We all shape the circumstances and realities of our own lives, and we can also transform them. People who find their Element are more likely to evolve a clearer sense of their life’s ambitions and set a course for achieving them. They know that passion and aptitude are essential. They know too that our attitudes to events and to ourselves are crucial in determining whether or not we find and live our lives in the Element.
CHAPTER EIGHT Somebody Help Me
AFTER I CAUGHT POLIO, I went to a special school for the physically handicapped. This was standard procedure back then in Britain; the education authorities removed any children with disabilities from mainstream state schools and sent them to one of these special schools. So I found myself from the age of five traveling by special bus every day from our working‐class area of Liverpool across the city to a small school in a relatively affluent area. The Margaret Beavan School had about a hundred or so pupils aged from five to fifteen with various sorts of disability, including polio, cerebral palsy, epilepsy, asthma, and, in the case of one of my best friends there, hydrocephalus.
We weren’t especially conscious of each other’s disabilities, though many of us wore braces, used crutches, or were in wheel‐chairs. In that setting, the nature of anyone’s disability was more or less irrelevant. Like most kids, we formed our friendships based on people’s personalities. One of my classmates had cerebral palsy and severe spasticity. He couldn’t use his hands and spoke with tremendous difficulty. The only way he could write was by gripping a pencil between his toes and arching his leg over the desk. For all of that, he was a funny and entertaining guy once you got used to his strained efforts at speaking and could understand what he was actually saying. I enjoyed my time at the school and had all the childhood excitements and frustrations that I knew my brothers and sister were having at their “normal” schools. If anything, I seemed to like my school more than they liked theirs.
One day when I was ten, a visitor appeared in the classroom. He was a well‐dressed man with a kind face and an educated voice. He spent some time talking to the teacher, who seemed to me to take him very seriously. Then he wandered around the desks talking to the kids. I suppose there were about a dozen of us in the room. I remember speaking with him for a little while, and that he left soon afterward.
A day or so later, I received a message to go to the headmaster’s office. I knocked on the large paneled door, and a voice called me in. Sitting next to the head teacher was the man who’d come into my classroom. He was introduced to me as Mr. Strafford. I learned later that he was Charles Strafford, a member of a distinguished group of public officials in the United Kingdom, Her Majesty’s Inspectors of Schools. The government had appointed these senior educators to report independently on the quality of schools around the country. Mr. Strafford had particular responsibility for special schools in the northwest of England, including Liverpool.
We had a short conversation during which Mr. Strafford asked me some general questions about how I was getting on at the school and about my interests and family. A few days later, I received another message to go to the headmaster’s study. This time I wound up in another room and met a different man who asked me a series of questions in what I later understood was a general IQ test. I remember this vividly because I made a mistake during the test that really irritated me. The man read a series of statements and asked me to comment on them. One of them was this: “Scientists in America have discovered a skull which they believe belonged to Christopher Columbus when he was fourteen.” He asked me what I thought of that, and I said that it could not have been Christopher Columbus’s skull because he didn’t go to America when he was fourteen.
The moment I left the room, I realized what a stupid answer that was and turned to knock on the door to tell the man that I knew the real flaw in the statement. I heard him speaking to someone else, though, and decided not to interrupt. The next day I saw him crossing the playground and was about to accost him with the answer. But I worried that he would assume that I’d spoken with my dad overnight and that he’d told me the real answer. I decided it was a waste of time to correct things. Fifty years later, I’m still annoyed about this. I know; I should get over it.
My error turned out to be insignificant to whatever the testers were looking for in me. Shortly afterward, the school moved me to a different class of children who were several years older than me. Apparently, Mr. Strafford had spoken with the head teacher about me and said that he saw a particular spark of intelligence that the school wasn’t developing as fully as they could. He thought the school could challenge me more and that I had the potential to pass a test known at the time as the eleven‐plus examination.
In Britain back then, high school education took place in two different types of schooclass="underline" secondary modern schools and grammar schools. The grammar schools offered a more prestigious, academic education, and they were the primary routes to professional careers and universities. Secondary modern schools offered a more practical education for kids to take up manual and blue‐collar jobs. The whole system was a deliberate piece of social engineering designed to provide the workforce needed for the industrial economy in the UK. The eleven‐plus was a series of IQ tests developed to identify the academic aptitudes needed for a grammar school education. Passing the eleven‐plus was, for working‐class kids, the best path to a professional career and an escape from a possible lifetime of manual work.
The teacher in my new class was the redoubtable Miss York. She was a small woman in her forties, kind but with a reputation for being intellectually rigorous and demanding. Some of the teachers at the school had relatively low expectations of what we kids were likely to achieve in our lives. I think they saw the purpose of “special education” mainly as pastoral. Miss York did not. She expected of her “special” pupils what she would expect of any others: that they work hard, learn, and do their absolute best. Miss York coached me relentlessly in math, English, history, and a variety of other subjects. Periodically she would give me past eleven‐plus exams to practice on, encouraging me to excel at these. She remains one of the most impressive teachers I have ever met.
Eventually, with a group of other children from my school and other special schools in the area, I sat down to take the actual eleven‐plus exam. For weeks afterward, Miss York, Mr. Strafford, my parents, and I waited anxiously for the brown envelope from the Liverpool Education Committee to arrive with the potentially life‐changing result of the test. One morning in the early summer of 1961, we heard the letterbox clatter, and my mother ran to the front door. Tense with excitement, she carried the letter into the small kitchen where we were having breakfast and handed it to me to open. With a deep breath, I took out the small folded piece of paper inside the envelope with its typed message. I had passed.
We could hardly believe it. The house erupted in wild excitement. I was the first member of my family to pass this test, and the only pupil at the school who passed it that year. From that moment on, my life moved in a completely new direction. I received a scholarship to the Liverpool Collegiate School, one of the best in the city. In one leap, I moved from the special school into the upper ends of mainstream state education. There, I began to develop the interests and capacities that have shaped the rest of my life.