I taught Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men for nigh on 40 years, man and boy. It was a set text for the 11th years. It never failed. Good classes and difficult classes – especially difficult classes – were mesmerised. Wild boys, who never read a book, listened, rapt. I never got bored reading it for the umpteenth time and they never got bored hearing it for the first.
I honed it down over the years to near perfection. I was good – shameless, big-headed and melodramatic. I’d unleash my best Woody Guthrie or Bruce Springsteen on the lucky pupils and ride roughshod over Ofsted silly criteria.
There were no measured, learning outcomes, just uninterrupted, riveted pleasure. I knew whole chunks almost by heart and wandered round the room, textless, reciting them. “A few miles south of Soledad, the Salinas river drops in close...” goes the first line and we were away.
Well, no more. It must go. It’s off the syllabus from 2016. Why? The dread Gove. He didn’t like it. Why? A whim? Who knows? Too short, too demotic, too populist, too American? Ninety per cent did nothing else, he droned. There are better English novels by dead, White, proper authors like Dickens, Austen. We know, but not for a class of 16-year-olds.
It’s exactly their emotional music.
The story-telling is gripping, the dialogue compelling, the characters empathetic, the setting sharply focused and the themes – loyalty, migrant workers, unemployment, prejudice, sexism, racism, the death of the American dream – as George and Lennie seek some kind of asylum – are more relevant than ever.
The great set pieces (beware spoilers!) – the begging for a job, the breaking of Curley’s hand, the killing of Curley’s wife – got them every time. And there was the collective intake of breath at Crooks being “nigger” in the inner city classroom and the subsequent, sensitive deconstruction.
“You can’t say that, sir.”
And, of course, Lennie’s unbearable death, the bullet through the head, the dream.
“Le’s do it now,” Lennie says. “Le’s get that place now.”
Bang.
“No. No sir.”
The classes got so angry. Once a girl ran out of the room in tears. It’s a socialist text among other things and is still, apparently, banned in some states of America. The Trump is keen to build a wall to shut out Mexicans or Muslims or migrant workers. It’s all coming our way.
Students still come up to me in the Portobello Road and yell some phrases from the novel.
“With ketchup eh sir?”
“An’ live on the fatta lan’, sir.”
Wonderful. Still, the Gove hath spoken. It is no more.
- Ian Whitwham is a former inner city London teacher.