him, down into the basement, as if expecting to see Phidias nodding approval from the Victorian armchair, or Praxiteles leaning on the workbench by the window and smiling encouragement. Instead, Stanley looked at Rachel, who was pretending to be absorbed in the dolls’ house. ‘Children are so plastic.’
As a very young child Eddie had admired Stanley and wanted to please him. Then his father had become a fact of life like the weather – neither good nor bad in itself, but liable to vary in its effects on Eddie. Then, with Stanley’s lecture on the aesthetics of his hobby, came the moment of revelation: that Eddie hated his father, and had in fact done so for some time.
The strength of Eddie’s hatred took him unawares and had a number of consequences. Some of these were trivial: he used to spit discreetly in his father’s tea, for example, and once he took one of his father’s shoes and pressed the heel into a dog turd on the pavement. Other consequences were more far-reaching, and affected Eddie rather than his father. It was Stanley’s fault, in a manner of speaking, that Eddie became a teacher, and Eddie never forgave him for that.
In his final year at school, Eddie told his father that he thought he might like to be an archaeologist. This was a few months before Stanley retired from the Paladin.
‘Don’t be absurd,’ said his father. ‘There’s no money in archaeology. I bet there aren’t many jobs, either. Not real jobs.’
‘But it interests me.’
‘That’s no good if it won’t pay the mortgage, is it? Can’t you do it as a hobby?’
‘There are jobs for archaeologists.’
‘For the favoured few, maybe. Top scholars. One in a million. You’ve got to be realistic. Why don’t I arrange for you to have an interview at the Paladin? There’s a chap I know in Personnel.’
The upshot of this conversation was that Eddie attempted to lay the foundations for a career in archaeology by studying for a degree in history at a polytechnic on the outskirts of London. It was not a happy time. As a student he floundered: it was not so much that the work was too demanding; it was more that there seemed such a lot to do, and it was difficult to know what was important and what wasn’t, and besides, his mind had a tendency to drift into daydreams. He lived at home, which distanced him from the other students. In the first summer vacation he spent a fortnight on an archaeological dig in Essex, where he began to grow a beard. It rained all the time and the work was hard and tedious. Eddie’s interest in the subject never recovered.
He kept the beard, however, wispy and unsatisfactory though it was, primarily because it annoyed his father. (‘Makes you look a scruffy little wretch. You’ll have to shave it off if you want to find a proper job.’) As a token of rebellion, the beard made a poor substitute for a career in archaeology, but it was better than nothing.
Stanley continued to badger Eddie about the Paladin, showering him with information about vacancies for graduates.
‘I’ve already dropped a word in the right ear,’ he said towards the end of Eddie’s final year. ‘Or rather ears. It’s never a bad thing to have a few friends at court, is it? And naturally, anyone who’s the son of a former employee is bound to have a head start. But you’d better get rid of that beard.’
With hindsight, Eddie agreed that a job at the Paladin might have suited both his talents and his needs. At the time, however, the source of the suggestion automatically tainted it. Desperate to find an alternative, he glanced round the room. His father had draped the Evening Standard over the arm of his chair, and one of the headlines caught Eddie’s eye: TEACHERS IN NEW PAY TALKS. Beside it was a photograph of a group of teachers armed with placards. Several of the men had beards. That was the deciding factor.
‘If my results are good enough, I’m going to be a teacher.’
His father’s attention sharpened. ‘Really? I hope you’ve got the sense to teach younger children. If what you hear nowadays is anything to go by, older children are becoming quite unmanageable.’
‘Secondary education’s much more interesting. Intellectually, I mean.’ Eddie hoped this last remark would remind his father that he had left school at sixteen, and therefore lacked his son’s qualifications.
‘It’s your life,’ Stanley replied, apparently oblivious of his intellectual inferiority. ‘People don’t look up to teachers as much as they used to in my day. There’s the long holidays, I suppose.’
‘Teachers have to work in the holidays. It’s not a cushy job.’
His father took his time over lighting a cigarette. ‘Yes.’ He blew out a cloud of smoke. ‘Well – as I say, it’s your life. I doubt if you’ll be able to cope, but that’s your affair.’
His mother had been in the room but contributed nothing to the conversation. Eddie still felt that if his parents had handled the situation more diplomatically, they could have helped him avoid the disasters which followed. Thanks to them, he forced himself to spend another year at college doing a postgraduate certificate of education. He was lucky – or perhaps unlucky – in his teaching practice: they sent him to a quiet, middle-class school where class sizes were small and his stumbling attempts to teach were carefully and even kindly supervised. At that stage, he had realized that he was not a natural teacher, but he had hoped that with luck and perseverance he might grow used to it.
Nothing had prepared Eddie for Dale Grove Comprehensive. It was a school in north-west London, not far from Kensal Vale, in an area which even then seemed to be slipping away from the control of the authorities. He applied for the job because the school was an easy tube journey from Rosington Road, and without discussing the matter both he and his parents assumed that for the time being it would be best if he continued to live at home.
Keeping order was by far the worst aspect of the job. His failure in this department affected his relationships with other teachers, who regarded him with a mixture of irritation and scorn. It was not unusual for Eddie to find himself trying to teach three or four children at the front, while in the rest of the room the remainder of the class split up into small noisy groups engaged in disruptive activities.
He was scared of the children, and they knew it. He thought them outlandish and disgusting, too, with their croaking voices, their shrill laughter, their burps, their farts, their blackheads, their acne, their strange clothes and stranger customs. The girls were worse than the boys: strapping, big-boned brutes; delighting in mockery and subtler in their methods; scenting weakness as sharks scent blood in the water. He had fallen among savages.
Matters came to a crisis towards the end of the summer term. There was no one he could talk to about it. There were problems at home, too: his father’s health was worsening, and his mother was never easy to live with. In the circumstances was it any wonder that things went wrong?
Two girls orchestrated what amounted to a campaign of sexual harassment against him. Their names were Mandy and Sian. Both were taller than he was. Mandy was thin, with spots and lank red hair. Sian was overweight and unusually well-developed. They began with innuendo, with whispers at the back of the class. ‘Do you think sir’s sexy?’ Gradually the campaign picked up momentum. ‘Please, sir, there’s a word in this book I don’t understand. What does S-P-E-R-M mean?’
After each of Eddie’s failures to control them, his torturers would take one small step further.
‘I can’t go to sleep without my teddy in my bed,’ Mandy confided to the class.
‘Me too,’ Sian remarked.
