There was a cloudless sky. The sea was transparent and full of greens and blues. You could see everything within. A seagull darted out from nowhere, swooped into the water and splashed out with an indefinable fish in its beak, and slowly started to take it apart as he stood on the pebbles.
The boat arrived and the grumpy geezer who runs it invited us aboard with about as much enthusiasm as he could muster, which wasn’t very much!
It was a perfect, perfect day as far as the weather was concerned. On arriving at the island, there was a slight disappointment on my part that the puffins were not there to greet us. Yes, they were in the sea, and there were plenty of them but they had left the south cliffs of the island already. There was not one nesting there whereas on the previous visit there had been about 500 as soon as you landed. The steep walk up the hill to the awaiting warden was a darn sight more tiring without the little orange beaked folk. Gone too were the Razorbills. I didn’t see one all day but luckily there were new experiences to be had. The landscape took on a completely altered appearance with the change in the weather. Last time it had been overcast to the point of typical welsh rain at the end of the trip whereas yesterday was the most perfect weather you could imagine.
We walked the opposite way around the island and therefore got to The Wick earlier in the day. This is the main puffin spotting area and once more we were not disappointed. The hue of variant colours across the central part of the island was breathtaking; vivid green, subtle pink, vibrant purple and the most incredibly strong, natural yellow – all topped off with a sky blue sky and a very intense blue within the sea. It was a perfect day.
Continuing across the north face of the island, we eventually settled down for a snack at the Garland Stone. I was hoping to see a couple of porpoises or dolphins along with some wayward gannets from the neighbouring island of Grasholm but none appeared. There were, however, a couple of seals or so, just bathing on the rocks below and there were many groups of people just spending some time, sitting down after their walk and taking it all in. Perfect for all concerned.
And then they arrived; a school party, probably Year Five I would have thought, all with their clipboards and rucksacks and...................... well I was going to go on and say their chatter and enthusiasm and excitement and noisiness and so forth but these children looked as though they had had a bad attack of the Harry Potter Death Eaters; sapping them of spirit and joie de vivre.
Here they were in the most beautiful of settings, admittedly not necessarily one that a ten year old might automatically conjure up as “the place to be” but nevertheless, one would have expected one of them to show some enthusiasm for life.
Admittedly once more, it was mid afternoon and they had probably been walking around the island for some time. It was quite warm and I suppose once you’ve seen one puffin, that is probably enough but why on earth were they so dismal and unenthusiastic?
And then I saw her. Or rather heard her.
“James, Jacob, Liam, and you and you and you. Over there. Sit on the grass. Be quiet. There are people here trying to have some peace. Oy, Liam, SIT!”
“Jem, Kate and Louisa – go over to Ms. Slightly Calmer and look at the seals. Don’t go near the edge”.
“Sit down!”
“No, you will wait your turn!”
“I don’t care if you don’t want to wait. Just sit down”.
“Draw what you see!”
“Alfie, Charlie and James – your turn”
“No Liam – you’ll just have to wait!”
“Oh for goodness sake!”
Mutter, mutter, mutter, hands on hips, arms flapping in the non-existent breeze. Eyes raised to the heavens, sighs echoing across the bay. Moan, moan, moan.
“Liam, your turn and stay away from the edge!”
“As if I am going to walk off the cliff!” muttered Liam calmly as he walked away with his clipboard to look at the two seals on the rock.
Go Liam!
“Right you! Sit down and draw a seal!”
Another mutterer – “I’d draw a seal if I could actually see one!” said one bright spark with the soul of the dispirited.
He couldn’t see the seal because she had placed her group so far above the cliff top that they were actually in more danger of falling over by stretching their bodies to full length and unbalancing themselves in the process.
How I did not stop myself getting up and slapping the woman I will never know. She epitomised everything that is bad about a primary school teacher. She was the living, breathing personification of the didactic, dictatorial monsters that our test driven system has created. I could see she was clearly out of her comfort zone and was obviously desperate to get back to her white board and powerpoint lessons, with her maps of the island and a red line to identify where they walked. Or maybe I am doing her too much justice. Perhaps she preferred exercise books and protractors.
She eventually relaxed enough to sit down with her arms folded across her breast, still barking out instructions, still sullen, still eagerly eyeing every movement from these poor sods, who weren’t moving because they were nullified into statue status.
Have you any idea what you are doing? I wanted to say. Here you are in the most unusual of settings where there are natural colours beyond imagination, where some of us have stupidly waited for forty years to see this incredible island, where the paths are clearly marked so it is perfectly safe for children to wander around and all you can do is bark at these children as though they were infantile morons.
The children, obviously middle-class to the core, sat obediently with their pencils in hand drawing away, writing away, not even stopping to sit and take in what they were experiencing. Everything was so bloody regimented, and the sergeant major was in control.
The children, once seated, were not allowed to get up. They were not allowed to walk behind the cliff top into the space behind. They had a mission, a task and they were damn well going to do it.
I’ve been there. I know it is tiring to take children out. I know it is somewhat nerve-wracking to take children into a place that one wrong-footing could spell out disaster but children have to live, have to experience and have to learn their own methods of safety and protection otherwise they really will never survive, and that is before you get onto the whole thing about what they are learning about social interaction from this woman.
Apparently, once you reach a certain age, with a certain amount of professionalism (!), you can treat little people as though they are sub-human.
I then wondered what these childrens’ parents would make of the way in which they were being spoken to. Personally, if I thought I had spent copious amounts of money in giving my child an experience like this, I would expect, nay demand that they were treated with the respect that their little souls deserved.
I know you shouldn’t do comparisons but my mind swiftly wandered back nearly twenty years when I brought a group of children to this part of the world.
With my leg recently freed from the fibre glass pot of plaster, I couldn’t walk too far but I had meticulously planned an experience for these children that enabled them to enjoy the very best of what this county had to offer.
On our way to St. David’s, where I had planned for them to rush madly around the ruins of the Bishop’s Palace and make up some plays to perform, we stopped at one of my favourite places – a little village called Solva.
As soon as the coach pulled into the car park, the children were off, wandering straight down to the estuary and then walking across the bridge and up the headland. They barely stopped to ask if it was okay to do so, and eventually the head teacher who was accompanying me, wandered off with them.
Half an hour later, with me beginning to wonder where they had got to, I saw these delighted little faces running back down the hill, smiling, laughing, rushing up to me to explain where they had been and what they had seen.
“Did you know there was a beach on the other side of the cliff?”
I hadn’t.
“We ran down the hill and touched the sea and then Mr A suggested we have a race back to the coach!”
They giggled some more, watched the river running under the bridge and reluctantly stepped aboard the coach for the next leg of the journey.
The interlude into our excursion twenty years ago was not planned, well not in that way. As I said, I thought they might take a short wander down the estuary but they had other ideas. They saw a big hill and their curiosity, that I hope I had some small part in developing, made damn sure that they wanted to see what was on the other side.
Where was the curiosity of the children on Skomer yesterday? If they had any, it was quashed completely by this Mrs. Hitler, and I do not use that surname lightly. Where was their freedom in a place that defied restrictions? How was their empathy with the natural world being developed? Where was their initiative? Who was nurturing their creativity? Who was saying to them “Just be, just feel, just imagine, just take in the natural high!”
Eventually I could take no more, and as soon as this woman had stood up, my brother and I marched towards her and pushed her off the cliff to much rejoicing from the much maligned Liam, and then the other children danced and smiled and ran around the island in the way that nature intended them to do so.
Or I just walked away fuming that this beast was in charge of these children who needed to be free.
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