Sorry I’ve been offline for so long. I’m back. For now, anyway.
Among other things I’ve been writing a little bit about what it was like for me being a teenager involved in left wing politics at the beginning of the 80’s. This is the first (and far the longest) of a series of reminiscences that were prompted by a casual conversation with one of my excellent graduate students. Feel free to ignore! I’ll also be posting them on a substack which, if you like, you can subscribe to (free, but god knows how you subscribe!).
Here goes:
We moved to Oxford in the wake of the 1979 general election. Dad had become Chief Education Officer in Oxfordshire a year earlier, but we’d waited to move till I finished my O’Levels and my sister finished primary school, to minimize disruption (because Oxford, itself, then still had a system of middle schools, my sister was more disrupted than I was, having to spend a year in a middle school before going to an ‘upper’ school.
I did the sixth form at Peers School, an inaptly named comprehensive which served two council estates (Blackbird Leys and Rose Hill; like Lord’s Cricket Ground it was named after a person, not a Peer or a Lord) plus some quite distant rural areas outside the city. The demographics were as you’d expect: mainly poor and working class kids, but with a smattering of middle class children like me who whose parents were left-ish, educated, professionals – teachers, vicars, nurses, etc, one or two academics, and the chief education officer (dad was shocked when he started in Oxfordshire just how many of his colleagues in the LEA leadership sent their kids private and I am sure he was not unduly diplomatic about it).
Peers was quite progressive – indeed, the Graunida had an article about how it had once been a school of the future when it was finally closed. It had a School Council, to which I was, I now realise rather surprisingly, elected by other 6th formers (maybe no-one else wanted to do it?). Mr. B, my rather posh Maoist [1] history teacher once told me that the School Council was supposed to be like a parliamentary democracy but that in practice it didn’t work that way, because it mainly endorsed what the head teacher wanted. This, I pointed out, was exactly how he thought a parliamentary democracy worked, so I couldn’t figure out what his complaint was. My role (again, I don’t quite understand how this happened) was to serve on the PTA, the main job of which seemed to be to organize dog shows to raise funds for the school, dog shows being the special enthusiasm of the couple who led the PTA, a policeman and his wife. I remember at the first meeting being kind of awestruck both by the whole scene and, especially, by a rather disheveled woman called Meg who turned up a late, clearly had no time either for the policeman or for dog shows, and yet equally clearly had more organizational sense than any of the other parents. (The dog show experts were manifestly annoyed by her, probably thinking that she was the kind of person who lived on Stratford Street, had probably been a member of the International Socialists who had left when Cliff took them in a Leninist direction, and drove a green 2CV with a “Nuclear Power: No Thanks” sticker on it. If they did think that, I’m pretty certain they were right on all counts; but they also accepted all her suggestions none of which, nearly 50 years later, I can remember).
A few days later I got a phone call at home from Meg.