Writer's Notes and Extract
Several of my novels draw on my experience as a pupil ,then
as a young teacher and then a more experienced teacher in the education system. The inspiration for my novel Cruelty Gamescame more directly from my experience when I was actually training teachers.
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Click for Cruelty Games |
Those were heady times full of creativity and idealism - a far cry from the challenges that present teachers meet as they struggle with documentation and guidelines, their creativity squashed worryingly to almost nothing.
One of my new colleagues had been head-teacher in the school attended by Mary Bell – a sensational case which had challenged all preconceived notions that it was unthinkable that a child could or would kill another child. (This novel was written before the notorious Jamie Bulger case.) My colleague told me that her young teachers had really suffered over this experience in their professional life. They needed counselling afterwards to help them come to terms with a combination of guilt that they had not prevented the tragedy and dismay at their loss of the certainty of the innate innocence of children.
Month later I was discussing this view of the event with a friend who was a senior child psychologist in the region. Such a tragedy, I averred, must surely be an aberration: an extraordinary event.
He told me that he was not so sure of that. In his career more than once he had addressed the possibility that some playground accidents that ended in death could have been caused by games of dare or taunting going too far and going wrong. Often, he said, the uncertainties involved would make it impossible to ascribe blame.
He also speculated that where cruelty was a norm in a child’s life then the possibility of such games going too far and ending in death was a possibility to be thought through.
This struck a chord with me. I do not believe in original sin and was always sensitive to the relationship between environment and personality. I was - and remain - idealistic, where children are concerned and still feel that in these cases there must be two levels of victim.
These thoughts mulled around and around in my head until a time, some years later when I came across an historical account of a local boy who, back in the 19th Century, had killed his employer’s children and was gibbetted for his sin. I visited a grave in a local churchyard which referred to him. It was a misty day and he seemed to be there beside me.
In the weeks that followed a feeling about this young idealistic teacher, Rachel, grew to some reality in my mind. And growing beside her was her pupil Ian who was so like many children I had taught. Then one night I had this dream of an an event in my life where I had nearly fallen off a bus. But in my dream it was not me who fell off the bus, it was Rachel.
That day I started to write this novel. And I wrote on and on. It was as though Rachel and Ian were speaking to me. It was as though the tragic story wrote itself...
Cruelty Games
Extract
1979
(For skipping . . .)
Ding dong my castle bell
Farewell to my mother
Bury me in the old church yard
Beside my elder brother.
My coffin shall be white
Six angels by my side
Two to sing and two to play
And two to carry me soul away.
(For saying . . .)
Cry baby cry
Put your finger in your eye
Tell your mother what you’ve done
And she’ll give you a sugar plum.
1 A BRUSH WITH A STRANGER
All right, sweetheart? Any damage?’ The bus-driver twisted sideways in the cab to get a clearer view of the chaos caused by Rachel Waterman’s mistimed jump from the bus. Her foot had missed the bottom step; she had crashed full-length, exercise books exploding vigorously from the constraints of various plastic carriers.
Rachel stood up, pulling down her sheepskin jacket, stroking the soft surface to clear it of particles of soil. She could feel blood oozing from her left knee and the throbbing of an embryonic bruise on her right. She shook her head. ‘I’m fine. Don’t you worry yourself.’
The lights of the bus faded into the distance, leaving her in the dim dark of the winter evening. She searched the shadows of the narrow pathway, retrieving the brightly coloured books lurking under the hedge and jammed behind the pile of redundant paving stones stacked beside the bus-stand.
She made her way along the familiar road with its tall narrow houses. These were no longer dark and gloomy as they had been when she was young. Many were smartly painted now, stylishly curtained by people; couples who had been moving into the district in the last few years; a process called, she had read, called gentrification.
She hobbled around the bend onto the narrow path that led to her own house. She could make out a child moving along on the opposite side of the path ahead of her. His fair hair bobbed along, alternately lit and lost in the gleam of the street lamps: a powerfully built boy of eleven or twelve. For a second she clutched the carriers closer to her side. Then she dropped them away, walking freely. Why was it these days that you had to be frightened of children?
‘Hey, Missis!’ His light voice called out to her.
‘Yes? What is it?’ Her over-clear teacher’s articulation cut into the gloom. She peered across. The boy’s mouth was opening and closing. But now there was no sound. ‘Speak up! What is it?’ She might as well, she thought, be calling to the moon.
Now the boy was running towards her. She could hear the heavy thud of feet. He bumped against her and passed her at speed, raking the bulky carriers out of her hand. Once again, within the space of three minutes, she fell down. Once again, she was scrambling around for the bags and the books.
Shaking from head to foot now, she scrambled to her feet, brushing twigs from her shoulders with a trembling hand. A savage dart of cold pierced the back of her neck, right through the protection of her heavy coil of hair. She hurried through her gate and into the safe haven of the house. Once inside she went across to the table by the window and stacked the in their usual place. She leaned across the table, peering through the window towards the old hedge. The lawn, uncontained by any fence, was deserted. She frowned. There was no one on the old path.
‘Just a kid!’ she muttered. ‘I’ve had enough of them, kids, all week. Up to here with them. I’ve had them large and small, silent and noisy, pleasing and petulant. God save me from kids!’
Rachel smiled a little, acknowledging her joke against herself. In fact she loved her job; she loved the cycle of fresh-faced children who came through her hands each year. She even loved toiling away on committees, trying to improve the everyday life of the children in Oak Ridge Schools. She knew that the fact that this left her with no time for her own life might be seen by some as an advantage for a single middle-aged woman whose only relative was a sister in a city hundreds of miles away.
The telephone rang.
‘Rachel?’ Her sister’s voice, on cue.
‘Elena! Great to hear you! I was just thinking of you.’ She changed the telephone from one hand to the other and winced.
‘Rachel. What is it? Are you all right?’
‘I’m fine. Just took a bit of a tumble off the bus.’
‘Tripping up again are you? Such a clumsy clot.’ Hard words but the the was soft, affectionate. Well, anyway, I’m zipping up north tonight on the eight o’clock from King’s Cross. A buckshee week-end. Something about rationalising the rotas for maximum output. I didn’t ask too closely.’
‘It’ll be good to see you.’ That was not absolutely true. Rachel treasured her independence. She tended not to like visitors. Not even her dear sister.
‘Well it’ll be a bit of a quickie, lover. I’ll get in after midnight and I’m going off in the morning up to Alnwick. This guy has promised me a bit of riding.’
‘Oh, has he?’ Rachel breathed out, relaxing now.
‘And I thought I must take him up on his offer.’
‘And you don’t want to look a gift horse in the mouth, do you?’ Rachel smiled. ‘I’ll see you, then.
‘Don’t wait up, lover, will you?’
‘Do I ever?’
An hour later Rachel was sitting with the ritual pile of books to one side of her; the ritual gin and tonic to the other; the ritual marking pen poised in one hand, when there was a long, over-sustained, ring on the doorbell.
A tall thin young man stood at the door. His skin was sun-tanned and his fair hair cut very close to his skull. A baby squirmed in his arms and a toddler clung to his hand. He was a stranger.
‘Miss Waterman?’
‘Yes?’
There was a pause. She moved from foot to foot.
He stood there, staring at her. He’d thought of her as taller. But she had the same heavy hair, threaded with grey now. The same big eyes, almost too round. The same figure, too bulky up-top. ‘I can see it’s you, now Miss Waterman.. I was wondering if you were all right . . . how you were?’
She frowned, ‘I’m fine. I’m well. But . . .’
He laughed. ‘You don’t recognise me! You were my teacher once. But then you must have taught thousands of kids since then.’
He had an unusual accent. Australian, perhaps. Or West Country. She scanned the narrow face. No spare flesh. There seemed to be no child underneath. If she did not see the child she would not recognise him. He was unrecognisable. ‘I’m sorry,’ she began.
‘I thought maybe you’d like to see my children. This is Charlie. And the baby here is Sophie.’ He pushed the small boy forward. The child was round-faced with a lick of blond hair falling in a sweep across his brow, smiling up at her, red-cheeked and confident. His eyes were a curious light blue rimmed with silver. Looking back into the young man’s face, she felt a spurt of recognition and relaxed. ‘You may as well come in.’ Resignation made her brusque. This did happen now and then: it was a compliment really, to be remembered after so many years. It was terrifying, the mythic image people sometimes conjured up of their former teachers. Sometimes the myth had truth. Sometimes it was mistaken. But it was always weird.
‘Tea?’ she said.
‘That’d be nice,’ he said.
He settled comfortably on the couch and watched her vanish through the middle door. In search of tea, she moved thoughtfully around the tiny kitchenette, making the tea, pouring it out and setting a glass of orange squash alongside the two mugs.
As she handed drinks to the man and the little boy, she looked more closely at the child. Something was picking away at her mind. She prided herself at not forgetting a face. And there were thousands of faces now. Still, there was nothing in the man that struck a bell; nothing in the face, nothing in the voice. ‘I’m really sorry. This is awful, I still can’t place you. Your voice. You don’t sound . . .’
‘That’ll be the Australian. I was there five years; back two years now. I live in Devon. Picked up a bit of that lingo maybe.’
‘Your name? Your name would help.’ She was good at names. Reading them off the register for a year, day after day. The names became fixed.
‘These days my name’s Alex Van Dorn. Now. You won’t recognise that name. That’s who I became. I got the name from somebody I once met.’ He paused, his head dipped over his coffee. ‘Once, when I was young, it was Ian Sobell.’
Her cup turned inwards in her lap, but she ignored the stinging liquid as it burned her inner thigh. His cool pale eyes looked across at her as he hugged the baby to him. She stood up, her face blank. ‘Oh dear. Look at this skirt. I must get changed.’ It was there, the black space inside her; the void with the black centre and the dark edge. Even now she could not put her mind to the centre of that huge black space. She would not. Her movements, as she put on a clean skirt, were sluggish and slow. She dumped the wet skirt in the wash-basket and went to the window to lean her hot head against the cold glass of the window. Her inward eye turned outward. She blinked.
On the edge of her garden, where it joined the old path, stood the stocky boy who had run past here, who had knocked her over. He was looking straight up at her face, into her eyes. She opened the window and leaned out see him more clearly. His clothes were bulky and rough; his hair was thick and unkempt. She was reminded of travellers’ children who, depending on the season, might turn up at school. She opened the window, leaned out and shouted, ‘You there! Just what was it that you wanted?’
The boy’s mouth opened but it seemed that only certain words emerged, like a radio going in and out of tune. ‘M . . . Missis . . . thou sh’d kna’ . . . not evil, bad . . . they shouldn’t a done that. Not . . . that.’
‘What? What? Shout up, dear!’
‘I need . . . I canna . . .’ The steel window-fitting was digging into her waist as she leaned out. She looked down to change her position. When she looked up, the boy was gone. All she could see was the shadow of the bush in the old hedge
She returned downstairs to find the young man humming away, playing finger-games with the little boy. ‘It’s Ian Sobell, then!’ she said brightly. ‘How are you, Ian?
Then she fainted.
Rachel sat up in bed, staring into a deep black, the blackness of funeral velvet. She opened her eyes wider, stretching the lids, to gulp in, to encompass any fragments of light that might be out there. There were no fragments, not a single chink of light. The black velvet began to move in on her, to lick around her. She opened her mouth to shout. At first there was no noise, then at last, ‘Mo –ther!’
The darkness thinned down, then receded. The room filled with grey-green shadow; the light from the street-lamp filtered through the flowered curtains. She breathed slowly in the way Daisy Montague had taught her, and the room threatened her no longer.
When she saw the figure in the corner of the room, the still-sustained meditation-state kept her calm. It was the boy from the path. He moved forward. ‘You all right, Missis?’ His hands were hanging down in front of him, loose and ungainly. The knuckles were over-large and purplish red.
‘Yes. I’m all right.’ She pulled her duvet closer. ‘What is it you want?’
‘Ah wanted to tell thee’. I bin watchin’ thee. The one. Thou’d. be the one. Ah’ll tell thee . . .’
Such a strong accent. She was right. A travellers’ child. ‘What is your name?’
‘Ah’s called Wales. Pip Wales.’
‘And what is it that you will tell me?’
‘I want to tell thee about the game. About the game. Those young’ns made me play, and they . . .’ The voice was fading although the mouth was moving.
She frowned and shook her head. ‘Speak up!’ she shouted across a broad abyss, across lijke a pathway to the moon. She blinked her eyes; he was getting harder and harder to see. ‘Stay! Don’t go!’ Tears were falling down her face, blinding her to his image altogether. ‘Stay!’
Sixteen years had passed since those disastrous events set in train by Ian Sobell and at last Rachel Waterman’s life now, though routine and pedestrian, was calm. True, it had taken her three years to recover : it took periods in hospital, and the ministrations of three therapists for her to understand something of the nature of what had happened to her and to others at that time.
In the end it had been Daisy Montague, the third therapist, who had come up with the most satisfactory - and for that reason the most - to something of a life.
In her cosy room Daisy had leaned back in her chair and tossed back her thick glossy hair. She’d taken off her spectacles and rubbed her tired eyes. ‘Look at it this way, Rachel, the path that leads to the act of murder is a very broad one. Most of us tread it. Don’t we all say at some time: “ could have killed him?’ Or killed her?”And for one fraction of a second we mean it. But the path we travel on is, as I say, a broad one, and we can choose to move aside, right away from the pain and the hurt, and that destructive parallel desire to hurt back, to kill, in order to show that we are here; we exist. ‘But for some people, this wide path splits and splits, like branching nerves in a muscle or a heart. For such people the way gets narrower and narrower and it seems to some that there are no choices; they are pushed and pummelled on by the seen and the unseen travellers who share their journey.’ Daisy replaced her glasses, in that single action reinstituting the grave competence meant sometimes to reassure, sometimes to deceive. ‘Perhaps at that point a savage act such as this is the only, and the inevitable way for them to go.’
Rachel had tucked away her hankie and frowned. This was like her mother’s argument only somehow worse, endorsed by this intellectual authority, this gravitas. ‘You mean it’s all preordained, inevitable?’
Daisy shrugged. ‘Not in the religious way. More like when you set a hoop rolling down a steep hill; almost impossible to stop.’
The yellow cookery timer on Daisy’s desk pinged, reverberating in the quiet air. She smiled her full-toothed smile at Rachel: a smile turned on like a lamp, accompanied by direct eye-contact, which seduced all her clients into thinking that here was a very nice warm person. ‘There, Rachel. Our time is up. See you next week?’
Rachel gathered up her bag, tried to put on her coat, dropped the bag and scrambled to retrieve it again. ‘I don’t think so, Daisy,’ she said vaguely. ‘I’ll need to get home early. Such a lot on at school next week. I’ll ring.’
Outside the room she had looked at herself in the mirror at the head of the Daisy’s stairs, tucked one unkempt curl back into her beret, put her shoulders back and set out to face yet another week, as she had faced many weeks, with Daisy’s help. But as she made her way down the steep shabby stairs with their curling posters about saving whales and driving with care, Rachel knew she would not return. She realized now that she had the skeleton of an answer to the thing and she’d have to make do with that.
Poor Daisy, she thought, no wonder she got tired, having to smile like that all the time, and listen by the hour to people’s terrors and nightmares. What a life she had!
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