Dispatches From a Dilettante (4 page)

In order to demonstrate my continuing emotional immaturity and conspicuous lack of a moral compass, the only time I ever wore the tie I had pinched from the Harvard Co-op was at the interview for my first teaching job at a Catholic secondary school.

2.
THE LEAVING OF LIVERPOOL 1972

The interview for the most junior of teaching posts at St Augustine of Canterbury Catholic secondary school on the tough Mosscroft estate in Huyton took place the day before the autumn term started. This should have told me many things. Firstly it was clear that talented, young and freshly qualified teachers were not rushing to get a post there. That alone should have sounded some warnings. The most searching questions at the interview were about my hairstyle and my commitment to Catholicism. Unfortunately I was committed to the former and disinterested in the latter.

Things were going badly until I mentioned the name of my cousin who, even in those distant days, was a precocious talent in the Catholic Church. He is now head of said Church for England and Wales and, as I type these words, Archbishop Vincent Nichols is being interviewed on the BBC news with regard to the Pope’s visit to Britain. As his faith and ambition got stronger and he rose inexorably up the ecclesiastical food chain to the higher echelons of the Church, my faith was thankfully atrophying and my professional life becalmed on a sea of mediocrity. Life is mystery and relatively short. I am now proud of my atheism, free of guilt and a paid up member of the Richard Dawkins fan club.

With the job secured my mind was full of creative strategies to make an impact. The first was to grow a beard to enable me to have a precious few extra moments in bed in the morning. The second was to negotiate an early finish to the term, claiming a booked holiday made before my late appointment. And the third was to buy a rusting sports car that I could not afford the payments or the petrol for. The only time I really needed the car to function properly was to escape an angry parent pummelling the windscreen after his son had been dropped from the football team. At the precise moment I tried to take cowardly and evasive action the starter motor gave out. Discovering hitherto unused ambassadorial skills that would have left Kissinger impressed, I placated the parent. In truth his anger had turned to pity after he had seen the fear in my eyes, so I got him to transfer his pummelling at the front of the car to pushing at the rear in order to jump start it. I mention this turnaround with pride and even now rate it as my greatest achievement that term.

Lessons passed in a blur. Geography with the first form consisted of me doing impressions of Ken Goodwin who was a well known northern comedian at the time. His catch phrase was ‘settle down’. Despite the unerring accuracy of my impersonation they neither settled down nor indeed appreciated the cabaret act in front of them. Registration in the morning was a source of constant nightmares. The first two names on the register were ‘Cathy Anderson’ and ‘Dorothy Begley’. The routine was the same every morning. As I finished the word ‘Anderson’, Cathy aged fifteen, would pout in Marilyn Monroe style and emit a long simpering ‘Yes Suuuur’. Before she was half way through the second syllable I knew that the whole class was aware of my blushing visage. The blushing got worse when Dorothy Begley emitted a whispering and breathless version of the word ‘sir’ adding a sexually knowing flick of the head for emphasis. Ribald comments could not be quelled by my increasingly despairing calls for quiet.

After a couple of weeks of this and against all regulations I gave in and got the two girls to do the register for me. A week later I was buttonholed by the head in the corridor. He congratulated me on the increased accuracy and tidiness of the register and of course I accepted the only praise I ever got from him with appropriate modesty.

As the term progressed and autumn days became shorter and darker, so the attrition rate among the staff increased. The music teacher stormed into the staff room one dank overcast afternoon and threw a pile of exercise books onto the table, dramatically announcing her immediate resignation to no one in particular. As she turned to exit, sobbing violently, I noticed the spittle on her back of her cardigan.

Pete Higgins the rotund PE teacher not noted for hard work, and known to the kids as ‘Piggy’, mentioned one day in the morning staff briefing that 4C had gone missing the previous afternoon. “All of them?” queried the head Mr Taylor, with a remarkable degree of sangfroid. What Mr Higgins omitted to say in his account was that the whole form had absconded from their weekly PE lesson for the last four weeks. In case the situation could be misconstrued they had kindly left a note, discovered by another staff member pinned to the PE notice board, which read “Piggy you fat bastard we’ve gone to Huyton.” When this note was read out a sizable minority of the staff audibly expressed their pleasure that the note contained no spelling errors and a reasonable stab at punctuation.

Two boys were sent to stand outside the head’s office for fighting. As I was walking towards the office their disagreement reignited and punches were being thrown. Before I could get to there the head bounded out of his office and tried to spit them up. The larger of the boys turned to him and with no particular venom said quietly, truthfully and with terminal consequences, “Fuck off…..this has got fuck all to do with you.” The words were uttered in perfect synchronicity with the blows now being simultaneously aimed at the head’s head so to speak.

A group of regional captains of industry were due to be shown round the school as part of the local authority’s attempt to engage business. The head was not enthusiastic and persuaded the local infants’ school across the way to host the visit, with me in charge of liaison. The suits arrived on the appointed morning and we tiptoed into the back of the hall. A class of five year olds were sitting on the floor at the front, enrapt at the story being told about the Three Little Pigs and the Big Bad Wolf. As we sat uncomfortably on chairs designed for small people, the kids were oblivious to our existence. In total concentration their eyes gazed upwards to the stool on which the teacher perched in front of them. She was commendably putting everything into the telling of the tale and their mouths were wide open. At the climax of the story she paused and then in appropriately dramatic tone said “And finally the big bad horrible wolf went to the house of the little piggy that was made of straw. I’m going to huff and puff and blow your house down roared the nasty wolf”. There was a collective intake of breath and a silent pause, followed by a five year old saying with feeling and in a loud voice “The bastard.”

Even as an ill prepared immature and less than wholly committed teacher I could spot the weaknesses of what would now be called at best a ‘satisfactory’ school, but in reality was a hugely under achieving one. It goes without saying that one of the weaknesses was the fact that they employed me. Although I thought of little else other than how I could get out of the position I had got myself into, it was never the kids that made me want to leave. They were challenging but direct and always funny. They played the hand they were dealt in life without complaint. Force fed religion alongside some subjects that had no relevance to their lives they exuded a knowing resilience, and in the circumstances, handled it all with minimum fuss, albeit with little enthusiasm.

Three years after I left in the totally unprofessional way I described in the prelude, I bumped into two members of staff that I had known quite well. We were in a pub, and they were having a Christmas drink with friends before going onto the staff party at St. Augustine’s where they had remained. Predictably I had consumed more than a few drinks and in a moment of madness agreed to accompany them to the party. The initial coolness, and frankly puzzlement, that I was greeted with was well deserved. To their eternal credit those that did remember me, including the same head teacher, soon thawed and were friendly to a fault. I almost missed Education more than it clearly missed me.

3.
BAHAMIAN IDYLL 1980-1981

My panting was increasing both in volume and speed my profuse sweating caused a damp stain to appear on the bed cover. I have a recollection of a vague feeling of nausea and embarrassment in the instant before I fainted. Meanwhile less than a metre away my wife was giving birth to our second son without a murmur. By the time I came to it was all over or more accurately it was all just beginning for Joseph Edward Rowson.

The faint was a result of a frantic dash from the train station after an equally traumatic interview in London that day for a job in Bahamas. I sense that I may lose a few female readers if I continue to use the word trauma in respect of my own condition that day, given what my wife had been doing. Nevertheless this being in the days before emails and mobile phones, I had spoken from London by landline to her after the interview and as usual she had listened patiently. Only as an afterthought did I enquire as to progress on the pregnancy front, to be informed that a taxi had just been ordered to take her to the hospital as the birth was imminent. The train journey home, not surprisingly, seemed to take an eternity but gave me the chance to realise that it would be better to hit the platform running than get a taxi to the hospital on arrival into Leeds.

Three months later we hit the Bahamas still running after a frantic readjustment to our lives. En route the plane had stopped in Hamilton, Bermuda for re- fuelling. The captain informed us that we would be on the tarmac for an hour and that the cabin doors would be opened. We were invited to stroll around the plane. Having left the kids in the care of two elderly Mexican women who were sitting opposite, we reached a door and a wave of hot air hit us with ferocity. “That must be the heat from the engines” remarked my wife sagely. It was of course the humid heat from the Caribbean climate which we then realised would take a little getting used to.

On arrival we quickly came to realise that clichés are often truisms. Orientation in Nassau started three hours after the appointed time. The Customs officer had to be bribed to enable us to get our worldly belongings from the shed at the harbour where they had been shipped weeks before. After the appropriate sum had been handed over for ‘release’ we nearly lost it all. The fork lift truck which was carrying our stuff swerved to avoid a lorry on the quayside and the whole load swayed dangerously. For an instant it seemed about to tipple into the Caribbean.

The national tourist slogan at the time was “It’s better in the Bahamas,” but the truth was that in 1980, a service culture had not developed, the tourism industry was run by a ramshackle and deeply corrupt government Ministry, and the islands were in the midst of a major political crisis. On seeing that slogan on a wall poster for the first time at the airport when we landed someone had scrawled underneath ‘but it’s best anywhere else’, which was not quite the greeting we had in mind.

Lyndon Pindling, the then Prime Minister, was one step away from being a dictator and it was only his craven sycophancy to the US Administration that enabled him to stay in power. He was arrogant and repulsive in equal measure but so were many of the old style colonial ex- pats who we soon learned to avoid like the plague. It was, in short, a country like so many others in the region, trying to shape a post colonial future against all the odds. The geographical position of the Bahamas placed it right on the drug route from Colombia to Miami and the islands were, even then, awash with cocaine.

We were to learn all this in double quick time but first had to be allocated an island and a school. I am still embarrassed by the fact that I signed the contract, moved my wife and two children to a distant location and new life, without even knowing where precisely we would be living. We found out at the final meeting with Government officials in Nassau that our final destination would be Freeport on Grand Bahama Island and that I would be teaching at Eight Mile Rock High School.

By this stage two couples had flown home in disgust at the chaos that had greeted us in Nassau. However we hopped on to the twenty minute flight to Freeport with minimal trepidation and gazed down at the turquoise sea and shimmering sand below with a feeling of naive optimism and excitement. As the plane banked to land both our sons projectile vomited on to the heads of the people in front of us with precision timing and deadly accuracy.

Amazingly, once we had made the decision to move to the Bahamas we had worked ourselves into such a pumped up state of positivism that nothing would deter us. We decided that we were on a roll and for a while that’s what happened. While other newcomers were refused a bank loan to buy a car we were given one on the back of a meaningless ‘reference’ from our bank at home that said only that we had been ‘customers’. Walking into the car pound behind the VW dealership I got a chance to display my vast knowledge of the automotive industry. I had to choose between a red VW with no air conditioning and a radio, and a yellow VW with air conditioning but no radio. In the weeks to come we listened to a lot of good music while sweating profusely in our lovely little red car.

It was two weeks before the first day of term and although we were still holed up in a hotel in Freeport having not secured a place to live, we decided to drive out to the village of Eight Mile Rock to see my future place of employment. It was twelve miles along East Sunrise ‘Highway’ to the Rock. You will be ahead of me here when I tell you that no highways existed on this little seventy by eleven mile island. A poorly maintained ‘B’ road would have been a more recognisable description. We drove onto a smaller road running parallel to the sea as we passed through tiny coastal settlements with names like ‘Hanna Town’ and ‘Fishing Hole’ as drops of warm salty sea spray occasionally made it into the car. Eight Mile Rock hove into view and turned out to be a big settlement of some four thousand people and twenty seven churches. It had a certain down at heel charm but was quite obviously an area of significant deprivation.

Poverty always looks less shocking when the sun is shining but it didn’t take long to see that it existed here as in most of the rest of the island. The school lay four hundred metres down a track off the only road. We drove tentatively down it to see a series of metal buildings with corrugated iron roofs built around a shabby sand courtyard. The school sign, bore the grammatically challenging affirmation “Eight Mile Rock High School - Wisdom and Knowledge
is
the Key to Success.” I quickly came to understand how tough it would be for the kids to develop a love for English in the scorching heat of my first outdoor assembly. The Head confidently announced, after a full hour of hymns and platitudes, “And now we are going to finish with a duet - from Mary, Louise and Ellen!”