The Lifeboat
A doctor, a lawyer, a cleaner, a cook. The list would go on but had to end with an artist, a musician and a writer. Then you draw a boat on the board, perch on your desk and wait for the students to trickle in.
“Right, we have to throw some people off otherwise the whole thing will go down.”
I was pulling late shifts at a dingy ESOL college off the M1. My voice would go hoarse bellowing over the hum of the cleaners vacuuming the neighbouring classrooms. The students didn’t want to be there after a day of work and, for the most part, neither did I.
Teaching, a lot of people don’t take into account, is like performing on stage every day of your working life. There’s nowhere to hide, and when you bomb you bomb and when you have a good day you’re not brought a bouquet of flowers you’re given homework to mark.
Between Universal Credit meetings, Tony, my work coach, had talked my ear off about new careers. I’d look longingly at the people before me who somehow managed to finesse five-minute appointments knowing that he was going to talk at me for an hour about manifesting opportunities and motivational podcasts. Copywriting? Marketing? Recruitment? Teaching? God...teaching. That saying “those who can’t, teach” always stuck in my throat like a popcorn kernel. I treated these comfortable options, or rather everything that wasn’t being handed a publishing deal, as if I was being forced to walk the plank.
It was difficult to explain to Tony that I couldn’t simply “give up” all the work I’d done, all the chipping away. If I was going to change tact in my career I’d need to be firmly on the moral high ground to save face. Start a wildly respected charity or become a professional ocean cleaner-upper or something. I couldn’t, I was adamant, slide backward.
Once I had made the leap, however, the lifeboat lesson became something I’d look forward to teaching. A well-known exercise it needs little preparation but a lot of Devil’s advocate along the way. Even the shyest of learners would be compelled to share their two cents. Everyone has an opinion on worth and inequality.
I’d put the students into small groups then smugly stalk around the classroom like Sherlock Holmes until I’d hear someone throw their first victim overboard.
“We kill the musician?”
“Really? You’d kill the musician? I see...Who is your favourite band?”
“The Beatles!”
“OK, The Beatles are gone. ‘Hey Jude’? It never existed.”
“Teacher, noooooo!”
If you pulled off the lesson it would descend into giggles of playful disagreement. There’s a strange satisfaction watching adults transform in a classroom, waggling a hand and stretching an arm to the Gods when they want to answer a question. Surreptitiously whispering to one another the moment you turn your back to write on the board, then pursing their lips in fright when you catch them.
I have a good enough way with words that I can rally troops to agree that, surely, what moves us to tears or laughter or action is worthy of staying on the lifeboat. But despite energetic debate, those last three — the artist, the musician, the writer — would nearly always be thrown off first. And I understood; you do not “need” the court jester like you “need” the doctor. But that wasn’t all.
It’s very difficult to ask people to advocate for a path that appears to only be set up for the elite to succeed. Would pursuing a creative livelihood be legitimate or at least feel less like a frivolity if it wasn’t overrun by a very small subsection of society hogging an already scant number of opportunities? It’s become so insular, in fact, that calls to save these industries from themselves all feel a bit Marie Antoniette making wanking motions at the commoners from the Palace of Versailles.
Even when you’re the exception, not the rule, the have-nots are expected to preface their success with an escape story. How they bravely prevailed despite obstacles, found resilience and now they’re a good person because they get to sit at the table with the upper crust. But when you don’t then define the haves, in all their unfettered affluence and nepotism, you leave a grey area that invites the cultivation of Eliza Doolittle storylines. Landed gentry posing as a squeezed middle. Heirs to empires obfuscating their background with isms.
And it’s not that those isms and prejudices don’t matter, they do. But a lack of wealth will only ever compound the things for which we get discriminated against. An abundance of wealth does the opposite.
As long as we continue to blur financial realities in order to fit into a system of class categorisation that is fifty fucking years old, and as long as barriers are romanticised as quests you must complete along the way, you put the onus on the have-nots. When the have-nots don’t reach the other side of the chessboard it becomes a personal failure, a case of not trying hard enough. That is a lie so ugly I can’t understand why we aren’t all angry about it.
Of course, I have aspirations for myself, social mobility over reform is so cooked into everything we’ve been taught after all. Especially if you make the mistake of aspiring to do anything vaguely creative where to make things that are intellectual or thoughtful or quiet or complex is reserved only for those right at the top already. A very small lens to be observing the world through. The more jaded I get each passing year the more frustrated I get at this fêted ‘way out’ when so many pull the ladder up behind them and abandon their intention of widening that lens.
My stint at the dingy college came to an end just as I was beginning to enjoy it. Before my final week, we bought a family train ticket down to Brighton on a particularly miserable day as a kind of end of course celebration. We walked up the promenade and when the pier emerged I was taken aback when everyone seemed to disperse towards the beach like a bag of marbles had been torn open. I laughed, baffled, and made a meal of gingerly walking onto the pebbles in my impractical get-up of a pencil skirt and boots. One of the students circled back and asked if I liked the seaside to which I think I first introduced her to the term “not when it’s pissing it down.”
The other teacher sidled up beside me as I was frowning to keep the drizzle out of my eyes and did that thing people do when they eye up your side profile until you give them your attention. Eventually, I turned and summoned a smile and he smiled sweetly back.
“This is the first time some of them have been to the seaside,” he said. “At least in this context, a happy context.”
It took me a second. Then the penny dropped.
He’d already walked off to join the students as they dashed towards then away from the waves like little kids. In that moment, I’d never felt like a bigger shit-bag. I’d become so preoccupied with feeling hard done by because, what, some snobs in an industry that’s rigged hadn’t accepted me? I had come far even if I didn’t get the Escape from Alcatraz arc I’d wanted and all it had done was distort my grasp of class and privilege.
So I hitched up my skirt and joined the students stamping at the sea foam as it whipped in. Then we got cans of creamed soda and chips drowned in malt vinegar and huddled around a bench. We played I spy until the bars opened and girls in short dresses and boys with sickly aftershave appeared and it was time to go home.
Every definition of haves and have-nots we’ve been taught, every assumption that you should, individually, work to join the elite rather than blow the doors off it is wrong. In bickering over definitions, we let that small, greedy minority yet again commandeer the lifeboat entirely. Now has never been a better time to take those people to task. To take aim at the top. Passionately and without exceptions.
I’ve had quite a few messages asking whether I’m going to start paid subscriptions and the answer is no. I sincerely appreciate those who have donated. Every penny has been put back into things I used to write-off as admin luxuries like having a functioning website and starting a fund in case the worst happens to my laptop. That is a big burden lifted after a long time in an industry where it’s par for the course to be financially and psychologically undermined. But, ultimately, as a one-man band, I’d simply feel bad asking people to commit regular money without offering other ~content~. And that’s something I can’t sustain.
With all this said, I urge you to support the individuals that you enjoy be it with money or sharing their work because I can see it in real-time disrupting the self-congratulatory circle jerk of hiring school pals and relatives. The gnawing uncertainty is palpable, yes. But I hope this muttering about “subscription entrepreneurship” shows that even when the institutions in place are crumbling and cutting employment that there are people who create because they love it and want to produce work that is more reflective of the world we live in.
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