The novelist and (now-ex) teacher stands at the ocean’s edge, contemplating his retirement years, while his colleagues return to the grind of school life
I’M ON A deserted beach facing the angry waves of the Atlantic, and the dark night sea stretches surly and uninviting. It seems to stare me down, daring me to enter. But when the morning comes, on the first real day of my retirement, I have decided I shall do this very thing.
It is when my former colleagues will return to start a new school year, so I’ve got it in my head that this is a life-changing moment that should be marked in some way. I’ve made my farewell speech to a crowded staff room; spoken to the students in my final assembly; been honoured with the obligatory tributes; received a touching and incredibly generous number of presents and cards, so all that feels left for me to do is to find some personal way to mark the moment.
I’ve considered many possibilities, ideas such as doing a trek in the mountains or going to a particular place on a kind of pilgrimage, and I understand that, despite not possessing any conventional religious faith, most of them contain a sacred symbolism, some spiritual iconography indelibly inscribed on my consciousness.
I’m retiring a couple of years early having weighed up the significant damage to my pension against the potential damage to my health; after much soul-searching, my well-being won out. I’m also retiring because I found it difficult to speak the new language which shapes so much of modern education.
So, for example, when the school's data manager (a seeming prerequisite for the modern school) asks me if I've sorted out my Hags, he isn't asking if I've found three suitable witches for staging the opening of Macbeth, but is enquiring if I've electronically coded my highest achievable grades for my examination classes. I had, along with my Cags (work that one out for yourself), and I'd also done my best to cope with quartiles, quintiles, residuals (both positive and negative ) and those curious animals, Midyis and Cats.
It's a language I won't have to struggle with anymore because, as I quoted in my farewell speech from the opening to Wordsworth's The Prelude, "Now I am free, enfranchised and at large". But it's a freedom that is coloured by apprehension and not least about future purpose. Of course, I have my writing, but I've always been a teacher who writes and never, as is the norm today, a writer who teaches. Teaching has been a full-on commitment for all my working life, insistent as the sea in front of me. And, despite what people may think, it was never a good career combination because the teaching occupied almost my entire consciousness and books struggled for a space in that consciousness.
Anyone who has taught and tried to teach properly knows that it is about giving of the self, over and over, through the decades until eventually you reach a point where you think there isn’t enough to give and you owe it to yourself and the students to go.
I am also a little haunted by a characterisation in Tobias Wolfe's Old Schoolof a schoolteacher who retires believing that it is his own qualities which sustain him and finds out instead that "his surety" has been conferred on him by others, "by their knowing and cherishing him". His fate is to become "a ghost, even to himself". I don't want to be a ghost.
There is also the inevitable questioning of whether what you did was of value and ultimately you come to hope, as in RS Thomas' poem, The Country Clergy, that there were moments, no matter how rare, or soon forgotten, when "sublime words" were written "on men's hearts and in the minds/ Of young children . . ." These "sublime words" were not mine but found in the literature I was privileged to share and explore with them.
There is, too, one intensely pleasurable legacy to be enjoyed hopefully throughout the rest of my life and that is in the blossoming creativity of former students. So when the post brings me a young man's (I can only think of him as a boy) first published poem in The Poetry Review, or a CD of someone's music, I feel a shared delight in that burgeoning.
There is much I won't miss about teaching, not least those interminable meetings and purgatorial hours spent on coursework and marking, even when they're leavened by this year's best howlers: " The Great Gatsbyis an allergy of the American Dream"; "Lady Macbeth manipulated Macbeth's motions"; "the Bible has many love stories such as Samsung and Delilah".
But I shall miss the camaraderie of my colleagues and, above all, that sweetest of sounds when a whole class is laughing, not at you, but with you.
When I come back to the beach early in the morning it is almost deserted and there is a pocket of intense brightness.
I’m still nervous as I stand remembering the moment as a teenager when I was baptised. Because it took place in a Baptist church this was no gentle sprinkling of the head but total immersion in our long black gowns, weighted at the hem to preserve modesty. Going under the water symbolised the burial of the old life and the resurrection into a new life of faith.
And, as I wade slowly into the white-tipped waves, this is the crazy thing I want to do, and so I baptise myself anew, then in the early morning light arise expectant and hopeful for health, creativity and through the rest of my life the sustaining echoes of children’s laughter.
