May 2010
‘We could start by writing about yourself: perhaps a thousand words for our next meeting.’
These words immediately transported me back through half a century and there I was writing with a freshly sharpened rubber-topped pencil the instructions down in my diary as I had all those years ago written in my homework book as a schoolboy. English language homework on a Friday was always a composition to be handed in on Monday. I knew it would mean long hours staring at my exercise book on Sunday morning trying to think of something to write that would achieve a mark over the usual ten out of twenty that was my norm. And desperately hoping that my essay would have a fraction less red ink covering it each week when my puerile efforts were handed back by the terrifying black-gowned master whose look as he threw my book down on the desk would tell me that once again I had confirmed his belief that I sadly did not possess the brains of my brother two years above me.
Now, fifty years on, what on earth was I going to write about myself? A thousand words! One or at the very most two would sum me up. Boring, suburban, dull: and after thirty years of marriage still ranking only third in the ‘Knee-Wobbling’ Husband Stakes behind a Scottish James Bond and a ‘Colin’ who has the advantage over me of being a swimmer good enough to emerge from a lake just as the heroine is passing. I am a child of austerity who grew up in the conventional Fifties and whom the flower-power movement of the 60s passed by almost unnoticed. My one rebellious act, the purchase of a pair of brown flares vetoed by my tailor-father who promptly removed the offending bell-bottoms and handed them back, re-sown and stitched, as a ‘proper’ pair of trousers. Me: the person who took a suit to University because his working class parents assumed that such a garment would be the daytime wear of students and who has never even to this day owned a pair of denims! Me: the person who spent over thirty years teaching History at the same school explaining year after year that the Battle of Stamford Bridge did not take place at the end of the King’s Road but outside York and coping with students who like Mrs Disraeli could never remember who came first, the Greeks or the Romans. What could I possibly write about me that anyone would want to hear?
The sad thing is I actually like suburbia. As I started out in the world of work, I hated living in the inner city: noisy and claustrophobic, staring out of my bedroom at the grey-brick walls of the Victorian terrace opposite across a small, snooty-green stretch of garden with a few laurels bushes struggling to survive. And the country: all very pleasant for days out, but to live there? No, too remote. I like the neat tree-lined roads which in Spring burst forth into a riot of pink, white and yellow: I like the mock-Tudorbethan and the stained glass front doors, the neat hedges and lawns and the friendly greetings over the weekly car washing and grass mowing. And now that I am a ‘third ager’ it is comforting to know that the bus from the top of the road runs to the hospital, that the seafront is flat for at least 6 miles for a future electric buggy to take me for an outing and that in ten minutes I can walk to a parade of shops to collect my free prescription medicine.
For more than sixty years the suburbs are what I have known and the environment that has moulded me into the person I am. From an Ideal Homesteads terrace outside which on a return visit a couple of years ago I found that the lilac tree my father brought from the East End still flourishes: to a semi with a garden running down to a railway embankment where even in the early 1960s the occasional steam engine shunting on the nearby sidings set fire to the grass and delighted we would climb through the fence with buckets of water to douse the flames: and finally to a bungalow by the sea. I wonder if there are suburbs in the next life…
I wake with a start. The clock says 4.20 in the morning and the cat re-entering its home from a nightly survey of its territory and hopefully another disappointing mouse hunt, has bounded on the bed to announce his return. I thought I was sitting at the computer typing all this, but I must have been talking it out loud in my sleep. No pencil and pad at the bedside ready to scribble down Dickens-like my ideas. They will have to wait for morning. But I haven’t got an ending. How to end? A joke? A witticism that will bring a smile to my listener’s faces? But I don’t do jokes and ‘funnies’ so I need another way to end. And then I remember Mr Burnip, our Merton College Oxford-educated master for A Level 17th century European History known affectionately to his students as ‘Jack’. Everyone in our class was told to end their essays on the decline of Imperial Spain with the title of a Spanish Renaissance play as a quotation: ‘la vida es sueno’. Well that will still do half a century on: ‘life is a dream’.