National Service was one of the bogeymen that lurked in the bushes when I was growing up, waiting to leap out and grab any callow youth on his eighteenth birthday, put him in uniform and shout at him. School friends of mine who didn’t go into the sixth form were conscripted and sent away. A few of them seemed to have enjoyed the experience, especially the ones press-ganged into the Navy, who came home on leave from the Med all tanned and manly. Those in khaki and Air Force blue, however, mainly resented the two years spent in Catterick, or Mildenhall, or wherever it was that they painted grass green and pretended to be invisible. Having no wish to join them I went directly to university, hoping that by the time I’d completed my course, National Service would have been abolished. Unfortunately it wasn’t, but I had another throw of the dice: stay on at university for another year and keep the sergeant majors at bay. Having already decided to go into teaching, I enrolled on the post-graduate teaching course that would enable me to become a schoolmaster and one day the Shadow Minister for Education.
In retrospect, I was lucky to have graduated at all. It had become clear to me (and my tutors) fairly rapidly that my interest in Geography was limited. I always contrived to go down with flu whenever a geological field trip was in prospect, and the various poetic musings and witty asides I worked into my essays on ocean currents and seismic plates were cruelly ignored. While sitting my Finals I wrote one of my better poems about the pressures of city life (borrowing freely from my epic about leading mankind out of the marsh) during the three-hour Regional Geography paper. Because I hadn’t done the required reading around the subject, my poem was probably an act of desperation rather than one of defiance, but even so I was disappointed to learn some time later that for my efforts I had been awarded ‘Nul points’.
I assume that I failed Geography completely, and that it was the French side of my degree that saved me from public scorn and my parents from bitter disappointment. Although my enthusiasm for poetry and ideas had taken hold in time for me to produce some decent essays, I did have an Achilles heel. Some weeks before I was due to sit Finals, one of the lecturers, more by way of filling in time, asked the group to read aloud a passage from the French text we were studying. When it was my turn I gave a Gallic shrug to get me in the mood and dived in. After half a dozen lines, as I was getting into the swing of things, he butted in, rather rudely I thought, and asked to see me at the end of the period. He led me outside the building into one of the forecourts where nobody was about. He was breathing shallowly and his face had paled as he leaned towards me. He’s going to kiss me, I thought. But no.
‘Mr McGough, how has the department arrived at a situation where you are about to sit for your final examinations, which include a viva conducted in French, a language of which you are unable to speak a word?’
‘I don’t know, sir.’
‘You don’t know? Didn’t you spend the required term in France during your second year?’
‘Er … no, sir, my grandmother was ill, sir.’
‘But you must have spoken French in class?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Why not?’
‘Nobody asked me to, sir.’
All of which was obviously quite worrying for the teaching staff. The prospect of an external examiner discovering a third-year language student who mumbled French in a Liverpool-Irish accent might prove a costly embarrassment, and so arrangements were made for my grandmother to go poorly again at the time of my viva and my Achilles heel remained undetected. (Except for the arrowhead embedded in it, which causes me to limp from time to time.)
My Education year was a doddle compared with my three years as an undergraduate because I was interested in most aspects of the course, particularly educational and child psychology, and rather fancied the idea of pursuing a career in it after a few years’ teaching. I was also going steady with a second-year Sociology student from St Helens called Josephine Twist, whom I’d met at a Cath Soc hop, a honeyed blonde, whose overarm smash on the tennis court would have had Sir John Betjeman keeling over with apoplectic lust. But all too soon our courtship was put to the test when I was allocated a school in Cleethorpes for my winter term’s teaching practice, which meant sad, rain-soaked goodbyes each Sunday night before boarding the ferry across the Humber (Gerry Marsden would never have had a hit song with that) and glad, rain-soaked hellos on Friday evenings.
I have never visited Cleethorpes in season, if it has one that is, but out of season it was a bleak, windswept nightmare. I was billeted along with three other students in Wave Crest, a little B&B run by an elderly couple who were thrilled to have paying guests to moan at and complain about. I particularly remember the breakfasts and the old man, who could have squinted for Lincolnshire, bringing in our bowls of porridge with his thumbs firmly embedded in the grey sludge. ‘This’ll set you up,’ he’d say, wiping his thumbs on the seat of his trousers.
Nor do I have fond memories of the Humberstone Foundation School, a grammar school with a proud tradition of being traditional. The boys were fine, but it was the staff who got up my nose. With a few exceptions they totally ignored me, even resenting my presence in the staffroom: ‘You can’t sit there, it’s History.’ ‘Not that mug, it’s Physics.’ And in general they were dismissive of boys who weren’t in the top stream. But I was there to learn and learn I did, so much so that when it came time for me to leave and the Headmaster, whom I’d met only once, handed me the reference I could use when applying for a teaching post, I was delighted to read that I was a pleasant, shy young man who, with further experience should develop into a teacher of average ability.
The term I spent there wasn’t completely wasted, however, for I was interested in teacher–pupil relationships and how to achieve an easygoing atmosphere in the classroom and yet maintain a reasonable standard of discipline, so I was advised to sit in on one of Mr Gould’s English lessons with 4 beta, ‘a particularly unruly crowd’. I got to the classroom before the teacher and sat down at the back, pen and notebook in hand. All the boys were chatting away but there was no shouting or fighting or throwing missiles, and when Mr Gould entered and took his place at the head of the class, the noise subsided even though some of the boys were still talking and fiddling with their books. I shall never forget Mr Gould’s strategy for creating order out of chaos, for it was to stand me in good stead later in my career as I strove to develop into a teacher of average ability. He picked up a pencil (Faber-Castell HB, I made a note of it, for such little details can make all the difference) and began tapping quietly on the desktop. Gradually the chatter ebbed away into silence. ‘Thank you, gentlemen, now let us begin the lesson …’ Magic.
That was March 1959 and the following September, stiffened with missionary zeal, I strode into the classroom of 3N at St Kevin’s Comprehensive School for Boys in Kirkby, stood behind the table and took out my Faber-Castell HB pencil. The lads took not a blind bit of notice and if it hadn’t been for the scream from Delaney when I stuck it in his ear I would be there to this day, tapping away with my little pencil stub.
In the fifties, when the old back-to-backs along Scotland Road and south to the Dingle were pulled down, families who had lived in the city for generations were offered the opportunity to relocate to the countryside. It may have sounded appealing, the intentions may even have been of the best, but it was a disaster. New houses and tenement blocks were thrown up and thousands of people were transported to Kirkby, fifteen miles outside Liverpool. When I arrived to take up my post, there were a few mobile shops and a church but no pubs, clubs, shopping centres, cafés, sports centres, or any ingredients vital to nourishing a community.
There were two mixed comprehensive schools, Ruffwood and Brookfield, and two Catholic single-sex comps, St Kevin’s and St Gregory’s, huge schools, so newly built the cement was still drying, and all within walking distance of each other. Except for the heads of department, all the teachers were, like myself, straight out of college, wide-eyed and enthusiastic, and the staffroom was a buzzy, happy place, such a contrast to the chill of Humberstone: ‘Not that urinal, it’s Latin.’
Because the boys were streamed according to ability it had been decided not to go down the tried and mistrusted A B C D route, because with an eight-stream intake and the likelihood of it getting even bigger, the fear was that boys in the lower streams would identify themselves as being losers and behave accordingly. So the Head came up with Pax Dominum Vobiscum (The peace of the Lord be with you) and the boys were streamed thus: PAXDOMIN and it worked a treat. At least until the end of the first week, by which time the lads in the top stream had worked it out and told everybody else. As young Delaney said on that first morning, handing me back my waxy pencil, ‘This is 3N, sir, it stands for Nutters.’
I like to think I was a decent teacher in that I enjoyed being with the boys and tried hard to encourage them, especially the ones who were unlovely and unloved. It’s always easy for a teacher to get the bright ones to respond, and then to glide along with them in tow, but it’s the ones at the back of the class, surly and unresponsive, who were the challenge. Being a teacher-of-all-trades and master of none, I taught English as well as everything other than science, and one of the set books was Palgrave’s Golden Treasury of verse, which I’d had to learn great chunks from at school. Except for the odd narrative verse, usually involving heroics on the battlefield, most of Palgrave went in one ear and out of the other (rather like that Faber-Castell HB pencil), so I didn’t have high hopes for the poetry lessons.
What I began to do, of course, was to read my own poems in class. By my second year at St Kevin’s I was leading a double life: schoolmaster by day and Beat poet by night.
After much soul-searching and busloads of guilt, I had broken off my engagement to the beautiful Josephine, much to the disappointment of the folks at home who thought she’d make an ideal Mrs McGough. In those days it was customary to settle down in your early twenties and nearly all my friends were getting hitched, so it took some courage to go against the flow and swim into the unknown. I was possessed of the romantic idea of the poet as an outsider, a lonely figure wrestling with his demons, for whom marriage and the conventional life would be stultifying. And so, being fancy free, I had begun to develop a taste for the city’s subterranean nightlife, which involved my carrying to school a brown canvas bag containing my poetry survival kit: tight jeans, a black roll-neck sweater, a packet of Gauloises and a notebook filled with poems about lost love. Rumour has it that at least two nights a week after school I would take the bus into town, go into the nearest telephone box and emerge as Superpoet.
But as well as my lost-boy, come-hither poems I had quite a number of funny ones about football and grannies and about Liverpool that appealed to the kids I was teaching: ‘Arr aye, sir, don’t do the dead ones, give us some of your pomes.’ After worrying at university about whether what I was writing was indeed poetry and, more important, whether anybody would be interested in it, suddenly the question didn’t seem relevant. Here was my audience, not only those lads in Kirkby, but my fellow teachers, relatives and friends, as well as the crowd listening at the bar and that girl, particularly that girl at the table in the corner, the one with the dark eyes and long brown hair, wearing paint-stained jeans and a black leather jacket.