I handed my notice in at school last Monday lunchtime. This may well go down in history as a legendary Crow clanger to rank alongside those humungously bad decisions already recently in the bag such as retraining as a swimming teacher to earn some proper money, trying to sell the house (hahahah!) and turning right not left onto the Old Kent Road the previous Wednesday in order to find a traffic avoiding back route to Rotherhithe so that I could return the skinny leg jeans I had kindly bought for my eldest without imagining for a zillion eons that any progeny of Jon and mine’s would have an inside leg length anything over 26 inches. It took me an hour to go from Short, through Regular to Long. Not to mention twenty quid’s worth of petrol.
No, I returned from resigning vaguely exhilarated, and switched on the radio to hear Eddie Mair with a voice like shortbread petticoat tails herald the end of civilisation, as the markets freefell and the prospect of a million out of work by Christmas even troubled the usually smooth delivery of the continuity announcer (how many of those does the world need?). A clever day to chuck in the job, what!
It was, it has to be said, only one of my jobs, but a time-consuming one nonetheless. The reason behind my - with hindsight – ill-timed recklessness was nearly four years of classroom distraction that didn’t actually even cover the monthly repayments on my moribund credit card. When I had kids of my own and went through the bum-wiping, nose-blotting, cajoling, dressing, washing, feeding, reading, writing routine with each, it never occurred to me that I’d have to be doing it for other people’s kids for a living. But four years ago, in a post-Morrisons apocalyptic Crystal Palace with a one-way system freshly inserted up its backside, it seemed I would never be paid to sell books ever again. But, ever the shopgirl, I adroitly acquired a raft of jobs that ensured that the only time my feet ever touched the ground was when I slung my legs over the side of our manky twenty year old mattress at seven o’clock in the morning.
The only advantage of working in a classroom full of dinkies - my other workplaces included a psychotherapist’s consulting room, the bookshop, two municipal pools and two private ones – was that I got to be artistic with the staple gun. However, as a fully paid up charlatan my dedication to Early Years & Foundation Stage education ensured that I absolutely loathed doing anything else, especially the messy stuff (like I hadn’t had a bellyful of that at home anyway) and despite its manipulative, creative and instant qualities as an education tool, my pure hatred of homemade play-dough was sealed and balled up in a tiny brown fist, the day that little Damocles sneezed palably into his lump of cochineal tinted flour and water fun. And then he flattened it with a rolling pin, pressed down on a pastry cutter and handed me a star-shaped snot cookie.
No. A nice safe staple gun was where it was at. Gimme all those little darlings’ paper pinwheels, cotton wool snowmen and crayoned depictions of their holidays at Disneyland Paris and I could turn it into a grim Bruegelian grim-scape in seconds flat. Because I’m a good actress – actually it is precisely because I wasn’t a good one that my first career choice in the theatre got its final exit stage left at age fifteen when I failed the audition for the NYT - one of the teachers kindly commented that I would make a good teacher myself, but quite aside from my complete lack of mathematical certification at any level, I couldn’t calculate anything worse. Not that I would ever admit that to a real live teacher with their place in heaven fully booked the day they became an NQT. God, imagine having to follow the curriculum by the jargonistic book. No, it was strictly “inside voice and quiet hands” for me. Imagine carrying the can if I failed to educate. Which, I surely would, given my own record. Or is it true that those who can’t do teach?
I was fond of grumbling that the school had me cheap but that is to flatter myself. No, what I had was the old shopgirl adaptability that meant that I wasn’t afraid to say, er.. yes. My ability to read then, write a sentence (aw, c’mon!) also meant that I could fill out the forms and clipboards and observations and tracking paperwork that the system demands and devours daily, without anybody having to explain it to me.
And my acting skills disguised my frustrated despair when I had to hold down untamed, trashing migrant three year olds without the support of any training or guidance. At other times, it helped suppress my revulsion at the unkempt cute tussle of hair crawling with lice or chipping shite off the inside of sad legs because parents failed to admit that their child wasn’t actually toilet trained, so keen were they to get them institutionalised. I’d take my hat off a million times to those who work in schools but I’d never take a hat off to me. I was just a pretender.
(I even managed to rouse the ire of the erstwhile deputy by wearing a hat indoors. True. My line-manager boss had the embarrassing task of informing me that my smurfish headgear was not “appropriate”).
Left to keep a pile of 40 three and four year olds from fidgeting while a story went over their heads in honour of Black History Week, I found myself pulling my jumper over my mouth and nose in a pathetic attempt to stave off the swarm of technicolour germs swarming like dust motes in the Autumn sunlight as they exploded from each little coughing gob. Out of 40, 11 kids sneezed during Anancy’s exploits with the emperor’s new dan dan. Then one little bugger guffed. I sat there trapped amidst the microbes wondering just what it was I ‘d done wrong in a previous life.
I couldn’t justify it, nor stand it any longer. Somebody else more talented and earnest than me would do far more justice to the position of classroom assistant. Someone who would take it and use it “appropriately” by doing something really useful for society, and not just excuse it as an outlet for failed artistic ambition, as well as a means of fending off Mastercard like some hapless liontamer with a plastic chair. Meanwhile, my Uncle Bri went and died at the not-so-old age of 58, which don’t half make you think long and hard about what constitutes the best use of one’s existence whilst everyone else weeps in the chapel.
I mean, somebody else more deserving would never in a million years entertain the consideration that snipping out scraps of fabric and attempting to get tiny people to glue them the right way up on sugar paper outside in a windy playground was an utter waste of time.
And I’d been late too many times. And I was spending a fortune on unleaded going between the bookshop and classroom and pool (I got the shrink job off my chest after a year of struggling up and down the Camberwell New Road). And my brain was atrophying. Which kind of negates the whole motive behind education, huh?
I have no fanciful illusions that I matter to the children who have passed through the last four years of my silly voices, French expletives, over-dramatised storytelling and bizarre playground antics – “Hot Beanbag!” – as, unless they were unlucky enough to have a form photo purchased on their behalf with me in the back row looking like a giant remedial, they won’t even acknowledge my presence by the time they go into the Juniors. I have been that ashamed teenager on Reigate high street who was once greeted lovingly by teacher from my formative years and of whom, to this day, I have not an iota of recollection. But, I will miss being cuddled all the time, inspite of the rules about contact, and above all I will miss being so unconditionally adored. It is the closest I’ve ever got as an adult to being on the stage. The little fools...
It is a time for change then. So, soon after handing in my notice and with Eddie Mair’s gentle incredulity at the headlines he was reading still ringing in my water-filled ears, I took a deep breath and ordered a brand new mattress from Argos. It was delivered yesterday and I can tell you now, as I rub the sleep from my eyes and swing my legs over the side, it is the best decision I have made for a long long time.
Ps. Sarah Montague says two million out of work by Christmas. I think I’ll go back to bed.
