Repeated as farce

A few weeks ago, I felt like a real teacher for the first time. I was walking back to school through a little waste ground after lunch when I saw a child get his head split open by a well aimed rock. I screeched ‘MAIS QU’EST-CE QUE TU FAIS????’ at the culprit, who hadn’t seen me coming, and dragged him into school while trying to reassure and hold up the bleeding stonee, who was half his size and very dazed. The stone thrower was this hulking kid called Hugo who sulks through English lessons refusing to attempt any activity, so I wasn’t inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt when he gave me what seemed a comically poor excuse: ‘I was aiming for his arm’. Apparently François had called Hugo’s mother a whore. The teacher on duty took François off to have his head seen to, and asked me to guard the school gate and the miscreant. This meant repelling the crowd of children who gathered to hurl insults at him, including a little girl who marched up shouting ‘is it you who threw a rock at my cousin!?’. Perhaps this is the start of a new vendetta…! I suppose that despite teaching for five months here I am still surprised when I have such an obviously different status to the children, and genuine responsibility for them.


Then today I thought a child might have died in my lesson. They were all standing up ready to sing ‘heads, shoulders, knees and toes’ (the only song I ever do, because they remember it from last year so it doesn’t require hours of me agonisingly singing the song again and again while the kids stare at me with a mixture of amusement, horror and scorn). I heard a loud crack and assumed it was a chair falling over, but it turned out to be Ayoub’s head hitting the floor. I don’t know how he contrived to fall over, but he was lying there looking very pale and spaced out, and the teacher ran over and immediately dragged him up, berating him and the class for being so agitated! I was just worried that he was having a brain haemorrhage. She dragged him off to the headmaster, I have no idea why, but he was walking and talking so I assume he was alright. It was slightly terrifying, because another teacher has told me that I ought to have personal liability insurance in case I injure a child in class and the parents sue for medical expenses. The example she gave was hitting a kid in the face with her ring encrusted fist. That afternoon, up in the village school at Monticello, I was teaching the youngest class to say that they are happy, sad, angry and so on. We were doing charades, and as a little girl called Claudia got up to the front ready to act out an emotion, she fell flat on her face and lay sprawled motionless on the floor. I honestly thought she was out cold, but was alerted by her giggles to the fact that she was just acting ‘tired’, albeit in the most melodramatic way possible.

Sperenza nova

After much procrastination, we finally went along to the Corsican choir which has started at the lycée. There are four or five teenage girls, a gangly boy, a man who plays the guitar and sings the female parts in falsetto, and a fat, blonde teacher who has a lovely Corsican accent and seems genuinely happy that we came. It was awkward the first time, as we really couldn’t sing along in Corsican without the lyrics written down and the guy playing the guitar gave us somewhat hostile looks. But we went again this week and, as they are writing a new song for a composition competition, there were no words to sing and we coped pretty well.

I love watching people conjure music out of the air, playing with melodies and layering harmonies. I like the fact that the French for tune is ‘air’. Gifted musicians do make it seem as effortless as breathing – the fat woman opens her mouth and her beautiful voice spools out of her in ululations and catches and reels. It was strange to be standing in this stuffy, battered classroom, still smelling like the adolescent boys who had just left it, gathered around a mobile phone to record the song which sounded old, although it was new. One of the girls asked if my parents were French, because of my accent, and I then completely failed to understand her next sentence or produce a coherent sentence explaining that they weren’t. It is a bit disheartening that my French is still so bad, apart from the freak accent. Another girl, Maddalena, has the clean, pale face of a Botticelli Madonna, and a limp, and seems very friendly - not too irritated that English girls have turned up and are massacring Corsican music. The next time we came, they had written some words. The new song is all about youth and the seeds of hope being harvested.

Winter melancholy

The time since New Year has gone past very quickly, but I haven’t done very much, and I've lost track of time. Despite Zoë and her wonderful car, our outings have mostly been slightly melancholy. We drive for hours, getting carsick on the mountain roads, and get out at villages which are always deserted. We take packed lunches, because it is rare to find a café or restaurant open anywhere other than the biggest towns, and it is too cold for long walks or trips to the beach to be much fun. One day we reached Porto, apparently the second busiest town on the whole west coast in summer, and it was deserted except for a dog that was attracted by the smell of our paté sandwiches seeping through the car windows. It was too cold and windy to do anything more than climb the hill past the old gunpowder store, which is now an aquarium, and walk up to the Genoese tower, where the wind almost knocked us over. We drove south a little way and reached the Calanches, beautiful orange-pink cliffs that sometimes look like Mars, and sometimes like melting coral-coloured wax. The sun had come out and we walked out the ‘chateau fort’, a chunk of granite rising out of the forest like a ruined castle.


I think that I’m feeling down because this time feels like a sort of limbo, waiting for replies from masters courses I’m not sure I even want to do, waiting for things to open up here again, waiting for people to visit. My failure to find local friends also gets me down, although it is hardly surprising given how quiet it is here and how difficult I find socialising even under ideal circumstances. Anyway, despite the fact that Corsica is a ghost island in winter, I can’t really complain - it has been lovely to visit the surroundings after being confined to stops on the rickety train network, and the landscape is breathtaking on a sunny day.

Katie J came to visit, which was lovely, and not only because I haven’t seen a ginger person for months. We drove around the mountain villages in atypical chilly rain, and visited an 11th Century Pisan church in Aregno’s cemetery. It was built in black and white stone with Romanesque sculptures that could have been moulded in plasticine by a child: there were men and women, baboons with large penises, and a pair of peacocks. The garish white tombs built around it were very new, and all had framed photographs of the dead screwed into the stone. One of them was garlanded with oranges from the festival of St. Anthony. The next day, after an evening of moules frites and Just Dance, and a morning of pancakes, we drove to Corte to show Mr. Hoggington, Katie’s new wild boar friend, his natural mountainous habitat. It was very nice, although strange, to have an old friend from my English life to visit.