Ursula Askham Fanthorpe

Neil Chambers

U.A FANTHORPE COURSEWORK

Ursula Askham Fanthorpe is a modern poet; she was born in 1929 in London. Many of U.A Fanthorpe’s poems are based on school life as this is the area where she had experienced most of her life being a university graduate and an English teacher, this would make it easier for her to use this topic to write about. She was not impressed by the British school system, and found the job too demanding so she resigned and went on to write poems about things she had picked up from schools. She expresses her disgust for the British school system in three of her poems that I have studied, Half Past Two, Reports and Dear Mr Lee. In these poems she criticises the teachers of Britain.

The first of U.A Fanthorpe’s poems that I studied was Half Past Two. This poem is based in a primary school with the main characters being a young female teacher and a young boy aged at five or six. The little boy has done something wrong which we are not told and he is not quite sure either and he seems too scared to ask. U.A Fanthorpe also shows the incompetence of the teacher as she writes about the teacher also knowing the little boy has done something wrong but even she is not quite sure what. The young boy is told to stay in the classroom till half past two, the title of the poem. Still U.A Fanthorpe wants to show more incompetence in teachers as the young teacher in the poem forgets that she has not taught the young boy how to tell the time. She then starts to explain a young child’s grasp of the time. She writes how he knows “dinnertime” and “notimeforthatnowtime”, but he does not know half past two, and so the little boy is submerged into a time-freeze. Not knowing what time it is the little boy does not know what to do and is just still in the classroom for what seems like forever until the teacher finally returns. Yet again U.A Fanthorpe tells us how the teacher forgot all about the young boy as she writes the teacher saying, “I forgot all about you”. The young boy is then returned to his world of time as he is back in “schooltime” and he was back in time for “teatime”.

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The next poem, Reports, is about another young teacher this time being advised by an older teacher on how to write a school report. U.A Fanthorpe separates the two teachers’ discussion from the words in the report by writing those words in italics. The more experienced teacher explains to the new young teacher how to handle different types of pupils, such as troublemakers and little geniuses. The older teachers says not to write down “unmanageable oaf” as this will not only show up the pupil but also the teacher at not being able to control a child. The young teacher is also instructed not to put anything too special on the reports, “has made a fair beginning” and “satisfactory” will do. I think the older teacher in this poem is very strict and is trying to mould the new teacher into someone like her. This yet again is U.A Fanthorpe showing another flaw in the schools. However this works in favour of the older teacher as the new teacher wants to avoid criticism from pupils or parents.

The last of U.A Fanthorpe’s poems I studied is one where she expresses her admiration for a fellow writer called Laurie Lee. The poem is formatted like a letter entitled, Dear Mr Lee. A young schoolgirl who loved Laurie Lee’s book writes a letter to him about her English lessons and her English teacher. The girl goes on to write about how Mr Lee’s book was better than any Shakespeare. She explains how his book was the only thing that kept her going through her English lessons and that she hated the way they had to study the book. The girl felt that this is not how Mr Lee would want his book read. “I want to say sorry”, is what the girl writes in order to apologise for writing essays and answering questions on his book, because that is not what it was intended for. As the letter continues she slowly become more informal with Mr Lee as she starts to call him Laurie. From what U.A Fanthorpe wrote in that part of the poem I doubt if she would like us doing this coursework on her poems, and I agree with her. The girl in the poem starts to comment on her English teacher Mr Smart, as U.A Fanthorpe starts to express her thoughts about the schools in this country. She writes as if he does not encourage the pupils enough. “ Mr Smart says for anyone with my punctuation to consider poetry as a career is enough to make the angles weep”. This re-kindles U.A Fanthorpe’s hate for teachers, and the fact that the girl in the poem hates the way they study the books for exams, she says it spoils the book and I think the girl is really U.A Fanthorpe, getting her complaints about schools out through the innocence of a child.

In all three of U.A Fanthorpe’s poems she has a bad attitude towards British schools and expresses it extremely well in these poems with the forgetful teacher in Half Past Two, the old influential teacher in Reports and the discouraging teacher in Dear Mr Lee. She feels that it is the pupils who are going to lose out if the school system is not changed, and the younger generations will be in trouble with little education. U.A Fanthorpe writes in a very informal almost chatty tone, so not to put herself above the reader, and so to keep with that motive she uses everyday language so not to confuse the reader either, and her use of italics is to show different voices such as in Half Past Two the voice of the teacher, in Reports what is written on the reports, and in Dear Mr Lee it’s the words of the examiner on her work. In Half Past Two and Reports the words are organised into verses. This is to show what happens at different times in Half Past Two, and in Reports it’s to show the different stages in the first five verses, when in the sixth verse its put together as a metaphor for life, and then in the seventh verse it eventually comes to death with “rest in peace”. In Dear Mr Lee, the poem is like a letter with no paragraphs as the girl rushes to get in all of what she wants to say.

In conclusion U.A Fanthorpe is a modern poet and this is shown in both the style and subjects of her poems. U.A Fanthorpe’s attitude to the education system is somewhat rebellious and she expresses it well in her poems.