In an extract from her new book, poet and teacher Kate Clanchy recounts how a school poetry club enabled often traumatised pupils to find their inner voice • Read an interview with Kate Clanchy

Thirty years ago, just after I graduated, I started training to be a teacher. I wanted to change the world and a state school seemed the best place to start. Certainly, it wasn’t a compromise or a stopgap career: I had no thought of being a writer then.

Soon, I was much too busy to write, even if I had thought of it. Teacher training is hard, a crash course not so much in the study of education, but in the experience of school: in the taking of the register and the movement of chairs from room to room; in the flooding sounds of corridor and stairs; in the educational seasons, from the tempering heat of exam week to the crazy cosiness of Christmas; and, above all, in the terrifying confidence trick that is classroom discipline. It’s a bodily experience, like learning to be a beekeeper or an acrobat: a series of stinging humiliations and painful accidents and occasional sublime flights that leave you either crippled or changed. If you are changed, you are changed for life: your immune system will no longer raise hives when adolescents mock you; you may stand at the door of a noisy classroom with all the calm of a high-wire walker, poised to quell the noise with a twirl of your pole.

Now, I can still confidently tell rowdy adolescents to behave on the bus; still enter a classroom and look at the back row in the indefinable, teacherly way that brings quiet. I still want to change the world and think that school is an excellent place to do it. I have never got tired of classrooms and have always, except when my children were very young, been employed in some capacity in a state school. Soon after I got my second teaching post, though, I also started to write in my spare time and holidays. When I was 30, I published my first book. Suddenly, I found that if I introduced myself as a writer I’d be listened to with a care that seemed exaggerated, even silly. I realised I was accustomed, when I talked about my work, to hardly being listened to at all.

Because everyone tells schoolteachers how to do their jobs: everyone from politicians in parliament and journalists in newspapers to parents at the school concert and pensioners on the bus. Partly, this happens because people are so interested in schools – most of us were formed there, many of us have children there – but it is also because people feel free to set about a teacher in a way they never would a doctor or a lawyer. For teachers have a lower social standing than other professionals. This isn’t just because we are paid less, as I found out when I entered the even less well remunerated, but far more prestigious, profession of writing. And it isn’t just because of the messy, practical nature of teachers’ work, either: laymen do not tell a vet how to go about birthing calves or a gynaecologist where to poke. It’s because of gender and class prejudice, because, in short, most teachers are Miss.

Miss: I have heard so many professional people express distaste for that name, but never a working teacher. It grated on me, as a middle-class Scot, 30 years ago. No longer: Miss is the name I put on like a coat when I go into school; Miss is the shoes I stand in when I call out the kids in the corridor for running or shouting; Miss is my cloak of protection when I ask a weeping child what is wrong; Miss is the name I give another teacher in my classroom, in the way co-parents refer to each other as “Mum” or “Dad”. Miss seems to me a beautiful name.

My multicultural school – the one I teach in, the one my children go to – is the opposite of exclusive. Our town, Oxford, like many in the south-east of England, has had huge influxes of migrants in the past 20 years and now our school includes, it seems, the whole world: students from Nepal and Brazil, Somalia and Lithuania, Portugal and the Philippines, Afghanistan and Australia and everywhere in between. Pakistani and white British students make up substantial minorities, but there is no majority group.

This makes for innumerable cross-race friendships and for a particularly respectful atmosphere: a careful, decorous gentleness that comes from no one knowing quite what’s what, from everyone being dependent on the kindness of strangers. It makes for beautiful scenes: a row of girls under the willow tree, their skin colours varying from black Somali to white Polish with every shade of brown in between, laughing and gossiping together; a boy called Mohammed from Syria throwing the basketball to a boy from Brazil and shouting his name – “Jesus, Jesus! Catch!”; our motley choir, representing all the nations of the globe, singing All You Need Is Love.

But a school full of migrants, refugees and difference also throws up questions about belonging. Complex questions, very often, about identity, nationality, art and money, but offered very personally: questions embodied in children and their stories and, in particular, the poetry they write; children like Shakila.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Clanchy in the school library with members of her poetry club Mukahang Limbu (centre) and Halema Malak (right). Photograph: Karen Robinson/The Observer

It’s sports day and Shakila slips from the shade behind the library, blinking in the sports day sun. “Miss!”

I wonder what Shakila does to her hijab and why it seems to sit fuller and higher than the other girls’ – a mother superior hijab or one from a Vermeer.

“Miss!” cries Shakila. “I won the 400 metres! I’m coming to poetry group. After the hurdles. Here. Poem.”

She hands me a sheet of A4 and dashes back on to the playing field.

The poem is very fine: a variation on a theme I gave the group last week, contrasting the morning adhan from the mosque in her native Afghanistan with the morning alarm of her new life in England. I’m more interested, though, in the writing on the other side of the sheet, which she has crossed out with a single line so the whole text is still visible and begging to be read. It’s about a man sweating and a scarf and a backpack and suspicious minds, so when, because of sports day, just Lily, Priya and Shakila turn up to poetry group, I ask her about it.

“Oh,” she says, “I was trying to write, you know, about terrorists.”

“What about terrorists?”

“But I couldn’t make it work. Miss! It was too hard.”

“Terrorists here? In this country?” I’m assuming the poem is a protest against suspicion of Muslims in Britain.

“No, Miss,” says Shakila, eyes snapping. “In England? There are no terrorists in England.”

“She’s from Afghanistan,” says Lily. “She means the Taliban.” Then Lily asks: “Is it a real terrorist in your poem? Like, you met him?”

“Yes!” says Shakila. “I saw him on the street – in the market – and I had this feeling, he is wrong. He is sweating, he wears all these clothes…”

“What clothes?”

“Like, you know, jacket, big scarf, big trousers. It is hot, it is summer – I had a feeling, run away, run away from this guy. I catch my friend’s hand. We run.”

“Yes,” says Lily, “but was he real? A real terrorist?”

“Yes,” says Shakila. “Real. I ran, I screamed, I ran, everyone ran. There was an explosion. I was hiding, behind a wall. He was in a bomb. He exploded. You heard it. Boom.”

And then the bell rings for a long time and we flinch from its noise.

Priya says: “You need a frame. For your poem. Miss. Give her a frame.”

A frame. They have learned my mantra. A frame, I say every week. Try this poem-shape, this form, this bit of rhetoric, this frame. Never: tell me about… Certainly not: unload your trauma. And still, they tell me these terrible things.

“Yes,” says Shakila, “a frame. How shall I say it, Miss?”

I haven’t the slightest idea. Shakila folds her hands on her bag, waits. I search my mind for the right frame for a poem about recognising a terrorist in the market place and then running away.

Shakila says: “Miss! You know, bombs. Miss, the worst thing is, they cut you. They cut off bits of you, Miss, like your feet, your leg! And when the bomb goes off, Miss, body parts, they land in the town around.”

“Did that happen in that bomb?” I ask. “The bomb in your poem. Did you see that?”

“Miss,” she says, “there was a head. A whole head.” “His head?” I ask. “The terrorist’s?”

“Just,” she says, “you know, a head.”

“Right,” I say. I look at the sunlight coming in the slats of the blinds and I suggest that the interrogative mood might be good for poems like this, and short lines probably, and regular stanzas. A ballad, perhaps, or a set of instructions. How to recognise a terrorist. Shakila says she will send me the poem, by email.

And she leaves. I sit and stare, listen to the roar of the children finding their classrooms, the silence as the doors close and the register is taken. This is an orderly school, I remind myself. A just one. A safe one.

Then I think I will go to the staffroom and find someone to tell. There will be someone there, someone to listen and to counter with some equally horrifying tale and we will rehearse all the interventions available, all the help school extends, which is good help, the best anyone can do. We will remind each other this is why we work here, why our school does so well. Our multicultural intake, our refugee pupils, so motivated, so very often brilliant, so, in the modern parlance, vibrant.

But it won’t do any good. Here in my ears is the sound of a bomb, a homemade one, a glass and fertiliser one, in a small town in Afghanistan, and it sounds like the school bell. And here on the desk, disguised as a sheet of A4 paper, is a head cut off at the neck, its eyes shut, its bloodstains minimal, its skin greenish, like John the Baptist on a plate. Does she feel the lighter of it, I wonder, now it is me who has to carry the head home? Or will it be equally heavy, however often it is passed, just as much a head? Well, we can find out. Shakila’s head: the weight of it, the warmth, the cheekbones, the brains. Here you are. Catch.

Heya, a 17-year-old Syrian girl arrives in school, part of a job lot of government-sponsored refugees from camps in Lebanon, Jordan and Calais. “Look,” says Shakila, showing me the poem Heya has written, which she has photographed, pushed through Google Translate, and is working into an English version. “Look, Miss, this is proper good.”

The poem is addressed to “Dawn in Damascus” and is in the grand Arabic tradition, personifying dawn, asking it not to come to her house because “the children have blood on their clothes” and the house cannot be cleaned for such a visitor. The last stanza is more conventional, a series of invocations to Allah, but these first lines are, as Shakila says, proper poetry. They make the disaster real, so real that I suspect this is a real experience.

We invite Heya to come to poetry group. She doesn’t come. Her form teacher won’t push her, either; she says that poetry upsets Heya. But I don’t believe that poetry will upset Heya; I think life does and poetry can bring control. We ask Heya to come to ghazal club. This is a new idea of mine and Shakila’s. We have assembled Persian, Pashto, Urdu and Bengali speakers. They all know a version of the word “ghazal” and its echoing, couplet form from their own language and their own mothers, and in ghazal club we read and write ghazals in English. If Heya comes, we promise, she can add Arabic to the mix and listen; she can write her ghazal on flowers, or stars, or really anything pretty and cheerful at all. There will be no tears, I promise the form tutor.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Photograph: Karen Robinson/The Observer

And finally Heya comes, a hesitant, small, neat figure in a long skirt, a T-shirt that says “Big Sister” and was probably designed for a British six-year-old and a tight black Syrian-style hijab over grand lumps of hair. Like all the Syrian kids, she is very pretty: pale skinned and dark eyed, with a sensitive mouth and a tiny, high-pitched voice. She is very interested in the ghazal. She knows it well. She has some on her phone, look. Yes, Heya certainly wants to write one. She chooses the word “country” as her repeating word. And before you know it, she has written another deeply moving and odd poem featuring dead children, and blood, and she is in tears and I am in trouble.

Now Heya won’t come to ghazal club either. Don’t I get it? says her form tutor. Leave her alone. Poetry just opens wounds. If so, Heya is very intent on hurting herself; she passes me in the corridor and hands me a sheet of A4 covered in purple ink. I read it and find it to be another poem, written probably in Arabic and then passed through Google Translate. The English is marvellously strange. “My sister, you are leaving by my doorway… my sister, in our not-there room, wait for me.” We version Heya’s work into a strong English poem. We make a couple of nice copies of it and, at lunchtime, I go down to Heya’s form room, clasping them. But I am not allowed to show Heya. The form teacher will pass them on at an appropriate moment. Heya has been upset by poetry again. Did I know that she lost three sisters in Damascus? Yes, three, she has just told the form teacher. They died in front of her. A bomb fell on the house. Heya is really upset now and all because of that poem, but I didn’t tell her to write that one, I squeak, helplessly, and I should take on board that Heya won’t be writing any more poetry.

I retreat. The form teacher is upset because she is being confronted by a level of distress she cannot accommodate. She isn’t a therapist – she is a teacher in the middle of her school day. And I’m not a therapist either, remember? I don’t know what I’m doing. Maybe Heya shouldn’t write any poems. Maybe the trauma of seeing your sisters die is something you should raise only in a safe place: a hospital, perhaps. Maybe a poem doesn’t count.

I try again. I go to Mahmoud Darwish, the great Palestinian poet who is also, thankfully, lyrical, accessible and widely available on the internet in two languages. I pick some sections from Under Siege, about the war in Palestine. I stick the Arabic original to the right-hand margin of my A4 sheet. I make several copies. Then, without a word to the form teacher, Shakila and I ambush Heya when we know she has a study lesson and entice her to the conference room, which we have booked in advance and which is carpeted and quiet. We feed her grapes. We whip out the Darwish poem. We hope.

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It works. In minutes, Shakila and Heya are swapping words in Arabic, Persian and English, working out, first, what has been done in the English translation, what the soul of the poem means. Then they start. Heya, I notice, is writing straight into English, with occasional glances at the dictionary on her phone, rather than, as she has before, writing in Arabic and translating afterwards. She writes about her street as it used to be, her house, her courtyard, the trees that grew there, the birds… We are back in the house in Damascus, the bomb, the noise, the dust, the blood. “How I held my sister’s body,” she writes, as the bell goes, and she hands me the piece of paper. The form teacher will find out what I did, I know, and we will be back at square one.

Except this time Heya is not crying.

I put together an anthology of the poetry group’s work, heavily featuring Heya’s poems. And when the book is printed, no one could be prouder than Heya; she can hardly let it out of her hands. She asks her whole family to the launch and they come and bring tabbouleh. She stands in front of them and reads her poems, in Arabic and in English, the one about dawn, the one about her sisters and the new one. We clap and clap.

A week later, a small Syrian boy appears, looking for me. He is from the same set of government-sponsored refugees as Heya, but has much less English, as if he were refusing to learn it. He is very short and exceptionally beautiful, with tawny hair and skin and huge, fringed, smoky blue eyes. At break times, he plays basketball with the year 11 girls, their mascot and pet, and I’ve seen him breakdance for them, tiny taut body thrown up and backwards, truly wild, reckless, almost feral. He was two years in the “Jungle” in Calais. Firmly, now, he hands me a poem, written in Arabic. “For the book,” he says, and I try to explain that the book is published already and there won’t be another one until next year and… “Poem,” he says firmly.

So I tell him to go along to the library and borrow Heya. She comes, modest and smiling. She says the writing is good, good Arabic, and gets out her phone, loaded with Google Translate. I put a new document up on the screen.

“They carried her in a black tent to my house,” says Heya, in her high, careful little voice. I stare. Then a news bulletin comes to mind: a funeral in the Middle East, a body wrapped in black.

“Oh,” I say, “like a shroud? Like a funeral?”

“Yes,” says Heya. “Funeral. And now we need the word for grave. But not grave. The word for the hole for the grave.”

And so we go on, the small boy – and he is such a very small boy – looking anxiously from one face to another. Working with Heya is nearly as good as working with Shakila. She doesn’t have so many words, but she certainly has the same drive for precision. Soon, we have this:

They carry you in a black shroud to my door.

This is your plot, Syria, strung with ropes, ready,



These are your deserts, and your mountains,



And all the people calling your name.

Syria, you must say to the mourners: my name



Is not on the grave. Though Daddy is martyred



And will not come back through the door,



Though from behind the cloth comes the wail of pain.

The name of Syria is not on the grave.

“Is it a good poem?” asks Heya.

“Yes,” I say.

“I will tell him it is a good poem,” says Heya. And she does, in Arabic, and he smiles.

“Tell him,” I say, “that he has a very grown-up poet living inside him.”

She does and this makes them both laugh.

Then I say: “Tell him, please, that if you are a poet it is hard to lose your language, very, very hard. But he can get it back. He can still write poems. He can learn to write in English too.”

“We can find his poem,” says Heya.

And she passes on the messages and the small boy cries.

And I thought, not for the first time, it is me, not the children, learning the lessons here. And one of the most important lessons is that maybe losing your language and your country isn’t something I have to compensate for. Maybe that loss is a poet’s gain. That shock of dislocation that has turned them in on themselves; which made them listen to their inner voice; the period each had gone through when “silence itself was my friend”, as another poetry club member Priya had put it, in another poem: doesn’t that also make a writer, that sort of orphaning? So many of the children in our school had a loss to mourn, a country, a family – and in the end, isn’t that what poetry is for? By the rivers of Babylon, we sat down and wept. A spell to bring things back.

• This is an edited extract from Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me by Kate Clanchy, published by Picador (£16.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846