In his first year as principal, Adrian Paul spoke to me only twice. This hardly worried me. His beginning was close to my end; I was ready to move on from teaching and his arrival stiffened my resolve. I had already decided to take a plunge into the movie industry. In my case this would mean buying a franchise in a video store but, soon enough, I would also get myself registered as a civil celebrant; a future with less stress lay ahead. After twenty years at Grace College, I had realised how many former students had approached me to find poems and readings for all sorts of occasions: weddings, commitments, namings, divorces and, sadly, funerals. I always enjoyed this, helping people find words that would stretch to cover an occasion, beautiful clothing for raw nerves.
Besides, mum had been an Anglican priest, one of the first generation of women to gain that distinction, a real achievement for a single mother. I was the product of a party during her pagan youth; I didn’t know the name of my father and I don’t think she did either. There was never a religious bone in my body and mum eventually gave up writing bible verses on my birthday cards. She once told me that God was her lover. Frankly, I would have preferred she had a fling with the bishop. I hoped, if mum still existed in some way or other, she might be secretly pleased that I was continuing the family business in a kind of a way, only not as a franchise operator for God. When she got sick in Kenya, mum said on the phone that she might be going on eternity leave. We both laughed. I cherish that memory. There had been a chasm between us that narrowed towards the end as we both began to experience doubt about our most earnest beliefs or, in my case, disbeliefs. It was never easy having a mother who knew more about poverty in Africa than she did about your soccer team.
The first time Adrian Paul addressed me was outside what had been the library but was in the process of becoming the ‘information exchange’. He wanted to correct me for wearing an out-of-date staff tie, one he professed not to recognise. Dr Paul, who had been an interior designer before he went into business, was giving the school a makeover and everyone had to lift to the new standard. Education was his mid-life crisis. He had never spent a day in a classroom but he hadn’t been hired because he knew anything about teaching. He had come to improve our image and this meant we were soon buried under a rubble of jargon and graphs. At Grace College, he subsidised personal trainers to work with teachers to get us into shape, especially before school photos, and he hired a celebrity chef to ‘re-imagine’ the canteen. For Dr Paul, even the tuckshop was a marketing opportunity. He got photos of our salads into the local paper, which also ran a feature on his ‘pre-natal learning centre’, an idea he claimed was a world first. Pregnant woman could pay fees and have Mozart, Bach and other stuff played to their unborn children, giving them an edge in the world before they even came into it. He changed the name of the chapel to the ‘existential meaning centre.’ He said so much about wellbeing that the very word started to make me feel unwell.
The second time Adrian spoke to me was to tell me that Helen Ollie, his predecessor, had suffered a stroke early morning and was not doing well. He thought I should know before he put out a press release and suggested I could visit and represent the school. He himself was busy that day himself with plans for the African village he was building on site, a scheme to enable kids to experience the third world and develop their social conscience without risk of kidnapping or bad stomachs. It was, he claimed, his personal triumph of risk management. The alumni of Grace College included many struggling actors whom he proposed to pay as tutors to play the part of the poor.
It surprised me that Adrian even knew I was friendly with Helen Ollie. Helen once said that a principal was paid to know things she hadn’t been told. It was hard to see Adrian trusting in intuition in the same way; he was a great self-believer and I remember my mother once saying that self-belief was the most boring religion as well as the most lonely. She wasn’t wrong about everything.
Helen was seen by her detractors as old fashioned but she suited the school and, for that matter, she suited me. She had known the original Miss Grace, the woman who started a little school from the single suitcase she brought to this country from the chaos of Europe after the war. I first met Helen when she was a young teacher, working in a steel-and-concrete boys’ school and coping with a Year Ten class of which I was a member. For a term she suffered the slings and arrows. Then she imposed a month of silence on the class. No-one was to speak. Not even her. She gave us things to read and put questions on the board. It was so bizarre the group went along with it, almost with a sense of relief. She told us to write whatever we wanted and she would read it; we just had to write. That month changed lives. Some exaggerate and say it was a term. But it only needed a month to break whatever compulsion she had identified.
When mum died I was finishing university and working part-time in the video store I would one day buy, filling the dead time by watching trashy movies when I should have been learning how to relate to people, something I have never got the knack of. I got back in touch with Helen and asked her if she could find something suitable for me to read at the service. She dropped in to the store, volunteered to come to the church service and suggested a sonnet by Shakespeare. She wrote it out by hand from memory on the back of a flyer for this month’s blockbusters. I still have that cheap sheet of paper:
Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore
So do our minutes hasten towards their end.
The poem was perfect. It understood mum’s dilemma perfectly. Mum threw herself at life. She was desperate to change a world that, at another level, she didn’t think really mattered. I fell in love with the poem, with the comfort of its honesty, and through it with poetry in general which, I admit, became both the family I never had as well as my secret stash of booze. On the day of the funeral, Helen stayed all afternoon and helped hand around food.
As chance had it, Helen interviewed me to teach literature twelve years later. She handed back my resume and said she was more interested in experience than a CV. We spoke mostly about poetry, in particular John Donne, who, I said, was one of my favourites. She warmed to this and asked me if I thought Donne could be trusted. After all, he’d become a priest just to pay the bills. Surely he should have been more idealistic about such a calling, ‘like your mother was.’ I didn’t let on that I was a teacher basically to pay the bills. Instead, I replied that I found Donne’s erotic poetry religious and his religious poetry erotic. She laughed out loud and said that an insight like that showed a lot of experience, inscribing my comment in ink in her famous ‘ledger of interesting thoughts and observations.’ I watched her write. Helen wore cheap clothes but she always had beautiful pens. It was the ambition of every girl or boy in the school to have one of their ideas recorded in her ledger.
Adrian Paul, on the other hand, arrived with all the ideas he needed already loaded. He stood up at assembly one Friday and announced that ‘Invictus’ by Ernest Henley was among the greatest poems ever written, perhaps the greatest. He read the last two lines
I am the captain of my fate.
I am the master of my soul
and explained, as if he were the first person to ever think of the idea, how extraordinary it was that something written over one hundred years ago should speak to us today. The only time I had a bad thought about Nelson Mandela was when I discovered he liked this bit of Victorian kitsch. I could see why it should appeal to Adrian. For him, a great poem was efficient. This meant it had to give up its meaning all at once. It needed to have the kind of obvious message that you could put on a bumper sticker or a power-point slide to motivate people to succeed. His idea of poetry allowed no room for confusion, mystery or surprise. It had to confirm what he already knew.
Adrian Paul’s arrival at Grace College had been heralded as quite a coup for a school with a modest tradition of unostentatious privilege and only five hundred students. When I started, one of my colleagues said that he enjoyed working in a place that was small enough to dislike everybody. He was a practiced cynic. It was part of his performance and the students warmed to him because he hated people in such an affectionate way. Teaching is a branch of show business. For Helen Ollie, that meant a subtle form of theatre. For Dr Paul, it meant a 3D blockbuster with lots of action and little character development. His most intimate moments seemed to be when he was addressing the whole school. It was here that he was happy to share about the ‘confusion’ and ‘tragedy’ that led to the soap opera for which he was famous, namely the collapse of Paul Holdings, and the six months he spent in jail. It took him six months to work off the losses to investors of about seven million dollars. It struck me as a decent rate of pay.
‘I learnt a lot about myself during my time in the wilderness,’ he said.
‘Christ was in the wilderness,’ I thought, thinking of mum yet again. ‘You were in jail.’
‘The most important lessons in life are always about yourself.’
This was hardly my view of education. Education, for me, was about the whole of reality, not just anybody’s little self.
‘I learnt the hard way. I learnt the difference between value and values. I went into business to create value. I have turned to education to create values.’
I couldn’t imagine Helen Ollie writing any of this in her ledger.
I spent hours sitting beside Helen after her stroke, first in hospital and then in her nursing home. The doctors were not sure that she would regain the power of speech. But she still had the power of listening. I read some of her favourites aloud to her: Emily Dickinson, Anne Sexton, Christina Rosetti. I went through the whole of Mrs Dalloway which I knew she loved and King Lear which I knew infuriated her, hoping she might react enough to blurt something out. If that didn’t work, I was willing to even try Hemingway, whom she despised, or something about Steve Jobs, whom she also reviled. She absorbed it all with a sturdy spirit, often drooling from the corner of her mouth but sometimes smiling as well. One day, out of the blue, I chose the very sonnet she had guided me to when mum died:
And Time, that gave, doth now his gift confound.
Time doth transfix the flourish set on youth,
At that moment, Adrian Paul darkened the door, paying a rare visit. It may even have been his first. He was clearly uncomfortable, looking at the ground as though this was already a funeral. We were a long way shy of that.
‘She still can’t talk?’ asked Adrian. His questions were often statements, distinguished only by a slight inflection. This time there was a hesitation as well.
‘She always preferred to listen,’ I said.
‘Really.’
He said he didn’t want to interrupt so I started the sonnet again.
‘That sounded very interesting,’ he said at the end. ‘Could you send me a link to where you found it?’
‘Perhaps I could write it out by hand for you,’ I said.
Michael McGirr