The tablemanners are appalling by Mr. Coulter’s standards. You notice him correcting one eight-year-old girl for some time. You do not attempt to do anything similar yourself: these children and their manners are the product of their environment, and therefore suit that environment. You are not sure enough of your own standards to take the responsibility of imposing them on these children for whom they would probably be quite inappropriate.
You do, however, very surely deal with two boys who are delightedly spattering each other with mashed potato.
School dinner is finished in just over fifteen minutes, the slower eaters being chivvied and forced. Mr. Coulter tells you how they pride themselves on this speed.
“So even if you do consider it an imposition, Albert,” he says as you climb back towards the staffroom and your own meal, “you can see that at this school we make dinner duty as painless as possible.”
The staffroom is on the top floor. There is a view from it out to the south-east, over the city. You are grateful for it. Some of the tower blocks are very good in their own right, though too many of them have services untidily designed on their roofs. After lunch you sit sketching it in your notebook, the skyline: blocks, spires, St. Paul’s. The blocks set off the cathedral: none are as tall: their rectangularity against the dome’s sweet curve.
The rest of the staff chattter and laugh: the air becomes polluted with the smoke of their camaraderie. They think you are unsociable. Even the woman of thirty does not talk to you after she has given you another cup of tea and charged you another twopence for it. You do not mind.
You teach them simple sentence construction during the first session of the afternoon.
You read them a story during the second session of the afternoon.
You feel exhausted at the end of the afternoon.
You decide to walk home slowly, up the City Road, towards the Angel. City Arms; St. Mark’s Hospital for Fistula &c.; Mona Lisa Cafe Restaurant; vast anonymous factory block shouldering Georgian first-ratings mainly used for light industries; Albion House with two lovely bow-fronts spoilt by nursery stickers inside the windows and two comically sentimental plaster dogs guarding the steps.
Sale Closing Down. Aspenville wallpaper. Claremont Mission. Overgrown gardens this side. Claremont Square. The bank again, yellow, saffron, green. Across Amwell Street, down Great Percy Street, to the Circus.
You feel far less tired when you reach your flat.
You walk to school as well the next morning, for your second day at St. Sepulchre’s. You look forward to teaching. You think of it as a great privilege, to be allowed to work amongst children. Very worthwhile, very satisfying. You think of these as commonplaces, but true and relevant, and remember that this is how you always feel, enthusiastic and dedicated, at the start of a term. Then disenchantment sets in, after perhaps two weeks.
But this second morning you look forward to teaching. You arrive early. You talk with the early children as friends, interesting yourself in their interests. When the class has assembled you say good morning to them, smiling, and they respond readily.
You try the standard jokes:
“All those who are absent please put up their hands.”
They are allowed to laugh at this.
And, later:
“Now who’s going to have super delicious school dinners?”
They are allowed to groan at this, in a derisive manner.
You like your class. You want to teach them well, as a result. Mr. Coulter interrupts your first lesson, ostensibly to tell you that you are on playground duty today, but really, you are sure, to check up on you. The class is working quietly, and you are giving personal attention to one child when he comes in. You are pleased he has not caught you out. He tells you that no ballgames are allowed in the playground because children have too frequently been knocked over and injured whilst playing them.
When you see them in the confined area of the playground, you can understand why. But, deprived of ballgames, the boys have evolved other ways of playing. The playground has a slope of perhaps one in twelve in its fifteen-yard length, and groups of boys link arms against the factory wall at the back and rush down it. Anyone in their way is knocked down. This game they call Chariots. You stop them, feeling a spoilsport as you do so. Even so, you notice that at any given moment there seem to be just as many boys on the ground, fighting, or being tripped, or falling.
