The job was at a prestigious EFL (English as a Foreign Language) school in West London. I walked up the imposing front steps in my newly-bought-for-the-purpose cream suit (builders made ‘ducky’ noises at me as I passed) and entered a world of Cambridge First Certificate, Swiss Bankers, high tech listening library, rich Iranian refugees from the revolution, free photocopying, high fashion Italian divas, boardroom role plays, Japanese rock guitarists, the digital revolution, and free lunches and morning pastries.
The photocopier was kept running 12 hours a day. My colleagues and I queued up to make teaching material out of anything that caught our eye, with complete disregard for the laws of copyright. The only thing that constrained our reproductive enthusiasm was an ex-actor called B., whose effectiveness as a teacher had been fatally undermined by his eccentricity and who was instead kept busy with a variety of support tasks, which he hated. One of these was to clean the photocopier every day. The time of greatest demand was just before start of the afternoon teaching session, so, naturally, that was when B. chose to start cleaning the photocopier.
I’ve depicted a few of the colleagues who I best remember from those early days: big T., responsible for technical innovation and general weirdness – he introduced me to micro computers (as they were then called); little M., initially staffroom pet, later Director (or Fuhrer, as she was known) of Studies – she acted dumb but managed to elevate herself to a high status role on the national TEFL stage; out-of-the-closet R., funny and acerbic – his later death from AIDS made the sensationalist media coverage shockingly real and tragic.
T. brought little computers called Newbrains into the school and encouraged me to learn BASIC so I could make digital teaching material. I took to it like a born anorak and began to spend much of my non-working time crouched over a little keyboard writing routines that ran to hundreds of lines and executed in half a millisecond.
Steph came to teach at the school in spring 1983. By summer we were walking together in nearby Holland Park, which was a magic garden of woods, lawns, Jacobean mansions, Japanese gardens and other pastoral delights, patrolled by peacocks, Rheas, Cockerels and other exotic birds (one night a couple of years later, two dogs got into the park and killed the lot of them). The park bordered on the Commonwealth Institute, where Steph took me to show me the landscape model of Auckland, her home town (there was also a transparent working model of a cow, but it wasn’t switched on while we were there).
In the world at large, the UK was being turned into Airstrip One. The Greenham women’s peace camp led the resistance, 30000 of them joined hands to encircle the American base in protest against the siting of Cruise missiles there. My friends Peter and Colin and I made our own protest, as part of a CND demonstration in London. We dressed up as characters from the Great War – Peter was Kaiser Bill with a brass coal scuttle on his head, I was Percy Topliss ‘the monacled mutineer’, Colin was Tommy Atkins (singing ‘Bye Bye Love’ by the Everly Brothers!). We carried a copy of a German communist propaganda poster that I painted on a bedsheet hung on the wall of my (Colin’s) flat. (The black paint went through to the wall and I had to spend several days cleaning it off).
Ronald Reagan announced that the US military had orbiting space satellites that could shoot down Russian missiles in the stratosphere. The media inevitably dubbed it Star Wars. No Russian rockets did get shot down but the technology was to come into its own 30 years later, helping car drivers to find their way through unfamiliar city streets (and in some cases blowing them up).
Not much to laugh at in Thatcher’s Britain, but the Comic Strip alternative comedians gave us some relief with their satiric TV takes on Enid Blyton’s Famous Five and other icons of our lost innocence.
On Christmas Day 1983 Steph and I met for a midday walk along the South Bank. As I remember, it was almost deserted, unbelievably. Since then it has continued to be one of our favourite London places, although it is rarely less than thronged these days. Early in 1984 she came to live with me in my (Colin’s) housing association flat in W10. Our bedroom window on the 4th floor looked out across communal gardens. We suspended a plank in front of the window and grew spider plants on it.
