Postscript
In October 1966 Uncle Ted, in his white van, took me, my case and books, electric kettle, toaster and my portable Olivetti typewriter to Leeds, where I spent the next four years studying for my degree and certificate in education. Apart from the school trips to the Isle of Man, the annual fortnight in Blackpool and the brief encounter with camping in Derbyshire, I had never been away from home. My enthusiasm and eagerness the evening before setting off to train as a teacher was palpable. The great wide world awaited me, a world of new friends and greater challenges, and I embraced it with open arms. It was the start of an exciting adventure.
I remember my first few weeks at college in Leeds thinking just how fortunate I had been with my teachers. Many of the students, the great majority of whom had been to grammar or independent schools and with whom I shared accounts of my own schooldays, described with little pleasure their own experiences in education. They spoke of their schools with little affection, as ‘exam-factories’, rigid authoritarian structures where they spent their time ingesting and regurgitating facts. They described sarcastic and sometimes violent teachers, tedious lessons and the obsession with examination results and Oxbridge entries. South Grove was different. The teachers were not scholarly or highly qualified, they didn’t walk the corridors in academic gowns, but they were first-rate educationalists. They created an atmosphere where the pupils’ curiosity could flourish, where we were allowed to think and question, where classrooms were cooperative, good-humoured places, where learning was not derived by the acquisition of a few arid facts but from an understanding and appreciation of the material. It was a child-centred environment well before the term was widely used by the progressive commentators of the late 1960s.
Over the subsequent years more doors were opened for me by people who played an influential part in any future success I might have had. There was my tutor at Leeds, Dr Raymond Cowell, who developed further my love of books and reading; the first headteacher I worked for, the visionary, ever-supportive Dennis Morgan, who picked me to join the staff at Brinsworth High School soon after I had qualified as a teacher; and Brian Lee, the kindly and erudite Chief Education Adviser for Rotherham, who appointed me as the General Adviser for Language Development some years later. Then in 1998 Esther Rantzen came into my life. Following a talk I gave in support of Childline (the organization she founded) and which she attended, I was asked to appear on her prime-time television show and was brought to the public’s attention. This led to the legendary Jenny Dereham of Michael Joseph publishers, editor of James Herriot and Miss Read, inviting me to write an account about my life as a school inspector in the Yorkshire Dales, a book which became (more to my surprise than anyone else’s) a best-seller. By chance, the theatre promoter Nigel McIntyre heard me speak on stage at Derby and opened another door, signing me up for a nationwide tour with my one-man show.
Finally there is my long-suffering wife, Christine. She has given me four wonderful children and has for thirty-six years put up with this mercurial, moody, demanding, garrulous character with the funny name. Recently she came to hear me on stage at the magnificent Royal Hall in Harrogate.
‘Did you ever imagine, Christine,’ I asked her as she sat in the middle of the front row, ‘in your wildest dreams, when you married me, that I would be doing this for a living?’
She smiled. ‘Darling,’ she said, with all the blunt honesty of someone born in Yorkshire, ‘you are never in my wildest dreams!’
Good Parents
(Parody in answer to Philip Larkin)
They tuck you in, good parents do,
They kiss your cheek and hold you tight,
They fill your world with gentle dreams
And pray you’ll have a peaceful night.
For they were tucked in, in their turn
By mums and dads who loved them so,
And by such loving quickly learnt
To love their children as they grow.
Good parents hand such happiness on,
It’s endless like the sky above,
So learn this lesson parents do,
And teach your children how to love.
Road to the Dales Page 41