Michelle

"Miss, can I talk to you, Miss?" asked Michelle.
"Yes, okay, what is it?"

That fourth year were known throughout the staffroom as a bit of a nightmare. It wasn't really that they were difficult to teach: more that you'd had a big success if you succeeded in getting them all inside the classroom and sitting down.

It was a girls' school, so many people assumed that it would be easier to teach in than a mixed school, but that wasn't the case. It was in a very deprived area of the city and most of the pupils found much of what was taught completely irrelevant to their lives, which were filled with drugs, alcohol and petty crime.

I wasn't even a permanent teacher there, I was a supply teacher, filling in for the many who were off ill with stress. Although I was theoretically on supply, in practice I was there almost every day for three years.

One day I called the register and when I got down to one girl's name she didn't reply.
"Where is Alison today?"
"Don't know, Miss, haven't seen her since Friday, miss."

By lunchtime we all knew that Alison was dead: she and her mother had been found hanging from the banisters, killed by her mother's boyfriend.

Because I was on supply and all the teachers were thoroughly exhausted, they used to swap the classes round so I ended up with the ones everyone liked least. After a while we got used to each other and they knew what I would let them get away with (non-uniform clothing: quite a lot of talking) and what I wouldn't (wandering round the classroom: fighting). I even got very fond of some of them, once I saw the whole year-group together and realised that they looked like underfed, badly-clothed Dickensian waifs. No wonder they were difficult to teach.

So, back to Michelle who was fourteen, small, pale and skinny. I let the others go out and then asked her what she wanted to talk to me about.

"Miss, I'm pregnant," she said with no preamble at all. Her parents didn't know and her ex-boyfriend didn't want to know.

I asked her what she wanted me to do next and she thought - very sensibly - that the thing to do would be to tell her Head of Year, Mrs Jones. She was too scared to do it, so I said I would.

I sought out Mrs Jones (who wasn't called Mrs Jones any more than Michelle was called Michelle, of course) after school and explained that Michelle had told me she was pregnant.

"Oh, that's terrible!" she said. She was a large, boisterous woman with a very loud voice.

I agreed that it was very sad, what with Michelle being only fourteen and not having a supportive family - -

"Oh no, I don't mean that. Loads of them get pregnant, the fools. I mean the fact that she told you. You're only a supply teacher, after all. She should have told me. I shall make sure she knows that when I see her tomorrow."

Michelle had an abortion and returned to school a couple of weeks later looking even smaller, paler and thinner. She'll be thirty-four now and I have often wondered what has happened to her, and whether she has any children.

I never spoke to Mrs Jones again. I might have said something I meant.