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This is a detour. Deal with it.
Furo was a troublemaker. No one wanted him in their class. His teacher, a good, kind woman, was known to be pressing for his permanent expulsion. Recently, he had set fire to someone’s essay and dropped it in a wastepaper basket, and the entire school had to be evacuated.
My thoughts? Troublemakers were troubled. Troublemakers needed help. And, to be fair, I had read the essay, and I’d say it deserved it.
Furo had been at the school for about five months, following a previous expulsion. I had taught him quite a few times. He always sat at the back, teetering on two legs of his chair, one earphone in and his phone in his lap. He was tall and wiry and I had never seen him smile.
One morning I was called into a child protection meeting for Furo because his teacher was ill with a mild case of complete nervous collapse and no one else wanted to do it. There were concerns over his numerous absences, and the recent arson incident.
I quickly realised I was the only person in the meeting who had read Furo’s file.
The social worker had just been allocated his case after his previous social worker had committed suicide. When I arrived, she was dabbing her eyes and ranting about her case load and a parent who had assaulted her and some AWOL minutes and a court date that she had missed, personal or work-related it was unclear. She had toothpaste around her mouth and one of her eyes was alarmingly red.
She wanted Furo’s mother to start taking more responsibility for her son’s behaviour. To draw some boundaries. To take an interest in his education.
The chair of the meeting agreed. She wanted the mother to understand that if she couldn’t keep her son safe and out of trouble, she could lose him.
The health visitor had a tiny gold cross on her necklace and kept having to readjust her lips to fit them over her braces. Her only agenda seemed to be to prevent Furo’s mother from having an abortion.
The woman from the addiction charity was very smug because Furo’s mother had – reportedly – not taken any narcotics since the discovery of her pregnancy, and she felt the risk of Furo’s exposure to drugs had now disappeared.
The police constable had arrived with a long list of incidents in which Furo was involved: shoplifting, vandalism, antisocial behaviour, one particularly florid report of a stop search that had gone sideways and resulted in damage to an elderly woman’s bicycle basket and the temporary loss of a police dog.
He was annoyed that Furo’s mum had no sense of discipline. He was annoyed that he’d had to handle three separate reports from different hospitals about unexplained bruising on Furo’s back and broken fingers. But mostly, he was annoyed that the coffee machine was broken.
Furo’s mother, who sat at the top of the table in a white, boho-style dress, had dark rings under her eyes and agreed, via her translator, that her son was out of control, a menace, but what she really wanted to talk about was the black mould in her flat, the problems she was having claiming benefits since missing a meeting, her unfair dismissal from a local bakery, harassment from a previous social worker who claimed to be in love with her, a £400 monthly direct debit her electricity company had set up erroneously, for which they were expecting her to accept account credit until the amount had been spent, sciatica that left her paralysed in the mornings, her fear of a man with an Alsatian who lived on the same floor, her complete bafflement at her residency forms, which were due the following week, her fear of being sent back home, her complex relationship with God, and how to get someone to fix her cooker, which hadn’t worked since they had moved in six months ago.
I had tried and tried to get hold of Furo’s teacher but hadn’t been able to, and had only finally received a voice note from her moments before I entered the room, by which point I had read the file and knew the following:
Furo had arrived in the country by boat with his mother from Nigeria four years ago at the age of nine. He had grown up on an isolated farm then moved to a rural village, where his three older sisters had been abducted, his father killed and the village razed to the ground in the Boko Haram conflict.
His only English was, ‘My name is Furo,’ and, ‘Please help.’ He had never been inside a classroom, learned to read or multiply or had a school bag or homework or a refrigerator or seen automatic doors or eaten French fries, and his sisters, who had always taken care of him, singing to him and making his favourite food and holding him close in the rain, had suddenly disappeared, screaming in the night.
His father, who had taught him how to tell when to harvest maize just by squeezing a cob, who had chased him through the tall stalks as he was learning to walk, who had told him off for causing his mother’s headaches and sucked his toe clean when he’d stepped on a scythe, had just been brutally murdered in front of him with the butt of a rifle, flies investigating the open wound on his head as whatever he might have wanted to say to his only son faded away unsaid.
But Furo was immediately enrolled in year four, halfway through the spring term, and expected to punctuate a sentence properly in fountain pen without smudging.
What an absolute shock it was when, within a month, he assaulted another pupil. How wildly out-of-the-blue, jaw-droppingly unforeseeable that his behaviour from then on sometimes fell below normal social expectations.
And, to boot, the man with the Alsatian terrorising his mother was a known drug dealer who happened to be Furo’s mother’s ex-boyfriend and the father of Furo’s unborn sibling.
And the teacher’s voice note?
‘Georgia, sorry, I know this is a pain.’ She sighed. ‘He’s obviously smart. Just… I can’t teach when he’s in the class. Make him someone else’s problem.’
I knew this teacher. I had sent her a message that morning when I’d heard she was off sick because that’s what I’ve heard nice people do.
We volunteered together once a week at a free after-school club. Like the rest of us, she arrived every day with bags full of books and pens the school could no longer afford to provide. She bought every single one of her kids Christmas presents every year, and hadn’t bought herself a single new item of clothing in two years. She cut her own hair. Very badly.
And the policeman was right. I was tired from staying up late marking, and the coffee machine was broken.
I’m not going to spell this out. If you’re incapable of figuring out the many ways in which this situation was subpar and nonsensical, and how money and politics and the pure ignorant idiocy of those in charge had created it, you can kindly go and further your education elsewhere.
Oh, please. Unruffle those electoral feathers. Tory scum and loony lefties cooked this up hand in hand.
So, that’s the day I decided I could have more impact teaching kids who would grow up into positions where they might make a difference.
And thank goodness I did, because I’m not a purely selfless individual, and when I got the call from the hospital about my father and realised I was about to do the thing I had always sworn not to do and go back to Port Emblyn, it didn’t take much (dinner and a blow job) to get the head of Redmoor to call the head of PES and put in a recommendation. The Redmoor head had been sad to lose me, but I think we both knew it was time for me to leave.
