A Cure for Arthritis and Other Tales

Alan Bennett

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Vol. 22 No. 21 · 2 November 2000 » Alan Bennett » A Cure for Arthritis and Other Tales (print version)
pages 8-12 | 5508 words

Letters

From Maurice Marks

For someone like me – ten years older, economically one rung lower (two up and two down, cold water, toilet in the back-yard) and from Sheffield – Alan Bennett's lament for the passing of the great municipal governments (LRB, 2 November) rings wonderfully true. Sheffield was Labour for most of the century. And Sheffield looked after you.

I failed my eleven-plus, but someone in the Education Office actually looked at the results and discovered the discrepancy between my IQ score and English Test, on the one hand, and the Maths Test, on the other. They told my headmaster to teach me basic maths in the summer term, and with no further exam gave me a scholarship to the grammar school of my choice. I contracted TB and Sheffield Health Authority (this was just before the NHS) sent me to a union convalescence home in Silloth. At Higher School Certs, I was offered a County Major Scholarship. I turned it down as I was awarded a State Scholarship and was twice offered further grants as I had 'saved' the city the money for my scholarship.

And what did I do for Sheffield in return? Bugger off as soon as I could to Manchester and then London.

Maurice Marks
London N2

From Chris Price

Unlike Alan Bennett, I remember George Guest, the Director of Education for Leeds, less as a bureaucratic hero and more as a mean old sod, who was no match for the educational giants around him, like Alec Clegg in the West Riding and Bill Alexander in Sheffield; but then I also remember my West Yorkshire Road Car Company bus delivering me to Vicar Lane not Wellington Street. I was, however, at one with Bennett in his wish to get out of the place. This was one of the few emotions common to sensitive Leeds teenagers. The most powerful encouragement to do so in the Classical Sixth at Leeds Grammar School came from our teachers – who told us that if we didn't work harder we would 'end up at Leeds University'.

Chris Price
London SE21

From Alan Bennett

Maurice Marks (Letters, 16 November) remembers someone in the Sheffield Education Department taking the trouble to see that he got to grammar school and in his autobiography, A Local Habitation, Richard Hoggart tells a similar story about an official in Leeds, who went out of his way to make sure the young Hoggart got in at Cockburn High School. That official may well have been George Guest, or someone in his department, and if Chris Price, in the same issue, thought Guest a mean old sod, that may have been because Price was at Leeds Grammar School which, being an independent establishment, would not come under the aegis of the municipal authority or get much sympathy there. LGS was always thought of as a posh school and snobbish, too, and I'm glad to see Price's experience confirming this. I doubt that it has changed much and am sure it remains endearingly Old Testament in its morals, a recent headmaster warning the school that homosexuality was an abomination.

Chris Price also takes me to task about the buses of the West Yorkshire Road Car Company. He will be relieved to know that we do not really differ. It's true, as Price points out, that the red West Yorkshire buses would deposit you at Vicar Lane bus station, particularly if you were coming from somewhere east of Leeds … Scholes, say, or Stanks. But the long-haul buses to the east coast also left from Wellington Street which, if you came from West Leeds, as we did, was a much more convenient departure point. I have a feeling that on the rare occasions when they were not filled up at Wellington Street, buses would then call in at Vicar Lane to pick up a few more passengers, this possibly confusing the young Price.

The bus station at Wellington Street has utterly vanished, as has the architecturally much more interesting Central Station which stood opposite, part of the site now taken up with something big and banal to do with the Post Office. While much of Vicar Lane bus station has disappeared, too, and been converted into a car park, the west range of buildings still stands, always intriguing to me as a child because built in a peculiarly edible-looking brick, so that mindful of Hansel and Gretel, I fancied it might be made out of ginger biscuits.

There's plenty more where this came from but readers may already be incensed by its inconsequence.

Alan Bennett
London NW1