Or, what college did and didn't do for me
I went back to school when I was in my early thirties. We don't have High Schools in the UK and we don't have an equivalent to the High School Diploma but I left formal education when I was 17 (I had stayed on for a year) with a clutch of not particularly impressive qualifications in my hand and a thoroughgoing revulsion for the School System deep in my gut. I'd had enough and wanted out. Unfortunately I left just in time to be caught up in a massive recession. This was 1977 and the events that lead to the total restructuring and virtually universal destruction of Britain's traditional heavy industries were just getting underway. We were taking our first steps towards a service-based economy, and toward the so-called 'knowledge' economy - but no one knew that at the time.
I watched my home town dry up and die along with the production of steel that the town's life had come to be based around. All of my family who had remained in Scunthorpe - my mother's sister and her husband and kids - were all employed by the Steel Plant (the Works, as it was called there). My Uncle Jack and his two sons, Andrew and John, drove massive cranes. Mary, his wife, (called 'Maimee' by all of us) and her daughter Linda both worked somewhere in the Office (administration, generally). And it was the same for a very large proportion of the town's population. Every family had at the least one member (most had all their members) working at the Works.
The three Blast Furnaces ran 24/7/365 and at night the skies above the town were a dull red. The town's motto was and maybe still is 'The Heavens reflect our Labors' for that reason. And every housewife cursed the Works because at some stage of production vast clouds of orange dust were released into the air - this was a very long time before the tree-huggers came to pre-eminence - and coated their washing, along with everything else.
My father was a lathe operator and himself worked on the Works. But he wanted to better himself (myself, I think being a lathe operator is pretty cool) and the way he chose to do it was by becoming a Prison Officer (a Corrections Officer?), which meant my immediate family moved away from Scunthorpe when I was three. My very first memory dates from somewhere before that time, so I must have been two-and-a-bit. It's of my parents arguing. My next memory is of our first visit to the Prison Housing that surrounded the Prison that was my father's first posting - Risley Remand Centre, near Warrington in Cheshire.
Prisoners were used as labor in building the housing complex. My mother tells me that I'd go out and sit with the prisoners when they were eating lunch, and take them sandwiches (which she made, of course). As I believe I've said elsewhere, I've always favored the underdog. I don't suppose that kind of thing would be acceptable here - but they never did me the least harm, and who knows, maybe I made their time a little easier.
My father was a vain, self-serving, foolish man. An alcoholic and ultimately an adulterer - what I have from him now is a love of books and his sense of humor. The last time I saw him I was seventeen - and then only for five minutes.
So. On the back of a broken family, and with nothing outstanding in the way of qualifications, I left school and entered the employment market - as I said, just in time to get caught up in an extended and debilitating economic depression. I left school with the offer of a job in my pocket - a crappy little job stacking shelves in a liquor store (an 'off-licence', as the British call such things) - which gave me my first taste of what it's like to have money you've earned yourself. Not much money lol but my own. It didn't last. The manager fired me so he could employ someone younger still who he could legally pay less than me. It wasn't a propitious start and I was right to think of it as an indicator of bad times ahead. I spent a year collecting welfare: and then I, my mother, and my sister (Sarah) left London and moved to a truly hideous town called 'Goole' (Why is Goole called 'Goole'? It's full of the undead - which is a joke on a par with the ancient graffito which reads 'Who put the cunt in Scunthorpe?').
My mother had found a job as a housekeeper - only her employer read 'mistress' for 'housekeeper' - and after fending off his attempts to bed her for a few weeks she was eventually forced into the humiliation of asking my father for help. I'll say this for him - so far as I know he never complained about helping us out, and he colluded in keeping our occupancy of Prison accommodation (which was reserved for the Officers and their families - mother and kids had no right to it) from coming to the Prison authorities' attention. Though it was, of course, an open secret in the community that he had left and we were living in the house without him. But my mother was hard working and honest and always looked out for her neighbours - so they looked out for her, and for Sarah and me.
i know she was grateful for his help. But he shortly fucked up, yet again, and reverted to his usual state of being a Prick. Because there was no formal element to their separation he was subject to no requirement specifying how much financial support he had to provide. He was a gambling man and needed money for the gee-gees as well as his drinking. So first he cut back on what he gave; and then he cut her off entirely - hence the necessity for her to work any job she could find, and for me to bring up my sister.
One of these crappy little jobs involved her in collecting weekly insurance payments and passing them on to the Insurance company. She braved dangerous dogs, foul weather, and bad neighborhoods. She kept us together and kept us housed, fed, and clothed.
My mother is made of iron. And she's still the only woman on earth that can put the fear of God into me - which is why I love her. But in the end, the low level of her wages, the increasingly unpredictable level of my father's 'generosity', and the ongoing stress of knowing we could be turned out of the house whenever he became vindictive enough to inform the Prison authorities he was no longer living there, proved too much for her and she was forced to appeal to Maimee and Jack for help.
They did help. I can't deny it - but they were as bloody-minded and ungracious about it as they could possibly be. They all were, except Linda. Linda was always my favorite cousin - I remember her as breastless and hipless as a young boy, midnight black hair down to her ass, skin as white as milk and eyes so deeply brown they were virtually black. I adored her as a kid, and thought she was the sexiest thing on the planet. Alas, she doesn't look like that anymore - but I'll bet you any sum you care to name that her eyes are as gentle, friendly, and humorous, as they were when I knew her. God bless her and her husband, Mick. They did what was right, and they did it without the least resentment, anger or regret.
My mother and sister stayed with Maimee and Jack. Most of the furniture we'd brought with us was stored at Linda's, and I stayed with John (Jack's son) and his evil cunt of a wife, Norah. At the time I knew her, Norah's ass was somewhat wider than a barn door and her disposition was not much better than that of a dyspeptic pig. I really did not like Norah. And she really did not like me. To such an extent that she accused me to John's face of doing perverted things with her underwear. This was ludicrous for two reasons. On the one hand, I'd just become involved with my first serious male lover since Paul (who was my first) at school. And on the other, if I'd played with her knickers, as she accused me of doing, I'd have become lost without trace she was so huge. I'm certain she had them custom-built by Bell-Tent (they made Circus Big-Tops).
But John, being the pussy-whipped little shit that he was, threw me out on the street. I was lucky, in that this wasn't quite the desperate situation it might otherwise have been. My return to Scunthorpe had seen me secure my first employment since the Off-Licence in London. I was working as a Filing Clerk, in the local branch of H. M. Inspector of Taxes, i.e. the Internal Revenue. I earned twenty-two pounds a week - of which eighteen a week ultimately was spent to rent a bed in a local Boarding House, in a room I shared with a fat laborer who had terrible problems with his bowels, complicated by his habit of drinking himself into a stupour every night, a stupour that meant he issued the most thunderous and foul-smelling farts imaginable. In terms of disposable income I was left with four pounds a week. Which meant I could drink myself stupid once a week, buy enough hand-rolling tobacco to last a week, and buy a sandwich in a pub a couple of days a week.
It was at this point that Terry came to my rescue. A man much older than myself, he first seduced me in the lavatories of the Talbot Public House, somewhere I remember with great affection. Terry was an alcoholic, and in some ways quite simple. I confess, I used and manipulated him, and generally made his life hell. Dennis, his brother, was a demented madman who twice tried to kill me - almost succeeding on both occasions. In all honesty, I whored myself out to Terry for bed, board, and anything else I could screw out of him. Though the secret of my success was simply this: I almost never let him screw me at all, but kept him in a perpetual state of semi-excitement. I was a prick-tease par excellence and played his obsession with me for everything I could get from him.
At the time, I thought he had no interest in me beyond sex. I think, now, that I did him a real injustice. Looking back, I honestly think he did, really, care. But I couldn't see it then and I treated him like a cunt.
C'est la vie, c'est la guerre.
Terry's part in my life falls within a period of ten years, for almost of all of which I was officially unemployed. I wasn't unoccupied. There were always government 'training courses' to fall back on - which paid a much higher rate of 'allowances', of 'benefits', than your basic welfare check. I took advantage of them as I could but nothing positive came of them because I didn't want a positive outcome: I was happy in my indolence and my despair and my depression. I didn't want to change. In the words of a friend I knew many years later: I liked how I was, and I hadn't had enough of the consequences of how I was.
That changed, of course. But it took ten years to bring about the change. I've written about the nature of that change in my threads that deal with religious conversion and religion generally, and this isn't the place to repeat what I've said there. Enough that I changed. As a result of that change I got married for the first time. And as a result of my marriage, and my first wife's deliberate encouragement, I started thinking about going back to school.
I wasn't the kid I'd been, of course. And it gradually dawned on me that I was preoccupied by a question I couldn't answer unless I went back to school. I wanted to know why and how a society can and does function in such a way that economic recession appears to be an integral part of that functioning. And I also wanted to know a whole host of other things. What's an individual? How and when did individuals first appear? What's democracy? Where did it come from, how does it work? Why is it so important and influential now? Is it really, as we're told, the only right way to organize a political society? What are the alternatives? If they're wrong, why are they wrong? If they're right why is democracy so widespread and apparently successful?
Questions... I had any number of them.
So with my first wife's unwavering help and support I went back to school. I first gained a Bachelor's degree, and then a Master's - and I subsequently spent six years working for a Doctorate I didn't complete, and never will complete now. I realised at the start of my academic career that there were two ways to go. I could study something that would get me a qualification that would get me a job; or I could study those things that really interested me. I took the latter course and not the former. I studied, for my Bachelors degree, Social Science. And when I say studied I mean just that. In the three years it took to gain my first degree I went to the theatre twice, to the cinema twice, and on two occasions I went drinking - one of those occasions being the day we learned our final results. I really did live like a medieval monk.
I spent fifteen to eighteen hours a day with the books - either in the Library or in private study. I associated with no one outside the classroom - and God help you if you interrupted me when I was working, which was all the time. I went to one party, in the whole of those three years - and I left early (though utterly, utterly drunk). And I loved every minute of it. I was finally free to explore knowledge, to find my own way to it, to assimilate it in a way that served my purposes, not those of others. It was one of the most liberating periods of my life to date. And it paid off. I came away with First Class Honours - which is the highest level of Bachelors Degree available in the UK. And that was the target I had set for myself, when I had begun: to get a First.
Why? Because, during the period of my unemployment I had been told, by the Authorities, those who were supposed to KNOW, that I was unemployable, that I could succeed at nothing, that I would be dependant on state benefits (and subject to those who issued them) for the rest of my life. My success was a form both of vindication and revenge. Fuck You.
And I discovered I was still hungry, that I wasn't ready to give up my inquisition of the world and how it worked. I had different questions, questions that related to forms of thought, to the nature of political and economic ideology, to the nature of power how it comes to be, how it's perpetuated, how it's made legitimate. And with questions as to the nature of power came questions as to the nature of obligation; of right and priviledge. And those questions ultimately came to be the basis of the Doctorate I attempted and did not, will not, complete.
Not because I lost interest in the questions and the issues, but because I reached a point where I simply could no longer support the necessary effort, the necessary concentration. I burned out, under the demands of the task I had set myself. And even now, years later, I can't bear to look at what I wrote, back then. Not because it disappoints or dissatifies, but because the effort I made permanently damaged me. I no longer can think with that same burning intensity, that furious concentration, that same unremitting determination to comprehend.
And a part of the reason for that is disappointment. From the moment the first lecture I attended concluded I knew I could do at least as good a job as the person giving the lecture. I knew it, and I was right. While working for my Doctorate I became an Associate Professor - and I was an outstanding success. I loved teaching at that level, I loved the interaction with students; I loved seeing them develop to the point where they could ask questions I was hard pressed to answer. It was just the most satisfying thing in the world.
What going to college gave me was the opportunity to formulate a plan for my life, and to begin to see that plan come to fruition. Reality intervened, and the plan did not succeed; but that's no longer important in contrast to the path my life has taken so far. I wouldn't be here, if things had gone as I hoped and intended. But that's OK - because I'd rather be here.
In terms of my current occupation, my education could not be more irrelevant. It fitted me only to teach others how to follow the same path. But that also is irrelevant, because I know that in doing what I did I made a profound impact on at least some of my students - an impact that will outlive the man who made it. But that time also left me with a legacy that I would not be without, now.
In some ways I've returned to my former disillusion with the process of education. Contrary to popular opinion, an advanced education is no certain guarantee of success in life - however you measure success. All it does is make you a person equipped with knowledge that is largely useless - at least, formal knowledge that is largely useless. It can, as it did for me, equip you with secondary (or 'transferable') skills that are useful in the real world. But the greatest thing that going to college did for me is less tangible and far harder to quantify: it taught me the limits of my own mind.
Can there be any greater lesson than to know yourself?
I don't think so.