She set us a task one week. She gave each of us a list of things that we had to make an arrangement with; my list said two or three smooth round pebbles, a piece of driftwood, a cabbage leaf and a stick of celery. I thought to myself: this is me, it’s right up my street. I got the stones and the driftwood down on the beach and it didn’t take me long to get a couple of sticks of celery and a cabbage leaf. First I tried arranging it on a flat dish among some wire mesh in a sort of – well it was a kind of . . . I thought it was a . . . but it wasn’t, so I took it all out and I got a lump of plasticine and started again. I stuck the stones round it and the cabbage leaf (wilting) and the two sticks of celery (brown at the ends). You ought to have seen the result. I carted it up there just for a laugh. Everybody had got their arrangements, some had very fine muslin cloth draped over them, some in cardboard boxes and all were very lovely – even I could see that. And I came up with mine in an old brown carrier bag.
So they said to me, ‘Where’s your arrangement?’
I said, ‘In this bag.’
‘In a bag,’ they said. ‘Well, what is it?’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘it’s a cabbage leaf and two sticks of celery and pebbles.’
When I got it out everybody nearly died of laughter. They made ever such rude remarks. So they lost one pupil at handicrafts.
It was when I was fifty-seven that I decided that I would study in real earnest, not just as a leisure-time activity but where I really sat for something. Mind you, I’d been in earnest about the other things. I’d enjoyed them, had a lot of fun, made a lot of friends, and acquired a lot of knowledge. But I thought I’d like to do something in competition with the younger ones. So I went to the technical college.
I found joining the class there a far different proposition from joining the leisure-time activities. In the leisure-time activities most of the people were about my age because we were doing things because we’d retired or because our families had grown up. But studying for ‘O’ level were young people who for some reason or other had failed when they were fifteen and were trying again. So when I tried to sign on I thought I might be rejected on account of my age.
I waited for hours in the queue; on the signing-on days there are queues everywhere. You’d think that half the town was dying to go to learn. So I waited in the queue and when I finally reached the young man who was behind the desk he looked at me in amazement.
He said, ‘What are you doing here, this isn’t a leisuretime activity, you know? This is studying leading to an examination.’
‘I know that,’ I said.
So he said, ‘Well, you obviously don’t want to do that. You’re in the wrong place.’
I said, ‘I know what I’m doing. Is there any reason why I can’t take “O” level English literature?’
That and the way I said it put him back on his heels. ‘So he said, ‘Well, no, I suppose there isn’t really.’
Anyway I finally convinced him I was serious. But he wouldn’t sign me on.
He said, ‘I think you’d better go and see the principal.’
I don’t know why. So I had to join another queue. Anyway when I finally got to the principal he also looked astonished.
He said, ‘You know this is a two-year course at least. It could be three if you don’t pass it in two years. Are you prepared to do all that? It’s not much good starting and then leaving because you might be taking somebody else’s place.’
That was all a load of my eye and Betty Martin, believe me. By the time the first year ended there was room for another half as many again. I made what I thought were keen noises.
‘Oh,well,’ he said, ‘I suppose it’s all right,’ in a very half-hearted manner.
He thought it was a waste of his time and my time.
Mind you, he was quite right. He’s not there for benevolent reasons. He’s there to see that young people who haven’t got an education get one. And I didn’t blame him in the least. Why should he bother about the older people? It was up to the older people to be very self-assertive for themselves and I certainly was.
Anyway I joined the original queue again. I was in queues about two hours that night. Finally I got up to the young man again.
‘Oh, it’s you is it,’ he said.
So I said, ‘He says it’s all right.’
‘Oh, well,’ he said, ‘then it must be. Anyway you’ll be glad to know there’s another old lady in the class apart from you.’
When I got to the class I found the other old lady was around forty so it was really very flattering. I thought that either she was a lot older than she said or I was a lot younger-looking. Still, contrary to all scepticism, I was in.
The class started off about thirty strong. Some took their exam in a year because they’d only just failed before they left school and all they needed was a bit of brushing up. I think it’s stupid that when you’ve failed an examination they don’t tell you what particular thing you failed in – whether it was grammar, the essay, the dictation, the spelling, or what. It’s left to you to realize for yourself. So you don’t know what you should be swotting. I felt sorry for the youngsters, they were so confused. But some of the class took the exam after a year and as they never came back I assumed that they had passed. My guess had been quite right: the class started off with thirty but it had dropped right down to fourteen and by the end of the second year there were only ten of us left to take the exam. I suppose it got boring for some of the young ones. There was so much else in life, so much else they could be doing. And it’s not just the evenings that are taken up. You’ve got to study at home. As well as the homework that you’re set, you’re expected to read books. So inevitably people did drop out. It wasn’t the quality of the teacher – we had a fine teacher. And as I hoped I would, I enjoyed being with and working with young people. They were great fun.
I felt embarrassed at first – especially the first night. I got there about a quarter of an hour before the class started, thinking I might be able to walk into a more or less empty room and that the others would come in gradually and I wouldn’t have to meet them all en masse so to speak. But when I got there the class was nearly full up and what made it doubly embarrassing was that they thought I was the teacher. It was terrible. They jumped up when I went in and came forward, said who they were and asked me what my name was. Then I realized what they thought.
I said, ‘I’m not the teacher.’
‘Not the teacher,’ they said. ‘Well, then you’re in the wrong class.’
‘No, I’m not,’ I said. ‘This is English “O” level, isn’t it? The first year of English “O” level?’
They said, ‘Yes.’
‘Well, I’m one of the students.’
And they all laughed, though I must admit in a very nice way.
There were more girls than boys in the class, but apart from this woman of forty I could have been grandmother to any of them. It wasn’t long before I was left in splendid isolation because the forty-year-old soon dropped out. Apparently she’d gone into it because although she was married, her children were off her hands and she’d taken up working in an office again. This entailed a lot of letter writing and she wanted to get her grammar right, but she reckoned this course didn’t really do anything for her. I think it would have if she’d stayed.
But the young ones were fun and I never once had any embarrassment. The fact was that they were there because they were keen on being educated and getting on. They weren’t a lot of hooligans or layabouts.
Two years later when I went to take the exam I got a terrible shock. It was held in a church hall and I thought there’d just be me and the nine youngsters who were left in the class. When I got there, there were about ninety-nine youngsters from other places – and me looking like Mrs Methuselah. I managed to find my own nine that I’d gone through with and I stuck to them like a leech. I didn’t want to feel out of it. We stood around with everybody saying that they knew they were going to fail. You have to say that bef
ore because it sort of lets you down lightly if you do fail.
Eventually we filed into the hall. It was all very austere and frightening. Every desk at a certain distance from the next, and you’re not allowed to touch anything till you’re given the word to go. Then they come round with the list of questions and when you look at it you nearly die. Your mind is a complete blank and you’re sure that you’re never going to be able to answer any of them. Then you sort of pull yourself together and things become a bit clearer and you think well I’ve got three hours. Three hours seems a long time at first but the trouble is to keep writing. Your hand aches; during the last hour my hand ached so much I thought I’d never be able to keep going. Then I glanced around at this sea of earnest young faces and I couldn’t help wondering what all these young people were going to do if they passed. How intent they seemed on striving to go one better. And I thought of what my life might have been like if I’d been able to take up the scholarship that I’d won when I was thirteen. And then I thought, well maybe it would have been like the verger in that Somerset Maugham short story.
He’d been a verger for years and he couldn’t read or write and it hadn’t mattered. But a new vicar took over and found that he was illiterate. So he was sacked. He was wandering around disconsolate and he saw a tobacconist shop for sale. He bought it and he did so well that he ended up with a chain of shops. One day he went to the bank and the manager said, ‘Why don’t you invest your money?’ And handed him a prospectus.
So he said, ‘It’s no good showing me this, I can’t read.’
The manager said, ‘Can’t read and you’ve done so well? Imagine where you would have got if you could have read.’
And the man said, ‘Well, if I could have read I would still have been a verger.’
So I often think if I could have taken up the scholarship and become a teacher, as was my ambition, life might not have been nearly so interesting as it has been.
Anyway even though I allowed my thoughts to wander I managed to get through the paper. I couldn’t answer all the questions, simply because the time limit beat me. I suppose when you’re younger your mind is more agile and certainly your hands are.
When we came out we all got together and had a celebration, coffee and cream cakes, the school tuckshop sort of thing. Then we all said how badly we’d done, once again preparing the way in case we’d failed. We all said we knew we hadn’t passed and yet we were very cheerful about it. But when we got the results we had all passed.
This success spurred me on. I thought: well I’ve got ‘O’ level so why not have a go at ‘A’ level. Mind you the ‘A’ level was a very different proposition from ‘O’ level. There was Shakespeare, Tennyson, and Huxley and books like that to be read and I, Claudius by Robert Graves. I thought I’d never get through it, what with everybody getting murdered and what not all the way through the book. Then just after we had started we were told that we’d have to complete the course in a year instead of two years. This was because the numbers were so low that if we didn’t the class would have to close. This I felt was asking a lot – and it might be expensive because the examination fees were quite high.
But I’m glad I took the chance. We had a marvellous teacher, I’ve got to hand it to him. Anyone who couldn’t assimilate the knowledge that he dished out and couldn’t understand the books when he explained them should have stayed at home and done fretwork or tatting. He was wonderful, but all too fast the examination day came round. It was the church hall again. This time when I got there, there was a bottle of smelling salts and a bottle of eau-de-Cologne on my desk with a card saying ‘Good luck, Gran’ – was my face red? I asked the others afterwards who put them there but none of them would admit to it. They were another grand set of youngsters.
Well, as you must have gathered, I passed. Once again success went to my head. So now I’m studying for my ‘A’ level in history. I’ve done one year and have got one more year to do and I hope to pass that as well. After that who knows? Has anyone ever got a university scholarship at the age of sixty-five?
People ask me what value has it been to you? What have you got out of it? This kind of remark sends me screaming up the wall. It’s as though you’re expected to show them money – or some object that you’ve been able to buy because you’ve acquired some knowledge. I suppose it’s the sort of bloody ignorance you’ve got to expect in a materialistic world.
I’ll tell you what I’ve got out of it. I’ve increased my fluency of self-expression both in the spoken and written word. I’ve got a new confidence. I’ve found beauty that I didn’t know existed in the English language – and you tell me where you can buy beauty.
Studying for the ‘A’ levels has given me an insight into books that I hadn’t got before. I never did read rubbish but when you come to books by people like Shakespeare and Tennyson and the teacher opens your eyes for you, it’s like Ali Baba and the treasure cave. I’d never liked poetry because I hadn’t been able to make head or tail of what the poet was getting at. But when you have a teacher whose whole being radiates as he talks about it, who so obviously loves it, who wants you to love it too and who takes the trouble to explain it to you, a new life opens for you. So even if you only get more pleasure out of reading it’s worthwhile.
Who wants money when you’ve got public libraries? Your life can be very rich when you have these so rich in knowledge and beauty. And this is what that teacher gave me: not just knowledge but the desire for and the direction to go to acquire more. And any man who can do that for people has reached the peak of human achievement. Well, that’s what I think anyway.
18
BEFORE I STARTED studying history for my ‘A’ level at the ripe age of sixty-one you could have written all that I knew about history on a single page. And that all boils down to the way I was taught at my elementary school. We weren’t taught that history was a record of the living past but that it was a record of a dead one. Nothing was presented as the vivid pageant of the times or the fascinating study of the people who’d lived in those times. It was nothing but a collection of facts, figures, and dates.
When I left school all I really knew of history was that King Alfred burned the cakes, King Harold got shot in the eye, and King Richard had a humpback. What a heritage to leave school with. Another bad thing about school in those days was that you never left with a desire to learn more, which surely is the whole reason for education – that you leave with a desire to learn more and that you know how and where to find knowledge. Mind you, you left school knowing the three Rs which is more than many do today. But looking back I can’t really blame the teachers because the same teacher had to teach every subject; not like now when you have specialist teachers for each subject.
Since I’ve been studying history I’ve listened far more attentively to my mother’s tales about Victorian life – she was born in 1880. Before I never used to take much notice of her. I used to let her drone on.
She says – and it’s true – that people think that life for the poor is as hard now as it was many years ago. I must confess I used to think the same. She tells me about her grandparents. Both of them had to go to the workhouse when they were old because the Government gave no money, they only provided workhouses. And none of their children could afford to keep them so they just had to go there.
My mother’s grandmother died in one and because of one. She was over sixty and you might say she died of old age, but the conditions there accelerated it. My mother’s grandfather lived on, though he couldn’t walk, and when his sons used to go and see him he’d cry and say to them, ‘Oh, get a cart, get a wheelbarrow, get anything – only get me out of this terrible place.’
Eventually my mother’s father did get him out and took him home. And the old man used to tell my mother the most harrowing tales. What an appalling place it was.
It was a workhouse and an asylum all in one. The laundry used to be done down in the cellars and the reek of that yellow soap and decaying bodies w
as always with them. The sick and the infirm just lay in the wards with no one to look after them – only the other inmates, if they felt like it. When it got dark there was just one oil lamp for everyone and they had nothing to do but just sit and gaze at each other. Most of them were illiterate so they couldn’t help themselves.
Things like this don’t happen now. It’s history. But it’s history within living memory and it’s history which accounts for the way some people think and behave today.
When my mother was a girl, the workhouse was at the end of their garden and the children from there used to go to the same school. They used to be known as the workhouse brats, with their grey woollen dresses in the winter and grey cotton dresses in the summer. In the area where Mum lived whole families used to go into the workhouse in the winter and in the summer when there was more work about they’d come out again. But while they were in they would be separated, the women from the husbands and the children from both. The shadow of the workhouse hung over every working-class family.
My mother went into domestic service in 1895. The people she worked for had acquired their wealth in trade as so many middle-class people had at that time. They had sold their town house and bought a big one in the country, filling it with the latest in Victoriana.
She got ten pounds a year there, paid quarterly as it was too small an amount to be paid oftener. Out of this she had to buy herself one new dress a year. She wore the same dresses summer and winter. But then of course you couldn’t buy anything ready-made. She’s told me it took seven yards of serge material and seven yards of lining and of course not only did she have to buy the material, she had to pay to have it made as well. So she had very little money left out of her ten pounds.
In this particular job, the under-servants were expected when they went out to wear a black bonnet provided by the employers. Mother simply hated wearing this bonnet. She was always a bit on the militant side. To her that bonnet was a sign of servitude and she thought it should be resisted. So one day she went out in her own hat and she was seen from the drawing-room. When she came in she was called for and she got a severe telling off. She didn’t dare do it again but she looked for and got another job.
Climbing the Stairs Page 14