Caroline Graham - A Ghost in the Machine

The Ewan Sedgewick School in South-East London was always advertising in The Times Educational Supplement and The Guardian for staff. Presently they were not only seeking teachers in nearly every department but also a headmaster. Mallory sent away for an application form. After all, it committed him to nothing. When he had filled it in and sent it back he tried to feel detached. In any case, such brief experience that he had as a deputy head would hardly qualify him to take over and run a large inner-city comprehensive. But within a fortnight of his application he was invited for an interview at which the board politely attempted to conceal their bafflement at his application in the first place. Barely a week later he was offered the job.

Kate, previously a source of support and encouragement for anything her husband and daughter undertook, struggled to conceal the depths of her dismay at the seriousness of this new situation.

Polly surprisingly, given the friendships she had made and her enjoyment of several aspects of country life, was immediately enthusiastic. Everyone knew London was cool and where it was all at. With the confidence bordering on rashness that was to lead her into so much trouble in later life she could not wait to get down there and start hanging out.

Money was going to be the real problem. Their current mortgage was by no means paid off and they knew that prices in the capital were horrendous. A pathetic London weighting allowance of just under three thousand pounds showed as nothing more than a blip on the Abbey National screen. To make matters worse, Kate insisted that Polly would not pay the price of her father’s sudden resurgence of idealism by attending a bottom-of-the-league school. This meant the few comparatively cheaper areas were out of bounds. Mallory, ashamed of cutting his cloth before even starting his new job, brought up the time-worn argument that poor schools would never improve if the middle classes abandoned them. Kate would not budge. For the first and last time in their marriage the Lawsons came close to out-and-out war.

In the end Kate won. They found an excellent all-girls school, the Lady Margaret, at Parsons Green, and bought a two-bedroomed terraced house in the area by putting down the modest profit made from the sale of the Cheltenham house, borrowing double Mallory’s annual salary and an extra fifty thousand against Kate’s earnings, which left them with a combined mortgage of a hundred and seventy thousand pounds. Kate returned to work full time and, early in September, Mallory took up his post at the Ewan Sedgewick.

His appointment coincided with a modest lottery grant. Repairs had been carried out, buildings were painted, new desks arrived. The gym was refitted and some musical instruments had been bought. Five new teachers were appointed to join the weary cynics on the permanent staff. Many of these, due to their rackety state of physical and/or mental health, were frequently absent. Not infrequently, supply staff outnumbered the regulars.

Gradually Mallory came to understand what he had taken on. Bullying, present to some degree wherever he had worked, had at the Ewan Sedgewick an organised savagery that was truly frightening. Drugs were everywhere: bought, sold or swapped with a defiant lack of concealment. The previous term a teacher had tried to interfere. The next night her teenage daughter had arrived home covered in bruises, her clothes ripped apart. Shortly after, petrol was poured through their letter box followed by some matches with the words “Next Time” scrawled on the box.

All of this Mallory gradually discovered. He discovered violent children, children who were mentally ill, children who sold themselves, pregnant children, children who were not children at all – who perhaps never had been. Frequently he confronted one or the other of the parents and marvelled that their offspring were still alive. He talked to more police officers during his first month at the Ewan Sedgewick than in the rest of his life put together.

Other pupils – the majority, though it often didn’t feel like it – struggled on, taught by worn-out, disenchanted teachers or visitors who knew nothing about them, didn’t wish to and disappeared almost as soon as their faces became vaguely familiar.

Mallory got himself dug in. For the next four years, although the hope took a tremendous battering, he somehow found the willpower and energy to continue. Not to succeed, not even to cope, but to go in day after day and wrestle with the job. Overwhelmed by floods of nitpicking paperwork, quarrelling teachers, incompetent administration and inadequate finance, he somehow held at bay the great flood of despair that constantly threatened to overwhelm him. And struggled to remain open to the troubled children in his care, even the one who had plunged a screwdriver into the back of his hand. But then something truly dreadful happened.

Two men, one describing himself as the uncle of a twelve-year-old boy at the school, had turned up saying the child’s mother had had an accident. The uncle explained they had come to take him to the hospital. The Office let the boy go. When he did not arrive home his mother contacted the school. Mallory rang the police. Later that night the child was found wandering at the side of the road several miles away, traumatised, naked and bleeding.

Mallory took full responsibility for this appalling incident even though he was not on the school premises at the time. It was right that he should but the effect on him was profound. He felt he could not bear to continue in his post yet knew he must. He had uprooted his wife and child, dragged them halfway across the country and plunged the family into heavy debt on the strength of what seemed to him now a maudlin, sentimental dream. Bitterly he recalled how, buoyed up by waves of naïve vanity, he had seen himself fighting for and transforming a school supposedly beyond hope of reclamation. Had even pictured himself addressing conferences at home and abroad. Becoming famous as the man who…

Sickened now by this former posturing Mallory started to apply for other posts: headships, for he could not afford even the smallest decrease in salary. His applications were acknowledged but that was usually the end of it. The two interviews he did obtain were fairly quickly concluded, for the truth was by then he stank of failure and neuroticism. And so Mallory was forced to stay on at the Ewan Sedgewick. To keep sane he withdrew from all but the minimum contact necessary to do the job, hardening his heart against any emotional involvement with either staff or children.

But the cost of maintaining this stance was high. Aware always of what was pressing against the prison walls Mallory could never relax. Soon he was unable to sleep without medication. For the first time in his life he had violent headaches and intense back pain. Sometimes he felt unable to breathe. He was prescribed tranquillisers, drank too much and his libido sank without trace. Recently, in the middle of the night, his whole body had gone into spasm and he was unable to move. Unaware then he was merely days away from delivery Mallory had wept with fear.

Though he had always known he would inherit Appleby House, Mallory had never thought to rely on this or take it into any of his calculations. It was his aunt’s home, not a counter to play with in the property game. In any case, he loved her far too much to anticipate her death. But when she did eventually pass away Mallory, even while still in shock, could not help being aware of the difference this would make to him and marvelled that a window had opened at last in the hellhole that was his life, admitting light and hope.

In the middle of the week after the funeral he and Kate were sitting in the walled space behind their terraced house drinking Meursault and watching the sun go down. Kate had painted the walls a soft, washed-out blue. Some Greek pots holding honeysuckle and clematis and a tiny lion’s head wall fountain prettified the area somewhat, but failed to disguise the fact that it was basically a very small brick and concrete back yard. She still found it hard to believe their property was on the market for four hundred thousand pounds.