Extract

You could travel up the Blue Nile
with your finger, tracing the route
while Mrs Tilscher chanted the scenery.
Tana. Ethiopia. Khartoum. Aswan.

Location

This poem is not included in the programme owing to lack of space. However, Carol Ann Duffy did read and talk about the poem. Some of her comments are reproduced below.

Summary

'In Mrs Tilscher's Class' is taken from a collection of poems entitled The Other Country. This title refers to the writer L P Hartley's famous statement that 'the past is another country'. In her poetry Duffy frequently uses her memory and imagination to reach back into that 'other country'. 'In Mrs Tilscher's Class' sets out superbly the poet's memories of the change from childhood to adolescence, pinning down the movement from the pleasures and security of a happy childhood to the first uneasy stirrings of sexuality and the adult world.

Over the four stanzas of the poem there is a progression from the timeless memories of the sights and sounds and feelings of the primary classroom to an increasingly exact sense of time and the period of the early 1960s, and specifically in the final stanza to the last day of the summer term of her last year at primary school.

The sensually remembered paradise of Mrs Tilscher's class - 'the chalky Pyramids rubbed into dust', 'The laugh of a bell', 'The scent of a pencil slowly, carefully, shaved' - is gradually invaded by less comforting images that either come from the adult world - 'Brady and Hindley / faded, like the faint, uneasy smudge of a mistake' or are disturbing signs of the changes on their way - 'the inky tadpoles changed / from commas into exclamation marks'. In the final stanza even Mrs Tilscher turns away from the questions raised by the 'rough boy' about 'how you were born'. Left alone with her confusion in the face of impending adulthood:

You ran through the gates, impatient to be grown, as the sky split open into a thunderstorm.

What Carol Ann Duffy Said

Carol Ann Duffy - Passwords 1998