Making endings
Gordon lives two doors away from us. He turned eighty a fortnight ago and one of his retirement pastimes is wood-turning. Periodically, he brings us scraps of wood from his workshop to use as kindling for our wood-burner. One of these kindling bags contained the two halves of this beautiful sycamore bowl. Gordon had finished polishing the bowl and its lid and then, as he reached up to put it on the top shelf in his workshop, it slipped from his hands and fell onto the concrete floor, splitting in two. And so the bowl and its lid came to us as kindling. But even broken the bowl was beautiful: the sycamore is pale and marked with fine lines that tell of its age and maturity. You can see the impact of its fall in a horizontal scratch and the curve of the hand-shaped bowl was lovely even in two pieces.
The bowl lived on our kitchen table — broken — for several months until my mum came to stay. She was studied it, considered the shatter-lines in the wood, and then asked if she could squeeze it into her suitcase and take it home on the train to mend it.
Several weeks later, the bowl returned to us, whole. Mum had used wood glue and felted Herdwick wool to join the shatter-lines in a way that drew attention to the bowl’s break and its repair. And to add a new texture to the polished sycamore. Conscious of the centuries-old Japanese techniques of kintsugi (mending broken pottery using lacquer mixed with gold powder) and sashiko (the visible mending of textiles), she had fused the two, using a textile to make a visible mend of a solid object.
I love this broken and healed bowl. And the concepts of kintsugi and sashiko have been very important to me in my teaching life, as well as in my private life. I never, ever want to convey a sense of perfection to my students; I do not want them to strive for it nor to expect it. Instead, I want them to know that is is normal to get a bit scratched and scraped by life; it is more than acceptable to be dented and fractured in places. These marks of living — our scars and wounds — are to be acknowledged and respected. I am very careful with students not to talk too much about celebrating scars, metaphorical or literal, because self-harm is a dangerous temptation for young people in moments of crisis and that is not to be glamorised. But I do tell them about the writer Kathleen Jamie’s book ‘Frissure’, made with the artist Brigid Collins, in which the two women explore the visual possibilities of Jamie’s mastectomy scar. They make it into a briar rose, a horizon line, a shore-line, the length of a slender harebell. And I tell students about the tattoos that trace my sister’s scoliosis: a curve of butterflies rising up her spine towards the nape of her neck.
The abrupt closure of schools on March 20th, left many aspects of students’ lives raw and ragged. My Year 13 students have been denied their final exams; their leavers’ rituals of a farewell assembly; dinner with their tutors; last lessons; farewells to friends; and a ball that marked the end of their school lives with champagne, a disco, extravagant dresses, crisp tuxedos and an early hours after-party by the lake. Several of these students have written to me expressing their shock and dismay. One young man articulated his sense of powerlessness: he had planned to caffeine-fuelled revision cramming for his final exams after a rather lackadaisical Sixth Form career. Instead, he has to rely on us, his teachers, to calculate his eventual grades. Other students are worried that their teacher-predicted grades might not be as good as the ones that they could (possibly) have achieved themselves after long nights and early mornings of revision. Others express shock at being unable to ‘prove themselves’ in definitive exams.
Meanwhile my Year 11 students have suddenly segued straight into a clunky start to Year 12. They were expecting revision, study leave, and then their GCSEs, but instead their exam results have been calculated by their teachers and they are starting work on material that they were not expecting to encounter until September. These students feel wrong-footed, disorientated and confused. How they can muster enthusiasm for new courses with so abrupt a transition?
And, of course, Year 6 students will suddenly find themselves moving on to secondary school without the guided transitional term that is so important for them. My 6 year old nephew’s Year 1 experience now consists of phonics exercises and counting tasks emailed to his parents, and I feel so sad for my ex-students who are just two terms into their first years at university. Their new independence, the energy and privacy of their uni’ lives have been cauterised and they are back home, learning long-distance.
Amid all this, I tell my students to find ways of making their own endings and transitions. Younger students might need more help with this than the older ones but it is still possible for them to be creative with the loose ends in their lives. Like the shattered wood made whole with wool, I tell my students to make their own ‘closures’. They cannot repair the cracks in their educational experience made by Covid-19 but they can make decisions about how to mark the untidy endings of seminal moments in their school lives. There can be class photo journals; class farewell message collections, year-group movies and mashed-up song valedictions. What I want my students to understand at this time is that life often involves sudden breaks and messy endings. These can be infuriating or unfair; they are often very sad and very shocking. What we can do with these moments is to make our own endings as creatively and as honestly as we can. I once wrote a final letter to my friend Bina, just a few days after she died, then sent it north to another friend who slotted it between two rocks in a corner of Scotland where Bina and I had travelled together. I planted a rose for each of my IVF cycles that failed, and we joined our neighbours Bernadette and Matthew for wine in the garden and a bonfire to mark the death of Sophie, their beloved little white terrier.
This is what we do, I say, to my long distance classes. This is what I have done in my life and what you will learn to do in yours. It is good and it is important. Start now.
