Fragment 8: The Life & Times of a Social Experiment
Break out! But can one live comfortably in two very different worlds?
Photo: Leicester Mercury.
My goal with this series is to explore the issue of “adoption and its reverberations”, as a friend has described it. Why? Well, for years I would have said that I ‘just got on with life’ but the older I have become, the more I have realized the foundational impact of my adoption on every aspect of my life. As you might expect, some of it is good but some sure ain’t so good. The time feels right to peer into some of the crevices and try to learn from the re-echoing sounds that linger there.
As far as the narrative goes, I’m trying to put down a set of snapshots to show how things developed. I’ll continue further with this but also spin round, so to speak, to inspect and try to analyse some of what has occurred. I’m trying to work stuff out and, progressively, I’d love to hear some of your thoughts and experiences, dear reader, whether you were also an adopted kid or the product of a ‘regular’ family.
If you have followed this memoir so far, you will know that it is 1956 and we’ve just arrived at the point in time when I am to sit The 11 Plus exam. These tests to determine one’s educational pathway from that point onward were used to provide a snapshot of an individual’s ability and predisposition towards a less or more academic education.
When the day of The 11 Plus arrived it didn’t mean much to me. Okay, it’s a long time ago now but I don’t recall there being any apprehension. Today, anxious middle-class parents hot-house their kids to pass various tests. Maybe some parents did it even back then but not in my neck of the working-class woods. There was no special preparation. Indeed, from my folks at least, there was barely any understanding about what was going on. As far as they were concerned, it was just another school day.
This relaxed approach was maybe a good thing because The 11 Plus was a set of tests designed to quantify IQ (essentially, one’s ability to reason and solve problems) and, although it can probably be tweaked, IQ is not supposed to be susceptible to ‘training’. It just is what it is.
So, I sat The 11 Plus and waited to hear the outcome. I’d passed! Not only that, but I was being offered a place at the city’s top grammar school. For anyone from our area to pass The 11 Plus seemed to be considered remarkable; to get to Wyggeston Grammar School for Boys (affectionately known as Wyggy) was a bloody miracle. Not that I understood it at the time but my escape hatch had just opened.
On my first day, as every subsequent school day, I cycled to school in the smart uniform that had been paid for by Uncle Rupert. The thought that George or Nellie might accompany me I’m sure never occurred to either of them. Nor to me.
The sight, smell and feel of the place was overwhelming. I had experienced nothing like it in my life. The school buildings and grounds, situated next to Leicester University, were extensive. The teaching staff scurried hither and yon in academic gowns. The Great Hall was, to my eye, magnificent. We were reminded that the school, founded by Queen Elizabeth I, had a long and proud tradition in academic subjects and sports, and we were expected to achieve.
Early on, we all read Walter Scott’s The Lay of the Last Minstrel (a popular hit of 1805) and Matthew Arnold’s Sohrab and Rustum (ditto, 1853 … but it is a magnificent piece of blank verse). These were followed up with texts such as John Buchan’s Prester John (1910) which, although I love Buchan’s work, is very much of its colonial time. Then there was Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s 1922 memoir of Scott’s ill-fated 1910-13 expedition to the South Pole, The Worst Journey In the World, and some adventure or other involving gauchos on the Argentinian plains.
Well, you get the picture ... although, at the time, I didn’t. That is, I didn’t realize that all this courageous, chivalric and generally stiff-upper-lip, Boy’s Own stuff was – how shall we say? – a tad old-fashioned, even then.
By the way, in 1973, the Monty Python team produced a book that contains a great spoof of this genre. Here’s a snippet:
The lion was rather bemused by my ploy, and so I was able to get in a couple of good straight lefts, keeping my guard well up, to his upper palate and follow them with a cracking good right cross, moving my weight into the punch (as old ‘Buffy’ Spalding had taught me so many years ago, prior to the needle match against Uppington when ‘Spindly’ Crabber got up off the floor six times so pluckily only just to fail to win the draw which would have halved the batwel or match), right into my opponent’s mane.1
Anyway, I loved Wyggy and its atmosphere although I was never going to be a global adventurer, administrator or sportsman. Particularly the sport bit: I didn’t take to it at all. I couldn’t see the point. Still can’t.
No, I was more at home with the arts. The first independent evidence I can find for this is the programme for a musical evening that took place in the Great Hall on the evening of 6th November 1957. Here, I am listed as a treble in the school choir. By the by, among our number was also a certain T.P Pigott-Smith who would go on to become a hugely successful actor, particularly making his name as Ronald Merrick, the lead role in a 1984 TV adaptation of The Jewel in the Crown. Tim and I met years later in a London recording studio and reminisced about our time at Wyggy.
I note that the musical evening’s programme included ‘Mirth and Melancholy, An English Pastoral Cantata’ with words by John Milton and music by Handel. One of the airs is as follows:
Let me wander not unseen
By hedgerow elms, on hillocks green,
There the ploughman near at hand,
Whistles o’er the furrowed land,
And the milkman singeth blithe,
And the mower whets his scythe,
And every shepherd tells his tale
Under the hawthorn in the dale.
Hmm, I strongly suspect I was the only member of that choir to have experienced the behaviour of the farming fraternity at first hand (pun intended), and it didn’t quite match this bucolic idyll. (See Fragment 5 in this series.)
Then, the programme for a Lower School Distribution of Prizes that took place in the afternoon of Wednesday 23rd July 1958 in the Great Hall, reminds me that I was awarded second prize for Reading. I have no recollection of the text that I read but I hope my success pleased Nellie who was in the audience. But all this was a mere prelude to greater glory. On the evenings of Wednesday 10th to Saturday 13th December 1958 inclusive I was back on the stage of the Great Hall – this time in drag.
The fact that Wyggeston Grammar School for Boys was founded by Queen Elizabeth I may or may not help explain why, three and half centuries after her death, all theatrical productions still followed the Elizabethan convention of having all parts played by males. Thus it was that in the December 1958 production of Sheridan’s The Rivals yours truly was the female lead.
I didn’t get it right. Let me explain. The Rivals is an eighteenth century comedy of manners. In it, the teenage heiress Lydia Languish (that’s me, folks - on the left in the photo) causes consternation for her elders and betters by insisting that she will marry only for love. ‘Sensible’ considerations such as wealth and social-standing are, to Lydia, as nothing compared to romantic love. High social position is, in fact, a definite no-no – true love must involve a poor (but, of course, handsome) chap. In other words, Lydia can be a feisty handful or, as Mrs Malaprop so memorably puts it, “as headstrong as an allegory on the banks of the Nile.” I did not get this at all.
Nor, at the time, would I have understood some thinking about romantic love that subsequently emerged. The Rivals, premiered at Covent Garden in 1775, was humorously presenting aspects of a cultural development of direct relevance to the emergence of England as a pioneer industrial nation.
In brief, in peasant societies marital decisions were primarily driven by questions of that which was best for the successful perpetuation of a family and its property. However, historian and anthropologist Alan Macfarlane has concluded that …
it would seem that the peculiarity of romantic love which anthropologists noted in the twentieth century is a very old feature of western Europe and is particularly marked in England back to the middle ages. … What was once a cultural oddity is now very widely disseminated, and we tend to assume that it is natural, rather than cultural.2
The argument then proceeds that this early ‘separation’ from the ties of family, this individualism, enabled English people to become more mobile and available for the wage-earning work demanded of the industrial society that burgeoned from the Industrial Revolution.
In 1958, I was, of course, blissfully unaware of any of this. At the time of the production, I was just two months into my own teenage-hood (at a time when teenage-hood as a specific life stage was still a very new idea) with zero experience of young women but preconceptions based mostly upon versions given to me by both Nellie and Charles Dickens. Nellie fed me the “Sugar and spice, and all things nice” view of young women, with the qualifier that whatever sex was it definitely was not nice. This was reinforced by my understanding from reading Oliver Twist and other Dickens novels that ‘nice’ young women were beautiful but childlike, or even childish, like Dora Spenlow in David Copperfield.
However, the exemplar of young womanhood that most bothered me was Oliver Twist’s mother, Agnes Fleming. Earlier, you may recall, when I was at junior school, Mr Dowling provided a copy of Oliver Twist to help keep me occupied when I was off sick with mumps. You know, too, that I was confused (still am, in fact) about my origins and about parent-child relationships generally. These elements combined to make the book feel extremely important to me personally. And, because Oliver seemed to hold some keys to help me understand my situation, anything about his mother, Agnes Fleming, seemed equally important.
At the start of the novel, Agnes, rejected by her family and relegated to a parish workhouse, gives birth to Oliver, then dies. You see the parallel? Of course, at that time I had no idea whether my birth mother was alive or dead. If anything, I think I mentally rejected either of those options in favour of the notion that I was ‘special’, a child of the universe, whatever that meant. Anyway, whatever the truth of the matter, my Mum was dead to me.
Nonetheless, right at the end of the book, Dickens wrote things that seemed to me to be relevant and important and yet so hard for me to understand. First, there was …
How Mr Brownlow went on, from day to day, filling the mind of his adopted child [that hooked me!] with stores of knowledge, and becoming attached to him, more and more, as his nature developed itself ...3
What did this mean in terms of my father if I even had one? And second, there was the killer final paragraph of the novel:
Within the altar of the old village church there stands a white marble tablet, which bears as yet but one word: “AGNES”. There is no coffin in that tomb; and may it be many, many years before another name is placed above it. But, if the spirits of the Dead ever come back to earth, to visit spots hallowed by the love – the love beyond the grave – of those whom they knew in life, I believe that the shade of Agnes sometimes hovers round that solemn nook. I believe it none the less because that nook is in a church, and she was weak and erring.4
Purple and un-feminist prose, maybe, but I welled up then and I well up now. And the vision of young womanhood that I took from it meant that I made Lydia Languish far too sweet and sad. But though I say it myself I looked damned pretty.
Just before leaving The Rivals, a comment about a fellow cast member, Bernard Simons (on the right in the photo) who played Sir Anthony Absolute, Lydia’s future father-in-law. He was born in 1941. At the time, the four and a half year difference in our ages seemed enormously wide to me: to all intents and purposes Bernard was a grown-up. But I admired him. He was a lovely man. And he went on to carve out an extraordinary, global reputation as an utterly committed human rights lawyer. Sadly, he died in 1993 at the far-too-young age of 52.
Meanwhile, back at Wyggy, the friends that I made brought dramatic changes into my life. One in particular, my classmate Tony, invited me to his home. It was two miles from our home in Holland Road, and a world away. Tony and his elder brother, Nick, lived with their Dad, Mum, granny and a cocker spaniel called Mandy in a detached house in a much more upmarket area. There was even a third of an acre of garden.
The whole thing was overwhelming to me, and they were so kind. Nigh on everything struck me as truly remarkable at the time. Take, for example, curtains. The downstairs front window at home in Holland Road featured green, self-patterned curtains – two leaves of a flimsy brocade-style fabric hanging from a stretchy wire that, when closed, presented a scant, flat sheet to the world. Oh, and the ‘best’ (shiny) side of the fabric faced outwards to the street. By contrast, the curtains at Tony’s home were of a far more attractive and robust material, lined and suspended from a proper curtain track. Even when closed the curtains featured a satisfying number of folds and, best of all, the patterned side faced inwards!
I became a frequent Saturday visitor. Tony and I would hang out (not a term that would have meant anything at the time) and Tony’s Mum would call us in for tea around five o’clock. Plaice and chips – a hitherto unimagined delight – and other good things. And we could watch television (there still was no TV at home) and I was allowed to sleepover on a mattress placed between Tony and Nick’s beds. I was inexpressibly happy.
Mention of television perhaps permits a brief diversion. The coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953 spurred the ownership of TV sets in the UK, with the BBC having the world of flickering black and white imagery exclusively to itself until the launch of a commercial competitor, ITV, in 1955. In 1958 the number of UK households with a TV set crossed the 50 per cent line. We were buried deep in the ‘left-behind’ 50 per cent.
Mind you, George found a lateral means to solve the problem: he ordered a telephone. ‘What the ...?’ Well, the decision had nothing to do with the fact that December 1958 marked the start of the UK rollout of automatic STD telephones, and rather more to do with George’s wish to stay in communication with fellow members of the temperance organization, the International Order of Good Templars – “What time is the meeting this evening at the Baptist chapel, Brother Frecknall?” sort of thing. But it enabled a secondary function of phoning people with televisions to ask if we could go round to watch something. Bizarrely, the large, black telephone instrument was not situated conveniently downstairs but in the dusty, bare-floor-boarded middle bedroom cum washroom as an accompaniment to the washstand with bowl and jug.
The poor souls who were most put upon were the nearest we knew with a telephone, the Walker family. On many occasions, following the obligatory phone call, George, Nellie and I walked the few streets to their house to watch Dixon of Dock Green or whatever. The Walkers seemed to take the intrusions with good grace: we three joined Mr and Mrs Walker and their two sons in the small living room of their terraced house, seated in two rows as if, for all the world, at a tiny cinema.
George needed these mental distractions. Although he had the job in the Post Room at the British Shoe Corporation at this time, it was poorly paid and financial stress was ever-present. Not good for a guy with his mental problems. Our electricity supply depended upon feeding shilling (5p) coins into a meter. I remember Nellie scrabbling around at times to find enough pennies, threepenny bits and tanners (sixpenny pieces) to make a shilling. I would then be despatched to the local shops to try get the pennies changed for a one shilling piece. On one occasion, I was shocked when the shopkeeper wouldn’t do it: “I’m here to sell things, son. I’m not here to help you out if you don’t buy anything.” I felt humiliated and went home crying. George retreated to the coal shed, sat on the small pile of coal and wouldn’t come out. Nellie and I sat in the house, also in the dark but in marginally greater comfort.
On several occasions the stress was so great that George wandered off only to be found days later by the police, sometimes hundreds of miles away. Upon being returned after these incidents he’d always insist that he had no recollection of what had happened.
So, a combination of difficult times in our immediate home but with some brightly shining destinations to escape to, including school itself and my friend Tony’s house.
If you have been, thanks for reading.
Coming next: my time at Wyggy comes to a premature shock ending.
Idle, Eric (Editor). The Brand New Monty Python Bok (1973)
Macfarlane, Alan. The Culture of Capitalism (1987)
Dickens, Charles. Oliver Twist (1838)
Dickens, Charles. Ibid.