Chapter 14 - Educating The Alien

 I started college to study 'O' levels in Sept 1980, when I was nineteen years old, on the dole, and living in the parental house. It was the first time that I had designed how to use my time rather than having to agree with somebody else's plan for me that also happened to be for their gain. Before these new studies I had gone through three training courses and done one quite basic job over three years. None of what I did on those courses was designed around who I was and what I wanted to do. All of them were makeshift plans with no planning for what to do next before, during, or after, they were completed. At least with the supermarket job I had proved that I could work as part of a team, depending on the team and team leader.

In the autumn of 1980 there was not much team spirit left in the parental house. In fact life there had become rather like being stuck in the middle of some strange emotional seesaw, with nowhere to grip and a parent on each end seat. Both parents saw it as their role to exert maximum emotional weight downwards, to upend the other end of the seesaw, as if that was all there was left for them to do. My best choice would have been to leave the house/get off the see saw and see my parents less. But to do that I had to know how to have a plan to find somewhere else to live first. One reason for doing the 'O' levels was about finding out how to think and plan that far ahead. As I was only just starting the education of my choice, I felt unable, as yet, to plan how to change my life and escape from my family. If I was barred from my best choice due to inexperience then my second best position was staying in the middle of the see-saw and learning to balance there better. Learn how to stay where there was the least amount of emotional pressure, the least amount of movement.

On one end of the seesaw, whilst trying to keep family at a distance from him, was dad. He was unemployed and attached to his similarly unemployed mates. He very politely made the idea of family as a unit seem as detached from him as humanly possible, whilst vaguely implying that we should all still feel like family to each other, but not to him. He was very keen that we should go nowhere near the question of how much money he spent on beer with his mates, week on week. 

On the other end of the seesaw was Mother who from the foundation of the household had held the family finances together and done it with a well practiced thrift. This thrift was ideological in character and it was driven by her memory of rationing from the time of World War two and after. It included her growing vegetables to feed the family. It was impossible, though, to point out to her that what she did was less 'digging for victory' and more digging to keep as much distance between her and the fear of debt as she could get. Through carefully planned spending she tried her hardest to stretch every pound go as far as it would stretch, whilst she knew that the unknown sum of money that dad spent on getting drunk would have saved her a lot of sweat and effort. She did not stint on making the money go farther than it was expected to, often at the expense of all lightness of mood and humour. If there was one thing I wanted to do sometimes it was to lighten her mood. But since only having more money and being assured of it's supply would do that, then that was for dad to do and he was not interested.

When dad made himself unreadable as a person I often found myself pushed towards Mother, in part to 'take his place' alongside her. Dad kept Mother at a greater distance from himself, and kept himself to himself, more than anyone could reasonably expect. I did what I thought I should, even as I sometimes felt press-ganged into service around Mother. But in the last year there had been personal changes for me that made my life around Mother seem more voluntary. I wore clothes that I felt happier wearing, I bought air-wear shoes, bought off the market, flared jeans, bought cheap because they were out of fashion, a Spanish civil war army belt, and ex-East German army shirts with the red yellow and black flag on the left upper arm, belt and shirt sold cheap at the recently opened small second hand army surplus shop, close to the parental house. My first thin but definite beard and moustache helped to make me less the person Mother had previously thought of as being in her image.  

My family had given me an education which had tied me to them, which had also left me unskilled and unemployable, whilst they claimed that they wanted me to have the best of jobs. In addition they saw no value to them in me finding any personal space for myself outside of them, whether that space was to do with work or it was to do with personal interests. What I hoped with my passing four 'O' levels was that the qualifications would give me a foundation of my own, through which to move away from family, which would set me up for both work and life. In any discussion I attempted with family they implied that my education had been for best when it was under their control. In any attempted discussion it was difficult to say to them 'Then why did I not take more exams when I was under your control?' They could not deny that after four false starts in work and training in three years they could not stop me from wanting to learn and to move away from false starts altogether. 

With my 21 hours a week in college whilst signing on fortnightly I chose to study English Language, Mathematics, Computer Studies, and History. My time keeping was good and my attendance of classes was diligent. I wanted the learning to be for it's own sake as well as for what an exam pass certificate might tell some prospective employer. One simple event that happened outside of education was a great help. For as long as we were a family we had cleaned our ears of what we thought was excess wax with the ends of matches. When stuff came out we thought our ears were clean and blamed the speaker when as family we failed to hear each other properly. We did not even use up the small bottle of olive oil that was over twenty years old that was in the medicine cupboard to loosen the wax first. On my own I went to the family GP and sought to have my ears examined. Dr Ward avoided the local joke about 'There are potatoes growing in there'. He was too distant a figure to do humour, though for what I thought he said a joke would have shown me he recognised what I was there for. He gave me drops to put in each ear, three drops for fifteen minutes at night every night for ten days. Then I attended my appointment with the nurse to have my ears syringed with warm water. For all the softener that had been applied the wax removal was still quite painful and I was amazed at the size of lumps of wax that came out. But when the soreness left my ears the results in clarity of hearing were remarkable. I finally understood more about why I went off subject so easily when I was in classes in college and why my concentration had been so poor in the past.

For the first time in ten years I studied sentence structure, the names for the different parts of a sentence, and I had to check my spelling and use of punctuation. I felt like I was a trainee mechanic in language, I found keeping up with the rest of the class to be hard work. Years later I would be told that I had borderline dyslexia. Back then if my teachers saw that then they never told me. I enjoyed discovering that I had a better vocabulary than the sixteen year old grammar school students I was learning with. Part of my better vocabulary than them came from all the journalism in the music magazines that Mother had been given to give to me. I could not account for how I cut an odd figure in all the classes I attended where in each class I was a little older than the other students but I was catching up a lot more than they were. I had a short thin-but-getting-thicker black beard, thick eyebrows and black curly hair. I was happy to wear flared jeans and tough army surplus dark green shirts; that was my uniform, the grammar school pupils had theirs. Finally, I had a habit picked up from Mother, who was always carrying something somewhere and carrying something else on the return journey. I always had a carrier bag with me, in which I had the materials for the class that were on that day. The grammar school pupils had lockers in the college that they could leave their work in. For my signing up for my courses independently whilst unemployed I never had a locker.

The biggest handicap I had, that I did not recognise as a handicap at the time, was that I wrote with my left hand. As I wrote I put a lot of pressure on the pen, held it awkwardly, and covered what I wrote with my hand as I wrote the next word. Before the end of the first half term I was very tactfully told by my lady English teacher 'Learn to write with your right hand, or you will never ever pass any exam. The examiner will fail you for not being able to read your writing'. It was nice of her to leave out of her argument that she could not read my writing either. Partly because of that I did not argue back that I had already passed some exams. The Royal Society for the Arts exam system, equivalent to a CSE exam, in Maths and English Language which had complimented the 1st year City and Guilds Radio and Television electronics that I had passed two years earlier

I accepted her advice about the hand I wrote with and started to write with my right hand for the first time since primary school*. It was painful at first. My right hand easily got sore, and at first the lettering looked odd too. But after literally filling a whole A4 pad with lines of practice, some 400 line's worth, holding my pen with my right hand began to feel more natural. The writing it produced was clearly more legible. I won't say the teacher was pleased with me, more relieved that she could now focus on the other problems in my writing because she could now see what I was doing wrong far easier than before. It took at least a college term, until New Year 1981 for the muscles in my right hand to feel comfortable holding a pen for long periods of time. I still printed with my left hand because my printing was neater in that hand than it was in the right hand. other. Printing with one hand and writing longhand with the other cannot be unique. But it must be rare. Encouraged by my teacher, I gave myself the best Christmas present which was going to be useful for the rest of my life. That education could have changed my life more than giving me confidence in a written form, my own new style of handwriting.

As I studied maths, history, and computer studies-a new subject in itself-and I struggled to keep up with students from clearly more financially secure family backgrounds than my own. I was often tempted to quit where I felt innately more ignorant for being poorer than the Grammar School pupils I was learning with. In history my awareness of party politics surfaced faster in me than it did in the younger students. But as that happened I also found that I had to think more to tailor my opinions around the detail in the historical subject, in whichever bit of British social and economic history 1760-1945 we were looking at that week.

With maths I could do the sums well enough. But often I struggled with writing down all my workings out with the teacher, the same teacher who had taught me maths two years earlier. I was too used to doing mental arithmetic, which I was good at. Whenever I failed to show my workings out I was reminded that examiners gave as many marks for showing how the sum was worked out as they gave for getting the answer right. Mr Metcalf would also put the words QED! and we knew the joke that came with it, how the initials meant Quite Easily Done, whilst in reality they meant Quod Erat Demonstrandum, or 'this is to be proved' in Latin. I liked his class because of the room it was held in where the back half of the room was taken up with an eight foot radius wheel with big gearing teeth on it which was connected by an axle to some sort of crankshaft system. Goodness knows what it was physically connected to on the floor below us, or where it all went. We never had the time to get the answers to such questions.

The teaching about computers had its archaic qualities too. It was the newest subject on the syllabus and thought to be important for the future. But from the way we were allowed to approach the subject you would have found it hard to tell. The earliest modern idea of a computer dates back to the 1840's. Until the 1930's women who did calculations for keeping accounts, or who added up the votes for different candidates in elections were also known as computers. The earliest electronic computers were the size of large rooms. They were built in the 1940's for decoding the encrypted messages that the Axis powers sent to each other to fight their side in the war. The Allied powers had to know what was in the Axis powers' messages to win World War Two. In the post war era Lyons tea shop used computers for keeping tabs of stock and staff. When Lyons no longer felt that the computer was necessary for keeping tabs on everything, they concentrated on tea and cakes and left the computer business, not realising what it would be worth in future or how far ahead they were in using computers for civilian purposes than anyone else, in Europe at least. From 1980 or so the first microchip based home computers were on the market. They were slow, primitive, and expensive, but amazingly powerful for their size. In the East Midlands of England the nearest we were going to get to a microchip based computer was to see the adverts for them in the broadsheet newspapers that showed us they existed. Microchips did not exist anywhere on the course we were taking.

With the 'O' level in computers our work was 90 % pen and paper, 9 % typing and 1 % experiencing the computer directly as we got the results from the teleprinter. We wrote lines of programme in BASIC and typed them into a terminal in the college which was linked to the only computer we knew existed. It was a valve computer that had been made in the 1950's and it was owned by the county education department and it was situated 25 miles away. The computer would run the programmes we wrote the same way it would run programmes from terminals from every college in the county. It would run the programme we had sent it and set us back whatever text it thought was apt. The standard rule applied 'Garbage [bad programming] in, garbage [nonsensical response] out'. With the print out we got to see whether what we had written was what we meant to write, and whether it needed amending. The process was hazardous. The computer could easily 'lose' lines of carefully typed programming because we were in a queue to use it with other users who we did not know about. Unseen and unexplained, something would regularly go wrong between the programmer, the terminal, and the computer itself. Some of us were good programmers and proved adept at the language of BASIC, but even the best of the programmers in the class found the process to be inefficient at best.

One disconnect I made on my own was that I was bad at remembering people's names, and often awkward in front of the rest of the class. When I was presented with an idea that was new to me I could not see it as something to be swallowed without question, revised for, regurgitated for the exam, and then forgotten as if the subject did not exist beyond it being the subject of an exam question. I wanted to understand the logic that supported the fact, but the teachers did not have the time to share their workings, with revisions, mock exams, more revisions and then the final sprint before the real exam just months away.  I reluctantly accepted that an 'O' level course that was just a year long was no place to debate as you learned, however much it raised ideas that deserved to be examined and respected in their own right. Add to the tight schedule we were on how I was at college whilst I was on the dole and with that I had significantly less support than the grammar school pupils around me, then my frustrations were inevitable, I was the last to learn that I had joined an exam factory in which for those who passed their exams there were many similar factories ahead of them and it was doubtful there would be further exam factories for me.

I still connected to other people through music rather than who I was and who they were. I felt almost personally anchored, through the shared experience of music. When some youths in the English Department had the idea of a student newsletter it was natural that I volunteered to do the music section and review a couple of albums. This was my first attempt at public writing. I chose to review and compare two records from 1967 that I thought held up to that day. 'The Doors', the first album by The Doors and 'Piper At The Gates Of Dawn'-Pink Floyd. Much of my review of the doors album was cribbed from Julie Burchill's mid 70's reassessment of the album in the NME. The review of the first Pink Floyd album was significantly unoriginal as well. But I had chosen two albums greatly influenced by poetry where the music reflected the substances that the musicians took but the arrangements and the words were both solid and tuneful.

The albums I chose to review would have been well familiar to the local progressive music set, who were just a few years older than me and who really liked the music I wish that I had been around to like when it first appeared, 1967-73. I was a late-comer, an outsider who they accepted as one of them, even though most of them could sing or play an instrument or contribute musically, and they had played live in front of some sort of ticket paying audience when I clearly had not. I was accepted because I became a bit of a fan of music made locally as part of the post-punk movement where the ethos of making and publishing your own music was allied to more melodic and less abrasive, albeit still lo-fi, arrangements than were typified by the original punk movement. I am thankful for the times I shared with them where they minimised the difference between me and them and left me to work out how better to feel and be accepted. The room in Graham Rainsforth's house where we all met was the first dedicated music room I'd ever been in. It was a comfortable side lamp lit room with scatter cushions, many chairs, a  hi-fi with big speakers hanging from the ceiling, and a large collection of records and tapes. Graham could play the music loud because it was a ground floor room in an end of terrace house; there were no direct neighbours who might feel that the music was an imposition on them.      

Music was one thing that kept me in the Christian Youth Fellowship as well. I borrowed and taped a stream of both Christian and secular albums from the leader of the fellowship, John Sargent. Sometimes he had to help me understand aspects of the music as it reflected life. Often he gave me a lift home in his car for the purpose of  having a chat about something personal to me that he saw was eating away at me where I did not recognise the tension that I created around other people. He treated me as an adult when I long way short of being one. Never was this truer than when he lent me his copy of 'Animals' by Pink Floyd. I had read 'Animal Farm' and knew roughly the source material Roger Waters was adapting for his biting lyrics. What I was not prepared for was the sheer anger embedded in the music, any more than we handled anger well with each other in the parental household. When I played the last long track on the album 'Sheep' with it's scary synths, bleak lyrics, cruel adaptation of 'The Lord's Prayer' spoken on vocoder by the band's drummer, and the slashing guitar chords of the outro I simply could not process it. John had to explain to me how it was anger that was hyped up by the arrangement which somehow remained supremely musical. He knew without me saying anything to him that the anger that was the problem for me lay less to do with the sound of the record and more to do with how we skirted around each other in the parental house. I forget what he said to pull me through the sense of crisis I felt from listening to 'Sheep'. Whatever he said, it was practical Christianity in action and to this day I am thankful for his being able to 'read' me and pull me through what I was feeling.

1980 was the year that a new line up of the band Yes formed. They recorded a new album, and set out to tour the world. The album was popular on immediate release but it's popularity was short lived, on third listening the record seemed to be only a pale imitation of the version of Yes that had gone before. The lyrics lacked the majesty and mystery of Jon Anderson's writing for the band. Nonetheless when we learned that the band were playing at Leicester De Montfort Hall it was an easy decision to find a car full of people to go see them. I was the one who was deputised to get everyone's tickets. We now live in a world of infinite and instant two way communication. Back then life was slow. There was the telephone and letter writing. Most working class people did not have phones in their homes. They used public call boxes. I rang up got the address to write off to, the price of the tickets and who to make the postal order payable to (none of my three bank accounts with small-ish amounts in them had ever issued me with a cheque book) and I sent off the money with the information about the tickets required and the stamped self addressed envelope for the tickets to get to me. It all worked very well until I was honest with John about having sent the postal order off with the request for the tickets and the s.a.e. rather than sending the postal order in response to the tickets arriving. The gig was okay, nothing more. People at the gig sat down to show their lack of enthusiasm until the encore when they played more of their classic material, which the lead singer was clearly slowly getting the grasp of.

That was the first of many happy escapes in small groups of us to small venues where live music being played loud was the point of being there. This included us going as a fellowship together to the Christian arts festival known as Greenbelt much later, over the August bank holiday weekend for several years running. But also with my progressive/hippy/CND friends I went to Glastonbury, twice. Coming from a family where the nearest we gave each other to a holiday was one day a year stopping each other going out of each other's sight in Skegness whilst dad got drunk in the nearest pub I discovered that every musical event that I attended had it's merits. However I did it, getting out of the town became important to me if I was to get the town out of my head. And getting the town out of my head was becoming more important to me than I could admit that it was.

Please find Chapter 15 here.

Please find the introduction and chapter guide here.

*Up to the age of ten I wrote with my right hand. At the age of ten, due to the combined effects of different pressures from both the parental house and primary school, I had a nervous breakdown. Overnight I changed the hand I wrote with. Either nobody noticed or somebody did notice but at the time could not get time enough with me on my own to point this out. In the midst of my breakdown I did not know which it was, and every adult around me denied that it was a breakdown. At the age I was when I went to college, aged nineteen, I had not learned to call what happened 'a breakdown' either. But if ever this 'normal' education proved to be remedial, then my being persuaded to revert to writing longhand with my right hand was practical proof.