People are very frustrated for me. Adults are still full of advice (that I’ve tried) but children are amazing. They are also concerned that it always happens at this time of year, although I'm not sure it's a reliable harbinger of Christmas. If anything, the children should be most frustrated. Can you imagine trying to learn from someone who can’t speak to you? I feel sorry for them but they are brilliant.
I leap around the room, pointing and gesturing. Playing an extended game of charades.
At the youth orchestra I smiled and gestured ringing a bell above my head and they played Ding Dong Merrily on High. I wrote on my paper that there should be prizes, touched my nose and pointed at the girl who’d said it first. It seems that I am, again, showing my age, as absolutely nobody does that when playing charades anymore.
At school when I get to the completely silent stage many of the children think I’m making it up. They can imagine it would be quite useful to point at their throat and shrug their shoulders when asked a particularly tricky question. You would think they would take advantage of a silent teacher but this doesn’t happen very often.
Their advice and comments are brilliant and have cheered me up enormously.
I found one child looking under my desk. I shrugged and applied my questioning face.
“I was looking for your voice. I thought it might be hiding under your desk. It’s a busy time of year. I thought it might need a nap.”
Apparently, it wasn’t there.
Another asked me what I could do for it. When I gestured that I didn’t know she shrugged, looked at my bottle of water and said, “I dunno either, maybe drink.” I assume she was talking about water but when a ten year old suggests you turn to drink, you know it’s serious.
I love children’s sense of optimism. They still think that everything can be fixed, easily. They also think that if it’s gone on a long time you might need to turn to more drastic measures.
“It’s no good,” said one girl, earnestly, “It can’t go on like this. What will you have to do? Get a new head?”
That’s the solution, like Worzel Gummidge it’s just that I’ve got the wrong head on.
You probably don’t remember Worzel Gummidge. He was a scarecrow, played brilliantly by Jon Pertwee on children’s TV in my youth. He was made by the Crow Man, who would make him a new head whenever he needed it. He had heads for thinking, dancing, arithmetic. He had a riddle-me-ree head and a wrangling head and he once persuaded the Crow Man to make him a handsome head, which gave him teeth like Rylan, before Rylan was even born. In the episode where he uses his singing head (which is probably the one I need to borrow) the vicar is distressed because a member of the choir has lost his voice. His wife has brought him to see the vicar to explain and the vicar says, “Speak for yourself man,” but he can’t because he has laryngitis. Oh, how we laughed. “You’d better be alright for the Harvest Festival,” says the vicar. The wife reassured him that it will be fine (that’s what wives do) and suggests that God will provide. The vicar, knowing God’s limitations slumps and says, “Not tenors, though.” The man with laryngitis and the wife walk away just as Worzel appears, wearing his singing head, humming All Things Bright and Beautiful, slightly out of tune. It’s only then that we realise how desperate the vicar was as he thanks the lord.
There is an odd synchronicity to this story, as when I first lost my voice I used to joke with the children that it had been stolen by the Crow that used to sit and tap on the hall windows when we were singing and this week a crow hand puppet appeared on my desk from nowhere.
Maybe it's time to search for Nellie (we named the crow after a music teacher who was at the school in the sixties) and demand my voice back.
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