Writer's Luck Page 4

  Julia obtained a 2.1 honours degree in Biology at Southampton in 1982, well before the era of grade inflation made this achievement commonplace. Mary and I went down there for her graduation, and brought her home, where we discovered that she had no idea of what she wanted to do by way of a career. The impact of Mrs Thatcher’s monetarist economic policies on job prospects for graduates was already manifest, discouraging Julia from looking for employment. There was a period of some months, worrying to her parents, when she spent a lot of time at home reading and watching television, and not doing much else except some voluntary work for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament to which she was committed. This however happened to be a cause also supported by Mike Brown and as a result of a chance conversation with him one day he offered her a temporary post as a research assistant at Aston and later recommended her for a studentship to study for a PhD in Microbiology, which she obtained in 1987. In the same year she was appointed to a postdoctoral fellowship in the School of Biochemistry at Birmingham University, having deliberately waited till I took early retirement from that institution before she applied. Later she was appointed to a lectureship in the school, and at this time of writing she is a Senior Lecturer and Head of Education for the School of Biosciences, an important managerial position, very happy and fulfilled in her career and a source of pride to her parents. Mike Brown’s part in this success story was crucial, but his faith in her potential has been fully vindicated.

  Julia’s younger brother Stephen was also highly intelligent, with no dyslexia, and the headmistress of his primary school, a nun, suggested to us when he was in his last year that he should be put in for a scholarship at Birmingham’s top school, King Edward’s, Edgbaston, next door to the University, the flagship of the King Edward’s group. It had been a state-aided ‘direct grant’ school, but when faced with the alternative of going comprehensive became an independent school offering a substantial number of scholarships. Although officially the Church urged Catholic parents to send their children to Catholic schools, it privately and somewhat hypocritically approved sending gifted youngsters to elite non-Catholic schools like KE. Mary and I thought it would be a betrayal of our principles to send Stephen to such a school even if he won a scholarship and, from the little we knew about it, doubted whether he would be happy there. There was a Catholic diocesan boys’ grammar school quite near us, called St Thomas Aquinas, which was rumoured to be turning comprehensive in due course, but we did not investigate it, nor did we consider another Catholic comprehensive in the area (of which more in a moment). We wished to send Stephen to the same school as his sister, and it was his own preference. Since Julia had been admitted there, however, a ‘catchment area’ had been allotted to Shenley Court by the local education authority, the boundary of which ran between our house and the school, though they were only a mile apart. The form on which parents had to list their preferred schools stated that these must all be within the catchment area where they resided, but priority had always been given to siblings in allocating places in schools, and relying on this practice I made only one choice on the form, Shenley Court, with a letter attached giving our reasons. As I heard nothing in response I was optimistic of the outcome.

  When the allocation of places was announced Stephen was assigned to Northfield Comprehensive, which drew most of its pupils from a vast troubled housing estate and was regarded as the worst secondary school in the area on every count. A former pupil recalled: ‘Growing up, as I did, in 1970s Northfield I remember the school having a woeful reputation.’1 Stephen was, understandably, almost in tears at the news, and I promised him that he would not be going to Northfield Comp whatever happened, but I appealed to the local authority in vain. The only acceptable alternative was St Thomas Aquinas, and we were lucky to have a friend who knew the headmaster, a layman like the rest of the staff, and arranged a meeting with him. We were sorry to learn that he was due to retire shortly, because he impressed us as a wise and humane man. He teased us a little for not considering his school earlier, but was sympathetic to our plight, and after interviewing Stephen found him a place, though the intake was officially full, to our great relief and gratitude.

  St Thomas turned comprehensive a year or two later, and became mixed in due course. Mary served as a governor for several years and gave useful advice on the needs of girl students to the other (all male) governors. Coincidentally, the Head of English when Stephen joined the school, John Bartlett, had been a pupil some years behind me at my old school in London, St Joseph’s Academy, where he claimed to have been in awe of me, though I had been unaware of his existence. He was appointed as the new headmaster of St Thomas, and the teaching of English declined after he ceased to be directly responsible for it. When Stephen was assessed as likely to get a C grade in English Literature at O level a few months before the exam, Mary began coaching him at home in that subject and as a result he scored an A. The science teaching in the school on the other hand was first class, with one particularly keen and charismatic teacher who inspired enthusiasm and devotion in his pupils, and Stephen and his school friends opted for science subjects in the sixth form. A group of them became very interested in astronomy and joined the Birmingham Astronomical Society. Stephen built his own 6" telescope single-handedly, a feat that impressed the father of one of his friends who was MD of a manufacturing company. The propensity of my two older children to specialise in science, which I had found so unappealing as a schoolboy myself that I dropped it as soon as possible, and of which I was still pretty ignorant, surprised me and caused me some regret since I couldn’t share their enthusiasm as they progressed in their favourite subjects. On the other hand, being always fully occupied with my own work I was selfishly grateful to be absolved from ‘helping with homework’.

  Stephen obtained three A’s in his A levels and was offered a place to do Physics at Cambridge, the most coveted place to study subjects known there as ‘Natural Sciences’, which of course delighted his proud parents. But a few weeks before he was due to go up to Emmanuel College, where my former colleague at Birmingham Derek Brewer was now Master, he announced that he didn’t want to go to Cambridge and he didn’t want to study Physics. Instead he proposed to go with some friends who had been trying, without much musical knowledge or skill, to form a rock band, to house-sit a property in the Welsh mountains where they would hang out and practise. The reader will easily imagine the dismay this caused Mary and me. Naturally we tried to dissuade him, but it was soon evident that this was no whim, and we reluctantly respected and accepted his decision. Stephen belonged to a generation who were born just too late to participate in the heady first wave of the sixties counter-culture, but yearned to catch up. The natural sciences did not offer the expansion of human experience he was looking for, and the ambience of Cambridge as he briefly encountered it when he was interviewed there had not appealed to him. The rock group never had a public existence, though a musician who associated with the house-minders in Wales played later in a successful band called the Housemartins. Stephen travelled in Europe, worked on two kibbutzim in Israel, came back to England to enrol for a BA in Politics at Newcastle, and graduated with a 2.1. He travelled around the world, worked for a year in Australia, came home via a spell in Central America, took a career aptitude test which indicated he was suited to law, and enrolled for a law conversion course at Newcastle Polytechnic. He was named ‘Most Meritorious Student’ at the end of his first year, and achieved First-class Honours in his final examinations. In due course he became a solicitor in Birmingham specialising in social justice legal aid work, and was involved in several important judicial reviews. He is currently employed by the Equality and Human Rights Commission in London.

  In the mid-eighties the notorious Northfield Comp was closed down and merged with Shenley Court. Combined with the exclusion of able middle-class pupils from outside the catchment area, this resulted in a gradual decline in the morale and quality of education at Shenley Court, which eventually became a failing
school requiring ‘special measures’, an outcome which would have been unthinkable when we sent Julia to it. There was a Catholic co-educational comprehensive school in south-west Birmingham named Blessed Humphrey Middlemore after one of the Forty English Martyrs of the Reformation period, whose history was even sadder. It was formed in 1966 out of two secondary modern schools in the older, poorer inner-city part of Edgbaston north of the Hagley Road, with many pupils from broken and chaotic homes, and accommodated in a new building in middle-class Harborne. It quickly acquired a reputation for low academic achievement and bad behaviour both inside and outside the school, and even the most loyal middle-class Catholic parents were reluctant to send their children to it. We came to know the school well because several of our friends in the Catholic Renewal Movement had taught there from its beginning, as did Mary herself as a teacher-counsellor from 1974. Her counselling skills were badly needed, and she was often required to speak for pupils at juvenile courts. The teachers at ‘Blessed Humph’, as it was familiarly called, were mostly able and dedicated, and had a remarkable esprit de corps, but they could not overcome the systemic flaws in the original foundation, and the best of them moved on to higher appointments elsewhere. Student numbers dwindled to the point where the school became unviable and in 1982 it was closed and demolished, only sixteen years after it had opened, to be replaced by a residential cul-de-sac called Humphrey Middlemore Drive.

  Readers of QAGTTBB will recall that a similar fate overcame my own grammar school, St Joseph’s Academy, Blackheath, when long after I was a pupil there it became a Catholic boys’ comprehensive with a catchment area that included Lewisham, one of the most socially troubled boroughs in London. As the years passed it became a failing school with a bad local reputation and, after several unsuccessful efforts to reform it, was demolished and replaced in 2007 with a co-educational ‘Academy’ in the New Labour sense of the word. This remedy seems to have been successful, but in my memoir I described the sorry last decades of what had once been a school that had sent many students from a broad social base on to higher education as ‘a sadly familiar story of unintended consequences in the implementation of an educational policy that claimed to be progressive’. In a long and otherwise sympathetic review of my book in Prospect magazine, the distinguished social historian David Kynaston regretted that I did not recognise the greater good achieved by the abolition of the socially divisive distribution of children between grammar schools and secondary modern schools at 11-plus, and that I said nothing about the even more malign effect of private education on equality of opportunity in British society.

  In retrospect I regret the choice of the word ‘claimed’ because the motive for comprehensivisation was socially progressive, and probably far more people have benefited from its positive effects than have suffered from its negative ones. That presumption was one reason why Mary and I supported it in principle and, up to a certain point, in practice. In practice few educated middle-class parents will ask their children to suffer for their own principles; so we sent Julia to a good comprehensive but rescued Stephen from a bad one, pulling strings to get him into an acceptable alternative. A successful comprehensive school depends on having a student body with a broad spectrum of intellectual ability and social background, and a curriculum which allows for different levels and types of achievement. Where they survive, as in Birmingham, grammar schools cream off able students who might otherwise provide the leaven in local comprehensive schools and, as I have shown, the bureaucratic imposition of catchment areas can be even more damaging.

  As to private schools, especially those still perversely called public schools, I think my novels, especially Ginger, You’re Barmy, convey a critical view of their influence on British social and cultural life. Of the schools themselves I have little personal experience. In fact I have been inside only two of them. Some time in the sixties I was invited by a housemaster at Shrewsbury School (the alma mater of some of the founders of Private Eye) to speak to a group of his students one evening about Jane Austen. Out of curiosity, and as it was no great distance to drive from Birmingham, I accepted. It was a small gathering in the teacher’s living room, and I saw little of the rest of the school, nor can I recall anything about my talk or its reception. What I remember about the occasion is that I received no offer of reimbursement for my car mileage and not even a letter of thanks afterwards from the teacher. I declined future invitations to speak at public schools, of which I received several over the years. They usually offered to pay travel expenses, though never a fee. One was from a group or society of senior pupils at Eton, and I was surprised to see my brief handwritten reply, in which I declined, offered for sale some years later in a catalogue. I felt, and sometimes said as much in my replies to such invitations, that I did not wish to take time out of a busy life to enhance the experience of pupils who were already receiving a very privileged education. The truth is that I never felt comfortable speaking in schools, but occasionally I would do so in comprehensives with which I had a personal connection.

  My second visit to a public school was much later than the first, and of a very different kind. Over the last decade or so the Graham Greene Birthplace Trust has staged an annual Festival devoted to his work at Berkhamsted School, where he was a pupil when his father was headmaster. The Festival, held during the school holidays, attracts a variety of people – writers, academics and ordinary readers – interested in the novelist’s life and work. One year I gave a talk about the literary influences on his writing, and in the course of the weekend I was given a guided tour of the school, including the rooms which were once occupied by the Greene family and are separated from the dormitories, corridors and classrooms of the school by a green baize door which frequently crops up in Greene’s writing. To say he was unhappy at Berkhamsted is an understatement. As the headmaster’s son he was regarded by other boys as a potential spy and victimised. In his travel book about Mexico in the 1930s, The Lawless Roads, he recalled his schooldays thus:

  In the land of … stone stairs and cracked bells ringing early, one was aware of fear and hate, a kind of lawlessness – appalling cruelties could be practised without a second thought; one met for the first time characters, adult and adolescent, who bore about them the genuine quality of evil.

  The young Greene was so miserable at Berkhamsted that he flirted with suicide in the game of Russian roulette, and ran away to live rough on the local Common for some days. As Norman Sherry revealed in the first volume of his biography, Greene eventually broke the schoolboy code and named his chief persecutor, who was expelled, passing on to the future novelist a lifelong fascination with the theme of betrayal. His situation was unusual, of course. Not all public school boys suffered as much as he did, and many claim to have enjoyed, or at least benefited from, the experience. But I have not read any novel of literary merit which has changed my opinion that sending children to boarding school at a young age, unless there is some pressing practical reason, is unnatural and sometimes cruel, and that single-sex education in boarding schools is apt to cause psychosexual problems in personal life later, as well as providing temptations and opportunities to paedophiles.

  The critic and Oxford professor John Carey, who is almost my exact contemporary, and attended what was obviously a very good London grammar school, much better than mine, asserts in his memoir, The Unexpected Professor (2015), that if most grammar schools hadn’t been abolished in the 1970s they would have improved to such an extent that they would have seen off the independent schools eventually by offering just as good an education free. This seems to me an unlikely scenario, but even if it had happened it would still have left open the question of what kind of education to provide for those who didn’t qualify for the enlarged grammar school sector, which is where the pre-comprehensive system largely failed.

  As things are, it is undeniable that the best independent schools offer an education that is beyond the reach of schools in the state system, and some of them, like King Edward’s i
n Birmingham, are day schools which allow their pupils to lead a normal family life. King Edward’s Boys in Edgbaston stands proudly opposite the main entrance to the University, an impressive and immaculately maintained redbrick building with extensive playing fields behind it, and a sister school for girls nearby. I have passed it countless times but never been inside. Once I was asked to speak there, but declined, giving my usual reasons. I could easily have made a more informal visit, but I didn’t. Perhaps I feared to stir up possible feelings of regret. For I sometimes wonder, especially when reminded of the limitations of my own education – its failure to give me any competence in the sciences, modern languages or music – whether we were right to deny Stephen the chance of going to KE, and whether he would have benefited from the superior education it offered. He would have been a contemporary there of Jonathan Coe, whose novel The Rotters’ Club, inspired by his schooldays, suggests that Stephen would not have felt out of place there. A pointless speculation, of course. If he had gone to KE his life would have taken a completely different path. Among other things he would not be happily married to Una, whom he met on the Newcastle law course, or have their two charming and gifted daughters, who adore him.

  The education of our Down’s son Christopher presented a different challenge to Mary and me from those we faced in relation to Julia and Stephen. As I explained in QAGTTBB, he was fortunate to be born at a time when attitudes to Down’s people were changing for the better and the state had recently recognised that they were educable in special schools. He was especially fortunate living in Birmingham where the provision of special education was very good. He also had the advantage of having a mother who was a trained teacher, and of being our youngest child, with two older siblings to stimulate him and no younger one to overtake him, so that he grew up with great confidence in his own abilities. Indeed, he was sometimes overconfident, occasionally escaping from the rather insecure side garden we had instead of a back garden to explore the neighbourhood. At the age of about six he was brought home by a neighbour who spotted him on a nearby railway embankment.