The Wrong Side of the Track

Life began for me in a small terraced house back in the Fifties.  My youth was spent in a tiny council house on an estate that could have been created for the factories. I don't doubt that there were people on that estate that had dreams, but most followed the Huxley mould from Brave New World and personified the dead-end 'Semi-Epsilon' existence of those destined to toil.

I was lucky to break that mould.  The Secondary Modern I went to prepared us with the limited and wholly achievable targets.  We were slotted into the many available apprenticeships and shop assistant posts that were our destinations.  Some did move up I suppose, but it was a world of easy employment and as ever we could not wait to open our very own wage packets.  Higher Ed was for Grammar School kids and if we did peer in through that window to see them feasting on banquets of knowledge, we didn't care anyway.  Our inverted snobbery preserved our belief that we trod the true path and most of us settled down to teenage procreation and early child allowance booklets.

I myself nearly entered parenthood as a seventeen year old, and I still remember the crushing disappointment when she told me she was not pregnant.  I am no superior being and it was only by chance that I had a second bite at a different kind of cherry or should I say fruit from the tree of knowledge.  The new love of my life was also from a humble background and her family were so different from what I had expected.  There was a profound lack of false pride and a genuine desire to do better for others and not to boast.  This girl took me on a journey that has yet to end.  My time with her family (I married her of course) was a kind of 'Finishing School' of life, morals and ambition.  I learnt not to walk over others to reach a selfish goal, but to walk arm in arm together. 

I have no issues with a certain TV entrepreneur who weekly sifts out the 'chaff' and discards the unwanted apprentices, but the manner in which the candidates trample over each other is for me wholly unpalatable. I am at the end of my working career now and it is with pride I look back.  Those values I learnt so late on did not stop me from achieving success, nor did I make anyone else look small so I could look better.  I still do a bit of teaching and I am proud to say that in my life I have tried to share the kind of ambition that bonds and builds.  I'm not sure where the saying came from but 'be careful who you upset on the way up, you will be meeting a lot of them on the way down!'