Keep on Running

Andy Armitage

Description

Bursting with hilarious anecdotes and moving personal stories, Andy Armitage's gripping and intelligent memoir, 'Keep on Running', takes you on the rollercoaster ride of his journey as a theatre and TV writer, teacher and lecturer.Andy takes you behind the scenes as the writer of five plays on the London and Edinburgh Fringes, five single award-winning BBC dramas, series for ITV and Channel 4 and as chief writer on Prince Edward's only foray into drama, 'Annie's Bar', currently available on All4, as well as a year on' Coronation Street' and 'The Bill'. You accompany Andy on his research journeys, Interrailing round Europe, investigating football violence in Germany, interviewing passengers and crew of a cruise ship and riding a meat lorry in the hope of being attacked by French farmers.

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie
• Memoir

Informations

• Publié par: Distributed by eBookpartnership
• Date de parution: 01 mai 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781839784743
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Keep On Running
A memoir
Andy Armitage


Keep on Running
Published by The Conrad Press Ltd. in the United Kingdom 2022
Tel: [phone]
www.theconradpress.com
[e-mail]
ISBN: 978-1-839784-74-3
Copyright © Andy Armitage, 2022
All rights reserved.
Typesetting and Cover Design by: Charlotte Mouncey, www.bookstyle.co.uk
The Conrad Press logo was designed by Maria Priestley.


For Penny Ovenden and other grandchildren who may come along


Chapter 1 – The daffodil competition
T he headmistress of the Infants was Miss Sharp.
I was amused that Miss Sharp had very sharp facial features but even more amused by what Miss Sharp would frequently say as we dawdled along the corridor, which I reported to my mother, herself a bit of a linguist: ‘Mum – Miss Sharp says “be sharp” all the time.’
It must have been Miss Sharp who had a hand in instigating the Daffodil Competition. So, the teachers gave us daffodil bulbs to take home. Mum placed them in a black plastic bowl and covered them with soil. Then, on a specified day in the spring, we were instructed to bring our daffodils in. I was very proud of mine. The bowls were placed along the corridor on the window sills and then judged. There were first, second and third prizes and, well, no awards for my daffs. I was outraged.
I used this competition, or at least my experience of it, when training teachers some thirty years on, as my first lesson about assessment. Firstly, when we were sent off with our bulbs, we should have been informed about what the judges would be looking for – what makes a good daff? Colour, stature? In other words, what would be the assessment criteria underpinning the judgement? Secondly, the competition didn’t seem to involve the deployment of horticultural skills. Mum just put the bulbs in a bowl and they were regularly watered. So why weren’t we given guidance about how to grow a good daff? Thirdly, why did the three winners win? Where was the transparency in this competition? And finally, and most importantly, never underestimate the emotional impact assessment can have on individuals: I’m still seething over sixty years later (so much so, I even wrote a book about assessment!)
This experience prefigured many others I was to have in my life. I was to discover that sometimes, however hard you worked and planned, things might not turn out well and success seemed to be a matter of luck. It’s as if I was playing a game but the rules were invisible and I didn’t know how to win.
I don’t know how we afforded it but for a short time we had a cleaner, Mrs Williamson or ‘Willie’ as she was known. Looking back, it sounds like something from the Royal Household! I remember standing at the bottom of the stairs and, being a child interested in language, I shouted up at Willie, kneeling half way up, cleaning the stair carpet, ‘Willie, I can see your willy’. Willie was very good. She came quietly down the stairs and said, ‘Andrew, ladies don’t have willies – only masters have willies.’ My first experience of sex education. My only experience of sex education.
Mum was a creative storyteller and wove her own stories for me about locomotives which she called Puffing Billy and Puffing Billy-ette. I think she must have combined various elements here. Although Puffing Billy was the first actual working locomotive, the tune ‘Puffin’ Billy’, about the locomotive, was the theme tune of Children’s Favourites on the radio at the time. She might also have been inspired by the Rev Awdry’s popular The Railway Series . She fielded a small child’s difficult questions well. I remember asking her what my belly button was for. She said that when God had finished making me, he pushed his finger in to my tummy to see if I was ‘done’ and then said, ‘You’re done.’ Although a little disconcerting in retrospect, I was entirely satisfied by this explanation at the time.

‘Off to school – the first day’ Clockwise – Baz, his sister Vivien, cousin visiting from Plymouth, me
This is a photo of Baz and I on the first day of school, September 5 th 1955 (Mum wrote it on the back), with Baz’s older sister Vivian and a cousin visiting from Plymouth standing behind us. We both look happy and even excited about the prospect of school. My memory of that morning is quite sharp. Our parents deposited us at the school entrance and we were then ushered into the hall which had wall bars, a horse (gymnastic) and a large painting The Adoration of the Magi by Breughel (I clearly didn’t know it was a Breughel at the time. I was a precocious little git but my art history was limited at five. However, I’ve loved Breughel ever since and was delighted to discover one of the world’s best Breughel collections in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, which included The Adoration of the Magi ). We were then led to our classroom and met our teacher, the kindly Mrs Moore. There was a large picture pinned to the board of a steam training running along by the sea. I remember the picture excited me and I think it was because it was in vivid colours (not much colour in my life in 1955) but more that it hinted there were journeys to exotic places and there were seasides. Sixty years later, on my way to do some work in Plymouth, I was taken aback as my train travelled along the coast between Dawlish and Teignmouth - here was my picture from Mrs Moore’s classroom.
That first day was very pleasant: suddenly I was surrounded by nippers my age whom I saw as potential chums. But one poor girl was not too happy. She screamed and wept and wouldn’t let go of her mum whom she clung on to. I remember we successfully detached children looked away from the drama: forty-four discreet little folk.
My lifelong tendency to be caught short was established in a traumatic event when I was five. I remember asking to go to the toilet and being turned down by Miss since it wasn’t a break time. It finally happened as I stood in front of the nature table. There wasn’t much on the nature table – a couple of old damaged pine cones and acorns as I remember, this being Stretford, Manchester, hardly an area of outstanding natural beauty in 1956, a decade before the Clean Air Act. The next thing I knew, I was being rushed home along Victoria Road by an alien dinner lady the teacher had obviously delegated to walk the steaming turd home. And then I’m sitting in Mrs Rose’s dining room with Mrs Rose and her children, Philip, Jean and Gillian staring at me in horror from a distance. My mother must have been out shopping and Mrs Rose had kindly taken me in, as you would a parcel, or, as in this case, a bag of shite.
Our only relatives in the Manchester area were Uncle Sam, my dad’s younger brother, and Aunty Jenny in Withington. They had an only child, Pam, who must have been twentyish when I was five. I remember they had (and we would reciprocate) Sunday afternoon teas which even in winter were salad affairs – tomato, lettuce, spring onions, Spam and pickled walnuts (I always believed my paternal grandmother, who lived with Sam and Jenny and had died round about this time, had swallowed a pickled walnut but Pam told me only recently that she’d choked on a piece of meat pie. I think it was this made me terrified of choking which I came close to once after swallowing a rather large piece of Chateaubriand in France).
My early memories of 599 Princess Road are all pretty much at or near ground level because that’s where I spent most of my time: memories of chair legs, a Bakelite electric fire, shoes and socks, table legs, carpet friezes I ran my dinky toys along. I remember they had a sofa which prickled my short-trouser bare legs. Upstairs, in their toilet, the cistern was on the ceiling and a pipe ran down to the lavatory itself. This pipe had lagging wrapped round it (was it so cold in pre-central heating houses that inside pipes had to be lagged?). I didn’t know it was lagging: to me the pipe was a hairy snake which made me too frightened to go to their toilet.
In my teenage years, Dad and I would visit Jenny and Sam on a Saturday afternoon. Jenny was hard of hearing for many years. Dad would tease her by making remarks pitched just below her hearing level which would have her fiddling with her hearing aid, ‘I didn’t hear that John. What was that?’ Meanwhile, Sam would smile knowingly – it must have been a game they’d played for years – and waggle his finger vigorously in his ear. Like me, Dad was incredibly impatient when visiting people and after an hour at Sam and Jenny’s, would start inventing girlfriends for me and ask me what time I was going to meet them.
Pam was my godmother. She married Denis in 1957 and they had their reception at the Deanwater Hotel in Wilmslow (which I see is still billed as Cheshire’s premier wedding venue). It was my first ever posh do. As I grew up, Denis was held up to me, by Aunty Jenny particularly, as a role model. And with good reason, I now reflect. As a working-class boy from Rusholme, he’d done well to go to Manchester University in the 1950s to study Engineering. He rose rapidly in ICI and by the mid 60s Pam and Denis were in a beautiful detached house in Thornton Cleveleys, Blackpool (over the years Pam took on a very motherly role and she kindly invited me to revise for my O Levels here after my mum died. I did so and helped myself to Denis’s fags piled up in his posh ciggy box). Denis rose to be Head of Engineering for ICI and later Director General of The Engineering Council, which earned him an OBE. But I’m equally proud of Pam. She’s always been a bundle of energy and even now, at eighty-five, dashes around the area in Hertfordshire, where they now live. I was delighted when she was awarded an MBE for her work with victim support.
I remember my primary school teachers as if they were sitting next to me. They are, after all, the most important adult