A Levels- The ToughYears

That English exam went on to become a recurring nightmare throughout the restof my life. Always the symbol of anxiety & worry.

A Levels, The Tough Years
By Helen Bawden

The first day of Torquay Tech came. I was excited and nervous both. My friends & I met on Dawlish Train Station. The ones going to Exeter College stood on Platform 1 & those of us going to Torquay stood on Platform 2. We waved and feigned pushing each other off the platform until the Exeter train came and they were gone. A little of the jollity left with them and those of us on Platform 2 smiled at each other bravely, trying to look bigger than we felt. The train came & we travelled along the sea's edge, tnrough the four tunnels, along the estuary until turning inland for Newton Abbot & then Torquay. Then there was still the long road to walk up to get to the college.

Once there we went our separate ways. I envied the pairs that went off together, hospitality courses, nursery nurses, hotel and catering. Me alone to the performing arts course, a small course with twelve students in total, four in music & eight in drama. I already knew the boy I liked that was also in my music group. I'd met him at a preparatory meeting just before the summer holiday. In the class we were all the same, just four students. In the breaks I was a girl and too embarrassing to be seen talking to.

That first day I arrived into the group of twelve and it seemed full of people already on stage. All extrovert and vying for the most notice. I wasn't sure how I'd have the guts to be visible. The only lesson I remember that first day was an English lesson. When we arrived there was no tutor. I went over to the window and sat on a table staring out. After a while two girls came over and engaged me in conversation. Then they got up and returned to the table from which they came. I assumed they had become bored and left. In truth they had expected me to follow them back to the group. I had missed that social cue.

Lunchtime came and with relief I rushed off to find my school friends only to find that the college had staggered breaks times, lunch times & day ends. It turned out that I was not on the same breaks as any of my school friends. I couldn't even catch their train home unless I missed my last session.

Those A levels were a real shock to the system. My pride in myself had always been that I was an A student in most subjects, enjoying learning and acquiring knowledge. Now on an A level course it was as if I was doing foreign languages. In English I didn’t seem to understand a word anyone was saying. I had now jumped from CSE’s which I was told you could not fail unless you had written your own name wrong to A levels which was a whole other way of thinking, prepared for via the O levels which we, from Dawlish school, had never done. I did not handle this sudden loss of ability well. My self esteem, linked as it was to my academic abilities plummeted. I started missing the english lessons, hanging out with others also missing their lessons in the refectory drinking coffee and eating egg mayonnaise rolls. This then extended to nearby cafes. There was quite a culture of lesson avoiders or else I was joining those students who did have legitimate free periods just then. I am ashamed to say that this behaviour both escalated and spiralled out of control. To make myself feel better I would eat. Sitting in cafes with others discussing world issues whilst eating a cheese toastie, a pasty, an egg mayonnaise roll, chocolate or coffee choux bun became my daily fix. On the occasions that I wandered down town alone the next level gripped me and I was no longer able to pass a cake shop without buying something. Sometimes I was so disgusted by my compulsion that I threw whatever I had bought into the nearest bin. Other times, most times, I ate it feeling better, comforted briefly then full of self loathing and disgust for the rest of the day.

I scoured every diet book shelf in every book store, buying the latest miracle cure. The grapefruit diet where, if you ate only grapefruit for two weeks you were guaranteed to lose two stone; the boiled egg diet where if you ate only three boiled eggs for lunch, three boiled eggs for lunch and three boiled eggs for supper you would be as thin as a pin in a month. You name it I tried it, for five minutes due to the ever present compulsion to buy food and either throw it away or eat it. My weight ballooned. My mother was disgusted. She had a disdain for those who carried weight. You’d think I’d manage to lose weight to finally win her approval wouldn’t you? But it was so linked with ‘if you lose weight I might like you’ that somehow there seemed too much pressure and I couldn’t even try. It was still eleven years before an eating disorder was diagnosed. Until then I struggled with it by myself even tho there was one point where my friend and surrogate mother Bettie in the Devon Community gave me a book to read about a girl with an eating disorder. I told her that I recognised all she had to say. ‘I know you do’, she stated. With her warm eyes she seemed to see right into my soul. I felt humbled, deeply touched and relieved that someone had finally seen ‘it’ and was caring, not judging. As I still didn’t fully understand that this thing had a name and that I had it I just felt the relief of feeling seen and that seemed to be enough.

But the music side of the course was different. I enjoyed those sessions and being a part of the performing arts course as a whole. We staged dramas such as a Victorian Christmas, took music and drama performances into schools - I can still remember the story ‘The Quest To Find The Magic Tincture’ written by the drama students and woven through by music composed and played by our group of four in the music department. We went into mental hospitals to take part in drama projects. It was a very practical course with so many active links to local community. We went into an old people’s home where, in my mime role of a clown trying to make a sad clown cheer up, smile and be happy I had slipped and fallen and broken my arm and this just three days before a clarinet exam.

Being the only girl in the music department had it’s drawbacks since the teacher, an old and ferocious seeming older man called Ben professed that he ‘did not like women’, that ‘my wife would be ok if only she wasn’t a woman!’ he said. The other three students being boys were at that age where they were embarrassed being seen talking to girls. I was alright in class because we all seemed to forget that when we were doing our sessions but the moment the breaks or lunchtime came the embarrassment came flooding back. I realised Ben did not listen to me when I turned up late one morning and said ‘sorry I’m late sir, my plane was delayed’ and he, absent mindedly, answered ‘that’s alright Helen dear, just sit down’. From then on my excuses became more and more fanciful which amused the boys who sniggered behind their books. Ben’s answers were always the same ‘that’s alright Helen dear, just sit down’.

A key meeting in this period of two years was with Sarah. She was teaching the drama students and this was her first teaching job after graduating from university. I don’t know how we became friends but somehow we did. We were both christians, she often gave me lifts as far as Newton Abbot where I then caught the train back to Dawlish. On Saturdays I would take the train back to college where she was running a morning of junior drama clubs where I was a helper. I loved those classes & the children that attended. I did this for the full two years I was there even after Sarah stopped. I worked with four different teachers in all and enjoyed each one. I so badly needed a positive adult role model and Sarah became it. She was just a genuinely good person and I recognised that I always felt inspired to be the best possible version of myself in her company. Conversations were creative & inspiring. I never told her about my home life or the struggle I was having with food. I just wanted to be seen as ‘normal’, the happy person I naturally was. I did not want her to abandon me as had happened before because of my home life where, once known about, no-one wanted to ‘get involved’. Looking back I believe it was known because Leon, the head of the department often found me wandering around Torquay late and night and would drive me home. It was he who drive me home after I had fallen & broken my arm because he seemed to know that I would probably be in big trouble for that.

These two years were tough because apart from the struggle academically & the advancing eating disorder these were the last 2 years I had anything to do with my home. My father’s abusive behaviour had escalated into deliberately trying to drive me insane, making me want to give up on life, lose the hope I had for a better life. Things finally turned for the better just after Christmas of the second year. There was a lady in the operatic society who had become divorced. She was a night nurse and had two children. I was asked to stay in their house over night and look after her children whilst she went to work. It was the chance I needed. I left home, lived in her house looking after her children by night, going to college by day. The mock A level English exams I thought I had failed, by chance I found that I had not - my error had not lain in the english but in the counting up of the marks - which then spurred me on to do better in the imminent real exams, to keep heading for my dream place of study, Dartington College Of Arts.

Strangely, those English exams have been a source of recurring nightmares throughout the whole of my life to date. Never the same dream but always the same scenario: the exam is next week and I do not yet know what books I am supposed to have studied, I hadn’t read the books yet, I couldn’t get there because events kept occurring that took me further and further away from where I should be. These years clearly made a mark in my whole body. Never again were there any exams as hard as these. The Diploma, Honours Degree all unfolded as naturally as the study. But tough as these years were they led me onwards and finally away where life then changed completely.

During the summer after I had left I moved away to Beer to work a summer job. Sarah sent cards and came and took me to the Seaton folk festival’s final night dance display. At Music college she moved cottage & collected me for the weekend where I then helped paint, sand, decorate etc. Sarah was to prove to be a key figure in my life as a whole, remaining a friend and in touch to this very day, now forty years on, never forgetting a birthday or Christmas. The stability in having found a reliable & positive adult role model was, I believe, what gave me the final security & trust that I needed to move forward in my life and out into the world armed with a greater trust in the adult world I would meet.

Reviews

[Miss Fedelm]

An interesting story about academic struggles. For years I too would have the dream you describe. Either the exam was coming and I had read nothing and did not know what I was supposed to read, or events made me later and later for the exam as I tried to get there. I wrote about some of my university experiences in my story, "Professor Simpson Becomes a Mountain Bum".