Open Writing

On holidays in north Somerset we drove our Ford Popular to Exmoor, Ilfracombe, Lynmouth, Porlock, Holcombe Woods, Dunster, Quantoxhead and Coleridge’s cottage at Nether Stowey.

One year we rented a bungalow at Doniford Orchard just outside Watchet. One evening, we walked into town to the Odeon on the quayside, their only Cinema. As we stood outside looking at the photos, a window directly above us opened and the projectionist stuck his head out. He called down that he would wait until we had finished our walk round the harbour and would start the show when we returned. After watching ‘The Man who Shot Liberty Valance’ with John Wayne, and just as the National Anthem was churned out and the lights went up, we saw we were the only ones there.
The best films in 1960 and 1961 were John Wayne’s ‘Alamo’, ‘Guns of Navarone’ with David Niven, Antony Quinn and Gregory Peck, ‘Spartacus’ with Peter Ustinov, ‘El Cid’ starring Charlton Heston, ‘Hundred and One Dalmatians’, Elvis Presley’s ‘Blue Hawaii’, ‘West Side Story’ and ‘Whistle Down the Wind’ with Alan Bates and Hayley Mills.

The sixties brought us the Beatles and songs with strange titles, like ‘Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’, ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ and ‘Yellow Submarine’.
In 1961 we saw Peter Cook, Dudley Moore and Alan Bennett in ‘Beyond the Fringe’.

When Val our son was about fourteen he would take young Cathy about ten, on a Saturday morning trip by tube to South Kensington to go in the Natural History Museum, spending nearly all the time in the birds section and sketching on clipboards provided by the staff. Travelling on their own, we did not imagine any harm would befall them in those days.
In the summer of 1961 we holidayed in Barmouth, North Wales, taking Bernard with us, then recovering from a nervous breakdown, after an attempted suicide. There we met a resident Meirion Rowlands, an already sick man. He took Les for a sail in his GP 14 sailing dinghy Nimboo Pani, which he sold Les, and we towed it home to Greenford on a borrowed trailer.

Les and I joined a philosophy evening class in Suffolk Street behind the Haymarket theatre. There we made friends with Kumar (Khoka) Chatterjee from Nepal. He came over to tea from Acton, and enthralled the children with stories of Jim Corbett and the man-eating tigers of Kumaon. He was the son of a one-time doctor, a member of the Magic Circle, who had taken his performing magic show all round the world, with Khoka as a member of the cast. At Christmas Khoka gave us a magic show in our own front room. Another time he used Val, as his subject, to demonstrate the art of levitation. We still have the snap we took.

After the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award classes, and having had the experience of standing in front of students, I enrolled in September 1962 for a three year Teacher Training course at Sidney Webb College in Oxford Street, to learn to really teach, with my main subject as Art. One of the tutors, Keith Richards, later became Chairman of the University of the Third Age.

I was thirty-nine. The majority of students were over thirty. Among them a grounded airline pilot, a school’s technician - who admired my drawing of Michael Angelo’s David when we visited the Victoria and Albert Museum, - and Michael Appiah, an Italian, a former monk, who chased the females, and then there was little Graham Hardwick, who counted members of the Pink Floyd group among his friends.
Graham was of slight build with a waif-like appearance, always seeming short of money, so I sometimes shared my sandwiches with him. He had been something of a drop-out and had travelled to Khatmandu, the Hippie paradise. An undertaker’s son, - a divorcee - living in a flat round the corner from Covent Garden Opera House with his new partner Francis (Fanny), a primary school teacher, whom I met when invited there to tea.

I was intrigued to see their books, including James Joyce’s Ulysses, Christmas Humphreys’ book on Buddhism, and The Golden Bough, a study of religion and magic, all set out in apple box ‘shelves’ which he had coloured with oak stain. As it got dark they lit candles round the room. I remember Graham asking Fanny if she had any bread, and had stupidly thought I could have taken some in, but they explained that ‘bread’ was the word for ‘money’. He came over to meet my family and ‘gave’ our son some photographic equipment on permanent loan.
He left the course early to travel again, leaving boxes of books and bed linen to be stored in our attic. He sent long descriptive letters of where he had been, especially favouring Greece. He ended up joining a Buddhist community in Ceylon and we heard no more of him.

I enjoyed the Art lessons, - collage with roughly-torn strips from coloured magazines, and making clay pots which we fired in a kiln. We went into the adjacent West End streets and were told to make rubbings of coal hole covers. We did a bit of silk-screen printing and spent time interpreting the meaning of shapes. There was Music and Movement in the hall, and netball on the roof. We were taught the incomprehensible Binary Number System, and had psychology lectures on child development, but nothing on how to control a class.

Gently let into teaching practice, at first just observing at a south London school, and then in Spring 1963 came a second practice in Argyle Square at Kings Cross, which I cannot recall.
The third teaching practice in the autumn of 1964 was in a Harlesden Junior school where we felt unwelcomed. The staff taught in the old strict method and we had been taught a freer style of approach, gathering the children in a ring round us for a story. On my first attempt, the classroom door burst open and an irate headmaster shouted at the children ‘get back to your places !’- which shattered my composure for the day.

We were expected to teach everything. One afternoon, a whistle hanging round my neck, my class crossed the playground to the sports hall. Once inside, the little West Indian kids were up the wall bars in a trice and hanging from the climbing ropes. Fortunately, one of the staff was with me to restore some sort of order. A Staff room story went that when a West Indian mother visited the Headmaster, she had told him in no uncertain terms, that he should make her boy behave, and if not ....’You beat him! You beat him!’

In the classroom the unruly noisy lot would move around, at times banging their desk lids. You can imagine how pleased I was after preparing a wonderful lesson using the Maori myth, - ‘When Yondi Pushed Up the Sky’, that they were well-behaved as they made boomerangs out of coloured cardboard, so the lesson went quite well.

But in general it was heart-breaking with doubts that I was doing the right thing with my life.