The Best Years of Your Life

When I was in my last year at school, there was a shortage of maths teachers. As a result, those few students taking the Certificate of Sixth Year Studies (something like a Scottish equivalent of the A-level) in mathematics had their classes from 4 until 5.30 after the other kids had gone home. My school was in Kirkcaldy, some 12-15 miles from my home in Cowdenbeath, and of course the school buses had all departed at ten past four. Do school buses still exist?

So after my maths classes were over, I would walk the mile and a half from St Andrew’s School, on Overton Road, part of a respectable but rather faceless municipal estate, down through nondescript streets to the bus stance on the sea front, and get an ordinary public bus back to Cowdenbeath. The walk down to the sea was a welcome period of calm solitude at the end of the day, and afforded me a feeling that I was departing the world of childhood and school, which I still, probably unfairly, regarded as a place of repression and confinement. In Alan Bennett’s memoir, Writing Home, he notes that no-one was cruel to him in his childhood, it wasn’t particularly unhappy, but he didn’t really like it and he was glad when it was over. This was how I felt in my teenage years. Now that I have reached mature years, I am never glad when an epoch in my life is over.

Anyway, this walk down to the prom gave me half an hour or so of quiet reflection. There would be the usual worry that so many of my friends seemed to be getting paired off with girls, and there was no sign of this happening for me, but the walk gave me a bit of perspective to think about the future and its possibilities. I would, for example, reinspect my plans to go to university in Edinburgh. If you read any of the great Russian writers of the 19^th and 20^th centuries, you get the impression of Moscow as the wonderful city of Oz, and the ambition of every young person was to be able to live in Moscow. Well, in the 1970’s, Edinburgh and Glasgow filled that role for young people of provincial Scotland. I would also wonder about what would happen after my time at university. I had only a hazy idea of what I would do, no career plan, but as I rounded a particular bend in the road, the sea appeared before me and it reminded me that I did hope to travel abroad. In particular I had a feeling, no more than that, that my future work would take me to what we then called the Far East. But it is purely coincidence that a dozen years later, I would find myself working in Singapore.

Three things particularly come to mind about that walk from school down to the sea front, which I must have done around 150 times in my sixth year at school. One is that it took me past a beautifully preserved old pub, the Feuars Arms, a magnificent Victorian inn, with stained glass windows, Doulton tile pictures and so on. Again, wishing off the shackles of childhood, I reflected that it would be pleasant to end the working day with a couple of pints in such a historic setting.

A little later, my journey would take me past a Scotch whisky maltsters, where enormous quantities of grain germinated. As one might imagine, this attracted the attention of various members of the animal kingdom. Every evening, I would pass large numbers of rats running about on the pavement outside the maltsters.

A few yards past the maltsters, the road was almost directly above Kirkcaldy harbour (which incidentally gets a mention in Moby Dick), and from there, one had a magnificent view across the Forth to Edinburgh, with the Castle, Salisbury Crags and Arthur’s Seat in full view on a clear day. Again I would think with excitement about my leaving home and living in Edinburgh, with its history, its dynamism, and most importantly, not being a powerless schoolboy in a small town. I only had a vague idea of what I wanted to do with the hopefully imminent freedom. Indeed I think I remarked to my roommate in my first year at Edinburgh that one of the good things about being away from home and at college was that I could eat as much chocolate as I liked and no-one told me off about it.

You should see the state of my teeth.

Like so many things in our lives, I could have taken more advantage of my subsequent student days in Edinburgh. I was young and I didn’t have the instincts of so many of my contemporaries, but all the same, I had a good time, and have many fond memories of those four years in Edinburgh. And when I think of the roll call of musicians I saw perform, I am awestruck: Captain Beefheart, Santana, Frank Zappa, The Ozark Mountain Daredevils, Commander Cody and his Lost Planet Airmen, Yes, John Cipollina, John Martyn…

Where is this maudlin reminiscence taking us? I suppose it is first to repeat the obvious lesson that the last two years have taught us: you never know when your aspirations may be blocked by circumstances. I at least have to consider the possibility that I might never go overseas again. What CP Snow called the ‘Last Things’, may have come upon my generation earlier than we anticipated or would have liked. We can still travel and have fun, but both may be fairly strictly circumscribed.

To the generations below mine, I am not the best person to give advice, but if I were asked, I would say: work hard as you see the world opening up to you, have an end in sight, and aim high. You will achieve something, even if it wasn’t what you expected. And if you can take an opportunity without serious risk to yourself or others, grab it with both hands. You never know when it might vanish.

                                                          **************************

Let’s end on a happier note, and return to school for it. Did you ever read the Jennings books when you were a child? These are very funny stories about a small boy, Jennings, attending a preparatory school (toff language for posh boarding school in which unfortunate little kids are confined before progressing to Eton, Harrow, Marlborough or wherever). He and his pal Darbishire have entertaining adventures, and the narrative style is very amusing. The author, Anthony Buckeridge, was described by one critic as ‘the Wodehouse of the school story,’ and it is a fair description. Like the Jeeves novels by Wodehouse, and the Just William books, I can still read Jennings and laugh out loud. Buckeridge, surprisingly, was a socialist and a friend of Michael Foot. He also wrote novels about a comprehensive schoolboy Rex Milligan, although they didn’t achieve the same success as the Jennings books.

Anyway, there is a rather pensive moment in one of the Jennings books, when around the end of a school year, Jennings and Darbishire are looking back on the events of the year and admitting that it wasn’t as awful as it might have been. Jennings remarks that they are often told that the best years of your life are when you are at school. Darbishire ponders for a moment and says, ‘It’s almost right. I think they are the second best years of your life. The best years of your life are when you’re not at school.’