Episode 10 - Sweet Caroline

Some people stay with you forever

Previously on This Writer’s Journey…

I now have my first professional writing credit. After some deep thinking about my future, I’ve come to a decision.

Her name is Caroline. She’s been my favourite since day one, the day she called me a witch.

Rewind to the chemical toilet on the Thamesmead Estate.

Many - possibly most - people reading this will recognise the compulsion I have to get stuff out of my head and into the world. In my case it’s stories. For you it might be poetry. Or opinion pieces. Or music. Or pictures, or sculpture, or ceramics. You might try to stifle it, but if you’ve got it, you’re stuck with it.

Back on the Thamesmead estate, I know I can’t stop writing. But I also know I can’t control how my writing will be received or whether I’ll ever again get paid for it. What I can control however, is how I make the money I need to live.

I decide it’s time to get a proper job.

First thing next morning I get on the phone to the Inner London Education Authority.

They offer me a teaching job in a primary school in a particularly deprived part of Hackney. It’s a temporary contract, initially for one term. They call me a ‘temporary terminal’. I am not making this up.

I buy a couple of sensible skirts and prepare to settle down to a life of lesson plans and staff rooms and paying into a pension.

I approach the first day with trepidation.

What do you know? I love it. My high-ceilinged, huge-windowed classroom; my wooden desk; my different coloured chalks; my ILEA-issue biros. The clip-clop of my heels as I stride down the Victorian corridors. The colleagues who smile at me across the staffroom. The Turkish bakery where I buy my sandwich at lunchtime. All of it.

Mostly, I love the kids.  The cheek, the humour, the skewed ways of looking at things.

And Caroline. I love her best of all.

Caroline turned seven on the last day of August and is thus the youngest in my class. If she’d been born a single second past midnight, she would be in the class below.

She’s the youngest, but also the tallest, and way, way the smartest.  Her brain is so fast it’s like trying to follow lightning. 

I think she might be the cleverest person I’ve ever known.

Caroline lives with her mother and older siblings on a notorious housing estate. Think broken light bulbs, dark stairwells and people making shady transactions, and you’re in the right territory. She’s always immaculately turned out, but I suspect she sometimes comes into school with an empty stomach . 

Caroline feels things strongly. Her tantrums are epic. She has no filters. She has a reputation in the staffroom for being one of the most difficult kids in the school.

Caroline says things exactly as she sees them. 

At the end of my first day, at three o’clock in the afternoon, the children are sitting on the book corner carpet. Thirty children, cross-legged, looking at me with big 7-year old eyes. Caroline has been kicking off all day, but for now she’s sitting quietly, scratching her ear. It’s a beautiful moment. I open the book, prepare to start reading

Caroline points at me. You’re a witch.

A what?

You’ve got a pointy chin.  

Oh. Right. Well. That’s quite a personal remark, Caroline.

I hate witches, she says.

Caroline’s best friend is Gaynor, who lives on the same estate.  Gaynor is small, with a shy smile and a tiny voice.  She’s clever too, but very quiet.  She never tantrums.  The two of them sit side by side, fizzing with friendship and possibility. 

Adam sits on the next table and also lives on the same housing scheme. He has a huge laugh. He has trouble interpreting letters and numbers on the page. Back then, dyslexia wasn’t much talked about and Adam calls himself slow, though his sharp wit tells a different story. The day he gets the concept of addition, I float home on a cloud. 

On the Friday of that first week, after I’ve dismissed the class, Caroline comes up to my desk.

Are you a witch, Miss ?

No, Caroline, I’m not.

She looks at me for a moment, with narrowed eyes. I don’t think I hate you, she says. And she scarpers out the door.

I love my job.

But it’s hard work.

The school’s philosophy is that the child shouldn’t be forced to fit in with the system, the system should fit in with the child. Work-plans are tailored to the individual. Preparing and following thirty separate plans is time consuming. I’m in my classroom before 8 every morning and rarely leave before 6.  Most nights I’m in bed by 9.

The October half-term holiday is approaching. My closest friend in the staffroom, a woman so warm she brightens your day just by passing you in the corridor, tells me she’s not returning to school after half-term. She’s jacking in her job and is going to join the women camping outside the airbase at Greenham Common.

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The mid-eighties in the UK is a tough time. American nuclear missiles at Greenham. The memory of the Falklands war still a raw wound. The striking miners being ground down by government and police. Inflation running high. Unemployment rocketing. At school, there’s a suspicion that Gaynor is being abused.

I’ve been working on a play. Ellen is the story of a Welsh grandmother, so tired of no one listening to her that she’s given up talking. Most days I wonder why I’m bothering. Really, what’s the point?

But I can’t stop myself. By the end of half-term I’ve finished a draft.

Are there two more beautiful words in the English language than The End?

I ask David if he’ll take a look. He says he’d love to, slips the script in his bag and goes off to a cafe to read it.

Domesticity is not my strongest suit, but I find I have an urgent desire to clean the kitchen.

The names of the children in this piece have been changed.

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PPS It’s that time of year and I’m taking a couple of weeks to be with my family and friends. This Writer’s Journey is taking a break and will be back on Thursday January 9th, 2025.

Happy Holidays to all.