Danny was twelve years old and the most difficult person I have ever had to deal with. I had known him for three school terms, but I had known him by reputation much longer. Danny came to me after I had had two and a half years of teaching remedial forms in one of the toughest secondary modern schools in North London. And in one month I had more trouble from Danny than from any child or any combination of children in the whole of my teaching career.

The children who came to me in my remedial form came with a sense of failure even greater than that experienced by others, for however skillfully and kindly it was disguised, it was impossible for them not to know that they were in the lowest stream of the school. They were the non-readers and the non-writers, the failures among the failures, the stupid ones. And they reacted with belligerence or rudeness or plain bloody-mindedness and sometimes with apathy and resignation, which was the worst of all. But not Danny, I had thought—Danny was different, I told myself. But I was wrong. It was not until my last week in school and almost my last conversation with him that I knew that in spite of his arrogant, often expressed, and invariably high opinion of himself, it was a question which had exercised his mind.

“Am I stupid, Ma’am?” he asked that day with unusual diffidence. “No,” I said respectfully and, as it happened, truthfully in this case, though he was in a remedial form, he could hardly read or write, his arithmetic was woeful. But this was only on paper. For no one ever succeeded in shortchanging Danny, and when it came to dividing sweets or marbles, no one knew better than Danny how to manage the division so that he got a more equal share than anyone else.

I would have liked to think of Danny as a misunderstood child with a heart of gold beneath a rough exterior. He was certainly misunderstood, but there was little evidence of that heart of gold. He was universally detested: he was a vicious, cruel, lying, foul-mouthed child without any sense of loyalty or fair-play, destructive, aggressive, bullying, dirty and he stank. His only virtue—at least the only one I was initially aware of—was his physical courage. Though he was small, boys twice his size feared him. He would fight anyone, and usually did. And I never knew him to be involved in a fight for which he was not wholly or mainly responsible. Physical punishment did not seem to bother him—it seemed to be his daily portion either at home or school.

I also realized one day as I watched him thumb through a picture book during one of his rare moments of repose that he was beautiful. It had never struck me before, perhaps because he was generally so thoroughly disagreeable. But he was beautiful—he had a great mop of golden hair and bright blue eyes. His freckled face was small and triangular, his mouth wide and beautifully shaped. When he was smiling and happy, which was rare, he was enchanting. When he was quiet and absorbed, which was even rarer, his face was like a Botticelli painting.

As far as I could tell, no one—including his parents—liked him, except me. It was a liking I found difficult to justify to my colleagues, or even to myself—I have disliked far less nasty children. I was never sure whether he liked me—he came to depend on me and sought my company, but even towards the end was violently verbally abusive and thoroughly nasty. At first he would come to talk only after he had so infuriated everybody else that no one would play with him or talk to him. But later he came anyway, perhaps because he discovered that however atrocious his behavior had been I was always willing to begin again.

Danny soon discovered that it wasn’t easy to rile me—the usual methods didn’t succeed very well. And when he tried some unusual ones they didn’t succeed either. One morning he marched up to my desk with his arithmetic textbook, on the inside cover of which were two boldly executed drawings of the male and female sexual organs, badly drawn and touchingly inaccurate. Underneath the drawings was a startlingly vulgar two-line verse. If the spelling and handwriting hadn’t given Danny away as the author, his face certainly did. Looking angelically innocent he said, “I just seen this in me book, ma’am. Please, ma’am, what is it, ma’am?” I looked at it with thirty-five pairs of fascinated eyes fixed on me in a tense silence. I told him what it was. And the drawings, I said, besides being bad weren’t even correct and this was how they should look, drawing them on the blackboard. Did anyone want to ask any questions? No? Well, if they did at any time I would be happy to answer them. Danny, now very irritated at my lack of the kind of response he had expected, sneered, “You don’t know everything. You ain’t that clever.” Of course I didn’t know everything, I said. When I didn’t know something I asked someone who did or found it out in a book. As a result of encounters of this kind, and because Danny and the rest of the class soon discovered that I did not react to four-letter words, they stopped using them, except in moments of great excitement or anger.

Danny did know that bullying and any act of deliberate cruelty did make me angry. And we quarreled, often violently, when he provoked me in this way. These quarrels, and the clashes we had on two occasions when I knew with certainty that he had stolen money, were the most serious of our differences. On each of the two occasions, Danny resorted to self-righteous anger—a “how dare you accuse me of stealing” attitude—followed by verbal abuse of me and ending in sullenness. But each time after much arguing and appeals and even anger he was persuaded to return the money with me compromising to agree not to reveal his guilt—we pretended successfully that the money had been found.

Danny’s reaction to my refusal to punish him, or anybody, by thrashing him was initially one of contempt. He certainly didn’t respect me for it and would often say I was too soft. I didn’t thrash him, he said, because I was afraid of him. I said that perhaps it was because (i) I liked him, and (ii) just as I hated to see him beat anyone I hated to see anyone beating him. Then, he argued, he could really do anything and I wouldn’t tell. I pointed out that this wasn’t very intelligent and others were bound to find out and tell if I didn’t, and this would lead to both of us getting into trouble. He was bright enough to see the force of this argument although he greeted it with his usual disbelief—Danny, it seemed, disagreed with anything he hadn’t thought of himself. But it did have some effect, for I know he tried not to put me in positions which would, as he said, “get you in trouble with the head.” When talking about getting into trouble with the head he once asked me if the head could cane me as she so often did him. When I told him she couldn’t, he seemed disappointed and brooded on the injustice of it.

The head was a woman he had the greatest contempt for. Some of his criticisms of her were reasonable and some were quite outrageous. He would get angry when I refused to discuss her with him or to let him abuse her, but when he found that I had on several occasions interceded with her on his behalf, sometimes successfully, he stopped trying to force me into abusing her. But it didn’t stop him from disliking her or airing his views about her to the other children. His vocabulary of earthy words was marvelously rich and his skill in making effective combinations of these words was never greater than when he chose to embellish his comments on her—a talent which earned him the envy and respect of the other children and which I had to pretend not to know existed.

Danny would taunt me for not hitting him. “Yer afraid of me,” he would say. “Look at her,” he’d say to the class, dancing round the room, “just look at her. She’s scared of me.” Once, though, he got into a furious, hysterical rage because I wouldn’t let him hit a girl who, provoked beyond endurance, had yelled abuse back at him. He struck me. I slapped him, deliberately and very hard. Shocked into immobility, he looked at me with an almost ludicrous expression of amazement on his face, and all he could do for some time was to say over and over again, “You hit me.” Later, during the mid-morning break, he came to me, obviously feeling very ill-used. “Yer a lying bitch,” he began accusingly and went to tell me what he thought of me, liberally sprinkling his recital with choice epithets of a most unflattering nature. I thought I knew all the words but there were one or two I had never heard before. I decided it wouldn’t do to get angry, so when he finished I explained that I had slapped him not in anger but to bring him under control, and I told him about hysteria. He didn’t, of course, believe me at first but like most children Danny could tell when he was being lied to. And because he knew I never lied to him, not even when it made him angry or hurt his pride—for example, he would get very angry and hurt if I made even the mildest criticisms of his drawings—he believed me.

Once Danny tried to make me very angry by commenting contemptuously on the color of my skin. Danny himself, I knew later, had no strong feelings on the matter, but since this line of attack had always produced the most gratifying results, he decided to try it on me. When he saw that it was impossible to make me angry he became angry. Then he was curious and began to talk about it during one of our innumerable private sessions. I told him that my English husband's parents had objected strongly to the marriage because I wasn't white, and that my parents had objected just as strongly because they thought my husband's white skin made him inferior to me. Danny was impressed—it had never occurred to him that prejudice could work the other way round, but he was quite able to accept that it could—thus showing his superiority to my mother-in-law, who thought it quite outrageous that my parents should object not merely to her son but to a white man.

Danny said to me once, “Come to think of it, ma'am, it's stupid. Yer better’n a lot of whites and that's what counts, ain’t it? Bet your husband likes kissing you better’n he would her [this was the head] but your husband's mum would like her better cos she's white. Ask her to ask me, ma’am, and I'll tell her who's better. Reckin all the boys would rather kiss you than her.” It was not in Danny’s nature to say nice things for the sake of saying them or to agree sycophantically with anyone. I was flattered.

One morning when I came in earlier than usual Danny was in the classroom. He was crying. I was shocked: I had never seen him cry before. I had seen him bleeding after a fight, once with two black eyes, with a bottom sore after a caning, but I had never seen him cry. I didn’t know what to do but I put my hand on his head, which was bent over the desk. He shook it off roughly and shouted, “I ain’t crying. I gotta cold.” I went back to my own desk. A few minutes later he went to the door, locked it, came up to me and without a word pulled his shirt and sweater up and showed me his back. Diagonally across it were great red welts. I was so appalled I wanted to throw my arms around him and comfort him but I knew that sympathy in this form would not be tolerated. It was not so much the sight of his hurt back—I had seen Danny take tougher punishment—but his obviously deep distress which shook me. He loudly and angrily refused my offer to bathe and dress his back—“Don’t baby me”—but he let me do it later.

The story came out in bits and pieces over a period of days. Danny had a younger brother. They were the only children of what appeared to be from Danny’s description a weak, oppressed mother and a harsh, tyrannical father. I had met Danny’s father once, over a matter of changed grades in Danny’s report card. Danny’s grades, except those he got from me and the woodwork master, were always very poor. He had on this occasion changed, unskillfully, I thought, an E to an A. I had known nothing about it until the father came to the school to investigate. He was a severe, unbending man who had not a word of praise or love to say of Danny. I did not fail to notice how quiet Danny was and how white he grew when his father asked about the report card. Danny had denied changing the grade and said that one of the teachers must have done it. I did not wait to consider the ethics of the matter—Danny’s father had told me in detail what he intended to do if he found out that Danny had been lying. So, I said that I had changed the grade and that I was sorry for the mistake which had made the change necessary. I could see that he was taken aback. Perhaps he was disappointed. He then went into a long recital of Danny’s wickedness and became quite angry when I refused his offer to thrash Danny whenever I felt like it. “I give you permission,” he said. “It’s the only thing he understands.” Being as polite and tactful as I could for Danny’s sake, I indicated that it wasn’t permission that I lacked—I had never found it necessary to thrash Danny, which was true, although I often felt like thrashing him.

Danny told me about his brother and what happened that day. “Me brother, Timmy, ma’am, he’s a plastic. He walks all funny, ma’am, and he can’t sit proper even, ma’am. But ma’am, he’s a good boy, you know, ma’am, he’s a good boy.” This was, it seemed, the only creature on earth whom Danny loved. I sat and listened with wonder to this dirty and uncouth child conveying in language nothing could make unlovely, his love for this pathetic little brother of his. His tenderness, his unselfishness, scraping together pennies and ha’pennies to buy, secretly, little presents to please him. “He can’t run about and play like me, ma’am, and I sometimes tell him the stories you tell us in class, ma’am, only I don’t do it so good, ma’am, but he likes it all the same, ma’am.” It was a secret present from Danny which had led to the trouble. Danny’s father had seen Timmy play with one of those things called transfers—bits of paper with colored patterns which when soaked in water transfer the pattern to another surface—and had demanded to know where he had got it. Danny and Timmy did not get pocket money. Timmy, terrified into silence, had been unable to answer. Danny was out, the mother too afraid or too indifferent did not protect or protest, and Timmy had been slapped. Danny had come in shortly afterwards, and so distressed was he by Timmy’s distress that he forgot to be afraid and told his father it was very wicked to hit a child like Timmy. This infuriated his father, and Danny’s explanation that he had bought the transfers with money given to him by his mother only made things worse. The father refused to believe him and insisted that Danny had stolen the money, even when the mother had confirmed the story (it was only three pence.) Danny had been beaten with his father’s belt and sent to the bedroom and told he should stay there until his father left the house.

“I didn’t cry then, ma’am,” he told me. But when he came out he found Timmy huddled in a corner and still crying. He had sat for a long time with Timmy, telling him stories and comforting him until Timmy fell asleep. He didn’t mind being beaten, he said, but couldn’t bear it when Timmy was beaten. The father, it seemed, often threatened and sometimes carried out his threats, to beat Timmy if Danny misbehaved. “He didn’t hit him bad, ma’am, but Timmy can’t take it. He only slaps him, ma’am, soft-like, but Timmy’s not like me, ma’am.”

There was little I could do. I suggested to Danny that I should visit his parents. I said that I could make my desire to see Timmy, about whom Danny had told me so much, my excuse for visiting, and then I could gradually lead up to telling them how much Danny had improved in school, and that because I believed he could do even better I would like to help him after school in my own home. But Danny absolutely forbade interference of any kind. One reason he thought it wouldn’t do any good at all was that his father objected to me because I was colored. I think he sensed that I was outraged by his accounts of his father’s behavior. I am convinced that he did not lie or exaggerate about his father—for he never tried to exploit my sympathy by piling on the agony and scarcely ever spoke to me about his father afterwards. I was helpless and even today I feel I should have done more, but I don’t know what I could have done—interference against Danny’s wishes was out of the question. I had even thought of going to a child welfare agency, but all the unpleasant consequences this might have entailed, and eventually the fear that if sufficient reason were found to remove the children from their parents, Danny and Timmy might have been separated, made me abandon the idea. The one small consolation I have is that I succeeded in enlisting the aid and sympathy of some members of the staff when I told them about his circumstances. Before I left the school and England, I saw with great satisfaction that two of my colleagues had begun to take an interest in Danny, and I had evidence that some of the others were less harsh and more sympathetic to him.

Although I couldn’t go to Danny’s home, I did meet Timmy. I invited Danny to come to tea with me and Timmy. But this was not possible. Danny lived very near the school and although my house wasn’t very far, he didn’t think he could bring Timmy that distance as they would have to walk, and in any case he knew that permission would be denied. So one afternoon I stayed behind after school, having supplied myself with cakes and buns and bottles of orange pop, and Danny nipped home and brought Timmy back with him. Timmy was very like Danny but being quiet and shy, his extraordinary beauty, especially when his face lit up at the sight of the goodies spread out on my table, was immediately apparent.

We repeated these meetings several times. They never lasted beyond half an hour as Danny was always worried about being found out, but short as they were, these were some of the most rewarding experiences of my life. In the deserted school building with only the noise of cleaners’ buckets as they moved around the building (I soon came to an understanding with them that my room should be the last to be cleaned), we were like three happy hobgoblins at a feast. Soon most of my colleagues came to know of these meetings and eventually even the head knew. But nobody objected. One of them offered to say that she was responsible for the parties if ever we were found out—the father couldn’t object as much as she was not colored.

Danny was extraordinarily kind and intelligent and patient with Timmy. Timmy was not severely spastic, but the disability was very apparent. Sometimes Danny would ask me to tell the stories I told in class—his favorites were the stories of my childhood spent on a rubber plantation in Malaya during the Japanese occupation. More often he would talk about growing up and what he and Timmy would do. His dreams were never wildly imaginative and his ambitions not very interesting, but Timmy was always at the center of them and his aim always was to cheer him and make him smile. If ever he mentioned Timmy’s affliction it was in a very matter-of-fact way. He seemed to know that he must not pity, he must not fuss, he must not show distress. In their plans for the future, Timmy’s being spastic was never talked of as being an impediment, and I am sure that Timmy’s calm acceptance of his disability was largely due to Danny’s attitude.

I have never ceased to wonder at this isolated instance in Danny’s behavior of what I can only describe as genuine goodness. For in spite of his extraordinarily tender and sensitive treatment of his brother, he was utterly indifferent to suffering in others. Sometimes it was more than indifference; it was positively sadistic. I have known him to plague to tears a club-footed child, and the only time I didn’t feel sorry when he was caned was when he deliberately tripped up a child crippled by polio who wore calipers on her legs. He had also been very unkind to me about the scars left on my face by boils and pimples to which I am even now prone. “Yer not only black,” he said to me once, “yer black and pitted like a sponge what’s been dipped in coffee.” I could admire his imagery but I could not be happy about his cruelty. And although I have always been sensitive about my blemished face, I managed not to give him the satisfaction of reacting to his unkindness.

The only time I nearly hit him in anger was when I saw him tormenting a toad which had been crushed by a car and was dying in agony. I pushed him roughly aside and told him he was the cruelest, nastiest, most wicked person I had ever known. He must have been very surprised by the violence of my speech and action for he seemed unable to say or do anything after my push and landed sprawling on the ground. But as the toad was carried off by one of the boys to be killed humanely in the lab, he called out after me, “Going to have toad stew for yer dinner, are you? Ugh, you make me sick, you do.”

After having met Timmy, I once remonstrated with Danny when I heard that he had been plaguing the club-footed child. That child, I said, would be as hurt as Timmy would be if people laughed at him. “They’ve laughed at Timmy,” he cried, “so why shouldn’t I laugh at them?” I pointed out that it wasn’t the boy with the club foot or the girl with polio who had laughed at Timmy. Did Timmy laugh at people like that? I asked. Timmy hadn’t seen people like that, he replied. But Timmy wouldn’t be unkind, I said, because he knew how terrible it was when people laughed at him. I am sure Danny understood this—he had said that he wanted to kill the people who had laughed at Timmy—but there didn’t seem to be any carryover from this to his own behavior.

Our very last quarrel was over his cruel teasing of a very overweight West Indian girl in our class. I refused to talk to him for a while. At the end of that day, he came to me when all the others had left and said in an aggrieved tone, “To please you I said sorry to Janine and look what she done to me. She spit on me, on my face!” And he pointed to the glistening saliva flowing down from his left temple. I was unsympathetic. I said he deserved it and he was lucky she had only spat at him and not wrung his neck. He became very angry and left saying he never wanted to see or talk to me again and he was very glad I was leaving the school for I was a rotten old teacher anyway. This was a week before I was due to leave.

Two days before my last day in school, he asked me to lend him two shillings. He had never asked me for money before. I have no doubt that he would have stolen from me if I had not always taken great care not to give him the opportunity. I was to lend him the money but I was not to ask why he wanted it, and I must believe that it was very important. He would pay me back; he knew I was going in two days and he couldn’t pay me back before then, but he would pay me back somehow and he knew I was coming back to England. He was very much in earnest, so I let him have the money.

On my last morning I knew why. The children were gathered round my table for a last chat. Some of them had brought little presents—a handkerchief a little gray with age but neatly ironed and folded; an empty cigar box; marbles; a red ribbon; yellow hair grips for my black hair; a piece of uncertain embroidery from last year’s needlework class; a small cake of soap such as what is found in hotel rooms; a home-made catapult; a ball of what looked like gutta-percha; a packet of rubber bands; an uneven wooden box whose hinged lid did not fit, made by the boy who was the despair of the woodwork master; and several other touching mementoes of affection.

Danny was on the outskirts of this group and unusually silent. When the excitement had died down a little, he came round and stood behind my desk and placed before me a small package bound in colored paper, which he must have pinched from the art room. Everyone was excited; his was the only wrapped-up gift. “What you got there, Danny?” “What you give her, Danny?” came the cries. “Shuttup, you bleeding nits. You want for the head to come in and give us all trouble, her too? Go on, ma’am, open it. I bin saving to buy it.”

I opened the package with an excitement which was not wholly feigned. Inside was a packet of cigarettes and a small bar of milk chocolate. It didn’t matter that I loathe chocolate and that the cigarettes were a brand I particularly disliked. Everyone was impressed, and one of them generously called out, “It’s the best present, ma’am,” and another even more generously, “Don’t you be ‘fraid to say it’s the best, ma’am. We won’t mind.” I said all the gifts were important to me but Danny’s was important in a special way, not because he had spent more money on it, money he had saved—here I looked at him and he winked at me—but because although I had quarreled with him and scolded and punished him more than any of them, he did not bear me any ill will, and had shown that he was just as much my friend as the rest of them were.

“Go on, ma’am, smoke one, just to show you really like it, eh, Danny,” one of the boys cried. “Yes, ma’am, please, just one, and eat some chocolate too,” Danny said excitedly, always willing to aid and abet the breaking of rules. I protested that school rules absolutely forbade smoking in classrooms. “Oh, blast the rules,” several voices cried at once, only they didn’t say “blast.” I had to comply after windows were opened to let the smell out, and watch was kept at the door. If Danny ever finds out what a great effort it was for me to swallow that piece of chocolate—even the smell of chocolate makes me feel sick and milk chocolate more than any other kind—he will be convinced that my affection for him was very sincere.

No, Danny was not stupid. He was a great many other things, but he was not stupid, and I think he knew I was telling the truth when I said he wasn’t. It is four years since I smoked Danny’s cigarette and ate his chocolate. I have not met him since, and now that I am back in England, I am afraid to ask about him. I am afraid to hear that Timmy is dead, for he was always weak and ailing, and I had known for some time that he was not expected to live long. Danny would then be beyond any influence.

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