I don’t ever get angry. I have never been angry about anything in my life. I am occasionally saddened or depressed about something. Sometimes I am irritated and once in a while I feel let down - but angry? No.
Grumpy? That’s another matter. Oh yes, I get grumpy but that’s a different emotion altogether and one that I may come back to at another time. I think that there’s something rather noble about being grumpy.
I suppose that’s why, despite the fact that my political views instinctively veer towards the left, I never would describe myself as a socialist. I’ve not studied politics but it wouldn’t surprise me to read that the definition of a socialist is someone who becomes “quickly and easily aroused to anger”.
I expect that if I were ever presented first hand with evidence of exploitation, maltreatment or abuse of children, I would be stirred to experience anger, but thank God, I never have. I can never get very excited about the sort of thing that gets socialists into a frenzy.
During the last fifteen years that I was a teacher, I was the union representative for those colleagues who were members of the NAS/UWT. I obtained the position of ‘Union Rep’ by default because no one else would do it. I can’t remember exactly now but it is probable that I was the only person to turn up to the meeting.
I was a useless delegate for the ‘workers’. The basic problem I had was that in virtually all the cases that I was involved, my gut feeling was that ‘management’ was right and that my member was wrong or at best, at fault.
The official line taken by all the teacher unions was and probably still is, that there is no such thing as a bad teacher. It’s just that some are more effective and produce better results than others, but all teachers are good.
What absolute bollocks! You only have to spend half an hour in the company of a group of teachers in a pub, with no children within a mile of them, to realise instinctively and very accurately, who can and who can’t. You don’t have to see them in a classroom to know who has something to offer a school and the kids and those who should get out immediately and go and work in a bank.
I once had to accompany, as the “friend”, a teacher who was to be interviewed by the Headteacher as the first step in a disciplinary procedure aimed at improving her performance, or ultimately, removing her from the school and after that, from the profession. She was relying on me to support her at the meeting so that the problem she had would go away.
The problem that I had was that I and all the other staff who knew about it, agreed with the Head. She had to go. She took frequent, long absences and when she did appear, the kids learnt nothing at all. In fact they probably made more progress when I, who had never studied the subject at even the most basic level, stood in front of them for an hour than they ever did in a twelve-week term with her.
We, the other teachers, were absolutely fed up with covering her classes, thereby losing our non contact time and the parents were complaining about the succession of non-specialist teachers who were teaching their children.
Against my better judgement, I followed the union line and that time, she kept her job. Two years later she resigned, left teaching and got a job in a bank.
As I grow older, my political views are moving ever more clockwise. Recently, when I have had a rant at the television about for example, British Airways cabin crew going on strike or how pathetic social workers are, Caroline has taken to calling me Adolf.
Yesterday, she looked up from the laptop that is grafted on to her thighs every evening and asked me some questions:
“Do you think immigrants in Britain should be given a grant to enable them to return to the country they came from?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because if they have realised that they have made a dreadful mistake, are miserable and would be happier if they returned, then I think they should be helped. Perhaps they should be means tested though.”
“Even if the cause of their misery was racism?” Caroline asked.
“Especially if it’s because of racism.”
“OK,” she said, “Do you think that there should be restrictions on imports of cheap manufactured goods from India and China in order to protect the jobs of British workers?” was the next question.
“Yes, and I’ll tell you why. It’s because in India the cheap goods are often produced by small children in appalling conditions, who should still be at school.”
“And China?”
“Same thing really, except there it’s because the wages are kept artificially low there. Also, although we can export financial services to China, most of our manufactured products are barred. That means that our banks and financial institutions do well in China but British workers get no benefit and cannot compete with such cheap goods.”
I was warming to this now and was feeling proud of myself for giving correct answers. Caroline obviously agreed with me as she was putting up no counter arguments.
“How do you feel about Quangos?” (quasi-autonomous non-governmental organisations)was the next thing she asked.
“Scrap ‘em. Bureaucratic, wasteful, excessive and probably often corrupt,” I said, thinking that I was really on a roll. “Most of them are useless and they duplicate the work of others. Billions of pounds are being wasted by the regional development agencies because they very rarely produce anything of lasting benefit to the region they serve. Waste of money!”
“Thank you, Adolf,” she said giving me a look that, if it came from anyone else, I would describe as contemptuous but from her, it conveyed sorrow, regret and disappointment. “You may be interested to know that you are in complete agreement with the British National Party election manifesto. I’m glad you won’t be voting.”
That’s not fair. I have been tricked. The worry is that so will several thousand of others before May 6th, the date of the general election in the UK.
Readers from outside the UK and that is 56% of you, should know that the BNP is a far right organisation with a reputation for extreme racism.
The BNP have recently been ordered by the courts to allow black Britons to become members. This gesture is obviously meaningless but it does serve to act as a reminder to me of the first time I ever saw a black person and the first time that I ever spoke to one. I bet that there are very few white readers who can say that.
The first time I spoke to a black man was in 1961. I was 14. I, with my friend Eddie Spearritt, who five years later was playing football for Ipswich Town in the first division, had come down to London to stay with my grandmother while we went, every day, to The Oval to watch the Test Match between England and Australia. We were in a railway carriage in a train travelling from Charing Cross to Mottingham in Kent.
During the journey a West Indian struck up a conversation with us, deriding the England batsmen for being boring. Having just watched England score 630 runs in their two innings at a run rate only fractionally above two an over, I had to agree with him. We were on our way back to Nana’s after close of play on the fifth and final day. It was therefore about 6:30 pm on August 22nd, 1961.
I was just five years old on February 25th, 1952 at around eleven in the morning and when I saw a black man for the first time. That part of London, sixty years ago, was entirely white. It isn’t now.
I know the date because I and all of Blackfen Infant School in Sidcup, southeast London, were taken out into the playground, armed with dark photograph negatives, to look at a partial eclipse of the sun. I remember it all very clearly. I remember Mrs M (there were two Mrs Smiths and my teacher was ‘Mrs M’) looking at her watch and saying, “NOW” at the moment of maximum effect. I remember looking around to see how dark it all was and being disappointed that it looked no different than it had done ten minutes earlier.
In 1999, Caroline and I travelled to a field in the middle of nowhere in France, about 30 miles north of Le Havre, where we had docked the night before after sailing from Portsmouth.
“The Middle of Nowhere.” What a stupid phrase! It was a field in France about 15 miles north of Le Havre. So it was actually, “The Middle of Somewhere” and the ‘Somewhere’ was a field in France, about 15 miles north of Le Havre and a field in France, about 15 miles north of Le Havre is certainly not “The Middle of Nowhere” because, as I have explained earlier, it is most definitely “The Middle of Somewhere”. Follow that?
We had intended to reach a point about twenty miles south of Dieppe where totality would be longest but so did everyone else in the region. When the traffic became too heavy, we turned right and travelled east. At around 10:30 we reached the village of Criquetot l’Esneval.
We had breakfast in the only bar in the village and then went off to find a vantage point. We found a field that was fallow and completely isolated. About twenty minutes before totality Caroline decided that she needed a pee.
“Go behind that bush,” I suggested.
“No, I might need more than a pee.” (Caroline has protested that this is too much detail but it’s staying in because it is true and it could have wrecked the experience of a lifetime. Talk about poor planning!)
I drove like Damon Hill into the village and waited anxiously for about five minutes alternately looking at my watch and the sun. She emerged at last and we got back to the field with about five minutes to spare.
We were standing in front of a barn. Its walls were whitewashed and in front of the barn was an apple tree in full leaf. About three minutes before totality, I noticed that the shadows of the leaves on the wall were shaped in crescents in exactly the same shape and proportions as the crescent of the visible sun.
Maybe 30 seconds before totality, all the hundreds of birds feeding on the ground in the field around us, suddenly took off, squawking as they did and flew in a huge, noisy swarm towards a copse some 400 yards away. Dogs were barking in the yard of a nearby farm.
A second before totality, we heard a huge cheer come from the village of Le Criquet, nearly half a mile away. We saw the "diamond ring" effect, created against the outline of the Moon. This final sparkling instant signaled the arrival of the moon's shadow. The last ray of sunlight vanished. We saw Bailey’s beads and then totality began.
It hit us. At 12:07 p.m. in a cloudless sky, we saw total eclipse. It was breathtakingly spectacular. I put down the viewing glasses that I had and looked with my naked eye. Absolutely beautiful! All I can say is that it looked just as fantastic as it did in the photos printed in the newspapers the next morning. What the papers couldn’t convey though, was the complete peace and tranquility. It was ethereal. Totally quiet. No bird song and no barking dogs.
Just as I had 47 years earlier, I looked around to see how dark it was. Near to the horizon, not very, but the sky directly above was as dark as night and stars could be seen. Totality lasted about one and a half minutes. I don’t think we spoke during it.
Right in the middle of totality, something incredible happened. The mood was rather spoilt by the sound of an engine running at high revs. Along the lane that ran past the field, a Land Rover was being driven at high speed - away from the direction of the sun! The driver must have been fully concentrating on the road to move as fast as that that on a twisty lane and so he won’t have seen anything of the eclipse. I wish I knew who it was. I’d like to comfort him and tell him that there will be another on at that same spot in about four hundred years. I’d also like to suggest to him that he keeps his diary free the next time.
In 1952, during the partial eclipse, I remember being the first to see the black men and I said, urgently,
“Look! The Africans.”
On the Monday and Tuesday of that week we had been told about the visitors that the school was to have. We were told that they were from a country called Nigeria and that country was in Africa. Mrs M asked us what we knew about Africa. I told her that there was a desert called the Kalahari and she told me that I was right but actually it was called the Sahara. Hmm. I didn’t argue. I was only five.
We were not to stare at them. It is rude to stare, we were told. They are just like us; they like the same things as us; find the same things funny or sad as us and they want to know about our schools. “You are not to call them ‘black’,” said Mrs M. “That’s rude. They’re coloured.”
“What are they?” she asked.
“Coloured,” we chanted.
“Good,” she said. “Remember that.”
The last thing Mrs M said, as we went outside to observe the eclipse was, “Don’t look at the sun with your naked eye and if we see The Africans, remember that they’re coloured and not black and above all, DON’T STARE!”
Standing next to Mrs M, on the edge of a group of about 150 infants, I put down my negative, feeling that the eclipse had not quite lived up to its billing. I saw a group of five people coming from the main building and heading in our direction. In the middle of the group was the head teacher. She was dwarfed by the four men accompanying her. But it was not their size that grabbed my and everyone else’s attention.
“Look Miss, The Africans,” I shouted.
“OK,” said Mrs M, turning to look in the direction that I was pointing, “don’t stare, remember don’t.…...”
Her voice tailed off and she became silent and open mouthed in wonder, STARING, as we all were, at four magnificent Nigerians, resplendent in loose, flowing national dress. Their clothes and circular caps were made up of red, yellow, orange, green, brown and black. The men walked towards us in wondrous, mind-blowing, kaleidoscopic, national costume.
“Don’t stare,” said Mrs M, despairingly and of course, none of us did.
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