growing pains…
Passing the 11-plus hurled me unthinkingly towards Abbeydale Boys' Grammar School. It was an undistinguished academic career and adolescence when it came was definitely a rite of passage.
I was 12 before I got to wear long trousers.
I remember music lessons well. Although in the Sunday School choir for a time there came to everyone the realization that I simply could not sing. There were two of us, our names adjacent in the school register. We were told by our music teacher not to sing because we spoilt it for the others. I was psychologically scarred. But only on Tuesdays.
In my third year my parents left our family home at Onslow Road to move to a new house at Bradway. Gone was the outside toilet, the cistern that froze in winter, the spiders webs on the limewashed walls. Gone was the zinc bath we placed in front of the fire on Thursdays and with it the once-weekly "bath night". Gone too was my beloved attic bedroom, scene of wild and reckless experimentation. Now, for the first time, we had an indoor toilet and bathroom. We had central heating and fitted carpets, a garage and G-Plan furniture. This was comfort beyond measure.
I was 17 before I had my first drink in a pub. I was 17 when I saw my first X-rated film at the cinema.
What happened between 11 and 17 I have no idea. School was mostly dreary, the science lessons I found exciting, the arts and classics forever a closed book. And so, by stealth, by accident, by rails invisible to the eye I inched my way along the perfectly straight road that was physics and technology. My heart took one road, my head the other, my feet slept.
By the time A-levels came making sense of the world, making sense of me, seemed far more important than study. I did badly at A-levels. The writing was on dad's face. I was a disappointment. No University for me then.
