Mortification: Writers’ Stories of Their Public Shame (12 page)

There was two hours of this, with me pinned back against the mauve leather banquette by the amplified torrent of screamed words from the stage, most of them (it seemed) directed to me, the upstart muthafucking so-called celebrity no one had fucking heard of. I’d just decided to abandon my policy of sipping from a single bottle of beer all night (in order to retain professionally crisp enunciation when I was finally on stage) in favour of a more appropriate bottle-of-Jim-Beam-down-in-one approach, when I heard my name being screamed out. I jumped up.

‘Hello,’ I said. ‘I thought I’d start with an excerpt from my new novel. It’s a psychosexual horror story full of squalid under-age copulation and lunatic rantings …’

There was a howl from the darkness.

‘Pardon?’

‘No!’ came a yell from the depths. ‘We want to hear your golf stories.’

What could I do? What do you think, for Christ’s sake? Like any good professional writer, paying for their fifty weeks of solitary deskbound scribbling in the only way possible – i.e. by whoring themselves to anyone anywhere willing to buy a plane ticket and a chance to shift a few units – I gave them the fucking golf story.

‘The tongue is more to be feared than the sword.’ Japanese proverb

I’d gone into schools before and enjoyed it. The teachers were welcoming and friendly; the children enthusiastic about writing poetry with a ‘real’ poet. But this school, a boy’s comprehensive, was different. The Head of English was surly and suspicious. He didn’t introduce me to any of the other teachers. He didn’t tell me anything about the boys I was to work with: just gave me the class registers with strict instructions to fill them in. Obviously, he didn’t want me there. Maybe he thought poets were anarchists.

‘We don’t accept any work that contains sex or violence,’ he said.

The classroom he led me to was right at the back of the school with windows facing north. The walls were bile yellow as if to compensate for the lack of sun. There was a smell of boiled cabbage and toilets. As soon as he’d gone, I stood on a chair to open a window. Then a bell rang and the first group of boys burst in. There were catcalls and wolf-whistles.

‘Great view of your knickers, Miss,’ a boy called out.

Certainly, the boys were interested in sex. ‘Have you got a boyfriend? Is he good in bed?’ was a running gag. I thought of getting them to write a sestina with that as one of the recurring lines; but resisted it.

There were five groups altogether, ranging in age from eleven to fifteen: all equally unruly and unresponsive. They’d volunteered for poetry, it turned out, to escape from music. Their reaction, even to Hughes and Heaney, was groans and yawns. Asked to write a poem, they were sullen and mutinous.

Wednesdays were my teaching day. I got to dread them. It wasn’t helped that I spent Tuesday nights tossing and turning or racked with nightmares. Part of the condition of my contract was to put together an anthology and organize a reading to which parents and governors would be invited. By the fifth and final week I was desperate. I’d got one day left to turn them on to poetry.

I’d prepared a session on poem portraits, using Norman MacCaig’s poem ‘Aunt Julia’ as inspiration. But as I was waiting for the first group to come in I flicked through
The Rattle Bag,
the Heaney-Hughes anthology. My eye fixed on Robert Frost’s poem, ‘“Out, Out –”’, about a boy who accidentally cuts off his hand with a circular saw. On an impulse, I read them that instead:

The buzz saw snarled and rattled in the yard …

The room went quiet. I could hear the boys’ breathing; my voice almost a whisper as I neared the end:

No one believed. They listened at his heart.

Little – less – nothing! – and that ended it.

One boy remembered a brother drowning; another a grandfather’s story of losing his leg in the War. They were interested; engaged; even prepared to talk about the way Frost used language; suspense; the senses. Then, I set them to write: about an accident; or something terrible happening. They had to use the senses, like Frost; and write, if possible from their own experience.

Before, I’d had to squeeze poems out of them like juice out of dry lemons: and those were mostly clichéd and dull. Now, they wrote freely and with energy and imagination: poems about car and boating accidents; about scaldings and falling out of trees, about baby seals being clubbed; about torturing a cat.

The poem had the same effect on every group. Then, in the final session of the day, just as the boys were about to begin reading their poems aloud, the Head of English walked in.

‘Carry on,’ he said, and sat at the back.

It would be untrue to say that every poem was wonderful. But they all had sparks of energy. And some, like Frost’s poem, were powerful and moving and shocking. There was one about a boy losing his eye in a fight after a football match; and one about a party of schoolchildren buried under an avalanche; and another about a family burned alive in a house fire.

After every poem there was applause. But the teacher didn’t clap.

‘They were good, weren’t they?’ I said to him when the boys had left the classroom.

He said nothing: not ‘Yes,’ or ‘No’.

The anthology never materialized. The evening reading with the parents and governors was cancelled.

After that experience, I stopped going into schools. I got a full-time job teaching in a college. Strangely, I began to address sex and violence as themes in my own work. There’s nothing like forbidding something to make it the topmost thing in your mind. But I don’t think it had anything to do with the teacher’s embargo. It’s more likely I learned the lesson from the boys: writing about something that really engages you.

‘A children’s writer should, ideally, be a dedicated semi-lunatic’ Joan Aiken

Some years ago, I was invited to attend a Salon du Livre in Bordeaux, along with Beryl Bainbridge, Tom Sharpe and a children’s writer who looked like a plump doll, spoke in a squeaky voice and told everyone incessantly how much she appreciated ‘black men’s willies’. One memorable Saturday afternoon, the four of us went to lunch at a superb restaurant on the outskirts of the city. The publicity director of Penguin France and her assistant acted as hosts, even though I was the only Penguin author present. Beryl, loath to eat ‘foreign muck’, was given a large tomato salad while the rest of us feasted on red mullet and lamb. It was a sunny day, so we sat at a table in the exquisite garden drinking champagne, Sancerre and Chateau Haut-Batailley. The two French women were regaled with stories of the children’s writer’s black lover’s sexual expertise, including his habit of removing his false teeth prior to intercourse, and as we were laughing Tom Sharpe observed laconically, ‘What is it with this crazy dame?’

Two hours later, flushed and happy, we returned to the Salon, to take part in a joint event. The interviewer was a nervous man who was seriously unacquainted with our books. In desperation he asked us what we thought of each other’s work. ‘What a stupid bloody question,’ Tom replied. ‘No comment.’ Beryl and I both said that we were too embarrassed to answer, and the children’s writer squeaked, ‘I’ve only ever read one book –
Winnie the Pooh
– and I never finished it.’ We then became aware of a commotion in the packed audience, which contained many schoolchildren who were studying English. A tall, gaunt man wearing a beret and smoking a foul-smelling cigarette made his way to the front with many an ‘
Excusez-moi
’ and jumped on to the platform. He sat down next to Beryl and announced, ‘
Je pense que les autres écrivains sont
’ – and here he paused before shouting ‘fucking cunts’. The parents of the children whisked them out of the tent on the instant. The man in the beret now had his hand up Beryl’s skirt. ‘
Je t’adore,
’ he repeated over and over, while Beryl wondered aloud why he was saying ‘shut that door’.

The man turned out to be Robin Cook, alias Derek Raymond, whose crime novels –
How the Dead Live
and
I was Dora Suarez
– were extremely popular in France, where he had lived for eighteen years. He was very drunk that day. Beryl firmly removed his roving hand. He stood up and straight away fell over. Someone took him out of the tent, but the event was already at an end.

The day’s madness wasn’t finished. None of Beryl’s books was on display, but a young girl asked her to sign a copy of John Steinbeck’s
Of Mice and Men
. Beryl remarked that she hadn’t written the novel and that she wasn’t a man, but the girl insisted on acquiring her signature. And later that evening the children’s writer revealed that she called her toothless black lover ‘Georgie Porgie’ when his denture was safe in its bedside glass.

‘If fortune turns against you, even jelly breaks your tooth.’ Persian proverb

It’s a dangerous thing to have too many esses in a poem. Or to have a tooth clean-up too close to a reading. Or to chew a toffee just before the reading starts – a toffee that turns out to suddenly have acquired a very hard nut, that is actually a crowned front tooth complete with mounting spike.

I was in Torhout, in Belgium, doing a few days’ work in a high school. Before coming over I’d been involved in the judging of a school poetry competition, and part of the prize for the winners was an early dinner in a restaurant with me. Some prize, I thought, but I went willingly – I had some bits of advice to give the young people about their writing, and food in Belgium tended to be good.

It was a girl and a boy who came to join me; the girl slim, diminutive, very confident, the boy, the first prizewinner, a bit on the shy side and fat. We chatted easily enough, they had pasta and coke, I had a rare Chateaubriand, and red wine. When it came to the dessert we decided to skip it, but a plate with four toffees came gratis, and I unwrapped one of these and stuck it in my mouth as we walked out.

So I was in the snow when I extracted my tooth from the toffee and held it up. The cold wind whistled through the gap which the tip of my tongue instinctively went to fill. And I was on my way to the library where in five minutes I was expected to give a poetry reading.

Somewhere in the back of my mind I had a déjà vu about this happening once before, but long, long ago. All I remembered, though, was that it had been a toffee, too, that had done the damage on that occasion. I resolved there and then to give up toffees, but that wouldn’t help me do the reading. As we picked our way carefully over the treacherous pavement, I chattered away, out of embarrassment, to the two young people. I knew that if they weren’t with me they would be laughing their heads off. All my words were coming out lisped. And all those esses in my poems!

Out of desperation, and prompted by the branch of the memory that stays in the unconscious, I put my tooth up into the gap and tried to push it back in. After a few attempts I actually managed this. It stayed in! So I might be able to do the reading after all. Full of resolve, and ambition to give the best reading of the year, I hurried us along to the library.

The teacher who’d organized my visit was waiting for me with the librarian who would introduce me. He was a quiet, likeable and clearly very decent man. The librarian was a jolly, quite attractive blonde. She immediately handed me a copy of the poster for the event which had a title at the top, I noticed –
A Dramatic Whole
. Puzzled, I looked at this until the teacher laughed and said he’d taken it from one of my e-mails, and I remembered something about telling him a poetry reading was a dramatic event, albeit drama with a little d. He’d turned it into a big D. I smiled thinly and asked to see the reading space.

There were twenty or so chairs set up in what appeared to be the children’s section of the library. As well as my reading, the presentation of the students’ prizes would take place, and they would each read their winning poem. These had been nicely produced in a booklet. It was all very well organized. And the fact that the students would be there meant that their parents would be there also, so I would definitely have an audience.

I tried checking my e-mail but the computer I’d been shown to refused to co-operate, so I flicked through some magazines instead, seeing how much of the Flemish I could understand from my rusty German. People were drifting in. I went over and looked through the prizes I would be handing out to the students. I sat down at the table at the front and looked through the reading list I’d carefully prepared. I wasn’t giving my tooth a thought.

When all the prizewinners had shown up it was decided that we should get going. The teacher told the audience about the competition, and how he’d coaxed me over to Torhout. I then gave a little spiel about poetry competitions, what I looked for, what I didn’t want to see. The students came up one by one, received their prize from me, returned my smile, mumbled their poem and sat down. Their parents took photographs.

Then it was my turn. As I half-listened to the librarian introduce me, I was pumped up with adrenalin and raring to go. I got to my feet like a boxer coming out of his corner. I launched, without introduction, into the first poem. Two lines into the second, however, I felt the horrible sensation of my tooth loosening in my mouth. Sure enough, before I got to the end of the poem it was in my hand again and I was lisping the last lines. Most of the adults in the audience were sniggering. I shoved the tooth back up into my mouth and started on the third poem, but this rendition was altogether less confident, and involved constant flicks of the tongue to ensure the tooth was staying in place. Not satisfied with this, I kept bringing my right thumb up to push the tooth in. I must have looked like Charlie Chaplin in
The Great Dictator
. Not surprisingly, there were frequent unscheduled pauses in the delivery of the poem. Even the teenagers were laughing now. The librarian had to take herself outside, overcome with hilarity.