This Is Your Life Read Free Page A

if it might provoke any sort of reaction, which I soon realized was wildly optimistic of me. Of course, it is possible to begin to teach English to students who only know the words ‘OK’, ‘taxi’ and ‘Beatles’. You can teach any language to anyone who wants to learn, but this, I think, was the problem. These adolescents had been exiled to this dismal suburb-on-sea against their will, leaving behind their friends in Turkey or Algeria or Brazil. Denied the opportunity to smoulder at their parents, they sulked at the nearest available adult, who happened to be me.
    â€˜Ball!’ I said brightly, holding up a ball. ‘
Ball!
Now you try’And I pointed to a young Russian sitting at the front. After about five seconds he blinked, which was progress of a sort; it was the most reaction I’d had all week. ‘Ball!’ I prompted him again, because after all it was a lot of lines to learn all at once. He looked at me. Not even a blink this time; we were going backwards now. There had been quite an exciting breakthrough earlier in the week when one of them had coughed. I had wanted to telephone his parents to share this exciting development. ‘Wonderful news! Nadim lives! Young Nadim actually coughed!’ and they would weep with joy at the first sign of life since their son was stunned into a silent stupor by finding himself imprisoned in a language school in some dreary English coastal town.
    I had moved to the south coast at the age of twenty-one and got myself a temporary job at the local language school, where I was now their longest-serving teacher. I had only come to Seaford to be with my Truelove-for-Evermore but six months after we’d self-consciously set up home together and got proper jobs we had split up; the white-hot comet of our love had burnt up on entry into the atmosphere of the real world. We parted amicably; I got her Hermann Hesse novels and she got the interesting life away from Sussex.
    Seaford is not the glamour capital of Western Europe. There are plenty of swinging songs about New York and LA, but I’m struggling to think of a single line that ol’ blue eyes ever sang about the bleak weather-beaten collection of bungalows that I’d made my home. ‘Seaford, Seaford, that’s my kinda windswept English coastal resort.’ Nope. ‘I wanna wake up in a town that fell into a coma in 1957.’ It wasn’t ringing any bells. On the plus side, the town did have a wool shop, so if knitting was your passion then I suppose it might possibly have justified a brief diversion off the A259. I’d livedin Seaford for thirteen years now, which was quite a short amount of time compared to how long it takes most of the local inhabitants to find the right change when they get on the bus. The wind blowing off the sea is so strong on this part of the coast that the indigenous population grows up at an angle. Like those bent-over trees you see on clifftops, some of the old people have spent so long staggering along the seafront leaning inland at an angle of 75 degrees that their bones are permanently set in that position. It must be impossible organizing the over-60s music and movement classes. Every time they turned around they’d bump heads.
    I didn’t plan to be around here for quite as long as that. I managed to make my job tolerable by not turning up to it every other week – I had a loose arrangement with the school’s owner to work alternate weeks or mornings only. This was when I would turn my attention to what I privately considered my real job: my comedy screenplay. The film idea was such a good one that I was sure someone would be desperate to make it. Ever since the concept had first popped into my head I’d had a positive spring in my step, sensing that my life was on the cusp of a great change. The thought of that brilliant opening scene up on the screen at the Odeon Leicester Square filled me with excitement. I