(“If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.”(George Bernard Shaw) - This speaks to the nature of ideas... that they are not owned in the sense of property and that when shared they only enrich the world for having been shared. Calling an idea your own seems absurd really and the only way not to share it is to keep it hidden... and where is the good in that?)
MR DODIE BREDWELL AND ALLEY-CAT
Miss Alice Greyling sat at her desk and sighed. The day had been long and the boys in the class more excitable than usual. It was the fair. It always stirred them up a bit and she’d had to raise her voice more often than usual. She was tired now the bell had rung and the classroom was empty.
Alice had a stack of work to mark before leaving for home. The sooner that was done the sooner she could go. But Alice was slow in starting. She was thinking. ‘Dreaming’ she would have scoffed if it had been one of the boys in her class. Unless it had been Munro. She had a soft spot for him. There was something she thought she recognised in him. Something serious. Like he was older than the rest.
‘You want to go for a drink?’
Mr Dodie Bredwell was at the door. Standing on the threshold, leaning in.
‘Sorry?’ she said.
‘It’s been a long day. Just thought a drink would make it seem a little shorter.’
Alice Greyling was crying. No sound but there were tears on her cheek. She had no idea why that was or what she had been thinking of.
‘Are you alright, Alley-cat?’
Mr Dodie Bredwell had names of his own for all the teachers, too. Gentle and funny and no reason for them that anyone could think of. At first it had irritated Miss Alice Greyling. She thought he was being rude. Then she had grown to like it without really understanding why.
‘Well?’
She shook her head and did not know what she was meaning by that. She wiped away the tears with the back of one hand and blinked surprise and opened the first exercise book on her desk.
Then Mr Dodie Bredwell was sitting at a desk in the front row, like he was a pupil. He rocked back on the chair, something she would have stopped if it had been a boy in her class. She made a show of clicking the pen she was about to write with and bent her head over the opened book. He did not leave.
‘Doesn’t get any easier, does it?’ he said. ‘What we do. Taming the unruly dogs into some appreciation of the written word. Casting pearls before swine, it seems like.’
She did not like that way of talking about the children.
‘Only sometimes it gets through. What we are trying to do. And someone in the class in front of you just gets it and you know then it has been worthwhile. Like Cor-blimey.’
She did not know what he meant. It showed on her face.
‘The pretty one from your class. She was reading over lunch. Poetry, it was. Yeats, if I am not mistaken. And that boy Monday-Monday was listening to her. All soft-eyed and eager.’
Monday-Monday: he meant Munro. Alice understood then. Corinne and Munro. Of course. She wondered why she hadn’t seen it herself.
‘So, Alley-cat, how’s about that drink and I’ll read you some poetry, if you like?’
Miss Alice Greyling looked at Mr Dodie Bredwell then. To see if he was laughing at her. She saw he was not.
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