Open Writing

I worked for Kingsway College of Further Education in Keeley Street from 1969, and went by tube train from Perivale to Holborn, buying a four-monthly season ticket for twenty pounds. Then the college moved to Sidmouth Street, off the Grays Inn Road and I travelled up to Kings Cross every day.
There I worked in the General Office and one of my earliest memories is of an enrolment day when we were moved into the hall and stationed at department tables. The Science and Maths department enrolled many Hong Kong Chinese who paid their fees in cash. On a hook behind me I had hung up a green M. & S. bag with my bits and pieces in, and before long ‘my’ students were being directed to the ‘bag lady’.

I felt vulnerable taking hundreds of pounds in cash, but the Office Manager said if there was any ‘trouble’ from gate-crashers - to ‘just give them the money Mrs. Perrin’.

By 1973 we were taking many more Asians. They had come from Uganda, which Idi Amin had determined to make a ‘black man’s country’. By the end of 1972 40,000 to 80,000 were expelled. He asked Britain to take responsibility for those who held British passports and about 30,000 were granted asylum here. Hence the number of our Asian students increased.
In the summer of 1974 Turkey invaded Cyprus as Turkish Cypriots were supposedly being threatened. Our intake then included many Cypriots, and once included an Ethiopian girl who had escaped from the conflict with Somalia, - and so on, up to the apartheid disturbances of 1976 in South African Soweto, when we had a few from there.

Once when crossing the road being repaired outside the college, I fell over and badly hurt the side of my head. One of the young African students picked me up. Encouraged by one of my office colleagues, I claimed on Camden Council, and sent in a photo of my black eye and bruised face taken by my husband Les. A witness to the event was Leroy, the assistant School-keeper, (replacing an Asian, always drunk on duty). Leroy was a Rastafarian, who frequently wore a red, yellow and green woolly hat over his dreadlocks. After various letters denying responsibility from the Council, the Gas Board, the Electricity Board etc, I waited many months and finally received the sum of £250 in compensation.

Once I recall I had a poster on my office wall featuring English apples, which was at the time when our shops were being swamped with French Golden Delicious. Chatting to a group of Chinese boys I tried to tell them about it, and emphasised buying English apples for their lunch. To make it more clear for them, as I thought, I pointed to the Union Jack in the corner of the picture and asked what it meant. To my dismay their unexpected answer was –‘National Front’, Mrs Perrin.

In May 1970, while a medical student, Val and his friend Ed Mitchell walked the Pilgrims Way, which runs from Winchester to Canterbury; said to be the route taken by Chaucer’s pilgrims when they visited Thomas Becket’s shrine in Canterbury cathedral.

It was an inter-hospital event organised by Guinness Brewery. Val and Ed did thirty miles of it and ended up with badly blistered feet and being picked up by a lorry.
Cathy was at Art School in Harrow, but kept on her Saturday library job at Perivale and Wood End. She was making silver jewellery, and had an exhibition of her work at Harrow. After interviews at various Art Colleges to further her career and getting a place at Taunton, (the return trip by rail from Paddington cost £4) and much heart-searching, she finally gave up the idea of making good in the Art field and took a permanent job with Harrow Libraries.

After five years Les had sold his GP 14 dinghy Nimboo Pani. He would come with me after we finished work, to many classes at London’s famous City Literary Institute in Stukeley Street off Drury Lane. Including Psychology of Everyday Life, Literature, and Architecture, I also did Painting and Voice Production. We joined a Wood Carving class, trying our hand with mallet and chisel to create imaginary figures. One by Les, depicting two asymmetric figures folded into each other, made out of one block of wood, he sold to one of the lecturers there.
At one time in my earlier years in Kingsway College in Sidmouth Street, students took over the college, and would not allow anyone in. However, I persuaded the boy on the entrance to let me come in to get something from my desk drawer, and he let me through.

I was astounded when I walked into the General Office where students were sitting, some with their feet up on the desks, and using the telephones. I quietly and thankfully collected the book in which I had painstakingly worked out the next intake’s fees and went home.

Among the members of staff was Audrey who had been a Holiday rep, taking parties around Europe. One of her stories was of a lady who, on the road to the next place on the tour, announced that she had left her false teeth behind at the last hotel.

Our Office Manager Elsie Godfrey was very proper and would not allow any of the girls to wear trousers to work. Toulla, the Greek Cypriot girl on the switchboard, once when talking about World War 2 caused a few comments when she told us she had read Mien Kampf and thought Hitler had some very good ideas.
At one time Ken Livingstone came to talk to the students.

A Sociology teacher Kate Hoey, (M.P.and Sports Minister from 1999 to 2001), tried to organise a staff netball team, but I declined joining.

John Yudkin came to work in the office. He was the son of Professor Yudkin who was running a one-man campaign about eating too much sugar in our diet causing diabetes. In his twenties, John was quite an erratic young man who, when put on relief switchboard duty was heard to lose his temper with some of the callers and to shout at them. He used to tell his troubles to June Gosnell and I, and once when he could not get his girl to agree to become engaged we wrote a letter for him to send to her, which seemed to do the trick.

I believe that in later life he followed his father’s footsteps into the world of medicine. Head of Science dept. asked the Office Manager if I could join a Counselling course I wanted to attend in Kings Cross. My interest in Psychology began when my friend Louie Gibbons gave me Carl Jung’s ‘Introduction to Psychology’ when I was sixteen, and then, when I was working at the Port of London Authority I had attended Psychology evening classes at Toc H in Aldgate. Now it was agreed I could go on one afternoon a week.