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This is a curiosity : some of my own creative writing. This was written years back, for a couple of Year 9 kids who I'd really enjoyed teaching, who were leaving our school and were very uncertain about the whole business of starting up someplace else. They will be in their early twenties now, that uncertain future by now a distant past. Reading it for the first time in almost a decade, it reads like a message from my younger self about a wholly different set of uncertainties and  transitions, which seems somehow fitting. It's really teachers, not those stock market/banking chaps, who deal in the futures market.

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For Alejandra and Paula

Two blank pieces of paper lay flat on top of the brown wooden table. She knew the place was hers; it had her name typed on a card in clean, sensible, emotionless black letters. Although rows and rows of identical tables stretched out as far as the eye could see, perhaps to infinity, in the high-roofed hall, this one was hers. So she pulled the chair back, and sat down.

“Ah…good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Er…are we all in the right place ? Good, good. My name’s Mr. Peters, and I’ll be invigilating this morning.” The speaker was an apologetic, middle-aged looking man with the air of a teacher who couldn’t find his way back to the staff room. Only a faint yellow light hanging around his greying hair suggested anything different. “Well, you have forty-five minutes to complete the exam. Your time starts…NOW !”

She turned over the exam paper. There was only one question, in the same clean, sensible, emotionless black print as the namecard :

Why do you think you deserve to enter the Kingdom of Heaven ? Justify your answer.

Crap. She’d been hoping for something easier.

Oh well. Here goes. She scratched her nose, and started to write : I’m really clever. And good at Drama. And I was really good with the younger kids in the Drama Club at my last school.  Maybe they won’t have a Drama Club here, she thought. And everyone will be really clever. Maybe I’ll be the youngest kid. That won’t do. So she crossed it out.

I’ve always been kind . And helpful, , she wrote. And I’ve got lots of positive energy. I’ve always got a smile for everybody. Big deal, she thought. Anyone can be kind and helpful. And I bet all these kids are smiling all the time.

She scratched her head, and looked around her. Everyone else had their heads down, writing furiously, filling the paper with line after line after line.

She didn’t recognise anybody. Nobody from her other school. Suddenly, she felt very alone.

She looked again at the blank page, and scratched out what she’d just written.Then she wrote, slowly and deliberately : But Idon’t want to go. I want to go back to my old school. I want to stay there.  And then, ashamed, crossed it out.

She started doodling in the margin. Suddenly, she couldn’t think of a single thing to write. All these other children, all the ones she didn’t know, worked furiously away. They must be cleverer, more interesting, know so much more than her if they had so much to write. Everything she’d ever done, everything she’d ever been, seemed so small when she looked across at these industrious strangers.

This wasn’t looking good. She looked over to the next table. The girl there had just crossed the last perfect T, put the last perfect full stop, placed her pen carefully down on the table, and was beaming with satisfaction. The page was immaculate.

Her own page, needless to say, was a messy scribble, crossed out again and again. She chewed on her pen, trying to find a single decent thing to write. Ink dribbled down her chin.

And then a clock somewhere was striking 12… and St. Peter was raising his hand…and saying “TIME UP ! Please be finishing off the sentence you are writing, and put your pens down.”

With a last, desperate surge of energy she leaned over, grabbed the bottle of Tipp-ex from the girl on the next table, wrenched off the lid, and poured every single last drop onto her page, obliterating in an instant the wretched mess on the paper.

Then she handed the exam in.

                                               *          *          *          *

The Director gestured to her, with a wave of his hand, to sit in the empty chair in front of the desk in the gloomy office. He was a small man, much smaller than she’d imagined, in a dark grey suit, dark hair, neat, clipped moustache, keen brown eyes looking out through small, neat glasses. When he spoke, his voice was so quiet that you had to lean forward to hear what he was saying – and even then you couldn’t be sure. “Original mumble mumble unusual mumble mumble mumble precedents mumble normal procedures…”

“I’m sorry, could you say that again, please ?”

“I’m sorry.” This time the Director spoke up. “ Your exam was very unusual. It’s a long time since I’ve seen one like that. It’s against our normal procedures, of course, and I should warn you that not all the staff agree with the decision. But a decision has been taken. And the decision is to admit you.”

“I’m sorry ?”

“You’ve passed. Don’t look so surprised. I have to read all sorts of rubbish from people trying to get in here. Half of them are self-satisfied idiots, and the other half are liars. But they don’t understand. We’re only a little interested in what our clients have been in the past, or in what they’ve done. We’re  really interested in their future. We’re interested in who they might become. We look at them as you might look at a blank page…”

Was there a hint of a smile underneath the moustache ?

“So…”

“Congratulations !” And the Director reached across the desk, and awkwardly, uncomfortably, shook her by the hand, like a man who’d seen the gesture on TV and was just trying it out, practising it for the first time. “Er…you can go now !”

As she turned back to the plain wooden door, she heard the Director say, “Sorry,no…not that way. This way, please.”

And she realised there was a door in the office she hadn’t seen before, in the opposite wall, with two transparent plastic gates, which opened with a SWISH as she walked towards them, like the doors in an airport.

The path led gently up in front of her. Away in the distance…it was kind of blurred, kind of fuzzy…but she thought she could make out the shapes of people. One of them was wearing a big top hat, and funny sunglasses. Some were doing sports, some were reading books with great interest.  Some of them seemed to be setting off on some kind of journey. Yes, lots of them were smiling. And there was a Drama Club.

She squinted in disbelief. One of the blurred figures was very familiar.

She turned back to the Director, at his desk behind her. “But that’s…”

“ You. Of course it is. From wherever you’re standing, there’s always a part of you that’s there in the past. But there are many, many parts of you that are there in the future, waiting for you further up the road. So you look back; but you also look forward. To the life you’re going to have, and the things you’re going to do, and the people you’re going to meet. You’d…um…be surprised to know what may be in store for you, young Paula…or is it Alejandra ?” And he shuffled the papers on his table around.

For the first time, she noticed his nametag, and smiled : Of course.

She looked wistfully back to the plain wooden door, and sighed. Mr. Janus smiled. “Now you wouldn’t want to stay in Year 9 for the rest of your life, would you ?”

And she smiled back. “No. I wouldn’t want that.”

“On you go.”

She stepped through the door…onwards. And upwards.

Ogion

 It's likely that my blog, inevitably, is likely to turn away from topics of theatre and poetry and more towards the role ( pun intended ) that I'll be spending  my time on in the next few years.

 At times when interviewing, I've been known to ask people to talk about a teacher they have admired, or who has influenced them. Sometimes ( although not always ) it can be a revealing question : a gentler, less direct way of asking "What are you doing here ? What brought you to this place ?"

More to the point, it cuts to the essence of what teaching is. For some of us it's a profession;  but as I often point out to kids, we are all of us at some stage in our lives teachers  : we all get given something by those who walked the road before us, which turn gives us both the opportunity and the obligation to pass it on.

Now there are certainly a number of teachers - three or four in particular - who I admired, and who influenced me, amongst my teachers and professional colleagues. But since today is Book Day, I'd like to write first about a fictional teacher.

Ogion the Silent is a character in A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula le Guin, the first book in her series of Earthsea novels which I first came across in 1976 ( on Jackanory, BBC television , a programme where for 20 minutes each afternoon, an actor sat in front of a TV camera and read out loud from a book. Nothing but words, and the occasional still image. )

A Wizard of Earthsea is wisdom literature for 12-year-olds, a study in power and responsibility,  the story of Ged, Sparrowhawk, a boy with vast but raw magical power, who travels to the centre of the world to study at a school for wizards, where in his pride and desire to show off his power and knowledge he lets loose a dark shadow into the world, and is forced to chase and be chased by it in a series of nightmare adventures across a range of pseudo-Celtic western islands until....well, read the book. You won't be disappointed.


Ogion is a minor character in Ged's story : an archetypal gatekeeper, the mentor-figure who guides the hero at the start of his journey. He is also a teacher, and a symbolic father. He inhabits a space halfway between a Celtic wild man from the age of saints, and a Zen monk. Here is how le Guin introduces him :

" Ged had thought that as the prentice of a great mage he would enter at once into the mystery and mastery of power. He would understand the language of the beasts and the speech of the leaves of the forest, he thought, and sway the winds with his word, and learn to change himself into any shape he wished. Maybe he and his master would run together as stags, or fly to Re Albi over the mountain on the wings of eagles.

But it was not so at all. They wandered, first down into the Vale, and then gradually further south and westward around the mountain, given lodging in little villages or spending the night out in the wilderness, like poor journeymen-sorcerors, or tinkers, or beggars. They entered no mysterious domain. Nothing happened. The mage's oaken staff that Ged had watched at first with eager dread was nothing but a stout staff to walk with. Three days went by and four days went by and still Ogion had not spoken a single charm in Ged's hearing, and had not taught him a single rune or spell.

Though a very silent man he was so mild and calm that Ged soon lost his awe of him, and in a day or two more he was bold enough to ask his master, "When will my apprenticeship begin, Sir ?"

"It has begun," said Ogion.

There was a silence, as if Ged was keeping back something he had to say. Then he said it : "But I haven't learned anything yet !"

"Because you haven't found out what I am teaching," replied the mage, going on at his steady, long-legged pace along their road."

We can certainly draw the conclusion that Ogion is just a bloody annoying Zen-type person and the sooner we get onto the next chapter the better : he probably wouldn't be much use as a line manager, really.This is some distance from Assessment Working Groups and reports deadlines, the type of detail on which we spend much of our working lives. I've re-read this passage many times over 40 years, and it's easy to read too much into it as well.

And yet Ogion remains a powerful archetype, a reminder that we all have gatekeepers and mentors at different points in our lives, that even as we learn we serve as teachers to others in turn, and that progress is not always so simple to measure.

And above all, that sometimes it's impossible to distinguish between the way we do something and the thing that we do. The way that we do the work is the work, and if we think we can set an objective which is somehow distinct and separate from the process we follow to achieve it, we may miss the point - in truth, we may not even be able to see the point.

In the context of twentieth-first century teaching, it's worth considering that the metaphor derives from archery : "point" is an Early Modern English word for "target".

Islands of Their Contentment

I'm not normally in the habit of doing this, but I'm dedicating this blog to a couple of my actors from Under Milk Wood, Mike Tweedie and Ingrid Miller. Mike’s just got married to the lovely Anne McConnell, and Ingrid’s leaving Madrid to train to be a professional actor. So, while I babble on about two of the characters they created in UMW... good luck to you both, and thank you for the amazing job you did to bring these characters to life.

Mog Edwards and Myfanwy Price ( played by Mike and Ingrid in our production ) are probably two of my favourite characters in the play. Mog is a small-town shopkeeper from the top end of Llareggub, a draper, an occupier of  small spaces,appropriately concerned with keeping up appearances, hemmed in by small-town religion and small-town lack of ambition. Myfanwy, the sweetshop-keeper from the bottom end of the town, is even less : you sense that going out into her garden to hang out the washing is as big an adventure as she can cope with. They are, of course, made for each other, and profess an intense, passionate, although in Mog’s case slightly inarticulate love for each other in letters they write each night; this is their only contact. Each perfectly fills the other’s need for a Mills and Boone, matinée-idol love affair without the financial and emotional risks – and the risk of disappointment -  involved in actually meeting the other person.

So far, this sounds pretty dark stuff; that synopsis reads like something out of Dubliners ( particularly “A Painful Case”), James Joyce’s collection of short stories about wasted lives blighted by small-town values and lack of ambition. I don’t dispute that Mog and Myfanwy can certainly be played that way, as “outcast from life’s feast”, in Joyce’s memorable phrase. But I don’t think that’s Dylan’s intention.

I’ve written elsewhere on this blog about what makes theatre the wonderful, addictive thrill that keeps us coming back for more, and the key word is COLLABORATION. You bring something to the party, and if you're really lucky, find out that the weird, creative folks in the room with you can pick it up, play with it, reshape it and hand it back to you as something way cooler than you'd ever imagined possible, and by the time you've finished, you can't really remember where it all came from.  As director, I had imagined Myfanwy, the sweetshop-keeper, as the way she’s usually portrayed  : demure and understated.  Ingrid turned up at audition with, well, a different approach.

With Madrid Players, Ingrid has tended to play strong female characters ( and monkeys ) : The Queen of Hearts, Lady Macbeth, Trudy from Steel Magnolias, various incarnations of Death. Her take on Myfanwy’s first appearance, where she fantasizes about Mog as some Mills-and-Boone wildman rampaging down the hill to sweep her off her feet and drag her off to his emporium-on-the-hill for, well, a good ravishing, was not understated in the least. In 297 re-readings of the scene, I’d always read it as a negotiation, as Myfanwy and Mog conversing; of course, I'd misunderstood. Suddenly, Ingrid showed us a woman pouring into her fantasies all the passion and intensity she keeps at arm’s length in her “real” life. And of course, Mog speaks with Myfanwy’s voice, the words she wants to hear, because it’s her fantasy.

In rehearsal, Mike and Ingrid built on this. The energy and movement in the blocking flowed very naturally after the still, word-focused opening, and the matinée idol fantasy fell into place, to be reflected later in Susie Jones’ perfect retro styling of Ingrid’s hair. Here's what they finished up with :

Mike’s big monologue, where Mog composes his love letter to Myfanwy, presents certain difficulties these days. Dylan was poking good-natured fun at the avarice of small-town shopkeepers, and the restrictive influence of religion in small communities, but frankly if these were recognizable features of 1950’s life in Wales, they’re gone for good now ( at least in the North ), and as it is the speech needs as many notes and subtitles as Dickens to make sense. If it's to work as anything other than a heavy-handed period piece, you have to find something else which will open it up and connect with an audience.

When Mog writes his letter to Myfanwy…I don’t know if sexting has killed off the love letter, but I’m guessing a lot of people remember what it’s like to have a blank sheet in front of them and the burning need to put their feelings into words…you want to be vulnerable - it's a LOVE LETTER, for goodness sake -   but how vulnerable do you actually want to be ?  They don’t teach you how to do this in school, thankfully.

Is that too much of a cliché I’ve just written ? It sounds good, but is it actually true ? Will (s)he recognize where I pinched that bit from ? What if s(he) thinks it’s funny ? We found the key in Mog’s line “…then we will be together for ever and ever !”, with its echo of an 8-year-old’s storytelling. What if Mog is not a gifted writer ? Every single night he gets to sit down with his homework, his nightly love letter to Myfanwy. What if he’s like Christian, Roxane’s gorgeous but inarticulate suitor from Cyrano de Bergerac, only in his case there’s no Cyrano to help him with the words ? 

As with almost all of UMW, this is a genius writing at the height of his powers; Dylan is aware of the power of language to spin out beautiful half-truths in the service of a deception; ironically, because Mog is an incompetent writer, his letter is true.

I’ve touched before on how UMW is a play about happiness, with all its strange couples all strangely happy in the strangeness of their relationships, washed by Dylan’s sadness at the shipwreck of his own marriage. That’s how I read Mog and Myfanwy’s last appearance :

 

“FIRST VOICE

Mr. Mog Edwards and Miss Myfanwy Price happily apart from one another at the top and the sea end of the town write their everynight letters of love and desire. In the warm White Book of Llareggub you will find the little maps of the islands of their contentment.”

There’s an odd little Zen vibe running through this. We all live in a culture which tends to focus on achievement. The stories we often tell each other, the stories we often tell ourselves,  suggest that our happiness, our fulfilment, is to be found in a happy ending : get married and live happily ever after, save the world from the killer robots and everything’s all right again. But life doesn’t actually give us endings, or at least rarely happy ones. At the end of UMW, it’s clear that Mog and Myfanwy’s dreams won’t come true – because maybe that’s not what dreams are actually for. Their relationship gives them a space to be happy in; they travel hopefully, because they know they will never arrive.

They remind me of a couple in another much-loved book. In Love in the Time of Cholera, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Florentino Ariza has loved  Fermina Daza, and courted her unsuccessfully, for 53 years, 7 months, and 11 days ( with their nights ). The vagaries of life, and 498 pages of novel, conspire to keep them apart, until finally they’re united, in old age, on an old steamboat travelling backwards and forwards up the river, banned from docking in port by the protocols to control a cholera epidemic. This is how the novel “ends” :

“El capitán miró a Fermina Daza y vio en sus pestañas los primeros destellos de una escarcha invernal. Luego miró a Florentino Ariza, su dominio invencible, su amor impávido, y lo asustó la sospecha tardía de que es la vida, más que la muerte, la que no tiene límites.

-¿ Y hasta cuándo cree usted que podemos seguir en este ir y venir del carajo? – le preguntó.

Florentino Ariza tenía la respuesta preparada desde hacía cincuenta y tres años, siete meses y once días con sus noches.

-          Toda la vida – dijo.

And in my slightly wobbly translation ( I don't believe it's possible to translate "carajo" accurately : )  )

The captain looked at Fermina Daza and saw on her eyelashes the first glimmer of a winter frost. Then he looked at Florentino Ariza, his invincible strength, his undaunted love, and found himself shocked by the slowly-dawning suspicion that it is life, rather than death, that has no limits.

“And how long do you think we can carry on with this frigging coming and going ?” he asked.

Florentino Ariza had had his answer ready for fifty-three years, seven months and eleven days with their nights.

“ Forever,” he said.

I've babbled on too much already, but this improbable Wales-Colombia connection also finds a harbour in Rota, near Cádiz, now home to Anna Rámirez, who helped with the most amazing props for UMW, including a whole series of beautifully addressed envelopes for the letters which Willy Nilly delivers to different characters.

I kept a number as souvenirs, and in front of me as I write, I have Mog's letter to Myfanwy :

 Now, as I hold the envelope up to the light, I can see that there's actually and handwritten letter inside it; and it appears to carry either a watermark, or a stamp, saying SHOP at MOG EDWARDS.

Obviously, it's pretty unforgiveable to steam open someone else's mail. But the fact that I was seriously thinking about grabbing the kettle - and not, like, ripping the thing open, in case Mog finds out what I've done - shows just how far this craziness can go. I mean, it's all right to open the letter of a fictional character, isn't it ?

And I know that inside, I'll find the letter Dylan wrote, that Mike learned and remodelled and made his own and shared with the audience over four days in March last year. It'll be lovingly copied out in Anna's handwriting. I'm sure that's all that's in there.

But what if I find another, different, new love letter from Mog Edwards to Myfanwy Price ?