s not exactly like living in one of those American high school movies, where the inspirational teacher saves a teenager from a life of gang-related crime because of their hidden love of algebra—but there are, undeniably, moments of absolute genius. Moments that bring you real, honest joy, a feeling of satisfaction so pure it is almost embarrassing.
I actually love my job, but I’m not immune to the stuff that drags either. Some of it is frustrating, a lot of it is tedious, and the hours are long. But I never, ever get fed up with the kids—and I never forget how important education is, even if they don’t agree with me.
So as I sit here in the staff room, with its familiar smells of toast and tea and its familiar sounds of chatter and scraping chairs, I fold my photo up once more and slip it, safe and secure, inside my purse again. It has given me the turbo boost I needed. I was in a strangely melancholy state of mind this morning, captured by the past, but today is all about new beginnings.
Some of us have been in to work for mornings or afternoons before today—those of us with limited social lives and no families of our own even more so—but this is the first proper day of class, when we are all together again. It has the strange feel of a boarding school somehow, perhaps because a lot of the teachers seem to be women in their middle years. In the forty-fifth grade at Malory Towers.
Hellos have been exchanged, how-are-yous have been asked, holiday tales swapped, suntans and new haircuts admired. There is an air of both desperation and muted excitement. Soon this will all feel normal again, but right now, it is a hubbub of coming together.
I am sitting alone in one corner, smiling but not joining in with the conversations. My default setting.
They are an active lot, these teachers. The long summer has been filled with rock climbing, camping, tours of the Louvre, island hopping in Greece, and long drives through Tuscany. They have managed their own children, looked after in-laws, stayed with relatives, planted herb gardens, been on open-top bus tours of Liverpool with visitors, adopted kittens, eaten pizza in pop-up restaurants at the waterfront, and, in two cases, been proposed to and gotten engaged.
One of the proposees in question, Miss Shannon—or Hannah to us grown-ups—is showing off her diamond ring to a keen circle of colleagues, who are all reacting in a suitably impressed oohing and aahing way. She looks really, really happy.
I have already congratulated her, and I’ve had a brief chat with everyone I needed to; I’m now hoping for a few minutes alone before I head into my classroom. I read through my notes in the hope that it will discourage anyone from joining me.
No such luck. Karim places two mugs of coffee on the table in front of me, presumably one for me and one for him, and throws himself down into the squishy chair at my side.
“Isn’t it weird,” he says, frowning slightly as he looks at Hannah and the small crowd around her, “how most of those women spend all their time moaning about being married and slagging off their husbands, but as soon as there’s a wedding on the horizon, they go all mushy-eyed and romantic about it?”
“Maybe it reminds them of the good old days. Or maybe they’re not actually as unhappy as they make out, they just like having a moan. It’s cathartic to have a moan.”
“You can’t use big words like that on me,” he says, flashing me a toothy grin. “I’m only a humble PE teacher.”
I raise my eyebrows at him, and he laughs. We both know that he understands the word cathartic, and many others besides—he just likes to pretend to be dumber than he is, for some reason. I think it amuses him.
He has hooked his legs over the side of the chair, as though glorying in the fact that he gets to wear a tracksuit to work—it looks new, dark gray with a white stripe down the sides. His black hair has been trimmed on top, shaved at the sides, and he looks great. Fit, relaxed, comfortable just being himself. I hate that I notice so much about him. I hate that I can’t stop looking at him when he’s in the room, and often find myself gazing at him from behind book covers, pretending I’m not.
“So, you dodged me all summer,” he says, the very slightest twang of the Midlands where he grew up left in his voice.
“No I didn’t. I saw you at the Parkrun by the beach.”
“That was by accident, so it doesn’t count. What I mean is that you avoided going out for a drink with me. I realize that doesn’t make me special, because you avoided going out for a drink with anyone from here, but still . . . you broke my heart just a little bit.”
He holds up his fingers, gesturing exactly how much heartbreak had occurred. It doesn’t look like anything fatal.
I stare at him for a moment, realizing that even after all these years, my early and unintentional technique of ignoring boys is still working—I was pretty much the only girl at the fateful teenage house party where I managed to get pregnant who ignored the new boy. D, he was called—Daniel or David or Dumbledore, who knows? I never found out, and I never paid him any attention while the other girls were flirting and hair flicking. It wasn’t because I didn’t like him; it was because I assumed he wouldn’t be interested in me. Apparently, blanking men seems to make you fascinating.
It’s not like it worked out that well then, though—or, in fact, anytime since. I have had three serious relationships in my life so far, and none of them have succeeded, obviously. I have been told, at different times and by different men, that I am “closed off,” that I “won’t allow myself to need anyone,” and that I am “an emotional cripple who makes me feel used.” That last one was especially harsh, I thought—but not so harsh that maybe a bit of me didn’t agree with him. That was eighteen months ago, and my emotionally crippled hobble to the finish line of my relationship with James was one of the reasons I moved jobs. Again.
I’ve reached the stage where logic tells me to give up. To stay single, because it clearly suits me better. I know that makes the most sense—but I am a human being, and try as I might, I don’t always feel sensible. Karim, especially, makes me feel a bit giddy, with his combination of charm and humor and that big smile of his. And any man who makes me feel a bit giddy is usually the absolute last man I will ever show that to.
“I suspect your heart is made of tougher stuff, Karim,” I respond. “You’re only interested in me because I’m a challenge, and because your sisters will hate me.”
Karim has four sisters, all of them older than him, all of them keen to see him settled down, married to a nice girl and producing some offspring. I am 100 percent sure that I am neither nice, nor girlish, nor interested in having babies.
“My sisters wouldn’t hate you,” he says quickly, stretching his arms overhead in a way that shows off his arms and torso. I suspect it was a move planned to do exactly that. I notice, but I don’t react—at least not on the outside. “But you are a challenge, I’ll give you that. Is it just me, or don’t you date at all?”
“I’m on some dating websites,” I say evasively.
“Okay. Well, I buy lottery tickets but I never win. How many people have you actually met up with from these dating sites?”
“Not a lot,” I admit. “Less than ten, I’d say.”
In reality, the answer is zero—but I’m not lying, because zero is most definitely less than ten.
“Are you worried in case they turn out to be creepy stalkers?”
“No,” I reply. “I’m worried they might turn out to be PE teachers.”
“Ha! Point to you, Miss Jones. Well, the offer is there if ever you want to take me up on it. I’m not proposing marriage, although we’d get a lot of attention in here if I did. I’m just proposing a drink, a chat, perhaps a walk on the beach followed by wild, uninhibited, and totally excellent sex.”
That last part makes me snort coffee out of my mouth in laughter, and he looks delighted with himself as I use a napkin to wipe my face clean.
“Anyway. Something to think on, yes?”
He stands up and strides away, leaving me staring after him and still damp. From the coffee. He seems to know I’m watching, and I swear he gives his tracksuit-clad backside an extra little wiggle. He is making my deliberately celibate lifestyle very difficult to be satisfied with. Being with Karim is like having a box of chocolates open on the kitchen table while you eat celery sticks.
It’s been a long, long time since I found a man as attractive as I find him—but for the time being, I am determined to stay solo. I tend to lose the people I get close to, and I’d rather have him on the periphery as an amusing flirtation than added to the list of those I’ve lost.
I shake my head and look up at the big round institutional clock on the staff room wall. There are twenty minutes to go until my first lesson of the term—second-year A level history. I am scheduled to teach a total of eighty-two students today, first and second years, across four lesson periods. We will range recklessly through time, leaping from tsarist Russia to the Tudors to the birth of the USA—though not all in one day, obviously. I am looking forward to seeing the familiar faces, at least most of them, and to meeting the first years, and to welcoming a new second-year student I know will be arriving today. Kathryn, goes by Katie, Bell is joining us from a school in Middlesex. I don’t have a form group so I don’t know much about her as yet.
I gather up my bag and head down the corridors to X12, where I will reside for most of the teaching day. This is a bustling inner-city place, offering arts and vocational courses as well as the usual range of A levels. The student common room is a mix of hormones, noise, and a lot of just-about-controlled chaos, painted in varying shades of awesome.
I chose to specialize in further education when I did my teacher training, and I’ve worked in it ever since, mainly with teenagers but sometimes with adults in the community. I told myself I liked A levels because all the kids doing them had chosen to, and nobody, in theory, should hate the subject. There’s always a bit of shuffling around at the start of term, when some pupils realize they’ve chosen three sciences but actually want to be a musical theater star or vice versa, but on the whole, these are young people who are here willingly, and that makes a difference in their commitment levels.
But if I am grindingly honest, I also chose to teach A levels because it was as far away as I could get from teaching a class that my own given-up baby girl could be in.
Not that I ever thought she’d show up in one—I’ve moved around a lot, including an early dart to Scotland—but it felt strange, all the time, in those early days. It still does feel strange, if I let it, but I’ve become better at managing it. At hiding it.
Back then, being without her was so raw that I couldn’t hide it. I’d see mums in the shops with babies in strollers and find myself staring into them so intently that I often set off parental alarm bells before I slunk away, stinging with tears and with humiliation. As my own child grew, I became more interested in toddlers—watching two-year-olds in the park, hanging around when it was kicking-out time at the local indoor playground.
By the time I got to teacher training, I knew that she would be in primary school—and the thought of going through that “I wonder what she’s like now” torture every single day was too much for me. Teaching young adults didn’t stop me from thinking about her—but it did mean I was able to get through my workday without having a meltdown.
At least it did until last year. I’d had to be tough with myself and focus only on the pupils in my classes—it wasn’t fair to see them all as surrogates for the daughter I’d willingly given up for adoption. This term, I think it will be even harder—and that is perhaps why I was in such a bleak mood this morning.
After this term, she will be out in the world, out of even my imaginary orbit. I mean, I could be totally wrong about her doing A levels—but Geoff with a G had told me that her new parents were wonderful, supportive, skilled people themselves. That allowed me to fictionalize her life at least this far.
Next year, who knows? I’m sure I’ll come up with something new and exciting—but at least I won’t be surrounded by people of exactly the same age, day after day after day. I just have to get through this next birthday—she arrived in the world on October 3—and this next year of teaching, and then—well, who knows what? Probably more of the same. Maybe I’ll start hanging around on the university campus, in case she chose Liverpool. Maybe I’ll go on a gap year, in case I bump into her in New Zealand.
But that’s the future, and this is now, and I have a busy day. It takes me five minutes to walk to the classroom—the building is huge, a vast warren that was originally Victorian, and still retains a pretty facade with red brick and ivy and an air of learned antiquity. It’s been added on to over the decades, each extension bringing its own architectural horror.
The block that holds the history department, along with English, religious education, philosophy, politics, and general studies, was created in the 1970s—which probably tells you all you need to know about how pretty it is. My room is five doors along on the corridor, and even though I know this for certain, I still count them every single day.
The floor is a deep green linoleum decorated with scuff marks from countless shuffling feet, and the walls are lined with noticeboards that will soon be displaying posters about relevant subjects, clubs, and trips. They’re pretty bare right now but will blossom as the week goes on.
It’s still very quiet, still almost spookily serene in comparison to the vortex of sound that will descend once the bell goes and the students swirl in from the gardens, the car park, and the common room, filling the empty spaces and the silence with their conversations and backpacks and laughter, their screams and shouts, their pushing and shoving and flirting and the tumultuous sense of excitement at simply being young and alive.
I pause outside the door to my room, noticing that it is already open, and gently push my way through. I have walked over to my desk and started to pull wads of papers out of my bag before I notice that I am not alone.
I give a small internal jump, which I hope she doesn’t notice, and smile as the girl sitting quietly at the back of the room gives me a finger wave. She stands up, and I see that she is tall and lean and has light auburn hair done in Dutch plaits down the sides of her face. She’s wearing a Guns N’ Roses T-shirt, denim shorts over torn fishnet tights, and a pair of battered cherry-red Doc Marten boots. A single black stud is in one ear, a hoop in the other.
“Hi!” I say as she walks toward me, exuding a kind of cool-girl confidence I could only ever aspire to at her age—or, in fact, even now.
“You must be Katie,” I add as she reaches my desk.
She smiles at me, and it is a tremendous smile—big and warm and amused, whether at herself or me or the world in general, I don’t really know. All I do know is that it’s impossible not to smile back.
“I am! So I’m guessing you must be Miss Jones?”
I nod and carry on preparing, lining up my pens and stacking my papers while we talk. I prefer to stack paper in piles of ten, for some reason unbeknownst to me. It just rests easier with my mindset, weirdo that I am. I also like to have my pens in groups of three.
It’s not a compulsion—I’ve known students with OCD, and it can be a destructive and life-bending condition. For me, it’s not something that I need to do, but something I just prefer to do. I don’t have rituals I have to complete before I leave the house, and I don’t feel threatened if one of my pens goes missing.
I can function perfectly well without knowing how many steps it will take me to walk across the class to open a window, or how many roundabouts I will need to navigate on a trip to the supermarket, or how many identical white mugs there are in the cupboards of the staff room. I just function better if I do know those things. I still find numbers comforting, and still enjoy the strangeness of trying to estimate how many coffees I’ve consumed in my life (currently at around thirty-one thousand, amazingly), or how many bottles of wine I’ve drunk (that number is best kept between me and my conscience). I find it relaxing to remember dates, to figure out ages, to add up the ships in the Spanish Armada with the ships in Nelson’s fleet at Trafalgar, to list Christmas Number Ones and how many copies they sold. I am an absolute titan at a pub quiz.
So, as an offshoot of that, my papers are stacked in tens, and my pens are lined up as triplets, and my new student is staring at my desk with genuine curiosity.
“What happens if you leave a pen at home by mistake?” she asks.
“Absolutely nothing. My head doesn’t explode or anything, I promise.”
“Good,” she replies, laughing, “because I left my pencil case in my mum’s car, and I was trying to figure out how to broach the subject of borrowing one.”
I hand her a black ballpoint, wincing very slightly inside as I leave twins behind, and say, “There you go, Katie. Keep it—call it a ‘welcome to my class’ gift. I believe you’ve moved up from Middlesex recently?”
“Yep,” she says, her green eyes skittering off to the side, as though she is uncomfortable discussing it. I, of course, could choose at this very moment to say something like “I used to live in London,” and use that to bond with her, two southerners living in the north. But I don’t, because I’m uncomfortable discussing that as well.
“My dad died,” she says abruptly, “and my mum was a lawyer down there and after that she had to work loads of hours, and we never saw each other. It was a bit rubbish, so we sold the house and moved up here so we could live like millionaires and she could work less.”
I smile, knowing she is joking, knowing that this is hard for her and joking is helping her get through it.
“Well, maybe not millionaires,” I say gently, “but it’s definitely cheaper to live here than down south. Why Liverpool?”
“Mum went to uni here and she always liked it. Plus she—we—needed a fresh start, you know? Our old house was too full of him. Full of him when he was ill, anyway, and neither of us wanted to remember him like that. We wanted to remember him how he was when he was the kind of bloke who cycled twenty miles to the pub at the weekend and went wild swimming and built me a tree house for my fourteenth birthday so I could have some privacy. So, we used to live in a big new house that felt haunted, and now we live in a small old house that feels brand new—if that makes any sense?”
“Perfect sense,” I respond. “Where are you living?”
“Waterloo,” she says, “in a terrace, with a bright purple front door and lavender in pots and a green gate. It’s really nice. We only arrived a few weeks ago, so it’s been a bit hectic. I got here early today because I wanted to just chill a bit before everyone else arrived.” Weirdly, I think I know exactly the house she’s talking about—it’s maybe a fifteen-minute walk away from my flat, and quite distinct because of its paint job. I don’t mention that, though, as nobody likes to think their teachers have a life, or even exist, outside the classroom. Kids are always surprised if they see me in the shop or a café, like part of them thinks I just hook myself up to some batteries and recharge in a cupboard when they’re not around.
“Well, it’s a pretty nice bunch in here,” I tell her. “I’m sure you’ll make friends really quickly; there’s no need to be nervous.”
She nods, and the plaits bob, and she doesn’t actually look at all nervous, I realize. She is bright and bubbly and also cool as a proverbial cucumber. At least now she’s not talking about her dad.
“Yeah, I’m sure I will. I’m looking forward to meeting people my own age. My mum’s great and we get on really well, but she is my mum, you know? I’m eighteen soon, and it’d be nice if I could have actual young people to go for a drink with . . . Is there a history club, anything after school or at lunch or whatever? I know it sounds lame, but I do love history.”
“I don’t know what kind of teachers you’ve had before, Katie, but on the whole I don’t tend to think people who love history are lame. Because, you know, I’m a history teacher? And yes, there is a club—I’ll put the details up on the noticeboard later. We’d love to have you come along. We can talk through your coursework as well. Sometimes, though, I warn you—we dress up. Just for extra-lame fun.”
“Excellent! I’ll root out my suffragette costume!” she replies, holding up her palm for a high five. Unorthodox, but fine—I briefly slap her palm with mine, and she laughs out loud, like it was the funniest thing ever. I don’t know if she’s laughing at me or with me, but it makes me join in either way.
She retreats back to her desk at the end of the room and starts to write in her notepad with the pen I gave her.
Katie Bell, I think, is going to be one of those students—the ones who give us teachers the bright spark that makes us smile inside. She will be a bringer of life, and light, and moments of joy.
The bell rings and I stand up, half an eye on Katie, the other half on the door as I wait for the rest of the class to arrive.
I sneak another pen out of my bag and add it to the twins to make triplets.
This, I tell myself, is going to be a good year.