Yellow

I emerged. There was crack in the cocoon and I was breaking free and stretching my wings.


I was looking outwards through the train window. In the distance a squirrel tiptoed hurriedly across an icy wall. The train eased slowly away from the station. Long thin November shadows cast by the morning sun over the frosty fields were wonderful to see. There was space in the carriage to stretch and breathe. No one knew anyone else and we sat in an equality of silence: blobs of potential colour.

Then the train stopped and more people got on.


Broken tangled fragments of conversation like strands of coloured yarns bound friends together repelling strangers to the darker regions of their own thoughts.

The elegant people opposite me, the one young, the other old, were dressed in rich tones of subtle complementing colours: neatly cut. They spoke with an assurance of smiles. I caught phrases, an odd word here and there. They were going to the city perhaps to launch a new fragrance upon the world; or maybe to reveal a new line of fashion, bright with colours. They spoke of wood, not of oak veneer, but real of real solid oak, which would look nice in the cloakroom.

Opposite them I greyed and looked inwards unpicking the stitches of my life.
When the train slipped into the station, I stepped once more into the colouring book world of bright sunlight.


Which way to go?


The building ate me up as I entered its shadows and climbed its teeth of steps. I walked through its cavernous echoing stomach then into its long intestinal corridors. There were moving walkways that I moon-hopped along.


I’d found the venue: the ‘Design and Technology Exhibition ‘in hall ten. We had to queue to register. Already I could feel the pull of the lights within. My name was printed; and once labelled like goods I was allowed inside.


I was drawn to the bright things; the things that glittered and sparkled, tiny lights that shone through diaphanously thin plastics. I flittered on to the gauzy materials and the soft multicoloured woven fabrics. I touched the warmth of felt and the chill of silky fabrics. I watched thin, skeletal leaves being ironed into a fusion of multicoloured glittering strands. They were made into a bowl that when lifted had shimmering edges that floated in the air and caught the breeze.


Someone else was quietly painting a bowl with deft sure strokes of colour. Nearby, great noisy machines repelled me as they screeched and cut metal and wood.

It was a market place: prices were high but ten percent off if you buy now they said.

Some stall holders were friendlier than others. Some with a cursory glance turned their backs on me and continued their corporate chat.

Above some of the stalls was the word ‘PSH’, a word that suggested to me the sound a train makes when closing its doors leaving a station, or a whisper.


It stood for Primary, Secondary and Higher I eventually realised.


I felt the discrimination before I knew the reason why; like a child not knowing why faces are turned from them. I had not noticed the yellow stripe on my name tag that proclaimed that I was from a primary school. It was an unsubtle apartheid.


Yellow: the colour used in our school to denote the bottom group. Yellow: the colour used to make a star that led its wearers to annihilation was here being used here to identify the primary school teachers.


We sat through lectures where we were told of our yellow-bellyed cowardice when teaching D&T.


While we, when we thought of our Cinderella subject, thought about budget constraints “you can have fifteen pounds to spend” (that was once my allowance for a whole year which led inevitably to a lack of resources). Or we thought of the perpetual motion machine of changing schemes of work and policies, “We don’t do bridges anymore!” (Damm! just when we’d become the Isambard Kingdom Brunels of the classroom). We considered the time constraints (a Pandora’s box of issues here, far too painful to open). We thought of thirty children all needing help and support with different aspects of their project at the same time. We thought of children with behavioural issues; children with special needs; children nearly arrived in the classroom from abroad who are told to, “Put the cam on the crankshaft!” We thought of our deaf children who leave the room for special time in their unit and return to find that their classroom world is even more bewildering place on their return.


Then worst of all we thought of our own lack of knowledge.



'Look at this.' He points to a slide of children standing dismally around a table of yellow painted cardboard boxes. 'Terrible, no imagination at all.'



We squirm in our chairs.



'These were lunch boxes. The children could have added decoration and compartments. They could have researched catches; but when I spoke to the teacher she said she'd finished with them.' He sighs.



We sigh too for different reasons. We know the teacher's constraints. We hope she was teasing him.


‘Don’t make the chassis of the car with the cut dowelling and paper corners,’ the expert says ‘it takes too long.’


Now he tells us. We’ve spent hours trying to locate the items in the catalogue and ordering them.


‘Use cardboard, this sort,’ he says waving a piece in the air.


We are hungry for his words, we have been starving in the ghettos and he is offering us salvation.


‘Make your own wheels,’ he says and demonstrates ordinary paper wrapped around a thin piece of dowelling.


‘Put glue into a syringe (without a needle) and then you’ll be able to get glue in just the right place with less mess. And use a paper clip when you need to seal it.’


‘Use straws from Starbucks! They’re bigger, stronger and they’ll fill the dowelling.’ He says. ‘I suppose you’ve already tried fitting dowelling into ordinary straws?’ he asks, noting our world weary nods. ‘It doesn’t work does it!’ he smiles wickedly, while we close our eyes sighing and remembering.


He gives us invaluable tips and advice. ‘Don’t let the children get glue on the foil, when it dries it will be invisible and the electrics won’t work.’


We are entranced by the simplicity of his ideas and the strength of the finished products.
‘Come and see,’ he says and we swarm around the nectar of his ideas. We have been fed crumbs of hope and we might just survive.


I leave yearning for the expensive coloured gossamer threads.



Sadly, I know that instead of their bright colours that my house will become a permanent storage unit for dull brown cardboard with the occasional green Starbucks straw thrown in for good measure.



And in the darkness, as the train’s windows drains any colour from my reflection, and I am reduced to a shadowy being, I realise that I am more moth than butterfly.