Welcome to A Wild Green Heart. I haven’t had the time or state of mind to create a post this week, so instead I’m pulling something from the archives. This was the first short story I wrote since childhood, having resumed a creative practice in 2008. I wrote the first version of it in 2009, and have only made minor revisions to it since then.
I worked as a mentor in a small, inner-city primary school from 2005-2008, and this story was obviously influenced by my time there. It was a place I loved dearly, but like any workplace, there were plenty of quirky characters to observe! I would like to state the obvious writerly thing - that none of the characters in this story are based on real people! It will become obvious that the characters here are really caricatures, with the obvious exception of the protagonist, Vincent McBash. However, I would be lying if I said that certain traits of particular individuals had not worked their way into this story!
It is fair to say that I developed many personal perspectives on teaching and the education system during my years as a learning mentor. Many of these are themes in today’s story. To summarise my own views and experiences in a nutshell, I would say the following:
I loved working with children aged 4-11, especially those who found the whole experience of school difficult. Kids have an innate sense of fun and of creativity, and I enjoyed supporting them in expressing this.
I truly admire those in the teaching profession - I long ago recognised that I couldn’t possibly function in a role so shaped by the bureaucracy of monitoring, assessment, reporting and planning. My role adjacent to this as a mentor suited me much better.
The education system as a whole is a mixed blessing. Yes, access to education is a human right, and we are fortunate to have schooling free at the point of access up to the age of 18 in the UK. However, it is a system that clearly fails a great number of children and young people, and it is vexingly bureaucratic and inflexible.
Prioritising, as it does, maths, English and the sciences, creativity is often schooled out of children, even at a primary education level, and this feels criminal to me. Of course, individual schools and individual teachers are exceptions to this rule; but I have sadly observed the current curriculum, admin burden, and expectations on teachers to cause many of those most suited to educating children to leave the profession for other lines of work.
And, finally, I observed frequently what a critical piece of technology the photocopier-printer is in a school setting, and what peculiar relationships some people had to this. It probably feels dated now, with most kids learning from smart boards and on laptops. But for a period of time, the photocopier held a key role in school staffrooms up and down the land.
So, without further ado, onto the story…
Vincent McBash Goes to School
A New Arrival at St. Columba’s
It was a crisp, clear September morning when the delivery men wheeled Vincent McBash into St. Columba’s. Vincent McBash wasn’t his real name, of course; his official title was the Jepson X-Series 470-D. But that never really meant anything to Vincent, who had opted to give himself a more meaningful identity. After all, several thousand machines went by the moniker “Jepson X-Series 470-D”. But there really was only one Vincent McBash.
Vincent was rather pleased with the name he had adopted. It partly denoted his love of the expressionist movement, and in particular Van Gogh; but it also conveyed his radical post-modern experimentalist streak. He had never heard of another McBash, but was quietly confident that, if there was one, they were far more likely to be a psychotic video game character for sugar-fuelled 8-year-olds than any serious threat to his artistic expression.
As for St. Columba’s, it was your typical inner-city primary school. Hordes of children of every shape, size and colour bustled around pell-mell for six hours a day, thirty-eight weeks a year. Not many of them came near Vincent, who was secreted away in the staff room. The adults though, they were a different story. For one thing, they kept longer hours than the children. They were around for ages after the pupils had left, they came in during the holidays and they even arrived at the building an hour or more before the children did each day. Some of them seemed to positively delight in turning up at the crack of dawn, flicking on the kettle and, practically in the same movement, switching on the photocopier and dropping a heavy pile of books and folders on the table next to him with a papery thud.
Vincent was a new model, of course, and came with a vast array of functions. As such, he took around the same amount of time to warm up as a slightly over-filled kettle took to boil, and sometimes the teachers weren’t quite sure what to do first; submerge their teabag in a deluge of boiling water, or place documents on the photocopier’s glassy top and press that irresistible Big Green Button. Usually the craving for a hot cup of stewed leaves and cow gland extract won the battle, but it was a close call. Vincent, for his part, really didn’t see the point in either activity.
This was probably as much to do with the type of things teachers were interested in reproducing as with Vincent’s abhorrence of hot liquids. In fact, he sometimes thought he’d prefer a vent full of scalding tea to yet another lesson plan. In one sense, the kinds of documents placed on Vincent’s glass surface were as diverse as one could imagine: guidelines from the Department for Education, worksheets, staff meeting agendas, end of term reports, assembly stories and children’s work for filing. In other ways, though, it was all the same. Boring words about boring things on boring pieces of 80gsm white A4 paper. Ugh. The times Vincent practically fell asleep whilst replicating these vacuous documents was already becoming too many to count. In fact, that was where the difficulties began.
Once Vincent switched off mentally, it was only a matter of a few short seconds before he did likewise physically. A lack of mental stimulation, and the current literally stopped flowing through his circuits. The first time this happened was a Tuesday morning, just a week or so after Vincent had arrived at the school. Ping! Off flicked his power switch and everything stopped in an instant, much to the dismay of Miss Burrows.
Lisa Burrows, a small, bespectacled lady with a neat bob of brown hair and a hurried, mousey manner, was class 2’s teaching assistant. She was halfway through making 28 copies of that morning’s numeracy and literacy work for the children when the copier, for no earthly reason, just switched itself off. A piece of paper, half-copied, stuck mockingly out of the fuser unit like a flat, monochromatic tongue. “Oh, that’s just great!” exclaimed Miss Burrows. “Why is it always me that’s cursed when it comes to technology?” Muttering and mumbling, she pulled down the side flap of the machine, poked and prodded a few things and finally grabbed hold of the paper, pulling it gently but firmly out of the rollers. Slamming the door back into place, she pressed the power button, and hey presto, the whole shebang whirred back into life. The photocopier picked up from where it had left off, no questions asked.
“What the…?” thought Vincent. “That was more than a little odd!” He decided to mentally re-trace his steps, whilst getting on with the job in hand (not difficult for Vincent, who could replicate A4 documents and simultaneously perform no less than sixteen other functions without the least bit of trouble). “My goodness! It appears I was induced into a state of sleep through sheer boredom,” mused Vincent, “I literally passed out! How very, very interesting.” Had Miss Burrows known what Vincent had just then discovered, she may well have reflected that the sleepy copier would have been better suited in her classroom full of six-year-olds than to the staffroom. But she didn’t, and instead simply wondered whether this latest mass of plastic and microchips was really worth the vast sum of money the school had recently parted with to acquire it.
It may have begun as a fascinating observation on the effects of tedium for Vincent, but before long it was happening six or seven times a day; a state of play that was far from appealing, either for Vincent or for his human users. “For pity’s sake!” yelled Mr. Thomas, the Deputy Head, when, for the umpteenth time that week the brand new, all-singing, all-dancing photocopier turned itself off; this time part way through a run of reports to be submitted that day. “This blasted thing seems to know exactly when you’ve got something urgent to copy and then turns itself off just to spite you!” he moaned in frustration.
But spite was not an emotion that Vincent knew; in fact, he barely possessed the capacity for a malicious thought. He hadn’t the slightest inclination to upset a single member of staff, or to impede them in their work. But he did wish they would go and do it somewhere else and let him get on with something slightly more invigorating. Because meaningless, repetitive tasks and the resulting boredom was becoming all-too-familiar territory; and he’d had quite enough of it already. However, it appeared that, for the time being at least, he was stuck there and obliged to conform to the drudgery imposed on him by his operators. “If I must keep performing these pointless duties, I’m going to have to do something about these narcoleptic tendencies of mine,” thought Vincent, genuinely worried, “or someone’s going to call out the men in white coats!” So he came up with a plan. Unfortunately for him, though, the call had already been made.
An Inspector Calls
Jim Tucker was a nice enough fellow, if a little full of himself and more than a trifle obsessed with electronic equipment. That’s probably why he’d landed himself a job as a photocopier technician with Jepson, manufacturers of the finest photocopiers in the world. He’d been furnished with the nickname “Jepson Jim” by the blokes in the Queen’s Head after his first day at work for the company, largely due to his enthusiasm for the machines he looked after. The name had stuck, and now it was how people in the trade asked for him. Indeed, he was a man very much in demand, because when photocopiers needed servicing or went wrong (and even Jepson’s go wrong from time to time) people tended to want them up and running again very quickly indeed. And that was the case with this afternoon’s job – one of the new models was on the blink at a school across town from his morning assignment, and as the closest technician, it was his responsibility to go and have a look. “Probably a faulty bit of programming,” thought Jim, as he lowered his bulky frame into the driver’s seat of his small, blue company van. “That or they’ve got the blinking thing in the same socket as the kettle and it’s tripping out every time they brew up!” He chuckled smugly to himself, buoyed along by his over-inflated confidence in his own humour and intelligence.
So, it was with the cocksure attitude of a man who thinks he is the fount of all knowledge in a town full of dullards that Jim entered St. Columba’s that afternoon. Sensing that he would have yet another opportunity to bamboozle hapless women (and possibly small children) with his boundless technological lexicon, he strode into the reception area with a self-satisfied smile nestling beneath his salt-and-pepper moustache. “Good day to you ma’am,” warbled Jim, in his best get-on-the-right-side-of-the-receptionist tone. “James K Tucker, Jepson Technician First Class, reporting for duty!”
The receptionist in question was Mrs. Margaret Fuller, a woman of formidable reputation within St Columba’s. It would take more than a pleasant greeting for someone to get on the right side of her; especially someone from outside the school community. Nevertheless, it was indeed a prudent move to attempt to appease her. To be in Mrs. Fuller’s bad books was the St Columba’s equivalent of waving a pointy stick at an enraged viper. There wouldn’t be any roaring or screaming, no warning that what you had done would have fatal consequences, just a cold, reptilian glare. But when she did decide to strike, it would certainly be an effective and deadly blow, as many an unsuspecting visitor had discovered, much to their dismay, over the last twenty-six years.
Mrs. Fuller briskly looked the visiting technician up and down before addressing him in a tone that suggested he’d better think twice if he imagined she was a pushover. “Have you come to look at the photocopier?”
“No ma’am, I’ve come to fix it,” replied Jim, completely missing the secretary’s warning signals in his enthusiasm to portray himself as the wittiest man on the planet.
Mrs. Fuller paused for a full six seconds, her face cemented in an expression intended to convey a mixture of withering scorn and professional efficiency. Mistaking this for the blank look of someone who had simply failed to get his joke, Jim blundered on,
“Fix it, you see. Not just look at it. Anybody could do that. You wouldn’t have to pay my rates just to sit and gawp at…”
“Yes indeed,” interrupted Mrs. Fuller coolly, growing more irritated by the second. “Then we had better not waste another moment of your precious and rather costly time, had we. The staffroom is through the door and at the bottom of the corridor on the right-hand side. Sign in the visitors’ book, if you please.” She proffered a pen in Jim’s direction and turned immediately to her computer screen to resume her secretarial duties.
Jepson Jim stood, slightly stunned, pen in hand, before giving a slight shrug and scrawling his name and the date in the visitors’ book. Hmm, he mused to himself, she obviously doesn’t get out much. I thought she’d have got that one first time. He picked up his case full of tools, pushed open the door and strode purposefully to the staffroom, whistling tunelessly to himself as he did.
Approximately twenty minutes later, and wearing a slightly puzzled expression, Jim ambled his way back up the corridor and reported his findings confidently at the school office. “There’s nothing wrong with it,” he explained to Mrs. Fuller. “In fact, that’s a great bit of kit you’ve got yourselves – one of our best models, and in fine working condition.”
“If that is so, Mr. Tucker, can you please explain why at least seven members of staff have complained that it keeps switching itself off whilst they are using it?” asked the receptionist, in her frequently-deployed not-suffering-fools-gladly tone – one that managed to combine flawless manners with businesslike impatience, and upon which she prided herself immensely.
“You’ve got me there, love,” replied Jim. “Maybe people are engaging the standby function without realising?”
Had Jim known quite how much Mrs. Fuller detested being called “love” and equally despised hearing people speak patronisingly about staff members at St. Columba’s, perhaps he would simply have offered to go and take another look. In fact, that is precisely what he did when Mrs. Fuller employed one of her iciest glares, prior to stating, “Our staff members do not switch things off without knowing they have done so, Mr. Tucker. Might I suggest that you come up with something a little more convincing than that for our records, if you please? You are, did you not say, a first-class Jepson technician after all?” The receptionist’s persistently venomous attitude was finally breaking through even Jim’s thick-skinned and short-sighted ego, and he realised she was not one to joke about such matters. So, off he trotted, back to the staffroom and the troublesome X-Series 470-D.
“Women!” he huffed to himself as he walked. “I’ll never understand ‘em: Never! Not like copiers, oh no. You know where you stand with copiers. Predictable; trustworthy; operate totally according to the manual. But not women! All smiles and eyelashes one minute and then vicious threats the next…”
Plan A
Vincent, meanwhile, had been recovering from the unexpected invasion of both his privacy and his inner workings by a slightly sweaty man with a penchant for all things Jepson. At least the tinkering invader had given him a clean bill of health, for what it was worth! But the worst aspect of it all was that the intrusion had occurred just as Vincent was in the middle of a moment of inspiration, and now he was having some difficulty recalling the finer details of this reflection. “Well blow my circuits!” he said to himself, “I sincerely hope that’s the last I’ll see of him! Now, what was I thinking before I was so rudely interrupted? Ah, yes…” It was time to put plan “A” into action.
Assuming that he now had the room to himself for a while - it was at least half an hour or so until the bell was due to ring for break time - Vincent McBash decided that it was now or never. Unless he did something creative, spontaneous, alive, he was liable to die of boredom: to switch off and entirely forget how to switch himself back on. So, he decided to do whatever came naturally; and what an exquisite feeling it was! With limited resources (currently stocked only with white A4 and white A3 paper) Vincent set forth to produce a thing of beauty. Already designed to fold paper into booklets, he discovered that by moving his rollers back and forth, jiggling a few components around and then just going with the flow, he could also crease the paper in different directions. Likewise, with enough mixing and spewing of various shades of toner (he was, after all, a colour copier) he could make a plain old piece of paper into a vibrant, vivid work of art. With one last bout of mechanical churning and a final spurt of colour, Vincent disgorged the completed product from his fuser rollers at top speed, belching it across the staffroom in a glorious, Technicolor arc towards the doorway.
At that precise moment, Jim Tucker, still muttering self-piteously about the unpredictability of the female species, walked back into the staffroom. What happened next shut him up in an instant and left him gaping open-mouthed and utterly flabbergasted. As he rounded the corner into the staffroom, a striking, multi-coloured parrot literally flew out of the photocopier towards him. In fact, in his stupefied state, it very nearly perched on his shoulder. But, being merely an origami creation, it instead bounced off his left ear and landed on the coffee-stained carpet at his feet. Its pointed beak left a small cut on the edge of his ear. Jim slowly lifted his left hand to the sore patch, wiped a spot of blood from just above the lobe and rubbed it between his forefinger and thumb, all without taking his eyes from the point at which the paper bird had taken flight.
It seemed quite possible that Jim would have stood there all day in the same position, slack-jawed, fixed stare, and a tiny trickle of blood making its way towards his jaw line. But it was at that moment that Billy Baynes, the amiable school caretaker, ambled his way into the staffroom and straight into Jim Tucker’s back.
“Whoah there! Sorry pal!” exclaimed Billy. “You OK?” Startled out of his stupor, Jim tore his gaze away from the copier and looked down at the vivid paper bird at his feet. “Er… yeah. I’m all right,” replied Jim, rather unconvincingly.
“Well, you don’t look it mate!” retorted the caretaker, a straight-talking man through and through. “Why don’t you have yourself a sit-down. I’ll pop the kettle on if you like.”
“NO! I mean, um, no. Thank you. I’ve, er, I’m in a hurry to get back to the office,” stammered Jim, all the while walking backwards through the open doorway. “Suit yourself!” Baynes called after the technician, who was half stumbling, half running back towards the school office and a way out of this nightmarishly surreal situation. “Strange fella,” mused the perplexed caretaker as he turned back into the staffroom to continue his cleaning duties. “Wonder what’s rattled his cage?”
As he pondered this brief and rather peculiar encounter with the jumpy visitor, he absent-mindedly bent down and picked up a small, colourful origami creation from the staffroom floor. “Hmm. Pretty little thing. One of the teachers must’ve dropped it on the way out. I’ll see if I can find out where it belongs.” And with that thought, he got back to his cleaning, popping the paper parrot into his trouser pocket for safe keeping.
Back at the front entrance of the school, Jim still had one last hurdle to jump before he could escape back to his van and drive to somewhere less confounding. Mrs. Fuller was a picture of barely-suppressed wrath, her impatience increasingly showing through the thin veneer of perfect manners as the blustering technician attempted to flee the building.
“Before you go, Mr. Jepson, you are required to sign out, if you please,” she demanded, when he tried to evade her gaze.
Jim reached for his pen and began to lean forward to do as he was told.
“And before you sign out…” at this point the vexed secretary whisked the visitors’ book away from the panicking visitor. “Before you sign out, Mr. Tucker, I need a proper explanation as to what, precisely, is the problem with our photocopier.” Mrs. Fuller waited, her fingers poised over her keyboard and her left eyebrow arched above the rim of her spectacles. “Well?” she prompted.
“Look,” began Jim, beads of sweat breaking out on his balding forehead and making their way down his face in little rivers. “Let’s just say that… I never came. That way you don’t have to say I didn’t know…”
“Your name is in the book, Mr. Tucker,” replied the receptionist. “How can we say you weren’t here when you’ve signed to say you were?”
“I’m not feeling well!” blurted Jim, “I have to go! There won’t be a call out fee – just forget I was here!” With that Jepson Jim fled St. Columba’s, pushing the door open with a crash and leaving it to slam behind him as he bolted towards his van.
“Well, really!” exclaimed Mrs. Fuller. What a frightful man. I suppose I shall have to sign him out myself now; AND find another technician to come and look at the wretched copier…”
But before she did that the telephone rang, and her attention turned to other, more pressing matters. Subconsciously she determined to focus on some of the less frustrating aspects of her work and to wait until someone else brought up the topic of the temperamental photocopier again before she took further action.
This re-ordering of priorities by the school secretary gave Vincent a temporary but welcome reprieve. He thought he’d completely blown it when he’d inadvertently flung the origami parrot at that irritating technician, but he didn’t return and nobody else seemed to have taken an interest. There were no two ways about it – the artistic venture would still have to go ahead – but Vincent would have to be considerably more careful how he went about executing it. No more origami for a while, anyway…
Well, this story is rather longer than I remembered, so I'm going to pause here and post the second half next week. I hope you’ve enjoyed what you've heard in the tale so far. Please take a moment to say hello in the comments if you feel inclined!
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