There is a small boy in the playground, probably about eight years old, and he is crying while his young mother stands and looks away. In a flat voice, she says “Shut your mouth”. He cries on. “Shut your mouth”. He cries on. She turns and leans into his face. “Shut your mouth or I’ll slap you.” He shuts his mouth and starts to cry through his nose instead, and his mother looks away again.
The school doors have just opened for the day, and the children are arriving from every corner of the estate: out of the tower blocks with the spray-paint on the walls; past the empty houses with their windows all “tinned up” against the thieves; down the road where the young woman was murdered; round the corner where the old Alsatian shouts; and into the playground. Just about nobody arrives by car.
Outside the doors, it is chaos. A boy shows off the ear-stud he has been given for his birthday. A girl falls off the school wall and takes a cuff across the shoulder from her mother. Somewhere, a car alarm starts screaming. A mother in a dirty track suit shouts “Stop it off now” at the baby in her buggy. The boy loses his ear-stud and starts to scream. Two small boys and a girl scavenge in amongst the rubbish that the wind has collected. Then the parents start to drift away, and the school doors close, and something rather strange begins to happen.
You have to understand that this is a primary school which survives in a state of siege. It happens to be in Leeds but its like could be found on any of the hundreds of sink estates which now ring the cities of England. The poverty invades the school. You can see it in the fabric of the building, which has bars on its windows and a spiked fence around its grounds, none of which stops joy-riders careering around the playing fields at night, or intruders routinely robbing the building at weekends, leaving a trail of graffiti, syringes and broken windows behind them.
It touches the physical well-being of the children, who sleep in damp houses and turn up wheezing; who wake up to find no food in the house and come to school crying with hunger – in such numbers that seven months ago, the school started laying on breakfast. And it touches their personalities as they grow up in families which have collapsed under the weight of their hardship, spawning problems that are often bizarre, sometimes macabre, occasionally nightmarish, all of which amount to one overwhelming problem which presents itself each day to their headteacher. “These children have no hope – they live in a state of despair.”
And yet, the school fights back. Within five minutes of the doors closing, some two hundred children are sitting cross-legged in lines on the floor of the main hall, and the teacher says “Good Morning, everybody” and they chime back “Good morning, everybody”, and she starts to tell them a story and they go all quiet and serious as she explains that this is a story about a girl who could not see and could not hear, and her name was Helen Keller.
She tells them how this girl grew up angry and tried to damage everything and everyone around her, kicking and fighting and scratching. “We sometimes say to you that your behaviour is bad, but no-one here behaves as badly as Helen. Because she was frustrated. She used to have the most incredible paddies.”
Looking at the children now, you can see only the tiniest hints of their lives outside. A couple of them are heaving with fatigue. Others have shabby clothes and broken shoes and there is something oddly adult about some of them: the eleven-year-old girl with her tight black mini-skirt and her tee-shirt that says she is “100% babe”; the little boys with men’s faces. For the most part, as they sit here now with their thumbs in their mouths, listening to their story, their poverty is invisible and they seem immune to trouble.
But these children understand how Helen Keller felt. There is a six-year-old boy here who is quite bright but who cannot handle anything going wrong and suddenly throws terrible tantrums in class and says he wants to kill himself. As far as the teachers can tell, his mother is working as a prostitute and parks him with friends while she goes out on the street or, worse, brings men home while he is in the house. There is another boy, slightly older, who mutilates himself, digging into his arms with any tool he can find, acting out some unnamed horror at home.
Sometimes the clues to the damage are obvious, like the children who have been acting out hard core pornography in the playground, copying videos they have seen at home; or the eight-year-old who brought a six-inch knife to school so that he could settle some bother with another pupil. Sometimes, the clues are harder to see: the boy who was suddenly sullen because, in the background, his elder brother had been jailed for five years; the strange excitement between unrelated children after the holidays when, it turns out, they were involved in some kind of sexual abuse between their two families.
There was an outbreak of friction in the playground between an eleven-year-old boy and some other children and, when the teachers investigated, they discovered that the boy’s father had fallen out with another family in his street and persuaded his son to set fire to their house by stuffing a flaming rag through their letter box. The next day, the boy was at school, along with the children whose house he had burned, who knew very well that he was responsible.
There are times when the teachers can help. There is a girl in the hall now who is swollen with fat, something which happened over the last year without any explanation until the school discovered that her mother could not afford to pay for any fuel at home and was reduced to feeding her daughter on nothing but chips from the fish shop on the estate. And there are times when help seems futile – like the mother who came in last week to describe her attempt at suicide. The teacher found an excuse to send her two children out of the room, so that they would not have to hear the story. But what was the point? They had been there when she tried to kill herself. They had already seen it all and heard it all and taken it all in.
But right now, the children are not thinking of their problems. The teacher is telling them how a governess broke into Helen Keller’s world of darkness by offering her kindness, how she persuaded the girl to stop throwing tantrums and to start to learn, and when the teacher asks how anyone could teach a blind child how to read, dozens of them shoot their hands in the air, using their spare hand to push their elbow even higher in hopes of being noticed.
There are children here who will survive, perhaps because their families have managed to resist the stresses of life on the estate, perhaps because the school, itself, will offer them a way out. There are pupils from this school who have gone on to succeed. One is a policeman, another is a teacher, some have gone on to secondary school and college. But those are exceptions. The most famous graduate of this primary school is a boy who was tortured by his family life and committed £150,000 of robberies before he was eleven years old.
The school has seen new shoots broken off, like the little girl who was a natural gymnast who couldn’t come and practice after school any more because she had to take over the care of her younger siblings, or the difficult boy who wanted to be a cub scout and who was offered the chance by the school, who arranged to pay for his uniform and to recruit the cub leader as an assistant at the school. It looked like a turning-point in the boy’s life, but then his father said he couldn’t take him to cubs, even one evening a week, because it did not fit in with his time table.
The teachers sometimes ask the children what they want to be when they grow up and invariably, they hear the same answer – “Nothing.” These children have no dreams. They have no heroes either, not even football players or rock stars. The nearest they have to role models are junk heroes from pulp fiction. In the nursery school the other day, they kitted out a four-year-old girl in a nurse’s uniform and when they asked her what she was dressed as, she had no idea. She looked at her cape and took a guess. “Batman?”
The school is trying to teach them not only how to be adults but also how to be children. When they first arrive, many of them cannot play, simply because they have no toys at home and they have never been near adults who had the energy or interest to play with them.
The teacher has reached the end of her story now and told them all how Helen learned to read and write and to escape from the troubles which had beset her. “There is nobody here who has the problems that Helen had, yet how many times do we hear children saying ‘I can’t do it, it’s too hard’. But there is nothing that you can’t do.” And when they wrinkle up their eyes and put their pudgey hands together and pray for the courage to keep on trying, they mean every little word of it.
These seeds of self-belief are allowed to grow for about six hours and then the school has to uproot them and send the children home – home where a two-yearold sister fell out of an upstairs window the other week because no-one was looking after her, where one of their fathers is suspected of murdering the young woman who died on the estate earlier this year, where many of them are left to fend for themselves while their parents deal with their own struggles.
It is not that the parents fail to love their children. When the school puts on a play at Christmas, the parents pack the hall and cheer with pride, but they have themselves grown up in chaos and despair. Many of them have no books for their children; and if the school tries to solve the problem by sending books home, they find parents angry and confused because they never had books themselves and never learned to read.
At the end of the day, as the children start to trail away, kicking and fighting and scratching again, their head teacher sometimes remembers the time that the Archbishop of Canterbury visited the school and watched all the children singing. Afterwards, he asked her about the childrens’ eyes – why it was that the youngest ones had a sparkle when they sang, while the ten and eleven-year-olds looked so dull and lifeless. And so she told him the truth. “These children have no hope,” she said. “They live in a state of despair.”
