Political awakening
Grammar School was very much a continuation of the prep school. I arrived a week late as we had been in Guernsey on holiday. So the friends and loyalties had already been fixed. I had few friends and the teachers were only interested if you did very well or very badly. I had learnt by then not to stand out and so was usually somewhere in the top half but not too near the top to attract attention. One wise teacher told us that examiners were as lazy as we were and set the same questions year after year – look through the past five year’s papers and you will know all the questions you are likely to get in the exam. I sometimes wonder if they ever thought about how I could be 28th out of 33 in the spring term and then about seventh when the exams came around. I never tried for straight As. Bs and Cs were enough for me.
The school pretended to be a public school, with rugby as the main sport. I had never seen the point in getting my head kicked in and so pleaded asthma most sports afternoons. In the summer they made me a scorer for the cricket team, so at least I had to turn up. And sometimes on a Saturday I would go off with the team for matches at other schools. But when I was thirteen and joined a tennis club I wasn’t allowed out of school to play at the club. And I wasn’t allowed to play at school as the courts were reserved for the team. I never did find out how the team were selected. On a more sedate level I was part of the chess team and we went around many of the local public schools playing matches. And I went to the Hatfield Congress held at what was then a further education college, later to become a polytechnic where I was chaplain, still later to become the University of Hertfordshire.
I was in many of the school plays. I still played for laughs, though the headmaster didn’t approve of me bring the house down at the most solemn moment of Antony and Cleopatra. I swung a sword alongside Colin Blunstone in Coriolanus. At the time he was mainly concentrating on his school band, the Zombies, who were beginning to get a name for themselves and played for school dances and at the local rugby clubs. Then we had debates where once again I could play the audience, and often win.
I even managed to crack up the fiercest teacher of them all. Know as Bullet, because of his cropped, swept back hair style. He was renowned for allowing no nonsense in his class, and it did take till the fifth form before I dared push the margins. Then after being called up to point something out on the board, I did a Norman Wisdom trip on my way back to the desk. And for the first time Bullet laughed.
At the tennis club I did join in the socials. They had in the past had dances, strictly supervised by an adult who would bring along his Scottish country dance records and try to get us to learn the Dashing White Sergeant. I always had to dance with his fat daughter because no one else would. Most of us were more interested in the beginnings of rock and wanted to get bands in. In the end the committee relented and I was part of the organising group for regular dances. The club had a bar and as I neared drinking age I became more interested in the social side of the club than the tennis, though I did once play in a junior match against another club.
But every Saturday I would say that I was off to see my mates. And I would walk around the lake in St Albans. Watch the ducks. Take some photos if I could afford the film. And then go home and say what a good time I had had. And I didn't speak to anyone.
One of the problems with that was that when it became time to go out with girls, I had no idea what to say to them. My first encounter was with Marjorie. We met at a church disco and I hardly spoke to her until we were about to leave, and then asked if she would like to meet again. She lived in Harpenden above the chemists. We went out for a few weeks after that. I got the bus across from St Albans and we went down to Harpenden Public Hall. It was just around the corner from the chemists and I was too young to drive anyway. To see Zoot Money and the Big Roll Band and the Bow Street Runners - winners that year of the Melody Makers Poll.
There I had my first snog, to Davy Graham and Angi, above the chemists, with her parents in the back room. We were in the front, and I was trying to get into her front. And trying, unsuccessfully as it turned out, to work out how you manage to find someone’s lips when you've got your eyes shut. Anyway I missed, and had to pretend I had meant to all along.
In three weeks we spoke about a dozen words to each other. Neither knowing what to say. I might have been her first boyfriend too, though she did know about tongues.
Somehow we drifted apart, though I don't think anything was said. I saw her a year or two later at a party on a farm. But I didn't know what to say then either, so I didn't say it.
Somerset Maugham said once, "I have most loved people who cared little or nothing for me and when people have loved me I have been embarrassed.” I can go along with that.
At weekends there were dances at the rugby clubs at Harpenden Public Hall or at the Market Hall in St Albans. Usually I went alone, sometimes I met someone. But the music was always good – Chris Farlowe, Julie Driscoll, Long John Baldry.
The first great love of my life, I met at confirmation classes. Moi was a couple of years younger than me but lived in the same road; she was the first girlfriend I took home. Sadly I went off to Cardiff University and she went to Sussex.
I was late coming to confirmation. My parents usually went to the evening service – sung evensong, so mainly a choir event. And brother John went to the early morning communion – I think he was a server. So for a few years as an early teenager, I stayed at home. But I did go to the youth club from time to time and there was influenced by the parish clergy. They were a mixed bunch. Andrew Bradley the Vicar was ex-army chaplain who was also heavily involved in work with the homeless. Order and discipline were the keynotes. Everything done properly, everyone clear what job they had to do. The curate David Woodley came from an Anglo-catholic background, he taught his confirmation classes a quiet devotion and traditional faith. Then there was John Wheatley, a lay member of the team. He had been influenced by the charismatic movement and taught the importance of personal faith in his bible studies. Later there was a new curate John Peart who had a pastoral touch.
Between them they covered the breadth of Anglicanism. A catholic faith, the power of the life of the Spirit and a social conscience. Soon after confirmation I was asked to join an ecumenical group – “The People next Door”. Back in those days (1966) there was little contact between the churches, so the group was set up to try to break down some of the barriers. As I could never see the point of denominations I was a natural fit.
It was during my time at the grammar school that I began to get interested in politics. One of my fellow pupils described himself as a socialist, though the rest of us had no idea what one of those was. And when I went home and started to say that the workers, or the poor, might deserve a better deal, my mother called me a Marxist and I didn’t know what one of those was either. But if it annoyed my mother I wanted to be one.
So as soon as I could, I started to study economics. One interesting spin off was that it produced in me a love of history. I had hated all the learning of dates and battles and kings and queens. Much to the consternation of the history teacher who said –“your brother was always good at history, why aren’t you?” But as soon as it became the history of people, who had struggled to survive as the kings and queens and wars rampaged around them, I was transfixed. And I read as much as I could of social history and the early trade unions.
When it was time to choose a university course – it was taken for granted at the grammar school that everyone would go to university – I chose economics.
The one snag was that I had got my usual exam calculations wrong and ended up one grade short. So I had to go back for a term to retake the exam on an easier exam board to push my grades up.
But that gave me nine months before I could take my place at Cardiff. So I went up to the City of London and worked, first for the National Debt Office and then for Barclays Bank chief foreign branch. At Barclays I managed to lose £20 million. Not mine of course, but it gave me an insight into how the City worked. I had been an accounts machinist at the NDO but was too slow for Barclays so they made me a supervisor. I had to collect the printouts from the machines and reconcile them. One morning I noticed that another bank was £15 million or so in the red. I assumed it was a mistake and saw the manager. So he phoned through to the Bank of England and asked them to hold up yesterday’s balances for a bit so we could sort it out. By 10.00am we had found the voucher that had dropped behind one of the machines and put everything right. The manager phoned the Bank of England back to say that today could start now. A private account would have been thrown into the red and interest charged even if it was the banks fault. As it was bank to bank it was overlooked.
It was also the time of UDI in Rhodesia. The white minority, under Ian Smith and the Rhodesian Front, had declared themselves independent of Britain to avoid moves towards majority rule by the black majority. There were supposed to be sanctions. No money was supposed to enter or leave Rhodesia. The only difference it made was that transactions went through management and not through us. With my developing political views, I joined the Justice for Rhodesia Campaign. Though I didn’t mention that at work.
I stayed on at the bank in the summer throughout my university course.
London not only gave me an insight into the workings of the City of London, but also provided the opportunity to get into the West End to see plays and concerts. One summer I spent almost every evening at the proms. It was a chance to hear music I would never choose to go to. Messiaen, Berio, Lutoslavski as well as the classics – Adrian Boult conducting Gerontius; John Ogden playing Tchaikovsky. And I continued to go to a dozen plays a year as well; some really obscure, like a Czech company performing Kafka’s Trial in Czech. And no surtitles in those days to help.
Then on a very rainy day in 1967 I went on the train to Cardiff.
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