Andrew McPake

The bride and I first met when my arrogance and pedantry drew the attention of four hundred people. Or rather, they inflicted themselves upon four hundred people, of which she was one. In my first seventeen years on the planet, I acquired many facts and little grace. Any point-scoring opportunity was enough to bring a giddy smile to my acne-ridden face, even if that meant interrupting our professor during the inaugural lecture of our degree. I can’t remember what I said. However Jenna, the bride, claims to remember my precise words in each of the multiple versions of the story that she tells.

The evening reception has now begun and the guests have been able to escape the enforced diversity of carefully planned dinner tables for the shelter of their homogenous clans. We share attributes. My table is: 27, from Fife, a graduate of the University of Glasgow and unemployed. And not just unemployed, but an unemployed teacher. It completed its Postgraduate Diploma in Education (PGDE) in 2009. It secured a temporary contract last year. It spent June in an interview suit. It did so squeezed out by this year’s probationer teachers.

The Scottish Government is keen to avoid a third consecutive year in which the number of unemployed teachers increases. To massage the statistics, it appears that priority has been given to those who completed their PGDE in 2010. That’s great for those who have just completed their probation year. But not for us: The Forgotten Generation.

The wedding reception, at Dunfermline’s Garvock House Hotel, is something of a homecoming for this generation. However, poverty has driven many of us back already; The Boomerang Generation returns to the familial home whenever times are tough. Jenna is the only one of us who won’t be on the supply list in August – she has secured a temporary contract that sees her working three days in one school and two in another. 

Are we Boomerangs? Or Forgotten? Or Forgotten Boomerangs? It’s hard to know what to call our generation, or any for that matter. Only the term ‘baby-boomer’ has ever truly stuck from cradle to grave. If my father was born in a baby-boom, we were raised during an economic one. Though at the time, we did not regard it as such. The then Chancellor, Gordon Brown, confidently assured us that he had brought “an end to boom and bust”. This was the New World Order, the consumer paradise that we, the children born during the Thatcher era, were to inherit.

As infants, we had toys that our ‘boomer’ parents could only have dreamt of. University entry was a breeze. Once at University, those of us with slightly better off parents would have flats purchased for us in the certainty they would go up in value.  I’m not the only one with a bit more humility about me these days.

Despite the impressions of some, there has always been some humility in me though; the mere site of a dance floor is enough to bring on a bout of social awkwardness befitting an adolescent. I regard my limbs with all of the trepidation that my less able students regard words with. While the majority make a bee-line for the ‘floor, I cling to the table for dear life.

Not that I don’t love music. My father taught me more about The Beatles than he ever did the Bible. In fact, we even used to play a game in which he would quote one line of a Beatles’ song only for me to respond with the next. Sat next to me is Brian, a fellow chorophobe and Forgotten Boomerang. We take turns guessing each song that the wedding band plays from the opening few bars. It takes all of two syllables in the line “Well she was just sev-en-teeeen” for me to liturgically interject “When I Saw Her Standing There – The Beatles”. Brian responds as an adult would to being told how to tie their own shoe laces. The song is fitting though, given that most of us met when we were seventeen, and now teach seventeen year-olds.

As with all weddings, there are many friends of friends present. Michelle and her new boyfriend don’t share Brian & I’s apprehension. They throw in a very public display of affection for good measure.

“She looks like she’s enjoying herself!”

“Well… she deserves it.”

“What do you mean?”

Brian doesn’t really know Michelle and thus isn’t privy to her open secrets. Inadvertently, and with a News International journalist’s regard for discretion, I proceed to tell Brian about Michelle’s fortunes over the past two years.

 I first met her when we studied Law at Glasgow; when we were just seventeen. We didn’t socialise at the time. However, we were both stunned to find each other in teacher training two years after graduating; I thought I was alone in abandoning a legal career to become a Modern Studies teacher. I was yet more pleased when her boyfriend Ieuan and I hit it off the first time we met.

“A bromance then, eh?”

You could say that. A mutual obsession with all things Welsh, especially rugby. But while our bromance blossomed, Michelle’s friends soon told me what he was actually like. When Ieuan lost his call-centre job in Glasgow he became, controlling, possessive. Just as teacher training had rejuvenated Michelle’s social life, unemployment had obliterated his. He soon told her that her girlfriends were ‘trying to break us apart’ and would feign illness in order to prevent her going out.

“She’s no the type that ‘ill put up wi’ that sort of control, surely?”

Of course she wasn’t. But when she tried to separate with him, Ieuan pointed out that moving out would force him back to the Valleys. Michelle’s parents had bought her the flat during the mortgage boom of the last decade and she sorely needed a flatmate who could contribute to paying it. Still, for his sake, she put that thought aside; Ieuan remained in the flat. However, she insisted that the relationship was over.

That was at the beginning of her probation year – the year’s worth of employment that newly qualified teachers receive on leaving teacher training. They must specify five local authorities in which they are prepared to work. Given that two of Scotland’s teacher training institutions are based in Glasgow, needless to say the authorities in this area are subject to a clamour for places. Not that those people should be blamed; those with no ties waives their preference in order to pocket eight grand for choosing to work anywhere in Scotland.

But Michelle had ties. She had a property that was on the precipice of negative equity – one that cannot be sold. And she had Ieuan. She would come home to him, everyday, in flat strewn with litter, to find him sat playing computer games or watching DVD box sets. Evasive action was taken; she would spend most evenings in her room with marking for company, but it was only a matter of time before the pleading started.

It is not difficult to explain that the woman who had earlier inverted one of Scotland’s foremost gender conventions and proceeded to spin her boyfriend at a nauseating speed during Strip the Willow was a strong one. But has Ieuan eventually did return to Wales, his unemployment was replaced by hers.

Brian nods, more than aware of the fact that barely 20% of Scotland’s probationer teachers secured permanent contracts last year. He knows what it is to cling to the wreckage of temporary contract after temporary contract, whilst the river flow of debt consumed your diminishing disposable income. All of us are wearing dresses and kilts we can ill-afford, drinking what little money we have left before being forced to sign-on.

The bride herself told me that she can’t start a family until she finds that island in the Pacific – a permanent contract. Nor will any bank entertain a mortgage request until she has one. In order to improve her employment prospects, Michelle took an Open University course in History. I often wonder what the dole queues of the depression would make of the idea 21st Century Law graduates on the brew.

That’s why I was delighted for Michelle having her new man. At least she had done something. At least she hadn’t been forced back home. As a seventeen year old pseudo-intellectual, one of my favourite forms of pretentiousness was reading Albert Camus’ Myth of Sisyphus. Sisyphus pushed a rock up a hill never to reach the top. And for all that Michelle and I had done, ‘when I saw her standing there’ I realised we were in almost exactly the same place after ten years: broke and at home. Though, at least ten years ago we had our delusions. Where will our students be in ten years?

The above is a work of fiction based loosely on true events.