13 February 2022 21
POETRY
Graeme Richardson
The Kids by Hannah Lowe
Bloodaxe £10.99 pp80Which book by a poet about
the modern multicultural
classroom has recently won
a big literary prize?
You might be forgiven for
not knowing that it’s Hannah
Lowe’s The Kids, based on a
decade teaching in inner-city
London, that has just carried
off the £30,000 Costa book of
the year prize for 2021. It has
been overshadowed by the
enduring controversy around
an earlier prizewinner, also by
a poet, also on teaching in
multicultural schools: Kate
Clanchy’s Some Kids I Taught
and What They Taught Me,
which won the Orwell prize in- But The Kids deserves its
own place in the spotlight.
Like Clanchy, Lowe is a
memoirist. But what started
here as a memoir was
refashioned in verse. Lowe
writes in sonnets. She uses
the form loosely, with
everyday speech patterns,
and not many are musical or
memorable. But poetry makes
you choose your words
carefully. And around
schoolchildren, around
subjects such as race,
terrorism and sexuality,
careful choosing seems wise.
Like Clanchy, too, Lowe is
frank and funny. But there is
more vulnerability here: “and
what they taught me” could
not be added without irony
to Lowe’s title. Her own
background (her father
was Jamaican-Chinese)
means that she’s one
of “the kids” herself.
The experiences of
any schoolkid are her
experiences too: a
crush (Boy), awkward
sex (The Pitch), taking
drugs (The Art of
Teaching I), fighting
(Queen Bee) and skiving, in
Red-Handed, in which she tells
us: “You set the kids exam
practice/ then excuse yourself
— even for five minutes —/
and in the teachers’ bathroom
check your texts/ or sneak
between the stockroom
shelving units/ to eat a Twix,
or bite your hand to keep/
from crying.”
Laughter and humour
intertwine, and the half-
rhymes (minutes/units) tick as
quietly as the classroom
clock. It takes hard work to
get poetry to sound this easy
and natural.
Sometimes what makes
The Kids so accessible makes
it shallow. Thought goes no
deeper than the accepted
pieties of a Guardian-reading
staffroom. It’s hardly
groundbreaking to hear:
“They carry/ such bags of
hope, these kids of
immigrants.” But Lowe’s
self-examination is too
unflinching to make her work
sentimental. From passing
“Shakespeare’s doubtful face”
at the entrance to the school
to making a stand on her own
mispronunciation of Pepys
(“Peppies”), the joke of great
literature being forced on
bored and disaffected youth is
one she tells against herself.
In The Art of Teaching II,
“Boredom hangs like a low
cloud in the classroom... If
gloom/ has a sound, it’s the
voice of Leroy reading/
Frankenstein aloud”.
Education is “like spending
years chasing a monster/ you
yourself created”. Taking the
class to the theatre is like
trying to control a pack
of dogs: but, as the
whole collection
makes clear,
“don’t you love
your dogs?”
It’s that love
that makes
The Kids a
worthy and
enjoyable
prizewinner. cThe point here, which the
author extends to other
regions, is that young British
officers failed to perceive that
many local people hated each
other more than they did the
Axis. Meanwhile the SOE’s
headquarters sometimes
displayed shameful
incompetence. The story is
well known of the Abwehr’s
Englandspiel, two years during
which it duped the SOE into
parachuting 54 agents and
resisters into Holland, directly
into German hands. London
ignored repeated warnings.
Colonel Maurice Buckmaster,
head of the SOE’s French
section, incurred severe
strictures. The field agent
Pearl Witherington said
harshly: “Not one agent liked
Buckmaster. Not one.”
The book notes that of
the great 1944-45 partisanFrank, funny,
vulnerable
Compassion is at the heart of this
winner of Costa’s book of the year prize
uprisings — in Warsaw,
Slovakia and Paris — only the
last succeeded, because the
German front in France had
collapsed, and Eisenhower
sent the Free French
armoured division to secure
the city. In eastern Europe,
by contrast, it suited Stalin
politically to allow the
partisans to die in their
thousands. No guerrilla
force could defeat an army
equipped with heavy
weapons, and it was wicked to
incite brave people to try.
The mistake made by many
authors writing about the
resistance is to focus on what
agents and partisans did,
disdaining the critical issue of
what they achieved. The 1944
SOE kidnapping of a German
general on Crete was a terrific
feat of derring-do, but did it
mean much when his own
officers allegedly toasted the
kidnappers for removing the
old fusspot?
The author deplores the
cynicism with which the
British incited a campaign of
rail sabotage in Greece and
Yugoslavia in the name of
blocking supplies to Rommel,
when they knew he was
getting most of his fuel and
munitions through Italy.
London’s real aims were, first,
to feed German delusions
that an Allied invasion of the
Balkans might be looming and,
second, to help to convince
Stalin that the British had not
given up on the region.
The book also offers an
extensive narrative about the
role of Jews. It dismisses the
myth that all succumbed
passively to the gas chamber,
highlighting the extraordinary
1943 Polish ghetto uprisings.
One participant wrote of the
desperation with which the
resisters fought, daunting the
Germans: “They had their
homes, their families. The
Jews had nothing.”
Kochanski acknowledges
that the moral value to
postwar societies, especially
France, of the memory of
a resistance exceeded its
contemporary strategic
contribution. Conflicts
between vast industrial states
are determined by the big
battalions. We may continue
to be awed by the courage of
individuals, while forswearing
illusions about how much
they hurt Hitler. A French
resister wrote: “Never have
so many consciously run so
many risks for such a small
thing: a desire to bear witness.
Perhaps it is absurd, but it was
by such absurdities that we
restored our dignity.” cComing to
an end
A member of
the French
resistance in
1944 at
ChâteaudunNever
have so
many
run so
many
risks for
such a
small
thing:
to bear
witness
Well versed
Hannah Lowe
taught in
LondonJEFF SPICER/GETTY IMAGES