Dispatches From a Dilettante

Encounters with Rock Stars, Royalty, Religious Leaders and Renegade Kids - From the Caribbean to Cambodia via the toughest estate in Britain

For Elspeth, Joe, Tom, Kate, Flo and Rosie

Big thanks to Chris Nott, Tony Shaw, Jean Rafferty, and Tom Rowson

DISPATCHES FROM A DILETTANTE
A Memoir of a Dissolute Life
Paul Rowson

PRELUDE
‘My old man used to tell me
Son - never look back
Always move on to the next thing
Fold your clothes and pack’
Warren Zevon

I was in the fast lane of the M62 and the monkey turd was still firmly lodged on the bonnet of the school bus. It had not been a good day at the Safari Park and it was getting worse. The gunmetal grey skies in the high Pennines loomed ominously overhead and the initial downpour had now become a deluge. This was a problem inasmuch as the opening gambit of the chimp, when climbing onto the bonnet, had been to piss on the windscreen. This, in turn, had fused the electrics and now the wipers refused to budge.

Driving blind and at speed with sixteen over excited inner city kids on a crowded motorway was the perfect metaphor for my teaching career to date – ill conceived, poorly planned, dangerous and full of shit. Most of it was of the bull variety and provided by me.

Never one to learn from experience I had only just recovered from a recent trauma which involved sleeping students on a school trip late at night. Unfortunately they were in separate carriages on a train which I failed to notice had decoupled in Manchester. We arrived home to find expectant parents on the station platform in Leeds, and witnessed their benign smiles instantly turn to hysterical anger when their precious offspring failed to appear. Even though they were found safe merely hours later, asleep in a siding near Huddersfield, the suspicion remained that I was an immature loose cannon.

This was even more disconcerting because it was my second attempt at teaching. The first one lasted just six months and ended suddenly. With the self centred and obsessive disregard that only the immature or impossibly talented can muster, and I was self- evidently the former, a plane ticket had been bought and I had flown to Boston one Monday simply because I could.

It did not occur to me that, as I was a member of staff on the Friday, the besieged head teacher could reasonably have expected me to turn up on the following Monday. I served no notice, phoned no one, and only as an afterthought penned a resignation letter of justification posted from the USA. As I recall it contained ludicrously pompous and self serving phrases like “I can only find solace in the growing numbers of young colleagues who feel a similar mounting disenchantment with the demands made on those entering the profession.” Apart from not making sense it was a lie. At this point in my life it was still a major struggle to get up before midday, let alone plan coherent activity for the acid tongued, wickedly perceptive and demanding young people that I was supposedly responsible for. That is how, eventually, I came to work for a Rock Music promoter.

Boston circa 1972 in February was a bit of a shock to the system. After the excitement of quitting and in the adrenalin fuelled few hours immediately after, it only occurred to me in mid Atlantic that I had no job, no visa, very little money, no accommodation and nothing that could reasonably be called a plan.

This was yet another case of the ‘Fuck it’ factor kicking in whenever boredom or disenchantment surfaced. It had been the same when I was a pupil. A spectacular and rapid decline set in when I arrived, aged eleven, at the Catholic grammar school after being one of the so called ‘bright lights’ in my junior days. So meteoric was this decline that it is worth recording. Year one in the ‘A’ form where we had exams every term – seventh out of thirty four, fourteenth and then twenty eighth. Year two thirty first and ‘relegated’ to the B form as we transferred to a newly built and non Jesuit run grammar school. This at least meant a better class of beating by lay men, who lacked the brutality of the Jesuits but maintained the enthusiasm. The decline continued apace but there wasn’t much further to fall as with the small initial entry there were no ‘C’ or ‘D’ forms.

The word ‘hate’ is often used casually without regard to its real meaning and I try to avoid it now. But what I felt then for many of the staff, was in a young teenager’s understanding, the real deal. I was once strapped for objecting to the fact that ‘Mass’ appeared as a subject in the timetable during school hours and we therefore had to attend. To encourage our reasoning abilities and articulacy we had ‘Debate’ added as a taught subject for one year. Unbelievably and with no-one noticing when 3B’s timetable came out at the beginning of term, Wednesday morning read as follows: ‘English - Maths - Mass - Debate’ and so I was strapped again for pointing out the unfortunate juxtaposition of the last two subjects.

A clear majority of the staff should never have been allowed near kids. The casual racism of the woodwork teacher, the sad suppressed homosexuality of the music teacher that manifested itself in bouts of extreme rage and the pompous sarcasm of the Jesuit Head at this supposedly non Jesuit school made for an inconsistency of approach, yet brooked no argument or questioning. There were none of the detailed and constructively useful reports written by teachers today. The brevity of the comments about my abject performance was pretty standard for the era, but even I had to admire their construction.

‘Charming, but indolent’ - Maths.

‘Seeks to incur my wrath on a consistent basis’ - Physics

‘Does not offer his views during class discussions’ - History.

This was at least accurate in that I wasn’t taking History at the time! The report must have got into the wrong pile and the phrase was obviously one of several trotted out by the History teacher secure in the fact that it was bland enough not to raise the ire of parents.

Eventually, I was hauled up after two months of idling in the limbo of the re-sit class of the lower sixth and informed by the Head that ‘The staff no longer want to teach you’. Incredibly I was packed off for a talk with a member of staff, whose name I have long since forgotten, as to what I might do. This lasted about ten minutes after which I left school that same afternoon never to return. Although clueless about what the future might hold I felt only relief, and my mother, still recovering from my father’s death six months previously, never thought to do anything except suggesting I look in the paper for a job.

Following her advice I did look in the paper and got a job in insurance - so unsuited to my personality that it merits a longer mention later on in this memoir. It was a catastrophic choice that almost made me yearn for school, and I only lasted for six months before quitting and then scraping minimal qualifications to gain entry into a teacher training college. There followed three years of small time gambling, table football, drinking and general carousing after which I qualified as a teacher. Failing to anticipate that action would be required to obtain employment at the end of this idyll I was interviewed for a post that no one else wanted the day before term started at a tough Liverpool Comprehensive. It was to prove yet another temporary assignment.

I had for all sorts of reasons developed a restless nature for which I blame no-one. It was however proving hard to shake off and meant many decisions to move on were taken prematurely and in haste - although in truth not that many were repented at leisure. The Great West Indian cricketer, writer and polemicist CLR James said ‘What can they know of cricket who only cricket know?’ By garnering experiences, even if many were stumbled into, I always felt better to deal with the challenges thrown up by the next move or job. The ‘Fuck it’ factor may not have been a sound career strategy but it consistently resulted in change, travel, occasional angst and plenty of fun.