STORIES|Leaving
They’re talking about sex education in the schools again – or rather the lack of it, he said, folding back his Guardian to read the item more closely. We know the pattern well enough. It happens every few years, doesn’t it, exactly the same, with exactly the same result. When they ask schoolchildren about it, they always say something like ‘Oh, we had a couple of lessons on it when we were in the fourth year. They tacked it onto Biology or Religious Studies or something. The teacher was embarrassed and we just giggled. We didn’t get any useful information out of it.’ Then a teacher is interviewed, who says they aren’t given the time or the resources to do it properly, so what do you expect. Then some voice from an opposition party comes on the radio, and bemoans the fact that Britain is worse than any other European country on teenage pregnancy and every other related issue, wants both the education system and parents to take more of a part, regrets the expanding wave of sexually transmitted diseases, and, because it’s part of their job to have a free dig on the airwaves, blames the government for it all.
Two complete strangers of similar age, we had just settled into our seats on the Pendolino down to London, arranging our newspapers and books on the table between us, in the Quiet compartment, where the use of mobile phones and other forms of noise maker is forbidden. He hadn’t immediately booted up a laptop as so many do on the train these days, especially at ten in the morning, so I had briefly wondered whether we might strike up a conversation. Something about him, rather than something about me, suggested we might. He wasn’t ranting or preaching at me, but had delivered his comments in a measured, considered way. He had a bright, interesting and interested look about him, of one who would talk readily and also attend intelligently to what someone else had to say. I’ve endured far too many journeys where I’ve found myself trapped by a bore talking at me almost without drawing breath, obsessed from the word Go with broadcasting every detail of his life story and of his opinions on everything. More than once I’ve gathered my belongings together as we approached a station, said Goodbye to the pest, walked down the platform to another compartment and got back on the train well away from him. This man seemed different, perhaps more like me, though I took the precaution of giving the usual signals that I had plenty to read and wasn’t necessarily looking for conversational company.
Still, I agreed with him. He was right, and it seemed to me that talking to the young about sex and its consequences had embarrassed virtually everyone involved, generation after generation. Many parents looked to the teachers to deal with it, while many teachers thought parents should be at least as involved as they might be. This meant the whole thing, admittedly far from easy to handle successfully, got rather side-stepped and there was rarely a serious attempt to confront it in a practical and helpful way. Hence the report he was reading today.
The train’s PA system broke in before either of us could say more. A whining youngish voice, toneless and expressionless, reminded us where our train was going, where it would be stopping and about the kinds of ticket that would not be valid for the journey. We learned about safety exits, about not smoking, about the location of the First Class section, and the Quiet section, about taking all our belongings with us when we left the train. With just a hint of increased animation, it concluded by telling us where to find the on-board shop for the purchase of hot and cold drinks, alcoholic beverages and light snacks. This voice belongs to the person they now call the Train Manager.
The train was gathering speed. Yes, he said. That’s how it goes. And on top of that, there’s a parental attitude that says that because they had little or no sex education themselves, their own kids would probably manage reasonably well without it too. I think that’s just another way of putting the problem. It still boils down to reluctance to engage, whatever the reason. He paused, clearly with something still to add. And it’s probably not helped, he went on, by a cohort of so-called ‘young people’ today that seems to strut around as though it knows everything, and would see a parent or a teacher as the last person to have anything worth listening to, on any subject. I nodded.
How about you, he said, can you recall anything in the way of sex education? There really wasn’t much, I told him. I certainly couldn’t remember anything of the kind at any school I’d been to. My mother had once read to me from a library book, when I was very young, much too young for it to be of much use. I was probably three or four years old. It was, literally, about the birds and the bees, and how reproduction took place in the natural world. I knew at the time, from my mother’s voice as she read it, that this was something a bit more serious than the usual bedtime story, but I can’t remember now how close it came to talking about the way human beings do it. That was about all, I thought.
Same here, he said. In my case, it was my father who handled it, and only just in time. I was leaving home the very next day to start my first job. He said: ‘Women of the street, old boy? I suppose you’ve heard about them.’ I nodded. ‘Well, I think you’ll find it’s probably best to keep well away from them when you get to London.’ He waited, perhaps to see if I had anything to say in reply. I didn’t. Then ‘Like some more beer?’ I nodded again. ‘Yes, please.’ So began and ended, without any further discussion, my father’s one and only life-skill lesson (sub-section: sex education) as I stood tentatively on the brink of adulthood and independence. I was nearly nineteen, and we were having a last pint together in the local. The next morning I’d be off and away to start the rest of my life, working for my living in the West End of London.
He continued. We’d lived in North Staffordshire for the previous seven years, just a mile outside Eccleshall. I’d had my secondary education at Alleyne’s Grammar School in Stone (Latin motto: Nisi Dominus Frustra – Without the Lord all in vain), and I emerged with three GCE ‘A’ levels, then the latest new school-leaving qualification. Founded in 1558, the biggest shock to the school had occurred shortly before I arrived there in 1951. After nearly four centuries as a boys-only school, Alleyne’s had become co-educational. There weren’t that many of them in the whole country at that time. Girls were let in, so were female teachers, and it was clear that poor old Tom Beardsmore, the headmaster – who looked to us as though he might have been there since the place was founded – would never fully recover from the trauma.
To him, the girls were the handmaidens of Satan, every one a potential Delilah. They were sinfully programmed to distract his boys from their traditionally healthy and innocent pursuits. Instead of playing football and cricket and doing their Latin homework, he feared these poor, unprepared boys would be lured onto the back row of the local cinema, or seduced into walking through the woods at dusk. He may have been a bit old-fashioned about it, but he was quite right. They were and they did. That was where our sex education took place. On the back row, in the woods: the practical, often clumsy, self-instructional approach.
At this, we smiled, both our minds probably doing a quick rewind back across nearly fifty years to those awkward open-air experiments on plastic macs or round the back of bus shelters. Ah, he continued, if things had turned out differently for me, by this time I wouldn’t have expected to be there having a farewell drink with my father. I’d have already spent my first term at university. But my results weren’t good enough for those days, especially having applied to read one of the most popular subjects. You’ll recall they gave us our results in percentages then and I got the equivalent of two Bs and an E. To be accepted to read English Literature at any university at that time demanded grade A, seventy per cent or higher. That was all before the huge expansion in university building during the Sixties, let alone what has happened since in Higher Education. The newest university then was Keele and they’d only recently issued their first degrees. Competition for places was enormous and, once the results were published, the individual rejections fluttered onto our doormat, one by one, from Birmingham, Reading, Bristol, Liverpool, Manchester and London. Did you get in anywhere? he asked. Yes, I did, I replied modestly - and with good reason. I went to Sheffield. I knew I wouldn’t get in for the subject I wanted, so I applied to do Economics, probably more for the family than anything. You know, ‘Our son is at the university. The first ever in the family.’ It was a complete mistake. I couldn’t understand any of it. At the end of the first year they asked me not to come back for the second. I wasn’t going to, in any case.
He smiled sympathetically. I didn’t know it at the time, he said, but my father wrote to the Admissions Tutor at Birmingham, and may have approached some of the others as well, asking for my case to be reviewed. I came across the letter among some of his papers that my mother kept at home long after his death. She threw most of them away at some later time without mentioning it to me, so I no longer have the evidence. He kept his correspondence immaculately filed in manilla folders. In the folder bearing my name I recall seeing the carbon copy of his letter and being a bit embarrassed by it, not so much by its content, which was perfectly restrained and logically reasoned, but more by the very fact that he’d written it. He sighed at this thought, quiet for a moment. The reply from Birmingham was clipped to it, brief and rigorously to the point. Results were results and there was no possibility of giving anybody’s application a second chance. This was precisely the sort of answer he probably expected and no different from the reply anyone should receive today. On the other hand, those results of mine would easily get you into some of the better universities today, and you wouldn’t have needed to ask for special treatment.
Were you very disappointed? I asked. I don’t quite recall how disappointed I was, he replied. I’ve a feeling that, like several other aspects of my life, I’d rather sleep-walked into the idea of going to university, naturally encouraged by my parents. Right from the beginning of my secondary education it felt to me that it was simply assumed that, in the phrase of the day, I would ‘go on’. No doubt my mother and father had made this objective clear when I’d been transferred here from my school in Shropshire at age twelve and a half. Certainly, throughout my time up to the fifth form, ‘Woofer’ the history teacher and deputy head would always return my dreadful essays or test results with the same comment made to the whole class ‘And now, here’s a boy who wants to go to university . . .’ Obviously, it was somewhere on my file. He smiled mischievously. Just to spite him, I very nearly passed his wretched subject at ‘O’ level. Not quite, he told me when the results came out, but very nearly.
We were drawing into one of the few stopping stations on our journey. One dark-suited man joined our table, sitting on my side, gave us each a cursory glance, judged us harmless enough, unzipped the familiar black carrying case and opened up his laptop. My companion continued. My father was the most deeply disappointed of all, he said. It had been his single-minded ambition for me throughout my young life, though I wasn’t aware of that until much later. Like so many children from not very well-off families in those days, I would have been the figure you just mentioned, that famous first member of the entire family in any generation to go on to higher education. He would have been quietly but immensely proud, perhaps bringing it modestly into conversation in the pub occasionally. Unwittingly, I’d let him down, and probably appeared relatively unmoved by it.
He sighed. It was several years before I came to know the extent of his intense sorrow over the outcome. My mother told me, and by that time there was very little I could say to excuse my failure to realise his ambition for me. My mother was in no doubt about the reason for it, and said so. It was the disturbing influence of my sixth-form girlfriend, whom she had never liked much anyway. She’d waltzed through all her exams, got excellent marks and gone off to Leeds. In his stuffy way, old Tom had been right about girls. For my mother, it was definitely a case of sex education getting in the way of academic achievement. And she was probably right as well. At least, I did eventually go to university full-time as a mature student, in my early thirties, and got myself a respectable degree during my father’s lifetime.
Did you know what you might do next, instead? I asked him. No, shaking his head emphatically, not the faintest idea, I wouldn’t have known where to start. But, putting his disappointment aside, my father soon got cracking. He was an introverted person, and he never said much to me about it, at the time or later, but he took my future in hand in his typically methodical and unspectacular way. He began researching large employers with junior management training schemes based in London. For that was another largely unspoken aspect of my future that we all took for granted. University or not, I would eventually work and have my existence in London. My parents were both born and bred south Londoners, and had never considered anywhere else but London for me to spend my adult life. For them, it was the obvious and natural place. Having been to London often during my childhood, and always enjoyed it, I had no objection.
Well, he really did his homework. As well as commercial concerns, he also looked closely into the Civil Service. He’d been a civil servant himself all his working life in what was then called Post Office Telephones, later, as he approached retirement, to become BT. A great many people over many years had seen the Civil Service as, if not necessarily the most exciting place to work, then probably the most secure employer in the entire country, genuinely then ‘a job for life’. He’d worked through the bad years of the 1930s, even, he had told me, during periods when salaries were actually being reduced year on year. He valued security of employment above everything else, based firmly on his own lived experience. With my three ‘A’ levels, I would be able to apply for the Executive Officer grade and gain entry through successful performance at an interview board. That’s what I did and they accepted me, despite an embarrassing misunderstanding that continued for a minute or two during the interview. I was rambling on about Anglesey instead of East Anglia which I later found we were supposed to be discussing. Just as well really, because I knew nothing whatsoever about East Anglia at the time. And not much more about Anglesey, though at least I had been there.
We both knew there was a bit more to tell, but he needed a breather, a moment or two to order his memories, to compose the final details in his mind. I was about to prompt him with another comment or a question, but before I could say anything, he went on, unprompted. Once accepted, he said, you received a detailed form listing all the Civil Service departments, asking you to select up to a dozen of the ones you’d prefer to work in. The form also asked you to nominate the kind of work you’d prefer to do, reflecting your strengths and weaknesses in various areas, such as working mostly with figures or having frequent contact with members of the public. I went through the departments and ticked the ones I thought most interesting and glamorous. The Diplomatic Service, Customs and Excise, and the Foreign Office particularly appealed to me. I can’t remember which others I ticked. While I’d passed ‘O’ level Maths at school, I’ve no idea how I did it unaided, so I indicated in the skills section that working with figures was definitely not one of my favoured options. Nor did I put a tick anywhere near ‘Inland Revenue’. As for the places where I’d like to work, I put ‘London’ and left it at that.
He waited, checking that he had my attention. Perhaps you can imagine what happened, he said, and I raised my eyebrows to indicate that I was more than ready for the answer, and had probably guessed it. I received an offer of training to become a Tax Officer (Higher Grade) for – of all the departments in the entire Civil Service - the Inland Revenue. I imagined that my more glittering selections had been discounted for one very powerful reason. The Revenue was desperately short of people, and particularly so in London. I accepted this invitation, thinking partly that I might actually come to like the job once I found out what it was all about. As it turned out later, I didn’t like it and left after eighteen months. Also, my first real salary of nearly £400 a year looked attractive. And, in any case, I’d no good reason to offer anyone, particularly my father, for not accepting the job. I thought too that perhaps I might manage to change departments once I was in. Anyway, I had absolutely no other plans in mind.
The last couple of drinks with my father that evening had ended three or four months of waiting while the Civil Service Commission took its time deciding exactly where to send me. At last they settled on Paddington District Tax Office, in North Audley Street, just between Oxford Street and Grosvenor Square. He paused, no doubt reflecting on this critical moment in his young life.
Oh, that's just opposite Selfridges, I said. I knew that area very well at one time. When was this? Ah, he replied, it’s one of those dates that stick in your mind all your life. You’re leaving home completely for the first time, and beginning your first real job. I was to report there on the first of February 1958, at half past eight in the morning. I had not much more with me than a few Savings Certificates accumulated over several years through my grandmother’s generosity, one of the cheapest dark suits that Montague Burton could supply, shoes probably from Freeman, Hardy and Willis, and a new Ronson gas cigarette lighter, a present from my mother. Oh, he smiled, and in case you’ve forgotten where our conversation began, I also had my very limited elementary sex education.