Preparing for Flight

So why York?

Like most key decisions in life, a mixture of determination and serendipity led me across the Pennines in 1963. Determination to escape the dead proto-existence my own perverse nature had imposed on me was a huge factor. I understood that I needed a completely fresh start in life, if I was ever to live at all. An adolescence spent watching others getting on with their lives as a spectator from the sidelines was not very constructive – but at least it motivated me hugely to make the leap. I was the Miller on the Dee in those day, determined to show no need for anyone else lest – I suspect – they should penetrate my carapace of ironic indifference. Nole me tangere, my motto – which people read clearly, and went on their way, leaving me strictly alone.

Nominally I was a full participant – at school at least. As I became a senior member of the community I played in the orchestra, sang in the choir, and also in the chorus of Martins Bank Amateur Operatic Society, the outlet for my father’s Gilbert and Sullivan fanaticism – a lone adolescent in a dressing room of adults who shed their workaday inhibitions, and (it seemed to me) their clothes in the changing rooms at Cranes Theatre in Liverpool – a fascinating insight into adult life! I recall training The House Choir to sing four-part harmony settings of musical standards (imagine trying to get 20 boys aged 11-17 to do that nowadays!) and I wrote a play for production by the school’s experimental puppet-theatre. Oh, and the music for it!

Oh yes, I participated. But I took care to hold my co-participants at arm’s length. As time went on, I began to realise that I was not living, but waiting. Waiting for an opportunity to fire the starting pistol. Parental expectation assumed that I would go to university, and I looked forward to that epiphany with a mixture of naked terror and surging hope.

So, why York?

Well, if life had organised itself differently, it would have been Birmingham. I had a place there, for 1962, needing only three A levels at fairly attainable grades. But Birmingham, on my one sighting of it, was a daunting place – a huge, grubby, populous place full of people who knew who they were. Perhaps that was why I failed to gain the grades required, scraping a pass in German and French, and doing little better in English. Or perhaps I was an intrinsically lazy student (a personality trait that hasn’t changed much over the years) unaccustomed to actually buckling down and learning stuff. Anyway, my dismal first shot at A level meant not Birmingham.

“Have you thought of York?” said Maurice Mullett, on one of the rare occasions I actually spoke to our distinguished (looking) headmaster. He was holding a prospectus, which interested him primarily because the school’s one and only distinguished old boy, Philip Brockbank, was to be first holder of the chair of English Literature at York. “It wouldn’t hurt, and might help,” he said. York was to receive its first batch of undergraduates in 1963, and I must say that I was immediately attracted to the idea of starting my own new life in a place with no traditions, no history, only a future. It also attracted that instead of joining a community of several thousand, I’d have the luxury of just a select few.

If, of course, I could get in – and avoid the soul-deadening thought of “The Bank” with my father! And there, of course, the possibility of at least being looked at twice by the “distinguished old boy” was one I immediately pinned hopes on. I was well aware that my academic background alone would not suffice. Tuition in Literature so far at Oldershaw Grammar had consisted of being dragooned into the library (from where our teacher, a little, fat Yorkshireman called Smoky Haddock whose fantasy other-life was as a star off-spin bowler for his native county, could conveniently watch cricket on the school field) and being told to “make notes” under a list of headings we had been supplied with for each set text. Making notes meant, collect short quotations from the text, and learn them. The idea of reading around, or enjoying, or making any original response to those texts was, under him, alien. Texts were simply repositories for quotations to be trotted out for examiners.

So when, to my astonishment, I was called to York for interview (at the wonderful, historic King’s Manor in the city centre, there being no premises ready at Heslington Hall, where the university was to start its functioning life) I had what you might call a purely analytical understanding of a handful of set texts, and virtually no reading outside that small canon.

Philip Brockbank terrified me then, and remained a figure of nameless, obscure threat throughout my time at York. His features were, I suppose, aquiline, and there was something about his body posture that always suggested a desire to take you off guard. He would lean forward slowly, head down, no eye contact, as he formulated a thought, and then, sweeping his long, black hair out of his eyes, bring his head up at the last moment to thrust his elegantly designed, surgically precise question at you. What he thought of the callow, under-prepared, poorly-read alumnus of his old school, at that interview, I can only surmise.

I suspect, with hindsight that – assuming his own schooling to have been perhaps no better than mine – he thought I deserved, like him, a chance to show what I could do. Certainly the place I was offered, in the company of a positively stellar intake, was down to no prior achievement on my part; and the very modest grades I was asked for suggested some generosity of spirit on his part.

And perhaps, having let me in, he then regretted that generosity! Or maybe it was just very good psychology that led him to say, at my first appointment with him as my Supervisor, “You do realise, don’t you Alan, that you are very fortunate to be here?”

That was, as I recall the sum of our first interview – and subsequent annual appointments were no more forthcoming. I cannot believe it was an accident that I was placed under his special care – or that that care was so remotely, almost hostilely administered. That very first, daunting comment, was either a voice of regret for a moment of uncharacteristic weakness in letting so obviously inadequate a student in, or it was a skilfully applied motivator. Whichever it was intended to be, it worked exclusively in the latter way. From that moment I felt like a condemned man on reprieve. From base zero, I determined somehow or other to stay the course. I watched how the super-articulate fellow students from ‘Good Schools’ in the ‘Home Counties’ comported themselves. I slavishly internalised a new vocabulary of critically accaeptable words. I even started to read books – not, generally, the whole of them, of course – but enough to be able, with a wing and a prayer, to get by. Application remained my weak point!

And I determined to be noticed. Not too much, you understand. But in every Seminar (or at least, every Seminar for which I had read any of the text(s) for discussion!) I would brace myself to make at least one pithy contribution. And then sink gracefully back into the undergrowth, satisfied to have made a mark, to have vindicated my place. After all, with luck and a following wind I had arrived at university, at a time – the early sixties – and in a place – the finest of the New Universities – that could hardly have been more auspicious. I was not intending to allow my quite evidently fraudulent claim to such a place to be discovered. I would work hard at one thing only – imitating those who surrounded me well enough to be taken for a bona fide student.