First steps in employment

My rather faltering tango with paid employment has always been a tad clumsy. The steps and the music seemed to be leading separate lives, and possibly seeking out bedsits in the suburbs of divorce.

In the final year at uni, the careers service (it deserved no capitals then) suggested only two paths to consider. With no glimmer of humour they called them options. Apparently Heinz Beans had vacancies, and then there was teaching. I wasted no more time on the careers service, and signed up for teacher training. I was opting to be a teacher of Classics at a time when the over-sized writing was already on the wall, but passers-by had not noticed it yet. Latin had all the popular appeal of body-snatching and none of the excitement.

As I had suspected, getting a job teaching Latin was not going to be a cake-walk. It became clear that the kind of schools that were still teaching Latin were exactly the kind of schools that I did not want to be seen dead in. And especially not seen alive in.

I enrolled as a trainee librarian at the university in Leicester.

This was the library where Larkin had cut his lugubrious teeth some time earlier. He wrote unkind things abut Leicester, comparing it unfavourably with Oxford. Well, doh ! You can get a sense of the depth of his dislike of Leicester as he took promotion in Hull where he stayed for the rest of his life. That's right. Hull. Boy, he really must have hated Leicester.

Armed with my barely unrolled BA hons, and a similarly pristine and useless post-grad certificate in education, I rolled up at the library where there was some sucking of teeth and uncertainly about how to deploy me. When they realised that I had skills in obscure dead languages their hesitation was over. I should work in the science library, housed in what the architects had probably imagined would be an underground carpark. The sun never shone in the science library, and nobody knew what Stygian meant.

It was fun dealing with the scientists, though. Many of them needed to get out more. One post-grad came to my desk seeking the Saskatchewan Journal of Geology. What, he enquired nervously, did Saskatchewan mean ? A little later, a rugby-playing post-grad came in, rooted amongst the stacks, and wound up at my desk. His lips didn't quite move when he was reading, but there was a chance they might. He could not find a journal he had come across in an article. I asked him what it was called. Ibid, he said. 

Then came my break. I applied for a job at a primary school. Or rather, I rang the school up about it, and within a couple of days had an interview. I think it was an interview. The head had his feet crossed on his desk, and was rocking back in his chair in just the way you ask children not to. The most striking thing about him then was his vast moustache which was rather like General Melchett's in Blackadder.  

Not a note was taken, and he was singularly unimpressed with my sports jacket, which was the better of the two jackets I owned at the time, the other being an army-surplus safari jacket made on Savile Row for some forgotten major.  

I got the job, and found myself, all innocence and ignorance, working in a show school at the cutting edge of primary education. The culture of the school was informal, verging eagerly on bohemian. If you needed the school secretary during lunchtime, she was to be found upside down next to a filing cabinet where she meditated and did daily yoga. 

This was my kind of place. I has stumbled upon it completely by chance. It was a school I would kill to work in now, bursting with creativity and turning out terrific standards (if standards are what float your boat) as well as art, dance, drama, and music to die for.

The moustache belonged to Gordon Hill, who was also a first-class football referee, though, as I was barely able to recognise a football, that had escaped my attention at interview. This chance appointment, and that charismatic educator, made me the teacher I was all my life. They shaped very unpromising material into an effective educator, and, most important, they showed me that whatever else you can forgive in education, you cannot forgive making it dull. 

The passion in that school was staggering, and it showed in every democratic corner of the place. The teachers thought the kids were exciting to work with, and the kids responded with verve.

It was an amazing break to work with Gordon Hill and his hand-picked team. It was one of two brief high spots in a modest career with lots to be modest about.

For a short serendipitous time the tango became less ugly than it could have been, and the music and my galumphing suddenly came together.

It did not last long.