A Great School

I was digging through some old photos at my mum and dad’s house a couple of years ago and found this one of my primary school class.

I’m the small fry on the back row in the blue dungarees, being strangled, next to my friend Edward, who is pulling his favoured “googly eyes” face. The girl on the far right, in the front row, is Emma Beldham, who, like me, had a mum who taught at the school. The redheaded boy with his arm around her is Danny McGuire, who was full of strong political opinions, and, just before my fifth birthday, informed me that Santa Claus didn’t exist. Danny’s mum always had big bowls of salted popcorn in her living room.

I believe the photo was taken in 1982, although - because the location is Nottingham and most of the children are from working class backgrounds with parents who live hand to mouth - the hand-me-down clothes and homemade haircuts might suggest to some that it was a little earlier. I love what an explosion of colour it is, what it says about the school: the excitement and innocence and diversity of the place.

The school was called Claremont: an allegedly haunted red brick building - formerly a wartime hospital - on an urban street, where two men in baseball caps once stole my mum’s car, close to, but not quite in, some of the city’s most dangerous and troubled neighbourhoods. With its focus on child-centred learning, I suppose it could be described as an alternative sort of school, but it certainly wasn’t alternative in any official or trendy way. It was, on the surface, an ordinary school, in an ordinary city, but the particular collection of teachers, working in harmony with an inspiring, visionary headmistress, made it a very special and free place. With time, I realise, more and more, what an important part of me it is. My secondary school - a vastly less pleasant environment, which did its best to close all the parts of my mind that Claremont had opened - became a weirdly important part too, but it was Claremont that taught me about creativity and art and imagination. It was the place that first made me realise it was ok to follow my own unique path: something that I do now more than ever. When I’ve had setbacks in my writing career - witnessed the cliques and clans and elitism of the media and publishing worlds, and felt like the whole place was just too impossibly hard to get by in, especially for someone of my background - there was a quiet breeze at the back of me that gave me the belief to keep plugging on, and I wonder now if that breeze was Claremont.

I found myself thinking a lot about this a while ago. The photo of my class took me down all sorts of rabbit holes. I remembered so, so much: the time, for example, that I got stuck in a chair and - while my classmates watched me cry buckets of tears - was expertly cut out of it by the school caretaker, Bill, who looked like this.

I remembered the way a whole day’s teaching would be based on something a child said had happened at the weekend. “I saw a frog!” a girl or boy might say. So that day we would learn about frogs, and draw, or even make, frogs.

I remembered the big sheets of paper Miss Needham would spread across the tables, allowing a dozen of us to all draw on it simultaneously, creating a huge, collaborative visual narrative. I remembered how wonderfully lost I would get in that narrative.

I remembered Edward, and playing with him in my garden, near our asbestos garage, which would later put me in hospital (though thankfully not with asbestosis), and going to his house, and all his brothers and sisters, and the big trunk of shoes where the children grabbed two shoes to wear that day, sometimes from a matching pair, but not always.

I remembered going to Alton Tower theme park for my birthday with Edward - whose singing skills you can witness in this clip (the second of two) from the school’s Harvest Festival, filmed by BBC Playschool - and my friend Benji, who had recently discovered the word “typical” and now, with me as his eager assistant, employed it as a useful catchphrase, applicable to almost all life situations.

I remembered Julian Kashdan, who had extraordinarily shiny hair, which I liked to idly twiddle during class, and who was always totally mellow about that invasion of his personal space, and who later came to my house for an advanced level bike riding lesson.

I remembered another friend, who arrived in school one morning and announced that his mum’s boyfriend was in hospital because his mum had bitten his willy too hard. And I remembered us speculating, with our classmates, about why his mum would have bitten her boyfriend’s penis, and reaching the consensus that it must have been because she was cross.

I remembered CND funfairs, and remembered my ‘Nuclear Power? No Thanks’ t-shirt, which I used to love.

And was flabbergasted to find that, despite me now being two whole feet taller, it is still a perfect fit.

And when I couldn't stop thinking about it all, I realised the only reasonable option was to write a novel inspired by Claremont, featuring a school not unlike it. My memories of Claremont made the novel a lovely place to live inside for a few months. I called it 1983 and published it this week.

1983 became a book about many other things, too: much more than an autobiographical, nostalgic novel about the 80s, much more anarchic and intuitive and free. But I doubt I’d have been able to write it in the way I did if not for what Claremont instilled in me at an early age.

When I made the following observation, I was talking about what years of writing and reading has taught me. But I think it was something that I was already beginning to learn at Claremont, already, all those years ago.

I wanted the people who were there at the beginning to know all this.

So, when I’d finished the book, I dedicated it to them.

You can order 1983 here from Blackwells with free international delivery.