NOTES
There are no notes for this chapter yet. Some of the notes on other pages are based on info YOU send me. |
Getting places at London University colleges was not, after all, the final escape from the hell of Skelmersdale. Well, it was for Angela, but not for me. We were forced to live apart, Angela in a series of dreadful bedsits with insufferable landladies (of a sort we thought had died out a couple of decades earlier) and I, with Felix, in the extension of a house in Walton-on-Thames. The landlord (who was reasonable enough) occupied the rest of the house. Felix began attending Rydens School. Angela tried to visit as often as possible, but her mother was very ill at the time. |
| The main problem for me was financial. The Royal Holloway was a long expensive bus journey away - I think it took about 1½ hours. The landlord, like many others, wouldn't allow me to claim housing benefit because he didn't want to pay tax on the rent. There were expensive school things to be bought. And, of course, the whole miserable situation required a lot of drinking to be done. All this had to come out of my student grant. It's true that student loans and tuition fees had not yet been introduced - university education was all still free, so there would be no huge loan debt to pay back, but I soon ran up a large debt with the bank. This was mainly because of their habit of imposing ridiculous 'fines' for unarranged overdrafts and bouncing cheques. |
| Under all this pressure, I couldn't possibly cope with the 10 essays a term that were expected, not to mention all the lectures and seminars. In any case, I was totally out of sympathy with the whole bog of literary criticism - overpaid academics spouting and endlessly writing constipated nonsense about other people's works of genius. After only one term I dropped out and got a series of labouring jobs in factories. I couldn't put up with any of them for long. One is worth describing, even though it only lasted a few hours, as it was rather amusing. I'd applied successfully for a labouring job, but there was a mix-up and when I arrived on the first day I was told I would be driving a small fork-lift around the factory floor, rather than labouring. Well, it has probably not escaped your notice that I had never been behind the steering-wheel of any vehicle before, and I told the foreman as much. "Oh, don't worry about that" he shrugged. "You'll soon get the hang of it." Well, I didn't. I spent a hair-raising morning careering wildly around, knocking over piles of boxes, crashing into machines and avoiding mowing down any of the terrified production-line women only by sheer good luck. By lunch time, the foreman was still insisting that I'd 'get the hang of it'. I chose not to believe him and disappeared without trace. |
| The bank eventually called in the debt, and the landlord was adamant that he only wanted students in his extension, not lowly workers. Although Angela paid off the debt, it would have been impossible for all four of us to crowd into the tiny bedsit she was living in. We no longer had the use of the rented flat in Skelmersdale, but we had not sold the house (assuming that to be impossible, in fact), so by the Summer of 1987 there was only one obvious solution, although it was a terrible one: I had to return to Skelmersdale with Felix while Angela stayed in London to finish her course at Westfield. We had allowed some transcendental meditators from the 'Ideal Village' to use the house, without charging them rent, for some reason. On my return I found that the occupants we had left in charge had handed over to another group, who had then passed it on again, and so on, so the people there had no idea who I was and believed that the house belonged to the movement. I had to bully my way into my own house and we became more-or-less lodgers there. However, by making things fairly uncomfortable for the other occupants, I eventually persuaded them to leave. Felix, who had been as deeply dismayed as I was at the prospect of going back, started attending Ormskirk Grammar School, rather than a Skelmersdale school, which we both considered to be out of the question. |
| Of course, I was desperate to escape again as soon as ever possible. I had not given up the idea of getting a London University degree and started to consider various subjects. I thought that the combined philosophy and theology degree looked interesting and started attending a Religious Studies A-level course in Ormskirk. The tutor, an exceedingly nice man, and most of my fellow students were RC and a big feature of the weekly class was the prolonged visit afterwards to the Catholic Club across the road, where I was signed in as a guest. As the pints went down, the talk always turned to the miracles and signs from God that people had seen. These sessions were very weird and very enjoyable and I always returned home from them pretty drunk. |
| Let me say at this point that whatever I say about Skelmersdale, the two towns on either side of it - Ormskirk to the West and Wigan to the East were (and no doubt still are) delightful places and I spent as much time in them as possible while Felix was at school, despite only having my Income Support to spend in the many interesting pubs. The problems in Skelmersdale itself continued. On one occasion I was so enraged by the taunting of three or four youths that I actually managed to frighten them away, whereupon I ran after them, chasing them for about a mile through the town. At 45 I could still run like a hare and keep it up for a mile or more. I overheard onlookers expressing astonishment. In fact, I eventually caught up with them but was hit in the face - it was definitely self-defence on their part. My glasses were smashed and I sustained a few cuts. |
| Despite all the aggravation of living there, I somehow managed not only to write long essays for the Religious Studies class, but also wrote a large number of short stories and joined the Ormskirk Writers' Club, which had some delightful eccentrics among its membership. We read our latest stories aloud to each other once a week. |
| Suddenly, Angela, who was supplementing her student grant by life modelling, achieved the seemingly impossible by finding an affordable flat in Hammersmith, near to her mother, who was by now terminally ill. The flat came at the right moment, just before I received an unconditional offer of a place at Heythrop College, University of London, on their Philosophy with Theology course, following an interview that was more of friendly chat than anything else. This meant that the Religious Studies A-level was no longer needed but I sat the exam anyway, to please the tutor, and got a B. A few months before my first term at Heythrop was due to begin I moved in to the Hammersmith flat. It was shortly after the death of Angela's mother and just prior to Angela's graduation from Westfield. Felix, on the other hand, had left school and had got a job working with computers. He therefore decided to stay on alone in the house. In September 1989, my first term at Heathrop began. |