From a Safe Distance Read online

  My first full-time job was in a comprehensive in the Midlands. The buildings were of the plain 1960s variety. In some places the roof leaked, and the paint was peeling, but the staff worked on regardless. Most were disillusioned, punch-drunk and demoralised, inured to the dismal round of coping with adolescent minutiae, doing their best in spite of everything, day in, day out. Cynicism, it seemed, was all that kept them going. They seemed to have forgotten how to live in any other way.

  I walked into a classroom one day to find two boys fighting. The rest of the class, a bunch of streetwise fourteen-year-olds, were cheering and egging them on. I went to the front and shouted.

  ‘Kevin and Sean, break it up! Now! Everybody sit down. Come on! Quiet! Sit down, Tracy.

  ‘Miss, Miss!’ Tracy shouted from the back. ‘He’s doin’ sumfink disgustin’!’

  I didn’t know what to do. I still did not understand why discipline was not automatic.

  ‘Eeurrh! Two or three boys stood up. ‘I’m not sittin’ next to him, Miss!’ said Jason. ‘He’s filfy!’

  ‘Miss! Sean’s bleedin.’ Can I go to Mrs Jones wiv ‘im?’

  ‘Oh, alright.’

  ‘Pwaar! Who’s farted?’ came another voice, followed by a peal of laughter. ‘Can I open the window, Miss?’

  Meanwhile I was trying to write something on the board, which was being pelted with bits of chewed-up paper meant for the back of my head. I turned round quickly and saw two boys hide something.

  ‘Miss?’

  ‘Yes, Sharon?’

  ‘Why do we ‘ave to learn French. It’s borin.’ We’ll never go to France, anyway. Who wants to? Bloody frogs!’

  This comment set off more laughter as well as croaking noises. I couldn’t give Sharon an honest answer, because in the end, Set 3 were never going to be able to get anywhere with their French. The idealism of teaching theorists would soon evaporate in this room. The truth was, I could see the children’s point of view, a fact which naturally undermined me. They weren’t there from choice, and they might have had problems at home, something which never crossed my mind at the time. Only dimly aware of it, I was digging a hole for myself with the class looking on. I wanted to keep up the appearance of being strong in adversity, so I ignored what my instincts told me. Uncle Ron had taught me to be tough, not to give in, not to complain. But my attempts to get past the issue of discipline and into the safer territory of actual teaching only served to make me more and more weary. The problem would not go away. Things rapidly reached the stage where I could not climb out of the hole. The black wave was up, ready to carry me to hell.

  My private insecurity was now on public display. Only in teaching do you stand exposed in this way, and only children are capable of rubbing away at your very soul until it dawns on you that all is lost. Then there is the heart-stopping, instant silence which tells you that another teacher has entered the room, an especially vivid reminder of your shortcomings if the teacher is there because your class was disturbing the one next door. The children searched in vain for someone in me who would stand up to them. I could feel the black wave twisting, threatening to burst through. I stayed at home for a couple of days, feeling empty and not knowing what I should do.

  ‘You’re depressed,’ said Wendy, a fellow teacher who found me in bed. ‘Go and see the doctor.’

  One of my flatmates had let her in; the school was concerned at my absence. But the doctor was no help at all, telling me to go away and sort out my problems. She must have thought I was weak. I was. I was useless. Aunt Mary … The padlock was broken, the boxes had been moved.

  When I failed my probationary year it should have come as no great surprise. But it was the first time I had ever tasted failure. I had always taken it for granted that I would succeed in whatever I did, if not from ability then out of determination, toughness. Something died in me that day. I discovered that getting things right all the time was impossible. I was, after all, a weak person. To my shame I packed up and travelled back to Howcester to stay with Mum. At least she and Ron were there for me.

  ‘So what are you going to do next?’ Mum asked one morning. ‘Do you want to retrain?’

  ‘No. I want to teach.’

  ‘But how d’you plan on doing that?’ She began the washing-up.

  ‘I can apply to independent schools. They might give me another chance to prove I can do it.’ I picked up the tea towel.

  ‘Oh, Vee! I forgot to tell you! You know your old grammar school?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Well, they’ve moved everyone out to another site. They’ve had to knock the old place down. Something to do with concrete fatigue … ’

  I had spent seven years at that school, but I didn’t get attached to places, did I? So what was this uncomfortable feeling?

  It was getting late, so Max closed the folder. With Simon and Jackson living in their house though, it was difficult to relax. Max did feel sorry for them, but he hoped they would soon find somewhere else. Helen was fed up. After reading these first pages, Max wrote:-

  “It is clear that Vee’s childhood was unremarkable, apart from the death of her father. She had been loved, but the spectre of Aunt Mary haunts her.” Then he realised that this Uncle Ron must have been the tall gentleman with Mrs Gates he’d seen at the funeral.

  He went on: “Despite the difficulties she experiences in her early career, Vee evinces the determination she will need as her life moves on through light and shade. I haven’t appeared in the story yet, and my anxiety is edging up a bit. But I know from the way things are going that Vee is about to move to Lexby, so no doubt I will be in it soon. I can’t recall what it was like not to know Helen, though. She now has Vee’s first pages. Incidentally, Helen has read nothing of what I’ve written; she wanted to, but I said I would only let her after we’ve read Vee’s book.

  “The big question of action remains. I might be committing myself to much more in the way of personal involvement, in ways I have not yet considered. Meanwhile I will read on, to escape domestic chaos as much as anything else – Simon knows what I’m doing and has left me to it. Vee’s story is made of the kinds of things you get to know about someone when you are close to them for long enough. While she did not have that opportunity with me, I can still feel her watching, somewhere near”.

  7

  A Mind for Change

  It was hard to get to sleep that night because Simon’s son Jackson had some friends round who didn’t leave until midnight and played loud music. Helen and Max had forgotten just how noisy teenagers could be. They asked the boys to turn it down when they went to bed at eleven, but after a hollow apology Max heard sniggering from the boys and it wasn’t long before the music was as loud as before. Simon was nowhere to be found. Max would not have been surprised if Jackson’s behaviour had contributed significantly to their eviction by Simon’s brother.

  Helen and Max were forced to lie awake until the boys decided to pack up. Max heard Simon come back at around 2 a.m. Then there was the bathroom. Not only a queue in the mornings but scum round the bath. And then Helen found a half bottle of vodka in the cupboard under the washbasin.

  As he sat wearily in his attic office, about to read Vee’s next chapter, the light changed and Max was back in the pitch black lecture theatre. Darkness, apart from the spotlight on him and the irregular lace effect of the light at the top of their heads. When a student speaks, his or her face is illuminated as if by a torch. Eerie though the setting may be, Max proceeds as if nothing unusual were happening.

  “Can anybody give me a definition of good mental health?” There is silence. Then Mr Phillips’s face appears as he says:

  “It means having your life in balance, keeping interested in things, not doing anything to excess – and getting enough rest.” The torch clicks off.

  “Fine, those are certainly aspects of it, but to my knowledge, nobody has ever summed it up succinctly. We have precise tools for diagnosing illness, and we can usually tell when somebody is un
well, but more often than not, we have to fall back on ‘the absence of illness’ as our unspoken definition, despite what this could mean. The WHO’s definition of health in general includes the words: ‘a state of complete well-being’, but that doesn’t help really, does it? And how would you define that other old chestnut, ‘normal’?”

  “That’s a bit easier, sir,” says Mr Jones, his features animated in the light, “because it has a social context.” Click.

  “Explain.”

  “Well, every society has rules and behaviour which are considered ‘normal’, even though one society’s normal might be another’s weird.”

  There is a short burst of laughter in the dark from the four tiers of young men and women, all in darkness.

  “That’s good enough for now, but it’s important to bear in mind that, whatever the social context, the differences between well/unwell, normal/abnormal, are not necessarily clear-cut – or even constant. So. Our next topic: severe depression. Symptoms can be quite unmistakeable. What does psychomotor retardation mean, Mr Phillips?”

  “It means, sir, that the patient is slow physically, so they have difficulty walking, eating, etc.” His torch goes out.

  “Right. Their thought processes are slow, too. In fact if the depression is extreme, they can go into stupor – I’m not going to talk about that right now – but in that state, they must be kept under observation.”

  The face of a young woman appears in the dark: “Would ECT be the treatment of choice for someone as depressed as this?”

  “It depends on the individual circumstances, but I have seen patients who have undergone a remarkable recovery with ECT. The argument against it relies mainly on the fact that we don’t know how it works. But the same could be said of many of the medications we prescribe.”

  The students murmur. Then Mr Flint speaks, his round face like a moon: “What do you think about the stigma attached to mental illness?” Click.

  “If people lost their jobs every time they had a cold, they would soon protest. But that’s what it can be like for people with a mental illness. When you think that one in four people at any given time are in the throes of a mental illness, you can see how illogical stigma is – it is born of fear and ignorance.”

  The darkness lifted and he was back in the attic. Fiery red and orange lines – that’s what he used to draw on the board in his talks to represent failure, prejudice and discrimination – they were the threat.

  He wrote:-

  “Because of what we the onlookers might be feeling, it is easy to miss the fear – drawn as a ragged black blob underneath the rearing colours – which a patient experiences: I knew that Vee was terrified when she began to relapse. Mental illness, the glass box round all my drawings, is not seen as a struggle in the same sense as, perhaps, a battle against cancer.

  “Becoming ill is all about losing control, which is not the same as giving in. Vee never gave in, but she feared losing control: her black wave. In terms of hostile environments, however, teaching was lower down the scale than what was to come. Oh yes, it was going to get worse for Vee.

  “Then there was guilt. Guilt was an empty sphere in the corner of this picture, which could grow and fill like a balloon, but filling with lead, not air. And what about the fear of change, represented by a jagged blue line along the bottom? Vee had had plenty of change in her life, so she wasn’t afraid of that in itself. But at Squaremile, she was to discover that change is not always for the better. I know this from what Bella has told me. And another thing: even if it is welcomed, change entails stepping into the unknown.

  “Finally, as a result of her experiences at Squaremile, Vee’s belief that you were not worthy of love unless you had never failed at anything, academic or emotional, seemed to be confirmed. So there is the ‘R’ stamp in the middle, obliterating much of the drawing. Reject”.

  Vee had been afraid of becoming ill, afraid of failure and afraid of love, each a part of losing control in some sense. But at the same time, ironically, she displayed great persistence. Someone else who knew the meaning of persistence was his darling Helen.

  As he glanced along his bookshelf and saw her photo, he remembered Edinburgh. The gusty wind reminded him of the city too. Helen was doing her nurse’s training, he was a brand new consultant, he’d only been there about six months, and they used to meet in a busy café. From the start, from their first encounter in Paris, he’d felt the rightness of it. His time in Lexby with Vee faded into the background, his love for her became dormant as Helen moved into the foreground.

  Any number of things might have prevented that first meeting, and yet here she was, Helen, wanting to be with him, sitting opposite him by the window. She was talking to him, pointing things out in the street, but he couldn’t hear what she was saying because he was overwhelmed by the wonderful fact of her presence, her amazing eyes, her beautiful, expressive hands …

  “Max, are you OK? Only you didn’t answer my question.”

  “Sorry … er, what did you say?”

  “What time have you got to be back at the Royal?”

  “Oh – now!” he stood up and put some money on the table.

  “Call me!” She smiled to herself as he headed out towards a sunlit Morningside.

  While Max was working at the Royal Edinburgh Hospital, Helen made their first few weeks together an adventure. As she had been born and brought up in the city, she was able to show him round. Edinburgh is amazing, full of contrasts, not least where the weather is concerned. Of course they saw all the tourist sites and places of interest in the area: the castle, various monuments and several museums for example; Max had particularly enjoyed the National. They walked their legs off.

  Max appreciated the fact that as well as knowing the cultural highlights, Helen knew all the right restaurants and cafés to go in, when they were too shattered to walk any further. They were both free at the weekend and spent most of the time together. Max remembered those Sunday mornings in her flat, in bed by her side one minute, then smelling the toast the next, and hearing her sing in the kitchen. He had the wonderful, comfortable feeling that he could say anything to Helen and she would understand. He could tell she was totally at ease as well. This was going to work.

  Coming back to the present in Howcester, he steeled himself to read the next chapters: Lexby was imminent. Once again, he had to try to be objective, a difficult task when he remembered the special party. Although aware that Vee’s account was allowing him a greater insight than usual into another’s thoughts, Max also had to bear in mind his main reason for reading the book: to find out what she wanted him to do.

  Castlebrough School for girls, in Lexby on the south coast, was in fact a row of five imposing houses dating from the early 1900s. They had been converted in the ‘50s and were linked at the back by a covered way. The sound of deep gravel in the parking area dignified the arrival of my taxi.

  ‘Miss Gates?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do come in. I’m matron. If you wouldn’t mind waiting in here, Miss Henshaw will be with you in a moment.’ She smiled graciously and I sat in a corner of a large room, my stomach fizzing with nerves.

  Miss Henshaw, the headmistress, was a short, round, pink woman of about fifty. She had a slight Irish accent. After my interview, in the few anxious minutes alone in that room with the high white ceiling, I knew I would have to say something: when Miss Henshaw reappeared, I admitted that I’d failed my probation. I could not look at her and the seconds passed. Her tone of voice did not alter, however.

  ‘I would like to offer you the post of French teacher,’ she said. ‘I’ll see you in September. And thank you for your honesty.’

  While my first thought was that Miss Henshaw must have been desperate to fill the post, the next moment I felt optimistic. Having passed my driving test in Howcester, the first thing I did was buy a car.

  A few years would pass with no hint of trouble, no sign of the black wave, making me think the dream of Aunt Mary was
just that, a dream, an ineffectual force.

  8

  Affairs at Lexby

  The staffroom was full of sunlight the first time I went in; the enormous windows faced south east.

  ‘You’ll be in charge of the French teaching,’ my new head of department told me. Miss Gibson was tall and thin and had a strange laugh, which seemed to require a lot of effort. She was responsible for the German teaching.

  ‘So – right through to ‘A’ level?’

  ‘Yes. The classes here are small, much smaller that I expect you’ve taught before, so you’ll get to know the girls quite quickly. I’ve been here ten years and I love it.’ She gave one of her laughs, which resembled deep-seated panting. ‘And there’s very little in the way of serious disruptive behaviour. After all, their parents are paying, and they’d soon hear if anything happened. The girls come from all over the world, you know.’

  I realised I was the youngest teacher there. And at last I could now do what I’d always wanted to do: enjoy my work. Marking in the evenings was nowhere near as daunting as before, and I could give individual attention more easily.

  On the subject of individual attention, the brand new computer room was opposite the staffroom in House 1: I was to spend some time in there, though not necessarily occupied with computing. Tony taught IT, when it had just emerged from maths as a separate subject. We found we were attracted to each other. On the last day before half-term, when as usual there was sherry in the staffroom, Tony went across the way to pack up his things. I teased, flirted. The sherry was strong.

  ‘You keep on like that and I’ll be round your flat.’

  I draped myself up the doorframe when the coast was clear. ‘Can if you want.’ The sexual tension between us about to find release, I drove home and waited, nervous but excited by the secrecy. I had only had one boyfriend up to then.