Now suddenly we were
quite well off because I got my student grant as someone having a baby and with a wife to support. We started thinking about getting transport, me taking my
driving test, and, with our budget, including saving towards a car, we could
afford one LP record a week: I had my priorities right. So I immediately started building up our small
collection by buying several, after all we had got the grant for the term in
advance, and I bought a decent stereo system with a pair of home-made speakers
that were loud and clear. Having music around the house again brightened up life
considerably and, although the volume was kept fairly low when baby Sam was sleeping,
music was on full time. I can’t remember in what order my collection grew but I
know that Velvet Underground, The Pretty things, Spirit, It’s a Beautiful Day, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin
and Soft Machine were all fairly early arrivals, followed by a batch with folk
or country edges, Fairport Convention, Roy Harper, Bob Dylan, Poco, CSNY, The
Byrds, etc who all entered the frame.
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A photo of me at around this time. |
Of my group of fellow
students I can only remember a few. Heather, the 40 something divorcee, Val,
the twenty something single mum, Stuart, the ex-Guardsman, the ex-vicar, the
ex-policeman. St Lukes was famous for its Physical Education section and gave
places to good players in most sports. We had a young Welsh International Rugby
player who was apparently as thick as two short planks, but he helped Lukes win
their league at Rugby. So a lot of the young students we saw around the place
were healthy looking athletic types and our group rather stuck out. There were
a couple of hippiesh types in our group but they both dropped out at some point.
None of the group looked like big party types, but neither was I at that
period, in fact I was very insular and got on with my course in my own way,
taking deep interest in that which interested me and virtually ignoring stuff
that didn’t.
What Heather did was
befriend me, along with a few others in the group, and invited us round to her
nice house in a very good neighborhood near the college. And then she wanted to
meet Simone and suggested she come down for a couple of days. Although this was
going to be a logistical nightmare, Simone was so desperate to get out the
house, that she agreed and it all worked out well with Heather and her two
daughters cooing over baby Sam and getting on well with Simone. This led to a
long friendship with Heather, right through our time in France even. Simone was
getting out of the first stage of mothering as the spring came on and began
going into Barnstaple on the bus again with Sam in a front carrier. She began
to meet other young mother’s particularly at the hippy Barum Market, and some
of these came out to visit. In fact, as the spring sprung and then summer
followed, our house became quite a popular afternoon venue.
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My then wife, Simone, with baby Sam. |
One event made us
realise that we would have to try and get a car at some point. One early evening
when Sam was first beginning to walk around, he spotted his milk being warmed
on the stove and made a grab for it. Unfortunately it was warming in a saucepan
of boiling water which went all over his leg making him scream. We tore off his
pyjamas, a mistake as the skin came off with them, and realised he needed
hospital treatment. We didn’t have a phone, the neighbours were all out so I just
had to hitch-hike the 7 miles to South Molton Hospital in the rain with a
screaming child. Luckily I got a lift quite quickly and Sam was well treated
and an ambulance took us home. But he had to have his dressing changed a couple
of times which meant more hitch-hiking. He had scars for a few years but there
was no lasting harm but we knew getting a vehicle and maybe even a phone was
essential.
As I mentioned, some
of my course I loved, some I despised or just found boring. Luckily, throughout the course, it was based on course work, with no exams. I did very well in my favourites and
scraped through the others having done very little work. Going through the
different subjects, we had obligatory junior maths which seemed mainly
concerned that we understood the metric system which was being rolled out into
all aspects of life – boring but not difficult. Then we had obligatory English
taught by a gay posh guy who had our tutorials in his ‘chambers’. I think he
thought we were at Oxbridge. He finished most sentences with ‘isn’t it’, told
me off for being so scruffy and served tea and biscuits all round. I enjoyed
his knowledge of English and of story telling, he told us there were only 7
stories in the world, they just kept changing the details. He was mainly fun
and English had always been my top subject.
Then there was the obligatory
subject of Educational Theory taken by my favourite, Sir Richard Acland. He turned
everything on its head from day one and had some of the group wondering what on
earth was going on. He ridiculised the present system with its ‘exams’ to make
sure we all ended up at the right desk or machine or broom for the rest of our
lives.
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Toddler Sam in front of our cottage. |
He wanted an education
system based on creative learning, starting with the things closest to us and
then slowly working outwards, so that our education was experience based and we
were taught how to think, how to develop an inborn bullshit detector. And,
certainly, no exams, just qualifications based on our showing what we were
capable of. He gave me as an example, a person who had been in the education
system for getting on for twenty years yet at no time had I been taught about
looking after a young baby, one of the most likely things to happen in my life,
a real need.
All this sounded great to me and I was all for it. We worked in
small groups to develop an alternative syllabus and then were sent out in the
streets to try and sell it to both school pupils and parents. That particular
exercise was quite depressing to us students because it was rejected by pretty
much everyone we showed it to. But Sir Richard said, of course they will reject
it, they are victims of the existing system and have been programmed to think
like that. We then moved on to learning about how children learn and why they
don’t learn and why so many children fail at school. I got really hooked on all
this and for the first time saw a potential future in teaching, not just my
own children but others too.
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