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CHAPTER 3
How the Light Gets In

Childhood is measured out by sounds and smells and sights,

Before the dark hour of reason grows.

—John Betjeman

You don’t see children playing out much unsupervised these days. You also don’t see drivers without seat belts, diners smoking inside restaurants, and teachers going out for lunch and a pint of beer on Fridays before they return to their classes either. So we have to beware of romanticizing the past.

But the truth is, we did play out a lot, and there was nobody to organize us except ourselves. We played football, cricket, and hide-and-seek at night by the lamppost on the street corner. We poked bits of tar between the cobblestones with sticks and collected old cigarette packets and brightly coloured beer-bottle tops from the gutters as our own kind of treasure. Occasionally and mischievously, we also knocked on people’s doors and then ran away. None of this would be acceptable today, of course.

Beyond playing outside, though, my biggest memories were of school. Teachers must be careful what they do with their students. The memories of it can last a lifetime.

Spring Hill and Its Streams

Spring Hill Primary School was in an 1899 stone building, a monument to the start of mass public education, a half-mile walk from home every morning, down the cinder-covered backstreets. There were no buses, cars, or school runs. Most of us walked to school by ourselves, taking in a few puddles along the way and, once we got home, getting scolded for ruining our lace-up shoes.

The infant school, for children ages five through seven, was in a separate, smaller building, a bit further down the hill. Eileen Whittaker was its kind, matronly headmistress. A few weeks before going up to the juniors, at age seven, I was called up to Mrs. Whittaker’s desk at the front of the class, where she gave me, like the students before and after me, a vocabulary test. The words were easy at first and then got progressively more difficult. I received effusive praise when I successfully struggled through the phonetics and even the meaning of pneumonia. Then, after two or three failed attempts to pronounce phthisis, the test abruptly came to an end. (Isn’t it interesting how, for the rest of our lives, we can often recall these moments when we failed a test more easily than we can the times when we passed one?) Why on earth somebody devised a test item that expected a seven-year-old, even a linguistically precocious one, to pronounce a word meaning “pulmonary tuberculosis or a similar progressive wasting disease,” straight after pneumonia, defies the imagination even to this day.⁶⁹

What I didn’t appreciate at the time was that this test, along with Mrs. Whittaker’s other information and judgements about me, were being used to determine the kind of primary education I would get for the next four years—and probably the kind of life I would have after that. Half of the seven-year-olds, along with me, would go into the junior school A stream, or A class, where we would first encounter the kindly older-sister figure Miss Pope. She was followed by the reality shock of a woman in fierce horn-rimmed glasses who would shake me and anyone else senseless in front of the whole class for merely talking out of turn. The somewhat austere Miss Sutcliffe in year 3 seemed not so bad after this, and as we shall see, the inspired teaching of Miss Hindle in the top juniors, for ten- and eleven-year-olds, was nothing short of an educational revelation that had a profound influence on the rest of my life.

The other half went into the B stream and got a different set of teachers, culminating in the school’s only male teacher, in 4B (the lower stream in the top juniors), a stocky bald man with a built-up shoe on one leg—the result, perhaps, of a war injury or a lifelong disability. We never knew.

I don’t recall being prejudiced about people with disabilities. For instance, a young man in his twenties at the bottom of our street had severe cerebral palsy. Although his limbs seemed to be at war with his mind, and his speech was almost unintelligible sometimes, we marvelled at the ingenious contraptions he invented for playing hands of cards and performing other everyday tasks. I also counted a girl with spina bifida amongst my best friends. This included our shared role in the school Nativity play where we each played half of God, issuing eerie commandments in two-toned unison from behind the vaulting box in the school hall. I was the back half—or God’s bottom, to be precise!

But if you have a disability or even a small physical curiosity and you attract dislike for any other reason, often it’s the “deformity” that gets the attention. The dislike in this teacher’s case stemmed from the way he handled discipline. Those of us in the A stream class came across him when all the boys from 4A and 4B would do craft while the girls did sewing. For me, this was a class to dread, not just because of my habitual disorganization that would leave me with bits of paper and smudges of glue all over my face and clothes but also because the teacher seemed to take perverse satisfaction in belting boys with his rubber slipper for the slightest infraction. In the A class, we were lucky; we had him only once a week. The B class was condemned to get him most of the time.

Decades later, for reasons that will become clear later in the book, the governors of Spring Hill shared some old class lists with me. On one side were the names of my peers and me divided into two different streams at age seven—one list for the boys, another for the girls. On the other side was the name of the school each student went to after he or she took the selection test at age eleven and moved on to secondary education.

The eleven-plus, as it was known, determined whether students would go on to grammar school and the high probability of university after that or on to secondary modern school (the British equivalent of vocational school) and a likely future in manual work instead. Most of the students—twenty-eight of them—in the A stream went on to the boys’ grammar school or the girls’ high school. When I read through the list, many of the names in that A stream were still familiar—I’d walked home with those children, gone round to their houses sometimes, played with them in the schoolyard or out in the woods, sung with them in concerts, or collaborated with them on projects.

I could recall almost none of those whose names were listed in the B stream. I’d never met the children except for the little hard lad who’d picked fights with many of us—including me.

Years after junior school, when I was in my twenties, I’d found myself on a Sunday lunchtime in a greasy-spoon café at Accrington Bus Station. A short man with broken teeth called to me across the counter.

“Andy! Andy!” he shouted. “It’s me!”

At first, I didn’t really hear him or realize he was addressing me. So he called out again.

“What’ve you been doing?” he asked.

I was a doctoral student by this time, but because doctoral study was a rarity then, I mentioned that I’d been in teaching, as this seemed to be a more easily understood point of connection.

“What’ve you been doing?” I inquired in return.

“Three years. Strangeways Prison. Robbing gas meters,” he answered.

Luckily, he hadn’t been aware it had been my brother, by then a policeman, who had arrested him.

By and large, from the age of seven, streaming kept students from middle-class or respectable working-class families apart from the rougher elements of the working class—as sociologists, for decades, had classified those within this group.⁷⁰ We were already living separate lives, building different networks, going down divergent paths. No students allocated to the B stream went on to grammar or high school. They all ended up in secondary modern schools instead. (By this time, around 1960, the technical school, like many others across the country, had been consolidated into a secondary modern.) As the Jesuits said, when they cited the Greek philosopher Aristotle, “Give me a child until he is seven, and I will show you the man.”⁷¹

A Child at Seven

Spring Hill’s streaming policy was not unusual. One of the first and most important studies in educational research in the United Kingdom examined the life courses and opportunities of a cohort of more than five thousand British children born in the first week in March in 1946. By 1954, these children were eight years old and had typically already spent a year in streamed classes, as I would do four years later. What effect would streaming at age seven have on them by the time they went on to secondary school at age eleven? This was one of the key questions asked by Professor James W. B. Douglas, the principal investigator of this landmark study, in his classic 1964 book, The Home and the School.⁷²

Just under five hundred children in the Douglas study went to two-stream primary schools, like mine. One of the conventional wisdoms of the time was that streaming reflected natural ability, even if this correlated with social class. Put students of similar ability together, it was argued, and teaching them would be more effective. And if there was a mistake in the initial selection, or if some students proved to be late bloomers, it was always possible to make adjustments later on.

To many educators at the time, opposition to this view seemed far-fetched. When, in the early 1960s, northern sociologist Brian Jackson asked teachers who supported streaming to characterize their opponents, they came up with views that destreaming was supported by “teachers who find non-streaming a useful gimmick” to get them promotion, “teachers who care more about starting new fashions than the welfare of children,” “earnest reformers who are disposed to accept slogans and emotionalism,” “ivory-towered lecturers in education,” and “sociologists with no practical experience.”⁷³