to sit the eleven-plus examination, the system suddenly changed. It was decided to conduct an experiment. Rather than sitting the examination, pupils would be assessed by the accumulated average of their grades across the year. Somehow, I had scraped through! I was off to Castleford Grammar. I had arrived and I had a bike to prove it.
In the event, I struggled at grammar school. I had no interest in Latin or the other subjects on the traditional curriculum. It’s a shame I didn’t pay more attention to languages though, given my later travels. After a French test where I scored seven or eight marks out of a hundred, the teacher took me aside.
“I gave you five of those because you’d turned up and put your name on the paper.”
I was good at spelling and English, brilliant at sport, but that was about it. One year my science teacher wrote in my school report, “He is lazy.”
“Well, that’s it then,” my mother said on reading it. “It can’t get any worse than that!”
The following year, with the same tutor, the report read, “He is bone idle.”
I had done it! I had exceeded even the damning report of the previous year. I had graduated from being “lazy” to “bone idle” and was very proud of myself.
Eventually, the school conceded defeat. It was possible to leave at fifteen in those days and they told me that I was wasting my own time as well as everyone else’s. I would be better applying to technical college. There I could learn a trade and prepare for work in the foundries or mines. So I applied to Whitwood Technical College, only to be refused entry. My cousin Catherine worked in the office there and saw the reference the school supplied. She told my mother in embarrassment that it was the worst she had ever known them receive.
We contested the decision. The College relented and let me in. For the first time, I began to do well and before long I was an apprentice mechanic at Kellingley Colliery.
I enjoyed working down the mine. I liked the banter, the strong bond and camaraderie between men who worked in hard, physical conditions. I enjoyed the challenge of making equipment work in the dank, dark conditions far underground. Kellingley was known for the width of its coal seams, at around six feet among the widest in Britain. Neighboring pits had seams just eighteen inches to two feet wide. To work them, miners lay on their sides to pick at the coalface. Kellingley was fully mechanized, but conditions were still challenging. The floors of the seams were so soft that the metal props sank into them. We often worked in cramped spaces. The place was tough and the talk was ripe. I was no prude, but for a young man with evangelical convictions, the language and stories could get a bit much. Men teased others during late shifts that colleagues from earlier shifts were even now around at their houses visiting their wives. If you were different in any way you became a target. You might be deemed too fat or too thin, too short or too tall, or you had spots, ginger hair, very curly or straight hair, wore glasses—whatever it was, your colleagues homed in on it. It was incessant. It could be harmless and funny at times. Often it was merciless. You had to be resilient and confident in yourself. You had to stand your ground. Many couldn’t face the relentless baiting and found other work.
This was the work and world I knew, so to leave all that and apply to Bible college was to enter a completely new dimension. Undeterred by Elim’s rejection, I persisted. The more applications I made, the more rejections I received. I began to lose hope. Perhaps I had got it wrong. Then, one day, success—an acceptance letter arrived. We were going to the Birmingham Bible Institute.23 Perhaps our calling was reaching fulfillment.
Birmingham Bible Institute valued fire and fervency. We certainly had plenty of that. I’d burned Mrs. Gardner’s curtains and worked in the intense heat of the coalface. The Institute was founded by a colorful Presbyterian minister called Henry Brash Bonsall. He preached an old-fashioned hot gospel. One tutor paraded around in a sandwich board calling upon people to repent. Brenda was required to enroll alongside me and took her two-year course over three years due to family commitments. For all the fervor there was certainly some academic rigor. We had to learn some New Testament Greek and church history, the kinds of subjects I had balked at during my school days. Most importantly for what was to come, it taught me how to study. Nobody had shown me how to approach a textbook, how to make notes in lectures, how to research and present my arguments, so I asked Pamela’s husband, Brian, to help me prepare for study.
We loved the community life at the college, the close fellowship with other families. We made long-lasting friendships. The discipline of study stood us in good stead too for what we were to do later, but even as stalwart Pentecostals, we found the fieriness and fervency hard to take. Not only was it presented in a style more fitting for the 1930s or ‘50s, but everything seemed bound by petty rules and regulations.
“Why didn’t we see you at the early morning prayer meeting, brother?”
“Because I’ve got young boys and they were up sick in the night.”
“The meetings must come first, brother.”
“What, with young children running a temperature? You have to be kidding!”
We lived at the top of a tall Victorian tenement block, sharing a confined space close to another family studying at the Institute. Our room was a combined kitchen, dining room, lounge, and bedroom. It was so cold in winter that the glass door on our wall cabinet iced over.
Our two boys slept in a small separate bedroom and had to run all the way downstairs to play outside. Sometimes the other family would leave their belongings on the landing and our lads would play with them or throw them down the stairs. Like me, Mark and Kevin loved the outdoors and loved playing sport, but whenever I kicked a ball around with them on the grass or we tried to play cricket, someone told us to stop.
“No ball games. You know the rules.”
“I’ve got two young lads here. What am I supposed to play with them?”
“Frisbee.”
“Frisbee? How come it’s alright to throw a frisbee around on the grass but not kick a ball about?”
“Those are the rules.”
So, here I was again, up against petty rules and regulations. We were adults and yet we felt treated like kids. When our third and final year came we were still no wiser as to what we were going to do at the end of the course. We became close friends with Richard and Paula, a couple at the Institute, who suggested we apply for a position as residential care helpers at Princess Alice Drive.
Paula said to me suddenly, out of the blue, “You’d make a good social worker.”
“What do social workers do?” I asked. By this time, I was twenty-eight years old.
Richard and Paula’s background lay in probation and social work and they felt we were ideally cut out for work of this kind. Again, it was an example of someone coming along at the right time and providing a prompting and direction when we most needed it. Without it, we may not have gone into the children’s home and from there onto my social work training and the work we do now.
We learned a lot at Birmingham Bible Institute. We learned how to live in close proximity to other people and how to study. I passed my O level English at the Institute, the first academic qualification I ever gained.24 We were also exposed to other cultures and made friends from around the world, some of whom we still see. During a road trip to Greece immediately after the course, we saw poverty at a much deeper level than we had seen in the UK. Passing through the former Yugoslavia we saw people living in crumbling houses and primitive conditions, working their meager farms by hand. It was still the Communist era and we experienced the bleakness and drabness I would not see again until my trips to Romania after the fall of Ceaușescu.
After the rigidity of the Bible Institute, the broad lawns and cottage-style accommodation at Princess Alice Drive seemed heaven sent. The home was in the leafy suburbs of Birmingham, near Solihull, where the James Bond