Dispatches From a Dilettante

by Paul Rowson

  I fell on my sword with unseemly haste soon after and beat it back to a college of further education to do ‘A’ levels. The embarrassing suit was dispatched to a downstairs cupboard and I had more enjoyment in eleven months of cramming for ‘A’ levels than I had experienced in the last five years. We were uniform free and treated as sentient human adults by benevolent ‘leftie’ lecturers. After the rigidity of a boys’ grammar school there were now attractive females out of uniform sitting right next to me. On the top floor of a terrace house owned by the college I learned that the words ‘study’ and ‘enjoyment’ could sit easily together in the same sentence. Life was looking up.

  20.

  THE YEAR OF HUMILATION 1980

  In the way that the Chinese have ‘The Year of the Cat’ or their erstwhile political leaders had ‘The Year of the Great Leap Forward’ this was the period of my personal and professional life my life when I was deeply embarrassed by my actions on a regular and humiliating basis. The trauma was so great that, to this day, I am unable to enter a Morrisons supermarket without blushing.

  For the first time in my life I found myself teaching, not amidst the poverty and violence of the inner city, but in the leafy suburbs. The school was noted for its prowess at cross country, and teams at all age groups won individual and team medals at county level. As a reward for this consistent achievement the school were given the accolade of hosting the under fourteen Yorkshire Schools Cross Country Championships and the race attracted hundreds of runners from all over the county. York, Sedbergh, Sheffield, Hull and Skipton visibly marked on the side of school buses confirmed the status of the event and in terms of our staff it was all hands to the pump in preparation.

  The runners were to start on the playing fields and then leave the school grounds and make their way up a steep hill to an old roman ruin (not the latin teacher), which was the turning point. A steep descent took them via a series of gates through fields and then briefly onto the road and back to the finish on the school playing fields. Such were the logistical challenges of hosting a high profile event of this magnitude that the helping staff had had briefings about briefings, and even a walk round the course. Extra changing facilities, food, parking and crucially the marshalling of the race itself had all been covered and there was even a press tent.

  On the basis that I was a close friend of the man responsible for all the cross country success that the school had enjoyed I was given a sinecure. My only task was to stroll half way up the hill after the start to the final gate in the last field and to open it. I would then be in a perfect position to see the runners end the descent, get back on the road and gather themselves for the sprint to the finish.

  It was a perfect winter Saturday morning and the blue skies ensured that the large crowd of parents, who had come from far and wide to cheer their offspring, were in buoyant mood. The race started on time and the three hundred runners surged forward in an effort to get a good position for the hill climb where the course narrowed. I strolled across the field to ‘my’ gate waving to a colleague further up the descent route. All the climbing runners were visible and the shouts of encouragement had a quite pleasant and old fashioned ‘Chariots of Fire’ sound to them. ‘Come on Johnny more effort’…….’No pain no gain James’ were two that I recall. It was hard not to get involved in the honest endeavour of young athletes straining to give of their best in the most important race of their young lives, and I was enthralled.

  They reached the top of the hill just as I reached the gate and opened it, waving again to my colleague further up the slope. I was to learn within minutes that his very enthusiastic waving was not just a greeting but a frantic attempt to warn me of impending disaster. We had eschewed ‘Walkie Talkies’ on the basis that there were clear sight lines. This was a decision that I had pushed through on the basis that the hire of such equipment was costly and unnecessary.

  The runners were descending quickly and were only about two hundred metres above me in the first field. I marvelled at their pace as they went through the exit gate. Within seconds they were looming large in my vision and only about a hundred metres from where I was standing. Until this moment I had been looking upwards to catch the action. Momentarily I glanced down and was nearly sick. I had opened the wrong gate!

  The runners were on me and there was nothing I could do. They stormed through it with their parents screaming encouragement in the near distance, and there was no stopping them. Wave after wave of mud spattered, grunting, sweating elite runners sped towards disaster. It was like the charge of the Light Brigade in athletics kit and without horses. I had been given the easiest job on the day and was now in a perfect position to watch the unfolding tragedy.

  It could have been worse, but not much. They could have been trapped like a herd of cattle being rounded up for slaughter. But at the bottom of the field there was a large gap in the wall which the runners took as the obvious, yet strangely unmanned, exit and so they ran through it in their droves. It led directly into the back of the Morrisons Supermarket car park which on this lovely February Saturday morning was jam packed.

  At first it was hard to tell who was more surprised. Shoppers, gingerly in the act of parking their Chelsea tractors, suddenly had to contend with a growing number of runners flowing into the car park. From my vantage point higher up it was vaguely reminiscent of a wildlife film showing wildebeest stampeding about the Serengeti Game Park with occupants of the four by fours playing the part of the big game hunters in confused pursuit.

  Given the competitive nature of the top class athletes that they were, a few of the boys thinking this was some course obstacle they had missed in the pre race briefing, tried to straddle the bonnets of cars in the manner of steeplechasers. Inevitably the sheer numbers of cars and runners meant that soon everything ground to a halt, including my career.

  Disbelief and incomprehension turned rapidly to anger and there is no anger to match that of middle class parents who have had their offspring’s potential moment of glory denied. Once it became clear that the race had effectively ended right there in the car park, recriminations began about a nano-second later. Initially they weren’t directed at me as efforts were focussed on extricating the runners from the chaos. The less than sympathetic supermarket manager had by now appeared just in time to observe that cars, now unable to access his car park, were turning round and leaving to shop elsewhere.

  At this point I was still watching impotently from my marshalling position, but could bear it no more. I slunk back to school where en route I endured the withering yet deserved scorn of the parents, who noted me slipping away from the crime scene. There were no other guilty parties and no other reasons to account for three hundred runners, together with countless parents and supporters, having their day ruined. Worst of all was the fact that my colleagues had also to face the ire of the parents even thought they were blameless.

  At the staff meeting on the Monday I waited to see how the head teacher would deal with the sullying of the school’s reputation. He was an articulate man, as you might expect, but had a tendency to use ten fancy words where one or two simple ones would have sufficed. Only days ago he had referred disparagingly to ‘pupils enmeshed in a fracas in close proximity to the drinks vending location’. Most teachers would have described it as ‘kids fighting by the Coke machine’.

  Nervously I waited and, after dealing with routine school business, he moved on to the events of Saturday. There was the usual long preamble and then quite suddenly he got to the crux of it. “Thank you to all colleagues who gave up their Saturday morning to help with the cross country” he began benignly and paused. “And for fuck all” a colleague nearby, who I had never liked, interjected just loud enough for many staff to hear. “There were some logistical difficulties near the end of the race but, all in all, a good day”

  This was like a report in Pravda. He had simply opted go for an editorialised version of the truth in order to minimise damage to the school. Grovelling letters of
apology were later sent to competing schools but our entrants and their parents were mollified by the confirmation, just days later, that ours was the top cross country school in the county. All was, if not forgotten at least not often mentioned by colleagues. Unsurprisingly my close friends on the staff, who I still go walking with in the Dales, chose to remember. Every time, when we are out hill walking and approach a gate in a field, I know exactly what they are about to say.

  Ultimately no one died, as the old cliché goes, and the rest of the term was fairly uneventful until the final week. With the Easter break fast approaching I was teaching a group of well behaved fifteen year olds. As they had dutifully filed in I had mildly reprimanded a girl for swearing. She had immediately apologised and, as it had occurred in a private conversation, no more was said. Right next door to my classroom was a tiny ante room which had shelves, a small desk and a phone. For weeks I had been waging an unsuccessful battle with the AA over their mishandling of my claim for minor damage to my car. The class were working quietly and I thought I’d nip next door and call the insurers.

  I told the class that I had to make a quick call to sort out a personal matter, went into the room and closed the door behind me for privacy. Most call centres in this country are located the West Midlands, Yorkshire and Scotland because surveys have found that customers report these as the most friendly accents. It was with some shock then that I managed to get an unusually truculent ‘Brummie’ who seemed disinclined to do much about my complaint.

  Whether it was fatigue as the end of term, annoyance at the fact that he continually mispronounced my name to the extent that I gave up correcting him, or possibly that his tone was one of complete indifference, the call was not going well. It got catastrophically worse when he attempted to end it by saying “I’m afraid there’s nothing more that I can do and I have other callers waiting”. I completely lost it.

  “What the fuck do you mean callers waiting…sort this out you useless bag of shite….You’ll fucking regret that you fucking tried it on with me”. As a final self defeating gesture I compounded my own dismal position by slamming the phone down without even getting the name of the person who was on the receiving end of my puerile tirade. On turning round to go back I noticed the door was ajar. I was sure that I had clicked it shut but it had wafted open, probably on the current of hot air that I had generated.

  Whatever the reason the kids had heard everything and had already come to several conclusions. Firstly they realised they were in the presence of a dangerous psychopath and wisely chose to keep quiet in the first instance, wary of triggering a further eruption. Secondly they correctly surmised that they were being taught by a hypocrite as they had plainly heard me, just minutes earlier, berate the hapless girl for using much milder invective. Finally being kids they weren’t going to let me get away with it. As they filed out at the end of the lesson I could hear one of them say with a huge smirk on his face, knowing I could hear but not act, “It’s fucking maths next”. Every time I went to that ante room to get equipment one of them would ask in the mildest of tones “Will you be using the phone today sir?”

  I phoned the AA from home the next day and spoke charmingly to a different person. In my most reasonable of voices I explained that I had handled the claim professionally and courteously to date but to no avail and I required the AA to get their act together. Equally politely the voice at the other end said “Sir you may be aware that we monitor our calls and we will not tolerate our staff being abused. As a result of your obscene ranting we are not obliged to progress your claim. Good afternoon”.

  It was small but appreciated recompense that the kids, displaying a loyalty to me that was much more than my behaviour merited, never mentioned the incident to another member of staff, and after the two week holiday even they got tired of reminding me about it. The final comment came as I was about to get into my car on the last day of term. “Still insured with the AA sir?” It even made me smile.

  Fortuitously, even though there were two more humiliations to come in 1980 at least they were played out to different audience. For the last fourteen years there had been a summer camp for about a hundred pupils and it always took place in the first week of the summer holidays at a campsite just outside Barnard Castle. Staff involved had the organisation down pat. Marquees were hired and assembled on site by an advance party, food bought in exactly the right quantities, and an exciting programme of activities executed without a hitch. Applications to go on the camp always exceeded the places available.

  It was my first experience and together with two other colleagues we were to drive north with the three trucks full of equipment needed by the advance party. One of them, Gerry, was a nervous driver but keen to volunteer even though the trucks were the largest that could be driven on an ordinary licence. It was the first time that he had driven anything other than a car.

  In view of this we drove in a cautious convoy up the A1 with speeds rarely exceeding fifty miles per hour. After a couple of hours we pulled up at a service station, and through force of habit, drove into the car park as opposed to the area reserved for caravans and trucks. It was crowded and it took us awhile to edge in to the few spaces remaining. Gerry was visibly struggling to reverse into a slot and, as we were parked and walking into the building, he wound down his window and asked us to guide him in which we did – almost.

  Painfully slowly and inch by inch he manoeuvred the truck into the parking space. It is not hyperbole to say that this took minutes rather than seconds, When he had almost got there we shouted ‘OK’ and walked in to order the coffees. Fifteen minutes after that a very shaken and incandescent Gerry marched up to our table. He was not a man, even in the worst of circumstances, given to using profane language but as he passed our table he eyeballed me and said calmly but furiously “I am holding you personally and totally responsible for what happened out there” before walking to the next occupied table. We could hear him asking them and subsequently every other table “Are you the owner of a silver Toyota Celica?”

  When he did find the owner, who then walked out ashen faced with Gerry into the car park, we thought that we ought to follow them. As soon as we emerged we could see that Gerry’s truck was not in the place where he had parked it. When we finally located the truck, it now had a dinted Toyota attached to it, rather in the way that a modern day Winnebago hooks a small recreational vehicle to its’ rear. It had travelled in this way for forty metres and the two joined vehicles were stationary but partially blocking exit traffic.

  Because Gerry was such a mild and cautious man and had never had even a scrape in his substantial past driving experience, he was displaying all the symptoms of a man in shock. He was so concerned at the damage done to both the Toyota and the rented truck that the more he looked concerned and devastated at the turn of events, the more we found it hysterically funny. So much so that we had stay out of the way and observe as, with some difficulty, four men struggled to tear apart the copulating vehicles. Gerry, and the remarkably sanguine Toyota owner, exchanged details as we recovered our decorum and strolled over to enquire whether they would like fresh coffees.

  It was two hours before the convoy could start the final leg of the journey and two weeks before we got the full explanation. By the time all was revealed the official version according to Gerry, which had long gone public, was that I was to blame. Apparently he had been shouting “Am I OK Paul?” while inching back slowly and had taken my waves as a correct indication that he was, although over the beeping of the reverse warning noise I had not heard him.

  He then claimed that we had abandoned him, which was true given he was safe in the slot or as good as. Gerry had, it transpired, sighed with relief at completing the reversing job and hit the accelerator instead of the brake - thus sending the truck at some velocity into the Toyota. Somehow they had become attached. In a doomed attempt to improve matters he then attempted to drive to a better parking slot that had become free, blissfully unaware that he was now tow
ing and further damaging the brand new Japanese sports coupe.

  The embarrassments of the ‘annus horribilis’ may have not been the reason we decided to go and live in the Bahamas but they may have been a contributing factor – and they weren’t over. Once the decision had been made to head for the turquoise waters of the Caribbean, we threw ourselves into multitude of tasks necessary to many secure what little we had in this country, before embarking in a new life in another. Perhaps the biggest of these was getting the right estate agent to handle the letting of our house together with the management of the finances and maintenance, while we were away for what we thought was going to be three years.

  We ‘interviewed’ three agents none of whom we found inspiring, before settling on a new company, and its’ managing director called round to agree the final arrangements. I had got home early from work to be there and as usual parked the car in the drive of our modest semi. The MD arrived on time in a gleaming new BMW and we ushered him in.

  The struggle for the legal tender loomed large in those days and I was working three nights a week as a Youth Leader to supplement my income. I had blotted my copybook recently by returning home late and drunk having completely forgotten that we had invited three couples to dinner. I walked in at eleven to an awkward silence. My wife, who is by nature a placid woman, remained calm until the last guest had left. Then without saying a word she threw a plate of spaghetti at me. I ducked and it hit a glass partition slowly slipping down it like a scene from a Fellini film noir. That is why I was early for the estate agent’s visit.

  From the off he was professional and competent as we finalised matters over a cup of tea in the front room. As we were clearly going to use him for the letting I made my excuses and left for the Youth Club. It was a journey that I had made a thousand times and I was on auto pilot as soon as I was out of the front door. Auto pilot disengaged the moment after I slammed broadside into the brand new BMW bought by the estate agent that very day, as he later told me. We headed for the sun leaving in our wake the remnants of what once looked like a bright future.