Names for the Sea, page 7
You should have just come in, explains the teacher who eventually comes, conducting us past an electrician who is being watched by a group of four-year-olds as he works on the fire alarm. No signing-in book, nothing to stop people with samurai swords or guns coming in and taking the toddlers hostage, or indeed taking one away. When we lived in Oxford, I explain, the nursery had a video-entry system and two doors and the outer door was always answered by two members of staff together. Yes, she says. We hear that these things happen abroad. And now here is Katrin.
Katrin is the head, and she shows us around. Each room has areas for drawing and painting, for messy play, for playing with model farms and zoos and dolls’ houses, for building train track and Lego. They have singing every day, and a dance teacher comes once a week. The children spend at least two hours a day outside, no matter what the weather, so they must have proper winter clothes. The food is Icelandic, traditional Icelandic, no pizza or pasta or any of that, they eat far too much of that at home. Independence is important and children are expected to fasten and unfasten their own snowsuits, gloves, hats and scarves. (In the event, we discover, the children help each other, four-year-olds doing the zips for three-year-olds and three-year-olds putting two-year-olds’ boots the right way round.) All the other children attend 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., five days a week, but if we want a different arrangement that is certainly possible. And here is Herdis, who would be Tobias’s keyworker. She’s Icelandic and has just returned from a year studying child development in Germany with her own young son, so she knows about being a temporary foreigner. This is Tobias, I say, because that is what it says on his birth certificate, and although we’ve called him Tolly from birth we’d always agreed he’d be Tobias when he went to school. No, I’m Tolly, he says. Tolli is an Icelandic name, Herdis tells him. That’s me, he says, Tolli. Having re-named himself an Icelander, our son sits down with Herdis and the toy farm and doesn’t want to leave. It doesn’t take him long to learn to climb the spider’s web and sit crowing on the top, higher than I can reach, or to learn to ride one of those tricycles, or to ask Herdis in Icelandic to push him ‘as high as the sky’ on a swing. After the first couple of weeks, he begins to use Icelandic words at home. I try to reply in Icelandic, to help him name his bath, his cup, his book, but his pronunciation is better than mine, and three weeks later he stops speaking Icelandic at home and stops speaking English at nursery. By Christmas, he is bilingual, and sounds like an Icelandic child speaking Icelandic, getting the grammar and syntax right. I try not to ask him, my three-year-old, to translate for me at the pool and shops when I’m embarrassed by my own linguistic inadequacy. He comes to terms with Icelandic food, and when Anthony tries to collect him after lunch, according to our special arrangement, he howls in protest. He wants to stay for kaffitími, coffee-time. We extend his hours, but not much, not to Icelandic levels, because we still know best.
By the end of August, term is about to start for me too. I think you could feel the seasons turning in a university without knowing anything at all about students or teachers or the rhythms of the academic year. There’s a stirring of the air, a fluttering of pages, a sense of something beginning to seep along the corridors and lap at office doors. I’ve spent afternoons in the National Library without seeing anyone but a soft-footed librarian, but now there are murmured conversations somewhere on the other side of the modern languages section, a mobile phone ringing, doors swinging, and, once, fresh bloody handprints on the door at the top of the stairs. (In England I would, I think, have called over a librarian if not actually the police. Here, I assume someone had a nosebleed or a menstrual disaster and hope the cleaners will be along soon; I am not thinking like a citizen.)
The university had planned to demolish the building that houses the Faculty of Foreign Languages, because it’s old and single-glazed and you have to use your hands to open the doors, because it’s un-Icelandic. All state building programmes are now suspended, and we will have to make do with what we’ve got. I taught for several years at a mid-ranking English university in a Portakabin erected as a temporary measure in the 1970s, which, thirty years later, had not only a rotten floor and leaky roof but pigeons and the occasional squirrel in residence, and I can see nothing wrong with Nýi Garður. There are four floors, each with a bathroom at each end – for both men and women, which I find unreasonably disconcerting, as if it’s worse to be heard peeing or seen putting on mascara by male colleagues – and offices off long corridors. It’s warm and smells faintly of floor polish and clean clothes, and my office is across the corridor from Pétur, next door to Matthew and two down from Hulda Kristín. I feel buttressed there, surrounded by friends and people who know where I’m coming from. It’s the only place in the country where I feel entitled to be. None the less, I leave my office plain, its lino floor and white walls echoing at each other. I bring in a shelf of books, only what I need to teach, because I need the others to help us feel at home in the Big Flat (named by the children to distinguish it from the hotel room where we spent the first days in Iceland). Then I sit there and do my job, in a white box that looks out onto a wall, where on bright days I watch the shadow of my own building creep up and then down the other building. Other offices along this corridor are thoroughly inhabited, with oak desks, velvet sofas, indoor trees, oil paintings, for these jobs are for life. British academics are a mobile bunch, tending to move hundreds of miles with every promotion, and most departments include several people who commute from the other end of the country, or even from another country, because their families have refused to move again or because their partner specialises in a kind of medieval history or neuroscience that happens at only one institution. People’s offices usually have a few boxes in the corner, full of things that never got unpacked or that are awaiting the next move. It’s not surprising to see a suitcase under the desk. There is no sense of this provisional, conditional way of living at Háskóli Íslands, no flicker of sideways glances at other institutions offering other jobs that might be nearer home or have a better library or saner colleagues. There is the University of Iceland, and, unless you work in Business Studies or Computing in which case there is the private University of Reykjavík, that is The University. All the MPs went there, all the lawyers (by definition, for where else would you read Icelandic law?), almost all the doctors and social workers and teachers. They all know each other. Until recently, doctors were required to complete their clinical studies abroad, partly because Iceland’s population isn’t big enough to provide sufficient teaching cases of unusual illnesses, traumas and complications, and until recently Háskóli Íslands offered doctoral degrees only in Icelandic Language, Literature and History, but now you can go from kindergarten to professoriate without leaving Reykjavík 101. Some people don’t think this is a good idea: I’m beginning to recognise the usual Icelandic tension between independence and insularity.
As teaching approaches, I wake earlier, take longer to go to sleep, need to extend my evening walks out beyond the Álftanes peninsula before the chatter in my brain goes quiet and I can see the wind on the water and the city lights over the bay without having to hold back a curtain of egotistical anxiety. My usual late-summer nightmares start up again, a month earlier than usual. I dream, annually, that all educational qualifications lapse after ten years and that I therefore need to retake every exam. I scramble for GCSE Latin, Biology, Religious Studies, for my lost A-level surefootedness around the treaties that ended the War of the Spanish Succession, for the French pluperfect subjunctive, for undergraduate Anglo-Saxon and the point of The Faerie Queene. I rediscover every September that I have forgotten my education, just as I am supposed to begin again to pass it on. But this time it’s worse; not only do I not know exactly what was changed by the Act of Union or the Corn Law Reform but nor do I know whether I am supposed to take a register, if the students are expecting lectures or seminars, or indeed how to find the lecture hall.
The university, like most, has older and newer buildings, but here they are linked by a web of surface and underground corridors that I never come to understand. There is no campus map, a state of affairs that begins to feel typically Icelandic: if you already know your way around, you don’t need one, and if you don’t know your way around, you shouldn’t be there anyway. Sometimes Matthew is in his office next to mine, happy to explain the coding on the timetable by which ‘A’ can mean one of three buildings, two located at opposite ends of the main campus and the other on the far side of town, but on my first day of teaching he’s not there. I set off for class, which cannot be more than two hundred metres away, half an hour early. I rule out the first two buildings I try, which turn out, after I’ve climbed three flights of stairs and walked five corridors, not to contain enough storeys or rooms to make sense of the room number. I still have fifteen minutes. I hope the students’ English is good enough to follow the material I’m planning to discuss. I hope my corduroy skirt and cotton jersey top are not unusual wear for a university lecturer here. I hope I haven’t smudged my mascara. I work my way back to a corridor I’ve traversed before, and glimpse the building third on my list of possibilities, but now I can’t get out. The door I want doesn’t open when I walk up to it, and there is white writing on a green sticker across it that almost certainly means ‘emergency exit’ but has extra words as well, probably warning that alarms will sound, alerting the whole institution to my foreign-ness and incompetence, if I take matters into my own hands and push on the door handle. I go back down the corridor. Doors slide. There are people going along but no-one else trying to get out, although there are several of these green-stickered doors. I go the other way but there is no way out towards the building where I think forty-five students may be waiting to hear my thoughts about English Romantic poetry. I go back, round, out through the student cafeteria, but I can’t see the building. I traverse a car park, late now, the wind whipping my hair over my head, rain hurling itself over my glasses, up a flight of concrete stairs. The hour has struck and there are fewer people moving around. I approach a door that does not open and has no green sticker and, thinking that I have a whole car park into which to run if alarms sound, haul it open. Someone behind me coughs and presses a button in the wall that causes the door to glide towards me. The rooms on the ground floor have the right letter code but the numbers are too high. There must be a lower floor. I hurry along the corridor, my heels tapping an authority I lost at Gatwick. Most of the doors are labelled with someone’s name and a job title that might be ‘janitor’ or ‘vice-chancellor.’ There must be stairs somewhere. I rush to the other end of the corridor, ten minutes late now. No stairs. Someone’s door is open and I tap and put my head around, I’m very sorry I don’t speak Icelandic, but where is room 49, please? Downstairs, she says. Yes, but where are the stairs? She looks at me as if I have asked where the sky is. At the end of the corridor, of course. Which end, I want to ask, but I don’t dare. I run back to the other end and find that the penultimate door bears a small label in the same font as people’s names and job titles, ‘stigahús’. Stiga could mean stairs, I think, and I’m fairly sure it’s not the Gents or the president’s office, so I open it cautiously, and there are the stairs, and at the bottom of the stairs, along the corridor on the left – though with the cars being on the wrong side of the road even my sense of left and right has become less reliable than usual – is room 49. I try to smooth my hair, wipe my forehead on the back of my hand, and go in. Here, at least, anthology in hand, I know what I’m doing.
And so, it turns out, do the students. Class sizes are at least twice as big as I’m used to, and my groups of around forty are smaller than my colleagues’. But the students are incontrovertibly adult in a way that British undergraduates en masse are not. Anyone who has finished high school has the right to attend Háskóli Íslands, and there are state loans available for subsistence and no fees to pay, so with rising unemployment there are several reasons to go to university and no reasons not to do so. The result is an unprecedented number of students with no increase in university staff, and English is a popular choice because it seems easy to people who have grown up watching American television, reading British and American magazines and listening to British and American as well as Icelandic music. Many of the students plan to become English teachers. Some see an English degree as a way out of Iceland, and a few love English literature. The shortage of staff means that we have to merge third-year and postgraduate classes and that group sizes are rising to the point where a classroom discussion is becoming impossible. At home, there would be outrage and despair. Here, we go to staff meetings where people knit and agree that the situation is unsustainable, that none of the possible ways forward is satisfactory and that something – admissions criteria, budget allocation, contact hours – will have to change. Then they shrug and go back to work, teaching groups of forty and up without handouts, which we can’t afford to print, or scholarly texts, which we can’t afford to buy. There’s always the internet. Þetta reddast, everyone always says at the end. It will sort itself out somehow.
After a few of these meetings, I talk to Matthew. I’m torn between admiration for my colleagues’ sangfroid and horror at the conditions they seem willing to accept. How can the students learn without discussion, I demand. How can we teach them to engage in critical debate when the most recent books in the library were bought in the 1970s? How can we teach them to write when there is no time to read their writing? He shrugs. I know, he says. I know it seems impossible but we get by. Þetta reddast. Calm down. Do your best. At least you don’t have to fill in any forms.
He’s right. My Icelandic working life is almost entirely unregulated. If I want to offer a new course at home, I have to fill in forms specifying learning outcomes, teaching methods, implications for resources, contact hours and primary and secondary reading lists. I am bound to follow these specifications in the classroom. I must take registers and upload the data onto the system. I must set essays of the approved length, getting the titles approved by the external examiner before issuing them to the students, and return these essays at the approved time, having provided written feedback that fills the approved space. I must give grades in accordance with the official marking criteria, and these grades’ conformity to the criteria must be confirmed by a colleague. I must report concerns about students’ health and welfare to the Student Support Officer. I must fill in forms detailing how I divide my time between teaching, research and administration. Older colleagues at home find these systems insulting and burdensome, and complain of over-regulation and a culture of infantilisation and distrust. Most of it seems more or less reasonable to me, but I do believe that I would continue to do my job to the best of my ability without surveillance. I’m looking forward to a year of free practice, teaching what I consider important and setting the work I think useful without needing to report and justify myself at every turn.
*
The students are older than at home, and, if only in matters of style, more diverse. In England, there is a de facto uniform for undergraduates which changes every couple of years. When I left, I was usually the only woman in the room not wearing tight jeans with flat sheepskin boots. Here, there are people older than me dressed as if for a day at the office, women my age in skirts and sweaters, younger people in younger clothes. While I’m waiting for the students to read a passage, I look at the feet under the desks, and feel cheerfulness rising at the sight of hiking boots, high heels, brogues and Mary Janes. Icelanders leave high school at twenty, and so without interruptions to their education would be in their mid-twenties by the time they reach my combined third-year/MA classes, but most of the women have had interruptions. Icelanders have children much younger than Europeans and North Americans. It’s normal, the students assure me, when they ask about cultural differences and I tell them that students at home are rarely parents. We don’t understand why you’d wait until your thirties when you’re interrupting your career and the pregnancy’s more likely to be complicated and you must get more tired, they say. It just makes more sense to start in your twenties and then make a career. There are so many assumptions built into this comparison that I don’t know where to start. I explain about the cost of British childcare, and about employers’ discrimination against mothers, and about the expectation that women will spend years at home with the children. There are no stay-at-home mothers in Iceland, which is why there are no toddler groups. Everyone takes nine months’ parental leave, divided between the father and mother, and then there is forty hours a week of highly subsidised, high-quality childcare, and since no-one commutes this is enough for parents to work full-time. Students can have babies without undue financial hardship. There is no particular expectation that the person with whom you have babies in your twenties will be the person with whom you live in your thirties, the students explain, no stigma around the separation of parents or the mutability of love. Gender discrimination, it seems to me at the beginning, is simply not an issue in Iceland. I have a year’s holiday from the guilt that blights the lives of working mothers at home.
So many in the class assembled to learn about English Romantic Poetry are parents, and it does make a difference. A great deal of Wordsworth’s early poetry is about children, and for the first time I am not the only parent reading it. Mothers, I find, have less patience with Keats. Older women are more likely to notice Austen’s deep scepticism about marriage, less likely to insist on reading her as a romantic novelist. Everyone who turns up in class does all the reading, and those who don’t turn up are no concern of mine. There is no register. Icelandic students attend class or not, as they see fit, and in fact in the absence of regulations are much more careful about sending apologies than students at home whose attendance is monitored and recorded, and who can expect threatening e-mails and summonses if they miss too many sessions. Icelandic students do not seem to confide personal problems to academic staff, although as the weeks pass I begin to think that it is not an Icelandic habit to confide personal problems to anyone. University lecturers are in no way in loco parentis, and freed of my institutional obligation to be police-officer, mummy and teacher in one handy package, I find myself more interested in the students’ lives. For me and for them, it seems at the beginning, lack of regulation coincides with greater personal responsibility. Maybe, I think, this is how Iceland works, and the abominable driving and indeed the economic crisis are the dark side of an unfamiliar but sometimes functional approach to rules and responsibilities. The children at Tobias’s nursery, unfettered by what would be basic safety precautions at home, are not smashed on the concrete but confident and independent in their own estimation of their limits. The students turn up well-prepared and open-minded. Nobody abducts six-year-olds making their own way to school. Playgrounds are not vandalised, teenage girls are not wolf-whistled, no-one fears mugging or car theft. Babies sleep in prams on the pavement while their parents try on clothes or sit over coffee with friends. I hear myself sounding much more right-wing than usual and remind myself that Iceland, even if it is not the classless society claimed by many Icelanders, has a far smaller gap between the rich and the poor than Britain, that low crime rates are usually associated with socio-economic equality, that there are complex reasons and a unique history behind Icelanders’ differences from the rest of Europe. There is, I hypothesise, six weeks in, something more like social equality, more trust, and better behaviour, at least until people find themselves behind a wheel or running a bank.
