BEING YOUR OWN HERO
BEING YOUR OWN HERO .
Around the age of 14, I went through a change in intellectual development which has served me all the rest of my life.
I was on the bus late for school one rainy morning with an acquaintance called Victor who had done a bit of his homework but not very well at all. I of course had done no homework at all. So, on the shaky upper deck of the wet bus I copied out what he had written down. Even in my haste to cover my empty page I could see his work was poor - and downright wrong and even illogical - but I copied it verbatim because time had run out and I needed to hand something in. We ran in to school wet and late, and pretty soon handed in the homework. At my position as nearly the worst in class, my homework efforts attracted only derision. Of course it gained only a poor mark ( about 0.5 out of 5) from a teacher called Creedy who taught physics. Next homework, it struck me that I could do it better than Victor even with one eye shut, so I did, and lo and behold I got 1.5 out of 5. I was amazed that it was so easy. Then I did it better each week till soon I could predictably get to 5.0 out of 5 . Then I decided to do it in other subjects and it succeeded. I sailed to top of the class and have never really looked back ever since.
It’s a simple enough story but I want to explain what was going on in my mind. What factors brought about this transformation? Self respect? No, I was too young a teenager to know the meaning of this. Shame? Not on your life. I liked the teachers and the school? Not at all. The desire to impress teachers? Never. The sheer joy of learning stuff in books, the widening world of knowledge? No way. Well then, why did I do it?
I have thought about it and I reckon the following. It was the sheer exultation in brain-power combined with scorn for the methods and slower ways of the school. Combined with the idea of taking them on and beating them, especially the wealthy church-going set in class. Playing them at their own game and winning. The idea of winning big, and then turning around and disdaining it all. Laughing at them all the way on the journey of learning, especially with my best buddy Nigel. We were just doing it because it could be done - in spite of apparently huge obstacles. We both laughed and ridiculed our way to the top of the class.
The obstacles against me were huge, all right. My social class was probably the lowest...from slumland with all my family unemployed or only ever manual labourers. The mere location of my home town - south of the Tyne - was enough to say it all. Almost all the posh places were north of the Tyne. There could even have been a mild race factor. Irish/English origins were indicated by my spoken vocabulary words like ‘tateys’, and sentence and speech patterns. In addition, my Tyneside accent was a lot rougher than that of the typical grammar school ‘drone’.
We had no family tradition of academic excellence, although some family members were good at mental arithmetic and spelling. My family’s values and attitudes were completely different from those of the school. They had no idea, no concept of what it was all about, for example, they saw no huge value to homework. The family’s circle of acquaintances included no teachers, no priests, no pro- footballers, all of whom were held in awe at that school.
Most other students at the grammar school knew each other outside school, and often personally knew the teachers. Many had families with money. Whereas I spent weekends grubbing around the alleys of slumtown, they went power-gokarting on private beach sands. They wore tailor-made uniforms from a posh bespoke tailor’s shop in Newcastle, while I was dressed in a made-up uniform of blazer with a hand sewn-on badge and cheaper, poorer pants from various slumtown stores.
There were two types of teacher in that school. The “Old Guard” of incompetent but well-established teachers, in my areas of interest such as geography, maths, and physics. They didn’t like me, nor I them. Then there were the “Outsider” teachers who were somehow not quite part of the establishment. In general they liked me, and I them . They dealt with areas such as music, French,maths, physics,chemistry. It was one of these outsiders, called Creedy, who was first to recognize my rising ability.
So, looking now at my dealings with Victor, I can see he had all the same social origins as me, maybe even worse. But he had no sense of being a smart-ass and enjoying it. In a very short time I had worked my way up to second top of the class, after my buddy Nigel who was top. Then next year I was top and he was second. The mass-goers and the wealthy in the class were enraged and even concocted some evidence of cheating between us two buddies. They got an Old Guard teacher to hold a sort of kangaroo court and try to force me to admit (‘shamefully’ of course) my so-called misdoings – actually cross-questioning me in front of thirty outraged church-goers. My brass neck came to my rescue. The teacher failed, and I laughed openly at his efforts, and so did Nigel.
In the end it was the gifts from my mother and uncle John which served me best in the struggle to throw off the dead weight of the wealth and religious snobbery of the grammar school. It wasn’t the high falutin educational philosophy of classical thought. It wasn’t the lessons of the teachers, nor the textbooks, nor the homework burden, nor any of the school’s offerings. It was the idea from my mother that anything can be done once you decide to put your mind to it, a concept which still guides my actions today. It was also the sense of scorn and ridicule, which I learned and developed thanks to my uncle John, which helped me to plough through endless schoolwork and still know instinctively at the end of it that our priestless, penniless life in slumtown was itself a good laugh, exactly as also was the priest-ridden, moneyed life of the posh suburbs north of the Tyne.
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