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CHAPTER ONE
The Gatekeepers of Knowledge
Autumn Term - Week 1 Day 1
Monday, September 2 nd , 2002
The Peregrine Lane Grammar School , Yarrow, Staff room - Morning
Even now my stomach turns to a fast stream surging down my colon when I think back to my first day at Peggy Lane . It was predictably a Monday, but the ground zero of standing before my first class of school children was mercifully 24 hours away. Meanwhile, a day of introductions and meetings waited for me. A single reflection on the whole enterprise produced a cold, clammy ghost trying to climb into my shirt, then a monster in the shadows waiting to stalk me endlessly down dark corridors and musty classrooms, torturing me until I could take no more.
I'm an English teacher. How could you tell.
At 8.18.am on Day One I pulled my front door shut behind me and crossed the street to the bus stop in front of the The Flying Bucket . A minute later and I would have missed the 419 that began its valley descent high up in the village of Holmes Farne bound inexorably for Yarrow, but there it was, just 400 yards away from easing to a stop in response to my outstretched arm. When it came I paid my money and found a seat near the front. It was nearly empty this morning. Before I began to feel my stomach aching with adrenalin and hunger we stopped again by a farm. An old man with a flat cap and a bursting girth cheerily boarded.
e y oop, Fred, said the driver.
Frank, he replied, nodding as he watched the driver bang the buttons which swiftly coughed up a curly white ticket. Quiet, this mornin'.
Won ' t be tomorrer, it ' ll be full o ' kids again.
Oh, bloody ell, replied Fred. He was a shouter. You could have heard him on the back seat through a Walkperson. He was still chortling as he half-walked, half-shuffled down the bus a few feet and dumped his bulk into the seat one row in front of mine across the aisle. I watched him and briefly compared his life to mine. Poor bastard. He looked, if his personal hygiene and his clothes were any guide, as though he had no money, no family and no friends. Not in the modern sense anyway. His most important possessions would be rheumatism, diabetes and the nagging threat of Parkinson ' s and Alzheimer's. Mind you, he wasn't facing my death sentence, I'd give him that.
Outside the window, green fields soaked and shining in silver dew, drifted up to a skyline of sweet-looking hills as we rattled down some of the prettiest country lanes anyone like you or me can imagine. All very restful and lovely when you haven ' t got a feeling of looming dread upon you. I hadn ' t slept well overnight. Every two minutes, so it seemed to me, my subconscious would douse my unconscious awake with a measure of iced water, causing me to writhe helplessly in fragments of miserable thought: what on earth are you doing, thinking you could be a teacher? a role model, a life enhancer, a ' - God, what did the advert say? A window-opener? '
I was already showered, dressed and pacing up and down the living room by the time I heard my radio alarm kick in upstairs. And now the bus took me unstoppably to destiny. Teacher? I ' d take s urvivor' to start with and move on from there. To avoid getting battered and humiliated by the youth of Great Britain was all I asked.
And to fit in.
Too soon we rumbled across the tiny suspension bridge over the river Whardle that meandered along feeling pretty pleased with itself each day, and slowly negotiated town streets clogged up with getting-to-work traffic. As we pulled up at the bus terminal beside the railway station, I let the fat man hoist himself to his swollen feet so he could get out in front of me. It was the least I could do.
Thank-yer very mooch, yoong mun, he said, smiling at me kindly. I sort of winced back and followed him at a half a mile an hour to the door and waited for him to plop down the bus steps, holding on to the rail for dear life as he shambled his way on to the street. But an arm came out to help him from the pavement.
Coom on, Dad, ye'er alright.
Thanks, loov.
Grandad!
e llo, me darlin ' ow are you this lovely day?
Fine, Grandad.
No school today, eh?
Not til tomorrer - ooray!
Oh, bloody ell, said Grandad, and they all laughed.
Coom on, you lot, antie Jean ' ll have the bacon on by now. It'll be burnt if we don't gerra move on.
On the West Yorkshire Council application form I was Dr. Timothy Weaver, PhD' but what did I really know about anything?
Looking both ways carefully so I didn't actually die or put myself in a wheelchair for the rest of my life on my very first day, I skipped across the road now worried about being late. At the hairdresser ' s on the corner I turned into the school road. Before you made the short tramp up to the gate you had no choice, if you were new to the journey, to look up at the high horizon and the outcrop of huge boulders there. The moor was the only factor in the town's small fame - until the events of autumn 2002 at Peggy Lane drew the media up here like a kid sucking melted ice cream up a straw that is - and I duly elevated my gaze. The game September sun was gently warming the rocks and heather already turned purple. So it was official now: I ' d arrived in the north.
The fast-approaching red and gold signboard at the school entrance announces The Peregrine Lane Grammar School (est. 1847) to the visitor , but it's Pegs' or Peggeh Lairn' to the locals in an accent you could bottle and sell at a craft fair. It proudly resides in the town of Yarrow in Yorkshire - to you? somewhere above Leeds . You probably won ' t know Yorkshire : the biggest county in England but practically unknown to the English. It ' s a pretty cool place to those in the know. There are prettier market towns in the area, especially if you venture further into the wild and woolly northlands of the kingdom, that sit among steeper green hills that rest above them like piles of green rumpled duvets. And sure, they have prouder little market squares too, boasting snug little buildings of rustic stone and hanging baskets of cheering flowers singing in the breeze. But all of them have fine Yorkshire beer and the best fish and chips England can offer, and that, as everyone should know, means the whole world. All-in-all, fair the town of Yarrow is, nestling and until this juncture in the space-time continuum, dozing in peace in its allotted hollow in the landscape. And right now here it was with me in it.
It would have been doing just that the day, months earlier, I, miles off in a far southern distance, saw an advert for an English job at a traditional, highly successful 11-18 comprehensive with a strong commitment to academic standards' in the Times Educational Supplement (teachers job Bible, out every Friday, £1.20). I ' d done a little research and had it confirmed that the title Grammar School ' was just a smokescreen: a desperate clutching to the past and proven attractor to local middle class parents in Guiseley, Keighley and sundry other outlying districts. The school was over-subscribed every year without fail.
This was exactly what I wanted to hear. I wanted a place where the kids knew how to behave and weren't likely to treat me to a Christmas nervous breakdown. Look, I'll admit it: I wasn ' t brave and I wasn't a crusader. I just wanted a safe job in teaching, and Grammar School' said all I needed to know in that respect. The imperious-sounding Peregrine ' and haughty Grammar ' probably conjured frightening images of Oxbridge entry and the cane for the others out there like me scouring the country for work. But I ' d seen all that as a braided-blazered schoolboy myself, so I wasn ' t put off. And besides, we ' d had a motivation specialist come and talk to us one slow college afternoon, so I knew not to be scared by the intimidating propaganda of schools desperate to attract the best unused material out there in the land of the greenhorn trainee. So what was there to lose? I applied, and shock, I damn well got me the position.
The nervous ache was still goose-stepping on my stomach lining as I crossed Moor Lane at pace now, almost losing one side of my body to one of those dreadful 4x4 four cow-crushers in the process but finally, I made it. Peggy Lane 's faux-gothic tower of blackened stone stood defiantly in the climbing sun looking down at me. W eaver, ' it said, come in here if you must, but mind yourself and no lip! '
Accepting that, I crossed the threshold.
I followed a number of fellows and females through the entrance hall and we all made a right turn to see a whole bunch of staff just twenty feet away up some steps milling around the staff room door looking relaxed, the long summer holiday still clinging to them. They looked as though they all belonged properly and thoroughly to the old place, and the image made something inside tug at me hard. If I could only just be a part of this. The thought quickly had company though, a sibling that crept out of a black hole in the mind, talking to the outsider again: what on earth are you doing here?' it said.
Ah, Tim: Hi.
Susan, my head of English my head of faculty, in fact, had spotted and remembered me. Rescued me.
Come through... she said, smiling.
And from that moment, I think, I was a member of staff at Peggy Lane .
The staff room was more cramped than I remembered it from my interview. It had seemed enormous then, but it was almost empty when they traipsed us through as part of the traditional interviewee tour. The odd head turned to peer at a bunch of callow, stupid-looking hopefuls, four of the five of us predestined to be cast out as failures, and then quickly went back to conversations, marking and photocopiers. Now it was crammed to bursting with The Staff, almost all in mufti and making a racket. The walls were a sickly light green, but at least there were notice boards everywhere to minimize the damage that might have otherwise been inflicted on everyone. In one corner those bulletins and notes not pinned properly, flapped in the 8.40.am breeze from a fan that whizzed round on a nearby table. It was going to be warm later on. As if reading my mind, a woman who looked old enough to be my grandmother, but who was clearly still teaching, began opening a window down the far end as I looked for a place to put myself.
Susan ushered me to an orange ten quid sofa - more a padded bench actually - just to the left inside the door, where five of us had to cram ten buttocks into a space meant for six. This was our domain - the English Faculty - for meetings such as these; we and one or two refugees from other faculties who sat here every morning break and lunchtime, and couldn't bring themselves to depart from habit, not even once a year.
Snatches of conversation surrounded but didn ' t include me, concerning just-taken vacations and school stuff that sailed way over my head like the balls Babe Ruth used to smash out of baseball stadiums:
I thought Palm Springs was in Florida !
have you seen the new school PANDA?
you should see the baseline data for my Year 10s, Christ!
that new Head of Year: gorgeous, I ' m telling you,
and we saw Rupert Castle Donington-Thali mime a one-man version of Macbeth at the Fringe - it was fabulous!
He can go and f-fuck himself with a b-bat handle for all I care, said a man with an accent that immediately took you to the bars and backstreets of some southern Irish town. He saw me looking as well as listening and inspected me as if I might be a patch of mould on an old piece of cheese before changing it to a short grin without an agenda. I nodded and smiled back. There was some hope of conversation here at least, but not yet, for the crowd noise had already fallen away. I followed the swiveling bodies and bug-eyed expressions that were now fixing themselves on a man in a sharp navy suit standing by the coffee hatch flanked by a couple of minders also in formal attire. Even I knew who this was: the headmaster, a man with whom I had at least one point of common connection: he was a new boy just like me.
He surveyed the crowd with an expectancy that was mutual. The air was so taut you could have cut it with foam rubber. He waited for the last buzz of conversation to die away with a smile that was open and hopeful, but one that had a back note of concern about the possibility of his inadvertently depositing a brown brick into the seat of his expensive trousers. This gave us all the chance to give him a good once-over even before he started to speak.
He wasn ' t that tall and he wasn't that slim. His light, finger-combed hair that had been blatantly cut for the occasion came forward with every sign of continuing thickness.
Hello, everyone, he said, I ' m Michael Peniston
He took a time out to give the whole room a good appraisal again, as if he'd been well-trained for this specific occasion.
and I want to welcome you to the start of another new year at Peggy I mean
He had to wait while half a dozen people laughed, some surprisingly enthusiastically.
The Peregrine Lane Grammar School .
And then he grinned and took in some giggling from a colleague-cum-minion in the front row just in front of him, before being forced to keep us waiting even longer: he was distracted by the woman at the hatch in a lemon housecoat putting out a row of cups and saucers and making too much of a rattle as she made her line. She looked up to see that the whole room was suspended on a wave of frustrated anticipation on her account and looked completely put out. She didn't tut' but instead fixed her new boss with a beady eye and stopped work.
Thank you very much, Mrs. Manicure, said Michael, and cast his eyes to the heavens this time, as if to say, too much like hard work this headmastering lark.' This got another laugh. Then at last he leveled his gaze on us again, and set off for real.
It ' s a wonderful thing to be given this opportunity. To be placed in charge of such a fine school is a great honour - a scenario I am looking forward to tremendously.
This was not the impression I ' d got from the local rag, where he had openly expressed his displeasure with the school ' s current situation. I can ' t recall the exact words, but it went something like this: we ' re in the crap house, we ' re falling behind most of the rest of the schools in the county and I ' m going to kick some butt to put it right. ' We were probably going to get the same thing here, only the long version.
However, those of you who have read last week ' s Yarrow and Oatley Examiner
Another pause.
will know that we have a lot of serious work to do to turn the school around.
No laughter this time.
He began to unreel the big speech, one he ' d probably fretted and fussed over for weeks, and I tried to set my concentration level on full so I could begin to bed into the place. But the controls didn ' t want to function. There was just too much competition for too little oxygen in my blood. My new colleagues were spread out all around me for silent perusal and sly analysis, and I still wanted to question the whole point of me being right here in this room, at this time. I could still skip the country if that's what I really wanted.
I tried closing my eyes to see what that would do and heard the hum of my internal mechanism, the machine that could never be switched off, churning out the same old slop. I was getting a lecture. Uh-uh, not this time you don ' t, buster: you ' re going through with this so accept it, sit there and listen! ' I opened my eyes again and came back into the room.
Having spent much of the summer looking at the full range of cohort data, Michael was saying gravely, when I suddenly noticed the Irishman smiling at my lack of attention. He gave me a wink before turning towards Michael again.
the figures from the past five years are eating holes in our key stage 2 performance levels, pouring custard into our values in Y9 SATS on top of GCSE sauce...
The rest of the assembled multitude may have been reveling in Michael's fluent educationese, but for all I knew he might have been trying to sell me a bag of carrots. Fuzzy buzzwords were flying around the room like a squadron of angry war planes. I listened harder, hoping that things would straighten out but new phrases were trying to choke me in a jargon blanket. I yawned to find I was dog tired even though it wasn ' t even nine o'clock . I started drifting away again into a fog.
Face it, Weaver, you ' ve always hated headmasters. '
Baldy Haldey was my first of several. Back then I was in England still. Haldey was as tall as a building, essentially an alien from a weird planet in a far distant solar system and armed with the power to kill. When you ' d done something wrong he stared at you with a raised eyebrow over a beady right eye that made him look like a demented crow. No wonder I was frightened of him. I was eleven years of age when he changed my life for good. It began when in one of Ernie Veal's boring Geography lessons I decided to amuse my ego. I wiggled my forefinger through my open trouser-fly at as many of my neighbours as would pay due court to this magnificent display of high comedy. It got a lot of laughs. Ernie, short-sighted and comically old, thought they were for him and smiled with his narrow eyes at the wall at the back of the room. He then paced way past me up the centre aisle, so unless he had eyes in the back of his grey head, I had free reign. My counterfeit wizzer wiggled again and I pushed my little groin in and out this time, causing the laughter to increase. Ernie had sensed that something was amiss.
Stop that talking! he barked.
In the quiet I carried on, keen to put in one encore at the very least, when something made me check the large pane of glass in the door. The Face of Doom was staring in at me as if I ' d committed murder - which I probably had in his malevolent eye. My insides melted and my forehead burst into a shower of sweat while I sat ramrod straight in my chair, now trying to do an impression of the best behaved student in history. I looked over at the window when I dared to - about three minutes later: the face had gone. There then followed fifteen minutes of shocking inner turmoil as I waited for the bell. Would stopping me in my tracks have been enough for him? A few moments after the infernal drrriinnng! ceased, Veal let us go and I shuffled out to the doorway hoping with all my might for a complete absence of headmasters. But there he was. He drew me aside as a mob of blazers poured through the corridor heading for their next lesson.
Name?
T-Tim, sir. I felt my knees banging together like two parts of a foundry steam hammer. Brave I never have been and never was.
Tim, what?
Eh, er, W-W-Weaver, sir.
So, Mr. Weaver, what were you doing in there, exactly?
That was enough. My lip wobbled and my eyes bubbled up with salty liquid. I couldn ' t answer. I just looked up at my headmaster and shook my head, lost and humiliated in front of about twenty young herberts who'd stayed on in the corridor to see what Haldey would do to his latest victim. He stared at me long enough to know he ' d done sufficient damage to my psyche, before turning for the stairs, gown flapping, calling over his shoulder as he departed,
School detention. See Mr. Challenger at the end of the day.
And that was my showbiz career up the chimney. Strange how we used to do impressions of his manic stare and laugh at the old git, but he bestrode our puny lives like a colossus. He was a God controlling our destinies with the twitch of a few facial muscles. I don ' t think I ever really recovered from the finger wiggling incident. Something I should have taken through my teenage years, something good, was robbed from me in that corridor.
Was Michael Peniston going to be a God to Peggy Lane kids? ' I wondered, as a late wasp hovered twitchily by an open window having saluted a strand or two of ivy. He certainly didn ' t look frightening, just smooth and professional, streaming on effortlessly in this foreign language.
...be accessing to the full, the new streams of government fundament now flowing into schools with arses this size.
He actually was like Haldey in one way: he made me feel like an inferior being. It could never be me up there. I almost guffawed out loud at the very idea: Dr. Timothy Vespasian Weaver, headmaster of a secondary school. If I ever made it to Michael's age I wouldn ' t look like this: fresh, forty and fucking ready for anything. I couldn ' t see myself dressing like that either. Whoever made his pristine, glossy outer covering had clothed someone to look more like a barrister than a teacher. And the tie was of a deep crimson depth that would have sat well upon an up-and-coming junior minister's shirt. I liked to watch Newsday with the sound down late at night so I knew what those dudes looked like. And even if Michael spent more time in front of a mirror than was good for him, he had to be a better bet than old Baldy Haldey, who even ten years ago was an embarrassing throwback with his bad brown shoes and two pound-fifty comb-over.
Mr. P. was smoothing his way through his oration now, words flowing into the air like miraculous jelly. I summoned up every ounce of waking energy I had; this stuff had to be good for me so I'd better start trying to catch on...
..Key Stage 3 Average of 5.5 is not sufficient for a school with our socio-economic profile, especially in the current nudist. With the government breathing down our necks I want us to be pushing the envelope wherever we can.....
Which reminds me: I ' ve got a couple of letters to post, f-huh-huh.
We were packed in so close together I couldn't help but hear that. The comedian was sitting to my left in a rickety armchair behind the door: a guy, late-thirties maybe, with wiry, russet hair and an unkempt moustache that went out of fashion in the 60s and wasn't coming back. His laugh sounded like someone trying to turn over a rusty engine. He looked at me looking at him and raised his eyebrows in a hello ' that said, it ' s okay mate, we're both on the same side - trust me. ' I wasn ' t sure whether to disapprove of his cheek or not. Then before Michael had finished another paragraph, another aside wrecked what was left of my concentration. This time it was my new Irish colleague.
Sef, you're m-missing 21 st century m-man.
He was whispering to a very late arrival who'd just squeezed through the crowd and sat down on the bench to my right where a space had magically opened up for him. He was in the wrong place. He was too stylish to be a teacher, with his expensive black t-shirt, perfectly faded Levi's and an ancient denim jacket Elvis himself might have owned. The cropped hair on a balding head looked so good I almost wanted to start pulling my own out in lumps, while the tan and overwhelming sense of quiet assurance said Italian film director ' . He was me at 55 in my dreams.
Damn! Strike three. He caught me staring and returned it with a rapid flash of mesmeric steely blue. He then swiveled his gaze elsewhere as if I wasn ' t worth the bother. Or maybe he was just ticking me off for gawping at him like he was some kind of zoo creature. Or maybe my nerves were making me paranoid. I rejoined my new boss.
...and of course, the A level results this year mean that those challenges are to be made into a warm, crusty bedpan in time for October half term.
As the clock moved past nine and the sun moved past the limbering up stage, the air really began to close in. I loosened another shirt button. Some of those around me looked less and less engaged as the minutes containing Michael ' s big opening performance slipped by. A dapper man in a bow-tie to my left who looked like a local art critic yawned with great care, while an asparagus-thin middle aged fellow opposite looked ready to give his right nostril a really good rake with his left index finger but, it seemed to me, remembering where he was, decided to defer the pleasure. In front of me a woman with a distracting figure reached up to open one of the higher windows. The sound of birdsong drifted in to us and a car changed down a gear in the distance to climb a hill. I tried not to look as a pair of bare brown legs lengthened with the long stretch upwards to get the catch, but if I'm honest, I deliberately didn't put in enough effort. The resulting look the film director shot me tore into my soul and almost caused me to lose the will to carry on right there and then. Suddenly, hitching a ride on Michael 's drone became a very comforting alternative.
...So we need to initiate a more organized flatulence procedure. I have asked Susan Climer to take on a new role, as head of Assessment, Recording and Peanut Stamps in addition to her responsibilities as head of the English faculty...
Whoah! Susan moving up in the world, good for her. She was sitting directly across from me under a window and had coloured slightly at the mention of her advancement. She was immaculately dressed today, where almost everyone else was in casuals, in a classic power ensemble: black suit, black tights and black shoes with a big heel. The jacket was slightly too big for her, but still. She would probably divest herself of the costume and shove her body into a pair of jeans and a loose sweater within three seconds of shutting the front door, but she still got my vote for professional effort. Something you could learn from, Weaver, ' I mused.
Michael had that I ' m coming to the end of my speech ' tone in his voice now. Come on, Tim, concentrate now or you ' ll miss something really important and regret it later...
So it ' s become clear to me, he said, pausing for big effect, that what the school badly needs is...
He stopped, hoping the build up of tension and subsequent release would leave his big message of the morning imprinted on our minds for all time.
...a vision!
The response was probably not what Michael had intended. Had the school employed an artist-in-residence at that point in time, they might have drawn a blank face on a big white piece of paper. The boss carried on anyway.
What that vision ' should be for Peggy Lane I ' m not exactly sure, but I want to build that vision with you in the coming term, so that by Christmas... Another stage pause: ...we know clearly and precisely where it is we ' re going as a school.
Well, I didn ' t think you meant as a tractor, f-huh-huh, said the ginger moustache, grinning. He seemed so pleased with himself, but so vulnerable at the same time that I decided I couldn ' t dislike him.
An integrated part of the plan...
Now there came a tut ' from the direction of the faded Levi's. This was fair enough; Michael meant integral, ' that was certain. Even I noticed that.
...naturally, is the word, targets. ' No longer can an organization like this get by without clear-sighted goals...
I ' d go back to using wingers, meself, f-huh-huh, said the chuckling moustache.
The scenario, then, is that the school has to look forward and outward to move onward.
Poetry, said ginger, looking right at me now. I almost burst into laughter but held on. I looked back at Michael and it was clear that fortunately, he hadn ' t heard. He was much too deeply immersed in his own world, though he could hardly be blamed for that.
I want to leave you with this: something I ' d really like you to remember as you go through the term: we are all gatekeepers of knowledge. Let us open that gate to the best of our ability at all times.
And there he stopped for the last time but one, to see what effect his grandstand finish had had on his staff. There was a cough behind me that was neither polite nor redolent of illness, while a white butterfly flapped its gentle way into the room before deciding it didn't contain a large flowering bush and flitting out again into the mellow morning. Apart from that and someone sniffing, there was nothing to report. Maybe there was a certain density in the silence - maybe I imagined it.
Okay. Thank you. Thank you for listening.
He strode back down the room and out through the door like visiting royalty. A crumpled looking managerial type I would later come to know as Malcolm then took us through the itinerary for the rest of Monday above a very low, murmuring chatter.
So that was the first part of my first day done. I was beginning to feel okay sitting there amongst my new colleagues, with my new boss having set out on the road to taking the school forward or skyward or whatever it was. But it could hardly be Michael ' s fault that I wasn ' t connected up yet to the new education practices sweeping the country; it was probably mine for being a 28 year old spoiled pseudo-American twerp with a bogus doctorate. But something there sparked me into life making me think, hey, maybe I can actually play a part in this.' If the kids don't take to me like undernourished lions falling on a side of warm meat, that is. And as long as someone sat me down pretty quickly and translated what Michael had said into English.
I was just trying to retrace the big end to his speech, something about Goalkeepers of the Flame, when I stood up with everyone else to stretch and maybe find someone to talk to when suddenly I saw her.
A real vision.
She ' d been five feet away from me the whole time, two scrunched bodies to the right. She was small and young, with short dark spiky hair and eyes like big dabs of shiny chocolate. She was talking to Susan when suddenly her face became a smile. Inside my head whole cities collapsed in ruins and rivers of blood poured through huge clouds of angry dust. Almighty screaming broke out as a million coloured rockets crashed into the soft open sky. I was suddenly wide awake. I ' d just seen Jez for the first time.