Small World

Small World Superhead destroyed my teaching dream

I was all set for a glorious third act in life – until I had a row about parking spaces with the headmaster jem clarke

Jem Clarke is in his very, very early fifties, is five foot zero inches tall and has never left the family home in Cleethorpes, which he still shares with his parents…

As I reassure my parents, constantly, an unsuccessful job interview is always a useful experience – if you learn something.

After having my worst-ever job interview on the hottest day of the year, I learnt that my summer-interview wardrobe isn’t climate-emergency ready. I also learnt that an entry-level job in education – as a teaching assistant – is hard to come by if the superhead interviewing you is a rotter.

In my search for a new vocation for my ‘third act’ in life, I’ve met two superheads. I’m thinking a job with ‘super’ in its title may attract a very specific sort of alpha male. Both of them looked like Gareth Southgate’s head transplanted onto the body of the Hulk.

This one, all polo shirts and push-ups, looked me up and down, with some level of suspicion. To be fair, he was probably expecting the interviewee for this lowly position to be a school-leaver named after a season, rather than a very slightly balding, short man in a white, crumpled foreign correspondent’s suit that Martin Bell would probably dismiss as too try-hard.

Thank goodness, in this time of COVID, that the handshake has gone the way of the waved kerchief. I don’t think my hand would reach that far up, or his that far down.

Like the time I dislocated my shoulder at a school dance. I took pity on the overly tall and hirsute viola-player from the year below. It was a bold move, attempting to do the underarm turn. But my best mate, Kevin, had intimated she would ‘put out’.

The only thing put out was my clavicle. The chaperone who accompanied me to the hospital said, ‘Underarm turn? She couldn’t get under a bridge!’

If Meredith is reading this, I am still available, and perhaps we could linedance on our next date.

Anyway, this superhead was droning on about how he had created a chain of pupil-referral units on industrial estates off dual carriageways, accessible only by car. They had the lowest truancy rates in the north, because there was no way a pupil could find anywhere to escape to.

He asked why I wanted to work with maladjusted, pre-teen delinquents. I couldn’t tell him the only reason I wanted the job was that the only other two options in Grimsby were being a carer or the twilight shift at the fish-finger factory.

I had already ruled out being a carer when Mother let me practise bathing her, to see if I could cope. ‘Unacceptably brusque, with cold, shifty eyes’ was the unsolicited feedback she gave me on a hastily designed report card she made.

So I told the superhead that, after working on telephone helplines, I wanted a role where I actually helped people. Craig seemed frustrated with my entire life, furrowing his brow and saying, ‘I’ve changed the lives of 1,700 kids. What’s taken you so long to come on board?’

Pointing out of the window, I gibbered, ‘I didn’t even know this place existed. You’re obscured from the dual carriageway by a cardboard-box factory, and surrounded by a … forest.’

He shook his head, muttering, ‘It’s a grove – possibly woodland.’

He grumpily turned my CV over, as if scrutinising it for answers, even though it had printing on only one side.

He then asked the killer question: ‘If I employ someone else and don’t employ you, what am I losing out on by not employing you?’

Initially I struggled, but then I sparked to life. ‘An additional parking space, because I’m a pedestrian! That’s what you’d be missing out on!’ I exclaimed, like a pint-sized Perry Mason, as smug as my seven-year-old self when I solved the Rubik’s Snake within an hour or two.

The superhead lost it, yelling like a full-on games teacher, ‘How do you expect to work at a school with no pedestrian access, if you’re a pedestrian? How the hell did you even get here?’

We had both drawn ourselves to our feet, our ruddy faces separated by several vertical feet. After months of COVID sluggishness, I felt alive again as I roared, ‘I came via the forest – grove … woody woodland, didn’t I?’ I pointed to my crumpled jacket and my slightly bleeding forehead and wrist, where the thorns had got me.

The superhead said he’d send me some feedback via email and I treated myself to a taxi home to Cleethorpes. My parents, sitting expectantly by the back door, looked alarmed. I’d been picking at my wounds throughout the taxi journey, and now had five-o’clock shadow, a suit in a shade of Turin Shroud Off-White and patches of poppy-red blood on my crown and wrists.

Spotting my stigmata, my mother said, ‘Oh, it’s the second coming.’

Father added, ‘Second coming? He’s never gone yet.’

I headed upstairs – the Jesus Christ of Cleethorpes – with a glass of cooling Ribena. I’m still awaiting the superhead’s feedback.