Many years ago, in a primary school staffroom in north Belfast, I was chatting with some teachers about the “11 plus”. They had all sat it, of course, 20 or 30 or even 40 years ago, and were considered the lucky ones because they had all “passed”. But what one woman said really struck me – “I passed, but my best friend didn’t, and she never spoke to me again”.
The sadness in her voice stayed with me, and I think that’s when this book was conceived, even though it took about 30 years to be born. During that time, there were various attempts to get rid of academic selection; in fact the official “11 plus” was abolished by the North’s Minister of Education in 2009, but the grammar schools proceeded to set their own tests. There are now two exam systems, one largely Catholic, one almost entirely Protestant. Some kids sit both. Many 10-year-olds spend the previous summer holidays doing several test papers a week, to practise for the tests in November.
I’ve experienced this process vicariously as a teacher, as a parent and as a visiting writer doing workshops with teenagers – some of whom had got into grammar schools, some who hadn’t, even some who’d got in but really wished they hadn’t. There are so many stories. I’ve talked to a man who “failed” the 11 plus twice, and even to a woman who “passed” it twice. But I’ve never heard anything to convince me that it’s a good idea.
The catalyst for my own determination to weave some of these stories into a novel came when I attended my old school reunion. I was fascinated to see what kind of grown-ups we’d all turned into, and for a while I toyed with the idea of writing a play, featuring two women dealing with the ghosts of their childhood selves … And one of them, Vinny, would be a hard-up single parent and teacher, doing some 11 plus coaching to help make ends meet.
But as I developed the characters of Vinny and Alex, I realised that it was going to be difficult to write a play in which the other two main characters were 10-year-old children who kept popping in and out, interrupting things. Denzil in particular – Alex’s lively, funny, bright but completely uncompetitive and unacademic son – kept expanding his own role, based on so many boys I myself had taught, full of life and ideas, but not the kind of ideas that could easily find an outlet in our education system.
Not to mention the dead rowan tree. This was in fact a real tree, which used to sit outside my study window, looking inspirational in all its spring or autumn glory. Until one spring, it put out new buds and then quite suddenly, and for no apparent reason, died. After a year or two, it became a glossy mass of ivy which harboured a lot of wildlife and became inspirational, in rather a different way, all winter long.
I’ve been writing and publishing poetry for many years, and as a poet I know that nothing ever really comes alive until you find the right metaphor. And when the metaphor takes over, that’s when you’re really getting somewhere. So, as the dead rowan tree took over my imagination and expanded into a wild garden, in all its scruffy lusciousness, with places for kids to indulge in deconstructive play and adults to crash out, I knew I was getting somewhere.
Another inspiration was my annoyance at the way I constantly see diggers descending upon a bit of park or roundabout, rooting up all the grass and bushes, flattening out the ground or smoothing out the slopes, and installing what councils are pleased to call a Public Realm, which consists of, er, grass and bushes – only much tidier.
It occurred to me that the novel could start with Vinny contemplating her own destroyed garden as a waste of churned-up mud, and some anonymous stranger coming in and trying to impose inappropriate order on what had been friendly chaos. So she would spend time remembering the wilderness in vivid detail, and as she gradually moved towards finding out “who did it”, she would also come to terms with the events of the past four months. But right at the heart of the novel, we would still have a wee bit of a “flashback within a flashback” in which we encounter the ghosts of those childhood selves I was thinking about earlier.
That’s one of the reasons why the novel is so short (though densely packed): it’s difficult to sustain a blow-by-blow flashback beyond about four months. Also, of course, once we got to the denouement – how can Denzil’s situation be resolved? and the situation of his desperate mother, Alex? – I just wanted to throw up solutions and leave it up to the reader to decide if these solutions might work.
The book was written around the time of the flag protests in Belfast; briefly, these involved a lot of people stomping around waving (or sometimes wearing) Union Jacks, and a lot of police stomping around after them. So, in Vinny’s Wilderness, there’s a bit of a sideways nod to flags as an issue; one of the characters more or less proves his virility by nipping up a lamp post to take one down. But essentially, the book isn’t about the sectarian divide in Northern Ireland, about which so much has been written. It’s about the class divide, and who can afford coaching and who can’t, and how that impacts on education.
Oh and I was going to call the novel just Wilderness, but sadly, Roddy Doyle got there first with his teenage novel. So Vinny, self-effacing though she is, gets her name on the cover after all.
Vinny’s Wilderness is published by Liberties Press, at €13.99
