Towards the end of 1993 I took up a post as Research Associate at Aston University in Birmingham, working on a 3-year project on computer-assisted language learning in French and German, neither of which I speak. I had to cash in my pension contributions to be able to live on the salary, but I was given free accommodation at the top of a student residence tower block on the campus for the three weeknights I was on site. Thursday-Sunday nights I was back at home writing up my PhD thesis. National Express coaches ferried me up and down the M1 between Victoria and Digbeth bus stations.
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This picture departs from my established format, partly because I wanted something different to mark the end of the first part of this cartoon autobiography, and partly because, for once, I don’t really want to share much about what was going on in my life at that point. It was a period of some unhappiness, although thankfully lasting only two years not the three I signed up for. I’ve confined the main illustration to an image, of a Birmingham tower block at night, which encapsulates for me the whole dark time. The city sleeps. One lonely window is illuminated. The lights of rail freight cranes patrol the otherwise empty horizon (the first time I saw these bright slow-moving lights in the distance I had the weird sensation that whole buildings were on the move past my window).
As the pretend-Latin caption says: ‘Here night falls and dreams end’.
Out in the world, these sad years were complemented by two long-running UK news sagas. One was the story of Charles’ and Diana’s gradually disintegrating marriage. Hours of TV and acres of newsprint kept us closely informed about every miserable twist in this sorry soap opera. Here I’ve shown Diana in an interview she gave with the BBC’s Martin Bashar (who, it turned out, got the gig via a bit of journalistic chicanery worthy of any scurrilous Sunday redtop hack). This charade became known as the ‘Bambi interview’, as Diana pulled out all the stops to make us feel sorry for her, having foolishly married into a family of Martians.
The other, more serious, story was the investigation into serial killers Fred and Rose West and the excavation of the cellar of their house in Gloucester. Over a few weeks Police found 12 bodies of young women in that cellar. All had been variously abused and murdered, over a 20 year period. They included the West’s own daughter. Whilst a trial was pending the tabloids were legally restrained in what they could report, but when Fred West committed suicide in prison all the shackles came off and there was a media feeding frenzy, complete with lascivious, sensational detail. Much of it made-up of course. There was so much coverage that it caused a public backlash and the papers were forced by declining sales to dial it down. By the time Rose West came to trial even Sun readers had had enough of the horror.
In 1994 Steph had a significant birthday, which will remain diplomatically untapestry’d, and my Dad turned 75. The family went away for a weekend together in a budget hotel in Buckingham to celebrate. The picture shows us all poised to toast the birthday boy with his most recent grandson on his knee. It hasn’t escaped me that, as I write this commentary, I’m fast approaching the same age.
In summer ‘95 I passed my viva, became a Doctor of Philosophy, and finally made up for my miserable O-Level results 32 years earlier. At the age of 48 I called time on my formal education. In the autumn I managed to get a 2-year post as a Lecturer at the Open University and my ordeal at Aston came to an end.
As does Part One of My Life as a Tapestry.
