The inner worlds of students. Part 2: Sarah

Newsletter 12: October 27, 2024

What follows was, with minor changes, written over 30 years ago as part of a Masters thesis. I had left teaching, and was working as an accredited psychotherapist, mainly with school-aged children.

I wrote about one of these children, a boy I’ve called Ben, in Newsletter 10, The inner world of students Part 1: Ben.

Sarah was another.

Waiting for Sarah

Cold winter’s morning. I’m in my study, standing by the window, listening to music. There’s a thick fog out there, dragging its damp shroud over the brick path, over the raised garden beds, over the table and chairs where, when the weather’s good, my students sit while waiting for a session to begin or a parent to pick them up. They are empty now, these seats, and wet. The street light opposite is still on, its light concentrated in a dense yellow halo. A solitary bird chirrups as it flies past in the gloom and lands on the bare branches of the forsythia. It has straw in its beak.

She will be here soon, my student, Sarah. In about twenty minutes or so.

As I wait, I find myself hoping that she has slept in. That I’ll be left alone for a while longer with my thoughts and my music, left undisturbed in my safe study, surrounded by the fog. Memories are stirred: of me aged ten (Sarah’s age!), five thousand miles from my parents and in bed at boarding school, in a dormitory with twenty others, the lights out, me under the blankets, safe from the boys’ soulless teasing and posturing, safe from the clanking routine and rush and noise, under the blankets with a book and a torch and a packet of Twisties. In my own world.

No doubt as soon as Sarah walks in the door, my mood will shift. We have spent many sessions together, Sarah and I. There’s a substantial history.

1. The horrible mask

‘There's so much to look at,’ Sarah told her parents soon after coming here for the first time, nearly a year ago. I often saw her looking up at the pictures and masks on the walls, or at the small sand tray toys that jostled for space on the shelves and in small cupboards.

‘Why have you got such a horrible thing up on your wall?’ she asked one day, pointing to a photo of a decaying cat’s carcass.

‘I like to have lots of different moods around me in the room,’ I replied.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, some of these things are full of power ...’ I picked up a plastic brontosaurus, ‘and others are full of wildness and fun.’ I pointed at a pair of stone figures from Bali, two villagers with sneering expressions. Sarah screwed up her nose. ‘Some things, like the painting of the pregnant woman up there are quiet, still and beautiful. Some things are ugly and unsettling, like the cat photo, or the red monster mask.’

‘Yuk,’ said Sarah.

‘I like to have life around the walls, and the other side, which is death.’

‘But death isn’t the other side of life,’ said Sarah, frowning as she spoke. ‘It’s something completely different.’ She paused to think. ‘Maybe something like starvation is the other side of life, the opposite of life, but not death.’

Her mother has told me of Sarah’s fears about death. ‘Sometimes we’ll be travelling along in the car and she’ll start screaming, desperately crying about something that’s going on inside her. She’s told me she’s sometimes afraid of going to sleep in case she doesn’t wake up. When I ask her why she feels so frightened, she says to me that if she died she wouldn't be able to think.’

2. Death and the soldier

For a while, death was a recurring topic of conversation between Sarah and me.

I have, among my collection of books and stories, a series of videoed fairytales for children called The Storyteller. The videos were by Jim Henson, the creator of the Muppets, and they are done with humour, with atmosphere, with a deep imaginative appreciation for the magic of these traditional stories.

One day, Sarah noticed a story from the collection called ‘Death and the Soldier’, and she asked me what it was about.

‘It's about a soldier back from the wars who is given a magic bag. He has many adventures with this magic bag, and one day manages to capture Death in it. The world celebrates. There is no more death. But then people become old and weary. They want to die, but cannot. The soldier releases Death, and the old and infirm are freed of their suffering. But the soldier is punished with everlasting life, and is condemned to wander the world forever.’

Sarah sat silent and thoughtful for a moment, and then said, ‘It's so selfish, Death is. Not always for the person who’s died, but for the ones who are sad and left behind.’ And then abruptly, as is her habit, before the conversation can go any further, ‘We won’t watch that video. It sounds awful.’

But the following week she'd decided differently.

‘I suppose we'd better watch it,’ she said in her world-weary voice, something she assumed when she needed to make a public statement that this didn’t really bother her, that deep down she didn’t really care. ‘After all, it’s the only one we haven’t seen.’

And so we watched it. I gave her the remote control, and told her to switch it off at any time if she didn’t like what she was seeing. But she didn’t use it, not when the soldier entered the haunted castle and played cards with demons, not when Death stood at the end of the bed of a dying king, not when Death was captured and put into a magic sack, nor when Death was finally released.

‘Well,’ she said when it finished, ‘that was the worst story I've ever seen, the way Death didn’t die at the end and had to wander around forever. Anyway, I hate sad stories.’

But she had watched it.

3. Tristan and Iseult

At one of our sessions at around this time, she saw a book on my shelves, Rosemary Sutcliff’s version of Tristan and Iseult.

She was curious. I told her that Tristan had got his name because it meant ‘sadness’.

‘Read it to me,’ she said. Sarah enjoyed bossing me around.

‘Are you sure?’ I asked. Perhaps she noticed that I was frowning.

‘Why do you ask if I’m sure?’

‘Well, I don’t want to give away any of the story, but I’m thinking about what you've just said about not liking sad stories.’

‘Are you saying that it's sad? Do they die in the end? What do you mean, Steve?’

‘I’m not saying any more, just asking you if you want me to read it?’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I want you to read it. Now.’

I was pleased, and not only because I have always loved the story. It seemed to me that Sarah was nudging us into the territory of her fears. Jung wrote that the energy of a person is locked up in obsessions or complexes. Joseph Campbell put it – rather grandly – this way:

The unconscious sends all sorts of vapours, odd beings, terrors and deluding images up into the mind – whether in dream, broad daylight, or insanity; for the human kingdom, beneath the floor of the comparatively neat little dwelling that we call our consciousness, goes down into unsuspected Aladdin caves. There not only jewels but also dangerous jinn abide: the inconvenient or resisted psychological powers that we have not thought or dared to integrate into our lives.

4. The fall

One day early in our work together, I asked her to tell me a story.

‘What for?’ she asked, frowning.

‘I often ask students to tell me stories,’ I said.

‘Yes, but why?’ she persisted.

It’s a question I find difficult to answer. Deep down, I know, but explaining why is sometimes elusive.

‘Because I enjoy stories,’ I said at last, impatient with myself for the inadequacy of my response. "Just for fun.’

‘Just a short one?’

‘As short as you like,’ I said, knowing that most of my students feel released when they’re given that licence, and end up surprising themselves with the length and depth of the story that comes out.

“Ok,’ she said. “Once a girl was riding on a horse, and she fell off her horse and found a crystal. The end.’

She smiled. She was enjoying testing the boundaries, seeing if I really meant what I said.

5. The king in the forest

At our next session I suggested Sarah use my sand tray figures to make a scene and then to tell me the story. This time there was no reluctance.

After carefully setting out her scene, she told me the following story.

The King's Hole

One day a king went walking on a royal walk with his army.

He wanted to show off to his army, so he went into the forest by himself and tried to find the lost gold that was hidden in the forest. The gold was lost by one of the king’s managers who was disposed of.

It took him five days to get to the deepest part of the forest. The king dug a hole in the deepest part of the forest.

The king was not a very strong man, and he also had a disease a couple of weeks before called hypothermia. He almost died. He was digging in that hole for so long that he got very sick, so the king got out of the hole. He was very dizzy. He decided to go for a walk. He was walking along when suddenly he fell into a hole. He was unconscious for five days and then he died. The king’s army came out the next day looking for the king. They were out there for a month and a half. Finally they found him dead in the hole.

The end.

I read once that the child psychologist Melanie Klein insisted that it was crucial to analyse children’s fantasies. Freedom from the grip of difficulties, she said, only comes when the child understands 'the meaning’ of the story.

I was shocked by this, and am still uncomfortable. How can I know the meaning of Sarah’s story? I can be affected by it, and tell her how I feel. I can speculate or make assumptions from it, about some of the things that might be preoccupying her at the moment. But I cannot analyse something as complex and instinctive. It has been my experience that the therapy (if that’s what’s required) comes, not from analysis (which children resist, and are mystified by), but from the telling. From giving expression to the content, airing it, bringing it up from the unconscious to the light where it can be heard, played with, manipulated, repeated, felt.

Despite my reluctance to analyse, I did find myself with some tentative speculations.

A king goes searching in the forest for lost gold, and I guessed that, at some level, Sarah was looking to replenish a part of herself which she experienced, at that time. I assumed that the fact that the hole was ‘in the deepest part of the forest’ was significant, and that perhaps it was telling us both that this would not be an easy journey. I began to feel – because the image had come in two stories now – that somewhere deep down Sarah felt that there must be a some kind of a death – a ridding herself of some habit or way of thinking – before progress could happen.

Over the coming months, Sarah told me many stories in which the hero suffered sudden setbacks, even when things were looking promising. A boy went to sleep and got stuck in a museum. An army of poisonous animals, sent to help the heroes fight evil enemies, turned on the ‘goodies’. Other heroes got stuck in ‘a large strong box’, trapped by a witch who posed as a friend.

One day, when we got talking about her passion for horseriding, she told me that she hoped she would fall off soon.

‘Why?’ I asked.

‘Because my first fall has got to come some time, and I don’t want to spend the rest of my life waiting for it.’

6. Hair, Googledah and Truly Wise

But gradually, the endings became happier, the obstacles were overcome.

She told me a series of stories about an alien wizard called Googledah and a horse named Truly Wise. In the first couple of these stories, the two friends got involved in various adventures where they kept being separated, coming together only at times of great danger and at the last moment. At the end of the second story, Googledah and Truly Wise built houses side by side, and a permanent connection was established.

The Googledah stories culminated in the following:

Hair, Googledah and Truly Wise

Once upon a time, there was a magical sorcerer called Googledah. He had a horse called Truly Wise. Googledah and Truly Wise helped all the children who were sad.

One day, Googledah was looking through his eagle eyed telescope and saw a girl who had just had an operation. She had had an operation that made her hair fall out. Her name was Sally.

One night Sally woke up and she was very hungry so she went into the kitchen and there she found Googledah with Truly Wise. Googledah said he had heard she was sad because she had no hair anymore, so Googledah said to put some butter on her head, then put some peanut butter, then some bread, then some more butter, then some more peanut butter, and then some jam.

Then they told her that she had to wait for a couple of days for it to start to work, and they said that she should pretend she was sick and stay in bed for a while.

The people at school knew that she had no hair, so she would have to pretend to be someone else, otherwise they would think she was wearing a wig. (She had tried sticking wigs on her head with superglue, but the kids had just pulled them off.)

So she thanked Googledah and Truly Wise, and went back to bed. She locked her door and went to sleep.

In the morning she found her parents knocking at the door and asking if they could come in. She remembered that Googledah and Truly Wise had said she had to pretend to be sick and to lock the door. So she said she was sick and she didn’t want anyone to come in the room. She did the same for a few days. The boys and girls at school thought she’d left. So that would make it easier for her to be a new girl.

When she woke up suddenly one morning, she looked in the mirror, only to find that she had the longest hair she had ever seen. So she went to school.

She was introduced to the class as a new girl. She kept her name, Sally, but she changed her second name to Tillerman. She made a lot of friends that day.

After about a month at the school, she got sick of having her hair long, so she cut it. But every time she cut it, it just grew back longer. So she had to keep it long.

By now, it was as long as her bedroom, and one day when she was trying to wash her hair, she had to tell her mother that she had to get a bigger shower because her hair wouldn’t fit in.

She had to wash her hair every day, because even when they piled it up on top of her head, it dragged along the road gathering chewing gum, ants, caterpillars and lots more.

Every time she got a bigger shower, she had to tell her mum that they needed a new shower. So finally her mother decided to get a shower as big as her room, which had now been enlarged.

The next summer, they got a new house because Sally had turned around very quickly while doing ballet with her hair out.

When she turned around, her hair spread out in all directions and knocked the house over.

So they bought a triple sized mansion. By now they were almost broke. When she sat in her room (as big as an arena), they had to hang her hair over a trapeze because it got too hot to stay on her back in the summertime. And when she went to school, she had to hang her hair over the branches of trees.

One day, her mother decided to shave her hair off. Sally tried to tell her that it would just make it worse, but her mother insisted that she try to shave it off.

So they shaved it all off.

In the morning, Sally woke in distress as she found she couldn't get out of her room because it was filled with hair. But in a couple of hours she managed to squeeze her way out.

One day, Googledah and Truly Wise came to visit Sally.

Sally told them how sad she was about her hair. So Googledah and Truly Wise told her to put vegemite all over her hair, with butter and a bit of peanut butter, because she didn’t want to have no hair again and they said that that would leave her hair down to the middle of her spine.

So she agreed.

In the morning, her hair was a nice length, and she went to another school as a different person.

She thanked Truly Wise and Googledah for their help. Her hair still grew, but not ever longer than her knees. And she still had the longest hair in her class.

I find it difficult to contain my excitement when children tell me stories like this one: the magical heroes who ‘helped all the children who were sad’; the sense of death waiting in the shadows of the opening scene where the girl’s hair falls out (Sarah told me later it was AIDS); the growing hair, so lustrous and long that the girl had to hang it over the branches of the trees, so heavy that it could knock down a house; and the opportunities the girl had ‘to be a new girl’, to be ‘a different person’. Again I hear the echo of Campbell’s words: ‘but then a wonderful reconstruction, of the bolder, cleaner, more spacious, and fully human life’.

7. Rapunzel’s hair

‘Do you know the story of Rapunzel?’ I asked after she'd told me her story.

‘Of course I do,’ said Sarah. ‘Everyone knows the story of Rapunzel. But read it to me anyway.’

So I read it, and when I approached the part where the witch cuts off Rapunzel’s hair, Sarah began to squirm in her seat. Then she pressed her hands against her ears, saying, ‘I hate this bit! Tell me when the hair has gone! I don't want to hear it!’

After I’d finished the story, Sarah said to me, ‘She wasn't beautiful, you know. Not after she had her hair cut. I did a play once, and I was Rapunzel, and in the play she wasn’t beautiful.’

Over the following weeks, it became clear that long thick hair (like Sarah’s, which was dark and shoulder-length, and which, her mother told me, she combed for hours) was deeply important to her, an image of such power that she brought us back to it again and again.

In one of the episodes of Tristan and Iseult, Tristan uses some strands of Iseult’s hair (‘hair that was as red, where the sun caught it, as hot copper’) to make a bow. Sarah, who was sitting in the sun stroking my dog Bella as she listened, suddenly looked up in alarm.

‘No! Her hair! Not all her hair!’

‘No," I said. ‘Not all her hair. Just a few strands.’

‘Tell me that she is still beautiful!’ said Sarah, with a kind of theatrical desperation in her voice.

‘She’s still beautiful,’ I said.

Her favourite story from the Jim Henson collection was the story of Sapsorrow, the youngest daughter of a king, a princess with long dark hair who is told she must marry her own father. The animals come to rescue her, and make her a coat of animal pelts and fur. She runs away in her new guise, and becomes Raggletag, the ugly and dirty kitchen maid in the castle of another kingdom. But over three successive nights she puts off her disguise, and wears three beautiful gowns that have been specially made for her and which she’s been keeping safely in a nutshell. She meets the prince, and they fall in love and eventually marry.

Sarah watched the video many times, the story of the princess with beautiful hair, the princess who hides behind a disguise of animal pelts and fur.

In all of these stories – stories she tells and stories she listens to – there was something alive, palpable, something real though elusive. What was it, I wondered?  I could feel, when Sarah clapped her hands over her ears at Rapunzel’s immanent shaving, or when she heard herself telling me about the hair that ‘dragged along the road gathering chewing gum, ants, caterpillars and lots more’, that she was experiencing a reality as real as the beating of her heart.

There was something working inside her, on her, and between us.

Still waiting for Sarah

It’s now about ten minutes before Sarah is due to arrive, and, as so often happens before a session, I begin to feel uneasy – indeed guilty – about the pleasure this work gives me. We spend time in the land of myths and fairytales, we talk (often indirectly through her stories) about wounds and healing, darkness and light, life and death. We sit with my dog Bella, and Sarah tells me about the horse she will one day own. I listen to her stories about school and schoolwork. We play SimCity and Lemmings on the computer. We work on her school tasks when she brings them along, and there have been periods when I’ve introduced material relevant to her specific learning difficulties.

But she continues to struggle with her spelling. She continues to find the maths at school confusing.

She’s more confident, certainly, and I have a sense of her shifting direction. I remember, as a child, going on ocean liners, and being taken by my parents to stand with the captain at the wheel as we approached an island or port. The captain would turn the wheel, but it seemed that nothing would happen: the great ship would continue to plough through the waves in the same relentless direction. But then the invisible rudders would begin to take effect, and the ship would slowly alter its course. This is how it feels with Sarah at the moment. Big changes are taking place in the engine room, and, though I still don’t know where she’s heading, a new course has been decided upon.

The other day she told me herself that she felt she had changed. She walked in the door, sat on the sofa, and said, ‘You know how I used to be shy with you and I’m not any more? What would you do with a student who stayed shy for a long time?’

There have been significant changes. In our interactions. In Sarah.

But still I feel uneasy.

Douglas – her father – is a retired school principal. He’s tall, in his sixties, wizened face largely hidden behind a long grey beard and coarse grey hair (both of which escape the discipline of the comb), a workman’s hands. He is building (largely on his own) an extension to their house, and arrives here each week in blue overalls. He is deeply involved in Sarah’s life, and speaks – peering over his bifocals – in measured tones about his concerns and his hopes for her.

He told me, when we began our work a year ago, that Sarah’s school experiences had been largely negative, that ‘her initial thirst for learning has been gradually replaced by a feeling that she can't learn’. He described – in a letter he wrote at the time – the disruptiveness of the kids in her class, the ineffectiveness of the teaching at a previous school, and the gradual adoption, by Sarah, ‘of a hard-edged style in her dealings with others’. All of this was exacerbated by ‘an underlying perception difficulty’ which resulted in ‘more reversals, both of letters and figures, than one would expect at this stage and she doesn’t spell nearly as well as one would like to see, or indeed, as well as one would expect from a manifestly intelligent little person whose speaking and reading vocabulary are both pretty good’. He speculated that there may be ‘some elusive genetic factor at work’, as Sarah’s aunt on her mother’s side was labelled ‘dyslectic’ at school, and Sarah’s older sister, while ‘one of the best students in Year 7 at her school’ had a terrible spelling problem. Maths was a particular nightmare for Sarah, Douglas told me, where she had significant deficits, where she had found it impossible to memorise the necessary number facts, where the other kids had poured scorn on her for using a calculator, and where she had learnt ‘to avoid trying in order not to expose herself to failure’.

‘What we want you to try and do,’ Douglas wrote, ‘is to restore Sarah’s faith in her ability to learn. She badly needs (and always joyfully responds to) praise for real achievement. We stand ready to help with anything you might suggest we do at this end, so please let us know what you would like from us.’

If the fog were less thick outside I’d see him soon, crouched behind the wheel of their light brown Tarago van, both hands wrapped around the wheel, staring intently ahead. Sarah will be sitting next to him. Neither would be speaking, and I’d imagine that Douglas was preoccupied with some building problem – how to get the right level, what kind of timber to use for a cupboard. I’d see them driving to the end of the cul-de-sac then turning to park outside my house. They often sit in the van for a while – he and Sarah – finishing breakfast or waiting for the clock to reach the hour, and sometimes Douglas will come to talk with me while Sarah remains in the van.

Jane, Sarah’s mother, I see less often. Sometimes I see her picture in the paper, as she has a high-pressured, high public-profile job. We meet occasionally – Douglas, Jane and I – to talk about how things are going, and sometimes Jane will ring to ask me to talk to Sarah’s teacher, or to respond to something I’ve written in the letters I write to the family after each session. She, too, is passionate about Sarah, and is occasionally thrown into the pits of despair by the vicissitudes of Sarah’s journey. Passionate about Sarah, and passionate like Sarah, so she tells me. The two have occasional clashes. Both have strong personalities. I imagine Douglas being the peace-maker.

I don’t know much more about the family dynamics than this, and occasionally this ignorance feeds my guilt. Should I not be more aware of the environment out of which Sarah has grown? How can I know how to proceed, unless I’m clearer about the factors that have contributed to Sarah’s school difficulties, and to her fears? Might it not be the case that Sarah feels intimidated by school, less because of what goes on there, and more because she’s the youngest in a highly literate, highly articulate, highly successful family? How can she make her mark, how can she be noticed, how can she compete for attention, unless it’s through ‘having problems’? Has she, perhaps, built up around her a way of relating to the world – her older siblings, her parents, her friends at school, her teacher – based on her ‘having problems’? A part of her long Googledah story comes back to me:

In the morning she found her parents knocking at the door and asking if they could come in. She remembered that Googledah and Truly Wise had said she had to pretend to be sick and to lock the door. So she said she was sick and she didn’t want anyone to come in the room. She did the same for a few days.

I’m beginning to listen out for the sound of the van turning into our cul-de-sac. I turn the computer on, the music off, and tidy up my desk, which is covered with the accumulated scraps and notes of a couple of day’s teaching. There’s a plaster dragon on it, one that I picked up at the markets for $5 and which is already beginning to crumble. But I love it. The dragon is resting, its nose tucked in over its front claws (just like our dog Bella when she sleeps), its wings folded carefully on its back. But its eyes are open, it’s awake, and it’s taking things in. I pick it up and put it on top of a speaker, its usual resting place.

As I potter, I try to throw off the unease, the shadowy guilt which is threatening to surround me, weigh me down, make everything grey, just as the fog is making everything grey and indistinct outside. Why does this recurring interrogation – different characters, different settings, but always the same accusations – haunt me? Is it some basic flaw in my character, some legacy of my childhood, something which subverts my work with young people? Is it true that I’m tending my own wounds rather than those of my students? There is enough truth in the suggestion to give it energy. And though I write, every day, to appease the spirits that visit me, though I’ve written two books to help me unearth the subterranean demons who unsettle my work, they still live, disturbed by my probing perhaps, occasionally wounded themselves, but still awake and active and invasive.

8. Working on schoolwork

My mind wanders back to other sessions with Sarah, searching for evidence that I do indeed respond to her needs, that I’m not just tending my own projections. And I remember a session from a few months ago.

On that day, Douglas came up to the landing outside the study, alone, while Sarah waited in the car. He had a piece of paper in his hand. It was a maths sheet from school.

‘There’s some reluctance from Sarah to work on this,’ he said as he handed it over. He looked concerned, and didn't elaborate. Sarah had joined us. He awkwardly thrust the sheet into my hand and left. It had passed from Douglas to me without Sarah touching it.

Sarah finished her drink, and then I asked her about her week. She responded to all my questions with a ‘good-oh’, delivered in a slightly uncomfortable way, and I sensed that there was lots going on for her.

‘Where will we start?’ I asked (having said nothing about the maths sheet, though it was sitting on the arm of the chair).

‘Well, I've got all this maths to do,’ she said. ‘We'll start with a story, one of yours, like usual. Then we'd better do the maths I guess.’

So I told her a story, a strange one about a blue lamp and a soldier. I felt slightly uneasy telling it because the goodies aren’t terribly good or admirable. Yet it’s got a strange power. Sarah didn’t like it much, she told me when I’d finished. ‘You’d better read me another,’ she said.

‘I will if you want me to,’ I replied. ‘These sessions are for you, and it’s up to you to plan our time. Don’t forget, though, that last week we ran out of time for some schoolwork you wanted help with.’

‘Mmmm. OK, we’ll do the maths. Will you read me a story at the end?’

‘If that’s what you want then, yes, I’ll do that.’

For the best part of the next forty-five minutes, we focussed on the maths. It was good working like this, reminding Sarah of things she knew, helping her with things that seemed initially difficult, showing her how to do things she didn't understand. She enjoyed it too, though of course it wouldn’t have been her preferred way of spending the time. The further we got into it, the more she relaxed.

But my doubts about the value of the work were certainly there, beneath the surface. The maths Sarah had been given to do seemed to have no context. It was not connected to what she had been doing the week before, to any theme that was going on in the classroom, or to any interests or questions of her own. Many of the concepts involved meant nothing to her, and I wondered, as I was explaining them to her, whether there would be any follow up at school. Or was it – as deep down I suspected – ‘busy work’, work to give to the kids without any justification other than to keep them occupied?

Still, Sarah had enjoyed it, and asked that we spend the rest of the session on a school project, rather than on another of the Grimm fairytales.

‘What’s it about?’ I asked.

‘Maoris.’

I waited for some more information, some context or reason why she was studying Maoris. There was none.

‘Why are you studying them? What’s the theme?’

‘It’s something to do with development,’ she said vaguely, ‘yes, that’s right ... we’re doing a theme on development.’

What on earth did this mean, I wondered? The attitudes of the Maoris to development in New Zealand? Child development in a Maori culture? But I felt I had to bottle up my frustration at the nebulousness of the task, otherwise her own tentative requests that I help her with schoolwork could be undermined. She seemed happy that I find material on Maori people in my encyclopaedia, and that’s how we spent the rest of our session.

9. A power struggle

At about this time, I became aware of a struggle going on in Sarah which was spilling over into our working relationship, a tussle that at times felt like a game being played between us, but which had darker and stronger undertones as well.

I first became aware of it at the session immediately preceding the maths-and-Maoris session. We began by watching one of the Jim Henson videos, and then she explained to me that she had a speech to make at school. '‘I guess I need some help,’ she said.

‘What are some of the things you might talk about?’ I asked.

‘Horses,’ she said. ‘That’s all I can think of. What else could I talk about? Help me!’

‘Would you like me to write down some of the things I can imagine you speaking well about?’

‘Yes, tell me what you think,’ she said. I was beginning to be aware of an undercurrent.

I wrote down some possible topics – Rapunzel, the books of Cynthia Voigt (which she’d been lending me and which we’d talked about together), Douglas the brick path layer, the problem of moving desks at school (a teacher-initiative to separate Sarah from her friends, and about which she was furious), having a tutor, animals, her friends – all topics about which I knew she had a lot to say. Then I talked about each one, giving some suggestions about how she might approach them. Sarah sat passively next to me, looking around at the pictures on the wall, occasionally glancing down at what I was writing.

She crossed some of these out, talked for a while about others, and finally it boiled down to a choice between horses and desk moving. She couldn’t decide which, so we tossed a coin. It came down on horses, and, as she seemed disappointed, I suggested she do desks. She decided to press ahead with horses. ‘But you write it for me,’ she said.

‘You would like to have a tutor who would do all your speech for you!’ Sarah smiled. ‘The trouble is,’ I said, ‘that I won’t. I’ll help all I can, but I won’t write it for you.’

‘How am I going to do it then?’ she said angrily.

‘Why don’t you tell me about horses,’ I suggested, ‘and I’ll type what you say. Tell me about an experience you’ve had.’

Without much enthusiasm, she began to dictate:

I went on a camp on these holidays, and we went on a trail ride. And seventeen people fell off! One girl’s saddle fell off seven times, and the girl fell off seven times too.

‘Now it’s your turn, Steve,’ she said. ‘You can write now.’

‘I’m not going to write your speech for you. But I’m happy to help by asking questions, and your answers to my questions could be a part of your speech. Is this what you'd like me to do?’

‘No! Just write it for me!’

‘Sarah weaves her magic spell,’ I said, ‘and tries to make Steve do the work for her. Will Steve be able to resist the spell, or will it be too strong?’ She laughed, but didn’t want to pursue this ‘horse’ theme any longer.

‘Why not talk about the desk moving,’ I suggested.

‘I’ve moved desks a lot of times.’

‘Why?’ I asked, hoping that she would stop answering me in short sentences.

‘Because my teacher moved me,’ she said, her arms now folded tightly across her chest.

‘Tell me about all the times you’ve moved desks this year.’

‘First I was sitting next to my friend, and then my other friend started to cry because her bird died. She was sitting next to one of her friends ... Steve, I’m not going to be allowed to do this. It’s too private. My friends will get upset.’

‘Would you rather talk about your feelings about having to move desks?’

‘I don’t like any of these ideas. None. You tell me a topic. You write it!’

We abandoned the attempt there, and Jane told me later that Sarah had prepared her own speech at home, on a different topic altogether.

10. Tensions build

There was clearly something fuelling Sarah’s mood, something contributing to the ‘darker, stronger undertones’ that I was picking up. A phone call from Jane later in the week shed some light on it.

‘We’ve got to do something, Steve, and fast,’ she said. ‘I’ve just discovered that things are in a terrible mess at school. I’m despairing, Sarah has given up, and something has to be done. I want you to go down to the school and talk to the teacher, and get some kind of program going where you’re helping Sarah with these basic skills.’

‘What’s happened?’ I asked. I was puzzled, as it didn’t seem to me that Sarah had thrown in the towel. We’d recently had the session on maths, for example.

‘A friend of mine was looking at some of Sarah’s writing, and made the comment that it was of Grade One standard. I was simply devastated. So I rang Sarah’s teacher, and I talked with Sarah, but I think she’s decided it’s all too difficult.’

I had a call from Douglas, too, suggesting that we make some school maths a regular part of our time together. I asked if he’d talked with Sarah about this, and he hadn’t, but said that he would before our next session.

I went to the school and asked Sarah’s teacher about her progress. ‘It’s so difficult,’ said the teacher, ‘when you've got thirty kids in the class, lots of whom need special help.’ She shrugged. ‘I do what I can, but ...’ She gave me a spelling list, suggesting that it would help if Sarah worked her way through it with me, and I left feeling that, while my own perceptions about Sarah had been ignored, it might help Sarah’s morale if she could see herself coping better with this school task.

Sarah was very tired during our next couple of sessions, perhaps partly because she could sense the tension around her. We worked on the spelling list, but she didn’t follow it up between sessions. She looked blank when I mentioned Douglas’ request that we do some regular maths. I felt unsettled, and after one of these sessions, I wrote to Jane and Douglas:

I feel keenly the responsibility involved in working with Sarah, and especially the emotions that her learning difficulties bring up – in Sarah herself and in you both when there is something of a crisis of confidence. And so I want to be helping her tackle her spelling and maths. But for these activities to have a real impact, there needs to be follow up between sessions: just doing half an hour a week on spelling and half an hour on maths is not going to make much difference. Yet I don’t want to be following this course if it's simply unrealistic or an added pressure for Sarah to be doing this extra work. If that's the case, I think it would be much more beneficial for Sarah if she and I reverted to a situation where what I’m doing is providing a haven for her from the pressures of school, a haven where she can be nourished in the ways that we know nourish Sarah: expressing herself through stories imagined and remembered, developing further this supportive relationship.

Jane rang me after she'd read the letter. She sounded anxious but less despairing, as if there’d been some resolution at home. ‘You’re on your own for a bit now,’ she said. ‘I don’t want you to feel that you have to work on the school work, and I’ve talked with Sarah’s teacher and told her that we want Sarah to be getting help there, at school. I want her time with you, Steve, to continue to be protected time, a haven, and I don’t want to be running about during the week doing battle with her over spelling activities. I need to have quality time with her, too, and that’s not possible if I'm being a policewoman.’

Sarah arrives

I can hear the van, and can now see Douglas at the wheel, peering ahead into the fog, his headlights on.

Sarah comes in without Douglas this time, knocks gently on the glass door at the top of the small concrete landing, then comes in.

‘Morning Sarah,’ I say cheerfully, my mood lightening already.

‘Morning,’ she says, and sits down on the sofa.

‘What's news?’ I ask. It's my ritual beginning.

‘Nothing.’ It's her ritual response. ‘Steve, do you ever get angry with your kids?’ It’s as though she’s been thinking about this one during the week.

‘My own daughters? Oh yes. You should ask them!’

‘What about with your students, do you ever get angry with them?’

‘Sometimes,’ I tell her. ‘One day a student of mine walked out after I got angry.’

‘What happened then?’

‘He came back later and everything was OK.’

‘Why don’t you ever get angry with me?’ she asks.

‘You don’t do anything that makes me feel angry,’ I reply, wondering what’s behind these questions.

‘I can’t imagine you getting angry,’ she says. ‘If I walked out one day, I’d never come back. I just can’t imagine you being angry. You are very easy with me, you know.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You let me do whatever I want. We don’t do any work if I don’t want to. You don’t help me. Well, it’s sort of helpful, but you don't help me ...’

‘You feel that I'm very easy with you.’

‘Steve, you’re going to have to force me to do some of these other things, otherwise I’m not going to leam anything. I mean I learn when I’m here, but it’s different. You’re going to have to force me to learn things. You’re going to have to make me do the things I don’t want to do, because otherwise I’ll never do them.’ And then, before I can respond, she adds, ‘What are we going to do today? Have you written up the options?’

‘Well, you’re saying that I'll have to force you to work.’

‘Yes, unless you force me, then I’ll never learn. I’ll just choose to do the fun things, which are good, but I’m not learning the things I need to learn.’

‘If you choose to do some of the things you don’t like doing, then I’ll help you in whatever way works best. But I’m not going to force you.’

Because I’ve been expecting something like this, and because my demons have been particularly active recently, I have prepared some cards. On them I’ve listed the different ways Sarah can use our time:

1. play

2. feed your imagination

3. learn to spell better

4. learn about the world

5. write more legibly

6. chat and think about things

7. work on maths concepts

8. get help for your homework

I hand these to her, and Sarah immediately chooses the cards which mention play, chatting and the imagination.

‘These are the things that we always do,’ she says. ‘These are the things that we will do every week.’ I think she is about to make some comment about the other cards, but instead she’s looking relieved of some burden, and she says, ‘And today we’ll watch a Storyteller, have some Tristan and play on the computer. But first we’ve got to go and say hello to your dog Bella, and at the end you’ve got to remind me to go and say goodbye to her.’

There’s something light about her manner, much lighter than it’s been for some time.

Then I see it. She has been testing me, testing my strength, my resolve. Sarah needs to know that I really believe that this is her space, in which she can do whatever she wants. She needs to know that I will support her, be there for her, no matter what she chooses, even if she chooses a dangerous path, a scary path, a path that might involve the death of an outdated and limiting part of her. She needs to know that I see her intelligence, her strength, her sense of purpose, even when she doubts these things profoundly herself, even when classroom assessments say she’s got deep problems. She has tried to put me off, she has spoken directly to my demons, and her new lightness suggests that I have passed the test.

And now I remember another conversation from earlier this year, a conversation between us during the time when things had been difficult at school and there was pressure on both of us – from within and without – to knuckle down to some school work. ‘Don’t forget, Sarah,’ I had said, ‘that if you leave tackling your spelling until some distant day in the future, you may not have me there to help.’

‘I’ll always come here!’ she said, with a voice that allowed for no contradiction, a voice that was speaking a felt (rather than a literal) truth.

And then she strokes and talks to Bella, and then she decides not to watch another Storyteller. Instead we have a long time reading Tristan and Iseult, sitting together on the sofa, our backs to the window. Indeed we finish the story.

The last scene especially grips her. It is the final scene of the story, where Tristan and Iseult are dead and are buried together in a single grave.

And out of Tristan’s heart there grew a hazel tree, and out of Iseult’s a honeysuckle, and they arched together and clung and interwined so that they could never be separated any more.

‘Is that the end?’ Sarah asks, playing the game of not believing that a story could have such a silly ending.

‘That’s it,’ I say.

‘That's awful! They’re both dead! That’s terrible.’ Then she sits quietly for a while, and says in a softer, more wondering tone. ‘Do you think it’s a sad ending, Steve?’

‘I love the ending,’ I say. ‘I love the way they are buried together, and from out of one heart there grows a tree and from the other there grows a vine, and these intertwine and are never separated.’

She screws up her nose, and shrugs.

The rest of our session is relaxed, seamless, as though the spirits that have been troubling both Sarah and me have disappeared. We talk about Oliver Twist, which Sarah wants me to read to her some time. She knows that my wife Jo is pregnant, and I tell her that our new baby is going to be a boy, and that we’ve decided to call him Oliver. ‘That’s a wonderful name,’ she says. ‘You couldn’t have thought of a better one.’ Then we go to the computer, and return to a game that we’ve been playing together, us against the computer. Sarah is very intelligent in her approach to the problems the computer throws up, and proud of the fact that she’s got to a higher level than any of my other students.

It’s time to finish. Douglas is waiting in the van. As Sarah walks down the three steps from the landing to the path, I’m aware that the fog has lifted, that the garden is bathed in watery winter sunshine.

‘Oh yes,’ Sarah says stopping at the foot of the steps, ‘I nearly forgot. Dad would like us to have an extra session together next week before the school holidays, so that I won’t become shy with you again.’

A session many months later

Sarah unpacks her bag at the beginning of the session and tells me that she has to write a story for school. ‘It’s got to be based on a soldier’s experiences at Gallipoli,’ she says, with her dark frown.

She hands me a book she’s borrowed from the school library. ‘Is this book about the right war?’ she asks.

‘No,’ I say, and explain that her book is about the Second World War and that the Gallipoli campaign had been a part of the Great War twenty years earlier.

‘Oh well, never mind, let’s look at it anyway,’ she says.

For the next ten minutes or so we look through the book. Sarah tells me about the pictures that have captured her imagination, and asks me about others, and towards the end of our turning over of the pages she says, ‘Well, I guess I can’t keep putting off doing the story. But Steve,’ she adds ‘I’m not going to write this story, you’re going to have to write it for me.’

I laugh, and remind her of the earlier session when she had to make a speech and wanted me to write the speech for her. Sarah laughs too, and then says, ‘Yes, it turned out to be a terrible speech. But you’re going to have to write this story.’

‘Why is that Sarah?’ I ask.

‘Because it’s too hard. It’s stupid having to write a story about a war. I can’t do it. It’s too difficult. It’s impossible.’

For the next twenty minutes, we spar like two chess players, Sarah trying to commit me to the writing of the story, me trying to resist her traps.

‘I need a suggestion,’ she says.

‘Well, why don’t you start with a character, with the person that this story is going to be about.’

‘OK, so now I need a suggestion for the suggestion. What character will I have Steve?’

‘That’s up to you. Who would you like to write about?’

After each of these little skirmishes, Sarah’s head slumps onto the desk, and she closes her eyes and says ‘Oh, this is awful. I’m getting so depressed. I hate this.’

About three quarters of an hour, many cycles of the above and a couple of false starts later, she again slumps forward and says, ‘I hate this!!’ I type ‘I hate this!’ on the screen, and suggest that she uses the feelings she is feeling right now in her story. ‘Your character could be someone who hates what he is being forced to do. Use what you’re feeling. That’s the way I write.’

She shows a flicker of interest, but keeps her head down on the desk.

‘OK, OK,’ she says with mock impatience. ‘Just keep writing.’

‘I’m not writing this story Sarah. You tell me what happens, and I’ll type it.’

‘I want you to write about this man who’s signing up for the war. They’re at the line and he’s talking to his brother. His name is John. Don’t use my exact words, Steve, or else I’ll kill you. His brother is telling him that it’s his duty to fight. Don’t use my words! But John gets pushed to the front of the line, and he signs up even though he doesn’t want to. Go on, type!’

So I type, and then read the following back to Sarah:

‘I hate this. I hate this war,’ John said to his brother. They were both lining up to sign up for the war.

‘You should be fighting for your country,’ said John's brother. ‘You’d be letting us all down if you didn’t sign up.’

John was pushed to the front of the line. ‘Go on,’ said his brother. John took the pen and signed his name. He knew he had no alternative.

‘Yes, that’s great. Very good. OK, the next bit ... don’t use my words or else ...’

And this is how the story is written, with Sarah getting more and more enthusiastic, her mood becoming more and more something to which she is playfully clinging out of a sense of good-humoured pride. There are whole sections where I just type what she says, and she listens to me read it back and says, ‘Very good,’ as if they have been my ideas and my words. It is all a part of the game that, with one part of us, we are still playing, though we are also well and truly beyond the game.

Weeks later, John found himself in Egypt, in training. The soldiers were formed into two teams, and they had to run towards each other and wrestle with each other in a practice for the war. John didn’t really want to do it. His heart wasn’t in it.

He ran up to his opponent and pretended to wrestle, but instead of fighting he allowed himself to be thrown to the ground.

Later on that night, John stared down at the silver metal holding up his camp stretcher. His bed was in the hospital tent.

He watched the light reflecting off the silver as people opened and shut the door, bringing in the wounded from Gallipoli.

John wondered if his brother was dead or alive. He had already gone to Gallipoli. For all John knew, his brother could be one of the wounded soldiers being brought in at that very minute.

Later that night, he woke up abruptly to the sound of a shrill whistle, signalling to all the men to prepare to leave for Gallipoli. He looked at his watch. It was 1am.

The boats approached the shore smoothly, in a deathly, silence. John glimpsed at the faces of his mates. They looked excited, as though an adventure was about to begin. John didn’t feel this. He felt scared, as he remembered reading a newspaper article which had photos of people being shot.

The boats hit the shore abruptly, and, in the dark of night, everybody was hustled into trenches. John watched bombs exploding within 20 metres of where he was lying. He didn’t think he would get any sleep that night.

It was not light when he was shaken from his bed. He was ordered to a central post in the trench, where he was issued with a rifle and informed that later on that day there would be an attack on the Turks.

It seemed like years before they were all lined up at the foot of the trench, all lined up ready for their deaths. John was in the fourth wave to go. He heard the dreaded whistle and the first wave went. Gunfire and death. Then the whistle again. Gunfire and death. Some lucky people wriggled their way and fell back into the trench. Stretchers were brought, and the wounded carried off to the beach where they would be sent to the hospital ships. The worst wounded would be taken back to Egypt. John found himself hoping that this would be his fate.

John knew that this wasn’t the place for him. He should never have come. But it was too late now. Whistle, gunfire and death.

It was his turn to line up now. He remembered what his brother had said, about his duty, when they were signing up.

We are now near the end of the story, and Sarah’s head is no longer down. Occasionally she will close her eyes, but that is to concentrate better, to picture what it is that she wants to describe.

A number of alternative endings run through her mind. ‘I could have him wounded, then he goes back to the hospital in Egypt,’ she says. ‘Or do you remember my guilty story? The one where the girl falls off the horse and dies? I could use that, though I’ll probably feel awful about it, I’ll feel so guilty.’ But this is the idea that has taken hold of her, and we have a look at her earlier story. We talk, too, about death, and about symbols and images of death, like the black horse, which she decides she wanted to use. She then dictates the rest of the story to me.

The whistle sounded and they all went up. It seemed like everyone around John was being shot. He was running. He didn’t want to die. Death seemed to be going through his head over and over again. He was nearly there, to the other side, and then he was shot.

His breathing got heavier as he felt the sand tugging at this feet, pulling him down. Suddenly the sand fell away from his feet as he felt himself falling. He saw the black horse. He knew he was letting go of life. He tried to hang on, but there was nothing to hang on to. It was as if he was in the ocean, the water closing in on him like a blanket, soothing but suffocating. He let go.

The final paragraphs don’t come out just like that. Sarah gets a pencil, and starts to write, trying out phrases and asking me what I think of them.

She only lets me type when she feels satisfied with what she has written.

‘What do you think, Steve?’ she asks when we’ve finished. ‘Is that my story or is it yours?’

‘I think it’s your story,’ I say. ‘They were your ideas and your words. Sometimes I put in a connecting bit or suggested a way of saying something, but it's your story.’

There is a silence for a while, as the printer runs it off.

‘I think it’s an important story for you,’ I say. ‘Do you want me to talk about it, or just leave it?’

‘No, talk about it,’ says Sarah.

‘Well, you have often talked about death in different ways. When you first came here, you would only mention it with a shudder, putting your hands over your eyes or ears. Then you talked about it more openly, and we’ve had quite long conversations about it at different times. Then you started to write about it, and today you’ve taken that a step further. It’s as though you’re making yourself more comfortable with the idea of death.’

‘I’ll never be comfortable with that!’

I then read to her what Mozart said in one of his letters:

Since death, when we think of it properly, is the true goal of our lives, I have for many years made myself so familiar with this best friend of men that his image not only holds no terrors for me but also brings me comfort and fortitude. I never go to sleep without remembering that, young as I am, I may never see the following day.

I talk too, about the Tibetan notion that you spend all of your life preparing for the moment of death, how they view death as a kind of gateway to another kind of existence, and how Tibetan monks are always full of giggles.

Sarah doesn’t respond. Not with words at least. Instead we sit silently for a moment.

We can sense Douglas waiting outside on the landing.

‘Time to go,’ Sarah says.

‘Time to go,’ I say. ‘See you next week.’

‘See you.’

_____________________________________

The painting at the head of this post is by Solomon Karmel-Shann.

I choose these paintings for my Newsletters not because they illustrate what I’m writing about (though occasionally they happen to), but because I like having my son’s marvellous paintings scattered around the home page of my site.

Solomon has just been awarded one of six 2024 Brett Whiteley Travelling Scholarships for the painting pictured below, which is currently being exhibited at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

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