Psychological horror · 3 min read ·
The Teacher Who Said Every Name
A supply teacher at a village primary keeps mispronouncing one child's surname, and the registers the school holds about that family do not agree with what the children say in the playground.
- perspective: first
I have taught in eleven schools in nineteen years, and I have made a rule, since my second term, that I will say every child's name correctly on the first morning. It is a small thing. It matters more than most people realise, and I have seen children's faces change when a teacher gets their surname right, as though they have been counted for the first time. So when I took the year-four class at Saint Verel's Primary in the autumn, I went through the register slowly, with my glasses on, and said each name aloud.
I got to the last one and stopped.
The register said *Ada Fenn*, and I read it out, and the child at the back of the class, a thin girl with a plait over one shoulder, put up her hand and said, politely, "It's Fenn, miss. But it's pronounced like the fen, not the fern."
I apologised, said *Fenn*, and moved on.
On the Tuesday I said it again, *Ada Fenn*, and the girl did not correct me. She just looked at me with a small, patient disappointment, as if I had made the same mistake twice in a row on a sum she had explained.
On the Thursday I said *Ada Fen* — no, I thought, that is wrong too. I said *Ada Fenn* again, and this time the class went very quiet, and a boy in the second row whispered, "She's not called that," and the girl said, "Yes, I am," and then looked at me, and I felt the cold of it in my spine.
I checked the register that evening. The name was written in the office hand, neat and fair: *Fenn, Ada.* I checked the family contacts. The mother's name was Fenn. I checked the school's old records from the previous year, which I had not been given. The name was Fenn there too, in a different hand, and the note beside it said *Fenn (also spelt Fenn, to be used).*
It did not make sense. I went round the staffroom the next morning and asked the others. The office secretary said she had always heard the family called Fenn and did not think about it. The head said there had been a Fenn in the village for three generations and nobody had ever said it differently. The caretaker, who had been at the school forty years, shrugged and said, "It depends who's asking."
That was when I started listening properly.
The children did not all say it the same way. Some said *Fenn* like the fen in the marshes. Some said *Fenn* with the vowel stretched out long, the way you might say *fern* in a Yorkshire accent. A few said something I could not write down at all, a short, low sound with a click at the end, like a latch being lifted.
Ada never said it at all. When the other children called her name in the playground she turned round, but she did not answer to the sound. She answered to the look of the thing, to the shape of someone standing behind her with their hand raised.
I rang the school in the spring holidays and asked the office to send me the family's full record. They sent a letter. It said the record was sealed by request, and that the family had asked that the child be known at school by the name on her birth certificate, which was correct, and which was spelt in a way the office could not transcribe.
I wrote the name on a card and put it in my bag. I read it on the bus home. It was one name, but it looked like two, or like the same name said twice in two different voices, one loud and one soft.
I still say *Ada Fenn* on the first morning, carefully, and I still watch the faces. Ada's face does not change. But on the last day of term she came up to my desk after the bell and said, very clearly, in a voice I had never heard her use, "Thank you for trying, miss. Nobody else has."