London, now
London. The first week of my new life.
The headteacher’s office at Oakfield School.
I am trying to seem normal. It is an increasing challenge. The past is trying to burst through.
No.
It is already through. The past is always here. The room smells of instant coffee, disinfectant and acrylic carpet, but there is a poster of Shakespeare.
It is the portrait you always see of him. Receding hairline, pale skin, the blank eyes of a stoner. A picture that doesn’t really look like Shakespeare.
I return my focus to the headteacher, Daphne Bello. She is wearing orange hoop earrings. She has a few white hairs amid the black. She is smiling at me. It is a wistful smile. The kind of smile no one is capable of before the age of forty. The kind that contains sadness and defiance and amusement all at once.
‘I’ve been here a long while.’
‘Really?’ I say.
Outside a distant police siren fades into nothing.
‘Time,’ she says, ‘is a strange thing, isn’t it?’
She delicately holds the brim of her paper cup of coffee as she places it down next to her computer.
‘The strangest,’ I agree.
I like Daphne. I like this whole interview. I like being back here, in London, back in Tower Hamlets. And to be in an interview for an ordinary job. It is so wonderful to feel, well, ordinary for once.
‘I have been a teacher now for three decades. And here for two. What a depressing thought. All those years. I am so old.’ She sighs through her smile.
I have always found it funny when people say that.
‘You don’t look it,’ is the done thing to say, so I say it.
‘Charmer! Bonus points!’ She laughs a laugh that rises through an entire two octaves.
I imagine the laugh as an invisible bird, something exotic, from Saint Lucia (where her father was from), flying off into the grey sky beyond the window.
‘Oh, to be young, like you,’ she chuckles.
‘Forty-one isn’t young,’ I say, emphasising the ludicrous number. Forty-one. Forty-one. That is what I am.
‘You look very well.’
‘I’ve just come back from holiday. That might be it.’
‘Anywhere nice?’
‘Sri Lanka. Yes. It was nice. I fed turtles in the sea . . .’
‘Turtles?’
‘Yes.’
I look out of the window and see a woman with a gaggle of schoolkids in uniform head onto the playing field. She stops, turns to them, and I see her face as she speaks unheard words. She is wearing glasses and jeans and a long cardigan that flaps gently in the wind, and she pulls her hair behind her ear. She is laughing now, at something a pupil is saying. The laugh lights up her face, and I am momentarily mesmerised.
‘Ah,’ Daphne says, to my embarrassment when she sees where I am looking. ‘That’s Camille, our French teacher. There’s no one like her. The kids love her. She always gets them out and about . . . Al fresco French lessons. It’s that kind of school.’
‘I understand you’ve done a lot of great things here,’ I say, trying to get the conversation back on track.
‘I try. We all try. It’s sometimes a losing battle, though. That’s my only concern about your application. Your references are amazing. And I’ve had them all checked . . .’
I feel relieved. Not that she has checked the references, but that there had been someone who had picked up the phone, or emailed back.
‘. . . but this isn’t a rural comprehensive in Suffolk. This is London. This is Tower Hamlets.’
‘Kids are kids.’
‘And they’re great kids. But this is a different area. They don’t have the same privileges. My concern is that you’ve lived a rather sheltered life.’
‘You might be surprised.’
‘And many students here struggle hard enough with the present, let alone with history. They just care about the world around them. Getting them engaged is the key. How would you make history come alive?’
There was no easier question in the world. ‘History isn’t something you need to bring to life. History already is alive. We are history. History isn’t politicians or kings and queens. History is everyone. It is everything. It’s that coffee. You could explain much of the whole history of capitalism and empire and slavery just by talking about coffee. The amount of blood and misery that has taken place for us to sit here and sip coffee out of paper cups is incredible.’
‘You’ve put me right off my drink.’
‘Oh, sorry. But the point is: history is everywhere. It’s about making people realise that. It makes you understand a place.’
‘Right.’
‘History is people. Everyone loves history.’
Daphne looks at me doubtfully, her face retreating into her neck as her eyebrows rise. ‘Are you sure about that?’
I offer a small nod. ‘It’s just making them realise that everything they say and do and see is only what they say and do and see because of what has gone before. Because of Shakespeare. Because of every human who ever lived.’
I look out of the window. We are on the third floor and have quite a view, even in the grey London drizzle. I see an old Georgian building I have walked past many times.
‘That place, that place over there. The one with all the chimneys? That used to be an asylum. And over there’ – I point to another, lower brick building – ‘was the old slaughterhouse. They used to take all the old bones and make porcelain from them. If we had walked past it two hundred years ago we’d have heard the wails coming from the people society had declared mad on one side and the cattle on the other . . .’
If, if, if.
I point to the slate terrace rooftops in the east.
‘And just over there, in a bakery, on Old Ford Road, that’s where Sylvia Pankhurst and the East London suffragettes used to meet. They used to have a big sign, painted in gold, saying “VOTES FOR WOMEN” that you couldn’t miss, not far from the old match factory.’
Daphne writes something down. ‘And you play music, I see. Guitar, piano and violin.’
And the lute, I
