Only one hurdle remained before I could finally wave goodbye to my first (and last) year of teaching – the school concert.
The 7-year olds (who were now 8) were to perform ”I Can Sing A Rainbow” – a confusing ditty, in which pink featured as a rainbow colour and the listener was recommended to “Listen with your eyes”. After all my laborious efforts to teach them that they saw with their eyes and heard with their ears, this was an unwelcome intrusion into the right order of things and sowed confusion in the minds of the two Pink Little Girls, happy though they were to have added pinkness in their lives in the form of a new rainbow colour. They all had different coloured sheets of paper to raise when their colour was mentioned (naturally, there was a fuss between the two Pink Little Girls about who was to be pink) and as sure as anything, the blue would be lifted up at the purple bit, the yellow at the red, the orange at the pink, and as for the green, well nobody remembered to lift it up at all. Then disaster – the boys anounced they couldn’t come to the concert. Two weeks later, their parents assured me they were coming after all and so they were reintegrated into the rainbow, which was just as well, as a rainbow of only two had been damned awkward and the two Pink Little Girls didn’t really have hands enough to deal with all the colours required.
My Perfect Class were doing the Water Cycle, which required them to star as water vapour and waterfalls, raindrops and rivers, snowflakes and glaciers and while they were happy to assume these attractive aquatic forms, there was no end of fuss when I told them they had to double up as drains and sanitation plants.
The other classes were doing an animal play and wore big laminated photos of whatever animal they were round their necks and fought about whose animal was best. The crocodile wore a green jumper and pulled his sleeves down so he had the small crocodile arms and asked if he could slither on his belly, snapping at things – a request that was slapped down by The Boss, on the grounds that his parents wouldn’t see him if he was lying down on onstage. The cat wasn’t allowed to chase the mouse either, only this time the grounds were that an onstage chase could wreak havoc, with assorted animals being knocked down in the melee and injuries don’t usually go down well with parents.
Meanwhile, Zoe and Zara, the two zebras, could never remember who was who and so Zoe would speak Zara’s part and then Zara would repeat the same part and then there would be foot-stamping and cries of “I’m Zara!” and “No, I’M Zara”, until I would stamp my own foot and shout, “STOP! I’m Zara!” and then I remembered that I wasn’t Zara or any zebra at all indeed, but rather the teacher and supposed to be on top of this whole Zara, Zoe, Zebra thing.
The polar bear wanted to hire a fur suit, but settled for painting her nose black and the horse wanted absolutely to have a tail, even though none of the other animals were having one. The cat kept forgetting to miaow her “Hellaow” and the dog really wanted to be a parrot, but couldn’t, as the parrot belonged in another group, so we compromised on a puppy – not as good as a parrot, but still cuter than a dog. The tiger, who was on last, was supposed to growl ferociously and scare all the animals away, only he couldn’t say “GRR” properly and so just started to giggle and whoever heard of a tiger that giggled for God’s sake?
After an afternoon of animal business, I would arrive home, EXHAUSTED. I’d run a bath, but there was no respite there either. I’d find myself singing the animal song, “There’s a pink and yellow rabbit in my uncle’s hat, aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah! There’s a fat and happy elephant in there too, oooooooooooooooooh!” At such times I worried that I might have to be sectioned. Sectioned under the Mental Health Act, that is, not sectioned like a formaldehyde-filled small animal being dissected under a microscope. Although come to think of it, teaching offered me that experience too, in the form of sitting beside The Boss on my sofa, engaged in the cringe-worthy pursuit of watching a video of myself, teaching. As a Desirable Thing To Do, I’d put it at no. 835, below no. 834 (putting drops in a cat’s eye) and just above no. 836 (playing pass-the-parcel with a live grenade). I was dissected with scalpel-like efficiency and left in pieces of blood and gristle on the carpet. But from the painstakingly reassembled pieces emerged a new improved version of the Teaching Me.