Elegy

Catherine Brereton

elegy_batsThat spring we journeyed to Colwyn Bay, crammed into Mr. Fairfield’s brown Austin Maxi, three in the back, one in the front, and Mr. Fairfield at the wheel, chain-smoking his way along the A55 from Chester to Caernarfon. We took turns sitting up front, until Marion Salisbury announced she felt sick, bouncing around as we were in the back, jolted over pothole after pothole, with the Maxi’s paltry suspension throwing us from side to side as Mr. Fairfield lurched and shuddered around the twisted, mountain-hugging road. He slowed the car, pulled over onto a grass verge, tipped out his ashtray over a patch of dandelions, and ushered a green-faced Marion into the front seat with a plastic bag for insurance. I found myself wedged between Steven Atkinson, with his piggy eyes and flushed skin, and Stuart Ward, who had once tried to hold my hand in his clammy fingers and had peed on the carpet at a school assembly when he was six. There were no seatbelts; Steven Atkinson heaved his bulk—substantial even at the age of ten—to kneel on the seat and pull faces through the rear window at Fergus Rhodie, who sat in the front seat of the car behind us.

Mr. Fairfield’s white hair fell in a heavy swoop from his forehead. It was nicotine-yellowed at the temples and matched the tips of his dark-stained fingers, fingers that were almost always clutching a Benson and Hedges Gold. His foot was perpetually swollen with gout, heavy on the accelerator and uneven on the clutch; as we pulled back onto the A55, the car jumped uneasily forward, leaping out in front of something fast and pale blue. I distinctly remember the blue; Mr. Fairfield blamed the near miss on the other car being the same color as the sky. It was the only day that week we saw any shade of blue above us.

Colwyn Bay was a school tradition. It was 1980, and the eight members of the junior class at St. Mark’s School were within four months of moving up to the Big School. Houghton Comprehensive waited; Colwyn Bay was a last hurrah, a chance for Mr. Fairfield to educate us about life outside the classroom and the tiny village that had been the center of our worlds for the last ten years. He knew, through some circuitous connection, a woman who owned a bed and breakfast ten minutes’ walk from the sea front, and he had been dragging car-loads of pre-teens to her chintzy establishment for the last five years, at least. The ten of us rolled up in two cars; Mr. Fairfield had led the way, and his sister, the formidable Mrs. Macdonald, pulled up behind us. She had stuck sensibly to the speed limit that Mr. Fairfield had pushed his car into ignoring.

* * *

I was scared of Mr. Fairfield from the moment I first saw him—and with good reason. He had, in his makeshift office, two cricket bats—one made of pink plastic, one made of polished wood—with which he meted out his own brand of discipline.

“Michael James, Jeoffrey Smart, Suzanne McMillan, Mandy Tuttle, Matthew Allen, Anne Hammersley…”

I stopped listening to the list of names he was reeling off when I heard mine. The blood rushed through my ears. I knew I was in trouble. I wound my way through the labyrinth of wooden desks to the front of the classroom and lined up, sucking in my breath.

“Bend over…”

And we did. A line of backsides and a line of panicked faces casting desperate glances at the rest of our classmates, who looked both sympathetic and relieved not to be us. We didn’t know what we had—or hadn’t—done to warrant this seemingly random identity parade of posteriors; they didn’t know what they had or hadn’t done to warrant being left at their desks.

That day, he used the wooden cricket bat. We grew to learn that it was the mildest of his sports-related punishments. The pink plastic cricket bat was heavier, slid through the air with a more threatening sound, connected with the backside somehow more thoroughly and with more of a sting. Some of us did not know that then, this being our first introduction to the discipline of Mr. Fairfield’s junior class. Mr. Fairfield was breaking us in gently.

A series of hearty thwacks was dispensed, the line of smarting backsides dismissed. A silence descended, and an anxiety-filled pause.

“Michael James, Jeoffrey Smart, Mandy Tuttle, Anne Hammersley…”

The list was shorter second time around, but my name was still on it. I looked confusedly to the girl on my right for an answer. Emily was three years my senior and ostensibly my best friend. She shrugged her shoulders in an almost imperceptible gesture of resignation, well aware that any outright display of sympathy would result in her name tacked to the end of the list. No friendship was worth that fate.

My backside was still smarting from the first round when the cricket bat connected for a second time. Tears pricked at the corners of my eyes; I sniffed them back quickly; I was a lot of things, but I was not a mardy-pants.

A heavy sigh, then another silence.

“Michael JAMES, Jeoffrey SMART, Anne HAMMERSLEY…”

The list was growing shorter still, but I was still on it. I squeezed through the wooden desks for a third time, concentrating now on the ink-stained wells and scoured surfaces. Someone behind me lifted the lid of their desk, but it slipped from their hands and banged noisily shut. The room jumped audibly in response.

“Stuart Ward, it is TOO late. Join us at the front, if you will, young man.”

Stuart Ward was close to crying; I wasn’t surprised. I could see that he was sweating and knew that his hands would be damp and nasty. Three, or maybe even four trips later, and mine was the only name left. I shuffled my way back to my seat, wincing as I eased myself down onto the hard plastic. Mr. Fairfield stood watching from the front, his small dark eyes fixed on my desk. I hung my head in shame and embarrassment.

“And what, ladies and gentlemen, do you think a steam engine and Anne Hammersley have in common?” Mr. Fairfield chortled heartily at the stunned room. Twenty pairs of eyes stared unblinkingly back, petrified that not knowing the answer would put them back on the list.

“They both have a tender BEHIND!” His chortling became eerie laughter; he had his hands on his hips like some macabre cartoon roly-poly, rocking endlessly back and forth. “Come HERE, girl, come on!”

That time, it was barely a pat; the cricket bat only made the lightest of contact with my corduroy-clad rump.

“Will someone, for Christ’s sake, PLEASE tell this girl what to do!”

Emily hissed at me from behind her hand. “Get your dictionary out!” I looked at her desk—lying there, next to an exercise book with an orange cover, was an old blue edition of the dictionary; I glanced at the desks in my line of vision—blue rectangles on all of them. Slipping into my seat, and finally allowing the long-threatening tears to spill down my hot cheeks, I lifted the lid of my desk and pulled out my dictionary. Mr. Fairfield let out another chuckle, scribbled some task on the blackboard, groped around in the pocket of his brown suit jacket, and, after retrieving a crumpled box of Benson and Hedges, announced that he was going for a fag.

* * *

Driving to Penmon along a road flanked with early spring. Deep rows of trees standing sentry, then scattering to haphazard silhouettes on a rising embankment of grass carpeted with daffodils. Marion Salisbury, still in the front, no longer carsick, but the risk was too great to have her sit in the back; me, face pressed against the window, squinting at the glittering patch of Menai barely visible in the distance. And the daffodils, brightly heralding the Priory ahead. Mr. Fairfeld, cigarette propped between his lips, one bushy white eyebrow cocked as he turned to us, squashed in the back seat, juggling bags of wax-paper wrapped sandwiches and bottles of orange squash.

“Wordsworth,” he said, “You should always think of Wordsworth when you see daffodils like this. Who was Wordsworth?”

Silence. Who was Wordsworth?

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high, o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;

And there it was, the host of which he spoke, Wordsworth brought to life before our juvenile eyes. Mr. Fairfield continued in what I now recall as a perfect recitation of Wordsworth’s poem, not so much as a word out of place. Steven Atkinson fidgeted and coughed, not seeing the point; Stuart Ward took a gulp of his orange squash; Marion Salisbury clutched her plastic bag to her face, the winding, shorefront road finally having a deleterious effect on her constitution. I was transfixed, hypnotized by the daffodils immortalized as they were in rhyme.

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,

“Pensive mood. What is a pensive mood, someone? What does it mean to be pensive?”

No answer. Just the wheezing hum of the Maxi’s engine and, through the window cracked for Marion Salisbury’s benefit, the distant squall of seabirds, circling above the shoreline. We hoped for puffins.

We ate lunch amongst the daffodils, on damp grass pocked with sheep droppings. The Priory beckoned, but not without adequate sustenance first—Mr. Fairfield wryly commented that no one should face a medieval priory on an empty stomach. He left his lunch in the car, lit another cigarette, and leaned his back against a tree. We had been instructed, before we set off from school what seemed like a lifetime ago, to bring pencils and paper, and I fished my blue denim pencil case out from the plastic bag that had held lunch, but now only held scrunched up wax-paper, a few crumbs, and an empty glass bottle. I had saved weeks of pocket money for the pencil case, and its contents. It was my pride and joy. The daffodils fluttered, just as Mr. Fairfield had said, bravely bobbing their golden heads, nodding in approval.

“You, Miss Hammersley, will remember these daffodils, will you not?”

I nodded, and Mr. Fairfield lowered himself gingerly to the ground beside me, puffing on his cigarette and wafting the smoke away from me with his free hand.

“Will you tell me that poem again?”

While I sketched childish trumpets and the rest of my classmates played hide and seek, Mr. Fairfield brought Wordsworth back to life. When we left the grassy bank, my pencil case lay, forgotten, next to a patch of daffodils.

* * *

I do not know what Peter Earle had done to deserve his fate, but there he was, perched precariously on top of the chalk board, clinging to the wooden frame, trying to ignore the frightening gap between him and the hard, tiled floor. Mr. Fairfield picked up a wooden board duster, thick with chalk residue, and lobbed it toward the ceiling; it ricocheted from a ceiling tile and bounced off the wall above Peter’s head, covering him in a cloud of chalk dust dandruff and setting off a chain of rib-shaking coughs. The board duster clattered to the floor; Mr. Fairfield threw a casual look at one of the boys seated next to Peter’s empty chair. The boy scuttled quickly to retrieve the duster and place it back on Mr. Fairfield’s imposing desk. I kept my head down, moving my pencil over my mathematics workbook and watching Peter’s fate unfold from behind my fringe. It was better to demonstrate no degree of interest in Mr. Fairfield’s punishments. These days, I kept my nose clean and my dictionary on my desk.

* * *

I am on the beach. It is cold, the wind is blowing, and the sea is a strange shade of gray. I am on the beach and I am crying, poking at puddles with the toes of my grubby shoes, the wind stinging my cheeks, already sore from my salty tears. I am homesick.

There’s a dead crab in one of the saltwater pools; I pick it up anyway and carry it tenderly across the dark sand. The sky is overcast, built of thick, woolen clouds that smother the horizon. Overhead, seabirds circle, occasionally swooping down to the surface of a scudding sea where foamy waves collect debris from the beach, leaving behind a scummy detritus of broken shells and seaweed. On the shoreline the silhouettes of my friends skip in and out of the waves, soaking their feet in icy saltwater. Their yelps of glee carry across the flat expanse and bounce off the high sea wall behind me, joining the cries of the seabirds in one indistinct cacophony. I discover a rock pool and place my crustacean on the surface of the fathomless water, but it sinks and I plunge my hand in to retrieve it, disappointed that it did not swim. One of its legs snaps off in my hand, and a shiver of disgust runs through me. I pull hanks of slimy kelp from the rocks and arrange them around the edges of the pool, a grave for the dead crab. The seaweed feels slick in my hand; my fingers are coated and sore. Ignorant of my absence, my friends are still frolicking in the water. Dozens of discarded limpet shells lie polka-dotted across the sand, and I jump up to collect them, in large handfuls, picking out the smallest and pinkest and prettiest, using them to decorate the kelp, a marine wreath that will soon be washed away by the incoming tide.

Mr. Fairfield is leaning against the sea wall. I can see the glowing orange tip of his cigarette; a sudden gust of wind brings a subtle hint of tobacco amid the brine-laden layers of sea air. I leave the grave of my crab-friend and walk slowly back to the sea wall, feet sinking in the coarse sand, leaving footprints in which the water quickly pools and small sandworms emerge before burrowing back down; piles of perfectly threaded sand, immaculate sculptures in miniature to mark my fleeting presence.

“Not getting your feet wet, Miss Hammersley?”

I shake my head. My white tennis shoes are already brown and spoiled, and my shins are pink and raw from the salt. The other children wear jeans, rolled to their knees, but I do not own jeans and my mother only packed flimsy cotton skirts. I look down to my feet and take in my socks, rolled down, vaguely grey, and already sodden through the thin canvas of my shoes.

“Did you find your pencil case?”

I shake my head again. The roar of wind and sea swells in my head and my eyes begin to prickle. Mr. Fairfield nods and grunts in response to my gesture, then inhales deeply on the stub of his cigarette. Closer now, the voices of my friends, blown up the beach as they gallop toward us. A crack in the clouds, and a slice of lemon sun briefly turns the green-clad sea wall to gold. Mr. Fairfield ushers us to a break in the wall where stone steps rise sharply to the road beyond. Here, the wind drops, and he waves at us to sit down, puffing furiously on the last few drags before stubbing out the spent cigarette on the side of the wall and flicking the stub down onto the beach. It struggles against its demise for a few short seconds, tiny pinpricks of orange fighting for oxygen, glowing hot, then dying to black. We fight for space on the sand-coated steps, huddled together for heat. I burrow my hands inside the sleeves of my jacket and scrunch my fingers into small fists.

“Listen.”

We listen. Just the ardent cries of gulls, still swooping, picking at remnants of packed lunches, discarded chips, fragments of fish batter, stale crisps and cake crumbs, a child’s dropped ice-cream cone. A car rushes past on the road above us and is gone. Just us, and the gulls.

It is an ancient Mariner,
And he stoppeth one of three.
‘By thy long grey beard and glittering eye,
Now wherefore stopp’st thou me?

I glance past Mr. Fairfield. He is standing above us on the steps, a towering figure looming ominously, his voice booming against the wind. An over-coated old man passes behind him, hovers over a litter bin at the top of the steps. I watch as he dives into the bin, pulls out a broken umbrella, and slips it into a plastic supermarket bag. Mr. Fairfield is still booming. The old man shuffles down the steps past us, looking sidelong at this curious group, vaguely irritated at our usurpation of his territory. He has a beard, not long and gray, but wispy, the color of the beach and the sky. He has been, I think, sucked in to the sea front, assimilated. He is part of it. He belongs here. I turn my head and watch him squelch along the sand, the red and blue print on his plastic supermarket bag the only color for miles.

The Wedding-Guest sat on a stone;
He cannot choose but hear;
And thus spake on that ancient man,
The bright-eyed Mariner.

I fancy this old man to be the mariner, and I, the Wedding Guest sat on a stone. I turn back to Mr. Fairfield, who has lit another cigarette. Between stanzas he pauses, inhales, and puffs out, circles of smoke quickly pulled apart by the wind. The sky grows ominously darker for a brief moment, black clouds gathering behind the sea front buildings, the windows dull and blank as evening begins its inevitable descent. When I turn back to the beach, the old man is gone and I imagine him swept away by the advancing tide. Out on the water a distant ship hints at the horizon line, a misshapen blob of darker gray moving slowly across my line of vision. The gulls are still circling, screaming overhead, excited by some washed up corpse of a fish, swooping still, their high-pitched squawks penetrating the wind. A fat drop falls onto my cheek; I cannot tell if it is rain or the approaching sea, but I trust that it is rain and that Mr. Fairfield will not allow us to drown here on the steps. On the wall I can see the murky tide-line, just level with the top of my head, but the beach still exists for long yards behind us, and the chalkboard nailed to the wall announces that the tide will not be high until 7:42 pm. I do not know what time it is, just that it is not yet 7:42. Another splash on my cheek. I brush it away with a hand that is still hidden inside my sleeve. Mr. Fairfield does not seem to have noticed.

At length did cross an Albatross,
Through the fog it came;
As if it had been a Christian soul,
We hail’d it in God’s name.

I have never seen an albatross, not even in a picture; I look at the birds circling madly overhead and imagine them bigger, less frantic, more graceful. Mr. Fairfield eases his gout-ridden limbs down the steps; our heads turn in unison to follow his movement. He is in full flow now, his white hair blown in a sheet across his forehead, revealing the tips of his ears, reddened with cold, and a baby-pink scalp. He does not make any attempt to brush his hair away, simply furrows his bushy eyebrows into a deep, satanic v, the corners of his piercing eyes crinkling. Again, he drags on his cigarette, pausing in his recitation to allow the smoke to fill his lungs. His feet, which are not equipped for the beach, sink into the sand, a million tiny grains pushing over the tips of his shiny toes; the hem of his dark brown trousers staining as salt water soaks into the polyester fabric.

Water, water, everywhere,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, everywhere,
Nor any drop to drink.

Mr. Fairfield cannot be stopped, puffing on his cigarette and gesticulating wildly with his free hand. His voice undulates with the waves, ebbing in and out on the growing wind. More raindrops, unmistakable now, water, water, everywhere, splashing heavily onto our bare cheeks, Mr. Fairfield’s hair starting to plaster to his pink scalp. I blink raindrops from my eyes, scrunch up my face, and shiver. My thin cotton skirt is already soaked; my knees are scarlet with cold. Finally he notices, abruptly tossing the still-lit half-smoked cigarette onto the sand behind him, where it fizzles pathetically out. He beckons us up the stone steps at a semi-gallop, but we will not miss the downpour. I turn and look back at the beach, half-hidden now behind a curtain of shimmering rain. The old man reappears from nowhere and picks up the discarded cigarette, slipping it neatly into the pocket of his fraying overcoat. We run to keep up with Mr. Fairfield, who is already crossing the seafront road.

* * *

I took home a slender manila envelope one day in July; it was addressed to my parents in a florid script and weighed heavily of judgment. A separate package too, wrapped in brown paper. I carried them both home and waited anxiously for my father to return home from work. No verdict would be passed without his presence. My father opened the envelope and passed the contents to my mother, who read silently from the two handwritten sheets. She nodded and handed me the pages. On my final report, Mr. Fairfield had scrawled, semi-illegibly, that it had been a pleasure to teach me. “Maybe,” he went on, “the word should be privilege.” My mother pushed the package across the table, and I ripped it open impatiently. Inside, a denim pencil case, new, filled with colored pencils, every color under the sun, more than I ever imagined possible, and with them a hefty roll of drawing paper.

* * *

By the time we returned from Colwyn Bay, the old wooden stage on which I had dressed as a fisherman and sung the Five Penny Piece classic “Big Jim” was demolished, reduced to a pile of dust-covered boards, the innards of the school laid bare. I had played Mary on that stage, to Peter Earle’s Joseph, with a pale blue tea towel tied around my head and a plastic doll wrapped in an old nappy in my arms. Before that, I had been a dove, in a costume made of tissue feathers which my mother had painstakingly put together in our living room. She made a beak from an old toilet roll tube painted orange, and fastened it to my head with an elastic band which pinched my skin.

I, said the dove, from the rafters high
I cooed him to sleep that he would not cry
We cooed him to sleep, my mate, and I
I, said the dove, from the rafters high

But now the stage was gone, and only fading photographs stuck in my grandmother’s album remained. Nothing stayed as it had been. My crab-grave had been washed away by the tide; I checked the following day, hoping that it might have survived the storm. Even Mr. Fairfield was different; he was quiet as we drove back up the A55. Marion Salisbury managed not to be sick; I slept fitfully with my cheek still pushed up against the glass. And now our school was being ripped apart. One by one, Mr. Fairfield called us into what was left of his makeshift office for the end-of-year spelling test. Every year, he pulled out a wrinkled, dog-eared piece of paper and tested us on the same set of words—antique to miscellaneous, and beyond. The rest of us worked quietly on long divisions, the answers to which lay in a slim booklet on Mr. Fairfield’s desk. Steven Atkinson slid up to the desk on rubber-soled shoes, carefully lifting the cover of the book, trying to search for the page that would solve his problems, but Mr. Fairfield was quieter, waiting until Steven turned around, swinging a cricket bat in each hand. We held our collective breath.

Obese tears fell from Steven’s piggy eyes, stumbling down his flushed cheeks, but he twisted his mouth into fake smirk anyway, determined not to wholly submit. Mr. Fairfield switched to the pink plastic cricket bat halfway through his disciplinary administrations, leaning the wooden bat against the chalkboard where it rested, mocking. No one looked; the room was eerily silent save for the swish and thwack of plastic on flesh, and Steven’s muffled grunts of pain. A loud telephone ring permeated the room, shattering the hush into a million bells that tinkled from the dusty walls. Mr. Fairfield laid down the cricket bat and set off at a limping run.

Steven Atkinson stood for a moment, frozen to the spot. Stuart Ward glanced at the wall behind which Mr. Fairfield’s office lay; we could hear his deep voice echoing indistinctly, bouncing off the exposed subfloor of the school, caught in the tangled yards of copper pipes and electrical wires that kept the building running. Then, the ping of a replaced receiver, and Mr. Fairfield calling out a name. Mandy Tuttle scraped back her chair and disappeared into his office; seconds later came the shrill pipe of her voice: “A—n—t—i—”. Steven Atkinson slunk back to his seat, perching gingerly on the edge of the plastic, surreptitiously wiping his swollen eyes. A gasp. Stuart Ward, walking to the front of the class and daring to pick up the revered cricket bats, one in each hand, swinging them in a grimacing mimicry of his teacher. We held our breath again as he walked to the far end of the room, where the stage had once stood and where now the floor lay discarded, waiting to be disposed of. The builders came in each evening, worked through the night, cordoning off their work site with yellow tape tied around the backs of small school chairs. Stuart Ward hopped quickly over this tape now, and into forbidden territory. Mandy Tuttle’s voice paused, and a terrified look passed over his face, swiftly shifting to relief when she resumed her articulation. All manner of debris lay scattered around—half-full bags of concrete powder, hessian sacks bulging with tools, black plastic bags filled with rubbish, rolls of subfloor insulation, boxes of nails, screws, and tacks, tubes of glue and silicon. Stuart reached for an open roll of insulation, fiberglass wadding marked “handle with care,” certainly not intended for the tender, gloveless hands of youth. He ripped a chunk from the roll and wrapped it around the cricket bats, pulling the instruments of discipline into an unfamiliar embrace. Leaning over the open floor, he reached in and shoved the parcel beneath a maze of pipework, nudging it close to the insulation the builders had already laid. The air supply in the room seemed scarce now, thin and insufficient. I felt light-headed, afraid, giddy. Stuart Ward eased himself over the yellow tape and back to his desk, throwing himself at his seat, ducking his head, and making busy with a pencil and his long multiplications.

Mr. Fairfield did not notice the absence of his cricket bats until much later that day, as afternoon slid into evening, after we had gratefully left for home, and thankfully after the builders had commenced their evening shift. He did not think to look beyond the confines of the classroom, and the builders didn’t notice the wadded-up parcel of insulation. They laid new floorboards over the top, then a layer of ceramic tiles set in place with a hard cement.

Stuart Ward was an unrecognized hero. Mr. Fairfield made vague threats in an attempt to have his cricket bats returned, but to no avail. Corporal punishment was made illegal just two years later. I never forgot the daffodils, or the new pencil case. Or the cricket bats, which still remain in their carefully insulated grave.


Catherine A. Brereton is from England, but moved to America in 2008. Her most recent work can be found in The Establishment, The Toast, Crack the Spine, Ekphrastic, The Indianola Review, and Literary Orphans, and is forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, Cheat River Review, Star 82 Review, and Litro. One of her essays was recognized as a Notable Essay in Best American Essays, 2015, and she is 2015 winner of The Flounce’s Nonfiction Writer of the Year Award. Catherine has an MFA from the University of Kentucky, and she lives in Lexington, Kentucky, with her wife and their teenage daughters. You can follow her on Twitter @CABreretonKY.