He was an art teacher of the old school; Feck knows
how he laid his way into a school. His name was Dylan Morgan. Christ he used to
smoke a pipe… Now they’d call him an extremist and hang him from the nearest
pole but this was back at the beginning before the Authority started to really
tighten its grip, before the Subversive Element existed and all the mass
corrections, before everything really. To me he was just funny old Mr Morgan
with his crazy ideas about ‘Personal freedom’ He even sounded funny when he was
saying it. Imagine it… ’Puuurrsonal Freeedom’ in a thick Swansea accent. ‘The
import-ants of Self Expresshunn’. He the man that taught me how to paint. How
to rebel.
I
don’t like to think it was just me that made them come for him. I heard a
rumour later that Dylan was using school printers to print leaflets, protesting
against having to teach Combat skills instead of rugby as part of physical
education.
He
suggested that the Authority’s changes to the curriculum were perverting the
natural course of free thought. He was worried we were heading for a new bout
of ‘English tyranny’ and was going to flyer some local schools to garner
support for a teachers’ strike… the photocopier he was using was also scanning
all documents and sending them to the Department of Consensus Correction.
They
didn’t like what they saw. But they wanted to be sure he was a threat before
making any radical steps. Maybe they were hoping for a poster-boy for the
implied corruption of their perfect youth. I remember around that time that we
were never allowed to wear anything with a hood because’ the era of hoodies was
over.’ That was why they took us out the cities in the first place. Out of
sight out of mind.
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