A journey through education 1

My family were not educated folk. Good folk, but not educated. My mother, perhaps the major influence on me, was a former domestic servant. The mother of five sons, I was the fourth, I knew throughout my childhood, with absolute certainty, that she ached for a daughter. My father, a manual worker and 'ganger' on the local council, gloried in his sons.

When I first encountered the pain of school, war was already raging. It was an Anglican Elementary School, the Head, who dominated everything, was much more fundamentalist than one might have expected at such a school, He was also a Tory. I know because he told us so, incessantly. He worshipped God and Winston Churchill. Much of every school morning was taken up with his religious and political rantings. The other teachers, standing at the back of the hall, didn't dare to remind him that it was well past time for lessons to begin. His was the only lesson which required to be taught. We were 'gutter snipes' he despised us, walking along with our heads down. True Britishers would walk with their heads held high. Our parents were inferior beings. We shouldn't imagine that we were tougher than children at better schools. Not only did they have much superior intelligence than us, they could thrash us at boxing too. We should be grateful that Winston Churchill was our leader under God. Then yet another of the inescapable hymns. God was English, let there be no doubt about that.

It was a time of conflict, inside and outside of school. I fancy that wartime education for the working class was even more inferior than it had been previously. Many regular teachers were away at the war and our class rooms were dominated by some strange substitutes, their fear of us making them get their retaliation in first. We waged our own war against each other in the 'playground.' Then came the V1 and the V2. What marvellous entertainment.

I have no recollection of ever taking the 11+, although I do recall a period of evacuation with my mother and baby brother to a place, I believe, called Draycott in Derbyshire. I managed to evade all schooling during this period, a time of unhappiness among strangers. We returned to the London area after some weeks, my mother greatly preferring air raids to isolation. I can recall the Head singling me out for abuse during assembly, for 'running wild' during my period of evacuation. Why he required such a public setting to vent his spleen, rather than a quiet word in his study asking why I hadn't attended school during my period of evacuation, was, I fancy, more to do with his personal psychology than mine. For children in wartime Britain there was little understanding or caring of the trauma they were inevitably enduring. Collecting shrapnel, which was technically illegal, was our recreation.

I was at an elementary school and could remain there until leaving age, as one of my older brothers had done, or so I imagined.. No doubt some of my age peers left for better places at the age of eleven, but I have no recollection of that. Those of us deemed dull, merely continued beyond the war years. The glorious Labour victory of 1945 was greeted by cries of betrayal by the Head at his assembly orgies of self indulgence. Our parents were ingrates for not rewarding the preternatural Churchill with the election victory he had so richly earned, by winning the war for us. What scum we were, and even the redeeming virtue of being British could not alter the reality of our class. Out of this, and other things, was born my enduring attachment to socialism. Not so much a conviction as a visceral sense of knowing that I was a socialist and always would be.

Quite unexpectedly, with only 18 months of my sentence as a child still to serve, my elementary school was unnaturally transmogrified into a primary school. I and my fellow laggards were well above primary school age, so we were despatched to the nearest secondary modern for the remainder of our porridge. It was quite a short time to be at that sad apology for a school. Little of moment happened there, apart from the usual bashings in the playground, before I was cast onto the labour market at the age of 15. One teacher made a big impression on me though. A Welsh English language teacher archetypically called Mr.Evans. His passion for the language rubbed off on me a little, I think.

The Youth Employment Officer said that he would have little trouble in placing me. There was a vacancy for an errand boy with W H Smith. My father thought otherwise. He wanted all his sons to enjoy the apprenticeship he had never had, the very peak of working class aspiration. Difficult in my case, with not obvious aptitude. However, I was found a place as an apprentice grocer, with the International Tea Company's Stores, for five years. One of life's great examples of miscasting. I actually lasted for only one.