A Saturday Morning revisitation.
The exotic security of primary education is superbly captured in this poem. This seemingly oxymoronic combination fosters learning of the most enduring kind, as the poem suggests.
The security of primary school emanates from the daily routines and the careful trust Mrs Tilscher enjoys with her class. The exoticism is created out of the the injections of wonder into the classroom. For this is imaginative teaching, untrammelled by the plague of constraints brought about by so many interfering ‘educationalists’ where theory and regulation count for far more than inspiration and imagination.
The other day I was playing the Christmas cd in the car as I drove to school and John Lennon’s Happy Christmas, War is Over came on. I felt a sudden rush of exhilaration. Tears appeared. There I was immediately back in Marple Cheshire, dragging my wooden sledge to school through patchy snow. For I had written a play at our red kitchen table about Captain Scott and Captain Oakes for an extra Xmas assembly. My teacher Mr Ottewell had arrived that term from Derby with his bouncy hair, his love of Alan Garner and John Lennon and his belief than only through the exercise of the ‘play’ of the imagination would learning compell .
I was compelled!
This poem by Carol Ann Duffy reveals the joy of learning and the ways in which imaginative ‘play’ thrives long after we are somewhere else!
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.
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