Babel Tower (31 page)

The Liverpool poet is very pretty, with a mane of buttercup-coloured curls, a sweet full mouth, and huge innocent blue eyes. He is wearing a collarless jacket over a bright blue shirt that intensifies his eyes. He has been very pleasant to everyone so far, helping the women up the bus step, standing aside for the older men. The other woman is Auriol Worth, the headmistress, dressed like a headmistress in a good-looking navy suit and white shirt. Her face is precise and professionally observant. She is about fifty. She looks so like a headmistress that it is hard to make anything of her. She says to Alexander, of the poet, as they wait on the pavement, “If I had that one in my class I’d keep a special eye on him.”

The Star Primary School is called the Star because of its revolutionary architecture. The committee has come to see it because it is new and exciting. It is wholly glass-walled, and is built in the shape of a star. It is wholly open-plan: the children gather in little, impromptu-looking groups, in one or another arm of the star, bringing with them their brightly coloured bean bags, their plastic stools, their little tables. They are grouped not by age, nor by subject, but by some sort of self-directed choice of activity. A group is making coiled clay pots. Older children are helping younger ones. A group is pouring and measuring water to and from a series of plastic containers, solemnly measuring and recording the heights of the contents. Little ones are pouring. Older ones are measuring. Still older ones are making a graph of the measurements. In another arm of the star children are watching snails climb the walls of a glass tank and are drawing the horns, the mouth, the foot. Small people dart busily and loudly from open space to open space, calling out, “We
urgently
need a wooden spoon,” or “Mandy’s gone and done it
again.
” Someone is playing the recorder in one star-tip, and someone near her is banging a drum. Because there are no classroom or corridor walls the children’s work is on display on easels and noticeboards in the centre. There is a display of portraits of “My Family,” and a table with the children’s weekly newspapers displayed. There is a book corner in one aisle with a round bookcase, a lot of cushions, and a casual heap of books beside them. There is a lot of noise. It is, on the whole, purposive
noise, shrill, variegated, busy, but loud. Alexander—like many of the older members of the committee—is moved by the contrast with his own schooldays. These little children, brightly clothed, free-moving, are different beings from the cowed, subservient, watchful little boy he remembers as himself. One inevitable effect on all the committee members who are not professional teachers, and even on those, like Alexander, who were and are not, is fear, the old cold terror of the school building, of power, of authority, of judgement. In places like this, that is gone. A little girl appears with a piece of bobbin knitting; she says, “Excuse me, I think I’ve dropped a stitch, it’s all gone funny, like moth-holes, I wonder if you could put it right.” He takes her darning needle, he prods at the wool. She expects his help as her right. He notes the analogy “like moth-holes.”

All the same, he has the beginnings of a headache, from the noise. Where are the corners where a child such as he was might hide, might crouch and read? There are no hiding places. It is all open, all group life.

Auriol Worth is talking to the headmaster, an enthusiastic young man, young for a headmaster, who is able to talk to her quite coherently about the degree to which the children select their activities and the degree to which he suggests and complicates them, whilst keeping up a running conversation with passing children and teachers, like a juggler with a stream of green and orange balls, never confusing them. “I think you’re bored with clay, Cilia, I think you should go and join in Miss Morrissey’s group, which is talking and writing about amphibians. Everyone always thinks they want to do clay, but actually you need to do a
lot
of things in a day.

“Never mind, Heather. I expect Mr. Dinsdale thought you were upsetting the others. If you come to me at break I’ll explain how to measure squares and then you won’t feel left out.

“We try to let them dictate the pace and the interest, Miss Worth, but of course we must have things difficult enough to attract and occupy the ablest.”

“And what about peer-pressure
not
to attempt the difficult?”

“Ah, there we have to be cunning. We have to disguise the difficulty.”

“So you don’t encourage ambition, as such.”

“We disapprove of competitiveness. We like co-operation. Everyone has his or her talent, which we try to foster.”

“And you are not flat on your face with exhaustion at the end of the day?”

“Often.” He laughs. “But it’s worth it.”

Roger Magog is studying the project on “My Family.” He says to Roussel, who is passing, “How significant that all these mothers appear to be angry. ‘My Mum screming.’ ‘My Mummy shouted at me.’ All these little children draw their mothers with a big, open mouth and a stick body. Only her screaming mouth matters.”

“Little children have a very simple scheme of human beings in their drawings,” says Roussel. “They learn bodies and hands and faces later. The older children have parents with bodies.”

“My dad has a big stik,” says Magog. “My dad has a Big ball. He threw the big ball hard at me. It hurt.”

“It probably did,” says Roussel.

“Sticks and balls and dads,” says Magog. “How direct, how innocent, how clear. And the mums screaming. The modern family. Sad.”

“Not necessarily.”

“Oppressive. ‘Go to bed, says Mum. I wont I say I wont. You will says my mum is ther no pease. I hate bed. I want to stay up all nite.’ ”

“Interesting,” says Wijnnobel behind him, “that
e
on nite. The child knows how to elongate the vowel, even in a misspelling.”

Alexander is trying to find a group of children who will be doing what Simon Poole might at this moment be doing. He finds a writing group with a young teacher. They have their “newsbooks” and their personal dictionaries, which they carry about in little cotton bags, since there are no desks. They write and talk and take their work to the teacher, who gives them long words for their dictionaries. Alexander asks the teacher what they read, and is shown bright cards with large pictures and a line or two of text. “I read them poems,” she says. “I read them Spike Milligan and of course I read them Mickey Impey’s
Naughty Poems for Bad Boys and Girls,
they love that. It’s great he’s actually here.”

“Do they learn the poems?”

“Oh no. That would take the pleasure out of them. Learning by rote is very destructive, we know that now, they must
discover
things. Some learn things almost by accident, but we’d never
make
them. They don’t learn tables, either, we draw number-squares and they
discover
the relations. That way, it stays in the mind.”

“But they learn the alphabet,” says Alexander, looking at the dictionaries.

“Oh no. Not as such. Not
by rote.
They sort of assimilate it.”

“So how do they find their way round their dictionaries?”

“I show them. Until they know it.”

“I used to love chanting the alphabet. Backwards and forwards both. And tables. And French verbs. A sort of pleasure. Like dancing.”

The young woman shudders expressively.

Mickey Impey is asked to say one of his poems. The children come out of the arms of the star. He sends two to fetch some big boxes, so he can stand up above them, so they can see. He is a natural showman. He says:

“Children are always being told, come here, go there, do this, do that. They can’t help it, they have to. What they get told makes no sense to them, they know what they really want, but the Tellers don’t know and don’t care, do they, they just go on fixing the world to make it comfortable for themselves, to keep children quiet and nice and sweet and
good.
So I wrote some poems for
bad
children. The one I’m going to read is about some children who go off to a secret country where there are no pushers-around and find all sorts of strange creatures who want to help them take charge of their own lives. Here it is.”

The poem was long. The peroration went:

“He is out of date in his equipment,” murmurs Auriol Worth.

The children roar with applause. Mickey Impey organises them into a long dancing crocodile, and they prance serpentining round the school, chanting loudly after their Piper, whose energies show no signs of flagging, though one or two little ones begin to stumble and cry. Finally Agatha pulls at his arm, and tells him the group must move on: they have other schools to visit. He does not stop immediately: she has to trot alongside, explaining. His lovely face is sulky. He calls to the children, “Do you want to stop?”

“No,” cry most. “Yes,” cry a few.

“They want to go on,” says Mickey Impey.

“Well, they can’t,” says Agatha, tartly. The rest of the committee group behind her.

“You see,” says Mickey Impey, turning to the children as he leaves, “they don’t care what you want, they don’t
really
let you do as you please, it’s all a trick, when they tell you you’re free to choose.”

A wavering scream, from some of the children, as though he were a pop star, answers this.

The Aneurin Bevan Comprehensive School in Calverley is not a shiny-bright new place like the Star Primary School. It was once the Archbishop Temple Grammar School and the Leeds Road Secondary Modern, and is now one institution on two sites. The old Grammar School is panelled and dark and echoing. The old Secondary Modern is square and shapeless, with pre-fabricated classrooms in its playground,
a smell of inadequate sanitation, and exotic salty-looking fungus or chemical rash sprouting on its heating conduits. In this school there is a vigorous discussion of the problems and blessings of mixed-ability teaching. The committee are taken to a fourth-form improvised play, which centres on a family conflict between the women who make Sunday lunch and the men who want to go out to the pub and to football. Parts have been given to the less articulate to make them more articulate, with some success—one girl cries suddenly into the hall:

“And must I spend all my days like this, the same thing time after time, shopping and cooking and waiting till what I have cooked is cold and greasy, week after week after week, and then washing it up and saying it doesn’t matter when you come home smelly and sick, smelly and sick, is this what it is to be a human being?”

This eloquence causes her subsequently to blush bright scarlet, and deeply embarrasses her male co-actors, who can only say, “Oh come on,” and “It’s not so bad as that,” and “Women do go on.” Magog is delighted with this moment, and congratulates the teacher on bringing out the girl’s inner conflicts. The teacher replies that that girl’s father is a vicar, and teetotal, and some imagination has gone into her performance. Alexander is bored. He remembers that school is 90 percent boredom. For the good and the bad student alike. Youth is boring, but this is not to be admitted.

The headmaster of the Aneurin Bevan School too is a tryer and an innovator. He has a school council and runs regular school debates in the hall of the old Grammar School. He has staged a debate in honour of the committee.

“This house believes that no good is done by the teaching of English grammar.”

There is a hidden agenda to this: the headmaster himself, a geographer by profession, remembers his English language lessons as a boy, the parsing of sentences, the location of dependent clauses, as a form of intense torture, an exercise baffling and pointless. The school week is short, this man reasons, the school year is short, school days in toto are short, and clause analysis is a cruel waste of time. It is probable that most of his colleagues share both his feeling and his opinions. It is probable that most of the children do. Learning English grammar, even to passionate readers, is peculiarly repugnant and somehow
unnatural.

The headmaster introduces the committee to the school.

“We have the honour to have amongst us a very distinguished group of people who are studying the very question we are debating today. We have Professor Wijnnobel, a distinguished grammarian, we have Alexander Wedderburn, a playwright whose rich language has entranced many of you, we have a young and popular poet, Mickey Impey. We have a scientist, a psychologist and an educational writer, all of whom will bring their own wisdom to the debate. I want them to see that the boys and girls in this school have thought carefully about this subject and I also want them to see that we are in the habit of debating issues that concern us, putting clearly points of view we may or may not agree with, and
listening to what is said by others.
”