The Bunker: La autotomia / El vampiro

La autotomia

Lizard season has been upon the Bunker for a few weeks now. Several mornings recently I’ve opened my door to find one basking on the step in the early sun, and I can hear them scuttle from my footsteps to and from the washing line round the back, just about catching a glimpse of their brown tails vanishing rustling into the flowerbed.

The Bunker, by the way, is the on-site teachers’ accommodation where I live. It’s so called because it has the grey, boxy and (almost) windowless appearance of somewhere you might shelter from a nuclear blast. It’s a bit like living in one of those big self-storage lockers, or a shipping container. Underneath the mattress on my bed previous inhabitants have scrawled the length of their stint, in a way that is just a bit too reminiscent of a prison cell. In all honesty it’s not too bad. It does in fact have windows, though not on the lizard side as this faces the school and the car park, and presumably the builders thought that parents might not enjoy the sight of the adults in whose care they were leaving their children wandering around in their pants. The fact that a good deal of the light from the window side is blocked out by two large billboards is probably a small price to pay for not being on constant show, and for not having to wear trousers the whole damn time. The kitchen is small but adequate; I have a choice of two sofas; a bathroom with what appears to be a regulated supply of hot water; even a spare bedroom, albeit containing nothing other than a bed. It’s the sort of place that would set you back about £1250 a month in London, and my commute is roughly two minutes. Despite this I am often late. Plus, I have a constant supply of rosemary as a bush grows by the front door, along with some pungent smelling pink flower with mint-like leaves, and a variety of other foliage that is home to big lumbering grasshoppers, hummingbird moths, a small yellow bird that I think is a kind of wagtail and of course lizards, of at least two different species.

On the whole when you open the door on them, the startled lizard hides in the nearest shrub but when last week Rachael –visiting from some windswept backwater called Madrid – interrupted one in its morning sunning, he ran not back into the undergrowth but inside the flat. Anyone who knows a bit about geckos and other small lizards will know that they can shed their tails when attacked, a move which either leaves the predator with only the tail to chew on, or at least creates enough confusion to allow the reptile time to escape – in this case to the initial safety of behind the sideboard and then inside the electric heater, from where he had to be ejected in a patch of flowerbed, by which time we had missed our train. This is autotomy – self amputation – and is practised by various animals including several different kinds of lizard (in this case probably a Mediterranean house gecko), salamanders, some spiders, and the African spiny mouse, which can shed its skin in order to evade capture. When a bee leaves its sting in you this is also autotomy, although given that the sting also seems to take with it the insect’s internal organs, resulting in death, I assume in this instance the goal is not individual survival but the protection of the group. Good old bees.

Turns out some geckos will perform autotomy not only if attacked but also if particularly freaked out, so it would seem the gecko that lives outside my flat is quite highly strung – assuming that Rachael didn't try to attack him – and was so startled by the opening door that he shed his tail. Like a really extreme version of wetting yourself. Either that or she trod on it. Also, what I didn't know is that – in order to distract the predator - the rejected tail retains movement, and writhes around for a few minutes independent of the body, which although interesting is a bit grimy. Don’t worry though, because the lizard might come back later and eat it.

So there you go; autotomy in neurotic house geckos. Every day’s a school day.

El vampiro

There’s that phrase or possibly psalm that says: ‘Out of the mouths and babes oft times truths do come’. Or something like that. I reckon most teachers wouldn't have to search too hard in their daily life to find examples where this is undoubtedly the case. Children’s somewhat unsettling habit of being uncannily honest and accurate about things that can make adults squirm is as endearing as it is terrifying. Then of course there are the times when they spew absolute nonsense, like the other day in science when one of them told me with great conviction that eggs melt. Eggs don’t melt kid.

Making the move from secondary to primary has obviously thrown up challenges. Some of these I was expecting; don’t trip over them; don’t expect them to get the difference between direct and reported speech the first time round; don’t worry if sometimes they make weird faces and roll around on the floor for a bit because fractions aren't that interesting; that sort of stuff. But some I was less prepared for, even though they seem obvious in writing; they don’t really get subtext or irony, weirdly; to them it does matter if someone took their pencil, even if they subsequently gave it back; whichever way you slice it, fart noises are funny; and more importantly, most will just say stuff if they are thinking it.

Of course, this isn't limited to primary. Anyone who’s ever taught in the depths of Y9 will know that it takes some students longer than others to develop the ol’ brain-mouth filter. It’s just that when it’s a seven year old telling you that your hair is messy and that you smell of coffee it’s somehow more disarming, because you know it must be true.

The fact that the change in key stage has also been accompanied by a change from state to private may also have a bearing on this. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t pretend to have been a crusading educator of kids from decaying and anonymous high-rises, steering them through the maze of violence and poverty that formed their everyday lives, protecting them from the spectres of gangs and drugs with the shining beacon of education. I taught French in a relatively leafy suburb of Essex. Not without its challenges obviously, but I’d be surprised if any of the kids I used to teach wound up in prison, or releasing a lyrically brilliant but virtually unheard of grime record. Even so, I think it would be fair to say that most of them didn't have maids. Much more ‘second car’ than ‘second home’. And their parents had more or less normal jobs. Jobs that you’d heard of. Stuff like ‘works in a bank, ‘architect’, ‘self-employed builder’, even ‘teacher’; not stuff like ‘professional footballer’, ‘pro-golfer’, ‘owner of four restaurants and a water park’ or the decidedly shady ‘something in North Africa’. Anyway point being that perhaps this background has imbued the students here with even less fear than the average pre-teen - the teenage years being a state of constant fear of absolutely everything – so emphasising and honing their ability to point out one’s foibles. But then, that could just be my liberal guilt talking. And you can’t resent them; they’re eight for Christ’s sake.

Either way, it took me all of three hours of my fist day to realise that they calls ‘em like them sees ‘em: ‘Mr Adam, you have purple round your eyes, you did not sleep well’ (for reasons which are unclear to me, they drop the surname here but keep the ‘Mr’). She was right; I hadn't slept well, largely because the next day I was starting a new job in another country in a key stage in which I wasn't trained. Thing is, it’s probably quite a big step for the average 8 year-old to get their head round this. To her I just looked knackered, and that’s what she said. Similarly, there was no arguing with the student the other week who they told me I had sweat under my arms and that ‘maybe I should change my shirt’. It is starting to get hot here.

There is something which should be said about the purple eye comment which is that, although that day I really hadn't slept well, mostly it’s just my natural colouring. My eyes are dark, and the rest of my face maintains a somewhat yellow tinge that has been described variously as ‘Scandinavian’, ‘Mediterranean’, ‘olive’, ‘waxy’, ‘sallow’, ‘ghostly’, and perhaps least flatteringly of all ‘grey’. In fairness to the kids, adults have in the past felt compelled to comment on my sunken features. A man in the pub once walked up to me and quite unexpectedly and not a little aggressively grabbed my face in both hands and held my head still so he could get a better look at it. He stared into my eyes for a while. I weighed up whether he was going to punch me or give me a kiss, and opted eventually for the former. Then he said simply, ‘You've got very dark eyes. That’s why I was looking at you earlier on’. I said I hadn't noticed. I had noticed; he’d been looking right at me for some time. Hence, I suppose, my nickname amongst some of the children - el vampiro - which emerged after a couple of weeks and, at the height of its usage, led some children to run away from me down the corridor in ‘fear’, crying ‘Oh no! It is Mr Vampiro! If he bites you, you will be a vampiro too.’ Thankfully, it seems to have settled down a little now, as has their habit of drawing pictures of me on the board in the morning, an exercise whose objective appears to have been ‘who can draw the picture that looks the least like Mr Adam, or even a human being’. If this is the case, the prize must surely go to the student who liked to draw me as a branch of the supermarket chain Mercadona, sometimes accompanied with an explanatory caption, but sometimes just left for the viewer to interpret. That was the egg melting kid.

Some comments of course are harder to stomach - or understand- than others. ‘Slow’ is an accusation that (perhaps appropriately) I am still struggling to get to grips with; I maintain that ‘old’ is a matter of perspective; and ‘feo’ is one that we had to have a little chat about. Some -‘Mr Gum’ for example- are just plain odd. The latest from one Y4 student is ‘Mr Puffin’. I quite like this one, not least because it comes with a full-on, head back, ear-to-ear grin, and is so strange that it’s pointless even trying to rationalise it.

However, some do have the ability to reach you in a strange and unnerving way. ‘Why are you so serious?’ is a question that keeps rolling around in my head, and one to which I can’t quite seem to find an answer, although it is probably just that at the time of asking I was trying to teach maths. It’s a hell of a question nonetheless. It’s a question that can keep you awake at night, especially when taken apiece with the character description of me written by one student, which read simply: ‘Mr Adam: tall, weird and sad’. I've been trying to work out whether she meant ‘sad’ as in ‘melancholy’ or, even worse, ‘sad’ as in ‘Warhammer collection and the novel of the game Halo’. If the latter, I can take comfort in the fact that this at least really isn't true, although I am able to identify all the flags of the World. Similarly, the all-purpose ‘bad’ is an adaptable and niggly instrument for all its bluntness. ‘How many minutes are left of the lesson?’ is another question that if taken the wrong way can cut through you a bit, and there is a knowing, prophetic tone to the disarmingly simple ‘Why are you always here?’ that could lead a man to madness if enough time was given to it.

But then, they’re only kids, just breathing air out of their mouths. Incidentally, the reason that student was doing a character description of me is that I appeared in the fantasy story she was writing. I was a gingerbread man who gets his arm bitten off by the Queen after failing to collect enough fruit. Apparently there are no unions for gingerbread men. It was an odd sort of compliment, but one which I took in the spirit in which it was offered; unknowingly.

Please enjoy below some highlights from the Mr Adam Gallery.