How Was Your Commute Today?

ALISTAIR PEEBLES finds Orkney school children exploring their own windows on the world with the help of visual artists.

HERE’S AN EXTRACT from Dickens’ Great Expectations (1861). The description is of Wemmick, the lawyer’s clerk, and it’s the first appearance in fiction of that familiar modern, the commuter (com: with; mutare: to change):

“Wemmick was up early in the morning, and I am afraid I heard him cleaning my boots. After that, he fell to gardening, and I saw him from my gothic window pretending to employ the Aged, and nodding at him in a most devoted manner. Our breakfast was as good as the supper, and at half-past eight precisely we started for Little Britain. By degrees, Wemmick got dryer and harder as we went along, and his mouth tightened into a post-office again. At last, when we got to his place of business and he pulled out his key from his coat-collar, he looked as unconscious of his Walworth property as if the Castle and the drawbridge and the arbour and the lake and the fountain and the Aged, had all been blown into space together by the last discharge of the Stinger.”

Fast-forward to Orkney, winter-spring 2004, and the northern component of a national project, Window in the World, a collaboration between artists and school children that focused on that bit of the day between home and … what fills the rest of the day. In their case, of course, the school. As they learn to commute, if that’s what they’re doing, how do our children shape up? How do our artists help them?

The project as a whole was devised and directed by The Working Party and funded by the Scottish Arts Council. It involved four Local Authorities: Glasgow, Dumfries and Galloway, South Lanarkshire and Orkney, and it culminated, in June this year, in an exhibition at the CCA in Glasgow: a chance for many of the children to meet each other and see their work displayed, performed and celebrated.

Since then, Orkney’s two Cultural Co-ordinators, Sheila Garson and Sheena Graham-George, have worked to compile an information pack on the local element of the project, plus DVD, to be issued to schools. The pack was launched in Kirkwall at the end of September.

“And delight is the characteristic quality of these journeys.”

Children from North Ronaldsay, Flotta and Evie – islands to the north and south, and a Mainland parish in the middle – worked with Sutherland-based filmmaker Gavin Lockhart, and each group produced a seven-minute film about that vital bit of the day between home and classroom.

The Evie kids also had the chance to work with a local sculptor, Frances Pelly. With her they made delicate, wire “sprites” that, as Pelly put it, recorded a different kind of journey. In this case, a journey around each of the dozen children themselves, beginning at one foot and going upwards to the top of the head (sometimes round a ponytail) and back down again to a hand.

The light-weight, airy shapes that resulted were made to be suspended in a stairwell at the CCA, and later this month they are to go on show in the Pier Arts Centre, where the films will also be played, and then on to Stromness Academy, the “big school” where half the Evie sprites themselves now travel daily. Sue Whitworth, headteacher, was full of admiration for the uncanny way that the pupils’ personalities seem to have been caught and held in these shapes. Indeed, it was she who called them “sprites”.

The three short films, each seven minutes, are also full of personality. Gavin Lockhart has an interesting and unconventional approach towards educational activity – exactly the right spirit to guide and be guided by the children – and while the films undoubtedly carry his own creative stamp, it is remarkable how directly they draw us into the children’s own world: not intruding, not fabricating anything, but sharing their delight.

And delight is the characteristic quality of these journeys. For all that the descendants of Wemmick may still grow harder and drier the nearer they approach their workplaces, these youngsters gleefully enjoy it all – remarking on the landmarks and rituals, listing the friends that join them in turn, and arriving at school brimful of energy: anything less like post-box automata it’s hard to imagine. I bet the teachers are glad about that.

“It turns out that all the kids in Flotta walk to school. All the way.”

The films were played for us in the order of their making. Somehow, in spite of the unfortunate choice of an “Arctic” February week for North Ronaldsay – a week that, with more irony than might at first appear, included county-wide school closures (the expected blizzards came to nothing very much) – the four children and Lockhart gave us something very convincing, and amusing, and, with the weird little band, quite surreal.

“North Ronald-say, so far away,” they sang. There’s some demographic oddness in the fact that the voices in the two island films were much more Radio 4 than Radio Orkney, whereas with the Mainland kids the reverse was true. However a couple of extracts from the local station – the weather forecast and closure announcements, and then the Director’s retrospective justification for the closure – added another flavour to the soundtrack’s musical mix. The film also included aircraft noise and shots from the air, a reference to the route taken when the children make the big step to secondary school.

The North Ronaldsay film is presented in a three-part panorama, the individual frames working against one another or showing different viewpoints of the same scene. It is effective, and helped make the best of limited opportunities, for they didn’t go outside much. As Lockhart said, “It was unwise to go far from any building.”

No such constraints a month later, however, with spring already showing. The Evie children carried their sprites into various locations out of doors, did aero-generator shadow-jumping up on Burgar Hill, and projected the video images of themselves onto the walls of a broch, on standing stones, and, hugely, on the wall of the aforementioned Academy. “It’s like we’ve already arrived there!” one said.

Like the other films, the soundtrack here was filled with the youngsters’ cheerful, confident voices, describing their journeys and telling their stories. And again, there was music, this time on fiddles.

The films were all enjoyable, and all quite different variations on a common theme, but there was something particularly appealing about the approach taken in the third of the films, on Flotta. It turns out that all the kids in Flotta walk to school. All the way. In fact between them they take 6,304 steps in each direction, daily. Jostling, chuckling children, with their hundreds of steps. Lockhart helpfully reminded us that these footsteps are taken on an island that is central to the North Sea oil industry.

“Window in the World gave us a look into a place that we all remember, and the filmic interface didn’t complicate things.”

It was a bold idea to concentrate on those hardworking feet and their trusty road. In fact you see little else on the film, except for quick flashes of what lies to either side, and a little sequence to do with the ferry: the ferry that will take them in turn to their own big school in Kirkwall. The red shoes that appeared in the last minutes were curiously compelling to watch.

Once again there was a terrific soundtrack, featuring the children’s own strongly rhythmical verse. This was recited with evident rhythmical pleasure and, as well as matching the steady beat of the steadily growing numbers of feet, it underscored a convincing sense of togetherness amongst the children, and a happy familiarity with their own corners and crossroads.

By contrast with the stereotype I quoted at the beginning, that sense of the journey to school as a shared, gregarious experience is what emerges most strongly from the films. The children are not commuters at all, of course, but remain happily in their own seamless world, a world apart from the inward, individual drive we get to know as grown-ups.

Here’s another quote, vaguely connected. It comes from Philip Roth’s American Pastoral (1997), from the chapter Paradise Remembered. The sixty-something narrator is in conversation with an old chum at their 45th high school reunion. “‘Well,’ I said, ‘after years and years of painting ourselves opaque, this carries us straight back to when we were sure we were transparent.’”

Window in the World gave us a look into a place that we all remember, and the filmic interface didn’t complicate things. It gave us, more or less straight, more or less transparent, the world through the uncomplicated eyes of childhood, through those children’s eyes: no small achievement.

© Alistair Peebles, October 2004