Climbing the Stairs (18 page)

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 before 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

B
EFORE
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 was 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.