Doors in our Lives

This blog is in two parts.

Part the First.

The scene is a teachers’ common room.  The sound of moaning common to common rooms crystallises around someone complaining that “80% of our time is spent dealing with the 10% of kids who don’t want to be here!”  The moaning around this theme intensifies until interrupted by a dangerous suggestion that a celebration of the 90% of the kids who did want to be in school is needed.  Amazingly, it comes to pass.

The design of the event was that every child would receive a scroll detailing their accomplishment.  In some cases it was just – they had attended! (But, remember, they wanted to be there.) To swelling music, each of them mounted the stage of the assembly hall over which their photo was, for that moment, projected.  Parental bosoms also swelled as their offspring had their hand shaken by the mayor of Beccles.

The atmosphere was electric.  Everyone was there to celebrate.  No-one was there to detract.  That knowledge liberated parents, children and teachers into unfettered enjoyment.  After, the adults gathered over wine in the library while the kids gathered in the gym for a session of break-dancing.  It looked as if Fame Academy had come to town.  It wasn’t an exhibition for the visitors – the kids just felt like dancing.

A number of the parents came up to my wife to talk about the bits in her speech that had awakened memories for them.  My late wife, held in honour by the school for being the second of their pupils to go to Oxford University (the first was Nobel Laureate Dorothy Hodgkin) had been asked to deliver the keynote for the evening.  This is her speech:

Part the Second.

Jennifer Westwood’s 5 minute intro to the Sir John Leman School evening for high-effort children and their parents.

Delivered Wednesday 13 July 2005.

I was wandering around Hampton Court Palace a few years ago and, in an obscure room in an obscure part of the Palace, I came across a portrait of Sir John Leman.  If any man deserved not to be kept in a corner – it’s him.

When I was your age Life seemed like a mountain – what I had to do was find the right route to the top.  Looking back, Life now seems much more like a long corridor with many doors: some are open, some are opened for you and some are closed.

Sir John opened more doors for more people than he could have imagined when he provided for this school in 1631 to give 11 poor boys an education.  He wouldn’t have recognised the Sir John Leman I went to in the 50s any more than I recognise this one we’re in now.  So it will go on.

I’m going to talk to you about 3 doors in my life:

The first that I’ll tell you about was closed.  The then headmaster said to me “Don’t bother with Oxbridge Jennifer, aim lower”.  My mother, herself a teacher, made life so unpleasant for him that he let me try for Oxford.  I passed the exams and was invited for an interview but it clashed with the school play in which I had a lead role.  “The school play comes first, Jennifer” said the Head.

But Mr Benson, one of the English teachers, drove me to Oxford – with me rolling cigarettes for him all the way.  We made it back in time for curtain up, and I went to Oxford.  There was a lesson there for me:  you don’t have to open doors alone and your parents and friends can be there for you in unexpected ways.  (I don’t think the lesson was ‘Be nasty to your headmaster’).

The second door I passed through without knowing it was there.  My Oxford tutor asked me if I wanted to do English Language or Literature.  I didn’t know Language was an option but I’d had enough of Wordsworth and Co, so I chose Language.  That brought me Anglo Saxon and the chance to hear Professor Tolkien, the one who wrote Lord of the Rings, lecture on the old poem – Beowulf.  Except he didn’t lecture on it, he delivered it as it would have been spoken in its day.  (He took his false teeth out first). It was like listening to a bard.  With my mind opened to a new way of thinking about language, I went on to read Old Norse at Cambridge and, during one of the Summer Vacs, wrote my first book for children, retellings of things I’d been studying.  It was called Mediaeval Tales.

More books followed, the latest is the big one for Penguin that Mr Leech mentioned.  In there are stories about England told by the Anglo Saxons, the Viking settlers, medieval people and people in modern times.  So everything I’ve ever learned has gone into it.  Some of the important doors don’t tell you where they lead.

The third door started to open in November 1998.  The organisers of the Glastonbury Festival offered me a pitch for the Folklore Society (I was their Books Editor) for the following year.  I wasn’t sure that I wanted to spend a week flogging books, surrounded by mud and music and thought it was just for young people. I was also just starting chemotherapy for breast cancer so I wasn’t even sure I would make it.  A spirit of “what the hell” made me let the door open and in 1999, I spent an amazing week – no sleep but endless sunshine and the support of a local team of twenty-somethings who came on bikes, in cars and on trucks to put up and man our marquee.  Those of you who have done a festival like Glastonbury know the kind of things that happened – and I wouldn’t have missed them for worlds.  So there’s maybe another thing I learned “It’s never too late for new”.

And Glastonbury 2007 will find me accompanying a 70 year old friend who is determined to go, despite the frowns of her husband and her family.  And that’s perhaps the last lesson I’d like to share:  education is a great door opener for you, and one of the things you do with your education is open doors for other people.  Pass it on.  Nobody puts Sir John Leman in a corner.