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“Wahoo!” Beth stumbled through the door into the kitchen and released a pile of bags loudly onto the table as she exulted. Kitty rushed in from the lounge, not used to such a boisterous entry.
“Beth, what in the…?”
Beth grins at her, grabs her hands and starts to waltz around the kitchen. “I am celebrating.”
“All right.” She lets Beth twirl her, both laughing. “And why are we celebrating?”
“I am done teaching ‘King Lear’, this year’s module and hopefully forever, we’re trying a different set Shakespeare next year!”
“Then I’m sure I’m very happy for you!”
“Don’t get me wrong Lear is a great play, it’s a wonderful exploration of aging and families and the decline of a once great man. But to teach it to teenagers? I don’t know why we do it to ourselves!” Beth lets go of Kitty to wave her arms vehemently. “I’ve seen some wonderful Lears, Ian McKellen was of course excellent, but I’ve seen some really good local ones too. And it was always easier to teach the years that we could take a class to see a production, like the one in Leeds in 2023, but even so it was always a trial to get through. And now we can do something else instead.”
“Well then I’m made up for you. Can’t say I was ever very excited about learning Shakespeare.”
“What play did they make you do?
“'As You Like It', and yeah it was oh so boring and I was not impressed by all the romance. I was not into love yet, or hadn’t recognised my feelings as being it.”
“For what it’s worth I think Shakespeare meant you to be. Not entirely, you can read it both ways, but he’s certainly poking fun at love at first sight.”
“Well that went right over my head back then. But we acted some of it out, and our group got stuck with part of Act, I think, Five? And so I got to make up a tune for the ‘Page’s Song’ and we played and sung it, which meant ours was the least terrible when we performed them for the lower forms.” Kitty shrugged. “That’s one of my better memories of that school.”
Kitty moves to the piano. “Listen to this.” She picks out a tune, sings along.
'Between the acres of the rye,
with a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonny no,
those pretty country folks would lie, …'
“Was that your arrangement?”
“Hell no, I don’t even remember mine, it was pretty basic. Nah, this is Bare Naked Ladies, they did an album of it.” She played a little more, then turned back to Beth. “So if you don’t like teaching ‘King Lear’ what do you like teaching kids?”
Beth looks thoughtful. “There’s a module on persuasion that we do, you know, explain the different ways words can be used to convince people of things, and at the end of it we go back through the previous modules we’ve done and apply it to the texts they studied there. It’s interesting because I normally see a real difference in their writing afterwards, as if it’s helped them define their audience.”
She sits down on the piano bench next to Kitty.
“Of course they also tend to act like they’ve found their one hammer and use that to analyse everything from them on. I often have to rein them back in, remind them that people write for many reasons, for pleasure, to capture a thought or a feeling, to share information.”
“I never really clicked with what we were supposed to do in English, identifying symbolism and themes and suchlike. I enjoyed reading well enough, when I didn’t get distracted by other things. Wish I’d had you for a teacher.”
Beth starts picking out a tune on the piano. "It's all just a starting point, you've found your own ways to appreciating words, mostly through music."
A buzzer on the oven goes off and they head back into the kitchen. Beth’s things are strewn across the table, including an extra bag with what Kitty thinks are posters from her classroom, based on the sellotape on the corners.
Beth tidies them all down to the end. “Not sure why I brought that home, should have shoved it all in the school’s recycling, except that’s out the other side of the building from the carpark. But I want to keep that one.” She points at a quote on yellow card ‘More sinned against than sinning.’ “I might put it in my workroom.”
Once they are sitting down to eat Kitty says, “We could burn all that. Ritual sacrifice. Right symbolic, eh?”
Beth looks like she’s considering it. “There are the branches the aborists left from when the poplar came down, they should be dry enough to burn now. Shall we do a bonfire with marshmallows?”
“Can we dance around it? Howl at the moon?”
“I don’t see why not.”
So after dinner they drag the dried wood out to the bonfire drum, and lay a fire with the posters and syllabuses and teaching notes stuffed in between them.
Kitty notices Beth is looking dubious. “We don’t have to do this? I know I can get carried away.”
“No, I was just thinking about the size, will it be sufficiently underway before we get Michael over here quoting the Clean Air Act and Calderdale bylaws. Let’s do it.”
Kitty pulls her lighter out and offers it to Beth. “You do the honours.”
Beth picks a couple of bits of cardboard well down in the pile to set alight and it catches nicely, with a crackle and pops as the wood also starts burn.
Kitty finds herself entranced by the building flames, and jumps when next to her Beth intones,
'Howl, howl, howl! O, you are men of stones!
Had I your tongues and eyes, I’d use them so,
That heaven’s vault should crack.'
“I take it that’s from Lear?”
“Yes, when he comes on stage at the end carrying Cordelia’s dead body.”
“Oh, that sounds like a bundle of laughs.”
“Pretty much. It’s one of those plays where everyone dies at the end - well the women do, and Edmund, and Lear himself."
Kitty frowns. "I'm suddenly really glad they didn't put a play about daughters doing their duty to their powerful father in front of me when I was fifteen. Daft lovers in the forest of Arda was probably much safer."
"Oh love." Beth puts her arm around Kitty's shoulder and pulls her close, and Kitty leans her head down against Beth's and lets herself be gently rocked as they watch the flames, while the twilight deepens into darkness.