Laura Is A Pig and What Can We Do?

Childhood is a fraught time!  I did not enjoy school and for many years when passing my old school had an irrational urge to roll down the car window and spit!  I have matured since then and now just avoid the town completely.  Here is a memory of those days.

Laura Is A Pig and What Can We Do?

When I was a child, life was so fragile. It wasn’t that my family was not loving, nor my school so very awful; it was just the fact that every aspect of one’s life was so obviously dependent on others. That dependence meant that when things went wrong in the playground, at home, in me or wherever, there was always that deep conviction that I, a child, couldn’t really do anything to change matters. Your very happiness, existence, recognition lay in others’ hands. The process of life that has gradually empowered me to believe that I am in control (well, in any event, more in control of myself than any one else) has soothed the ageing process. Those who announce at dinner parties that childhood was the happiest time of their lives quite stun me still.

I have a vision of being back in room 4L, doing Maths with Mr Bell, whose room not only rhymed with hell, but also at times seemed it. Those dreadful expectations that adults make of children whatever their circumstances - homework. How many children have longed to announce ‘the reason I was unable to do my homework last night was because my Dad has left home and the sound of my Mother’s constant crying has signalled the collapse of my entire life’. The completion of homework in such circumstances is a bit like expecting the condemned man to fill in his tax returns just before being executed.

At school we had a lovely teacher, a Mr Smyth - good teachers do exist - who had returned to N. Ireland after teaching in Africa for decades. He was quite old and spoke Swahili. He said, one day in our class, ‘the only sure sign of intelligence is adaptability’. Strange how twenty years later I can quote what he taught verbatim. I suppose that is what a good teacher can achieve. Anyway he had been to a funeral one morning, and was teaching us Geography still dressed entirely in black. Laura Pickett, a pratt by any other name, began to cheek him. It started simply but she became more and more strident. The rest of us were embarrassed as he couldn’t control her, in fact he couldn’t control himself and suddenly his head sank into his hands and he started sobbing. His grief was raw and terrible and he left the room. There was a horrid stillness followed by a giggle from Laura. I don’t know who started it, but someone began singing in that familiar school singsong voice ‘Laura is a pig, Laura is a pig’. Everyone began to join in, and so did I. The sound became a crescendo of noise as feet and hands banged the incessant, triumphant message. ‘Laura is a pig, Laura is a pig’. She couldn’t stand it for too long, but it seemed satisfyingly long for the rest of us. She burst into tears and ran out. She ran straight to the headmaster’s office. The entire class was hauled before the headmaster and there we were asked, “How could we be so cruel, to the smallest girl in the class, to an orphan”? I didn’t know Laura had no parents and as we all stood shoulder to shoulder in his dark wood stained office, a part of me screamed at the unfairness of Laura’s parents being dead, and the horrendous grief of Mr Smyth. But mostly I screamed inside at the helplessness of any of us to make it all better.