by Paul Morley
James Cook, sailor, surveyor, cartographer and explorer, was born on 7 November 1728 in the tiny Yorkshire village of Marton in Cleveland in the North Riding of Yorkshire. Cleveland is a district bounded to the north by the River Tees, to the south by the North Yorkshire Moors and to the east by the North Sea. As a teenager he learned about sailing in the dangerous waters of the North Sea, and taught himself algebra, trigonometry, navigation and astronomy. Cook began the life of a sailor on the Freelove in February 1747, carrying a cargo of coal to London, and spent ten years working in the coal trade off the east coast of England with its treacherous shifting shoals, uncharted shallows and difficult harbours. Cook seemed born to sail.
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In 1968 I took my eleven-plus examination. I was a bright but unremarkable boy, and wanted people to think I was smart because it made me feel good. There was a general feeling within the school, communicated by the confidence of my teachers, that I would pass the eleven-plus, devised twenty-four years before to channel children into the school apparently most suited to their needs and abilities. It was a form of streaming intended to separate the cleverer kids from those allegedly not so clever. The only reason you were tested at that age was because you were now due to go to what was generally known as big school.
There were three tests – in maths, writing and general problem-solving – and I was moderately capable in all of these. Assuming I passed, I would then go to the single-sex Mile End Grammar School, also known as Stockport School, along the Buxton Road in Great Moor, heading south out of Mersey Square. This seemed my approximately-one-shade-above-average destiny. For those who failed, their next school would be Reddish Vale Comprehensive. Throughout my childhood I heard dark rumours about what went on at this vast low-lying post-war school lurking at the edges of the Vale. Exaggerated, or quite accurate, reports built up in my imagination until I came to believe that it was the educational equivalent of the prison where my dad once worked. There were hints of initiation ceremonies involving toilets, heads, flushing, and even knives, muscles, fists and bloody noses. Attending such a school would make living in Stockport seem much more threatening, make you feel closer to the edge of real danger, with a more direct sense that you were in constant competition with others battling for space, control and survival.
The kids who went to this school, even the kids who seemed likely to go to this school after North Reddish, were to my mind the harder, meaner ones, and compared to them I was a little sensitive. The terrifying thought of this school, which although low slung and modern in look seemed to belong to the nineteenth century, a cousin of the gothic Strangeways, a place where children went when they were stupid and aggressive, encouraged me to do so well in my eleven-plus that I leaped above the medium-level Mile End Grammar and won one of the scholarships that went to the fifteen top children in all of Cheshire, giving me a place in a school that seemed nineteenth-century in an entirely different way, Stockport Grammar.
The comprehensive conjured up visions of ill-disciplined teenagers the rough side of mod and the mad side of rocker, while the grammar school suggested a world where all the kids lived in mansions and were waited on by servants. Before I went all I really knew about the place was that it did not play football, promoting rugby as the true gentleman’s game, that you had to wear a uniform that featured an ornate peaked cap, that the teachers addressed you by your surname, and that the kind of boys who went there bullied you in a different, less physically aggressive way than the kids who went to the comprehensive. For some reason I imagined there would be no bullying at the more modern Mile End, which had a uniform that seemed less stiff and archaic than that of Stockport Grammar. My dad was very proud of how well I had done and could see doors opening to a career in accountancy, even a place at university.
Stockport Grammar was along the Buxton Road three miles out of the town centre along an uneventful section of road near the Davenport Theatre. It had a motto – ‘He who endures conquers’ – was boys only and had plenty of history. It is the oldest school in the north of England, founded in 1487 with a legacy left by Lord Mayor of London Sir Edmund Shaa, who was born in Mottram in the extreme north-east of Cheshire, in the valley of Longdendale (long wooded valley) north of Glossop, close to the fluid borders with Derbyshire and Yorkshire. (Where L. S. Lowry moved in the 1950s. The Shaas were among the earliest inhabitants of Mottram.) Shaa, whose parents had been born in Stockport, wanted the school ‘for all the boys of Stockport and their neighbourhood’. As mayor of London, he appears as a character in Shakespeare’s Richard III. When the head of the executed Lord Hastings is brought in, he is persuaded by Gloucester and Buckingham to tell the citizens he was executed for just reasons.
As a daydreamy but ambitious boy, Shaa yearned to escape Cheshire, rapidly developing an ‘unconquerable aversion to the unchanging life of the country’. Life was relatively pleasant, but the work he was expected to do as a plain yeoman seemed to lead to nothing better than humble respectability and more, more or less, of the same thing all his life. He wanted more. He desired power and influence, the sort he saw when lords and ladies and noble knights passed through his hometown. The young Edmund told friends and relatives of his determination to stretch his mind and rise above his station, and they laughed at him. ‘Banish all such dreams from thy foolish pate,’ remarked one, ‘thou art a good lad, and a clever one to boot, but the life thy fathers led is good enough for thee.’ Others jeered openly at his conceit, poured scorn on his ambition, and he would wander off into the woodland glades and sob his heart out. He became a lonely boy, frustrated by everyone’s lack of faith in his dreams of escape and personal triumph.
Inspired by a dream in which fairies ‘stealing from their tiny palaces under the leaves in the forest’ whispered in his ear about the wealth and honour in London awaiting those lads bold enough to seek their fortune there, he set out for the capital and settled there, becoming a goldsmith. He rose rapidly in wealth and status, was employed as an engraver by the Royal Mint, became prime warden of the Goldsmiths’ Company and was eventually appointed jeweller to King Edward IV. By 1482 he was lord mayor, and he played a key role in securing the crown for Richard III – with more influence than Shakespeare suggested as a mere henchman of the alleged arch-villain – helping Richard secure the sympathies and support of the city of London against Edward IV’s children. He was knighted for this valuable service, and attended Richard III’s coronation, serving the King and Queen wine and receiving the cups and pitchers as his fee. After Richard’s 1485 defeat and death at the Battle of Bosworth Field, Sir Edmund continued as court jeweller to his Tudor successor, Henry VII.
Shaa didn’t forget the county of his birth, leaving an endowment of seventeen pounds per annum to found a school in Stockport, despite the small size of the town. The school moved to the building on Buxton Road in 1916, and from my house in Reddish this meant catching two buses – the 17 right outside the Conservative Club to Mersey Square, changing underneath the viaduct across the square from the now very settled shopping centre on to the 92 on its unbending way from Manchester Piccadilly to Hazel Grove. The journey would usually take about forty minutes, getting me to school with five or ten minutes to spare. (There was also the rare 17X, which went all the way via Mersey Square and the school to Hazel Grove, so there was no need to change, which saved a few minutes, getting me to school early enough to fit in a quick chaotic game of football, but this was an irregular bus which took the sort of planning and preparation to catch that was generally beyond me at eight o’clock in the morning.)
This was the beginning of my main move out of Reddish, the thickening of my world, the regular crossing and recrossing of borders, the shift into a larger space which promised views of even larger spaces and sightings of greater possibilities. Home had expanded into street had expanded into neighbourhood and now expanded into town. Parts of my mind expanded too. The next part of how I was inventing myself, based on the evidence, knowledge and equipment available to me,
was under way.
The first sight I had of Stockport Grammar School was at the far end of its long drive, which seemed more suited to a nineteenth-century horse and carriage. Lording it over its own grounds with the railway track at the bottom of the extensive playing fields, it boasted its own cricket pavilion with electrically powered clock. Despite this clock, the trains and the odd modern building, it seemed more 1487 than 1968. This impression never left me in the five years I attended the school: at the moment the sixties seemed finally to be seeping into Stockport I had been thrust back into the numbing, unforgiving past, a past that involved rules, and order, and ever-present tension, and striding menacing authority figures, a past that seemed all about keeping you in your place and separating you from the real world – and all the intriguing furtive changes that as an adolescent you want to use as your inspiration.
The school was like a massive version of the Conservative Club. At the centre of the main school there was a quadrangle open to the skies, paved it sometimes seemed with gravestones, around which heavily wooded echoey old classrooms patterned with scratched sloping Dickensian desks were arranged. (You would write on these desks using your (compulsory) fountain pen, which was of little use to me, being left-handed, as my wrist dragged through the wet ink, smudging everything I wrote and leaving me with a thick permanent blue stripe on the underside of my hand. It was a relief when the ink ran out in my flimsy cartridge pen, the cheapest in WHSmith, and my writing faded away into almost invisible marks on the paper, until I reluctantly inserted a fresh cartridge.) The quadrangle created plenty of dark corridors for masters to swoop along with their gowns flailing dramatically around their backs. Bells for lessons to begin and end would ring as if there was an emergency, the sound always a shock to the system. There was a daunting theatrical quality about daily life at the school that was somewhere between the unnatural and the weirdly camp.
The other boys, my new colleagues, all seemed to come from deep inside the posher parts of Cheshire, not from the remote north-east of the county, which was really Lancashire, or the narrow corridor of uncertainty between the two that meant I belonged nowhere. These boys seemed more definite than I was, came from more definite families with dads who did definite things. The firm, forceful, starched masters, in my limited political view of the world, seemed more Enoch Powell and Harold Macmillan than Roy Jenkins or Harold Wilson, which meant that to me they were stuck in post-Victorian 1910 and had no interest in even pretending that the world now involved rockets into space, Concorde and the Rolling Stones, and that farthings, ancient fragments of an empire-controlling pound, were a thing of the past. Their job was to maintain connection with a world undisturbed by facile modern nonsenses and trivial transient distractions. The atmosphere in the school seemed cut off from the rest of Stockport, enclosed inside its own petrified space, far away from the mutant shopping centre. It confirmed what I felt about such schools formed by my limited unenthusiastic reading of the public schools and boarding establishments written about in slapstick Billy Bunter books featuring a bumbling buffoon, a junior Falstaff, and in books about eternal schoolboy Jennings set in anxious post-war austerity that would be described as a children’s Wodehouse.
A flyer for the Manchester Stoneground venue
The mild rebelliousness of William Brown, the devil-may-care hero of Richmal Crompton’s Just William, was too subtle for me to appreciate. Born in Bury in 1890, on a moral cause to monitor the dismantling of the Edwardian age and the assumptions of 1910, a firm supporter of the Suffragette movement and regular correspondent of the Pankhursts, Crompton, the second child of a clergyman, was educated at St Elphins, a boarding school for daughters of the clergy in Warrington which hosted a resident ghost. She should have been the missing link between soft, silly but weirdly adultless Enid Blyton – where I had gone after wearing out the repetitive and dull Rupert the Bear – and the illuminating darkness of Alan Garner, but I could never summon up much interest in stories, however smartly told, about an unruly boy my age having adventures in a world that was a lot like my world and nothing like it at all – perhaps a reflection of how Crompton set William in a weightless hybrid location that was part her childhood Lancashire and part where she lived as an adult in north Kent. I didn’t identify with William’s naughtiness, his style of causing trouble, which to my mind was a bit Beano, a bit twee. I was already straining to understand the cause and complexity of the rebellion of Orwell’s Winston Smith and developing a preference over Bunter, William and the Famous Five – with their yearnings for an idealised childhood set in a space only lightly, if at all, ruffled by the war and post-war realignments – for the way Animal Farm was unconventionally but more dramatically rooted in fairy stories and magic.
My Stockport Grammar School, to which I wore a uniform like that of Bunter and his pals, was the stuffy mid-twentieth-century residue of Shaa’s generous fifteenth-century desire that Cheshire boys might have the sort of opportunities he had taken to get on in the world, to lift themselves up a level or two or even more in the social order, although it now seemed about maintaining the status quo and frustrating social mobility.
Of all the boys at the school, certainly in my class, travelling in each morning in their yellow and black uniforms from leafy Bramhall, Gatley, Dukinfield, Wilmslow, Heald Green, Cheadle, Disley, sons of affluent, professional families, I appeared the odd one out, the awkward introspective loner who might spend time daydreaming alone among the wild flowers near the Tame in Reddish Vale and imagine fairies chattering in my head, outlining what I should do with my life. This advice would not involve business, or passing exams, or pleasing or appeasing threatening and mostly eccentric teachers, who seemed to be acting on behalf of distant powers to ensure 1910 values would not be undermined by the fairies introducing the Toggery and the Merseyway shopping centre into Stockport, and the Beatles and Kinks to the world. The fairies whispering in my ear were talking of something else, another way to become if not the lord mayor of London then something other than who and what your father was. I couldn’t quite make out what they were saying, except that it would be best if I stuck to Orwell and Garner and even the Merseyway shopping centre, and the 92 bus to Manchester would open up more possibilities than anything said and done at the school of Shaa.
From an academic high as one of only two pupils from North Reddish Junior School to make it to Stockport Grammar School, I plummeted almost from the day I arrived to the very bottom. It was as though wearing the black cap with yellow bands crushed my brain and savaged my concentration. The teachers must have taken one look at me and sensed I was away with the fairies: perhaps it was all the chalk dust, which would now be a part of my life for a few years, or the hard blackboard rubbers regularly hurled in my direction, occasionally making contact with my teenage skull. Maybe they saw me as a Lancashire outsider, a subdued Reddish failure split apart by the Nico Ditch, who had gained entrance to their hallowed halls by a lucky fluke, or could they tell that I had made it there only because the thought of spending time at delinquent Reddish Vale Comprehensive, teeming with ruffians from the Brinny part of town, where I really belonged, had made me panic and rise above my station, and travel beyond my bus stop.
Some pupils there might have been guided, inspired and encouraged, but I felt totally lost. From the outside, and as far as my parents were concerned, my life had been put in the hands of teachers who definitely knew what they were doing, but I learned less in the five years I was at Stockport Grammar School than I did at North Reddish. The job of the teachers seemed more about breaking your spirit than opening your mind. My one lucky break was that the year before I started was the final year the school had lessons on Saturday mornings to compensate for sports on Wednesday afternoons.
A detail of the Alfred Waterhouse-designed St Elisabeth church in Reddish
I was taught history throughout those five years, and it was one of the four O levels that I passed, two at fifteen in the fourth form, two a year later. I strugg
led to grade 5 at history, grade 6 in English and English literature, and a miraculous grade 6 in religious knowledge, which perversely suggested my deceitfully hypocritical prayers had been answered. I was a disaster at all other subjects, the sciences, the languages, failures which opened up holes in my life that were never adequately filled. In four years of Latin I learned perhaps one fact: boredom is an extraordinary thing, somewhere between a time machine and a near-death experience, in which you become increasingly aware as a distant light beckons you that words are mere sounds containing only the meaning you can muster up from within your own fear that nothing makes sense. From the very first year I was scared of taking my annual report home, a folded blue card filled with expressions of pity, hostility and anger written in various impatient shades of emphatic dark blue ink by those who loved using fountain pens and had found a way of making their own very particular, savage sense.
After my dad’s initial euphoria, each report, acknowledging how the stuffing had been knocked out of me, and most of my brains, seemed to knock more and more stuffing out of him. His disappointment and what seemed to me at the time fury at the first two or three reports was replaced by a weariness, as he started to give up if not on his family at least on himself, with life becoming an increasingly complex series of puzzles he had no answer to. The fact that those teachers, with names like Gosling, Harris, Durnell, Swallow, Stanley, Slaughter, Bromley, Johnson, Jermy, were reducing me with their withering one-line year summaries and damning C minuses and Ds to the level of feckless class idiot suggested that his dream of me as accountant was fast receding. If there had still been cotton mills or coal mines, I would have been heading there or, at best, into the sort of office he worked in, a vacuum of repetition, with no real job title, no real prospects, playing with ultimately meaningless numbers and systems not that far removed from what I did with imaginary cricket scores when I was eight.