When the alarm went off I was badly hungover and too ill to go to the exam, and, between vomiting, I lay in bed hardly able to believe my own stupidity. By the afternoon, feeling a bit better, I dressed and was sipping a coffee when there was a knock on the door. When I opened it, the lecturer who had taught me Education burst past me into the room.
‘You stupid . . .’ he said, just stopping himself. Face white with anger, he told me that after three years of work, and being awarded an A in my recent teaching practice, I’d blown it and was now going to be thrown out of college without my teaching qualification.
‘You made your point in that article,’ he went on. ‘Couldn’t you just have left it at that?’
‘What?’
Then it dawned on me what he meant.
Earlier in the term, I’d written an article in the student magazine arguing that exams should be scrapped and replaced by ongoing assessment of course work throughout the year. He thought I’d missed the exam on principle.
‘I was ill,’ I insisted.
I don’t know if he cottoned on that my illness had been self-inflicted, but to my huge relief he said, ‘Send in a sick note, and I’ll arrange for you to sit a different exam paper’, then abruptly left my room.
I sat the exam a few days later with two or three other students who’d missed the original exam through genuine illness and passed with a good mark.
In that summer of 1970 I returned to the pit village, where I spent my summer working as a labourer on a building site, and walking the countryside with Jackie in the evenings and at weekends. I also applied for two teaching jobs. Had the head teachers who interviewed sober, respectful, enthusiastic me known about that irresponsible drunken night I’d spent crowded behind the shuttered bar, things might have been different. But they didn’t know, and to my amazement I was offered both the jobs I’d applied for. In the end I chose to work in a junior school on the outskirts of Barnsley in an Educational Priority Area, the purpose of which was to try and improve the life chances of educationally disadvantaged kids.
TWENTY-FOUR
Managing is to handle any thing with cunning according to the true nature therof . . .
– Symon Latham, Latham’s Faulconry, or The Faulcon’s Lure and Cure, 1615
The autumn of 1970 was an eventful time. In September, aged twenty-five, I became a school teacher. Jackie was working as a designer in a quilt factory in Barnsley, and we bought a detached 1930s house on the edge of the village. We enjoyed doing it up: sanding the floorboards, painting the walls white, Jackie making the curtains. We moved in after marrying in the October school holidays. The wedding was a funny affair. Neither of us had wanted to be the focus of attention, so we only invited two guests to act as witnesses, my brother, Barry, and his wife, Margaret. The four of us travelled together on the bus to Barnsley registry office. The others had boarded at earlier stops, and when I got on the bus I had to smile when I saw my bride, Jackie, sitting there dressed in a black crocheted beret, a dark green belted coat and black knee-length boots. Jackie’s dad had found a wedding ring while renovating an old pawnbroker’s shop and during the ceremony I slipped it on Jackie’s finger. She also wore the bangle I’d bought her in Kano, and just as the bangle carried its fascinating history of Nigerian village life with it, so the ring from the pawnbroker’s shop intrigued us and felt like a direct connection to our pit village’s past. Even today we occasionally look at it and wonder what circumstances forced the poor woman, its previous owner, to pawn her wedding ring. Had her husband blown his wages on booze? Was he unable to work because of injury? Or did she need the money to pay a doctor’s bill?
After the cinema release of Kes, newspapers reported how the film had sparked a craze for taking young kestrels from the nest to train, and one evening I came across what I suspected to be a victim of that craze. I was out walking through farmland at the edge of the village with our dog Gyp, a Labrador, when I met a man I knew who pointed across the fields and told me he’d seen a trapped kestrel. I followed his directions and soon I could hear the kestrel calling out in fear, ‘kikiki . . . kikiki’. It was hanging upside down at the top of a wooden electricity pole. Whoever had tried to train that kestrel had committed the worst crime in falconry by letting it escape with its leash attached, and it was caught on the crosspiece that supported the electric cables. The circle of barbed wire wrapped around the top of the wooden pole meant I couldn’t climb up that way, but to either side, like the guy ropes on a tent, were two steel ropes that helped secure the pole. So, hand over hand, my legs wrapped around the steel rope, I climbed up. Gripping the kestrel’s leash between my teeth, I climbed down with the kestrel flapping around at the end of the leash calling, ‘kikiki . . . kikiki’. Gyp went crazy, leaping up, trying to bite it. I couldn’t open my mouth to shout ‘No!’ or the leash would have slipped from my teeth, but I managed to keep her away with my foot. Within an hour or two of her rescue the kestrel was flying free the length of our long sitting room to my glove, and after I’d fed her up on beef, she calmly stood on a block perch while Jackie drew her in her sketchbook.
Our house was surrounded by a garden in which I could have flown the rescued kestrel on a creance, and a few minutes’ walk away were the fields in which I’d flown my two Keses and Freeman, Hardy and Willis for the film. I still loved hawks. Yet meeting Phillip Glasier and realising that I had been obsessed with a world which wouldn’t have welcomed me had put me off falconry. In addition to that, after training so many kestrels I didn’t want to stoop another to the lure; it would have felt repetitive. So, even though the rescued kestrel was beautiful, I passed her on to the son of a member of staff where I worked, who was interested in flying her.
One day my old friend Towser and his sculptor wife, who were visiting his parents in the village, called in to see Jackie and me in our new home. Handsome and as charismatic as ever, Towser sat on our green Chesterfield, talking to Jackie and his wife in his beautiful accentless actor’s voice, and to me in Yorkshire dialect. To my surprise he’d decided not to take up acting, instead going on to become a successful writer for BBC Radio. Towser’s wife was seriously posh and at one point in the conversation he told us that if we thought she sounded posh, we should hear her dad. He then made us laugh, his wife included, by impersonating his father-in-law’s astonished words upon hearing they were going to the theatre before eating: ‘But one has supper.’ It was an enjoyable afternoon, all of us talking together, with Jackie and Towser’s wife discussing art, and laughing as they listened to their husbands recalling their schoolboy antics. As they left Towser then commented on the large garden, and how it would be a good place to keep a kestrel. I told him I’d packed in hawking because of the lack of opportunity to fly other species of hawk, which were under threat of being poisoned into extinction by pesticides, rather than embarrass his lovely, friendly wife by explaining that it was an encounter with a man with a voice just like her father’s that had prompted my decision.
Not long after Jackie and I had married we’d bought Gyp, our black Labrador, who I took to work. We travelled to the school by bus, or on fine sunny mornings walked the four miles to school through farmland. In autumn and winter, with her head down sniffing the trails of scent, and her tail wagging, she’d quarter the stubble fields and frost-covered meadows; in spring and summer, when the crops were growing, she’d walk at heel behind me along the field paths. The nine- and ten-year-old boys and girls I taught loved having a dog in the classroom, and the headmaster didn’t mind, although he wasn’t best pleased when one day I asked him if he could order me a new chair. Gyp spent a lot of her time lying under my desk and had chewed through the leg of my current one.
When I’d applied to college I’d intended to teach environmental science in secondary schools and my first stint of practical teaching, ‘teaching practice’, was in a secondary school. Then, while doing my next teaching practice and teaching a class in a junior school, I changed my mind. I enjoyed the variety involve
d in teaching all aspects of the curriculum to one class of children, rather than having different class after different class parading in for their science lesson.
I didn’t regret my choice of age group and really enjoyed teaching the class of nine- and ten-year-olds. Each day the boys and girls would enter the classroom bustling with life and energy, some of them laughing and chatting with their friends, others greeting me cheerfully, while others would come up to my desk to tell me what they had been up to. Then it would be down to work. Whatever the subject – be it maths, English, history, art, drama, dance, or an environmental science field trip – I’d do my best to engage the pupils’ interest, then keep them on task, encouraging them to do their best work, whatever their capabilities. At lunchtime and after school I’d mount children’s work and put up classroom displays, always making sure each child had a turn to have work displayed on the wall. I was always on the lookout for opportunities to help boost the self-worth of less confident children. For example, one lad who had difficulty with his reading and spelling found that a technique I’d shown him – tracing the letters of a difficult word in the air with his finger – helped him remember the word and how to spell it. One morning I secretly asked him to learn to spell ‘psychology’, then later that day contrived to bring the word into a class discussion. When I asked if anyone could spell the word this boy was the only one to raise his hand. He spelt it correctly, to the astonishment of the rest of the class. When the other kids were working, we grinned at each other as we shared our secret.
Of course there were pupils in the class who didn’t need me to contrive secret plans to raise their confidence. One day a pupil told me he didn’t understand the difference between vertical and horizontal. I asked the class to stop work for a minute so they could all listen, but one lad continued to talk to a friend as I explained. Irritated, I asked him to give me an example of something that was horizontal. ‘A ruler,’ he said.
Seeing my chance to put him in his place, I picked up a metre-long ruler, held it up vertically with my fingers about a third of the way down from the top, and then asked: ‘Is that horizontal?’
I should have known better. This lad was such a bright spark he pointed to the top edge of the ruler, which was one or two centimetres wide, and said: ‘The top is.’
His answer brought laughter from all the children in the class, as well as me, as I conceded I hadn’t thought of that myself.
Of course I had no control over my pupils’ home lives. One morning I was sitting at my desk having just listened to a pupil read from a book, when a friendly girl, who was usually cheerful, approached me close to tears.
‘I’ve got bellyache, Mr Hines,’ she told me.
‘Oh dear,’ I said, before asking, ‘Did you have some breakfast?’
‘Yes.’
‘What did you have?’
‘A pork pie,’ she replied.
Another morning one girl spotted something through the classroom window and laughed. Moments later, all the class, boys and girls, were on their feet, pointing out of the window in amusement, while some of them called out warnings, such as ‘You’re in trouble now, Mr Hines’, or ‘You’ve had it now, sir’. Hurrying to the window I saw for myself what was causing such merriment. I don’t recall the circumstances – maybe he’d fallen out with another pupil, or perhaps I’d told him off – but whatever the reason, earlier a lad from my class had bolted out of the door and run home. And now, on the school field, there he was being half marched, half dragged back to school by his mother, a big woman with her sleeves rolled up to her elbows and with a grim, determined look on her face. The kids thought it funny, but my stomach churned when the classroom door opened, and, wearing a striped pinafore, the mother dragged her son into the classroom. Whatever the reason for it, to my relief she didn’t hold me responsible for her son’s flight from the classroom. It was him she was angry with for running home, and she apologised to me for her boy’s behaviour.
I took my job very seriously, and by studying in the evenings, at weekends, and in the holidays, I added to my teaching qualifications by gaining a BA (Education) from the Open University. In 1974 I moved to another junior school in an Educational Priority Area in Doncaster, where I taught for a further two years. I then took a year’s sabbatical in 1976 to study for a Master of Education degree at Sheffield University, and complete a thesis on how family background can influence educational achievement. That year was special, for one day in October our son John was born at 6.15 a.m. in Barnsley hospital. Perhaps it was frowned on in those days, but I wasn’t encouraged to hold him. Still, that didn’t dampen my joy. Later, after leaving the hospital, I caught a bus to the edge of town, and still smiling with delight I walked the rest of the way home through fields and woods as the cobwebs on the hedgerows glistened with dew.
I wasn’t the only school teacher in our house. Soon after we’d been married, Jackie had left her job as a designer in the Barnsley quilt factory to study art as her main subject at a teacher training college in Doncaster. On gaining her teaching qualifications, just as I had she’d decided to teach primary school children, but in her case she taught five- to seven-year-olds in an infant school in a nearby village. She loved the job, so what happened one hot sunny day in 1976, before John was born, came out of the blue. While on holiday in East Anglia in the June school break, we visited an art gallery. I don’t recall what kind of work was displayed but I remember Jackie looking at it with interest, and at one point leaning in so close to examine the brushwork on one painting that an attendant had walked up close to us, as if fearing she was about to damage it. When we walked out of the gallery into the sunlight Jackie began to cry, and cry, and cry.
I was in despair, begging her to tell me what was wrong. When she did eventually stop crying, she tried to put her feelings into words. She explained how she’d been overwhelmed by a sense of being unfulfilled, and how that awful sense of emptiness had been followed by an almost unbearable yearning to take up art again. On that lovely sunny holiday, as we walked hand in hand along the sea front, Jackie decided that, after our baby was born in October, she would leave her teaching job to look after the child while also developing her own artwork and teaching part-time art classes. These were plans that I wholeheartedly supported.
Twenty months after John’s birth, in May 1978, our daughter Katie was born in Barnsley hospital at 4.15 a.m. Just as I had when John had been born, unable to contain my delight I walked all the way home smiling. On this beautiful morning there wasn’t a cloud in the sky and the woods were full of bluebells. By the time of Katie’s birth I had become deputy head of a junior school in another part of Doncaster. I enjoyed my job and planned to eventually apply for headships. Then, just as my youthful obsession with hawks had led to me working as a volunteer overseas, and later to my decision to become a teacher, my hawking experiences influenced another decision that dramatically changed my life.
TWENTY-FIVE
RAKE AWAY. To abandon the flight and career away down wind.
– J. G. Mavrogordato, A Falcon in the Field, 1966
In 1980 I’d been deputy head for nearly three years at the junior school in Doncaster, and had already begun to look in the Times Educational Supplement for suitable vacant headships I could apply for, when, one Sunday night, I stayed up late to watch a 1940s black and white Hollywood film called The Best Years of Our Lives. Next morning at school a consignment of stationery arrived and, as I stacked the shelves with exercise books, paper, boxes of pencils, I couldn’t get the film out of my mind. It haunted me. The stories of the men returning from the Second World War changed by their experiences, and having to adjust to civilian life; the women having to adjust to the return of their menfolk, and the loss of their war work and the independence that went with it; the title of the film, The Best Years of Our Lives, all combined to create a sense of yearning. By the time I arrived home that evening I’d realised what I was yearning to do.
‘A film director?’ Jackie
asked, after I’d told her. Then, laughing, she added: ‘You’ve only just learnt how to take a photo.’
This was true. I loved cinema: British social-realist films; American films such as The Last Picture Show and Five Easy Pieces; French and Italian sub-titled films. Yet I’d never given any thought to how they were made or to the cinematography. When I’d worked as falconer on the film Kes I’d never owned a camera, or taken a photograph or thought about framing a shot. Each time Chris Menges – who went on to win two Oscars for cinematography – invited me to look down the camera, to me the shot didn’t look any different from the view I’d seen before. Once when I’d heard Chris talking to his assistant about emulsion I’d thought one of them had been doing a bit of home decorating; I’d never heard of film emulsion. Even so, working on Kes had sown the seeds for what I’d decided to do next.
When I told Jackie that I wanted to use film to tell the stories of working-class people like ourselves, she realised I was serious. And, just as I’d supported her decision to give up teaching to concentrate on her art, so she supported my decision. In the summer of 1980, aged thirty-five, I left my job as a deputy head teacher and gave up my good salary to begin a one-year film-making course at Sheffield Polytechnic.
I enjoyed the course but my elation at having taken a new direction didn’t last, for after I’d completed it I found myself unemployed. A year earlier, my decision to give up my job had seemed exciting. Now, each morning as I awoke and remembered that, for the first time in my working life, I had no job to go to, I began to fear that my decision had not only been naive, but stupidly reckless. Although I wasn’t entitled to unemployment benefit because Jackie worked part-time, I could have my National Insurance stamps paid by the state, and keep up my entitlement to health treatment and a pension, as long as I signed on at the Social Security Office, or the ‘Dole Office’, as we claimants called it. In the early 1980s the Conservative government were closing mines and steelworks throughout South Yorkshire, and once every two weeks I’d join one of the queues of men – it was almost exclusively men – that snaked around the Dole Office as they waited to sign on. When I signed on – I think it was on Thursday mornings – it always seemed to be raining and I can remember how the breath and the damp clothes of the hundreds of queuing men steamed up the rain-spattered windows.
No Way But Gentlenesse Page 20