E is for English Teacher

I chose to make James, the main character of Foul and Fair an English teacher, albeit one who is no longer working at a school when we meet him, for a number of reasons. I liked the idea of him drawing on works of literature in his team talks, not least for the incongruity of him quoting Alexander Pope and Dylan Thomas on the touchline with eleven-year-olds. I also wanted to use literature to help pick out some of the themes of the novel, similarly to the way I used music in my previous book Dead Man Singing. The Macbeth theme is the most obvious one, not least because of the book’s title, but there’s plenty more woven in to the text through literary references and even a few of the names I’ve chosen for particular characters.

I’m not a teacher, although my wife is (Maths rather than English, in her case), so I have some awareness of the dynamic that underpins groups of teachers. The English department in Foul and Fair was fun to write, and while none of the individuals are based on any of my wife’s colleagues, the overall cut-and-thrust, the playfully fierce debates on trivial matters, owe something to the tone that some of her departments have had over the years.

I may not be a teacher, but I do have a lot of experience of working with young people and in a school environment. I spent several years employed as a youth worker, and I currently go into local primary schools as a football coach. Foul and Fair isn’t a children’s book, but I wanted to give a fair representation of the children it depicts, as well as the adults who work with them. Most of all, I wanted to explore the central ideas of the book in a wider context than the footballing one. The tension between doing the right thing and getting the right result is a challenge for all of us, and not just on the touchline.