Chapter 6
Mature-Student Days
Open University – Evening Classes – English Literature
around the Kitchen Table
As a child, to please an eccentric grandmother who insisted on
paying the school fees, I was sent to Heathfield, a boarding school
near Eton. The priorities among the pupils in those days had little to
do with learning, and I left after a few years of scant education with
three O levels.
Many years later I made some attempt to repair this state of
affairs I joined evening classes, studied A level English and began
a mammoth course of reading. But as a busy mother of three
schoolchildren my latter-day studies were always forced to come
second. So, it was not until I was alone and free in Oxford my
opportunity came to make up for the lost years.
The Open University seems the obvious answer to my desire for
some sort of intellectual achievement. It was started by Sir Harold
Wilson in 1969 (and established by Royal Charter), with the
admirable idea that countless poor people deprived of a good
education, could, by entering the Open University obtain an
academic degree. No qualifications are necessary, only a real desire
for knowledge. Large measures of enthusiasm and stamina are
necessary to face the six years of hard work needed to get a degree,
plus, two years more for an Honours Degree. It is possible to reduce
the years by working on two courses simultaneously, but this really is
a feat of endurance taken only by the very brave. Everyone has to
start with a foundation course, either in the Humanities. Social
Sciences, Mathematics, or Science and Technology. I tried the
Humanities. Having sent off for the relevant forms, I eventually
received a mass of information and was accepted. I rushed down to
Blackwells, Oxford’s famous bookshop, and queued with the
students to pay for academic books. This gave me the importance
that queuing to pay for the latest Shirley Conran certainly did not.
At 7.15 on a January morning the postman banged on the door to
deliver two enormous parcels from Milton Keynes, the Open
University’s headquarters. Now I have seen the amount of paper for
the OU A101 Foundation Course the fact that thirty acres of forest
land is destroyed every minute to provide enough paper for daily
world consumption makes a little more sense. Looking at my kitchen
almost entirely covered with handbooks, lists, cassette tapes, units
and an accumulation of other information, the thought struck me
forcibly that perhaps, I should have stuck to evening classes.
However, although frightened, I was determined. I attended various
social evenings before the first seminar, where I met my tutor, drank
wine out of a paper cup and hoped the attractive man in the
corduroy suit was going to be in my group and not doing Social
Sciences. (He did do Social Sciences).
At the first seminar in the Polytechnic Building our tutor, Mary
Somerville, set the pace – a pace that was to continue throughout
the whole course. She had tremendous energy and was always
prepared to take one’s pathetic attempts at intelligent answers to
her questions seriously, and to help unconditionally with all aspects
of the course, including me ringing her up in hysterics at 10.30 one
evening because I couldn’t get the grasp at all of the meaning of
witting and unwitting testimony; a requisite for my history essay.
And several other crises, when, without her help, I would have given
up altogether.
Every kind of student imaginable was in class. The left-wing CND
ex-student graduate; the ex-nurse now housewife; the Sergeant
Major from a tank regiment who had started the OU to combat the
many tedious hours of inactivity in the guard room which he would
have to endure whilst serving in Northern Ireland; a primary teacher;
two or three secretaries; a homosexual computer operator; and a
North Oxford housewife who bought her own tea in a thermos
packed into a wicker basket full of notes, reference books, library
books, handbooks, and digestive biscuits. She interrogated Mary
intensely about statistical matters to do with the final exams or
financial reimbursements or whether the unemployed amongst the
class could get cheap rail tickets to their summer school destination.
Then there were several others whose lifestyle never became clear.
I looked forward to these evening seminars greatly, almost as
much for the inevitable quarrels between the left-wing graduate and
the Sergeant Major, as for the academic content. The LWG and
soldier were the total antithesis, the one to the other. Whilst
Stravinsky’s music, Karl Marx’s manifesto, and the paintings of
Munch or Picasso, seemed totally unacceptable to one, Wordsworth,
Jane Eyre and Constable were execrable to the other. Towards the
end of the seminar, when possibly attention was faltering, the two
protagonists would start their battle. During the music evening,
intended for serious discussion and some enlightenment for those of
us who couldn’t tell a violin symphony from a piano concerto (least
of all understand the meaning of counterpoint) the soldier suddenly
shouted out that he thought Stravinsky was a load of old rubbish and
certainly not music as he knew it, if his favourite Strauss waltzes and
Val Doonican were anything to go by. Chaos ensued.
To some students, the marks obtained for essays were of
enormous importance; but invariably As and Bs were awarded to
much the same people each assignment. I was one of the ones to
whom work did not come easily. I would spend twenty or twenty-five
hours sweated writing and rewriting an essay. I had sleepless nights
trying to understand utilitarianism and some of Descartes’ theories
and chewed through at least three biros. For all that I only got Cs,
along with a few others who found the going just as rough.
Summer school at the Open University had already been
thoroughly reviewed by The Sun newspaper, suggesting an orgy of
incredible proportions with tutors and students leaping in and out of
bedrooms, beds, bathrooms, cupboards, cars, classrooms and almost
anywhere coition could possibly take place with ‘lightening velocity’.
My experience of summer school was of no such activities
whatsoever. Studying the proposed timetable on arrival, I wondered
whether there would be time for breathing, let alone ‘people
interaction’ of any kind other than a muttered good morning on
hurrying somewhere, somewhere usually so obscure, that, like White
Rabbit I was always late. When I finally arrived at the right room the
blackboard was inevitably covered with unintelligible signs or words
to do with music or logic or whatever, whose meaning I never
entirely caught up with.
Summer schools are held throughout university vacations and last
from a Saturday to a Saturday. In the first year it is a compulsory part
of the course, after that it depends on the curriculum chosen. A good
many students really enjoy summer school, away from home
perhaps for the first time since marriage, they relish the stimulation
and the opportunity to meet others with similar interests. Feeling
young again and carefree, with seven days without responsibilities
and with positively no washing up, is all pretty heady stuff. However,
I hated it.
Bath University, where I had chosen to go for my week of
enlightenment, is a serious of sprawling modern buildings,
unaesthetically pleasing and about as quietly friendly and charming
as Gatwick airport at an Easter break. The concrete block where
my room was, although facing north, seemed to be directly in the
sun’s lethal rays all day, so that by early afternoon it felt like the
inside of a recently used chicken hut, boiling hot, airless, sticky
and humid and remaining in that state until about midnight. I wasn’t
in it much but if the place of refuge in alien conditions cannot
‘restore the spirit and enhance the soul’, your heartbeat is
metaphorically weak and your condition poor. I felt strangely lonely
there in spite of the 1000 or so students everywhere. There was
seldom time to exchange more than a few words to anyone before
rushing somewhere else, and being middle-aged and middle-class
was not a bonus. The D102 Social Science Foundation Course has
been widely discussed in the media for its strong leanings towards
the left and Marxism. A large element of aggressive lefty students
were certainly at Bath. Naturally, they could not bring themselves to
accept a student so different from themselves as me. Apparently my
accent or lack of it, plus age factor, betrayed me as a middle-aged,
middle-class housewife dabbling in the arts. Whiling away time, they
thought, and did nothing to hide their scorn. An ex-Welsh miner I
met, now working at British Airways, taking the Technology Course,
held particular grudges against the Conservative government and
seemed to hold me partly responsible for its activities. Intense
anarchical discussions at the bar in the evening if one dared to
venture there at all, became tedious, and I was branded a
capitalist Tory (me!) the first evening because I chose to drink gin
instead of beer. Even the thought of the gin lost its appeal by the end
of the week and I stayed in my room.
I did enjoy the seminars. The quality and quantity of intellectual
stimulation was prodigious, particularly from the history tutor, a jolly
feminist lady who smoked throughout the seminars, but who bought
a new light to my understanding of primary and secondary sources
and to the secrets of unravelling mysteries of ancient documents. For
two packets of cigarettes she gave me and extra hour’s tuition, which
temporarily fed her addiction but permanently fed my mind.
I am not clear what exactly Rudyard Kipling had in mind for filling
in his sixty seconds worth of distance run, but certainly in the three
months after summer school and before the examination on October
25th 1982, my minutes were well filled. I started a full-time job at the
beginning of September, leaving home at 8.15 and returning at 6
o’clock. After 7.05 supper (with relaxing Archers) I did OU revision for
two and sometimes three hours every night. My lovely house was
very neglected, dust piled up and somehow rushing to shop at
Tesco’s on Thursday evenings I always forgot the lavatory paper.
Thinking about it afterwards I assumed that subconsciously I thought
I wouldn’t have time to use it. Exalted though I felt in Schools – the
Oxford University undergraduate examining rooms, no less – when
the off was given on the examination day my hands were trembling
so much I couldn’t write, or even remember my identity number. I
immediately dropped my packet of fruit gums onto the floor. The
only thing that danced in my mind was that John Stuart Mill was born
in 1806 – a fact that, having glanced at the questions would be
totally useless in any answer. Sir Harold Wilson would certainly have
been very proud at the amount of sheer effort, concentration, and
agony that went into those three hours by the OU students. (These
were not the privileged university undergraduates with all day free
to work, but ordinary people who at their own expense and often
with very little free time, struggled on courageously in order to
acquire their own sense of identity and personal achievement).
My relationship with the OU was similar to that of a lover; it
produced sleeplessness, it fascinated, I thought of little else. I loved
it, but I hated its power over me. It was like an ongoing battle I could
never escape from. I have to admit I never succeeded in putting it
entirely out of my mind. It teaches self-discipline by its very solitary
nature, but the seminars and self-help groups produced a sense of
belonging to people all striving for a common goal. Thank God
indeed, for the other students’ support because no one else is
remotely interested in your cut-off date or your essay and its
contents. For dinner party conversations such matters rate low.
Academics, or anyone who might be trying to relax at the end of the
intellectual day, do not wish to discuss the Italian Renaissance or
Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, they are keener to argue the relative
merits of Tesco’s or Sainsbury’s if they want to discuss anything at
all. The knowledge I gained by studying was entirely for myself. The
pleasure now felt in an art gallery recognizing an artist not previously
known, the familiarity with Beethoven’s violin concerto or Chopin’s
preludes; or simply being able to understand some of the more
obscure words in a Times leader, without the aid of a dictionary, and
the pleasure that ensues, are autonomous. Mine alone.
In early January 1983 a letter came from Milton Keynes
Examination Board. In the appropriate box was the word ‘Pass’.
When the exhilaration had died down there was a new decision to be
made. Only five years to go now before getting the degree – was I to
go on or to stop? Questions, questions. Was it worth the effort? Did I
enjoy it? Would I be able to manage another year with more
specialized work and less tutorial help? Could I afford it, financially or
mentally? Had I enough friends and family prepared to sympathise
and encourage a second year? Was it rather absurd to be a ‘mature
student’ anyway? And so on. I found myself deliberating in a way
that must be very familiar to OU students. Sifting through the pros
and cons, which were about even on my list, it was passion that
determined my answer. I want to know passionately. Opening the
book of knowledge is like stepping into Aladdin’s Cave – wonderful
exciting treasures beckoning and sparkling everywhere. Obviously
the Open University is not for everyone. For those who merely flirt
with the idea, or quite enjoy evening classes, or who are inspired by
the neighbour’s boasting, or whose academic children instil a sense
of competition, the trials of OU are probably too great to be
undertaken. But is under considerable thought, working out how
much time is left, how it will affect family life, and how important it
really is and why, then it is worth at least a go – it is a challenge well
worth taking against yourself. That June I signed on for another year.
The battle starts again.
* * *
Over the last twenty years I have gone to numerous WEA classes.
The Workers’ Education Association is a body created, like the Open
University, by the Labour Party, to provide further education for
those thirsting for knowledge and who did not, by and large find
much to quench it during their school years.
Oxfordshire provided a multiplicity of these classes, and on the
quest once again, I found I was studying Shakespeare in Abingdon,
Philosophy in Burford, the First World War in Wantage, and English
Literature almost everywhere. In my academic rush to acquire new
knowledge, and the prosaic rush to drive frantically through the
countryside in order to arrive at the correct college, school or
where ever the classes were being held, I confused Shakespeare with
Nietzsche, Nietzsche with Siegfried Sassoon, and Kafka and
Kurt Vonnegut simply not read at all. (Probably because I did not care
for either of them.
I had, during my class-going years made a few assessments of the
tutors’ role in the classes – success or lack of it. These are they. As
many more women go to classes than I do, certainly in the arts
subjects (I can’t vouch for Car Maintenance), male tutors are more
popular than female tutors. Male tutors teaching Hardy, Byron,
Wordsworth, Keats and so on are automatically associated with
romantic male emotions. In these tutors can be seen, by fairly
desperate and disparate women, poetic and understanding men
who, given a chance, could and would quote passionate and
romantic lines from favourite authors when smitten with love
themselves. In fact, these tutors would do no such thing, anymore
than the average Englishman whose knowledge of poetry is minimal
or non-existent. But that is something these mature students would
not ever wish to believe. However, to be so revered by his students is
to the ‘romantic’ tutor’s advantage. Such trust is put in his every
word that he can get away with little or no class preparation. One
such tutor told me that at breakfast before his morning class he
opened the set book, selected a passage wherever it fell open, and
talked about that passage during the two-hour session. With a coffee
break and lots of questions like “Do you think Sue Brideshead really
enjoyed making love to Jude or was it just another of her
perversities?” which started the whole class off on personal
memories of one sort or another, the tutor could then sit back and
the class rolled along by itself.
Much the same power that doctors possess over patients, tutors
possess over students. It is the power of superiority. They
supposedly know things, important, exciting, interesting things that
the rest of us would like to know but which we do not know. Their
esoteric knowledge and the mystery surrounding it is their pulling
power. Hence the reason why passions between doctor/patient,
tutor/student, teacher/pupil, vicar/choirboy or girl, abound in the
hearts of the uninitiated. During the twenty years or so attending
classes I have met numerous tutors, and am now of the opinion that
they possess no magical qualities whatsoever. No more, at least,
than could be found in any man in an average bus queue at an
arbitrary bus stop anywhere.
The English Literature class I attended in Oxford was very
depressing. Charles Dickens, it appeared, did not write novels that
wended their way through adventures of a fairy-tale nature with an
underlying social message. No, according to the new structural
criticism, we were told, he simply wrote a series of words that had
‘meaning’ in themselves. Herman Hesse wrote in “Writing on
Literature (Vol 2)” that “clever talk about art and literature has
become a mockery and an end in itself, and the striving to
understand them through critical analysis has done untold harm in
the elementary ability to see, hear, and to be carried away.’’ I agree
absolutely with this statement.
While I was queuing to be admitted to the class in which Dickens
was horribly assessed, a young punky man stood behind me drawing
on his cigarette.
“What made you choose this class particularly?” I asked him.
“Well, I fell out with my girlfriend last week,” he said, “so I went to a
film by myself, I saw Educating Rita and fancied Julie Walters no end.
Fucking lovely she is. So, seeing this class advertised I came along
hoping to meet someone here like her… .”
Looking at the other students later in the evening I felt he might
be disappointed. Even the youngest lady was in her thirties. I did not
see him during the two classes I did attend, so assume he hadn’t
been lucky with a look-alike Rita, and had therefore traded in
Dickens et al for the Duck and Drake down the road.
This literary criticism I felt, was not an exercise in which I wished
to take part, so I left that class and started one of my own. It took
place around my kitchen table. To find enough students I advertised
in the local paper’s Personal Column. (I got some funny replies. I
think some of the men who answered confused ‘English Lessons’
with ‘French Lessons’ as advertised in Soho shop windows in the
1950s). I also had some friends who, keen to improve their
knowledge of Jane Austin, Henry James, DH Lawrence, and the like,
came to the classes. An impoverished graduate, who was writing a
thesis on Anthony Powell, agreed to teach us. Unlike others I have
mentioned he was extremely conscientious, punctual, and spent long
hours preparing our classes. Over the two years that the classes took
place, we tackled several Victorian novels and became familiar with
their plots and characters.
The eight members of the class (no room
at the kitchen table for any more) were female, and a rare
contemporary breed, happy housewives. Mutual interest in
literature bound us as fluctuating prices ties other housewives, and it
was a sad occasion when we had our last class. I bought several
bottles of wine which we started to drink at about 10.45 am and
continued drinking until lunch time. The students took turns to recite
their favourite vignette, poem, or passage. Liz MacFarlane, a former
member of the Royal Shakespeare Company, performed last. She
read Robert Frost’s poem The Road Not Taken which briefly is
about two choices – the obvious one and the other one. The narrator
took the other one. During the applause which followed her
rendering there were few dry eyes, and in the following weeks I
greatly missed the work and the fun of my Tuesday morning
literature classes.
The mature student in adult education is a wonderful
phenomenon. It brings new dimensions into life. I recommend it to
everyone with any kind of thought in that direction, be it the Open
University, or WEA/LEA classes or one started by enthusiasts up the
street. If there is to be further unemployment, then there will be
ever more unwanted free time to be filled by increasing numbers of
people with little money to spend. I have a great vision for a New
Britain, where people trade in their television sets and buy books
instead and discover the intense pleasure they can bring. In this elixir
we shall hear Chopin, Beethoven and Mozart played in the shops,
music to stimulate the soul and not the terrible noise we hear in
them today. (The sounds that deafen the ears and dull the senses to
such an extent that after two minutes compulsory listening, I can’t
even think, least of all remember what I wanted to buy).
Not only book learning is important, of course, any learning in
anything is important and exciting. Perhaps what I learnt was not so
important. It was, simply, the learning process itself. The learning to
learn, as it were. Acquiring knowledge and skills not known hitherto,
not even dreamt of, producing new satisfactions in myself that I had
not thought possible. I would like to think I had become wiser, and
found that using wisdom through all life’s vicissitudes brought me
new and greater joys and contentment.
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