Banana Skin #1: Home

If press reports are right then tonight Boris Johnson will announce to the nation that the Covid-19 slogan ‘Stay at home. Save lives” will change to “Stay alert, control the virus and save lives.” As an English teacher, I notice that two imperatives (stay; save) are about to become three (stay; control; save) and that there is something comically amiss in the combination of ‘alert and control’. The visual image of the new slogan seems to make us all amateur virus detectives involved in a counter-Covid task force armed with masks, gloves and copious quantities of disinfectant (to spray, you understand, not to drink a la Trump.)

The word that is being removed from the slogan is, of course, ‘home’. Quite apart from the political complexities of when and how to ease the lockdown, this word and all of its connotations has preoccupied me since March 23rd. One of the reasons for this is that after two decades in the classroom I know ‘home’ to be a banana skin word for teachers.

During teacher training, we are taught to establish a classroom culture of our own as soon as we begin work with a class. This means that we spend every September establishing rules and expectations. For example, I do not expect my classes to stand up when I enter the room; I do expect students in Years 7–11 to put up their hands when they want to speak; Sixth Form students do not necessarily need to put their hands up when they contribute to discussions but they must be respectful of one another. And so it goes on. Within a few lessons, each teacher will establish a broadly similar classroom culture so that they and their students can work within a mutually-understood framework of expectations. Within this, we all make our own idiosyncratic variations. One of my ex-colleagues invariably taught lessons in her socks having kicked her shoes off under the desk and omitted to put them back on. I keep a stack of post-it notes and a ‘Thoughts and Feelings’ pot on my desk so that students can write down anything that they might find hard to say and leave it for my attention. The notes in this pot tend to say “Tom is an idiot” or “Your homework was way tooooo hard, miss (sic)” but sometimes students scrawl, “I wish dad wasn’t so angry all the time” or “I don’t like myself very much.” My theory here is that if our students can share what they feel then we can start trying to help them.

Part of this making of a classroom culture is about avoiding banana skins. And this means talking about Home at some early stage in one’s relationship with a class. I don’t plan this moment but it always comes in the first fortnight or so of a new school year as I say something like, “When you are doing this piece of work at home …” and then I hear the word rattle around my consciousness as I finish what I am saying. This when I need to avoid the banana skin tumble into crass assumptions and so I ask the class why ‘home’ can be a really complicated word. Students are usually quick and imaginative in their responses to this question and it does not take us long to establish that home is not always a safe or a happy place for people; that some people have more than one home if they move between divorced parents; that refugees have lost their homes; that some people do indeed live in cottages with roses over the doors; that home is a quiet, soft word that might actually mean a very cramped flat with noisy neighbours, cat pee in the shared hall and a hole where the letter box used to be.

I know that for some of my students the injunction ‘stay at home’ will have caused all sorts of problems. I think of one orphaned student, an only child, for whom lockdown will have meant weeks and weeks with her much loved grandparents who are now her primary carers. She will have missed daily contact with her peers a great deal. And I have worried and worried about the students who have really difficult domestic lives. These might involve an alcoholic parent, a parent struggling with mental illness, a bumpy patch with an adoptive parent or a new foster placement with all of the disorientation of that experience.

On the wall by our kitchen table hangs the picture above, a watercolour of my childhood home by a man who rang our doorbell and asked if he could paint our house for £100. My mum remembers feeling some alarm at the man’s arrival. She knew him to be a recently released prisoner and she felt a twinge of anxiety being at home with three children, my sister only a year old, with this chap at the door. Mum agreed to the painting because she had worked in prisons and knew how hard life after release can be but she did not offer the man a cup of tea and she still regrets this 38 years later. The artist, Jago Stone, sat on the corner, his back to the church a hundred metres down the road, and painted this slightly wonky, out of perspective watercolour. I love it for its story and because this house was my home for 23 years. I love it too because the comforting familiarity and homeliness of this building survived my parents’ divorce and because it is a house with an evolving identity. Our kitchen and the bedroom above it had been the last of a terrace of three workers’ cottages: two up two downs with narrow gardens at the back. Next door to this terrace was a pub - The Plough - with a thatched roof and a central position in the village on the corner just up the road from the church. At some point in the late nineteenth century, the thatch was replaced by tiles and the end terrace cottage and the pub were joined to become a larger, smarter building. And then, in the 1960s, the pub closed down and the building was converted into a home, which my parents bought in 1977. The pub cellar remained intact beneath a trap door in the corner of the dining room, there were two doors with sash-window serving hatches in the kitchen, and we had the pub to play in while Mum was in the kitchen. With its peculiar shape and all its windows, we could never forget that our home had once been something else and there were older folk in the village who reminisced about drinking there after work. My treasured watercolour by Stone, the artist-ex-convict, reminds me of how lucky I was to have this cottage-pub-house as the place where I grew up. It also reminds me to avoid assuming anything at all about the places that my students call home.