My great escape
David Hargreaves says that running away from school was one of the best things he ever did
Thirty years ago this month I ran away from school. I was not quite 15 and had been at boarding school for over five years by the time I left. A turbulent puberty and a delayed recognition that years of searing unhappiness were damaging me — both helped to shape a decision made one lonely night in my dormitory.
The next morning I slipped away in between lessons. The distance involved was nearly 200 miles, but the first 200 yards were the most hazardous. Stonyhurst in 1974 was not Dotheboys Hall, but still a tough proposition, and it was difficult to pass through its extensive grounds undetected. I discarded my school uniform in a dormitory, climbed down a fire-escape and, a few breathless minutes later, found myself on the main road between Clitheroe and Preston.
The next issue was money. My escape fund consisted of 10p — not a lot, even then — and I disbursed half of it on a Cadbuiy's creme egg. This was good for morale, but did nothing to eat into the miles that lay ahead. By dint of walking and hitch-hiking, I reached Preston after a couple of hours and managed to take £5 out of my bank account. By two o'clock that afternoon, 1 was in a second-class compartment of a British Rail train pulling out of Preston station, drawing deeply on a fresh packet of Disque Bleu (of course).
As I lurched in an old green United Counties boneshaker bus on the last leg of my journey through the Northamptonshire countryside, I tried to frame an entrance speech appropriate to the occasion. The choices were restricted: anything studiedly casual (`God, Lancashire's depressing': 'I don't think daily Mass is me somehow') might have sounded good when part of family folklore two or three decades down the line, but that was to look further ahead than was wise. Yet the truth ('I'm pretty comprehensively unpopular. Oh, and by the way I think I'm gay') was terrifying. Anyway, that was then and this is now. Back then, those were thoughts I couldn't bear to frame, even to myself.
I remember the compassion in my mother's eyes as she opened the door to my knock, and the love with which she took me in her arms. 1 remember catching the profile of my father at the same moment, as he crouched by the telephone in the front hall, and the timbre in his voice as he said to the person on the other end of the line, 'Thank God. He's just walked in through the door this moment.'
So they gathered me in their arms, ran me a hot bath and made me supper. There was no cross-examination. I remember my father saying gently. 'The school may not want you to go back, you know', and me replying, 'I'm not going back, Dad.' That was all. We watched a lot of television that night — Colditz, Play for Today, and I felt calmer than I had for many months. I went to bed late and slept dreamlessly — unlike, I am sure, my parents. I was aware of murmured conversations in the kitchen and of telephone calls conducted in the privacy of their bedroom, but everything in my world bore a reassuring normality. The next day I helped my father in the garden, and on Monday he asked me to clean my mother's car and sweep the garage. Every evening, we sat and ate together and, an inveterate chatterbox, I talked freely of everything save my immediate circumstances.
My parents were disciplined at concealing their anxiety. They were also pragmatic. The only school was four miles down the road — a big ex-secondary modern, newly comprehensive. It was rough and rustic, but there was tacit agreement between us that, having made my choice to come home, I must adapt to the consequences. On the Saturday before I began my new school, my father bought me a school blazer, tie and a black plastic briefcase. He was jolly enough, but there was a flash of steel as he signed the cheque, and it did not take a genius to read the runes: time to lie low and melt into the background.
It turned out better than any of us dared believe. Against the odds, I made friends quickly and easily, started to do some decent work and, three years down the line, won a place at Oxford. I am a late child of that generation in which parents expected unselfconsciously to have the last word and so living at home was sometimes combustible. But underpinning everything was the absolute certainty that my parents' commitment to me was limitless, apparently devoid of resentment, and grounded in love.
Now, as a teacher with more than 20 years' service, I've had ample opportunity to see new generations of adolescents wrestle with their own demons. Undoubtedly, some things are easier: adults are less frightening, society less restrictive and censorious, and authority less arbitrary. But the journey to adulthood is still seldom less than complicated, and often harder than that. Peer pressure is as great as ever, and draws much of its inspiration from our world of strident materialism and moral relativism.
And that last point applies to a new generation of parents with a vengeance. Because they love their children, when fond dreams (or illusions) are shattered, most work bravely to subordinate their own disappointment and concentrate on the needs of their sons and daughters. But I've seen some ugly egoism over the years — rotten parenting cuts across all the usual boundaries of class, education and ethnicity, and in an age characterised by secularism and affluence the dangers of losing a sense of proportion are rife. I've never forgotten bumping into the father of a very bright expupil of mine at some dinner. 'I haven't spoken to Henry for six months,' he told me. 'As far as I am concerned he has wasted his life.' Shocked and sorry, I asked what on earth had happened. 'He got a second,' came the reply, voice shaking with indignation. 'The third generation of our family at Trinity, and all of us with firsts. I can't even look at him.'
There are so many obnoxious elements to this incident that it may be more merciful simply to pass on. For a moment. I wanted his son to be struck down by a passing lorry or fall victim to some wasting disease, simply so that his father could get some instruction into what real grief was all about, as opposed to a spurious dent to his vanity.
As I say, it's 30 years since I made a decision as big as any I've made in my life. I see again how it was a choice fashioned by the certainty that I was loved and loved well. Like all lucky children who have grown into mellow middle age, I am overawed by the blessing of good parents who alone stood between me and disaster. In my own way, I hope I can still repay some of that.
Previous page
