The Hideous Path

THE HIDEOUS PATH

Once my GCSEs finished, I helped out in a primary school for their sports day. And from that day, I didn't really leave the classroom. I continued volunteering three times a week throughout my A Levels, moving up with the same class of kids as they passed through Year 2 and Year 3.

I did it because I enjoyed it and because it made me feel useful in a way I hadn't experienced before. I was young in age, but also in life: I felt the world with a raw nerve and great sensitivity. I was newly politically-aware, was discovering literature and had just developed a consciousness about inequality.

I was extremely keen, restless to live, to know and feel things, and to be useful.

In the school, there was a six-year-old kid who was struggling. His behaviour was impulsive and violent. He swore and upset other kids for seemingly no reason. He couldn't cope in the classroom. He was so little and sickly-looking. And he couldn't read.

I was asked to sit alongside him in the class and to just broadly help him to try to be a bit more OK. As often as possible, I'd take him aside and read with him, which is when I could interact with him most calmly. It settled him, and I could get him laughing, and this was noticed so it became something I was asked to do more - when the classroom activity was explained by the teacher, I would often work with him to do it in the little intervention room alongside the classroom.

One of my most powerful memories of that time involved us doing some craft. He was using sellotape, and bit the tape to cut it. It stuck to his dry lip, and ripped the skin off. He yelped in surprise and in pain, and looked so stunned and hurt, as if it didn't make sense. He looked into my eyes in panic. Utter confusion. Why does everything find a way to hurt me?

It sticks with me so much because I think it was the first time I realised how much I had grown to care about him. As surprised as he was about the pain of the tape ripping his lip, I was equally surprised to find that his hurt affected me too.

Things moved quickly from that time onwards. He trusted me more and when we would be doing this and that activity, he would tell me in a very nonchalant way about stuff that was going on at home. Worrying stories grew into disclosures, which themselves grew in seriousness. I passed everything on, but with every conversation, more layers were being shared.

He ended up being put in care of social services and removed from his family. From my own childish perspective at the time, I did that to him, or for him. I know now, of course, that there would have been far more going on than just his talks with me. But for me, in my dramatic adolescent way, it felt like it was a story of me and him. It felt like anywhere else would have been better than what he was experiencing, and I was pleased he was away from it, but broken by the abruptness of it all.

For myself, I was utterly crushed. I had the care and the sensitivity to help the kid, but not the maturity to shoulder his story and look after myself. I cried a lot and through talking with him, I think that's how I came to see how fucked up the world can be for so many people. It entailed a loss of naivety for me.

I would be lying if I said that I haven't thought about him since. Whilst I was in university, I did a lot of voluntary work as a Big Sibs mentor, largely out of a wish to replicate the kind of support I thought I had provided to that first kid. And when I became a teacher, whilst being the one at the front with the knowledge and the pens, I always try to make sure I can be the one who a kid can talk to.

But I haven't actively thought about him for a few years.

A couple of days ago though, he popped back into my mind. What might he be up to? I googled his name. The same kind of overwhelming nausea that hit me when he told me about his life, whilst we made paper snowflakes nearly twenty years ago, now hit me afresh. The sad sickly boy became a sad sickly man, and he has committed his own cruel awful acts and is now facing a long prison sentence. I look at the photos of his face, and see the boy in the man.

This damaged person has gone on to commit so much damage to others, and it makes me feel such utter despair. So many of the children we teach are already being made to walk a hideous path, their own horrid life circumstances steering them to replicate the suffering they feel. This does not absolve one of responsibility for one's actions, but the seeds of one's choices lie in experiences beyond their control.

This kid, a child no more, won't have any recollection of me at all. I can't quite get my mind together on this point, but somehow I see a link between his stunned pained face when he sellotaped his lip, and stared out desperately for help, and the behaviour that followed - a blankness when it comes to hurt, but transferred to others.

I can only imagine what happened in the years between knowing him and reading about his actions, but it suggests a path of misery.

I have to find something positive out of this, and the best I can find is the sense that just perhaps, this hideous path has other paths alongside it, and educators can perhaps sometimes be the people to help kids cross from one to the other. This is never easy, and can take a lifetime. But it needs us to work at it.

As teachers one thing is sure. We must recognise that the people in our classrooms have lives outside of our walls, and some of those lives are awful. We must see them as a full person, with a story and with a journey that they are already on. Their pathways can be diverted.

For now though, I need to be sad for a little longer.