I've started a new short story - about a subject I feel strongly about. I wanted to try out my first couple of scenes on you. Let me know what you think!
Mr Child
‘Watch out for people who go putting on airs,’ said Mr Child. ‘Beware of people going out of their way to show you how clever they are.’ He looked up from the little philosophy book he said he’d found in Durham’s Oxfam shop and grinned. ‘Because they’re full of shite, usually. Watch out for them!’
He had dragged his chair out from behind the teacher’s desk – as usual – and was sitting right in front of our class with one leg crossed over the other, holding his little book up. He smiled at us in the half-light through the black venetian blinds.
What was it with that room of his always being half in darkness? It was right at the top of the glass building, and it should have been the lightest and airiest of all the classrooms. It looked out over miles of bright yellow fields. Mr Child jumped up to adjust the bent and dusty blinds once more. He didn’t like the direct sunlight, he said, so down they came, lowered noisily like a broken guillotine.
‘The… man who… invented the guillotine was actually called Mr Guillotin… and he invented it especially for the French Revolution…’ Mr Child was puffing and panting as he pulled the strings at his end of the blinds. I was pulling on the other end and the blinds were making an awful ratcheting noise. ‘He practised decapitating sheep! On the cobbles in the street… outside his house, in a little alleyway near St Germain des Pres… in Paris. Imagine the poor sheep queueing up and watching him experimenting with his terrible machine!’
Mr Child tugged on the string and his end of the blinds shot down faster than mine. We had a lopsided triangle of shade bisecting the brilliant sunshine. ‘That’ll do. Will that do? Half the room’s in shadow, and the rest of you can just sunbathe…’ He shrugged as our class gave him an ironic burst of applause. ‘What can I say? I’m a ginger fella. I can’t stand being in the sun, I evaporate! Now, where was I..?’
He went back to his chair at the front and picked up his book. ‘Oh, yes. Don’t trust those who crack on they’re intellectuals. Just watch out for them! And ornate prose styles! Oh, my god, watch out for people covering up the fact they know nothing by putting on an overly ornate prose style! That’s bullshit of the highest order, that. Awful! And the worst thing is, people are taken in! If they read something they don’t understand they think – ooh, it must be clever. Too clever for me to understand!’ Mr Child burst out: ‘But, no! They’ve been hoodwinked! They’ve been blinded by bullshit! Absolute bullshit and bollocks!’
He flapped his book and kept shouting the words ‘bullshit’ and ‘bollocks’, and this was the bit we liked the best. He was getting excited and red in the face. He rolled up the sleeves of his grey shirt and rubbed a hand through his hair. ‘Now, where was I? Aye, yes. Just think! What must have been going through the heads of those poor sheep? Besides a razor sharp blade, that is! Mr Guillotin had an arrangement with the restaurant next door and he’d pass on all the heads and bodies and grisly bits of mutton when he was finished. Forty thousand people died on the guillotine during the Revolution! Forty thousand human heads followed all those sheep! Including Monsieur Guillotin’s own!’
There was a knock at the door and, without waiting, the head of German stepped into the room. ‘Is everything all right in here?’ Mr Robbins asked. He was a beaming, worried kind of man. He wanted the best for everyone, but something about Mr Child always made him feel nervous, you could tell.
‘Aye, Mr Robbins. All fine in here. Am I being too noisy again? We were trying to fix those bloody blinds…’
Mr Robbins surveyed our class worriedly. Clearly he felt protective of his small band of A Level students. There were only three of us studying German with him and Mr Child. We were an elite band he was very fond of. He had high hopes for us. While he was our main teacher, Mr Child had the responsibility of guiding us through the Literature part of the syllabus. It was a big task. Fully half of the final exams were on books that Mr Child was teaching us. When he heard Mr Child getting excited and shouting ‘bullshit!’ and ‘bollocks!’ and playing with the blinds in the next room, Mr Robbins always became nervous. He’d come darting through to check on us all.
‘We’re fine, Mr Robbins,’ said Mr Child. ‘We’re having a lovely time. Just dandy.’
‘That’s all right then,’ said Mr Robbins. ‘Entschuldigen sie.’
‘Aye, whatever,’ said Mr Child and gave him a wave. The door closed again.
‘Right, where was I with philosophy?’ Mr Child flapped his little hardback book at us again. ‘Okay, Verstand and Vernunft. That was it. Now, I’ve got a feeling that Emanuel Kant is the key to all of this. Verstand and Vernunft. Two different kinds of understanding. Now, does anyone want to have a go at describing the difference between the two different kinds?’
He looked up at us and his eyes were very pale and blue. He looked like he really expected us to have all the answers. He was trying not to seem impatient with us, but we really weren’t on the same page.
My friend Gail asked him, ‘Is this to do with Wilhelm Tell, sir? Are we still talking about Schiller?’
‘Yes, yes, of course we are,’ he said, impatiently, and smiled to soften his tone. ‘But my feeling is that you can’t read the Schiller without understanding Emanuel Kant first…’
We hadn’t read the Schiller yet. We were still on the first page. After two classes on Wilhelm Tell we hadn’t got very far at all.
*
We were used to going off on tangents with Mr Child. He’d get carried away. We’d encourage him. His tangents would take us further and further away from the point. They’d take up whole lessons. We loved them though.
‘The moon! Lunatics! Lunacy! Do you know about the connections between the moon and madness? Werewolves! Legends! And… Psycho..! Who’s seen Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho?’ He stared at us with disbelief. ‘What?! None of you? None of you have seen Psycho..? But it’s a bloody classic movie! Where have you all been all this time..?’
‘We’re not as old as you,’ Gail said cheekily. ‘We’ve got catching up to do!’
‘Hey, you’re not that much younger,’ Mr Child laughed. ‘I’m only twenty-three. What’s that? Five years older? When you get to my age, you’ll find that’s nowt. That’s nowt at all! Age is an illusion! It’s all bullshit! Now, where was I… Yeah! Psycho..!’
And he spent the rest of that hour acting out the whole story of Psycho. He did all the voices and actions. He crept around the classroom like it had been transformed into a chilling murder house. He mimed being Janet Leigh standing in the tub, lathering up and then shrieking when the shower curtain got ripped back. He acted out the frenzied stabbing and we sat there in amazement. Was he really going to do the whole film? He was! Right to the end.
‘I wouldn’t even hurt a fly…’ That was the final, unnerving line and we got there eventually before the home-time bell, but not before Mr Child had taken a detour into explaining schizophrenia, transvestism and the Oedipal complex. When the bell went he grinned and took his bows and said, ‘But we still didn’t get to Wilhelm Tell, did we..?’
The German books we were supposed to be reading for the syllabus came out of the cupboard at the back of the room and they smelled really damp and old. The print was tiny and generations of kids from our school had written notes in pencil on every single empty bit of page.
‘Verstand and Vernunft,’ he kept saying, chewing on a biro. ‘It’s all to do with these two different ways of understanding. Can anyone help me? Does anyone know what I mean?’
And we’d struggle with the opening scenes of Wilhelm Tell again. We all knew the famous bit, with the apple on the kid’s head and the arrow and all that, but we hadn’t quite got to it yet. ‘But it’s just like last term and Brecht,’ Mr Child said. ‘We got there eventually, didn’t we? And now you’re all experts on The Life of Galileo! I could ask you anything about that play, couldn’t I? You’d all know the answers in a flash. I could ask you like… like I was the Spanish Inquisition..!’
This really cracked him up. Every mention of the Spanish Inquisition during the Brecht play had made him howl. ‘I know it’s not funny… and they were bad buggers really, all the things they did… but I just… can’t help thinking of the sketch…! You know… You know the one..?’
Then he was horrified that we had never seen the Monty Python sketch. The very next week he turned up with photostats made on the school copier. Pages from his book of Monty Python. We were all going to act out the Spanish Inquisition sketch in class and by the end we’d understand Galileo much better. And we did! We really did!
He was lugging the heavy Multimedia trolley into the classroom. He’d brought his copy of Queen’s ‘A Night at the Opera’ on vinyl. He flapped the gatefold sleeve at us excitedly. ‘Now, just listen to the words! We can sing along! ‘Galileo! Galileo! Magnifico-oo-oo..!’ He beamed. ‘See? It’s all about Galileo, too! Beelzebub… has a devil put aside for him! And it’s the moon again, you see? The moon going round and round the world! The moon in the sky and madness! Lunacy..!’
So then he had the three of us taking different parts to sing ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ along with the school’s ancient record player.
Mr Robbins came knocking. ‘Erm… that’s a bit loud, Mr Child… We’re doing our language lab next door…’
But Mr Child was still singing: ‘Bismillah, no…!’
Suddenly Mr Robbins was frowning. It was rare that we saw him frown. ‘Mr Child,’ he said, warningly. ‘Turn it down. Bitte sehr.’
So Mr Child did.
Weeks later he harkened back to that scene and he told us: ‘Now, it was my Verstand that gave me my immediate understanding of the situation. If I don’t turn down the volume Mr Robbins is going to be very angry, and with possible awful consequences for all of us. But my Vernunft… that was a different kind of understanding of the situation. I think that’s the right way round, anyway. All to do with principles and the bigger picture. Did I think it was important that I played Queen at top volume to you three, sitting here, last thing on a Tuesday afternoon? Did I think that was dead vital for your understanding of Bertolt Brecht?’
He looked faraway and thoughtful for a second. His eyes closed and you could see that his eyelashes were actually white. ‘Why, yes, of course I did! Of course it was!’ He dashed back to the blinds and started yanking on the cord again. The late afternoon had shifted and the sun was getting on his nerves. ‘And do you know why? It was important because you lot – you three – because you’d remember it. And I was right, wasn’t I? You do remember all of it, don’t you..?’
This is gorgeous. Looking forward to the next installment.
ReplyDelete