the times | Thursday February 3 2022 2GM 17
News
So Miss, the schoolboys once asked
the Costa prizewinner, did you take
us to see that steamy film because you
want us?
Hannah Lowe, who this week won
the book prize with her collection of
poems recounting her days teaching
teenagers, has opened up about
mistakenly taking pupils to a film about
a teacher’s illicit relationship with a
pupil. Lowe, whose collection The Kids
also contains a sonnet about a “half-
boy, half-man” igniting “a little flame”
within her, said she had “misstepped”
when taking her students to see the film
adaptation of Notes on a Scandal.
The film, starring Cate Blanchett and
Dame Judi Dench, recounts a teacher
having an affair with a 15-year-old.
Lowe’s school trip to the cinema ended
with “my boys” asking: “But, Miss, do
you want us?”
Lowe, who started teaching pupils
aged 16 to 19 at an inner-city school in
London aged 22, said that while there
was no “actual line stepped over... I
think we all have thoughts and feelings
about all kinds of things we wouldn’t
want to share with people all the time.”
The ethics of teachers writing about
their pupils has been given extra promi-
nence in recent months through Kate
Clanchy’s award-winning memoir,
Some Kids I Taught and What They
Taught Me. Her descriptions of pupils
belatedly led to strongly denied accusa-Teaching taboo that
inspired Costa winner
David Sanderson Arts Correspondent tions of racism but led to Clanchy last
month parting company with her
publisher, Picador.
Lowe, 45, told The Times that
through conflating and anonymising
characters she was confident no stu-
dent would “recognise themselves”
within her poems.
She left her teaching position at City
and Islington College in 2012 and
started “sketching out the sonnets” in
2016, with the collection released last
year. The sonnets also explore parent-
hood and being parented.
She said of the poem about mistak-
enly taking pupils to see Notes on a
Scandal: “It is about the students’ wit.
They were so funny — the fact that the
cheekiest of them would say that.”
Two poems in The Kids alluded to the
subject of teacher-pupil sexual rela-
tionships. But she added: “Most of the
time students just see you as a teacher.
I never felt a consistent frisson going on
between me and the students.”
Lowe’s collection, which took the
overall £30,000 first prize, was praised
by the judges as a “book to fall in love
with”. The BBC broadcaster Reeta
Chakrabarti said it was “joyous, warm
and completely universal”.
Lowe, who now teaches at Brunel
University, said she had been drawn to
teaching older pupils because of her
own experiences. “That is the age kids
get really galvanised, socially and polit-
ically,” she said. “Maybe I was aware of
the echo... of myself as a learner.”TMS
[email protected] | @timesdiaryWhen Hislop
was spiked
Twenty years after Spike Milligan’s
death, Ian Hislop and Nick
Newman have written a play about
the comedian to whom they owe so
much. Hislop says that very early in
his career he went to interview
Milligan and, noting that it was his
birthday, took some champagne to
get on his good side. Alas, on being
opened the fizz erupted all over his
notes. As Hislop looked at a sea of
blurred ink, Milligan, above,
laughed and took over. “He started
interviewing himself,” says Hislop,
“which was much better. From then
on, I felt I owed him one.” As a
young cartoonist, on the other
hand, Newman was inspired by
Spike’s artwork, saying: “It was
great to see that you didn’t have to
draw at all well to get published.”shades of gray
Leaping on the news bandwagon,
Victory Colours, a paint company,
has announced a new product
called Sue Gray No 10. “Specially
formulated to cover anything up,”
the press release says. “Resistant to
smears and extremely durable.” It
adds, for this is a real paint, that Sue
Gray goes well with “warm colourssuch as oranges”. Though perhaps
less well with certain mandarins.Last month I wrote that Debrett’s
newsletter was advising “How to
apologise with integrity”, which was
timely for some people. It seems the
etiquette experts remain interested in
current affairs. The latest bulletin is
on “How to quit your job”.the royal arms
The satellite royals are said to be
worried about their security, with
Harry and Meghan thinking Britain
too dangerous to visit without
protection and Prince Andrew at
risk of losing his bodyguards. He
used to think he didn’t need them.
A leaky footman recalls a security
briefing at Buckingham Palace in
the 1980s when Andrew asked if it
wouldn’t be easier to arm the royals
and teach them how to shoot.
There was precedent for this.
During the war, the Queen Mothercarried a revolver lest she bump
into a Nazi. She used to train by
shooting rats in the palace garden.Being a vegetarian is commonplace
now but in working-class Sunderland
in the early 1980s it was quite a
rarity. Nonetheless the broadcaster
Lauren Laverne says that her father
was delighted when she announced at
the age of four that she was going
veggie. “Toby Carvery would only
charge you for meat,” she explains,
“so I got a lot of free lunches.”major mistake
Whips are supposed to be the one
group of MPs whose loyalty a
beleaguered prime minister can
count on, though it should never be
taken for granted. The key for one
who wavers is to keep his disquiet
discreet. A veteran Tory recalls one
junior whip in the 1990s who
scribbled in the office remarks book
his honest opinion on John Major’s
efforts in the chamber. “Another
uninspiring contribution from this
dull and ineffective man,” he wrote.
This would have been fine had the
prime minister not popped in to the
office and picked up the book to see
what they were saying about his
colleagues. “The whip lost his role
in the next reshuffle and was never
heard of again,” my source says.patrick kidd