I typed my own surname into a school system on a Tuesday afternoon and did not see it, because it is the eleventh most common thing I type and because you do not read your own name.
It was not. She had asked her mother, at Christmas, whether she could be moved to a different English class.
And her mother had said no, and had said something about not causing a problem in the middle of the year, and Rhoswen has since told me that she did not know why Etta was asking, and I believe that, and it is the single most expensive assumption anybody in this story made.
Three weeks later it was parents’ evening.
Thirty adults at tables in that hall. No students — they are not there at ours, they wait in the car park or at home.
I had a stack of Etta’s books on my table because she had left three more on my desk that week and I had not been able to make myself take them home.
Her mother came across that hall.
I had never met Rhoswen Brann. She is forty-five and she has known about me since 2009 and she has known my name and my job and, I have since found out, what I look like.
She took hold of my wrist on that table, on top of those books, and she said it loud enough for every person in that room:
You buried a daughter. Don’t you dare try to borrow mine.
Nobody moved. A man two tables down put a pen down.
She did not let go. She leaned in and said:
Say you’ll stay away from her. Well?
I did not say it.
Not out of defiance. I want to be accurate, because there is a version where I refused nobly and that is not what happened.
I did not say it because I could not work out, in that second, whether she was right.
What ended it was Vivika Storr, who is head of Year Eleven, who is about sixty and who has worked in that building for twenty-six years.
She did not raise her voice. She came up on Rhoswen’s left and said: Mrs Brann, we’ve got a room down the corridor. Come with me.
And Rhoswen let go of my wrist and went with her, immediately, without one word.
Vivika came back about forty minutes later and sat down in the parent’s chair opposite me, in a hall that had mostly emptied out, and said two things.
The first was: you are going home now and I am going to drive you.
The second was: I’ve put in a safeguarding note and I’ve named you in it, and I’m telling you that to your face rather than letting you find out on Monday.
I said thank you and I meant it, and I have meant it more every month since.
Because that is exactly right. There was a child in the middle of it and there was a member of staff with a personal connection nobody had declared, and it did not matter one bit that I had not known — the note was correct on the day it was written.
Vivika Storr is the only adult in this entire account who did the boring, correct, uncomfortable thing inside an hour of finding out.
Everybody else in it, including me, took between three weeks and sixteen years.
