Half Century

At a certain point last week I entered upon my 70th year. Which – just to be clear – does not mean I am now 70, but 69. Like the debate over the start of the millennium (2000 or 2001?) I suspect this common terminological confusion will never be resolved, but, as far as I'm concerned, this will be my last year of late middle age, or of nearly being old. Inevitably, this has led to a certain degree of retrospection.

In terms of anniversaries, in 1963 – the Beatles' first LP and all that – I was only nine years old, and still almost entirely concerned with the things that concern children: play, toys, comics, cigarette- and bubble-gum cards, and going to school. That was sixty years ago, and feels like it; in fact, it feels like another lifetime in another country. But 1973... Can that really have been fifty years ago? The arithmetic says yes, but I'm not entirely convinced. In a well-worn cliché, it still feels like yesterday. But there is no denying that fifty years have somehow passed since I finally left school and embarked on various postponements and approximations of adult life.

1973 was a very important year for me. One of the oddities of the British educational system back then was that Oxford and Cambridge ran their own entrance examinations which, inconveniently, happened during the winter term (i.e. the first term of a new academic year), followed by interviews, with admission results sent out by telegram and published in the national broadsheet papers around Christmas. So potential Oxbridge candidates would first have to secure some non-Oxbridge university offers, then wait for their A-Level results in the summer (in my case, summer 1972) and – if these were judged good enough (generally three or more straight A grades plus a couple of S-levels) – ask to defer when they would start at university by a year, and then spend an extra term at school preparing for and taking the entrance exams. The consequence was that you had to experience a peculiar extended period under a secondary school regime – a "seventh term" of sixth form, with uniform, shaving, haircuts and all – followed by nine months in the following year with nothing much to do. Meanwhile, nearly all your contemporaries would have left, either for university or the real world. [1]

I suppose for children from wealthier families this was an opportunity for travel and adventure: what today would be called a "gap year". But I and two of my fellow candidates – two of us successful in our applications, one not – came from typical New Town families, and needed to find paid work. Luckily, there was an informal agreement between some Stevenage schools that any Oxbridge candidates (there were never very many) might be taken on as temporary teaching assistants, so that's what we did. In January 1973 friend Dave went to a primary school, and friend Alan and I went to the Catholic boy's grammar school, St. Michael's, where I was put to work mainly as an art assistant.

Those two terms were actually some of the most contented months in my entire life. This despite the lingering illness and death of my grandfather and the family bad blood it was stirring up, all of which had cast an unhappy pall over home life in our little flat, and was exhausting my poor parents, emotionally and physically. Which, shamefully, I barely noticed. I was earning real money for the first time and, outside of work hours, was free to do whatever I wanted: no more homework, no more exams; for now, anyway. Life was good. I was finally able to let my hair and beard grow, too, with the result that the boys at St. Michael's nicknamed me "Roy", after Roy Wood of Wizzard, a group that was a bit of a fixture on Top of the Pops in 1972/73 [2].

"Roy", the carefree technician

With most of my friends away at university I had the time and the money to visit them at weekends in what were still to me exotic, faraway cities like Bristol, Norwich, Birmingham, and Brighton. In the main we just got drunk and/or helplessly stoned together, which in those days seemed to be the main point of going to university. I had also begun one of the more ill-fated "relationships" in my life, which started well but ended in confusion and anger later that same year. In retrospect, I suppose I was spending as much time as possible away from the glum atmosphere at home.

But I loved the work. I was a "technician": I learned to stack and fire a kiln, how to prepare and use slips and glazes and other useful hands-on skills, such as how to make screens for screen-printing, and racks to hang prints and paintings to dry. Sometimes I was asked to help boys realise their art projects, and I also occasionally gave a hand with remedial literacy classes. During the 1973 Easter break I was part of the staff contingent accompanying two mini-vans full of boys to a Youth Hostel in Derbyshire's Peak District, although in the event I had to leave early to attend my grandfather's funeral. But the job was mainly brain-light manual work. I did an awful lot of sweeping up, tidying up, and putting tools back in racks and cupboards, as well as the eternal de-hazarding of the clay bins, into which the more psychopathic boys would drop razor-sharp Stanley-knife blades or transparent plastic injection-moulding pellets that, undetected, caused pots to explode in the kiln.

I made friends with some of the younger teachers, and was invited into their homes. It was there that I first became aware of the ways of the new, semi-bohemian professional classes, with their Habitat furniture and collections of eye-pleasing junk-shop bric-a-brac: stuff like antique glass bottles, stoneware jugs, enamelled metal signs, and little lacquered boxes, which sometimes concealed a small lump of hash for their weekend soirées. One couple in particular introduced me to the pleasures of illustrated books, of which they had a strikingly well-chosen collection, including one I came to covet, Arthur Rackham's Some British Ballads [3].

In return, I introduced them to the likes of Joni Mitchell, and other musical revelations. It's hard to imagine, now, how quickly one lost touch back then with the latest things after settling into adult life. The hipper reaches of pop culture were still mainly passed on by word of mouth, and the very idea of a middle-aged enthusiast for what was still seen as ephemeral young people's music remained a little left-field. Besides, none of these cash-strapped, child- and career-bound folk could have afforded the speculative investment in vinyl records that would have been necessary to keep up with the burgeoning music scenes of the late 60s and early 70s. And what a time that was! [4] 

To those teachers I expect I was just a curiosity, one of the local natives with unexpected tastes and ambitions, but to me this was an important glimpse of my anticipated future life. These were the people I aspired to become, and I studied them like an Ancient Briton hoping to become a Roman citizen. This, combined with the rather wilder times I and my old schoolfriends were having together, and an affaire de coeur that had soared then crashed and burned, meant that by the time I turned up at Oxford in October 1973 I considered myself quite the worldly sophisticate, especially compared to my privately-educated peers, most of whom were a year younger, some arriving more or less straight from school.

Heh. Little did I know how much I still had to learn, and what a gulf there was between the home life and aspirations of a secondary school teacher in a New Town and those of the established upper-middle classes, brought up to expect privilege and prominence by right of birth. But there was one very valuable lesson that I had learned that year that was out of reach to the privileged, the well-connected, and the wealthy: that there is great satisfaction to be had in doing a necessary, semi-skilled, reasonably-paid manual job, free from worries and responsibilities, with the anticipation of a pleasure-filled weekend just a few days away. It's what ordinary young people are for, isn't it? It's Saturday night and I just got paid... Here comes the weekend... Believe me, we will be making a huge mistake as a society if we allow such jobs to be automated out of existence, just because we can. Not everyone aspires to a career as a policy wonk looking for new ways to destroy other people's lives, or as a hi-tech nerd handing them the means to do so. It's just wrong, and so short-sighted. Call for Captain Swing!

So, anyway, here we are, fully fifty years on in 2023. Well, who'd have thought it? Although, sadly, not everyone I knew in 1973 has made it this far. In fact, several didn't even make it to 1974. But I suppose it's time to get on with figuring out what us ordinary old people are for. I'm sure there must be something more than endlessly going on about the old days, and how different, and how good those days were...

Oh! pleasant exercise of hope and joy!
For mighty were the auxiliars which then stood
Upon our side, we who were strong in love!
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven!—Oh! times,
In which the meagre, stale, forbidding ways
Of custom, law, and statute, took at once
The attraction of a country in romance!

Wordsworth, The Prelude, Book XI (1850)

Yeah, yeah, OK boomer... 

50 years on... Thinner hair, thicker beard

(and whatever happened to the nose?)

1. It's hard to recall, in these days when almost 50% of British youngsters go into higher education, that even from a selective state grammar school like mine – typically divided in each year into ability-streamed classes of 30-ish pupils each – only some of the top "A" stream class and a few from the "B" stream would go on into the sixth form, and even then nowhere near all of them would achieve university or polytechnic places. Far fewer numbers, of course, meant that generous full grants were available from the county authority. (Student loans? What are these "student loans" of which you speak?)

2. Curiously, an old friend from those days knows someone who had been a pupil at St. Michael's at the time. It turns out that he remembers me, but thought my my name was Mr. Wood...

3. I recently discovered that this lovely book is currently available in facsimile as a Kindle book for a mere £2.99.

4. I was reminded of this when Tom Verlaine died recently, and I realised I had never knowingly heard the album "Marquee Moon". Why not? Partly because nobody I knew owned a copy, but mainly because by 1977 I, too, needed money to pay rent and bills, not to buy new records, and it no longer seemed that important, anyway, to keep up with the latest rock and pop sensations. Although in later years younger friends and colleagues repaid the favour by introducing me to the music of artists like Suzanne Vega and "world music" stars like the Bhundu Boys.