Mrs Tilscher's Class by Carol Ann Duffy

You could travel up the Blue Nile
with your finger, tracing the route
while Mrs Tilscher chanted the scenery.
Tana. Ethiopia. Khartoum. Aswan.
That for an hour, then a skittle of milk
and the chalky Pyramids rubbed into dust.
A window opened with a long pole.
The laugh of a bell swung by a running child.

This was better than home. Enthralling books.
The classroom glowed like a sweetshop.
Sugar paper. Coloured shapes. Brady and Hindley
faded, like the faint, uneasy smudge of a mistake.
Mrs Tilscher loved you. Some mornings, you found
she’d left a gold star by your name.
The scent of a pencil slowly, carefully, shaved.
A xylophone’s nonsense heard from another form.

Over the Easter term the inky tadpoles changed
from commas into exclamation marks. Three frogs
hopped in the playground, freed by a dunce,
followed by a line of kids, jumping and croaking
away from the lunch queue. A rough boy
told you how you were born. You kicked him, but stared at your parents, appalled, when you got back home.

That feverish July, the air tasted of electricity.
A tangible alarm made you always untidy, hot,
fractious under the heavy, sexy sky. You asked her
how you were born and Mrs Tilscher smiled,
then turned away. Reports were handed out.
You ran through the gates, impatient to be grown,
as the sky split open into a thunderstorm.

If Duffy often uncovers the ‘foreignness’ of the past,and may explore its disturbances,  then it is of significance that in this poem, at least initially, she appears to celebrate any exoticism she finds back then.

For the wonderfully nostalgic opening line:

‘You could travel up the Blue Nile /with your finger..’  revisits the wonder and freshness of Primary School where learning has its own permitted conventions such as the recurring blue colour of all the world’s water ! Such unrealistic conventions are completely accepted as it is this unique naivety of   experience at school that defines it and makes it singular.

The poem appears to open in the middle of a lesson and it is this seeming ‘naturalness that makes the world of school come back to life. Memory is resurrection  as well as recollection.

For Duffy is reanimating a lost world through a highly selective series of images and ideas which have to represent  experiences now well out of view. The intensity and power of Duffy’s selective process transport us back into a past where Rivers are everlastingly  blue and windows have to be opened with long poles usually borrowed from another class!

We are also immediately anchored into the highly sensory world and words of primary school so that we feel this journey back into the past almost bodily/physically so that we are listening as Mrs Tilscher ‘chanted the scenery’ or smelling the ‘scent of a pencil’ or basking in the pleasure of ‘a good gold star.’ these images only work as they are both local and universal.

And it is the Universality of Duffy’s world of primary worlds and words  which recreates a past that seems safe and secure; even killers are relegated to being an ‘uneasy smudge of a mistake’  through the lovingly observed  procedures and rituals of school routines.