thousand pounds I beat you,’ I said, giving him my hand.
Saturday
The night sizzled and fried, even with the window wide, the low eaves trapping the heat. I slept fitfully and woke early, detaching myself from Em to lie apart, clammy but cooling, on the sheet. Dust hung in the light beam from the curtain crack. From the height of the sun — a yellow circle behind the gingham squares — I put the time at six. Unknown birds called across the fields and I imagined them as species redeemed from extinction: the corncrake, little bustard or red-backed shrike.
Till recently, I had a gift for putting my problems to sleep when I went to bed. Then something changed and I began to wake at unknown hours and to worry away in the dark; even alcohol, my usual prologue to sleep, was no help. When I saw ‘my’ GP — the possessive seems misplaced, since I’d never previously seen her — she tried the word depression on me, which was something else to fret about. We agreed that I try some over-the-counter herbal sedative called Somaduce (Comatose as Em christened it), which carried no risk of addiction. Its only effect was to make me listless by day, and, after a month of insomnia (the nights made worse by my indignation at wasting good money), I abandoned it. If I couldn’t sleep for worry, that was natural. Why worry about being worried? I was right to be worried. The worrying thing was that I’d taken so long to see it.
That’s how I sold my insomnia to myself, jokily, which was a step forward, or rather back to the ironist I used to be. But what had been waking me early for several weeks before Badingley wasn’t a generalised midlife crisis but something quite specific. I lay brooding about it that morning, after dreaming of it half the night. Ollie’s tumour and the reckless bet I’d made were bad enough. But it was school, and an episode just before the summer holidays, that had me sweating under the eaves.
Few teachers enjoy playground duty. And my mood was not the best that Tuesday lunchtime because Mrs Wilkinson, our dyslexia specialist, had spent so long discussing one of my pupils with me it left no time even for a sandwich. Outside the kids divided in the usual gendered fashion, the girls colluding in quiet clumps close to the building, the boys running wildly at the fringes. As I stood unnoticed by the boiler room, I heard some girls from Year Three singing and clapping hands. I recognised the tune from childhood. But the words and gestures were new.
We are the Derby girls (clap hands)
We wear our hair in curls ( pat hair)
We don’t wear dungarees (rub thighs)
We show our sexy knees (touch knees)
The cocky boy next door (pat crotch)
He got me on the floor (touch ground)
I gave him 50p (slap hands)
To give it all to me (thrust crotch)
And now I’ve got this brat (rock arms)
In a high-rise council flat (reach up)
We drink and smoke and shag (wiggle hips)
We are the Derby slags (clap hands)
My first impulse was to intervene and discipline them. But did the girls — seven- and eight-year-olds — understand what they were singing? I’m not used to younger kids; it’s the tough nuts, the ten- and eleven-year-olds, I specialise in. And these girls could have learned the song by rote, just as I used to learn carols ('Lo he abhors not the virgin’s womb'), uncomprehendingly. Best let it go. If I raised it with our head teacher, Mrs Baynes, she would take no action. I left them to it and walked away.
Even if I’d not been bad-tempered, I would have dealt with Campbell Foster in the same way. I’ve never taught Campbell
– normally I would have had him in Year Five but that year I’d been switched to Year Six as an experiment before switching back again. I’d been aware of him, though. You couldn’t not be. You only had to attend Assembly, for which he’d be late or in which he’d be noisy or from which he’d be escorted and made to stand in the corridor. Some kids are trouble for just a term or two.
Saturday
The night sizzled and fried, even with the window wide, the low eaves trapping the heat. I slept fitfully and woke early, detaching myself from Em to lie apart, clammy but cooling, on the sheet. Dust hung in the light beam from the curtain crack. From the height of the sun — a yellow circle behind the gingham squares — I put the time at six. Unknown birds called across the fields and I imagined them as species redeemed from extinction: the corncrake, little bustard or red-backed shrike.
Till recently, I had a gift for putting my problems to sleep when I went to bed. Then something changed and I began to wake at unknown hours and to worry away in the dark; even alcohol, my usual prologue to sleep, was no help. When I saw ‘my’ GP — the possessive seems misplaced, since I’d never previously seen her — she tried the word depression on me, which was something else to fret about. We agreed that I try some over-the-counter herbal sedative called Somaduce (Comatose as Em christened it), which carried no risk of addiction. Its only effect was to make me listless by day, and, after a month of insomnia (the nights made worse by my indignation at wasting good money), I abandoned it. If I couldn’t sleep for worry, that was natural. Why worry about being worried? I was right to be worried. The worrying thing was that I’d taken so long to see it.
That’s how I sold my insomnia to myself, jokily, which was a step forward, or rather back to the ironist I used to be. But what had been waking me early for several weeks before Badingley wasn’t a generalised midlife crisis but something quite specific. I lay brooding about it that morning, after dreaming of it half the night. Ollie’s tumour and the reckless bet I’d made were bad enough. But it was school, and an episode just before the summer holidays, that had me sweating under the eaves.
Few teachers enjoy playground duty. And my mood was not the best that Tuesday lunchtime because Mrs Wilkinson, our dyslexia specialist, had spent so long discussing one of my pupils with me it left no time even for a sandwich. Outside the kids divided in the usual gendered fashion, the girls colluding in quiet clumps close to the building, the boys running wildly at the fringes. As I stood unnoticed by the boiler room, I heard some girls from Year Three singing and clapping hands. I recognised the tune from childhood. But the words and gestures were new.
We are the Derby girls (clap hands)
We wear our hair in curls ( pat hair)
We don’t wear dungarees (rub thighs)
We show our sexy knees (touch knees)
The cocky boy next door (pat crotch)
He got me on the floor (touch ground)
I gave him 50p (slap hands)
To give it all to me (thrust crotch)
And now I’ve got this brat (rock arms)
In a high-rise council flat (reach up)
We drink and smoke and shag (wiggle hips)
We are the Derby slags (clap hands)
My first impulse was to intervene and discipline them. But did the girls — seven- and eight-year-olds — understand what they were singing? I’m not used to younger kids; it’s the tough nuts, the ten- and eleven-year-olds, I specialise in. And these girls could have learned the song by rote, just as I used to learn carols ('Lo he abhors not the virgin’s womb'), uncomprehendingly. Best let it go. If I raised it with our head teacher, Mrs Baynes, she would take no action. I left them to it and walked away.
Even if I’d not been bad-tempered, I would have dealt with Campbell Foster in the same way. I’ve never taught Campbell
– normally I would have had him in Year Five but that year I’d been switched to Year Six as an experiment before switching back again. I’d been aware of him, though. You couldn’t not be. You only had to attend Assembly, for which he’d be late or in which he’d be noisy or from which he’d be escorted and made to stand in the corridor. Some kids are trouble for just a term or two.
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