Not the typing pool

After three years at a secondary education school in my town, pupils and their families were asked to choose subjects from the school curriculum that would likely determine the exams we would take, the jobs we would apply for and the careers we would develop, if any. Now I see that the choices we were given were both limited and limiting – a menu dished up to the offspring of the working class.  Back then I didn’t have the advantage of a degree in sociology to understand how limiting CSE subjects could be and the extent to which they would influence the course of my life; all I knew was that I did not want to end up in the typing pool of some business or other. That was why I refused to join the other girls in my class and learn how to type. At some level I sensed that being assigned to the typing pool of a business would not get me where I needed to go, although I did not know where that was at that time.

I was 14 then and unaware of the ways in which social class can determine the direction children’s lives would follow; I believed only that if I did not know how to type then I couldn’t end up in a typing pool. That was my rationale when I used my father’s razor to slice at my fingers, so much so that I could not physically type during class. Strangely, harming myself in this way gave me perverse pleasure. First came the ice-like pain from the razor blade that was followed immediately by the warmth of the blood oozing out of the wound and down into the whiteness of the bathroom sink. Then came the satisfaction from knowing that I had achieved some level of control over my life, even if it was only not learning to type. It also showed that I had enough courage to defeat the fear of pain.

Prior to this desperate measure I had made a choice from the list of subjects given to all pupils at the end of year 3; I had purposefully chosen technical drawing instead of typing as my first option. I was the only girl in the class and the teacher, Mr Booley, did a laudable job of making me feel invisible. He didn’t appear to see me whenever I raised my hand to answer a question or request help. Within three weeks, humiliated and dejected, I’d given up and moved next door, into Mrs Smith’s CSE Typing class. Even then, I still felt like an outsider. My classmates – all girls – had used the previous three weeks to memorise the keyboard and to work on building up their typing speed. They were much faster than me, which alienated me even further.

Even though I now belonged to the typing class, I still resisted. I resisted in the only way I knew, not by playing truant, because truants are eventually caught out, but by handicapping myself. That is when I first used Dad’s Gillette razors. Not a soul questioned me about why I had bandaged fingers, although my stepmother said she would beat me “black and blue” when the wounds had healed. For her to make that threat indicated that she knew I’d done it to myself. If Kathleen knew that something was “very wrong” and that maybe she was not the innocent party, she never spoke about it.

Contemporary teachers, I believe, would be alert to the dangers of self-harm, but they are unlikely to be more alert to the snobbery and social class bias that still prevails in schools today. The likes of Sarah Winstanley, * whose father was a policeman, was fawned over by the needlework and biology teachers in a way that spoke to me of a shared secret. That secret was of course a common social class background, although I didn’t know it then. Mrs Smith too was in on this “secret”. I knew that on the morning she reprimanded me for calling a vacuum cleaner a “hoover” in a way that made me feel small and uncouth. One day she came into class wearing trousers, which was a first for female staff. When she saw the shock on our faces, she announced that it was now school policy for women teachers to wear trousers if they wished. I raised my hand to ask if the girls could also wear trousers and Mrs Smith, put me down with a caustic remark about knowing that some “smartass” would ask that question. As a timid pupil, I was mortified.

Fainting in morning assembly was habitual. Teachers blamed the lack of oxygen in the hall for the phenomenon, and it was a daily phenomenon. Prayers were often interrupted by the sound of a dull thud as a hapless pupil hit the floor and had to be carried out. The rest of us looked on in silence, wondering whether we would be next. It never happened to me, for which I was both grateful and mystified. Since I was as skinny as the others, I couldn’t understand what kept me on my feet for the duration of morning assembly. Perhaps those afflicted had had no breakfast at all, whereas I ate cereal, ironically Special K, bought for the family because both my parents were keen to lose weight.

One of the groups on the lists of subjects for third year options featured a new subject: Integrated Studies, which was being trialled. The subject was offered as a continuous mode of assessment which gave less academically able pupils more of a chance of obtaining a CSE grade 1 because they were able to work more closely with their teacher. The problem was that IS, as it was known, replaced two solidly academic subjects: history and geography. The extra class time gave tutors of IS more of an opportunity to guide and direct pupils toward better grades. For me, the problem was that I had been chosen to study IS because it was a mixed ability subject being trialled and pupils were selected according to their ability. As one of the more capable pupils I was put into the IS group without being consulted, and indeed one of the universities I applied to a few years later, refused to acknowledge IS as an acceptable academic qualification. Prior to then, nobody, not least of all my school, had given us a warning about the drawbacks of studying IS because, I presume, pupils from St Joseph´s were not expected to get into university.

Being in the IS cohort meant that I was with other school children who I’d only ever seen in morning assembly or the playground. It gave me an opportunity to observe how teachers related to some of the poorest and less confident children. One incident comes to mind in this respect. Three brothers who may have been triplets came into IS class a bit late one morning and on that day it was the turn of the deputy head teacher, the much-feared Mr O´Rourke. to give the lesson. As soon as they walked into the room, he humiliated and abused them with their dank greasy hair and unwashed uniforms by starting up a chant: “Here come the dustbin men.” As I watched them take their seats, my heart ached for those three boys whose only crime was to be poor. At the same time though, I was keenly aware that I was only half a step away from “the dustbin men” and was grateful that nobody had pointed the finger at me.

Nobody saw any potential in me, neither my teachers nor my parents, even though I hungered for more challenges, the kind of challenges that would have opened the path to university for me. For example, my father read the Daily Mirror every weekday and on his days off work, it was my responsibility to buy the paper at a local newsagent. In my final years at school, I began to feel embarrassed when asking for the paper, particularly so because of the photo on page 3, but also because it was so simplistic. One day, I decided to buy the Guardian with the excuse that the Mirror had sold out. Dad was not happy at all and I didn’t dare deceive him this way again.

Ironically, typing became a necessary skill when I reached university. Assignments and essays had to be typewritten and handed in to our lecturers without errors. I was far too dependent on whitener to cover up my clumsiness, so I regretted not having learned to type in Mrs Smith’s class at St. Joseph’s. But then nobody ever mentioned university to me; it was deemed an improbability for us working class kids. That was the way things were in the 1970s and I doubt that they have changed since then.