. . . . The O U

 

 

 

 

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

25^th 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.

 

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