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4 over time Shirley became an experienced schoolteacher who remained committed to giving the kids a fighting chance realizing everything else was against them with such large classes and lack of resources and parents who didn't have a clue how to help them with their homework parents who'd left school early to work in a factory or learn a trade or be assigned a bunk bed in a Borstal she was quite unlike the cruisers in her profession, as she frequently complained to Lennox, who do as little as possible and openly despise their charges as if they're an inconvenience rather than the reason they have a bloody job it was bad and got worse when the Thatcher government began to implement its Master Plan for Education teachers went into meltdown with pay battles and three-day strikes and when the public lost patience with them the Third Reich took advantage and steam-rollered in the dreaded National Curriculum which imposed a syllabus that curbed her own pedagogical freedoms that produced excellent results thank you very much hot on its heels were the League Tables and with that came a whole raft of computerized data entry, form-filling, stats, inspections and pointless, mandatory after-school staff meetings twice a week, even when there was nothing to discuss then Gestapo HQ enforced lesson plans, a new swear word in Shirley's ever-expanding canon: National Curriculum! league tables! lesson plans! all of which left no room for responding to the fluctuating needs of a classroom of living, breathing, individualized children nor could she freely write school reports any more, which she'd actually enjoyed, commenting on her pupils' progress, letting their parents know she

was looking out for their child instead she had to tick boxes according to a list of generic statements she could no longer say, for example, that a child's handwriting had improved, making their work more legible and therefore higher gradable because she had encouraged the child to sit straight, concentrate and write slower or that a child was no longer disruptive as the class clown but had channelled their comic ability into the drama group, at her suggestion, and had shone in a school production of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs unless such a question existed which it never did then the Gestapo demanded each pupil produce a Folder of Good Work every year, carefully handwritten from their classwork or homework, which took up hours of valuable teaching time and stressed the kids out no end, to be kept in a file in case a parent or a child's new school asked to see it guess what? no one ever did what was she? a Cog in the Wheel of Bureaucratic Madness when Shirley drove up to the school in the mornings moments before the inmates charged up the Paupers' Path to destroy any sense of equilibrium its monstrous proportions settled in her stomach like concrete and as the eighties became history the nineties couldn't wait to charge in and bring more problems than solutions children at school coming from families struggling to cope unemployment, poverty, addiction, domestic violence at home kids with parents who were 'inside', or should have been kids who needed free school meals kids who were on the Social Services register or radar kids who went feral – (she wasn't an animal tamer)

by the time the new millennium pitched up, knives large enough to disembowel rhinos were discovered in school rucksacks during what became regular spot-check inspections pistols were hidden down socks gang recruitment agencies, or as good as, loitered outside the school gates a bustling drugs market in the school grounds replaced the tuck shop there were increased sexual assaults on girls and more girls becoming mothers when they were still children themselves the school installed a metal detector at the gate and security guards, passcodes were introduced for all doors and cameras appeared in the corridors to each graduating class, she resisted the urge to offer advice on prison visiting times for their families, as opposed to encouraging them go on to further education especially to the low-lifes, weirdos, sub-70 IQs (eugenics? love it!), potential serial killers and other deranged psychos who sat at the back of her classes and made such a racket that she, of all people, had to shout to be heard she, who once had such exceptional class control she was asked to mentor junior teachers in the art of cultivating a quiet authority an authority where her word was once God, now if kids fucked with her, she fucked with them back because of your behaviour, the entire class will have to stay behind after school now she worried that one of the 'Category A' contingent would stab or shoot her as she walked alone past the hedges in the car park on a dark winter's afternoon worst of all was the school's most promising Lifer-in-Waiting in Year 11, Johnny Ronson, whose sole purpose was to undermine her authority whenever she told him off for disrupting class one time rubbing his crotch so that his prick stood up under his trousers it was her word against his no evidence, no witnesses the little bastard if only she could send these brats back to when the school was a workhouse, make them spend a day or two crushing stones to make roads or

bones to make fertilizer slave labour twelve hours a day for bread and gruel and a hard, blanketless floor to sleep on the number of times she told them how generations of reformers and campaigners, unionists and clergy, do-gooders, writers, politicians in the Houses of Parliament and peers in the House of Lords had fought for their right to better themselves through education she told them until she was bored of repeating herself it never went in furthermore, after decades of religiously marking homework five nights a week, she now loathed doing it with a venom piles of crap piled up on her study desk produced by mostly semi-literates who made her life hell in the classroom mixed ability classrooms? to think she once approved, it didn't raise standards, it lowered them on this she and Penelope Halifax agreed the strangest thing was that after many years avoiding each other, they bonded at being overlooked by the new crowd of teachers who now ran the show they'd sit in the staff room together as youngsters of all races bounded about full of themselves, ignoring both of them as irrelevant antiquities in spite of the fact that Penny was considerably older than Shirley they particularly hated the naïve young graduates who bounced in at the start of every term with their PhDs and espousing their show-off 'constructivist' teaching theories all ideology and no experience – wankers wankers-wankers-wankers, she and Penny would mutter to each other under their breath, gloating as over the years the newbies either left or had the life sucked out of them they loved it when a twenty-two-year-old rookie teacher who'd arrived as a fashionista size six began to trudge around wearing trousers with elasticated waists

join the club, dearie! Penny whispered to Shirley, and they'd collapse, ignoring the curious glances of their fellow teachers who wondered why these two relics were having such fun Shirley and Penny sat there with their sandwiches and moaned about the good old days when teaching wasn't over-bureaucratized and the kids weren't murdering each other in turf wars when Penelope retired, her greatest ally was gone Shirley wanted to leave for the private sector, a girls' independent populated by polite middle-class girls (preferably under thirteen) who knew how to say please and thank you and knew better than to get in teacher's bad books she wanted teacher-pleasers, that's the truth of it not gun-wielding, gum-chewing, coke-sniffing, up-the-duff, scumbag gangster thugs she wanted girls whose parents 'helped' them so much with their homework they appeared to be child prodigies, the great middle-class scam she and Lennox had themselves perpetrated with their own two daughters that's what she was now, middle-class herself in which case, middle classes über alles! the sticking point was the hard-won Education Act of 1944 that made school free for all children had been been the subject of her thesis at university when push came to shove, she couldn't sell out on it unlike the colleagues who absconded to fee-paying vistas and returned to boast about their outstanding inspection reports and dizzying position in the private school league tables schools with rowing and equestrian clubs, lacrosse, rugby and squash teams with Olympic-sized swimming pools and Olympic-trained sports coaches and fully-equipped theatres who went on school trips to the Himalayas, the Pyrenees, Chile, even the Maldives to 'study the marine life' (oh please) who boasted about the pleasure of teaching in a beautiful listed building that smelled of pine furniture polish rather than the overpowering blend of teenage odours, leaking urinals and industrial disinfectant (health & bloody safety!) that burned the throat and eyes

thank goodness they'd escaped the worst school in London, they'd say, making eye contact, emitting pure pity so when are you leaving this dump, Shirley? she did think of applying to a better-performing state school, the day after she had such a lovely dream of being a high school shooter who mowed down the entire student body at assembly (worryingly, it wasn't a nightmare) and walked off with her machine-gun trailing the dust like a latter-day bow-legged black female Clint Eastwood yet when she sat down in her study with an application form one night, she couldn't get past filling in her name Shirley King the thought of being interviewed by a panel of strangers scrutinizing her intellect, skills, teaching philosophy (everyone had to have one these days), her personality (ha ha ha), her clothes, body language, looks (what looks?) she imagined their rejection letters 'Dear Mrs King, We had an exceptionally strong field of candidates for this position and unfortunately for you we decided to make an offer to someone younger, prettier, slimmer, less experienced, more enthusiastic, gullible and pliable as opposed to a bitter old workhorse such as yourself who should be sent out to pasture henceforth! Yours Very Truthfully' Shirley realized that everything she'd ever wanted, she'd achieved, which hadn't prepared her for rejection she got into university at a time when only the brightest kids did she got the first teaching job she ever applied to, and enjoyed the school before it went downhill they'd bought a family house in Peckham Rye when the area was an affordable dump, now it's pricey and the mortgage is paid off she'd found the husband she'd wanted when very young, sparing herself years of wondering if she'd ever find Mr Right her parents adored Lennox from the minute he walked into their house when they were students they said Shirley could bring him over as often as possible

her mother barely noticed her when he was present, and her history degree, which had previously elevated her status above her brothers, paled in comparison to his law degree Lennox could do no wrong in her mother's eyes nor in hers, a husband as suitable now as he was when they first met, as loyal and faithful he still did the shopping, but only cooked at weekends, they ate takeaways or readymade meals in the week, the cleaner did the housework she still met up with friends for a meal or to see a film or for cocktails Lennox went out on Friday nights after work to trendy Covent Garden wine bars with his younger colleagues, returned home happy and late, reeking of smoke and red wine, a greasy chin from the kebab he'd picked up on the way home from the station he was still a solicitor, specializing in personal injury and clinical negligence, had never even tried to become a criminal barrister, too stressful and underpaid he made the right choice they had sex on Sunday mornings after he'd brought her coffee in bed and before they read the newspapers it had deepened, was tender when once it was craven and athletic they still fancied each other, after thirty-something years of lovemaking lately he'd taken up bird-watching, filled their garden with multiple feeders suited for the small birds he loved the most – the goldfinches, blue tits, wrens and the fearless robins who hopped about low on the ground unfortunately, dropped seeds from the feeders also attracted pigeons who liked to shit on their garden furniture and strutted about the garden like Nazi bully boys and the mice also behaved as if they'd been invited to dine Lennox trapped and released them in the woods a few miles away because he couldn't bring himself to poison them she'd warned him that at first sighting of a rat she was going to get a hunting rifle Lennox was a football nut, went to matches with his friends, his only real vice was watching way too much of it on TV

it was the main outlet for his feelings, it seemed to her, as she sat in the next room listening to him holler and exclaim and cheer and boo and groan at the behaviour on the pitch, especially when Leeds United were playing he'd been a hands-on father to their two daughters Karen and Rachel who were born two years apart and became the stars of the movie of their lives it was hard juggling work and babies, her mother, in particular, pitched in, Lennox rolled up his sleeves in the evenings and weekends, and while he wasn't averse to changing nappies, he refused to do the bottle feed in the middle of the night he slept undisturbed in the spare room once the girls were weaned, he took them away for weekends at the seaside with her mother to give Shirley a much-needed break she'd sleep a whole weekend away, grateful for her mother's support Amma babysat Karen and Rachel once or twice, she was usually too busy, plus Winsome was wary she'd drink or smoke around her little girls on the other hand, when Yazz was born, Shirley became her number one babysitter, Amma took it for granted that adding a baby to Shirley's family wouldn't be too burdensome it's true that Karen and Rachel treated her like a kid sister Yazz was a delight when she was pre-verbal, less so when she discovered the power of words she and Lennox dutifully attended church every Sunday for five years to get their girls into the Church of England's Grey Coat Hospital School in Westminster an ordeal because while both of them are Christians, they're not churchgoers Karen is now a pharmacist, Rachel's a computer scientist Shirley has come far enough for a Second Generationer her girls have already gone further.