Pilot holes: an origin story and a prequel

Pilot holes: an origin story and a prequel

The Ms Tan Tales (Short Stories), Book Zero

Johor Bahru, January 2004. Tan Su-Lin is twelve (the Future Ms Tan), at the wrong end of the country from a shop the law has just closed, admitted “on condition” to a school where everything (the lessons, the announcements, the jokes, the punishments) arrives in a language she cannot hold. On her first morning she cannot find her own name on the class lists. She used to be a person who knew the words for things.

At the end of a corridor, a storeroom is being emptied. Workbenches come in on a lorry from Muar. A subject with three names and no teacher gets a new padlock on its door… until, one Monday in March, a woman walks into assembly carrying a wooden toolbox with a rope handle.

In the room behind the frosted glass, Su-Lin can read the tools but not the labels. It turns out to be enough. What happens there takes one school year and no translation; and twenty years later, in a Midlands workshop with rain on the skylights, it is still going on.

Pilot holes is the origin story of Ms Tan: the small one you make first, so the rest can go in without splitting.

The Ms Tan Tales: series description

Greencutting used to make things. Shears, billhooks, plane blades: the unglamorous cutlery of work rather than the dinner table. Now the drop-forge is a gym, the last edge-tool works is a retail park, and the old comprehensive has been re-clad, re-branded and absorbed into the Bright Lights Trust, which has a data dashboard for everything and a mission statement on the corridor walls.

In what's left of the Design and Technology Department (half its curriculum time gone, its workshop older than most of its staff), Ms Tan is trying something her colleagues would rather she didn't. No keyrings. No phone stands. Nothing you can put a number against by Friday. Just thirty Year 8s, a fictional town in 2050, and a term spent learning what it actually means to design something for someone else.

Each book (except for the short stories, like this one) is one term, told as episodes: one lesson, one Wednesday morning at a time, the way a school drama used to fill a Tuesday-evening slot and the way a scheme of work is supposed to build; not eight unrelated hours, but one thing, constructed in eight instalments.

Funny, sharp-eyed and set in a real place that isn't on any map, The Ms Tan Tales is a series about a teacher, her students and colleagues, and a subject the system stopped counting.