Sixteen

I learned for the first time that summer that what seems like a
disaster can sometimes turn out to be more than a blessing in disguise.
At the end of my fifth year at grammar school, I'd only managed to
accumulate two O levels, three less than the requisite number required
to continue as a sixth former. For a while I contemplated life as a
dustman, but fate took over and told me to sit quietly while it sorted
me out.

I'd grown to hate life at the grammar school, almost from my first day
there it was clear that I was a long way from their idea of a model
pupil. The trouble was I spent half of my time feeling terrified, a
third of it bewildered and the remaining sixth ill (yes I did get O
level maths). Even after the 'swinging sixties' it was still old
fashioned, run very much on public school lines and highly elitist and
disciplinarian. I would have benefited much more from a progressive
comprehensive education, but I didn't know that then, and my teachers,
most of whom had modelled themselves on one or other of the nastier
Dickens characters, certainly didn't.

The only factor that had helped me survive all this was that for some
reason the headmaster had taken a liking to me. When my exam results
had confirmed that I wasn't an advertisement for his brand of
education, he phoned an old colleague who now worked at the local
college of further education. I went for an interview, and to my great
surprise, they accepted me.

So, at the age of sixteen years and about three weeks, I started a
course to re-take several O levels and begin two A levels and entered a
world so utterly different from school that I took to it straight away.
The teachers were actually nice to me and helped me. This was such a
revelation that learning became a pleasure rather than something to
dread. Moreover there were no uniforms (though I was a fashion victim
at first as I had no idea what to wear) and there were girls, or rather
young women everywhere. And I didn't have to play rugby any more.

I left what remained of my childhood behind in that old school,
rattling around the dingy corridors with my old friends, who didn't
know why I'd left them and gone off to the strange college full of
hippies, drug addicts and weirdoes, as grammar school indoctrination
would have them believe. I began to take control of my own future for
the first time which was exhilarating after years of my individuality
being stifled.

Most importantly I re-discovered all the things that had been made to
seem dead at the school. Music wasn't just hymns and Gilbert and
Sullivan; art wasn't just Constable and boring portraits; theatre
wasn't confined to the RSC and, crucially for me, literature wasn't the
sole territory of Shakespeare and Tennyson. This opening of the flood
gates was a lot to cope with at first, but I did and life was
immeasurably better for it. By the following summer, I'd collected four
more O levels and was half way to two A levels. I had a new set of very
good friends and I'd become involved in a drama group which was to
change my life.

How frightening in retrospect that my potential had very nearly been
completely destroyed by a place that called itself an educational
establishment.