Middle Class

By Kester Brewin

'Hugely accomplished' - Lucy Morris, Curtis Brown

'An exceptionally talented writer' - Emma Finn, Conville & Walsh

'Brilliantly depicts the emotional knife-edge on which a teacher and her classes rest' - The Literary Consultancy

• Language: English
• Publisher: Vaux Publishing
• Release date: Jun 25, 2022
• ISBN: 9780993562860

Kester Brewin

Born into a Yorkshire vicarage, Kester Brewin has taught mathematics in South East London schools for over twenty years and writes regularly for the national education press. The author of a number of celebrated books of non-fiction, notably Mutiny - an exploration of the impact of pirate culture, and Getting High - a history of the human quest for flight, he has twice presented at the UK's premier TEDx event and spoken on his work across the US and Europe. An excerpt from Middle Class was shortlisted for The Bridport Prize in 2020, and his story The Rot was shortlisted for the Dinesh Prize for Short Fiction in 2022. He lives in London with his two teenage children.

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Blurbs

An exceptionally talented writer. I was completely absorbed by the sense of a teacher walking a line between a semblance of control and total collapse.

– Emma Finn, Conville and Walsh

Hugely accomplished prose, both in its precision of observation and outstanding dialogue. It is rare to read such a vivid cacophony of voices.

– Lucy Morris, Curtis Brown

Compelling reading. An unflinching yet humane account of teaching in an inner city comprehensive. Beautifully written and tenderly imagined, this novel will stay with you for a long time.

– Mary Bousted, Joint President, National Education Union

Author Bio

Born into a Yorkshire vicarage, Kester Brewin has taught mathematics in South East London schools for over twenty years and writes regularly for the national education press. The author of a number of celebrated books of non-fiction, notably Mutiny — an exploration of the impact of pirate culture, and Getting High — a history of the human quest for flight, he has twice presented at the UK’s premier TEDx event and spoken on his work across the US and Europe.

An excerpt from Middle Class was shortlisted for The Bridport Prize in 2020, and his story The Rot was shortlisted for the Dinesh Prize for Short Fiction in 2022.

He lives in London with his two teenage children.

Copyright Information

All rights reserved

© Kester Brewin 2022

The right of Kester Brewin to be identified as the author of this work is asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

Also by Kester Brewin:

The Complex Christ  /  Other

Mutiny  /  After Magic

Getting High

Published by Vaux Books

www.vaux.net

978-0-9935628-5-3

Epigraph

‘They chose their pastors

as they chose their horses:

for hard work’

We are beyond ‘crisis’.

We are in a state of distress.

— 2019 report into mental health                    of teachers in England.

1

It is just before 9 am when Sally calls, the soft hum of phone vibrations shaking Jo from her thoughts.

‘Hey,’ Sally says. ‘Just wanted to say good luck today.’

‘Aww Sal, thank you.’ She smiles. To be thought of is a wonderful thing. ‘Where are you?’ There’s noise in the background, a pause before Sally answers.

‘Sorry,’ she says. ‘Caught me mid-slurp. I’m actually going into work. Bit of a shock but save Pret, you know.’

On Jo’s desk is a mug of ditch-water instant balanced atop a pile of papers, the actual furniture barely visible under the stacks of paper that have already accumulated. Risk assessments. Instructions for quarantining worksheets. Homework timetables. Symptom checklists and action plans bumping up against fifty pages on the new school inspection framework, the ‘three Rs’ metastasising into long acronyms which will apparently help children to become more efficiently educated. She lifts her coffee, takes a sip and pushes the pile an inch or two further away.

‘You’re going to do great Jo,’ Sally tells her, changing her tone to solemn, and though she’s never seen Jo teach and has no metric by which to make this judgement, there’s even warmth to be taken from naive encouragement.

Sometimes it hardly seems possible to Jo that the same literature degree landed her and Sally in two such different places and with such a vast difference in the quality of their beverages. But she knows better than to say this because: job security. Plus, she’s just had six weeks off and — though Sally wouldn’t ever say it so bluntly — knows that she has hardly put in a proper day since March. Things posted online. Worksheets and videos. Poems to for students to self-destruct, if they had access to the internet. If she can survive six weeks of this new madness back in school there’ll be another week off as reward. So yes, the readily available caffeine is terrible but no, she mustn’t be heard to complain.

‘Thank you,’ she says again.

‘I’m sorry I haven’t been there more,’ Sally begins, but Jo quietens her. No one has been allowed to be there, that has been the point. Kill the bug off by keeping people apart. Death by separation. The ghastly chorus of her personal collection of socially distanced horrors rises and limps across the stage. Unable to visit her dying mother. Forced to miss the funeral. Dad left alone. Ben using the convenience of lockdown to finish with her.

But — again she mustn’t wallow — each has had their own private accretion of painful experiences. Sally marrying without her friends around her. Maria bringing a baby into a world so reduced and narrowed. At least Sally has made the effort to call. ‘It’s been hard for everyone,’ Jo says with a wince. Her moods have swung hard recently; she is wary of any nudges that might send her towards descent.

But Sally hasn’t got where she is without the courage to speak words into hard places. ‘You’re due to see him today?’ she asks.

That she doesn’t even need to mention the name is instructive. Darren. Of course she means Darren. The wince becomes a grimace. Jo presses thumb and finger to eyelids and tries to push her head back somewhere positive. ‘Yes,’ she says with a dark laugh. ‘His class is due any minute. Very first lesson since lockdown and would you believe it it’s them’

Sally giggles. ‘Well… If you don’t tell him to fuck off you’re already winning.’

‘That’s not funny Sal!’ Jo tells her. But she is smiling now.

‘Sorry Jo,’ she says. ‘It’s not.’ Then pauses for another slug of coffee before giggling again. ‘Except it is.’

Except, Jo doesn’t want to have to point out, it nearly cost her her job. And coming up for forty going into a pandemic would hardly have been the ideal time to try to convince someone that a just-sacked English teacher was just who they ought to be hiring.

Sally thinks that she should be ennobled, that tough West London schools like Cromwell need more teachers like Jo. In the staffroom she’ll now forever be the woman who told a rude, indolent boy to get the fuck out of her room, who finally said what everyone had been dying to say. But — Dad had told her in no uncertain terms — whatever her colleagues might feel, however much you want to tell a boy like Darren that he’s a depraved human being he is ultimately a child, one who had deserved better.

‘Don’t beat yourself up. It’ll probably end up being the best thing that’s happened to him, you’ll see.’

Just FUCK OFF Darren.

A shadow across Jo’s face and the smile evaporates into a residue of grave doubts. Sally doesn’t know all the ways Jo had tried to quieten him, all the grammar she’d tried to instil before a single syllable of old Germanic had finally slapped him into stunned silence. She loves her to bits, knows that Sally surely has tough days at work too, but probably has no idea how much she had taken before finally breaking.

Darren had goaded Nishaan again and again and she’d asked him politely, again and again, to stop.

He’d made disgusting remarks to Hayley and she’d stiffly, patiently chastised him.

He’d yawned, complained that Jo’s breath stank, slapped Ade, threatened to bang Charlie up, got up to shout out of the window, refused to take his cap off, leant back on two chair legs, chewed gum, screwed up his first worksheet on An Inspector Calls, splayed his tag all over the back of the replacement.

Concern about the virus had already seeped under the doors, begun clinging to each surface and hanging in the air between them, but all of this she had taken, each thing Darren did further sucking her reserves, each incident tightening her nerves, the pitch of their trembling rising, desperately trying to push on with the lesson, to communicate something – anything – to them about the tension between the social classes in an industrial town a century or so ago, this pretty young girl who has taken her life…

‘Not as fit as you,’ he’d leered at Hayley. Hayley had not even turned round, just flicked a bird over her shoulder. ‘Spin on my finger? Yeah, bet you’d love to.’ The other boys shaking their heads, the girls united in disgust. ‘No? What about your mum then? She’s peng enough.’

Snap. Two words and Jo had exploded. Your mum. It was like blade he’d pulled from nowhere and thrust hard into her chest, releasing a gush of long-caged expletives.

Just FUCK OFF Darren. Get the fuck out of my classroom.

An injured look as if she’d hit an ill-healed wound, but she hadn’t cared, had stormed on, pointing with the book she was meant to be teaching and continuing to shout at him, all that she’d kept pent up spilling out onto him and burning. A mild March day, but the classroom oven-hot with this scalding, the salad cream walls sweating as her voice had begun to crackle. Fury, love and hurt combusting together, and he’d risen in raging obedience.

She shifts in her chair and glances up at the clock. He’ll be here again soon. There isn’t much time.

‘I don’t know Sal.’ She needs levity. Good humour a better weapon than rage in this place, but it takes a lightness of mind, a nimbleness of thought, and she can feel herself dragging. ‘Not sure screaming expletives at him is going to turn him into Gandhi.’

Sally laughs. ‘Well if anyone can, it’s you Jo.’

Stock phrases like this, sometimes Jo wonders if the gradual accumulation of them over time is how she ended up going into teaching. The problem being, it’s only now that she’s realising how far teaching has gone into her, so far that she’s not sure how she might ever pare herself from it. It has entered her, consumed her, taken over her days and infected her nights, and if the past months away from this place have taught her anything it’s that she is desperate to wrestle back control. To do it, but not to be it. Yes, she thinks, to have an actual life apart, to have some independence, and if I cannot do that I might have to leave, to break it off, finish it. Then the but. But someone has to think of the children. And so she stays. So she comes back. Because what else does she actually have?

A gentle ping of an elevator door comes through the phone into one ear and, as if in cosmic mockery, into the other comes the obscene clanging of the school bell, ringing in the start of the lesson with all the volume of an emergency situation. With Darren on the way it might well be.

‘I’d better go,’ she says, posture and expression shifting quickly.

‘OK. Me too. Take care Jo. Chat soon.’

She thanks her again.

Take care. Be careful. Mind where you tread. Yes, Jo thinks, Sally is right about that at least. Pitfalls everywhere, mines that children keep buried just below the surface, knives everyone worries are concealed under a jacket or down a sock just a short angry grab away. Press them gently on some matter or another and suddenly you’ve triggered an explosion, a frenzied slaughter.

She pumps a squirt from a bottle and wrings her hands clean. Stay positive. Stay up. Don’t swing now. So many deaths this year already, but she cannot think like that. Mustn’t. All she wants is her mother’s arms cradling her but it is too late for that now. And it always was, she can’t help telling herself, her mind getting in a last word before she tells it to belt it. Too late. She and mum should have broken their silence sooner.

No, she mustn’t start with complaints now; the bell has sent the building into its hourly writhing, there’s no time for those thoughts. It trembles with the mass of children shouting and leering, cursing mothers and commenting on footwear and calling out greetings and — despite everything they’ve been told — still wrestling one another, hugging and landing punches. The hard thud of bodies slamming against walls and doors, bubbles broken as their arms lay around shoulders and trainered feet moon along corridors, the school flexing and shaking as they begin to close around her.

She scans the room. New exercise books have been fished out of the cupboard. She has her mask and her sprays. The desks are in reasonable lines. The interactive board is plugged in, next to it the old whiteboard on its runners, not clean exactly, but — she concludes happily — no marks that could easily be turned into a phallus. The floor pretty is much clear of the cans, cartons, or any other sizeable detritus that they could toe-punt, hurl, pop or splat. It will do.

Charlie is thumping on the door, Danny next to him. No sight of Darren. There’s a rumble from somewhere below, another crash of chairs above, a shrill scream from a group of girls, corridors broadcasting on all frequencies. Forget novels and poems; if she can’t grab their attention she knows that it’s her that they’ll critique in fine detail, offering strong opinions and different perspectives, tearing into her for an hour before tossing her aside and moving on to another colleague.

The pressure is building around the door. Two metres? Either their Maths is worse than she’d thought or they have agreed to be one very large household. She spurs herself, tells herself I can do this, and digs these words into her rib. Like a horse impelled she suddenly brightens, exaggerates a smile and strides over to welcome them, pre-flight check on the way: blouse buttons, skirt front and back, a sweep of the nostrils. Everything else might go awry, but this trinity of rites remained sacred. A stray bogey, sight of the underside of workaday bra, a piece of Sellotape stuck to a backside — avoid those three things and she had a fighting chance.

They know the drill. She holds the key up, shoos them back to stop them pushing on the door. Danny is yanked by the collar by someone and thrown backwards, disappearing from the frame of the window like a cartoon character. Jo laughs, actually laughs at this, is reminded that no matter how shit this job can be she still works with teenagers, children who in the throes of a global pandemic will still find ways to be entertaining, ridiculous or hilarious. All of these things, and then horribly cruel and this is interminable chiaroscuro of the job. Light and shadow always together, so laugh, yes, but keep your eyes open lest someone takes your feet out from under you, jumps up and throws a chair. She places the key in the lock, pauses a moment, blinks and repairs her face, swallows hard. No sign of Darren.

When she turns the lock they are meant to file in one by one, but instead the door breaks open and it all crashes over, a crescendo of noise, a torrent of bodies, some shoved in who shouldn’t be, others just shoving because shoving is what is done around doors. English timetabled, but it is a whole chemistry lesson of violent reactions, bouncing, thumping, flaming, crashing, shouting, laughing, moaning, slapping, yanking, tripping and yelling.

She steps back and pulls her mask up over her mouth as she manages to resurface. ‘Oi!’ she splutters into the crowd, picking out Charlie who is now trying to charge back out. ‘Come on. Once you’re in, you’re in!’

‘Miss, man,’ he says, pointing to someone ducking and weaving up the corridor, ‘he’s got my pen!’

She can’t see who he is, but granted, Charlie will need a pen.

He takes Jo’s permission before she’s given it, dashes up the corridor and wrestles his friend to the ground amid a chorus of cheering, trainers flying in on both of them. A little lull round the doorway because of this, Jordan and Michael diverting to join the melee. They’re big lads, have all put on inches over the summer, filled out in every dimension.

Hayley approaches with some of her friends and it’s the same for them too: each less girl than when Jo had last seen them, and more woman. Their skirt-tops are rolled over and over how they like them, landing the hem mid-thigh, all them trilling hello, Hayley fussing at the cuticles of the nails that are done to the max.

‘See you’ve got your priorities right,’ Jo says, nodding at the little stick she’s using to push the flesh back, and Hayley pulls her selfie face, holds them up as if for a photo and laughs, ‘yeah, right hand first, then left.’ Such a nice kid.

‘Very droll,’ Jo tells Hayley, ‘I hope you’ve sanitised, right?’ She funnels them in through the door then turns and calls, ‘right, hurry up!’ at no one in particular, and no one in particular listens. Neither Jordan nor Michael react, so — rules be damned — she launches out from the doorway to approach them. Michael turns and scowls before carrying on talking to a girl Jo can’t recognise, an expanse of glistening Lyrca pulled around almost all of her face. Almost nobody else is wearing one, and Jo doesn’t know what she is meant to feel about this, tries out different emotions — worry, relief, anger, empathy — but finds that none really feel true on their own. She opens out an arm to guide them in.

‘Don’t touch me, man,’ Michael spits. ‘Do. Not. Touch me.’

‘Innit,’ Jordan concurs with faux menace, knowing damned well that she’d never dare, this new panic of new rules nonetheless giving them a new means of baiting her, insisting that for their safety she cannot come too close. But before she can think of a way to turn this sneer — to use its own energy and send it back with enough spice to earn a smiling nod from Jordan that yes, she still had it — a battle erupts, a group of boys turning and forming, morphing and twisting like a rolling Hepworth, hard as bronze. Jesus, she thinks, even if they were wearing full PPE could they get any further from the idea of social distancing? Inside the womb of this scrum Jo can just see a boy, shoved this way, then that, baseball cap off, half of him trying to reach it while half struggles to break free. He emits a yelp like a fox as the hard toes of a trainer fly towards him, all the time working to get himself back up to his feet.

Please God, she prays, don’t let Darren be among them. She needs to start positive, can’t have an attempt to discipline him the first thing she does this year when it was the very last thing she did last. No, mustn’t be moaning on the very first day, so she doesn’t go straight over, forces a laugh instead and calls, ‘come on, that’s enough! Two metres please.’ Silly boys, too much testosterone, wrestling and jousting. Jump in and they’d probably say she’d spoiled their fun.

There is laughter, but some of the kicks are really going in, and she recoils a little as she sees two punches land hard. Darren isn’t among them, she’s sure of that now, but — snoods round mouths and noses — neither does she recognise them or know any of their names. Function of a big school, it happens. Over two hundred children in each year, half of them with hoods permanently raised, a kind of brutal monastery, anonymity prized.

The boy in the middle of it all has made his way back to his feet and a couple of them have pinned him up on one whitewashed wall of the corridor, just beyond a large display board that’s got photos of the lovely Year 7 trip to Canterbury last February. The only trip last year, as it turned out. She’s annoyed to see that people have already brushed their bags up against it and the backing paper has begun to rip. Someone from management will doubtless be up to nag.

Then she sees the actual terror on the boy’s face. One of them has cocked his fist at him, drawing it back like an archer, aiming head high.

‘Stop it!’ she shouts, suddenly back in the present. ‘Stop that!’

But they don’t seem to hear and she looks unsure, doubts whether her voice actually sounded. Lock yourself away alone in your flat for months and it turns out that this can actually be a question, but before she has time to answer it the boy’s eyes widen in panic, then slam shut in anticipation of pain.

Just at the last a door swings open and the approaching fist pulls out. Mr Jackson.

‘What do you think you’re doing?!’ he yells, and Jo comically smarts like he’s telling her off too, which he might well do — standing in a daze while these boys went about beating someone up. As soon as they see the Head they melt, tight grips turning fluidly to pats on the boy’s shoulder, the solid caps of trainers transformed instantly to slowly oozing steps, turning, relaxed, away from the scene.

‘Alright Sir,’ they say. ‘Just messing.’ Lowering their coverings to flash wide smiles while the boy now kneels, picking up his cap, breathing quickly, unsure if it is really over.

‘Messing with the bubbles we are trying to maintain to keep you lot safe! Get to your lessons,’ Jackson orders, and they look him up and down a bit, take some measurements and then troop off.

‘What was that about?’ Jo asks the boy sympathetically, more loudly than she might need to, but trying to recover some sense of agency. He doesn’t say anything, just offers a crumpled look, an almost imperceptible shake of the head as he pulls his hat firmly down. He gets up, attempts to straighten himself out, looks at a creased timetable, then the number on Jo’s door, winces as he feels for a rib and ducks through it.

Shit. She tries to hide her wide-eyed surprise. She hasn’t actually checked her class list for changes; it’s their GCSE year, she hadn’t thought she’d even need to. Jackson turns inspector, peers a moment at her door and the noise coming out of it before looking further along at a corridor that has miraculously cleared. His suit has a lustrous, firm weave that holds its shape in a way that a young staff member’s cheaper cloth never would.

After the mess with Darren, Jo has become convinced that he wants to find a way to be rid of her.

‘I’m an embarrassment,’ she’d said earlier that morning to Cara, who teaches in the room opposite.

Cara had told her that she was being ridiculous. ‘You’ve got experience,’ she’d pushed back. ‘Right now that’s invaluable in a school like Cromwell.’

‘Yes but you say experience to Jackson and you can see him auto-replace it with expensive.’

Cara had laughed but Jo knows that there’s some truth in her worries. Budgets had been strangle-tight even before this, and now things could only be worse, so the last thing he needed was a fight kicking off first day back from lockdown, a fight right next to the teacher who went viral in March, hollering for a student to fuck off out of her classroom.

‘Bitch!’ Darren had screamed back. ‘I fucking will leave! School is dead, man!’ finally obeying one of Jo’s instructions, getting up to go, fucking off out of her classroom, nearly knocking the door off its hinges. That was it. In loco parentis and she had gone loco, had totally lost it with him.

It had made it to YouTube before Jackson had even heard what had happened. Scores of views before he’d called her in to explain herself, him furious, baying for blood, thinking first of reputation, threats of action against her for putting the school’s image at risk, Jo breaking down, finally telling all. I’m so sorry, my mum has been terribly ill, she’s actually dying, and I… he’d been shocked into silence, into a spluttered expression of condolence, and Jo had gone running and sobbing to get her things, rushing from the building, racing to see her mother while there was still time.

There hadn’t been much, not nearly enough to say all she’d wanted to. A week, then the hospital had curled into battle-mode, all visits banned. Another week or so and she was gone. April. Not even allowed to the funeral.

So yes, if it’s the first day back and already the Head is interrogating her again she feels she has some cause for worry. Sally’s you’re going to do great feels optimistic at best.

‘Everything under control Miss Barker? Are you sure you can manage?’ Jackson’s questioning snaps her back into the now. She can’t see his mouth, feels that half of the information she’d normally work with has been taken away. Stripped of any moderating smile the words land fully loaded, a subtle flash of the steel he is carrying, concealed for now but she’s sure he won’t hesitate to use it.

She tells him that she is fine. ‘Tens of thousands dead, no vaccine, back in front of classes.’ Her voice chokes like a faulty engine, refuses to go further. She restarts, more serious. ‘But yes, everything under control.’

But he is not a man of humour, nor much grace. Taught Physics once (not well, apparently) so his universe is hard laws. He nods as if pondering slowly, looking over the English department corridor as if it were a troublesome galaxy. ‘A big year,’ he says, though he neglects to add who for.

Jo gathers herself to speak again, as if this were perhaps the right moment to remind him of her long service. But he pulls his eyebrows up, stretches his half-face into a picture of impatience.

‘A chance to redeem yourself,’ he says.

Her actual face is a poor mask. It slips and folds, creases and furrows under the cloth round her mouth as she collapses behind it all, trying to hide the smarting pain of him repeating words her mother had challenged her with.

Running out of school and up to the hospital, she’d told her mother what had happened with Darren, hoping for pure sympathy. But that wasn’t the Barker way, and instead she was told that she shouldn’t have, that the boy was just a child, that she had to look for a way to make things right.

Something had blown inside. ‘Jesus mum, I just needed a bit of sympathy.’ A shake of the head, a scoff that had rung its message clear: why are you always like this.

Mum had apologised then, and blamed a wave of pain. She’d reached out and asked Jo to start again, to tell her, to really explain how it had all happened. She’d taken her mother’s hand and they’d looked at one another — really looked, perhaps for the first time in god-knows how long, both withered, both exhausted — and something had begun to shift.

But then the enforced separation, then the final blow, leaving Jo full of echoes, locked away all summer looking for an answer to this hanging question of how to achieve her redemption. Even though some saner part of her knew it was her father’s religion speaking, her only conclusion had been a redoubled commitment to hard work. All of the sermons she’d grown up hearing him deliver had remixed themselves into this single problem: having lost a child, how was she going to make it better again?

She knows her mother had stood at church fetes, bragging ‘yes, my daughter is an English teacher, in such a tough school and she just loves it,’ had said nonsense like this without ever knowing the true brutality of her work, the sheer numbers of children that Jo was expected to carry without ever stumbling. Yet work was what she knew best, and this would be the forge from which she fashioned a restored reputation. In the waves of August heat, turning in her bed, peeling morning sheets