Never think you know it all

The Class From Hell were bad right from the first moment Hannah walked into the large science lecture theatre in which she was expected to teach the twenty three fifteen-year old adolescents, twice a week. After spending quality time at the beginning of their first lesson together getting to know their names, Hannah felt she was ready to launch into some serious work. Or so she thought. It was evident the little tinkers were not interested at all, continuing to laugh and have their own loud, private conversations whilst she quietly pleaded with them from the raised dais at the front of the lecture theatre to be quiet. They simply refused to heed her appeals for calm. To add insult to injury, her new colleagues next door in the workroom must have heard every sound and every part of the lesson’s proceedings, yet no one came in to support her.
‘Set 5 is outrageous!’ she exclaimed passionately to Timmy Baldman, her head of department later that same day. ‘Their behaviour is unacceptable! They don’t have any textbooks or if they do they don’t bring them to lessons, they forget their files, they’re noisy, they’re rude and they’re the worst class I’ve ever taught!’
‘You’ll have to train them to bring their textbooks to lessons,’ suggested Wicksy, the youngest biologist in the department, trying to teach grandma to suck eggs. ‘They’ve probably been told in the past to leave their books in their studies in their boarding house.’
‘Well, if I can’t get them to use their textbooks, and it’s nigh impossible to get them to bring their lap tops into lesson, then can we please order some new resources for them to use in class?’
‘But we have lots of resources,’ replied Timmy, pointing to a couple of pathetic clip files of photocopiable question sheets.
‘No, I mean more than that: a variety of books and interesting worksheets and schemes for them to follow. I can’t keep giving out photocopied handouts all of the time or writing notes on the whiteboard. And as there is no data projector for me to use, it’s boring for them and that’s why they’re behaving like this.’
But despite Timmy’s assurances that he would order some new resources for Hannah’s class, it was obvious he had no real grasp of what she was talking about and that he lacked the interest in helping her out. Unfortunately, she was too overloaded with work from teaching entirely new courses to order any of the resources she suggested herself, so she would just have to make do with what she had.
‘Well, if they won’t behave, may I have an overhead projector in the lecture theatre, then?’ she asked the chief technician, knowing there were no computer facilities, not even a fixed data projector in any of the biology classrooms or laboratories for her to call upon. ‘I can teach and face them at the same time. It’s a method that’s always worked well with difficult classes time and time again in the past.’
‘But we can’t wheel an overhead projector into the lecture theatre because of the steps,’ objected the chief technician.
Hannah looked at him, bewildered. At times, some of her new colleagues were anything but helpful and she already sensed their growing resentment towards her each time she made a suggestion to try and improve the behaviour of Set 5. She later discovered why the chief technician was so unaccommodating towards her: he had applied for her job but had been unsuccessful because he was unsuitably qualified for the task.
So, what about carrying the projector in and placing it on the teaching desk at the front, she thought in frustration? How easy would that be?
Despite the technician’s unreasonable objection, an overhead projector magically appeared on the bench at the front of the lecture theatre a few weeks later without a word being said to anyone but by this time Hannah had already engineered a room change with Timmy Baldman. Annoyed though he was that she had suggested he tinker with his timetabling to suit her needs, Hannah could at least now stand a better chance of managing more effectively the young, rich reprobates of Set 5 in the more user-friendly environment of a classroom.
‘When are we going to learn anything new?’ shouted a small, over-weight Asian boy. Very rich and very spoiled, his frustration at being told to get on with his work usually resulted in him shouting abuse at Hannah.
‘Please do not shout out at me, Poonutter,’ asked Hannah in a reasonable fashion, keeping her cool.
The boy stared back at her, eyes screwed up in distaste.
‘But I’m not shouting, I’m being quiet and I’m trying to ask you a question,’ he argued back, in an overly rude tone of voice.
Hannah wasn’t used to being addressed by a pupil in this way and so she had already after similar previous outbursts sought the advice of her colleagues to determine exactly why Poonutter behaved as he did. According to his tutor, the boy often screamed his unreasonable demands down his mobile telephone at his mother thousands of miles away at his home and she, being an honest and loyal Asian woman, had no choice but to give in to the screaming little shit. Her misplaced motherly indulgence, however, certainly explained why he behaved so badly towards Hannah in the classroom and it came as no surprise when many months later she had to complete various official forms for Poonutter’s attention-deficit and hyperactive condition! By the end of that academic year, he would also manage to secure, at no insignificant cost to his affluent parents, a specially assigned examination invigilator whose prime function was to not only prod him to keep his attention from wandering during his own examinations but also to prevent him from distracting other examinees around him! But in the meantime, for the majority of the year, Hannah had to persevere with the boy’s excessive demands in the classroom, totally ignorant of his true educational needs and mental deficiencies.
‘Why won’t you answer my questions when I ask you,’ Udder reasoned, continuing to pester Hannah for her attention whilst she dealt with another pupil. Here was another spoiled and badly-behaved boy of Asian extraction, being educated in Britain far away from his rich parents abroad.
‘I’m trying to answer Tom’s question, Udder,’ replied Hannah, hanging on to her patience for dear life. ‘I can’t answer both of you together. Please be patient and I’ll deal with you when I’ve finished with Tom.’
‘Yeh! And you haven’t answered my question yet,’ piped up Ackmed, a sly-looking and impatient boy from the Middle East. He was always dissatisfied with Hannah’s equitable approach to her pupils’ demands.
‘Oh, God, you’re so…’ piped up Gus, not finishing his statement but intending it to sound like a criticism of her classroom management.
‘Yes, Esan? What is it?’ asked Hannah, responding to the boy at the back of the classroom who was frantically waving both arms at her. She had heard him loudly complain to his friends around him that she had not answered his question either.
‘Oh never mind,’ he replied slyly, once he had got her attention. ‘It doesn’t matter now.’
‘And Dr Thompson,’ demanded Jeremiah, a giant smirk on his face as he recognized the incessant pressure the class was putting her under. ‘What about my question?’
‘And mine!’ indicated Hacker, with one of his annoyingly haughty public schoolboy looks.
‘Ackmed, please stop making rude noises at Poonutter,’ she asked in response to Ackmed’s attempts at sounding Poonutter’s name in an exaggerated Asian accent. ‘Let me make it quite clear that any racial undertones will not be tolerated in my class.’
‘Racial undertones!‘ rippled several male voices in close succession. The class burst into laughter. Hannah was devastated. It seemed that no matter what she said or did, the class always got the upper hand in making her look like a fool.
Her initial attempts to stamp out any racist behaviour in Set 5 ultimately proved to be a dreadful mistake. Sly comments about ‘being racist’ would often emerge from one mouth or another in subsequent lessons and eventually Hannah was forced to ignore them, to minimize the general mayhem and interruptions they would cause to her teaching. There was no doubt these were pretty sick kids and Hannah could see why their parents had packed them away to boarding school, out of their sight. Not long after the racially-motivated verbal mimicry, Poonutter’s tutor confirmed that Ackmed had indeed been racially bullying Poonutter, and although Hannah lacked the time to contact the relevant housemasters about her perceptive observations at the time, she did at least feel some satisfaction in dealing with the situation within the small chaotic domain of her classroom. For her, it seemed unfair that she had to suffer the derision of the class over the issue, which only added to her dwindling reputation with them; it also further substantiated her theory that those teachers who survived at Faggs School were those who constantly turned a blind eye to some dreadful behaviour in the classroom, ensuring their lives remained as easy and pain-free as possible. It appeared that not making a complaint about a pupil to either their housemaster or a housemistress, or even to the senior management team, meant a teacher was doing well in the classroom.
The situation could not have been further from the truth!

Very early on in her relationship with The Class From Hell, Hannah patiently insisted on decent behaviour and hard work in the classroom and as many of the pupils clearly lacked a good knowledge base in her subject, she understood it was her responsibility and hers alone to make up for their scientific deficiencies. She persevered in answering their often menacing questions, even though they were impatient with the speed with which she answered them, and tolerated their retaliatory behaviour if ever her response to any one of them included the word ‘No!’, whatever the rationale behind her answer. On other occasions when they were feeling overly-antagonistic, she noted how several of the boys would insolently persist with the same question, repeating it several times over, sometimes in unison, as if they had practiced their technique before arriving for class. In spite of this, she decided it was much better to stomach their rude antics and to answer their incessant, time-wasting questions than to face the music from difficult and aggressive parents had their sons ever complained to them about her. But the calmer she became in asking them to be quiet, the more they continued to be rude, impatient and deliberate in their attempts to make life difficult for her. Their constant noise making, chatter and raucous laughter and their resistance to all reasonable attempts to stop misbehaving was a new experience for Hannah.
And she hated them for it.
‘Dr Thompson, would you get me another set of notes for the last two years’ work?’ asked Hacker, disturbing the flow of Hannah’s teaching one day.
‘What’s wrong with your old notes, Hacker?’ Hannah replied, unprepared for what was to come next.
‘I’ve thrown them all out.’
‘You’ve thrown them all out? But getting you a new set would involve a lot of work for me. And besides, I didn’t teach you during those two years.’
‘Yes, I know that but without notes I won’t be able to learn anything.’
Hannah continued to stare at the boy, stunned at his request. It would take her several hours of effort to put two year’s worth of work together for what was a badly behaved, arrogant trouble-maker who had to take responsibility for his own actions in throwing away his old notes. It was unheard-of!
‘I’ll see what I can do for you but you’ll have to give me a while to sort it out because it’s not going to happen overnight,’ came Hannah’s reply, mindful of her long working day and the need to press on with the lesson.
‘Why can’t you go a bit slower for me?’ Poonutter suddenly demanded, once they continued on with their notes from the whiteboard. Note-making seemed a waste of precious classroom time as far as Hannah was concerned but the pupils at the school seemed to thrive on it, allowing them to preserve their precious, thinly-spread energy without having to be proactive and think.
‘No, go a bit faster!’ insisted Ruzzerman, a small but very strong-willed barrel of a boy.
‘Yes, faster!’ insisted Tom, his spotty adolescent face beaming with enjoyment.
‘No, slower!’ repeated Poonutter, genuinely getting agitated.
‘No, faster!’ came Ruzzerman’s antagonistic response.
‘Yes, faster!’ agreed Udder, smirking.
‘No, slower!’ shouted Poonutter even louder at his classmates, afraid he would lose his teacher’s vote.
‘Oh, God, you’re so…’ put in Gus, with one of his all-knowing sly smirks.
‘Thank you, Gus. Please, let’s just get on with our work,’ Hannah asked quietly. She resisted the deep-seated urge to angrily bellow at them; this would have ensured her getting a reputation for shouting at the school but, unbeknown to her, she was already gaining herself a reputation – as someone who could not control The Class From Hell. Even though every teaching colleague she had ever worked with knew she could control every pupil in every class at every school, it seemed here, at Faggs School, the school which had produced so many famous alumni, she had completely lost her touch. A professional failure in the making, no less.
She was in a slow downward spiral to nowhere and she already sensed it.

‘You’re Welsh, aren’t you?’ persisted an impertinent Gus at the front of the class, during the middle of another one of her lessons with Set 5.
Oh, no, she thought. His tone of voice! Here we go again! They’re going to rip me apart for being Welsh, now!
‘My nationality has nothing to do with you, Gus. Please get on with your work.’
‘She’s ashamed to be Welsh,’ he slyly pronounced to Tom sitting next to him, pretending to whisper but being just loud enough for the whole class and Hannah to hear. She looked at him quietly, intent on ignoring his deliberate attempt to disrupt the semi-workish atmosphere she was constantly fighting for in each of their lessons together. Even punishing them within the school’s sanctions system was an option closed off to her, for whenever she pursued two or three of them at the end of each lesson for their poor behaviour, she was always greeted with a spiraling tirade of their lies and denials. Very soon in her conversation with the miscreants, they would succeed in convincing her that she was the one who had got it horrendously wrong or that she was being professionally unreasonable because no other teacher tried to punish them like she did. In time, this only meant one thing: she was losing her confidence in dealing with naughty, adolescent boys. To cap it all, she just did not have the time or energy to contact the boys’ housemasters to report them or even to collect in the written punishment she might have set them as a compromise. So, Hannah just stuck it out but, as one would expect, the background mumblings of discontent, criticism and the constant ‘she…she…she…’ behind her back in class, gradually wore her down.
Just as The Class From Hell had intended.
‘There’s something wrong here and I’m going to see someone about you. You are not right,’ accused Gus, after the umpteenth time of Hannah patiently asking him to stop talking and messing around in class, and to get on with his work.
‘I’m going to say something so that she loses her job,’ he semi-whispered to Tom, within Hannah’s earshot.
She looked at Gus, astounded yet silent, not imagining that anyone so young could be so evil in his intent. Had she heard him correctly? She dared not ask him to repeat himself in case it sparked another round of impertinent questions and comments. Gus would always without fail have a wonderful knack of making Hannah out to be the one who was wrong and as he lived with his mother, there being no father at home to lend a steadying hand on his emerging adulthood, his lack of respect for women was painfully evident to observe.
Whilst the vast majority of bad behaviour Hannah had seen in classes before in other schools was mostly directed pupil against pupil, at Faggs School it was viciously directed at her. As a successful professional and disciplinarian, focused on her work at all times, Hannah was trying to move The Class From Hell in a forward direction but they were having none of it. Not one bit. And the more she tolerated their bad manners, the more she must have angered them and the more they sought new and different ways to get under her skin. There was no doubt they were winning control of the classroom battlefield and Ackmed, the arrogant son of a very oil-rich Arab, had even taken to overtly calling her Dumbledore, although Hannah had to admit she did not mind that at all, taking it as more of a compliment than an insult.
Unsurprisingly, tales of Set 5’s misbehaviour soon reached the ears of some parents and the complaints started to trickle into the school; at least, the ones she was informed about. As a spot-ridden, adolescent nuisance of a boy, Tom would often slyly play up in her class, having the cheek to complain about Hannah to his father in an attempt to cover up for his poor grades and homework marks. His father, a headmaster at a fairly well-known prep school, was a man of the cloth but he displayed little humanity towards Hannah and, without knowing her or even his own son, wrote to the school to complain about her teaching and the lack of discipline in his son’s biology class.
There was no doubt Hannah hated each and every one of the fourteen pupils in the class who made her life hell. Fourteen out of twenty three, she thought! She had never had to contend with so many badly behaved pupils in one class in her entire career before and she had taught in some of the roughest schools in South Wales!
With the sound of the bell at the end of each of their lessons together being greeted with an enormous internal sigh of relief, Hannah could not help quietly muttering to herself ‘I hate the little fuckers’ as the last little fucker disappeared out of the classroom door to create havoc in their next. She never could quite pinpoint who was the source of the constant classroom battle because the guilty core hovered from anywhere between one to fourteen of them, depending on whose turn it was to have an adolescent giggling fit, mood or emotional outburst. Outside of the core group, other pupils in the class were generally receptive learners and it was remarkable they were taught anything at all considering the unwillingness of the core group to embrace the education their poor parents were heavily paying for. She schemed and schemed to subtly get her revenge on the troublemakers but it was a difficult task to achieve with them constantly on her case, until one day she noticed Hacker had left his English notes in the classroom at the end of one of her lessons. His coursework, no less.
‘That is going in the bin!’ she muttered triumphantly, removing the thick file of untidily scribbled notes to dispose of them safely at home. It was the first of several similar revengeful opportunities which arose over the next few weeks; she knew instinctively her teaching career was over.
She could never have realized then how close she was to the truth.

‘Right lads,’ said Ruzzerman, gathering the infamous School House three from The Class From Hell together one evening after supper. ‘This fucking bitch has come here, tried to make us behave and on top of that she’s trying to make us work as well. We need to see the Head of House.’
‘Yeh, too right,’ agreed spotty Tom, grinning.
‘We can’t let this go on for much longer, lads,’ piped up slimy Jeremiah. ‘We’ve got to get the bitch; good and proper.’
‘The way to play it, lads,’ suggested their Head of House, notorious around the school for his demeaning arrogance, ‘is to treat her mean to keep her keen. She’s a good teacher, there’s no doubt about that, and she won’t give up on you because she’s a professional but at least we can humiliate her and try to break her even if we don’t succeed in getting her to lose her job.’
With years of experience of seeing many a member of the teaching staff under similar pressure when dealing with misbehaving School House boys, the Head of House knew what he was talking about.
‘So what you’re suggesting is to just carry on as usual,’ checked Jeremiah, smirking as he did so. ‘Mumbling under our breath, talking and laughing loudly, and thinking up as many insulting things to say to her as we can. Is that right?’
‘Yeah, that’s about it,’ replied the Head of House. ‘Disrupt the flow as much as you can. Watt Grayman will get to hear of it sooner or later and there are bound to be more parental complaints other than from Tom’s father and Hacker’s mother kicking up a fuss because Dumbledore didn’t get Hacker’s replacement notes as quickly as he wanted them. With Grayman and old Fleischmann, his deputy, being what they are, they’ll be shit-scared to lose your parents’ money and their social contacts, so they’ll do anything to hush this entire thing up. And apart from that, we School House boys have a long reputation of unruliness to uphold. Nothing must come in the way of that!’
The Head of House reflected on how the sixth formers in his house had managed to ingratiate themselves with the sixth form girls at the school by calling them derogatory names whilst they went about their normal daily business. With their characteristic hands-in-pocket swagger and exceedingly tousled hair donned by all modern, self-possessed public school boys, the boys had been reported to the headmaster for their shocking comment of: ‘Get out of here, you bitches!’ when a handful of sixth form girls from one of the boarding houses had innocently walked into the school sweet shop for their daily sugar fix.
‘Yeah, the Head of House is right,’ continued Tom, stupidly. ‘We’ve got to uphold tradition. But what if Neil-boy finds out what we’re doing?’
‘Look, there’s no reason why our housemaster should find out about our conversation or believe what Dumbledore says about you all. It’s against his interests as a housemaster: too much trouble for him to sort it out and all of that. No, we’re on to a winner, just as long as you lot keep your cool.’
They certainly were on to a winner.
Whilst Hannah inevitably would become the loser.

Hannah’s shock at the depths to which The Class From Hell sank in their misbehaviour would often cause her to exclaim the phrase ‘Outrageous behaviour!’, much to the hilarity of the members of the naughty class but no matter how hard she tried and how hard she worked and how much she cried on the telephone to her mother, recently retired from teaching, it did nothing to alleviate her disbelief at being dealt such a poor hand at Faggs School.
‘I’ve hankered all these years to come and teach here and this is what I find. I just can’t believe it!’ she complained tearfully to her mother.
She knew all of the educational theory, all of the classroom strategies but no matter how much they failed with this particular class, she never gave up. Until, inevitably, she was forced to cancel their practical lessons, out of desperation to preserve her sanity and satisfy the Health and Safety regulations of the land.
The expected tirade of rude complaints from Set 5 at the sudden loss of their laboratory playtime was intolerable for Hannah to bear, but with visions of Gus pouring acid from a large glass beaker into a small measuring cylinder from a height of at least three feet, water taps being purposely placed on at full pelt, and water fights stretching the width of the large laboratory, Hannah felt a sense of relief her decision had been the correct one. Ironically, as she watched the chaos around her, she inwardly laughed at the situation she found herself in. After sorting out one discipline problem in one area to her left, another problem would quickly break out to her right, and because the design of the laboratory was unusually wide, the brats had her head going back and fore, from side to side, as if she watching an exceedingly energetic tennis match. Either she had lost her disciplinarian’s touch or she was ready to give up teaching. From now on, it would be a damage-limitation exercise and because it was so unlike her not to have her class where she wanted them – learning, inquisitive and enquiring, and damned well-behaved – she became increasingly depressed about her plight.
Hannah’s other classes were generally a reasonable bunch, with only the odd small handful in each class who were not always as well behaved as she would have liked. But with The Class From Hell, things were different, very different. She remembered how she had been the first female housemistress of a boys’ house in Queensford’s one hundred and sixty-year history. Yet here, she was totally at sea with a dozen or so fifteen-year old boys who had her around their wealthy little fingers, eating their humble pie. How dare she think she was a strong professional! She was no longer that at all!
In time, Hannah would be criticized for not disciplining the miscreants of Set 5 sooner rather than later, although she would argue she did try. As a new member of staff, she was simply too overloaded with work commitments to find the time to implement the school’s extensive punishment system effectively. She would soon also discover that overloading new staff was a habit the school had never broken in its long and well-established history as an institution for bullying, of both its boys and its staff. She was also at last beginning to understand why the pupils were given an unusual abundance of single lessons in their timetables. It was a transparently curative measure, a glossed-over admission that things were adrift, and that the senior management failed to possess the balls necessary to sort out the problem at its roots: arrogant pupils, with too much money to spend and too few manners to treat other people with respect.
And so, humiliation at the hands of pupils became very much a part of her experience at Faggs School. It was a very bitter pill to consume but one that taught her an important lesson.
To be on her guard: always.

Whilst Timmy Baldman had already demonstrated he was disinterested with her precarious position with The Class From Hell, Hannah began to wonder whether he actually possessed the professional skills to cope with sorting out unruly pupils, yet alone understand how to support colleagues, good ones at that, when they needed help.
‘Timmy, I’ve been teaching for eighteen years and I’ve told you several times before, I’ve never come across such a bad class. There are far too many of them misbehaving for me to control. Not even in some of the roughest classes in the roughest of schools have I ever seen such bad behaviour like this. Usually, there only two or three kids to keep on top of but here there are at least fourteen of them!’
‘Do you want me to come in and talk to them?’ he asked, in a seemingly helpful manner.
‘I appreciate the offer but what good will it do? They’ll be good when you’re in there but as soon as you go out they’ll revert back to their old ways again. What I cannot understand is why they are so rude towards me?’
‘It’s because you’ve told them they’re different from the pupils you’ve taught before,’ piped up Wicksy, trying to be helpful but betraying the fact he had been gossiping with the pupils.
‘No, that’s not true. I haven’t said that at all,’ replied Hannah, defensively. ‘Yes, I’ve been shocked by their behaviour and I have voiced my concerns to them but I have been very patient with them and still they don’t respond in the right way.’
Even though Hannah had not quite told The Class From Hell they were different from pupils she had taught before, Wicksy’s statement made her realize the pupils had obviously taken offence at some of her admonishing comments. After all, they were the ones who prevented her from teaching, constantly chattering and laughing out loud and shouting racial comments at each other, particularly amongst the Asian and Arabic members of the class. Despite this, she had been determined to be quietly patient with them and to appeal to the more mature sides of their characters but it just did not work and she began to dread going into their lessons.
‘Look, Hannah, you’ll be laughing about all of this, this time next year,’ suggested Timmy, trying to avoid the issue completely. ‘I also had a very bad time of it in my first year.’
‘But that can’t right, Timmy! Think about it! Why should you accept this sort of behaviour just because you’re new to the school? At the beginning of this term, you were talking about why the results in Year 11 were so bad and here you have the reason for it: it’s because they’re not being stimulated. It’s obvious.’
When Timmy admitted very much later on in the summer term of that academic year that The Class From Hell had always behaved in this way, Hannah felt like crying.
‘We knew the class was badly behaved and in hindsight we should have sorted them out, well before you got here. Neil taught them last year and, because he didn’t like them, he passed them on to you so that he could take over as the new housemaster in School House.’
‘Neil even eventually refused to teach them,’ whispered Wicksy as soon as Timmy had disappeared out of the workroom to his lesson. ‘He just let them get on with their own work during their lessons.’
Sadly for Hannah, she saw the evidence of Neil’s unprofessional negligence of Set 5 when she inherited a multitude of problems in the classroom with them. But now, it was all just history and as Hannah gave witness, they passed the shit on to a new member of staff to deal with.
As they always did at Faggs School.

At the first staff meeting half way through the winter term, Hannah was surprised to see only two pupils from The Class From Hell on the circulated list of ‘pupils of concern’. With the half term reports written, teachers had an opportunity to either praise, rebuke or encourage their pupils for their efforts but as her colleagues at the meeting tip-toed their way around the issues of poor behaviour and underachievement, seemingly afraid to speak their minds about how dreadful and psychologically damaged some of these young people really were, Hannah wondered whether she had got it all so terribly wrong. When invited to speak to give her opinion by Sarin Fleischmann, the deputy head, Hannah adopted the tack of talking generally about The Class From Hell, in a positive and hopeful way.
‘I’ve been listening to what people have been saying intently and, using my professional judgment, I would say these pupils are disaffected. It would certainly explain why the GCSE results are not as good as one would expect for a school like this. However, we haven’t given up on them in the science department and we’re trying lots of different strategies to engage them and I’m sure, given time, they will respond positively to that.’
She looked at Nadolf Fitler the head of science as she was speaking, not realizing he would be taking her comments personally and logging them against her in his little black book, whilst she was only doing what professionally came naturally to her. Two days later, Sarin Fleischmann, the overly smiling deputy head, pulled her aside in the common room. She had given no indication what she wanted to talk about, smiling sweetly at Hannah as she always did.
Until the kill.
‘Hannah, you used the word ‘disaffected’ to describe the behaviour of some of the members of your Set 5 in the meeting the other day and I think you used the word wrongly,’ she said sharply. ‘They are certainly not disaffected, just badly behaved.’
Hannah could not believe her ears! Sarin was admonishing her for using the word ‘disaffected’, a term often used to explain poor pupil behaviour in the classroom. Sarin was clearly indignant and, in her role as academic deputy head, had taken Hannah’s description of some of the members of Set 5 as a criticism of her professional skills.
‘I used that term as a result of my professional judgment and teaching experience,’ Hannah explained, feeling like a naughty schoolgirl being told off. ‘I must admit I’ve never seen bad behaviour on such a scale. I’ve reported it to Timmy Baldman and we’ve discussed ways of trying to take the situation forward. But what I’d like to know, Sarin,’ asked Hannah, feeling it was now her turn to be indignant, ‘is whether their behaviour constitutes some sort of initiation ceremony one has to pass before being accepted at the school?’
‘No, it is not a sort of initiation ceremony,’ she pouted back indignantly, her voice getting more strained and definitely much louder and more emphatic. ‘I didn’t have any problems in my first year here.’
Ah! The classic response, thought Hannah. Because I didn’t have any problems then I can’t understand why you are. A veil for a lack of professional guts in dealing with a situation they were clearly aware of.
But then, didn’t you just admit that Set 5 were ‘badly behaved’, she thought?
And then, as if Hannah had woken a sleeping dragon, Sarin proceeded to drag up other situations and discussions she had obviously been party to with Hannah’s colleagues, without her knowledge.
‘In my conversations with Hirsuter Montage,’ Sarin began, the sickly smile long gone from her lightly freckled face, ’she reported you were difficult in discussing with her the behaviour of some of the girls in her house.’
‘Two of her girls were very cheeky towards me and so I reported them in their half term reports,’ replied Hannah, hardly believing the housemistress had reported her to Sarin, especially as Hirsuter had been the one who had been rude towards her. ‘Our conversation took place in the common room, so I cannot understand why she said I was difficult. Hirsuter obviously didn’t like what I had to say about why the girls had been reported and all I did was to fill her in on the details of what happened.’
‘Look, Hannah, of all the members of staff you were the one who had more ticks for behavioural concerns on the half term reports than anyone else,’ she said, using the tone of voice usually adopted for disciplining a naughty pupil.
‘But every time I ticked a box, I backed it up with an explanatory comment in their reports,’ Hannah explained, calmly.
There had been no guidance issued to her on using the boxes, so she had used them honestly, to reflect how her pupils had behaved in class, just as Sarin had suggested a couple of years previously in the heads of department minutes which were on the school intranet for everyone to read! She wondered why teachers were given the facility of ticking boxes to report badly-behaved pupils if they were going to be rebuked each time they used them! And why were these so-called professionals so jumpy, anyway, always on the defensive and taking things personally? Hannah then realized the significance of what Wicksy had advised her just a few days before writing the reports which had resulted in gaining so much attention from Sarin Fleischman.
‘I wouldn’t report discipline problems too much if I was you,’ he had told her. ‘Otherwise you’ll get yourself a reputation, especially if you give too many detentions.’
The system seems ludicrous, she thought, and no wonder the pupils play up because they know they can get away with it! And Sarin is behaving like this because it’s her first year as the deputy head and she’s obviously on eggshells with Watt Grayman the headmaster!
‘I’ll support you just this once, Hannah,’ continued Sarin sharply, wanting to have the final word on the matter. ‘And I’ve already seen a few members of Set 5 to tell them this sort of behaviour will not be tolerated anymore.’
So all of this had gone on behind closed doors, keeping Hannah in the dark, had it? Was this how Faggs School operated? In secret? But not even the curt words of Sarin Fleischmann would have an effect on the thick hides of the Set 5 reprobates.
Nothing did.

During her brief conversation with Sarin, Hannah felt disinclined to make any mention of how several of her colleagues had also experienced the same sort of bad behaviour in their first year of teaching at Faggs School. When she accompanied these whistle-blowing colleagues between departments or to the compulsory break time coffee sessions in the senior common room, she would often find herself listening to their open admissions that they were still having behavioural problems with various pupils, particularly those in Year 11. Just like Hannah. And here, in one of the leading coeducational boarding schools in the country, and probably the best in the world if the headmaster’s quotation in the school literature was to be believed! Such bad behaviour being tolerated! Whilst sharing professional experiences with colleagues was usually considered to be the norm in a school, at Faggs School it was very much frowned upon and Hannah was dismayed to hear it was accepted practice to put-up and shut-up when it came to the issue of unruly pupils.
‘This is certainly the worst Year 11 class I’ve ever taught in my thirty-year career,’ admitted William, over coffee one lunchtime. ‘The usual suspects know as soon as they walk into my room they’ll get a punishment by the end of it.’
‘Who are we talking about, William?’ asked a surprised Hannah, hoping to hear the same names crop up so she would feel less isolated in her predicament.
‘Jeremiah, Udder, Ackmed, Ruzzerman, Tom…’ counted William on his fingers. ‘There are at least six of them who are totally out of control.’
‘Only six!’ exclaimed Hannah. ‘I’ve got at least fourteen of them to contend with! It’s a nightmare!’
‘Unfortunately, this is how things are here.’
‘But this is unacceptable! Why don’t you say anything?’
‘If I’d have admitted I was having problems with discipline in my first year, my career here would have been over.’
Hannah was shocked to hear William’s revelation; after all he was a respected teacher of maths, one of the ‘old school’, a pillar preventing the school from total chaos and collapse. But she understood immediately how his comments fitted in with how things worked at the school: no one was willing to listen to or do anything about the discipline problems, especially as they were on such a large scale. In total, there was no professional support for teachers and this was totally unacceptable in the present day and age.
‘When Major Monty was here, he just wasn’t interested in helping or supporting anyone who had difficulties with controlling their classes, although it was well known he had his own problems in the classroom as well,’ explained William. ‘So you just learnt to keep quiet. There was no other alternative.’
‘When I had problems in my first year, the head of department was hopeless in giving me any support,’ admitted Isadora, an experienced teacher of Spanish and a tutor in the same boarding house as William and Hannah. ‘When Sarin became involved and I had a meeting with her and the headmaster, I said I didn’t have any support from anyone when I needed it. And do you know what? She wouldn’t listen to a word I said and then she shouted at me saying that I did have support! And all of this in front of Watt Grayman the headmaster!’
‘And what did Grayman say?’ asked Hannah, recognizing Sarin’s trait of refusing to listen to anything her colleagues had to say.
‘Nothing! Absolutely nothing! I felt hopeless and worthless and that I couldn’t teach any more. My husband also felt the same way in his first year here when he experienced trouble with his Year 11 class.’
‘Don’t worry, Isadora, you’re not alone,’ reassured Hannah, elated to hear yet more stories similar to that of her own. ‘I’ve been made to feel exactly the same way as you did and because I used the word ‘disaffected’, Sarin told me off and raised her voice at me when I asked for help with Set 5.’
Two other female colleagues, Angela and Nigella, also shared their experiences with Hannah when the question of pupil discipline came into the conversation. In Nigella’s case, her overloaded timetable as a teacher of chemistry and assistant housemistress in Hirsuter Montage’s house forced her on to anti-depressants right from the beginning of her first year at the school but she kept this fact very much close to her chest in case she lost her job. After all, she too had children going through the school and losing her job would either force her into financial disarray to keep paying the school fees or the children would have to leave and go to another school, probably a state one.
‘I too had an awful Year 11 class in my first year and I hated them!’ admitted Angela, on their way back from games one afternoon. ‘I couldn’t wait for them to leave.’
But the most upsetting story of all was Wicksy’s, her young, talented colleague in the biology department.
‘My Year 11 class was so bad in my first year that they drove me close to tears on many an occasion,’ he explained.
This was familiar territory to Hannah who had already been on the verge of tears and walking out on The Class From Hell on several occasions. To date, she had managed to keep relatively calm but there would come a time when her pent up anger and frustration would disastrously erupt in a way even she could never have predicted.
‘They gave me a terrible time and I really thought I’d have to give up teaching,’ Wicksy recounted to his attentive colleague.
‘I’ve felt like that as well and I’ve been teaching a long time!’ exclaimed Hannah, empathetically.
‘When Neil was head of biology before Timmy Baldman took over and before he became housemaster of School House this year, he was appalling as far as giving support to colleagues was concerned and it was either a question of sink or swim. He just wasn’t interested in helping me at all, even down to helping with resources and notes. You had to do everything yourself. Of course now, he’s a very popular housemaster in School House.’
‘Why’s that, then?’
‘Well, they’re running amok, aren’t they? He’s got no control over them and so they’re having a great time.’
‘What? You mean running around the corridors, not going to bed until the early hours of the morning, that sort of thing?’
‘Yes,’ came her colleague’s knowledgeable reply. ‘That’s why they’re always so tired in class.’
As a bachelor in his forties, with obvious issues with women, Neil’s lack of discipline with the boys in his boarding house came as no surprise to Hannah. Having passed his role as departmental head over to Timmy to take up the prestigious position of housemaster, his naivety about the youth of today and their ways very quickly began to show, and as the boys ran riot in their dormitories late into the night with little effective intervention from Neil, it was understandable he was a hit with the boys. It also helped to explain the poor behaviour of the School House boys in Set 5: the strong-willed Ruzzerman, slimy Jeremiah, and the sly, spotty-faced Tom.
The immediate events after the suicide of a previous housemaster of School House going back to the latter part of the 1980s gave a brief glimpse into what life must have been like for a weak housemaster. As an experienced teacher at the school, Jill Heaps had been ‘sent’ into the house to oversee it as caretaker housemistress whilst the whole nasty business of the suicide was sorted out. The boys were obviously devastated by their housemaster’s untimely death but they could not deny their poor behaviour in some way or another had played a contributory role in his suicide.
‘Right!’ Jill Heaps had said, according to the school gossip, on her first night in School House. ‘Let’s get you boys off to bed.’
‘Bed? I’m sorry, Mrs Heaps,’ replied the Head of House, apologetically, ‘but you’re not allowed on the boys’ side of the house, only the housemaster’s side.’
‘What do you mean?’ she asked, perplexed.
‘The boys will get themselves into bed when they are ready and you are not needed to help.’
Jill was undoubtedly shocked. The boys’ side, consisting of a vast and complicated network of Victorian corridors, study rooms and dormitories, was a no-go area for teaching staff and no one at the school had known about it, except its poor housemaster driven to suicide by the pressures of trying to keep order. With the boys being left to their own devices whilst the housemaster was absent from proceedings, entrenched in his own private side of the boarding house, it was no surprise that tales of buggery, bullying and fagging abounded right up to the arrival of Major Monty at the school a short while later. Monty’s fight to end fagging, so prevalent at Faggs School for so long, was understandably historic and more than poignant in the light of the suicide in School House.
‘It appears the boys never allowed their housemaster beyond the green baize door,’ Jill related to her colleagues. ‘So no wonder there was mayhem within!’
‘Things are getting better here, though,’ assured Vernon, one of Hannah’s colleagues in the science department when she first heard the story of the housemaster’s suicide. ‘But they’re still not quite what they should be.’
With two housemasters committing suicide in just five years, Hannah could not have agreed more.
She had known that right from her very first day at the school.

It wasn’t so much the case that The Class From Hell misbehaved because they had had a different biology teacher every academic year; no, it was more a question of a tradition, to be upheld at all costs and passed down from every Year 11 group to the next. The pupils at the school were generally an intelligent, but arrogant bunch and it was this intelligence and the lack of a suitable and stimulating classroom experience which drove them to play up their teachers. Set 5 was certainly having a wild time at Hannah’s professional expense and Faggs School was doing little next to nothing about it. Naively, Hannah imagined her professional experience would move the whole situation forward, both for herself, her teaching colleagues, and the disaffected pupils who were fed up with their schooling but little did she realize how the spiral downwards had already begun towards losing her sanity.
And her job.

Visiting old friends at Queensford School during the half term break in October was high on Hannah’s list of priorities. Her time and experiences at the school seemed to have been transported into the dim and distant past but, just like old times and against her better judgment, she found herself driving past Justin’s house, checking for any clues about his movements and welfare. She noticed immediately his house and Ali’s next door were both up for sale and, on the pretence of keeping in touch, called Wallace her friend in the music department the moment she arrived back home at Faggs School.
‘Hannah, how are you? How lovely to hear from you! How’s Faggs School?’ Wallace asked.
‘Very busy and very mad,’ Hannah laughingly replied, not wishing to give anything away about the hell she was living. ‘How are things with you at Queensford?’
‘Oh, they haven’t changed much. Boris Arnold is still trying to get rid of me and Terry Adams has cut down on the number of pupils I can teach so that eventually I’ll have no pupils at all and I’ll have to leave.’
‘That’s outrageous, Wallace! It’s been going on for so long! What does your union rep say?’
‘I’m afraid I can’t afford to join a union.’
‘Well, what about writing to other schools in the area for a job? Surely there must be something you can do?’
‘What can I do?’ she exclaimed helplessly. ‘I’m stuck. I’ll maybe have to consider teaching at home like Justin if things get any more desperate.’
‘Now that you’ve mentioned his name, how is the old bastard?’ Hannah asked with sarcastic affection, hoping for some new information about her ex-lover, something negative to satisfy a deep-seated hope something awful had befallen him, something worse than being barred from teaching and having no contact with children ever again.
‘Oh, he’s doing OK,’ she replied, cautiously. ‘Of course, he’s not working nor is Ali but they’re pooling their money together and they seem to be surviving. Both their houses are up for sale and they’re talking about moving in together.’
With the situation confirmed, Hannah felt strangely unperturbed about Justin’s new love life. Any feelings she possessed for him had almost finally gone. She recognized that poor old Ali would sooner or later appreciate the enormity of who she was in a relationship with and only time would prove Hannah’s opinion correct. Justin and Ali had only been together as a couple for about a year but, given one more, Ali would begin to experience the full impact of Justin’s way of handling his boredom with the woman in his life: unfaithfulness and lies.
‘Why isn’t Ali working, then?’ Hannah asked, picking up on Wallace’s throwaway comment.
‘She’s having a break from acting, although she’s doing some rep work in a few minor theatre groups at the moment.’
More like she can’t get any decent work, thought Hannah. You don’t just have a break from acting at her grand old age of nearly forty, otherwise one risks missing the boat and becoming unemployable altogether.
‘And she’s so sweet with him,’ Wallace continued, much to Hannah’s annoyance. ‘She even goes to church with him to turn the pages of his music. He seems so much happier nowadays and a little more grown up.’
Hannah hated hearing this and she particularly resented Wallace for the way she always supported Justin, in spite of his bad behaviour. She had always been so sympathetic towards Wallace, listening to the rancour of her divorce from a husband whom she had driven away with her constant criticisms, and here she was being nice about a man who never even knew the meaning of the word!
‘Do you think he’s really happy though, Wallace?’ asked Hannah, falsely.
‘I’m not so sure. He hasn’t got a job so it can’t be easy.’
‘Well, I can’t stand the man,’ Hannah finally pouted. She could not help herself. Wallace had mentioned the man in the first place and she was annoyed with herself for quizzing her about his welfare. ‘He’s caused me a lot of pain and I don’t want to talk about him anymore.’
‘We need to get you a different man to take your mind off Justin,’ Wallace suggested cruelly, knowing Hannah had come such a long way in getting Justin out of her life.
Don’t you think that being on the Sex Offenders’ Register would accelerate him out of my mind, she thought? And do I really need a man to take my mind off him? Aren’t they trouble enough?
‘I’ve already got a man, thank you,’ she lied back. ‘Look, the man is a nightmare and I don’t really want to talk about him anymore. Listen, it’s been lovely talking to you, Wallace. We must keep in contact, yeah?”
Without any new information, and feeling frustrated at Wallace’s continuing support of Justin, Hannah decided there and then she would never ring Wallace again. She had to move on from their friendship.

As Justin’s replacement, Lenny heralded a refreshing new start for the troubled music department at Queensford, breezing into the school with promises of erasing the wrongdoings of his predecessor’s past. But it wasn’t long before Lenny began drinking heavily with Grunt and Burper and, within a year of his employment, the young musician began to show his true colours. The more intuitive amongst the teaching staff sensed things were about to go off the rails, again.
‘Lenny’s a pervie,’ one of Hannah’s daughter’s old friends from Queensford casually commented on one of her visits to see Charlotte.
‘What do you mean?’ asked Hannah.
‘Two of our friends were in CO2s, the nightclub, when he went up to them and started to dance in front of them. Before they knew it, he took one look at their boobs and lunged at both of them with his hands.’
‘He did what?’
‘He touched the boobs of the two girls whilst they were dancing.’
‘He did that to two of the pupils at the school?’ exclaimed Hannah, reflecting on how these two physically well-developed thirteen-year old girls had a penchant for clubbing and drinking even at their tender young ages.
‘Yes.’
‘And did the girls report him?’
‘No, they didn’t.’
‘But why was that?’
‘Because he apologized to them and said it was the drink which made him do it.’
‘I don’t believe it! The girls should have reported him because it’s inappropriate behaviour.’
‘Yes, everyone realizes that but the girls were too afraid to report him.’
It was madness to think that in such a small town teaching staff and pupils, irrespective of their ages, continued to socialize together in the same places. Despite numerous warnings from Terry Adams to both old and new staff not to engage in such behaviour, it seemed his good advice was still falling on deaf ears.
Hannah’s mind ruminated over the Queensford School bachelors, wondering how she could cause them pain for their continuing inappropriate behaviour. Should she contact the authorities about Grunt, Burper, Flirt and Lenny and their involvement with female pupils at the school, to pose the simple question: why were they still allowed to teach? As far as Justin was concerned, she was still incensed he continued to breathe yet alone anything else. Should she ring his local school or church to warn them a sex offender was in their midst? After all, he had taken control of the local church choir since his resignation and all it took was one of the young female members to respond to one of his come-on looks and the rest would be history. And what about ringing his local pub, the one he frequented when he was a million different people other than the sex offender? She was still in such a dilemma.
She might have left Queensford in a physical sense but emotionally she was still attached.
By the pain she had endured in knowing Justin Rupert.

By the November of that year, things were still not going well for Hannah at Faggs School. What with four long sessions of major girls’ games, tutoring in a boarding house, running around the town with one of the community service programmes, and teaching pastoral issues to a group of noisy sixth formers, this was more than enough for Hannah to contend with in a single working week, on top of her full teaching timetable. Apart from that, she felt ignored in the science department as Nadolf Fitler moved around the new members of staff recruiting them for giving lectures to the pupils, leaving her out in the cold with a: ‘Don’t think I’m neglecting you’ statement to keep her happy. He had already shocked her by stating that she was probably ‘ready for retirement’, and then twice referring to her as a ’strong character’ in front of her colleagues for no apparent reason and without qualification! But then he always did come out with odd statements within her earshot, as if he was deliberately letting her know someone was reporting back her innocent comments to him, or ones he had been led to believe she had made.
‘The school inspectors praised my departmental handbook when they were here last year.’
Hannah had never even discussed his handbook with anyone, let alone criticized it as he was implying!
‘The headmaster was pleased with my appraisal last year.’
Eh? What’s that got to do with me?
When she considered that the vast majority of her time was taken up with working, she failed to understand how a snatched conversation here and there could be blown up and given such damming significance which became the case where she was concerned. Even her colleagues in the science department with their constant complaints and acid observations about the state of the science department under Nadolf’s management were allowed to get away with much more than she was.
Is there a sexist element here, one which I’m only just beginning to realize pervades the whole place, she thought?
And to make Hannah even more paranoid, Nadolf always chose to make odd statements to her when nobody else was around: in the photocopying room, in the biology workroom, anywhere when she was alone, with no witnesses. And each time he did it, she found herself getting upset, feeling harassed and worst of all, totally tongue-tied as to how she should respond to him.
It was a nightmare scenario.
Involving another nightmare man.

The letter from Nadolf Fitler, copied to Timmy Baldman and Sarin Fleischmann, arrived on Hannah’s desk just after the teaching staff had written the end of term reports at Christmas. It had been a horrendous term but everyone had kept to the tight work deadlines and were looking forward to a long and well-earned Christmas holiday.
‘I want you to put your grades and marks into a spreadsheet prepared by Sandra my secretary for the Report Orders,’ Nadolf demanded after bursting into the workroom full of beavering biologists in his usual brusque and aggressive manner.
‘I’ve already placed my grades and marks on my end of term reports,’ offered Hannah, trying to be helpful but confused by what he was referring to. What were ‘Report Orders’?
‘No!’ mouthed Timmy silently, shaking his head at her behind Nadolf’s back
Hannah look dumbfounded at her head of department. She did not comprehend what was going on and why was Timmy warning her?
‘Have you not read about this in the science department handbook?’ demanded Nadolf in a hostile way, turning on his heels to face her.
‘No, I haven’t,’ she replied, innocently. She could not remember seeing the term ‘Report Orders’ in the copious inch-thick document.
‘Look, Nadolf. We’re all trying to work as hard as we can,’ interjected Wicksy, in a rude tone of voice, clearly showing his frustration with the over-weight bully. ‘We can all see that the science department is in chaos!’
‘How dare you speak to me like that!’ Nadolf screamed at him. ‘Please just do it, will you? Timmy will help you!’ And with that, the bully stormed out of the workroom. Immediately, the biologists dissolved into a seething mass of complaints about his attitude towards them.
‘What did I do wrong?’ asked Hannah, guiltlessly. ‘What are ‘Report Orders’? I couldn’t understand what he was on about!’
‘It’s a term no longer used in school jargon but he was referring to the internal setting arrangements and he seemed, for some reason, to be really mad with you.’
‘He’s a fucking bastard that man! Talking to us like that. Who does he think he is?’ spat Wicksy angrily, clearly upset by the way Nadolf had shouted at him. ‘I hate him.’
Within an hour of the incident, the aforementioned letter was surreptitiously placed on Hannah’s laptop; when she picked up the letter to read it, her stomach turned over. She was in trouble, yet again. In the letter, Nadolf criticized her for not reading his precious science department handbook in not one but two situations by his reckoning. What upset Hannah more than anything was the fact she had read all of the relevant pages he had suggested before she arrived at the school but because she had been so busy and preoccupied with moving her family lock-stock-and-barrel from Queensford to Faggs School she had genuinely forgotten she had done it. Ironically, in the letter he referred to the ‘Report Orders’ by their new and correct term, slyly covering up for his stupid mistake which had led to the misunderstanding in the first place!
When she showed the letter to Timmy Baldman, he was appalled.
‘He doesn’t like you at all, that’s obvious. You must have said or done something to really upset him for him to send you that.’
‘But what have I done? I was genuinely confused by what he was saying. I had never heard of ‘Report Orders’!’ replied Hannah, very much taken aback by the idea that Timmy could get away with saying Nadolf did not like her. ‘Will you please see him to put forward my case?’
‘Yes, I will see him for you but I can’t take away the letter because he’s already sent a copy to Sarin Fleischman.’
Later that same day, Timmy came back with Nadolf’s response.
‘He doesn’t accept your position and insists you should have known what he was on about but I did tell him he couldn’t send a letter to you without sending one to Wicksy. After all, he was the one who was rude to him, not you.’
Within a day, Wicksy also received a letter from Nadolf and although Hannah had no knowledge of what it contained, it must have been bad enough for Wicksy to spit blood over. As far as Hannah was concerned, she felt she never had any understanding shown to her as a new member of staff and she was too afraid of rocking the boat to see anyone on the senior management about the letter, especially Sarin who would never have listened to her anyway. And it wasn’t as if Hannah was stupid or inexperienced.
But the only thing that united them all that day was Timmy Baldman’s summing up of the whole stupid incident.
That Nadolf was Out of Order.
Period.

So what was driving this maniac to treat his colleagues in such a demeaning way? There was no doubt Nadolf Fitler possessed a dysfunctional personality and that he had always behaved this way, hence his unsavoury reputation at every school he had ever taught at but what made it all so much worse for Hannah was the timing of her employment at Faggs School.
During the pregnant condition of his wife.
When she rang Nadolf at home that evening to talk to him about the letter he had written to her, little did she expect the frightening nature of his response.
‘How dare you ring me at home when my wife is ill!’ he screamed uncontrollably down the telephone.
‘But I only wanted to discuss the letter you sent me,’ replied Hannah meekly, thinking she was too overloaded with work and frantically trying to keep to her deadlines to see him during the day at work.
‘This is not the time for doing that!’ he continued to scream. ‘My wife is about to have a baby and I’m tired! I’ve also been talking to other people who say you are positively resisting settling into the school and upsetting people in the process. You are also teaching the curriculum incorrectly!’
‘Who has said that about me?’ she asked calmly, not believing what she was hearing.
There was no immediate reply back to her direct question until he commanded: ‘I’ll speak to you tomorrow!’ which, of course, he never did. He was far too much of a coward and a liar to back up his outlandish accusations against her with hard fact.
She remembered Timmy saying he had discovered Nadolf snooping around the biology workroom looking at the papers the biologists had prepared for the end of term examinations at Christmas. Hannah had been asked to prepare exam papers for both the lower and upper sixth forms, having been amazed Timmy had trusted her to do such a thing, although she finally realized everyone else had no more than one paper to prepare compared to her four! And then she remembered Neil’s written comment on the front of one her papers, about a small part of a question which had been repeated twice. Admittedly it had been her mistake but one which she would have easily remedied as a result of Neil’s careful observation. It had been a process they were all involved in: checking each other’s papers before they were photocopied for the pupils’ exams. Of course, she wasn’t the only one who had a comment made about her papers but one very small rectifiable mistake was big enough for Nadolf to accuse her of teaching the curriculum incorrectly! Was he raving mad?
‘He’s obviously very angry and doesn’t seem to want to sort it out with you,’ concluded Timmy when Hannah told him of her telephone call to Nadolf the previous evening.
Probably because he knew he’d made the mistake in the first place, she thought.
In hindsight, the only thing that gave her any satisfaction from the whole episode was the way in which the science staff never even bothered to ask how his wife and baby were once the pregnancy was over. Sadly, they were both quite ill after the birth, with the baby spending several weeks in hospital on death’s door. Their disinterest not only showed how busy they all were with their own lives but also how much they hated him. Someone even commented on the lack of humanity shown towards them.
But he deserved it, thought Hannah. He damned well deserved it.

‘You behaved unprofessionally,’ she told him a few months later when she felt brave enough to confront him, although she began to shake with the upset the matter generated within her. ‘I wasn’t even given a chance to discuss the issue with you before you sent that letter, making accusations against me which were unfounded.’
And did she get an answer from him?
No!
Or even an apology?
Never!
And did he send the letter to cover his own tail in case the senior management accused him of not carrying out the edicts he had written about in his precious science department handbook?
Probably!
Whatever his motives, Nadolf Fitler knew how badly he had behaved.
But he had got away with it, yet again.
It just wasn’t fair.

Revenge is definitely very sweet and it came quickly enough for the members of the science department soon after the incident with the letter, towards the end of Hannah’s first term at the school. With Nadolf winning some sort of national award in recognition for his science teaching, Watt Grayman announced to all and sundry in the senior common room that a major television company was to film Nadolf during a normal working day at school. No one knew who had put forward his name for such a prestigious award; certainly it wasn’t anybody in the science department! Anyway, amongst the annoyed comments and digs that abounded behind Nadolf’s back as a result of his public adulation, his colleagues were nevertheless excited at the prospect of having their faces on TV.
But it didn’t quite work out like that.
As the camera crew followed Nadolf closely around his domain, recording his every seemingly-wise word and move, very few pupils or colleagues dared to go within even a few feet of the despot during the whole time of filming. It was as if they were either afraid of the camera or, more cynically, they refused to make a fuss of a man who ruffled his feathers more frequently than was humanly acceptable.
But the best was yet to come! When the film crew was having a well-earned coffee break in the science department coffee room, Timmy Baldman took his chance.
‘You never guess what I’ve just done,’ he announced to the biologists on returning to the workroom after popping out to the toilet.
‘Tell us,’ said Kent, smiling. As a newly qualified biologist, Kent had started the school at the same time as Hannah and, although he had kept his mouth shut for a while, was now catching up fast on the unhealthy goings-on in the science department.
‘I’ve just seen the television crew downstairs and asked them why they are filming such a nasty bastard as Nadolf Fitler. He doesn’t deserve it.’
Hannah’s jaw dropped. She looked at Wicksy who just grinned back. Even though they all laughed, Hannah could not believe Timmy could be as evil as Nadolf himself! Nevertheless, she knew Nadolf deserved it but it wasn’t until the staff meeting at the beginning of the following term in January did they discover the full consequences of Timmy’s spiteful action.
‘I have some very sad news for you,’ began Watt Grayman at the start of the meeting, giving the impression somebody had been injured or even died over the Christmas break. ‘The television company is dropping Nadolf Fitler from their programme. They have enough footage to make their film and have thanked us for the time and effort placed into their day here.’
Everyone enjoyed hearing that, she thought, looking at some of her science colleagues smirking quietly at each other. And she would never forget the cries of joy and hoops of delight when they all finally got back to the biology workroom after the meeting!
Serves his own right, Hannah thought, smiling to herself.
The cheap little bastard!

Leading up to her appraisal with Watt Grayman the headmaster at the end of the winter term, Hannah noted how she very rarely had a chance to converse with the man, partly because his appearance around the school was confined to certain set times of the day and partly because his stressed red-face and sickly smile betrayed an unhappiness and distance which made him mostly unapproachable.
His entrance at morning chapel was always at the last minute, just as the last pupil had taken their place in the pews and the service was about to start. Perched on a large, wooden high-backed seat at the rear of the ancient chapel, Grayman would then proceed to stare persistently straight ahead of him for the entire length of the service, his Catholicism evident from his signing of the cross, which he would make at the end of each prayer. Subconsciously, he cut himself out as a lonely figure, detached from the general proceedings around him. With his smug deputy head to his right and the president of the common room across the other side of the aisle to his left, the seemingly intimidating seating arrangement was more of a tradition than any important part of the service. Hannah never actually heard the man speak in chapel, as he preferred that unpopular task to be managed by his capable and charming chaplain who assumed the role of spiritual and moral educator entirely on his own.
As part of the appraisal process, it was Timmy’s responsibility to write a statement of Hannah’s performance to date and to conduct a discussion about what he had written but when she read the statement he had prepared, she felt professionally let down and very worried. Whilst he praised her contributions to community service, her efforts on the sports field, and her work as a tutor, his assessment of her classroom performance and personal qualities was way below what she was used to receiving from her line manager. And, needless to say, she was upset.
‘But I’ve said some really nice things about you,’ he tried to explain, as they sat side-by-side in his musty old office for her de-briefing.
‘Yes, I know you have but there are other things you’ve written which I think are unfair,’ Hannah replied, having already checked with Wicksy whether she should challenge his opinion of her or not.
‘It’s just that you’ve written some blanket statements, making it seem as if I’m going around upsetting people. These things will obviously be on my record and I don’t want that.’
‘What sort of things are we talking about?’ he asked, sounding reluctant to change what he had written.
‘Where you talk about Set 5 and how I have been shocked by their attitudes.’
‘Well, you have, haven’t you?’
‘Yes, I have but there’s no need to write that in my appraisal. I’ve told you before that other teachers have voiced their concern about some of these characters as well as I have so I’m not the only one having difficulty with them. And the bit where you say I’m not afraid to ‘make my feelings known’ is unfair given what I’ve had to put with and my request for support from colleagues with some of these difficult pupils. And what do you mean by ‘other difficulties in the department’?’
‘I’m referring to Nadolf Fitler.’
‘But everyone, without exception, airs their negative feelings about the man! And of everybody in the department, I have kept my counsel the most about him! So why have you put this in my appraisal statement?’
It was painfully clear Timmy was using her appraisal as a dishonest means of notifying Watt Grayman there was a problem with Nadolf’s management in the science department. He had often openly backstabbed Nadolf with his criticisms and sour comments, whilst she, recognizing the symptoms of a department in crisis, had kept her mouth firmly shut.
‘I was thinking in particular about the letter he sent you.’
‘But you know exactly what happened with that letter! You yourself admitted Nadolf was out of order!’
‘Yes, I know. Well, I’ll change a few things and get back to you,’ he finally agreed, reluctantly.
‘Thank you.’
When he finally presented the updated appraisal statement, the one to be forwarded to Watt Grayman, the situation had worsened.
‘May I see you about my appraisal statement again, please?’ she asked, her upset evident in her voice.
He looked at her grim-faced. She had no right to question him.
‘What’s wrong with it this time?’ he spat, between his teeth.
‘You say I’ve tried a number of strategies to engage the pupils in Set 5 but without success. What you don’t mention is that despite their appalling behaviour I’ve kept them working and on task. You’ve also criticized me for not punishing them and that I’ve been too patient with one or two of them. I’ve been patient with all of them! And I haven’t had the time to punish them and follow that up. I’m always the last person to leave this place of an evening and that’s because I spend a lot of time preparing my lessons. When am I supposed to find the time to email their housemasters about their misbehaviour? And apart from that, I’ve been told not to punish too often or too severely because I’ll get myself a reputation! It seems there are too many mixed messages here and I can’t win either way.’
Timmy just sat there listening. He knew she was making sense but he lacked the written skills to communicate the difficulties she had experienced in any other way.
‘And your reference to ‘my plain speaking’,’ she continued. ‘What do you mean by this?’
‘You express your feelings quite often in the workroom in front of everybody,’ he replied, defensively.
‘So does everybody else, including yourself! In fact, I have said the least and you know it! And then I have only passed on my concerns about Set 5! So why is this in my appraisal statement? And then you say I should be more aware of ‘other colleagues’ sensitivities. What do you mean by this?’
‘I was referring to Hirsuter Montage and the situation with the two girls you reported for being insolent.’
‘But they were insolent and why shouldn’t I report them? And apart from that, Hirsuter was rude to me! And then you’ve gone and made this a target for improvement. This is so unfair! It’s as if you want me to keep my mouth shut, as if I shouldn’t pass opinions and I’m only carrying out my professional duty.’
When she finally met up with Watt Grayman for her appraisal interview, her heart wasn’t in what she said. Having convinced him she was happy at the school and that her use of the word ‘disaffected’ to describe The Class From Hell had been a mistake, she proceeded to kow-tow to his insistence that she accept her colleagues’ sensitivities and the comments they had made about her.
So, Grayman’s telling me the problems I’m experiencing at the school are different to the other new members of staff, is he? Could that be because I am the only woman amongst ten other men? Surely this implies I am being treated differently and probably because I’m female? He’s also subconsciously telling me to put-up and shut-up about how unprofessional Nadolf Fitler and Hirsuter Montage are in the course of their duties! When their reputations go before them!
It was when her housemistress offered Hannah her ear whenever she needed it did things start to seem clear.
‘You know Timmy has a reputation for being macho, don’t you?’ her housemistress declared in a quiet moment after lunch one day.
Hannah looked at her at once.
‘No, I didn’t,’ she replied, feeling uncomfortable.
The warning had been given but she never imagined how far he would go.
Towards pushing her out from the school.

By Christmas, Hannah felt totally demoralized with her position at Faggs School yet still she was determined to succeed. With examinations in the last week of term and further reports to write in addition to the detailed ones she had just completed, she felt it was all a little bit over the top. But every overwhelming task had to be completed, and completed well; otherwise, there was always someone to give her a ticking off. The school was a supreme master of criticism and not at all good at appreciating anyone’s talents, efforts and hard work.
As head of science, Nadolf was responsible for devising the staff invigilation timetable for the science examinations and it was only when Hannah saw her allocation did she realize, like all of the other activities she was involved in, she had been overloaded once again. When she brought the issue up at the weekly departmental meeting, Timmy casually dismissed the time allocation breakdown she had carried out for each science member of staff. Her analysis, however, was positively received by those science teachers who, like her, were being shafted by Nadolf’s inability and reluctance to be equitable in the division of labour at a very stressful time of the term.
‘But he always does this to some of us, not all, just the same few,’ one of the physicists explained to her.
‘But it’s bullying!’ exclaimed Hannah.
‘Yes, we know that but what can we do? Have you confronted him over it?’
‘No, I haven’t.’ came her reply.
‘Oh, I thought you had,’ the physicist replied, having already spread the word around that she had.
Looks like another controversy for me to deal with, she thought, as she picked up on her colleagues’ tone of voice.
I’ve had enough of this.

After each pupil had completed their biology examination, Hannah was startled to witness the rigorous, military-style dissection each and every paper underwent before it could be marked. The whole process would begin with each pupil marching up to the teacher’s bench at the front of the classroom, bringing one page of their completed paper with them at a time, to finally produce several separate piles of alphabetically and numerically sequenced answer sheets ready for distribution to every biology teacher for marking. Once the sheets had been marked, the process would be reversed with a reassembling of each paper to give back to the pupils over the last two days of term. To make the practice even more insane, it was performed under the closest of scrutiny by Timmy and the technicians and the same process would be repeated throughout the entire science department. As Nadolf’s brainchild, the whole crazy procedure fitted in well with his psychotic and obsessive personality.
But to experience giving back the examination papers at such a late point in the term was the only way to actually appreciate how bad it all was at Faggs School and Hannah naively fell into the trap of trying to go through the examination answers so that the pupils could learn from their mistakes, just as any decent teacher would try to do. Although she had been warned about giving back the papers so late in the term, the advice had been given only as a passing comment and it was only when she found herself constantly struggling to keep the pupils quiet did she eventually abandon the entire process all together.
‘My goodness, Wicksy! The noise the kids made when I was giving back the exam papers! I’ve never heard anything like it in my life!’ she sighed, despondent at her professional efforts.
‘Yes, it’s bad, isn’t it?’ he replied, a serious look on his face. ‘I don’t even bother going through the papers anymore.’
‘But it makes a mockery of actually doing the exams in the first place!’
‘I agree but the school has to keep them busy right up to the end of the term, otherwise they’d run amok around the school.’
‘But why are the kids like this? They were totally out of control! I could hardly make myself be heard!’
‘Think about it, Hannah,’ he said, sensibly. ‘They’ve all been packed off to boarding school, usually against their will because their parents don’t like them, and they’re understandably excited at going home.’
‘Ah, that’s what it is. But, my God, it was awful!’
‘Well, that’s how it is,’ he said finally.
I can’t believe this is all happening to me, she thought.
I hate it.

In the penultimate week of term, Hannah received Christmas cards from both Hirsuter Montage and Nadolf Fitler, an event which seemed to directly reflect the double standards each employed in their working lives. She also finally gave a detention to two of the boys from The Class From Hell: spotty-faced Tom and slimy Jeremiah, which meant they would miss their social entertainment on the last Saturday night of term. It was to be expected that both boys pleaded unremittingly with her to forget their punishment, with the promise they would behave in the future but Hannah had heard enough of their lies and sly promises too many times before; she was going to stand by her decision, firmly. What she did not expect, though, was the bad feeling her action would generate amongst their fellow School House chums, which only served to reinforce her belief just how male chauvinistic and unpleasant they all really were.
The first incident occurred when two sixth form boys from School House approached her on her way to the biology workroom, antagonistically banging their feet on the wooden corridor floor as they marched slowly by. At first, Hannah wondered what the hell they were doing until she realised: it was a protest.
‘How juvenile!’ she retorted quietly but just loud enough for the two boys to hear. Suddenly, to Hannah’s astonishment, both boys calmly turned their heads back towards her with the insolent intention of directly holding her gaze. Clearly, their threatening behaviour was their way of registering their distaste for her.
Males under threat, she sneered bitterly, once they had disappeared off to their lessons.
The second and most disconcerting incident occurred at the end of term carol service, in front of the whole school. During the service itself, Hannah felt not a tinge of emotion nor a sense of occasion of being where she was, sitting in the glorious school chapel, painfully struggling to sing ‘Adeste Fideles’ in Latin without her glasses. What if the more talented colleagues around her noticed her evident linguistic inadequacy? It was only when the service came to a close did it become clear how far she had rocked the School House boat and that something was unmistakably wrong.
‘Look! There she is!’ one of the School House villains shouted loudly as she made her way to walk out of the chapel.
Suddenly, the sound of slow handclapping and a cacophony of accusing voices reached her. Their humiliating action was directed at her! She turned her head away, to pretend she had not heard them.
Surely this isn’t happening to me, she thought.
Not that the boys’ protest was overtly obvious to others around them, what with the background noise of loud chatter and laughter of boarders excited at the prospect of going home for the holiday. No, it was more of a slyly orchestrated remonstration, engineered to take place in the middle background to minimize any adverse response from observers, particularly from Neil, their housemaster.
But, in spite of the waves she had created in alerting Timmy Baldman she needed help with The Class From Hell, Hannah had managed to make it through to the end of her first term, although Faggs School had done nothing but create a professional headache for her. She thought she had known it all. She was at her lowest ebb.
The lowest she had ever been.