My previous blog talked about school days and teachers. This month, whilst younger children are starting school for the first time or pupils are moving up into new year groups, many students are leaving home for college or university.
As I’ve mentioned before, I don’t have children, so I’m not here writing as an empty nester. However, I was thinking about what leaving home meant to me, 54 years ago.
As an only child you may have thought I would have been nervous about going to college, and in some ways, I was, but in others – I couldn’t wait. I had gained the required grades and been accepted into the Royal Manchester College of Music, which was my dream.
I shared a bedsit with another girl from my youth orchestra, in a large house which was full of other female students, within walkable distance to college. The house was owned by a very strange guy, who owned a martial arts clothing company, and who lived in one of the rooms in the house. He shared the kitchen and bathroom with our bedsit, and with the girls who lived in the room opposite. None of us girls would ever bath when he was in the house. To say the least, he was creepy.
However, the accommodation was incredibly cheap, considering we had full use of the kitchen, we had a radio/record player in our room (which was heated), and had use of communal washing and drying machines that were in the basement. There were two houses joined, with about 8 or 9 bedsits in each – all girls sharing.
We weren’t allowed men in the house, or basically, any visitors at all. But the house was full of boyfriends, who would make hasty exits around 5.30 when the owner came home from work. They could escape down through the basement, to where both houses had access, or they could move from one house to the other on the top floor!
Add to into this situation the fact that we were surrounded by a male hall of residence – which we weren’t aware of until a couple of weeks in when there was a knock at our front door, and we were invited to a party they were holding. I made friends with Norman, Steve and John, and we’re still in touch and friends, these 50+ years later.
College was the making of me. I was a funny mixture of being shy when it came to my abilities, but not shy when it came to meeting people. Due to me being an only child, my parents – Mum in particular, had always encouraged me to take friends home and to go to events and meet new people. So, making new friends and having a fun time was wonderful. Without the confines of parental rules!
I’d had the lecture from my mum about making sure I didn’t get up to anything I shouldn’t with boys, so when Norman asked me back to his room for coffee, I replied, ‘As long as it’s only coffee’. He’s never let me forget that!
Why was college the making of me?
- I met people from a wider range of society. People who’d been to private school, people from different cultures (although we didn’t have many people from culturally diverse backgrounds at music college). People from different walks of life, who’d had very different upbringings to mine.
- I had to look after my money and not go into the red, which I managed for the whole 3 years, much to my mum’s amazement – I was crap at maths, and still ‘am.
- I had to wash my own clothes and cook for myself.
- I could make my own choices about how I spent my time.
- I had to be in control of practicing my instruments and turning up for lectures on time – which I did without fail.
- If I got drunk, it was my own responsibility.
- But what I loved most, was the freedom to be me and make my own decisions without my parents (read mother), telling me what she thought I should do.
My dad died in my second year, a week before my 19th birthday, and when an old aunt collected me to take me home on the train to Mum, the aunt spent the entire time telling me I’d have to give up college and go home. I battled feelings of guilt about the fact there was no way I wanted to go home, along with grief for my Dad. I didn’t have to worry. Mum wanted me to go to college. I think had she had the opportunity when she was younger to do what I was doing, she would have taken the same route.
In the last week of my last year at college I went to a party with Norman (and his girlfriend at that time), and I met Graham. He came from a town not far from me, also in the Midlands, and when we left and went home, he got in contact. We started seeing each other and I married him at the end of my teacher training course, the next year.
I was 22 and looking back, we should have lived together, but like me he had older parents and at that time, 1974, for both sets of parents having co-habiting children would have been a definite sleight on them. We stayed married for nearly 18 years, and ended up amicably divorcing, 19 years after marrying. We grew apart for many reasons.
There are so many thoughts in hindsight; would we have split earlier if we’d just lived together?
Would I have gone home if my dad hadn’t died? I don’t think so.
Would I have moved to somewhere else in the world? That was part of my teenage dream, to move to Germany – but after Dad died, Mum was very good at playing the guilt card if ever Graham and I talked about the possibility of us moving abroad – which we could have done with his job.
However, at the age I’m at now – I wouldn’t have changed any of it. All of those things have made me who I am today – a happy, confident women who loves and is loved; has many wonderful friends; has travelled to some wonderful places around the world, and still feels full of life and possibilities.
And I still laugh with Norman about the ‘only coffee’ whenever we meet with him and his wife!