‘Please, sir, I never read any books.’
This answer amazed him for he could not conceive of a world where one never read any books and he was the more determined to introduce them to the activity which had given himself so much pleasure. But the more enthusiastic he became, the more eloquent his words, the more they withdrew into themselves till finally he had to admit that he was completely failing with the class. As he was very conscientious this troubled him, and not even his success with the academic classes compensated for his obvious lack of success with this particular class. He believed in any event that failure with the non-academic classes constituted failure as a teacher. He tried to do creative writing with them first by bringing in reproductions of paintings by Magritte which were intended to awaken in their minds a glimmer of the unexpectedness and strangeness of ordinary things, but they would simply look at them and point out to him their lack of resemblance to reality. He was in despair. His failure began to obsess him so much that he discussed the problem with the Head of Department who happened to be teaching Rasselas to the Sixth Form at the time with what success Mark could not gauge.
‘I suggest you make them do the work,’ said his Head of Department. ‘There comes a point where if you do not impose your personality they will take advantage of you.’
But somehow or another Mark could not impose his personality on them: they had a habit for instance of forcing him to deviate from the text he was studying with them by mentioning something that had appeared in the newspaper.
‘Sir,’ they would say, ‘did you see in the papers that there were two babies born from two wombs in the one woman.’ Mark would flush angrily and say, ‘I don’t see what this has to do with our work,’ but before he knew where he was he was in the middle of an animated discussion which was proceeding all around him about the anatomical significance of this piece of news. The fact was that he did not know how to deal with them: if they had been boys he might have threatened them with the last sanction of the belt, or at least frightened them in some way. But girls were different, one couldn’t belt girls, and certainly he couldn’t frighten this particular lot. They all wanted to be hairdressers: and one wanted to be an engineer having read in a paper that this was now a possible job for girls. He couldn’t find it in his heart to tell her that it was highly unlikely that she could do this without Highers. They fantasized a great deal about jobs and chose ones which were well beyond their scope. It seemed to him that his years in Training College hadn’t prepared him for this varied apathy and animated gossip. Sometimes one or two of them were absent and when he asked where they were was told that they were baby sitting. He dreaded the periods he had to try and teach them in, for as the year passed and autumn darkened into winter he knew that he had not taught them anything and he could not bear it.
He talked to other teachers about them, and the History man shrugged his shoulders and said that he gave them pictures to look at, for instance one showing women at the munitions during the First World War. It became clear to him that their other teachers had written them off since they would be leaving at the end of the session, anyway, and as long as they were quiet they were allowed to talk and now and again glance at the books with which they had been provided.
But Mark, whose first year this was, felt weighed down by his failure and would not admit to it. There must be something he could do with them, the failure was his fault and not theirs. Like a missionary he had come to them bearing gifts, but they refused them, turning away from them with total lack of interest. Keats, Shakespeare, even the ballads, shrivelled in front of his eyes. It was, curiously enough, Mr Morrison who gave him his most helpful advice. Mr Morrison spent most of his time making sure that his register was immaculate, first writing in the O’s in pencil and then rubbing them out and re-writing them in ink. Mark had been told that during the Second World War while Hitler was advancing into France, Africa and Russia he had been insisting that his register was faultlessly kept and the names written in carefully. Morrison understood the importance of this though no one else did.
‘What you have to do with them,’ said Morrison, looking at Mark through his round glasses which were like the twin barrels of a gun, ‘is to find out what they want to do.’
‘But,’ said Mark in astonishment, ‘that would be abdicating responsibility.’
‘That’s right,’ said Morrison equably.
‘If that were carried to its conclusion,’ said Mark, but before he could finish the sentence Morrison said,
‘In teaching nothing ought to be carried to its logical conclusion.’
‘I see,’ said Mark, who didn’t. But at least Morrison had introduced a new idea into his mind which was at the time entirely empty.
‘I see,’ he said again. But he was not yet ready to go as far as Morrison had implied that he should. The following day however he asked the class for the words of ‘Paper Roses’, one of the few pop songs that he had ever heard of. For the first time he saw a glimmer of interest in their eyes, for the first time they were actually using pens. In a short while they had given him the words from memory. Then he took out a book of Burns’ poems and copied on to the board the verses of ‘My Love is Like a Red Red Rose’. He asked them to compare the two poems but found that the wall of apathy had descended again and that it was as impenetrable as before. Not completely daunted, he asked them if they would bring in a record of ‘Paper Roses’, and himself found one of ‘My Love is Like a Red Red Rose’, with Kenneth Mackellar singing it. He played both songs, one after the other, on his own record player. They were happy listening to ‘Paper Roses’ but showed no interest in the other song. The discussion he had planned petered out, except that the following day a small girl with black hair and a pale face brought in a huge pile of records which she requested that he play and which he adamantly refused to do. It occurred to him that the girls simply did not have the ability to handle discussion, that in all cases where discussion was initiated it degenerated rapidly into gossip or vituperation or argument, that the concept of reason was alien to them, that in fact the long line of philosophers beginning with Plato was irrelevant to them. For a long time they brought in records now that they knew he had a record player but he refused to play any of them. Hadn’t he gone far enough by playing ‘Paper Roses’? No, he was damned if he would go the whole hog and surrender completely. And yet, he sensed that somewhere in this area of their interest was what he wanted, that from here he might find the lever which would move their world.
He noticed that their leader was a girl called Tracy, a fairly tall pleasant-looking girl to whom they all seemed to turn for response or rejection. Nor was this girl stupid: nor were any of them stupid. He knew that he must hang on to that, he must not believe that they were stupid. When they did come into the room it was as if they were searching for substance, a food which he could not provide. He began to study Tracy more and more as if she might perhaps give him the solution to his problem, but she did not appear interested enough to do so. Now and again she would hum the words of a song while engaged in combing another girl’s hair, an activity which would satisfy them for hours, and indeed some of the girls had said to him, ‘Tracy has a good voice, sir. She can sing any pop song you like.’ And Tracy had regarded him with the sublime self-confidence of one who indeed could