1
Jo
When she eventually came to write her memoirs, The Unexpected High Dramas of a Northumberland Headteacher, Jo thought she’d probably start them during the PTA meeting at the end of her first half-term at West Burntridge First School. Until then, everything about her new post had gone well. The teachers had responded to her leadership without too much resistance; the children liked her; and the parents, on the whole, welcomed her, despite the initial rumblings that if she didn’t live up to her retired predecessor, house prices in this part of town would begin to slump. People moved from all over the Tyne Valley to get their children into West Burntridge. It had the academic standards of a private prep, but was funded by the state and enhanced by a few generous parents and a zealous PTA.
Jo allowed herself to experience the first stirrings of relief as she cleared her office that Friday afternoon. She’d decided long ago that this was to be her last job before retirement and she would end her career among the happy, high-achieving children of the clean-living middle classes. Jo had done her time in the inner cities, transforming failing schools. In the end, it ground her down. She was fifty-three years old and on bad days reckoned she already looked at least sixty-five. She’d tried investing in a good moisturiser, but it was delusional to think any overpriced cream flogged to her by a teenager – everyone looked like a teenager now – could undo years on the frontline of poverty and everything that went with it.
But still, she was here now, and she’d done it. She had half a term under her belt, the school was still officially outstanding and the empire ruled over for twenty-five years by the formidable Mrs Pearson had not fallen. In fact, word had reached Jo that there were murmurs about her having made things even better: there was now more music, more outdoor learning, more pastoral care.
Things were good, she acknowledged, slinging her bag over her shoulder, then locking her office and heading down the corridor to the staffroom for the PTA meeting. She did wish they hadn’t chosen this – the last day of the autumn half term – as a time to meet, but the treasurer apparently couldn’t make it on any other day and nothing was allowed to happen without the treasurer present. They were a force at this school, the PTA. They saw themselves as an integral cog in the managerial wheel.
Jo had never known this in any of her previous schools. There either hadn’t been a PTA at all, or the one they had was so small she’d only really spoken to them once a year when they told her they’d raised three hundred pounds at the summer fete. A pound for each child. Jo had seen the accounts and knew that at West Burntridge, last year’s summer fete alone had brought in over £6,000. She realised quickly that these fundraising mothers were not to be offended.
The trouble was, they were all really bloody annoying. In every meeting, they talked in painstaking detail about their fundraising ideas for the month ahead: the usual weekly cake stall; a craft fair; an art competition; perhaps a Christmas ball so their husbands could finally all meet each other. Sometimes, Jo found these plans so dull she had to control the urge to suggest something radical and shake them all up a bit. It wouldn’t take much. As a group, they were devastatingly shockable. Drugs, she wanted to say. A sponsored experiment to see if any of you become more interesting coked off your tits.
Instead, she nodded and thanked them for all their hard work raising the valuable funds the school couldn’t manage without. Then she’d move to leave, and that was when the trouble would start.
‘Ms Fairburn, could I just have a quick word?’
That was it, the line they always opened with. Everyone knew it was never going to be a quick word. It was going to be a lengthy forty thousand words, possibly stretched over several meetings for the next six months. But still, ‘a quick word’ was what they called it, in recognition of the fact that they understood Jo was a busy woman and didn’t want to take up her time; it was just this one thing they were worried about and they needed their minds putting at rest.
There were three women today, wanting a quick word, although two of them came together, as a package of joint concern. ‘We just wanted to talk to you about the changes you’re making to Toy Day this term,’ one of them said. Kate Monro, the all-powerful treasurer.
Toy Day was a cherished ritual at West Burntridge, a legacy Jo had inherited from Mrs Pearson but which she herself would rather do without. On the last day of every half term, children were allowed to bring a toy from home to play with during that final, golden hour before freedom. Jo had decided not to do away with it entirely, on the grounds that it was a small issue and she didn’t want to upset everyone so early on, but she had made it clear there were to be no electronic devices. This, no doubt, would be Kate Monro’s point of irritation. Her daughter was in year one and obsessed with screens and everything in them. Already, she had her own deeply obnoxious YouTube channel in which she starred alongside her mother, the two of them dressed in sparkles and tiaras, performing godawful karaoke. The Monro Girls. It made Jo want to vomit. She had little patience for a woman in her forties calling herself girl, and even less for anyone who encouraged their child to dress and behave as a sex symbol.
Jo smiled professionally. ‘OK. I’m all ears.’
‘Well, we don’t think it’s completely fair that those children, like my daughter Kendra, who love making videos with their friends, are no longer allowed to bring iPads.’
‘iPads aren’t sensible things to have in school, Mrs Monro. They’re expensive items and we just can’t run the risk of them being broken.’
Kate looked unconvinced by this and in truth, it was only part of the argument, but Jo wasn’t about to share the other part, which was that she needed to poverty-proof this place. She couldn’t allow the affluent eighty per cent of children to bring iPads and handheld Nintendos while the poorer twenty per cent played with bouncy balls and string.
She wondered if Kate was going to argue further. She looked as if she might, then clearly thought better of it.
Jo turned to the next woman in front of her. Laura Spence, PTA secretary, single mother of Max in year one. Jo imagined she probably didn’t get out much. The PTA was her social life, her connection to the world. She took it seriously. If she slacked, the rest of them would boot her out and there she’d be: night after night spent in loneliness on the sofa, eating too many KitKats and watching iconic episodes of Friends on repeat, wondering what had happened to all the spark and promise she’d had in her youth. (She’d exhausted it on the wrong kind of men, of course – the ill fate of so many otherwise sensible and intelligent women.)
Laura glanced furtively around the staffroom at the other members of the PTA who were failing to leave, and lowered her voice. ‘I’m just a bit concerned,’ she said, ‘about this new idea that children have to be taught about the issues of LBG … LTP …’
‘LGBTQ.’
‘Yes, that. All that. I wondered what your view on it was, and whether you intend to bring it into this school?’
‘My view,’ Jo said, smiling politely and pleasantly, ‘is that I am obliged to run a school that delivers the current curriculum and I am fully supportive of promoting inclusion, acceptance and equality in all areas of life.’
Laura looked crestfallen, and anxious. ‘But homosexuality? For children?’
It was as though the woman thought they’d be showing gay pornography in the classroom. Jo went on smiling. ‘It will all be age-appropriate, Miss Spence,’ she said. ‘When we talk about families, we will talk about families with same-sex parents, in the same way we talk about families with one parent, or step-parents, or your bog-standard married mum and dad.’
‘But my son came home the other day and told me a teaching assistant had said it’s OK for men to marry men. I just don’t want—’
The smile was beginning to ache. ‘The thing is, Miss Spence – and I say this with the utmost respect for your beliefs – it is OK. It’s part of UK law now that men can marry men and women can marry women. As a school, we have a duty to impart the values of—’
‘I’m very unhappy about it.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that.’
‘I don’t know why it’s necessary …’
‘It’s necessary because there are children in this school and in other schools in the country being raised by single-sex parents who have a right not to feel ostracised from their peers because of that.’
‘Well, of course. It’s not the children’s fault, is it? Poor things,’ Laura said, though not without first registering shock at the idea that such grubbiness had forced its way through the gates of West Burntridge First School.
‘Have a good half term, Miss Spence,’ Jo said, by way of ending the conversation.
Laura nodded and strode purposefully away from Jo, towards the other mothers. She was angry. Fuming. The whole group of them left quickly after that, the indignant murmuring beginning before they’d even closed the door.
2
Erin
Even now, a pond-grey afternoon in late October, the park was heaving with its usual after-school crowd. Red-uniformed children dangled upside-down from the climbing frame, or hurled themselves down slides, or ran in dizzying circles as they spun their friends on the roundabout that had been whirling in defiance of health and safety laws for the last twenty years.
Erin was new to all this. She stood at the edge of the playground, trying not to look self-conscious and resisting the urge to scroll through her phone so everyone would know she wasn’t alone in the world. All around her, groups of women stood chatting to each other, cemented to one another by bonds of friendship that had been forged years ago, when they’d all plunged into the tumultuous waters of motherhood. Together, they’d spent years barely keeping afloat amidst the sleeplessness and the mind-wrecking boredom of baby groups, while the women they used to be drifted further and further out to sea, never to return.
It was a world Erin was still navigating her way through: sudden parenthood and everything that came with it – the schoolyard, the PTA, the groups of women and where she fitted among them.
She watched Tess playing football with a group of boys from her class and wondered when would be a good moment to break it to her that they’d need to leave soon and meet Maia from the high school. Tess’s moods were difficult to read. It felt sometimes that Erin was making progress with her and they were getting along the way she’d always hoped they would, and then Tess would suddenly remember who Erin was. She’d back off and say something angry and rude, unwavering in the determination to hate her.
She noticed another woman standing alone a few feet away and smiled at her. She thought she might as well. The woman didn’t smile back. Then suddenly – so suddenly Erin couldn’t work out how it had happened – a boy lurched himself to the ground at the woman’s feet and began howling, waving his limbs in all directions.
Erin shot a glance around the park. No one else seemed to be taking any notice.
The woman kneeled beside him and bent her head low so her hair shielded her face from Erin’s view. The child went on kicking.
Erin watched with mounting horror as the boy’s fist flailed and struck his mother in the face, forcing her to stand up and step back.
Erin had never seen anything like this. The woman looked mortified and close to tears. Why was no one helping her?
Erin couldn’t stand it. She headed over. ‘Are you OK?’ she asked. ‘Can I help you?’
The woman was silent for a minute, her face registering shock, then she smiled appreciatively. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘He gets like this sometimes. It’s hard.’
Erin didn’t know what to say, so she just said, ‘It looks it.’
Beside them, the boy’s howls continued.
‘There isn’t much I can do, except weather it out. I’ve got better now at spotting the signs and I can usually get him home before he starts, but I missed it today. I was at a PTA meeting. He went to the after-school club for half an hour and that seems to have done it.’
She sounded apologetic.
Erin looked from the mother to the child and back to the mother again. She was young. Erin wouldn’t put her much over twenty-five. She had an image of herself at that age – sharing a damp flat with her best friend in Lewisham, drinking most evenings, occasionally taking Class A drugs at weekends, shirking responsibility. There was no way she’d have had what it took to devote herself to a child. She felt a mixture of pity and awe for this woman.
Beside them, the boy’s howls grew slowly quieter.
The woman sighed deeply and said, ‘He’ll be exhausted now. I have to get him home …’
She looked desperate. Afraid.
Erin glanced at the abbey clock, visible between the gaps in the trees. She needed to be back at the car in ten minutes. Maia would be leaving the high school by now, walking expectantly towards her waiting chauffeur service. She’d be angry if Erin was late, and Erin hated the thought of giving her any more reason to hate her.
She said, ‘Can I get you anything? I could run over to Costa and pick you up a coffee or something?’
The woman flushed, embarrassed. She shook her head. ‘It’s OK. We’ll be fine. It’s not far.’
The sobbing stopped, but the child didn’t move.
Erin nodded. ‘OK. I’m going to have to go. I’ve got a high-schooler to meet. I’m Erin, by the way.’
She offe...
