The Substitute

Year 9 had been through four supply teachers since September, and the head of department had stopped pretending this was a coincidence.

"They're not bad kids," she told Mr Ferrier, in the tone of someone who has said this many times and is no longer entirely sure. "They're — testing. There's a group of about six."

"Names?"

She hesitated. "Does that help?"

"It usually does."

She gave him six names. He wrote them in a small black notebook, slowly, in capitals, and something about the slowness of it made her want to add they're only fourteen, though she couldn't have said why.

Mr Ferrier was perhaps sixty. Grey suit, grey hair, the flat unbothered face of a man who has been shouted at by professionals. He did not ask about the syllabus.

Period 3, Tuesday. Room 14.

They came in loud. This was the standard opening move — flood the room with noise before the adult can establish a baseline — and it had broken two of the four. Mr Ferrier stood at the front and did not raise his voice and did not ask for quiet. He simply waited, hands folded, watching, until the noise ran out of its own accord the way noise eventually does when nothing is pushing back against it.

It took four minutes. That was quicker than they expected, and they knew it, and it annoyed them.

"Right," he said. "I'm not going to teach you anything today."

Silence. Suspicion.

"Today I'm going to tell you about a boy I taught in 1987. Then you can go."

Somebody at the back said, "This is a lesson?" and somebody else laughed, and Mr Ferrier waited for that to finish too.

"His name was Andrew Salt," he said. "He was fourteen. He was in a class much like this one, in a room much like this one, and there were six of them who made his life a particular kind of hell for two years."

The room shifted. Fourteen-year-olds have excellent instincts for the moment an adult stops performing.

"Not violence. Violence would have been noticed. It was cleverer than that. It was every day, for two years, and it was small enough each time that no single instance was worth reporting, and Andrew was clever enough to know that if he reported the sum of it he'd sound hysterical." He looked around the room without hurry. "They were bright, the six. That's the thing people get wrong. Cruelty at that level takes real intelligence."

Nobody spoke.

"I knew," said Mr Ferrier. "That's the part I want you to have. I was twenty-six and I was frightened of them — of the six — in a way I have never admitted to another adult, and I decided that Andrew was managing. I told myself that. He's managing."

He paused.

"He wasn't managing."

The bell for period 3 was still twenty minutes off. Room 14 was completely silent.

"I have spent a long time," he said, "thinking about what I would say, if I could go back and stand in front of those six children. And the honest answer is that I don't think I'd say anything to them at all. I don't think they were the problem. I think I was."

A girl near the window — Naomi, one of the six names in the notebook — said, quietly, "So why are you telling us?"

Mr Ferrier considered this.

"Because I've been doing supply for thirty-one years," he said, "and I've never once had a difficult class. Not one. And it took me a very long time to understand why."

He turned and wrote on the board. Six words, in capitals, slowly.

SOMEONE IN THIS ROOM IS ANDREW.

He put the pen down.

"I don't know which of you it is. I never do. I've stopped trying to work it out, because I'm not very good at it — I proved that in 1987. So I say this instead, in every room I stand in, on the first day, and then I teach the lesson and I go home."

He picked up his bag.

"Off you go. You've twenty minutes."

Nobody moved.

He was at the door when Naomi said, "Sir. What happened to him? Andrew?"

Mr Ferrier stopped with his hand on the frame.

"He became a teacher," he said.

And he went out into the corridor, and left them with it.