By Sam Smith
Published: February 21, 2008
Updated: October 27, 2008 PrintEmail
3) Paul Waiting
"I'll come in and get it."
"No," Michael says.
Paul is about to pretend to ignore Michael and go with him into his classroom; but, seeing how rigidly earnest Michael is, Paul stops where he is told.
"It's only a piece of paper," he says quietly, warningly, to Michael.
"Wait here," Michael orders him.
Paul can't remember being that anxious about anything at eight years old. He watches Michael, all thin and stiff and jerky, and tries to recall his being like that. He was worried sometimes — about looking a fool, about being told off — but he can't remember being that afraid. And it is only over a note, telling of a future school trip, that Michael forgot to bring home yesterday.
From the yard the school seems all portakabins and unbroken blue sky. Other children, boys and girls, all are reminded to say goodbye to their parents. Alice dully, dozily, watches them from her pushchair. None of these other children seem as tense as Michael. But then Michael has always been one for correct form. His clothes are always precise, his hair neat. Even his shoelaces have equal size bows.
Julie ascribes Michael's pernickitiness to his insecure infancy.
"He has to have as much as he can under his control," she says, "Let him be."
Paul lets him be. But he feels that he should occasionally be allowed to comment to Michael on his peculiar ways. Others will. And if Michael is used to it from Paul then he will have learnt how to deal with it.
More children, brothers older and younger, a sister and younger brother arguing, go in past Paul. He is beginning to feel tall and conspicuous in this school yard. Self-consciousness brings with it associations of guilt. Because, if he feels that his standing here can be remarked upon, then he has to be doing something remarkably wrong. What wrong, though, can he be doing here with little Alice as his alibi? Only if he was loitering here alone could his suspicious mind cast him in the role of child-abductor, and have him trying not to act suspiciously and thus acting suspiciously.
Paul considers going in to look for Michael.
"Come on Michael," he mutters, and imagines Michael in there in a state of panic because he can't find the note. All Michael has to do is ask the teacher for another copy of the note, explain what has happened, 'We're all of us human, aren't we..? Teachers too...'
One of those teachers sits alone in one of the portakabin classrooms. Behind him are wall paintings of plain green fields and white woolly sheep. Paul watches the teacher turn the pages of a large newspaper. Also on the desk is a blue-patterned mug of tea. Steam curls from the white rim of the mug. The blue sky is reflected in the windows. Paul, standing behind the pushchair, waits for the teacher to look up from his newspaper and smile a hello at him. The thinning teacher reads.
Two boys run in barging together. That was me as a boy, Paul decides. And knows immediately that it wasn't. Because now he can remember wanting to be like those so physically confident boys for whom all life seemed neatly simple — for, against; good, bad; let's do it, let's not. The predominant state Paul remembers of his own childhood is embarrassment, confusion and awkwardness. Always he had one item of clothing that didn't fit — jacket or trousers or shirt — and he had to put red-faced self-conscious effort into what came gracefully to others. Yes, he certainly was not like the two boys who now used upright Michael to dodge around. But nor was Paul as a boy like neat Michael, who makes no attempt to exert himself unless he is properly and sportingly attired.
Paul wishes that Michael would now loosen up and run. Skip even. Instead Michael marches towards him victoriously bearing the note like a wages clerk come up on the pools.
"I put it inside a book," Michael smiles a tight little smile and looks around to see who might be looking at him.
Paul reads the note.
"Can I have the money then?" Michael asks him.
Before he puts his hand in his pocket Paul knows that he hasn't enough on him. He shows Michael his handful of change.
"You can bring it tomorrow," he tells Michael.
"Oh..." Michael's knees jerk in a suppressed stamp, "Paul I told you."
"It says," Paul shows him the note, "it doesn't have to be handed in until Friday."
Alice is looking incuriously up between them, waiting.
"That's the last day!" Michael's voice is low and urgent as two older girls walk smiling prettily by them. "That's the last day she wants it in. She'll ask for it today."
"And you'll have it tomorrow morning. Do you want me to come in and tell her?"
"Doesn't matter." Michael marches off.
"See you tonight."
Michael doesn't answer. Nor does Alice say goodbye to her brother when told. The teacher's head is bent over his paper.
commentary .... In every life there are repetitions. Not every moment of every day is filled with importance. Except in that moment's moment. Then it is usually gone and forgotten. Observe it, take a photograph of it, study it, analyse it, write of such a moment; and those few minutes take on an importance unrelated to the rest of that life. Put it into context and that moment disappears into the humdrum. Paul's waiting in that schoolyard, for instance.
He disliked that teacher sat there reading his paper carelessly ignorant of him. His uninterest denied Paul's existence.
Paul's transient discomfort in that hard school yard, however, was not due solely to a teacher turning pages and making him a nobody. It was because Paul secretly wanted to be seen and to be liked by that particular teacher.
One winter's evening, in a borrowed car, Paul and Julie had gone to the pub in Burrowbridge. They had recognised the teacher as one of the teachers at Michael's then new school, and they had sat out of sight of him and, smiling at one another, they had eavesdropped on him.
The teacher had been with a friend. He had been arguing with that friend in his teacher's loud confident voice. Here follows what Paul overheard that evening, and other information he has subsequently added, although the order here is not as Paul first heard it, rather it was his then understanding of that teacher's past.
That teacher had once been enthusiastic. That, though, had been in London, with disadvantaged children. Not here in Bridgwater. Although many Bridgwater children, he said, just by being Bridgwater children, were disadvantaged.
"An odd mix though. The eager and the indifferent. I must say I prefer the problem children. That sultry bunch that skulk at the back of the class. Not the eager crew jumping about me with their hands in the air."
In London he had lived in the same catchment area as the school. By choice here he lives in Burrowbridge. By choice he sold his London house ten years before, paid off his mortgage and bought outright the house in Burrowbridge.
"My last act of idealism brought me here. I came in search of an idyll. Boredom keeps me here .... I can't believe it of myself. In Hammersmith, so committed was I, that I was accused of fanaticism. I'd only been eager for change, though, for improvement." (Fanaticism is a petty mentality carried to extremes: an awareness of the whole of life, an acceptance of such diversity, defeats such smallmindedness. Any fanaticism on the teacher's part, therefore, had only been his battling against the establishment's inertia.)
The teacher was balding with thick-rimmed glasses.
"I used to have a beard you know. Now I wear a tie. That most absurd article of clothing. Like a dead fish of many colours hanging from the collar of one's shirt. And it's not even as if my employers insist upon it: I now expect it of myself..."
"Pack it in," his friend told him, "You could easily make a living from your watercolours."
"No I couldn't. And that sort of living is too vague. I only know how to work. How to have a job. I don't know how to cultivate people. I don't know how to take people out to lunch. I don't want to have Rodney and Sylvia around one evening. I want to work and I want to be paid for it. As simple as that."
He repeated that he didn't care anymore,
"What point in creating caring individuals for an uncaring environment? I teach in a school that is next to a busy road, is beside a chemical factory, and is under electric pylons. What chances do those children have?"
By this time Julie and Paul had stopped smirking over their naughty eavesdropping: their son was going to that school. The teacher, however, had become fed up with being solemn.
"People these days," he said, "can be divided into those who wear barbours and those who don't."
Paul would have liked such a man for a friend, to be the recipient of such clever remarks. To the teacher, though, Paul continued to be just another parent, to be kept at a cautious distance. Mothers berated teachers at the school for the failings of their children.
"I am tired," the teacher reverted to his disillusion, "just tired. Those teachers who can impart an enthusiasm for their subject are leaving and are teaching their own selves. This teacher now feels he knows it all, has nothing new to learn or to teach. There's not one enthusiast left now in that school. Cynics and careerists all. Graduates of Brown-nose College. Without honours."
The drunker the teacher got the more sober did Julie and Paul become by his description of their state of existence.
To Paul and Julie their being parents, their watching over their children's welfare and education, was all happening for the first time and was therefore, to them, unique. That teacher, though, had been a part of their new experience a thousand times and, having once decided on the parents' type, he could predict their almost every reaction. So did Paul learn that the advantage will always be to the policeman, the doctor, the nurse, the solicitor, the soldier, the teacher... they are familiar with the rules of the situation and know their role in it. Paul will be a stranger to every step.
Paul thought then that he knew much more than many of his neighbours; but, at 21, life was still largely a puzzle to him. In prison he'd said to a cellmate who'd been wont to spout politics at him,
"I don't accept any of your creeds and philosophies. I am trying to work out my own." His cellmate had contrarily congratulated him on that.
"Education is the learning of something," the teacher said that night, "Indoctrination is the teaching of it."
Those words stuck; despite Paul already knowing that we, as a culture, had got into the dangerous way of thinking in singular dichotomies, believing that to every pro there is but one con, that every action must provoke but a single reaction, rather than a multitude of inter-reacting reactions. Such is life. Such are we. Yet so small have we allowed the general intellect to become, so little have we come to expect of it, that we now, confronted with any novelty, seek but mental simplicities to explain it.
Paul was still having arguments with the memory of that cellmate, used him as a mental device, bouncing new ideas off him in an internal dialectic. From which Paul, at this remove, usually emerged triumphant and vindicated. Yet what his actual cellmate had actually said had often been complex and too subtle to allow for anyone being proven wrong or right. In that shared cell Paul had rarely been able to pre-empt his conclusions. Even with hindsight. Paul didn't know what to label him. Trotskyist?
No. That cellmate had called Trotskyism another of history's missed opportunities. He did say, though, that as an idea it would continue to appeal to young people because it was both vigorous and neat. Only later, given today's society, would they see it as impracticable. The world has had other inventions since its conception.
Any dogma is attractive, Paul was told, because it enables the believer to see clearly. The lack of moral certitude of all governments thus makes the moral certitude of terrorist organisations all the more attractive. Mao Tse Tung had been right in theory, he said, wrong in application. We do need a constant revolution. But one cannot impose a revolution. One can only devise a system whereby the old order is unable to entrench itself. Yet such a system is impossible, because the power in ascendancy will always seek to protect itself, thus altering the system to suit itself and to prevent the rise of anything which threatens its establishment. Thus the new will be strangled yet again.
Impotency was the gist of all his cellmate's conversations.
Loyalty, he said, is promoted by all those in power. Loyalty of itself in their eyes is a virtue. It doesn't matter to whom or to what the individual is initially loyal — football team, brand name, nation, political party, pop group — so long as the individual gets into the habit of loyalty. Because once they 'know' that loyalty is good then they can be manipulated.
That teacher too was someone Paul had come to use to clarify his own thoughts. He had himself mentally admonishing the teacher for his sophistry, for its inherent defeatism, thus finding for himself reasons for hope. However, the teacher being someone he thus intimately employed, and content then to own him as such a device, Paul was uncomfortable with but a windowpane between their two real selves.
True Stories
In July 1985 David Charles Williams appeared in court charged with being in fraudulent receipt of £1,335.75. While making false claims against the DHSS David Charles Williams had also been working for Bridgwater Taxis and BT Transport Services. He also admitted to the theft of a case of pernod from BT Transport Services.
"But I'm not taking the blame for everything that's gone missing," 27 year old David Charles Williams told the police, "They're all at it."
On being found guilty David Charles Williams told the court that, at the request of his wife, he had left the matrimonial home. He was now living in lodgings and looking after his 4 year old son whom his wife could not control. David Charles Williams was sent to prison for 6 months.
Peter John Claxton, of Middleton Close, Bridgwater, was brought before Sedgemoor Magistrates charged with receiving a stolen half bottle of whiskey. He had drunk the stolen whiskey in Blake Gardens. On the morning of his court appearance, in September 1985, the magistrates decided that 36 year old Peter John Claxton was too drunk to understand what was going on. They remanded him to the police cells until after lunch.
In August 1989 a bread van crashed on the motorway at Dunball, near Bridgwater. The loaves, that were strewn over the motorway, attracted a flock of seagulls, which became a hazard to traffic.
