Things never have just one cause. Though frequently,
if you take just one of the causes away, the thing doesn’t happen.
For example, if Mr Frith hadn’t been a supply
teacher, the class might not have got away with it. Or at least, not for so
long. A supply teacher obviously likes teaching, otherwise they wouldn’t do it.
But there are other things to do with teaching as a full-time job in one school
that they don’t like. Maybe they can’t stand marking. That’s reasonable. If the
homework you set for one child was to mark everyone else’s homework they’d
pretty soon get sick of it. Or maybe the supply teacher doesn’t want to work
full-time or get trapped in one school where they don’t feel happy. Or maybe
they don’t want to have to fill in all those forms the real teachers need so
much time to fill in that they have to get in supply teachers to cover their
lessons while they do it. Or maybe supply teachers prefer being in a classroom
helping pupils to learn, rather than sitting in a meeting for hours, talking
about what children ought to learn and how.
The class didn’t know any of this. The class didn’t
see any of this. The class didn’t think about any of this. What the class knew
was that Mr Frith didn’t know their names. What the class saw was that
if one of them was naughty, the whole class was kept in. What the class thought
was that in that case they might as well all misbehave. And they did.
While Mr Frith was telling Gemma to give back
Freddy’s pen, and asking Kyle if he knew where Emily’s pencil case had gone,
Ellie and Helena were chewing up pieces of paper and spitting them at Simon and
Dale, and when Simon and Dale turned round and threw coloured pencils at the
girls, it was the boys that Mr Frith noticed and gave detentions to. In fact,
it’s a general rule that it’s always the second person that misbehaves
who gets caught.
So many people were doing so many things that they
shouldn’t have been that Mr Frith was absolutely right to keep the whole class
in over breaktime. And lunchtime. All week. And then the next week. And the
week after that. Their friends began to wonder if they were all ill, because
they never saw any of them. But they still didn’t behave any better. “He’s
going to keep us in anyway,” they said to themselves, “so if we can’t have any
fun at breaktime and lunchtime, then we’ll have it in classtime.”
Finally, though, they began to get bored with all
this. But they didn’t think of behaving differently. They weren’t very good at
cause and effect, at the idea that one thing happens because another one has
already happened. They thought Mr Frith just didn’t like them. Which was true,
by now. But they didn’t see that it could have been different. They always
thought in terms of likes and dislikes, and never in terms of the reasons
behind them. They thought their real teacher, Mrs Barnaby, had left without
saying goodbye because she didn’t like them. In fact, her husband’s firm had
transferred him abroad at the start of the Christmas holidays, without giving
any notice at all, and because it was somewhere very exciting Mrs Barnaby
hadn’t wanted to be left behind.
One sunny lunchtime they were all sat in the
classroom, wishing they could go out to play, when a note arrived for Mr Frith
and he had to go off to have some work explained to him by the Head of Maths.
He didn’t want to leave the class in the classroom. He was afraid they would
tear down the displays on the walls or break the chairs or smash the windows,
though they really weren’t like that at all, so he told them they could go
outside and play. Of course, that was what they really wanted to do. But because it was Mr Frith telling them,
they felt they didn’t. He had to rush off, so he didn’t see them all still
sitting there, glad on the one hand that they were defying him by staying in
the classroom, and annoyed on the other that they weren’t going out to play –
for which they blamed Mr Frith, of course.
Almost at once, they began talking about their
problem, which they thought was Mr Frith, even though it wasn’t.
“Why does he always blame us?” said Ellie.
“Because we’re always doing things wrong,” said
Jeremy, the cleverest boy in the class, who was listening to his Walkman. It
was interesting that he said “we”, because he really didn’t do anything wrong –
except not always listening, because he was usually three stages ahead in his
thoughts.
“No, we aren’t,” said Dale. “It’s always someone
else who starts it. It’s Helena.”
“Or Kyle,” said Helena.
“Or Emily,” said Kyle.
“Or Simon,” said Emily.
“That’s right,” said Jeremy, “it’s always someone
else. It’s like our dogs. When we come down in the morning and there’s a mess
on the floor in the kitchen they look at us as if they were saying, ‘It wasn’t
us, you know, it was that big black dog that comes in during the night and
knocks the water over, and scatters the biscuits and sometimes makes a puddle
in the corner. You know us. It can’t possibly be us. We wouldn’t do a thing
like that.’ And we believe them. Well, we pretend to believe them.”
And they all laughed. And Simon laughed so much, he
nearly fell off the desk he was sitting on and he put out a hand to steady
himself and he caught hold of one of the displays and it ripped, a nasty tear
right through the middle. And just at that moment Mrs Oliver came in to take
the register, because Mr Frith was being used to see that nobody cheated in a
maths test, and couldn’t be spared. (Timetables are very complicated things,
like those puzzles with sixteen squares and fifteen moveable blocks, which only
really work if you lever them all out and start again. Don’t get involved with
timetables unless you have to, and/or somebody pays you a lot of money.)
Mrs Oliver saw the dangling ends of the sugar paper
and asked, “Who did that?” and Dale answered, quick as a flash, “It was the new
boy, Miss.”
“The new boy?” said Mrs Oliver.
“Yes, Miss!” said Ellie and Helena together.
“What’s his name?” asked Mrs Oliver, opening the
register.
“Trevor,” said Freddy.
“Rhys,” said Kyle.
“Owen,” said Gemma.
“Uble,” said Jeremy, who was still listening to his
Walkman.
“Jeremy,” said Mrs Oliver, “please take out your
earphones and put your Walkman away. Lunchbreak is over now, you know.”
“Sorry, Mrs Oliver,” said Jeremy, who never got
shouted at, because he was clever and polite.
“Well,” said Mrs Oliver, “he doesn’t seem to be in
the register, this Trevor – ”
“His mum brought him in, Miss, during lunch – ” said
Emily.
“And then he felt poorly, and had to go home,” said
Gemma.
“But not before he’d torn the display! Not a good start,
for all his three first names,” said Mrs Oliver, as she wrote the new pupil
into the register. “I’m sure none of you would behave like that.”
And of course they didn’t. They didn’t need to. Trevor Rhys Owen Uble did it for them. He wrote on desks. He threw pencil shavings on to the floor. He put chewing gum on to the radiator just where Mr Frith usually leant against it. There was absolutely no end to the wicked things that young Master Uble did. But nobody ever saw him do them. He was far too clever for that.
When the register was called, somebody answered for
him. Always somebody different, of course. It’s not easy to look at a list of
names and a set of faces at the same time. After a while, as Mr Frith became
more familiar with the class, they had to become cleverer and invent excuses.
Trevor had gone to the toilet, or slipped out to get something from his locker,
or had to go and see another teacher, or had left his PE kit in his mother’s
car and had gone to ring her to see if she could bring it in for him. They
could always point to his coat and his bag on an empty chair – and it was
always somebody else’s coat and bag.
After a while, Mr Frith gave up asking where Trevor
was – which was just as well, because the class had pretty well run out of
excuses. He didn’t shout at them any more, either, because there seemed no
point when the person he needed to shout at was hardly ever in the room.
Instead, he walked among them and chatted to them about the work they were
doing. He even let them finish off their homework in tutor time, which he
really shouldn’t have done. And he let Jeremy listen to his Walkman, and talked
to him about music.
“What’s this, then?” said Mr Frith, picking up the
CD case. “Prokofiev – Lieutenant Kijé Suite, eh? Do you know the story?”
“No, sir,” said Jeremy, who did, of course, but also
knew that teachers like to think they know more than pupils, and take a lot of
pleasure in passing that knowledge on. Mr Frith was letting him have the
pleasure of listening, so he didn’t see why he shouldn’t let Mr Frith have the
pleasure of telling him something he thought he didn’t know.
“Kijé is the Russian for ‘Who’s that?’ – he doesn’t
exist, you see – he’s just a mistake in a list, but because the Tsar notices
the name and takes an interest in him, they have to invent a whole life-story.
He gets married and he gets a medal for bravery and then he dies – and he never
existed at all!”
Meanwhile, as the class was growing quieter, so
Trevor Rhys Owen Uble was getting wilder. Rude words and unpleasant messages
started appearing on the walls of the classroom, and the class had to shift
their desks and chairs around and move the posters to hide them. No one owned
up, either, which was strange. They began to get worried, because if Trevor did
something really dreadful, then the school would get in touch with his mother,
and that was when the school would discover that he didn’t have a mother and
didn’t have a home address because he didn’t exist.
It all came to a head one breaktime when they were
being kept in, not in their own room but in one of the upstairs classrooms,
where they were having a double lesson with Mr Frith that continued after
break. They hadn’t been really naughty, but because Mr Frith had spent time
explaining something to Dale, Emily had got bored and started fighting with
Kyle, and because Mr Frith had to sort that out, Simon and Dale had got bored
and started throwing pencils over their shoulders to see if they could hit
Ellie and Helena, and Ellie and Helena had thrown them back, of course, and
that was when Mr Frith had shouted at them again, the first time in a long
while, and told them they wouldn’t be having a break. Then the bell rang, and
he went off to do playground duty for Mrs Oliver, who was at the dentist’s.
And it was while they were sitting around in the
upstairs classroom that Gemma decided she wanted to do some drawing and got out
her special tin of pencils, all the way from 2H to 8B, and found that someone
had broken every single one into three pieces, and so of course she started
crying, and Emily was trying to comfort her when Helena discovered that someone
had unravelled all the knitting it had taken her twelve weeks to do, which was
going to be a scarf for her Mum’s birthday the following week, and that was the
same moment when Dale discovered that someone had stamped on his favourite
model car and broken it, only of course nobody could have stamped on it because
it had been safe in his bag, just as nobody could have ripped the book that
Jeremy was reading right across the middle (it was by Robert Louis Stevenson,
and called The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde). Everybody had had
something broken or spoiled – and they all knew who must have done it.
“Trevor Rhys Owen Uble!” they all said together. “But
he doesn’t exist!”
“Oh yes I do!” came a voice which they had never
heard before but they all recognised. They turned round and saw him standing on
a desk by the window that overlooked the playground. He was wearing Dale’s
navy-coloured duffle coat, with the hood up, so they couldn’t see his face.
“We’ll tell Mr Frith on you!” said Simon.
“He knows already,” said Trevor Rhys Owen Uble. “I’ll
tell him on you – right away. There he is now.” And he bent down and
pulled up the sash window, that nobody was supposed to open, because it was
dangerous, and leant right out, and seemed about to call – and there was a kind
of long, screaming cry and he wasn’t there any more.
For one second the class was something it had never,
ever been: completely still and silent. Then they all rushed out of the door,
down the stairs and into the playground. Like a dark stain, the navy duffle
coat lay with its arms spread out on the light grey asphalt. Mr Frith was
standing over it. The class could imagine what was underneath. As Mr Frith bent
down to pull it aside, they wanted to turn away, but they couldn’t. He gripped
the back of the hood and lifted it up to reveal – nothing.
As if he had suddenly become aware of them standing
there, he turned round and said, “Who is responsible for this?” And the whole
class put up their hands and said, “Me, sir.”
“Thank you,” said Mr Frith, in a voice so quiet they
could barely hear it, “thank you for being so honest and taking responsibility
for your actions. Now go away, and don’t do it again.”
At afternoon registration, they explained how
Trevor’s mother had come and taken him away, and Mr Frith ruled a big line
through his name. He should have checked with the school secretary, of course,
but she was off ill and by the time she came back, he’d forgotten. But the
class never forgot, and they became the best behaved class in the whole school
and stayed that way until they left.
12pm-3.40 pm
10.iii.2002