Of course I probably wrote a couple of thousand words at work today. I’m working on an awards submission that’s a thousand words and 200 word summary to go with it. Then there’s a couple of letters as well so yeah, I have taken all day to write as many words as I hope to do tonight. Silly, but there you go.
So what were we going to talk about today? I did primary school yesterday, and a thing about Glastonbury that was mostly waffle but there you go. I’m currently running at nearly 300 words of waffle tonight too. I’m getting good at that. It would make sense if I went onto what happened to me at secondary school to follow that, wouldn’t it? I started secondary school early because I had spent a lot of time in hospital and mostly I read books and learned tings. It didn’t take long for me to get ahead of my school friends. I’d already been pushed by my teachers, as I wrote a couple of posts ago. It was clear at the time that I had more hospital time to come, so mother pushed for me to take my eleven plus early. I didn’t think much about it at the time because I’d been pushed to be a swot for as long as I could remember. I had to be top of the class in everything. That was ow I’d been brought up. So I didn’t question it when the school put me forward for the 11 plus. I knew I’d pass it too. There was no doubt in my mind. I knew i was as good as anyone else at school.
I wasn’t prepared for the outpouring of bullying that happened when I passed. Another girl who was the right age to take the 11 plus (der – 11!) didn’t pass. My pride at getting through was knocked back by the barrage of accusations that I had robbed her of her ticket to high school. I took her place, apparently. All my class knew it. And I suddenly became very unpopular. As usual when life gave me lemons, I read. Books and books and books. I’d had an operation the year before and someone bought me a copy of The Hobbit to pass the time while I was in hospital. But I never read it. I couldn’t get into it because I was quite distracted and I needed to read things I already knew. I couldn’t handle a completely new species off on an adventure in a mythical land.
However, when I found myself alone after the 11 plus, when the entire street blamed me for the fact that the girl from number 3 wasn’t clever enough to pass her exam, I turned to The Hobbit. I read it more or less in one sitting when I finally got into it. About seven years later I did the same thing with Lord of the Rings. I read the whole thing in the space of 24 hours with only a short break to eat dinner. I’ve digressed again.
When I started secondary school I went from being top f the class, goody goody swot to just one of the cream. Not top any more. I always ended up in the top half of the class. I was about twelfth in a class of 28 or so. Good, upper middle class stuff, but nowhere near the crème de la crème! It was a disappointment for my mother, and quite a disappointment for me. I was used to being top and getting praise from my teachers but it didn’t transfer to high school. I was just an also ran. My reading habits changed by force as I was given te classics to study. Shakespeare and Dickens and the bloody awful Bronte sisters. Not to mention Jane austen who had an unhealthy fixation with who married whom. Yes I know it was important to her and her kind and her class because women needed to make good marriages if they were to have comfortable lives. At my level of society the best you could hope for was not being beaten up or dying of exhaustion after having a dozen or so children. That’s probably why Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility never appealed.
Eventually, when I started getting interested in social history I began to read Dickens for what I could learn about poor Victorian people but I still never took to the upper class twits and Misters Darcey however good looking they were in wet shirts. That was a long time after though. I remember one of the first books we were given to read was about a Greek boy called Theras and the first chapter was called Theras in the Agora, which means market place in Greek. One of the first things we had to do with the book was cover it in brown paper to protect it. We were expected to cover all of our books in brown paper. We actually hd to take them home and do it. Can you imagine today if you sent kids hoe from school with a pile of books and the instruction to make dust covers for all of them? Oh yes parent, you’re paying for the paper and the sellotape. You’d have a riot on your hands. You can’t even tell them off if they rip the covers off these days. Not that kids want books any more. They want electronic everything. But I’ve digressed again. So Theras was my first experience of reading t secondary school and let me tell you it was enough to have put me off for life if it hadn’t been for my settled love of books that Dad had instilled in me.
I think we also had A Midsummer Night’s Dream that year too. Not the best of Shakespeare’s plays. I think it’s hard for young people to get the comedy out of The Bard just by reading him. You need to get used to the language and it’s a lot easier to get sense out of it if you hear him spoken out loud, rather than translating him in your head. Either way it was about four years before I had experience of a Shakespeare play that I enjoyed when we did Julius Caesar. I quite liked that one.
At the same tme as this I was also being asked to write, but the sort of stuff they wanted wasn’t my whimsical, creative writing. I was expected to do a thing called comprehension. Read something then answer questions about it. Not complete the story the way you tink it should go, like I was used to. But actually answer questions about what the text means and what te author intended. My English teacher was called Mrs Cross, and she and I never seemed to agree about what the text meant n a comprehension exercise. I never had good marks from Mrs Cross, which is odd really because many years later when I took the JMB Use of English exam and got a grade 2 she apparently told someone she was disappointed because I should have got a grade 1. Bless her.
She was also our librarian and, when we reached sixth form and were given a list of classics we ‘should have read’ by now she was extremely understanding after I said I really didn’t want to. I asked for recommendations for things I might prefer and, after a conversation that rather reminded me of the things Dad and I discussed, she came up with Mistress Masham’s Repose by T H White. She was right. I loved it. But my writing didn’t impress her.
Some time after Theras I studied Wuthering Heights for O level and was taught by a Miss Addinall. Just as an aside here she was actually a very good teacher and was one of the people who inspired me to read poetry. She awoke my senses to the music of words – the poetry. Before her I’d really only taken in the story of poems. Mr Wilson with Lochinvar and how the knight rescued his lady love; Hiawatha and Nocomis; The Highwayman and so on. Although I could appreciate the rhythm of poems I still didn’t really get the music. I can remember learning about Hiawatha rhythm: By the sores of Gitchee Goomi, By the shining big sea water etc. Every line of Longfellow went dardy dardy dardy dardy. So I could pick out the rhythm. I could pick out rhyme schemes. Which lines rhymed with which, and why. But still no real beauty. Then along came Miss Addinall and that lovely onomatopoeic line about the skaters: all shod with steel we hissed across the polished ice. I must look that up.
So she was an excellent teacher. She never tried to teach through fear or embarrassment like others did. \It wasn’t her fault that when she came in one day and wrote on the blackboard ‘gambolling’ I blushed like a tomato! As soon as she wrote it I realised it was my mistake. I had, of course, meant ‘gambling’. The essay was about Heathcliffe winning the house by playing dice against one of the Lintons. He didn’t, as Miss Addinall was kind enough to joke, skip joyfully across the moors like a spring lamb. I’ve never made that mistake since!
So secondary school almost killed my writing bug. I always wanted to be a science writer. I had dreams f joining the staff at New Scientist or Scientific American, but my forward thinking, blue stocking school wanted me to be a scientist first and a writer second. I was taught by women who mostly had sacrificed a marriage and family for the sake of their career and who felt we should do the same. (It was a girls’ grammar school) Science was a respectable way to challenge male supremacy but I didn’t really want to do it. I took science A levels but my best result was in general studies, where I was expected to write something creative. (It was an essay about ‘natural’ countryside and humankind’s effects on the world. All about how the so-called natural world was actually the result of millennia of crafting by farmers, industrialists and gardeners. Hedgerows, fields, ponds, ditches, all created for some purpose to make life easier for humans. Not natural in any way since prehistoric man cut down the virgin forest to create fields for his new activity of agriculture. )
So my best exam result, when it counted, was for creative writing. That’s why, when I messed up my post school science course I redesigned my career and trained to be a journalist. Because I could do it. I wanted to do it, and I realised it would help me start my dream career as a writer.
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