HICKATHRIFT PRESS

ISN’T is strange how life so often goes round in circles? More than two years ago, when Andrew Stephen wrote his first book, Reading, Writing & Redemption, for the Hickathrift Press, he thought he’d told the full story of his life in education, little knowing there was more to come.

Just in case you didn’t read RW&R, it was an autobiographical account of how, back in 1971, the teenage Andrew was expelled from a Norfolk grammar school, for a crime he didn’t commit. Rather than sulk, he decided to turn a negative into apositive by becoming a teacher himself. A successful career as an English teacher followed, culminating in hom becoming Head of English at a large, inner-city comprehensive school in Nottingham.  After he retired, he returned to Norfolk, got involved again with his old school – King Edward VII School (KES), in King’s Lynn – and eventually was made a governor and trustee of the very school he’d been expelled from, 50 years earlier.

Here at Hickathirft, we reckoned it would be hard to find a better tale of redemption, but when we publish a second edition of RW&R later this year, we will have to update the ending.

Why? Because since RW&R was published, Andrew has become a prolific writer of modern poetry and short stories, which have caught the attention of Ian Corns, the highly-respected Head of English at KES. Ian is a great fan of Andrew’s work, and kindly edited and prefaced his latest book of poetry and short stories, Under A Norfolk Sky.

But, this week, Ian was even more impressed with a new  short story by our gifted writer.  So impressed, in fact, that he requested permission to use That Was The year That Was as a teaching aid for KES’s current crop of GCSE students.

Ian said: “I’ve read it twice. It’s outstanding. Immense. Brilliant. Flashbacks and cyclical structure – all within an extended metaphor. Amazing stuff. Can I use it in one of my GCSE classes? I’ll read it to them as a model of great practice, particularly as it contains flashes of irony throughout. It contains all the stuff I’ve been trying to get over to them.”

Permission was, of course, granted. And we can tell you that Andrew is thrilled to know that his writing will be helping students at a school that is so close to his heart.

And today, as a special treat, here is the first rough draft of That Was The Year That Was. Please read it and tell us what you think.

That Was The Year That Was

The only sound he could hear was the relentless slap of his tatty trainers on the treacherous mud as he hopped from side to side of the track he was following. This gave him momentum, something to think about and a faint hope of staying upright until he reached firmer ground. It was yet another race but it didn’t feel like one since he couldn’t see anyone else anywhere. It was easy to get strung out in the empty vastness of the saltmarsh. Was he in the lead? He didn’t know or care much. He was enjoying the challenge and the solitude. He was even enjoying the view, bleak as it was, flat, wet and dull brown in the fading winter sunlight .The sea was a mile or so away on the horizon. He could see well established tracks leading to it but wouldn’t have fancied following them. This part of Norfolk was full of unseen dangers and risks which he was happy to leave to the experts .There were plenty of those who earned their living from the sea, although better money could be made nowadays by exploiting rich and undiscerning tourists. Even at eighteen, he didn’t like change and loved the feel of something which seemed timeless and beyond challenge. The seabirds seemed to agree, reminding him of their invisible presence with a range of haunting and plaintive sounds.

He loved these races. They gave him chance to think through the clutter of rapid and seemingly random events of his recent life. This run was over a favourite course too. It was approached on a disused railway and passed rotting hulks and ancient buildings which smelled of fish. He passed equally ancient men mending nets and dripping cigarette ash as they nodded to their secret thoughts. A month ago he’d run in a Norfolk trial, leading for much of the way until he misjudged a leap across a tidal dyke. He sat with water up to his neck and looking up ,somewhat dazed, several feet to where he would escape after several futile efforts. He felt disappointed and stupid. He had been so convinced of victory that complacency had taken away the prize and the enjoyment of the day. He had smiled and waved at the photographer from the Eastern Daily Press who’d taken his picture seconds before his fall from grace. He wasn’t smiling when he saw the picture on the front page the following day and when his friends made fun of him. For an hour he’d run soaked to the skin with his clothes sticking to him and smelling of seaweed. His feet had made a very different sound that day.

Only a week earlier he’d landed from a flight from Cyprus where his parents were stationed with the RAF. It had been a nightmare journey, beginning with a fire before take-off at Nicosia. The passengers had been evacuated from the Trident using the emergency slides, and they had waited hours for a replacement plane which made unscheduled and boringly long stops at Athens and Rome, where he paid a small fortune for a Coca Cola. At least he saw the Acropolis at close quarters, although he wasn’t too impressed by it. Maybe he wasn’t in the best of moods but it just looked like another ruin propped up by scaffolding. He could see plenty of those in King’s Lynn. Then, just as he was anticipating landing in London, they were told that Heathrow was snowbound and so they would now land at Brussels where they would receive further instructions. Oh good. A bus eventually took them to Zeebrugge where the passengers boarded an old ferry which was already very full and disturbingly smelly.

It was stormy in the Channel and all too soon the floors were slippery with vomit and discarded food. At least the bars were empty and a couple of pints made the ordeal a little more bearable. For a time he and a couple of newly made friends went up on deck ,where they could enjoy the full ferocity of the sea and watch the blizzard in the ship’s lights until it got a bit too cold even for their youthful indifference to sense. They were all loaded on a train at Dover and tried to sleep as they edged towards London. Annoyingly, the train kept stopping to let smart commuters on. There seemed to be no such concept as a carriage that was too full. When he boarded his next train at Liverpool Street he seemed to come back to life. He felt energised and amused by the sheer impossibility of the journey.

Back at school, his bousemaster allowed him time to shower, change and unpack, but insisted that he attended lessons in the afternoon. If that seemed unkind, being told off for not paying attention that day seemed even more unfair. He had always enjoyed school but just lately it had all been a bit of a strain. It seemed that developing opinions and having the temerity to express them wasn’t universally welcome. Some of his teachers seemed more concerned with their own authority than the welfare and development of the boys in their care. Even his favourite teachers kept giving him unwelcome advice about not antagonising the Headmaster by wearing his hair too long or wearing red flared corduroys with his maroon blazer. And meeting girls seemed problematic too. At least being out of school outside of designated times was a problem. Teachers didn’t mind sending him up the road to buy fags for them but using the phone box outside the school gates after 9pm was regarded as a serious offence. No wonder there was talk of revolution, ending all wars and rejecting rampant materialism. At least until leaving school, going to university and becoming a bank manager. Already he felt a little sceptical about hippies and their fashionable politics.

He had to admit that girls were a growing mystery to him. One had found another boyfriend as soon as he was out of the country and then shed crocodile tears when the story came out. She was so upset at his terminating their relationship that she started going out with his very best friend the following day. Some heartbreak. Another girl had gone out with him in order to get to know a former best friend. This one had a car and it was therefore no contest. A third had been trying to persuade him to be her boyfriend until he agreed, at which point she decided that she preferred someone else. Many years later he had worked out many of these strategies if not the motives for them. It was all great fun until the first real love of his life greeted his return after Easter from thousands of miles away with staggering indifference, which turned out to be something to do with a medical student at Cambridge. He hadn’t seen it coming but he had been a little upset by hearing her parents suggesting that she could do much better for herself. That was hard to hear but it was even harder to understand how she’d been affected by their opinions.

He was just getting used to the idea of thinking for himself after years of institutionalised conformity and group think. He found that running had similarities with becoming your own person and developing his own voice. His fellow boarders didn’t seem to find it such a struggle. The obvious thing to do was to get your head down, work hard for A levels and get the promised places at university. But that wasn’t what Bob Dylan was saying or the writers of Oz or the Beat Poets. Up until now, all that mattered had been sport and doing well at school. He felt a new kind of restlessness. Of recklessness. A desire to test boundaries.

He wasn’t quite so certain about the wisdom of age. His teachers still spoke to him with assurance about facts and what you needed to do to get on. Yet, when it came to analysis, interpretation or opinion, many of them seemed weighed down by habit or convention. They seemed troubled by films which asked questions and pupils voicing their opposition to apartheid, inequality between the sexes and the class system. He was told that every generation thought that they would change the world but questioning materialism, status, qualifications and those who knew better were passing fads. It was as if society framed a kind of game and if you knew the rules and played the game well, you could do well out of the very system that young people seemed opposed to. He was never sure what to believe. He’d been brought up to trust the police but they’d roughed him up searching for drugs. He’d never used them, indeed he never would but his long hair and asking them what right they had to search him seemed to antagonise them. He thought that they would have set a better example and acted fairly. This year was one where many lessons were learned which ran contrary to much of what he had been told .It was hard to discuss such things with his friends since so much of what they said seemed to come from a kind of script. They liked the same music, the same films and, apparently, the same opinions.

There was a kind of rivalry about books funnily enough. Several of his friends had taken to carrying paperbacks which were clearly visible in their blazer pockets. Kerouac, James Joyce and Dylan Thomas represented the blazer owners in some kind of pretentious way. He had taken to displaying novels by Hermann Hesse as evidence of his Buddhist interests and esoteric tastes. Some of them liked to be seen on a Saturday in John Prime’s bookshop and it never struck them that hating elitism contradicted the principle of being recognised as unusually intelligent. It mattered though.

He had been very proud when his new girlfriend had turned up to watch him run on Sports Day, although she had got into terrible trouble for it later. She was very beautiful and he loved having her on his arm although, unlike her predecessor, who he didn’t miss at all, she didn’t have much to say. Perhaps it didn’t matter, although he was disappointed sometimes. Once he took her to the Guildhall to watch Zefferelli’s Romeo and Juliet, which he really enjoyed. As they left , she asked, “Don’t you think they were a bit young to get married?” Maybe lively and challenging conversation was important after all, even if it was fraught with danger.He thought of the grief he’s got from some girls’ parents, of his frustration with a lack of freedom and too little money. It seemed unfair that he had changed in ways that nobody seemed to like. He smiled to himself as he heard himself think, “Nobody understands me.” He had no time for people who wallowed in self-pity or who moaned that life was unfair. Of course it was.

At that point, the path began to take him back towards Wells. The race was half run. His had hardly begun. He knew that he was really only responsible to himself, that he was on his own and had to make the most of what life threw at him, however hard some of those things might be. It had been a pig of a year but he’d had some fun along the way and he knew that there were plenty of adventures ahead. He would try to appreciate the good times when they came and accept wherever life took him. Suddenly the black and vast sky in the distance was split by a dazzling line of sunlight which was desperately trying to break into the late afternoon gloom. He felt privileged to see it. He loved being here, being solitary and free from any need to conform.