‘I’m often impressed by the creative practice of Caro Giles, who writes while caring for her four daughters. She makes no excuses about lack of time or resources. She creates the place for her creative power to exist. I admire this a great deal.’ Clover Stroud, bestselling author
Next week I am going on holiday for a few days. It will be the first time I have been abroad without my four children.
I last left a daughter and flew across the sea a long time ago. I took a group of students to Paris, when I was working at a school for children who had been permanently excluded from the mainstream. These schools are now labelled SEMH (Social Emotional Mental Health), but fifteen years ago they were still SEBD (Social Emotional Behavioural Difficulties). Both of these acronyms are fancy ways of describing young people whose main additional need is their challenging behaviour. But the kicking and swearing and punching are just expressions of pain and frustration, and it is the job of staff at these schools to unravel this and not only keep them safe, but help them to develop skills that will enable them to function and lead independent lives.
I’m trying to remember exactly when that Paris trip took place - somewhere in the gap between being a mother of one and a mother of two, so my mermaid daughter must have been two years old. At the end of the previous year we had moved from South-East London up to a town in County Durham that became notorious during the pandemic, and is still the target of jokes about opticians.
I was already wearing a sense of otherness like a cloak around my shoulders, trying to navigate my professional role in a North-East school that seemed not to have quite stepped into the 21st century. I arrived armed with ideas of how to diversify the curriculum, keen to nurture these children who had been failed so badly by creaking systems. I wanted to heal their brutality and anger by showing them magic and calm. But often they heard a voice with an accent that was nothing like theirs, saw a young woman who could never inhabit their world, and scoffed at a female whose gender and physical weakness they knew they could exploit verbally and physically. A few months after the trip to Paris I would find myself on a hospital bed in Darlington because a child had slammed a door hard into my pregnant stomach.
That school was tough place to work if you were a woman. It was a tough place to work if you were a woman who had not grown up in the harshness of a community shattered by the decimation of industry, and it was definitely a tough place to work if you were pregnant, which I was three times during my time there. Family members and friends frequently asked me why I was placing myself in an environment where every day I was at risk of physical harm and verbal abuse. But I loved that job.
The reality was that the six hours I spent each day with the children in my care was never enough to turn their lives around. They always went home to situations that fed their troubled behaviours - multiple care settings, parents with addiction issues, homes where a parent was trapped inside the criminal justice system, abuse…it was impossible to completely save these children. But there were snatches of such joy too, moments when I caught glimpses of the children they should be, could be, if only they were allowed.
I was the head of the music department, which was both a blessing and a curse. The blessing was that music was an effective way in to learning for these kids who more often than not had very poor literacy skills and struggled to access other subjects. It’s one of the reasons I am so passionate about the impact the arts can have upon society and their ability to enhance human connection. The curse was that the music room was a portacabin about 100 metres from the main school building, across a large playground.
At this school, if you heard shouts or thumps coming from a nearby classroom, the teaching assistant would run to the noise because it usually meant a child was kicking off and support was needed. In my classroom, if any kids kicked off no one could hear, and we were reliant upon another child being stable and calm enough to be sent quickly over to the main building to get help. Once, a very violent student started throwing chairs around the room and I was terrified he would hurt me badly. Many of the kids really wanted to hurt us because they were testing our commitment to them. Every time a child called me a posh c**t, or tried to bite me as I held them to keep them safe I told them I wasn’t leaving them, I wasn't going anywhere, and when they walked through the door tomorrow I would be here. It messed with their heads, the prospect of reliability and consistency, and this confusion and disbelief manifested as violence and extreme distress.
But amidst the ever-present undercurrent of tension and fear, there were moments of cohesion and calm. I would write the letter names of chords onto pieces of paper for a boy who wanted to play the keyboard. Another lad had a beautiful voice and twinkling eyes and sang effortlessly into the microphone. For those who were too self-conscious or just too battered by life, I brought out handheld percussion instruments and showed them how to play a simple rhythm. For these children it was enough that they could sit on a chair with other humans, they were learning how to listen and be heard.
There is so much power in conversation, but it is a skill. Some of us are born with an ability to communicate - part genetics but also hugely down to the opportunities we are given. These children, whose access to learning had been severely impacted by trauma, neglect, misunderstanding and disability, needed intense support to develop basic social skills. When they sat on chairs creating soundscapes or copying rhythms I clapped out for them, I was teaching them music, but really I was speaking to them, showing them different ways to connect as people. My teaching plans were full of national curriculum learning objectives, but I refused to take them too literally, knowing that what these children needed to learn was how to exist alongside other humans, how to trust and how to hope.
This is the backdrop against which I took a group of young people to Paris. The trip was another example of me not really knowing my limits, trying to show these kids a bigger world, so far removed from their own. I was naive and hopeful, as I often am, the two male teachers who accompanied me eyeing me sceptically as I rejected McDonalds in favour of a more traditional French cafe and led these volatile children onto a boat for a trip down the Seine. I spoke French and encouraged them to do the same, whilst being constantly terrified that one of them would abscond or start a fight below balconies dripping with begonias.
I’m not sure whether the beauty of Paris was lost on them, or if any of those students remember their time in that evocative city. It’s hard to know whether even Paris could momentarily crack the hard shells they had formed around themselves. But I do know that when I returned to County Durham and saw my little daughter again, standing on the concrete playground next to the portacabin, I felt grateful that she was safe and once more in my arms.
Next week, when I fly from Edinburgh to a country I have never visited before, I am once again straddling two worlds. That constant push-pull between the mother and the woman. But this time I am not trying to grow the lives of a group of schoolchildren - I am trying to grow my own.
Beautiful and heartfelt Caro, and those children were very lucky to have you. My closest friend works with troubled kids and has the same deep investment. I admire her so much for this difficult work. I imagine it’s equally heartbreaking and rewarding. But how exciting you’re going on a trip for yourself. ❤️
This is such a moving read Caro.
The break away will surely be an injection of much needed life-juice. sending you love x