I once was a spy in the eastern bloc, just before the Wall came down. A double agent in Berlin. I'm still not sure for whom.
I went on a jolly for leftwing loonies called the London Communist Teachers club. We spent a week incarcerated with a sort of Stasi Ofsted.
They told us their schools were hunky dory. No delinquents, druggies, punks, drunks, or misfits there.
Correct. They had been disappeared, hidden.
Some of this seems to have come our way. We are airbrushing mischief. We've gone Commie Lite.
"You'd be shocked!" says Tom Trust of the General Teaching Council for England, "how naughty pupils are hidden when Ofsted visit."
No, I wouldn't. It was common in my old school for our more illustrious villains to beput on a sort of gardening leave. "Temporary suspension". Only a few slipped the net. Like Luke in year 8, whose English book was full of car-crash spelling.
"Why is your book such a mess?" quizzed Herr Inspektor.
"Because I'm a fucking dyslexic, you donut!"
Or like the legendary Shaka, who zoomed about hearing skunk voices before getting his dreadlocks trammelled up in our electric fan.
"Flash!" went his locks.
"Aargh!" went he.
"Why are behaving so badly?" quizzed Herr Inspektor.
"Because I am Shaka! And you are not!"
Teachers too can get hidden, on open evenings, for example. I was once put in a cupboard.
Some of my more unsightly chums, ravaged Leavisites and battered dotards, were consigned to murky stockrooms. We were deemed beyond makeover, beyond cosmetics, and not part of the prevailing, corporate culture portrayed in the whizzo, perky prospectus.
Our foyer resembled a new age Nip and Tuck clinic. Foliage bloomed, floors were lacquered like toffee apples and management schmoozed like those clots in the NatWest adverts – about as sincere as an usherette's eyelashes.
It was a reflection, perhaps, of our catchment area of Notting Hill, which had morphed over the years from an inner-city mix to a sanitised Richard Curtis film set: Smug, Actually.
Things are no longer various. Whole communities, as even Mayor Boris has observed, can be cleansed. Hidden. It's all go.
So where have they gone? The street it seems. We've turned them into folk devils – chilling on corners, dealing in stairwells, spooking you in car parks and scrawling graffiti on the subway walls.
"We teach all hearts to break!" it says at Royal Oak.
"We're out here!" brags one at Ladbroke Grove.
Quick! Quick! Expunge it. Cleanse it! It's gone by dawn.
And back by night. You can't hide these things.
