My old school has been much on my mind lately, as I was researching for a post I want to write here about John Ruskin, after whom my school was named. For reasons that will become clear when I eventually write the piece, I wanted to be reminded of the words of the school song. I searched for them online, and in the process found a website for the school’s alumni.
I spent a happy couple of hours on the site, making contact with an old friend from those days and also going down the byways of memory with speech day programmes, exam papers and a list of teachers and what had happened to them.
I have never been nostalgic for my schooldays in the sense of the old cliché about them being “the happiest days of your life”. True, my teenage years were spoiled by the need to come to terms with being gay, and the fears that induced. I can recall that I felt trepidation about my future but could never claim to have been bullied at school, or made unhappier because of it: in that sense, my problems were internal.
As I took two exams in the January fifty years ago, I was coming out of the worst period of depression I can remember as a teenager. This had come at the end of 1968 after reading Malcolm Campbell’s novel Lord Dismiss Us – which, I suppose, was the first occasion I had confronted the idea of sex as part of a loving relationship as opposed to just a means of relieving teenage horniness.
Even that period, painful as it was at the time, had a positive result, in the sense that it started me off on my own fiction writing – I began work what became my first novel, The Stamp of Nature, though it took another fifty years to complete and publish it. The writing of the book would sustain me through what I now recognise as a far more difficult period of depression whilst at University – and then later as a young manager in the bus industry.
I had first started at what was then John Ruskin Grammar School in September 1962 and left six and a half years later, at the end of February 1969 – 50 years ago about now. The school still exists, but not in the same buildings and not as a grammar school. Over the years, it has evolved steadily, firstly into a comprehensive school then a sixth form college before taking on its current existence as a Skills for Life College.
I was able to leave that February because I had been in an accelerated stream, taking ‘O’ levels a year early at 15 rather than 16, and ‘A’ Levels at 17. This was probably as well, since my performance at the latter in the summer of 1968 was hardly stellar. I therefore stayed on for a third year sixth, resitting one subject, history, and taking a new one, British Constitution. Once those results were out, I knew I had a place at University in Lancaster, to study economics starting in the October, so there was no point in staying on at school.
I had secured a temporary job in the Civil Service, so off I went into the world of work for nine months. Thus, I said farewell to my old school and left with barely a backward glance. I was to return only a couple of times – once for a play in which a friend was appearing and then in 1973 to a party for the Headmaster’s retirement after 27 years in the job. To my horror and regret, the buildings which had housed the school since 1955 were demolished in 1991 and the site redeveloped for housing. The only visible memory now is the historic windmill which had stood in the grounds.
Looking at the alumni website, it’s clear that I am not the only one who now looks back on their time at the various incarnations of John Ruskin School with pleasure. There were dark times, it is true – but then that is surely true of most teenagers, whatever their sexual orientation. Overall, though, the school was good, both to me and for me. Looking back now, I could and should have worked harder, and could and should have achieved better than my distinctly mediocre exam results. But on the other hand, I did gain so much from my time there – a love of music, especially choral music, a delight in history and a way of thinking based on it, and being taught how to write. On the whole, it’s pretty good legacy.
So hail and farewell to my old school.