Colouring Outside of the Lines

School brought the smell of the herd; brown leather straps, regulation pens, black and blue pulled out of a multi-pack, ‘rather see than be ya’, Purple Cow… And Mrs Arnot…

Mary Ann Bretton! What on earth do you call this? I don’t know what colour the cattle are where you come from, but I’m fairly certain they’re not purple. Are you really so stupid that you can’t even complete a simple colouring task? Cows are brown, Mary Ann… Brown!

Shockwaves of icy blue, stun gun electrocution sparks. The split-second eyes-wide-open upward chin-jolt, and down again. Pencils stilled, elbows on desk, mouths concealed under palms, laughter - more nervous than mocking - stifled, gasps swallowed, and less empathy on the whole than there ought to have been for this newcomer to the class. 'Must be trouble', they said, because she’d been sat at the front, and Mrs Arnot’s daughter, Patricia, had told them. ‘Dirty, grubby gypsy’– I’d heard the whispers from her and her top-table clique. ‘Won’t fit in here’. ‘Don’t need her as a friend.’ Not in uniform grey like they were, nor in conservative seventies ‘kiddie boutique’, nor even falling some way between the two like I was - up there academically with them, but with those I got on with best haphazardly positioned around the middle. Quiet, conscientious, pencil ever-sharp and colouring well within the lines… How now…? My cows were black and white.

Oooooh, you’re gonna get in trouble… Mrs Arnot said they’ve got to be brown.

Grace, sitting next to me, sketching away in the earth-coloured pencil she’d swiped from my case, mother a leading light in the local amateur operatic society, thought by mine to be ‘nice’, ‘respectable’, ‘well-dressed, but not as showy as some’, so, naturally, when her daughter came round to play, no problem. Grace was always more than welcome, although to be fair, Mum was consistently happy-smiley when anyone came to visit and she could feed them the homemade soup I refused to eat. Of course, I never did tell her what had happened when this ‘lovely, polite little well-bred girl’ came to my room in summer, singing her note-perfect Edelweiss and dancing in the old-fashioned way… I’ll be the boy, and the boy always kisses the girl… Oh, but, Carol, you must, or I’ll make you strip right down to your vest and pants. Make you climb out the window like that, all the way down the brambles...

Crying. It was so embarrassing. Made for such a horrible blotchy face. Say nothing. Say nothing. Keep sharpening that pencil, keep within the lines, write ‘Friesian’ underneath those black and white cows. Was that how you spelt it? ‘I’ before ‘e’, ‘I’ before Grace. ‘I’ before Mary Ann’. ‘I’ before Mrs Arnot headed my way and picked up on some tiny mistake I'd made. Just like she did with that sentence, the one I’d been so proud of, the descriptive one with all those wonderful grown-up words…

…And you have the audacity to sit there without a capital letter at the start…

And you to begin a sentence with ‘and’, breaking your own number one rule… If only I’d had the nerve to speak up. If only I’d been a bit more like Bruce. Big and burly and brash, and like Mary Ann, sat at the front of the class. He’d been moved there on day one when he’d come in with his shirt open right to the waist, swinging back on his chair like the boss that he said he would be when he finally came of age, although really, he had a girlfriend in the year above and they’d ‘done stuff’, so he was halfway there already. Lived on the council estate, the second eldest of six, always up for a fight and usually winning. In winter he’d helped make the playground ice-slide – the legendry one which had caused Mrs Arnot to fall and ‘very nearly concuss herself’. Bruce wasn’t the only boy involved, yet he’d shouldered all of the blame, and even he didn’t know what was worse, teacher’s red corrective marks on his jotter or the ones on his wrist which had brought him to those 'sissy girly tears' he so frantically attempted to hide and later denied, a once in a lifetime event which, once word had spread beyond our classroom walls, had shocked everyone in the school, even those who’d never so much as witnessed one of his fights… And let that be a lesson to you all… Bruce the Big-Man-Bold marked down same as me in the newspaper task for describing the Spaghetti House Siege as ‘sad’ as opposed to ‘exciting’…

Grey. The cows looked too grey. I needed to blacken them up. Felt tips were a no-no in case they leaked through the paper, but maybe I wanted them to. Maybe I wanted to add to the marks on that desk. So many dark arrowed hearts. So many grimy scratched initials. U and I (we must remember) if destroyed still true. Indelible… Even then I knew the meaning.

It was Mum who taught me to read before I went to school. A native Austrian, she’d lived in Vienna during the war, and had come over to Britain as an NHS nurse long before I was born. My father was Latvian, so officially stateless. I knew he’d been a prisoner of war, and had suffered greatly under Stalin. His parents were dead, his brothers lost, and he must have been shot at some point for he had the bullet wound in his bicep to prove it, but any more than that was never discussed. He was patient, hardworking and quiet, too quiet really, but then (I’ve often heard it said) Mum spoke enough for both of them. He loved his garden, rarely ventured anywhere else on weekends, and I only heard him lose his temper once. I was only little, and I’d been snapped by a press photographer at a Christmas bazaar, hand in barrel ‘interviewing’ Santa Claus. The day the paper came out someone passed by our house shouting about ‘bloody foreigners’ getting their name in print. He was up off the chair and raging towards the door when Mum pulled him back saying things (in German, I think) that I didn’t understand and which saw me cowering in the toy room where Mum kept her sewing machine and hiding there between worktop and treadle until I was sure the ‘bad people’ had all gone away and it was once again safe to show face.

I was six when Dad taught me how to play chess, younger still when we did the dot to dots and paint by numbers… Slowly, slowly, steady now, always keep within the lines… And if I wanted to colour outside of them…? One thing at a time, remember, one thing at a time, you’ve got to master the basics first… So, I couldn’t change the picture…? Well, you could if you think you could make it any better…

I had the green felt tip in my hand. Grass. The cows needed grass. Especially the one whose head was lowered. Pen to paper, let’s give them something to eat, to digest, to fill whichever stomach came first… Ow…! Did Grace really have to do that? Knock my arm so that the pen scooted right across the page, across all my listed farmyard facts…? Hahaha, serve you right for using felts. You’ll really get in trouble now… Face triumphantly twisted. And I’d seen that look before – the day Mrs Arnot had gone ballistic, blaming Bruce for spilling the painty water all over Patricia’s ‘lovely’ portrait of Grace… But it wasn’t me… It was…

Don’t you dare answer me back, boy. Who do you suppose you are? Any more of that and it’ll be six of the best… Grace, get on with your work, please…

And again. Grace never got a telling off like me or Mary Ann or Bruce, or any of the other ‘kiddie boutique crowd’ who occasionally copped it.

Sorry, Miss, I was only asking Carol for a loan of her sharpener…

So upright and poised, adjusting her tie to fit even more snugly into her whiter than whitewashed collar. Must have had dry toast for breakfast otherwise she’d have been ill with all that unmelted butter clogging up her gut… I could extend the grass, I supposed, make a field of it – a meadow! Go over the words in felt tip, brighten them up like flowers. And if I did get a row for doing things differently, well, what was the worst that could happen? And just like that, at the flick of a switch, I saw them all looking up to the strip lights as the teacher pulled down the blinds.

I sat back and loosened my tie. Soon I’d lose it completely. Forget it ‘accidentally on purpose’ on the day that it mattered most - class photograph day - when I’d be made to stand up and hang my head in shame. And when the photos eventually came, with me front and centre, there Mrs Arnot would be, holding up the print for all to see… Just look, everyone. Look at who’s spoiling the picture… Colouring outside of the lines was alright, I decided. But colouring over the lines was sometimes even better…

When Dad said I had to master the basics first, he never did add the words that I knew must have been in his heart, but which, given his past, he was probably too afraid to speak, the ones regarding rules and regulations, laws and social conventions, and how it was up to us to live and learn and determine for ourselves if these were just, and only then to decide what ought to be challenged and changed, and the best way to go about it, even if that way was a safe one, centered within oneself and only expressed to those closest to us. And, of course, as I sat in that classroom with all the Graces, Patricias and Bruces and Mary Anns, the likes of whom (along with several more Mrs Arnots) I encountered throughout my life, as yet I wasn’t grateful for what he and they had inadvertently taught me, for as yet the various parts of this lesson, like seeds scattered over the ground, had barely sunk in. Indeed, it took many years, much misplaced teen rebellion, adult mistakes and misadventures before they did, and that’s when it all came together and I finally realised the truth - that education (and in whatever form it takes) is indeed a ‘leading out’ and should therefore never be seen to imprison, restrict or isolate, or categorize, intimidate, discriminate or sneer. But I am grateful now. More than ever…

Grandma, do you like my drawing? I made the people and animals all different colours. Is that alright?

It’s more than alright, hun. It’s beautiful.

***

Names changed for obvious reasons.