The university of life

One of the wisest people I’ve ever had the honour to have met is my own father. It wasn’t until well after his passing that I realised just how wise he was and how much wisdom he had passed on to me.

My father fought in World War Two and was captured and held as a prisoner of war, but I never once heard him speak badly of the people who had held him captive. On return from the war, he married my mother and they had their first son. Eleven years later I arrived on the scene, and three months after that, my mother tragically passed away with a heart attack.

So here was my father, a man of little education, left to bring up two sons in his late 50s. There was no welfare state so he also had to juggle a full-time job. It was a struggle for him and he had very little time or educational knowledge to help me with my school work. Even though I passed what was then my 11+ exam and entered a grammar school, I soon fell behind in my learning.

What my father did foster in me was a love for nature and animals. Every weekend, or so it seemed, we would venture onto the Durham moors and I would dabble in the streams and hide among the ferns.

I remember vividly telling one of my teachers that I wanted to become a safari park ranger in Africa when I left school and getting laughed at. (You really needed to be a child growing up in the north[1]east of England to truly understand what ‘levelling up’ is all about). So, off I went into the shipyards and a life of trawling through one dead end job after another.

I eventually ended up with a career in the Prison Service and started to facilitate some training as part of my duties. The government at the time then brought out legislation that anyone teaching adults would have to attain a level four teaching qualification. So full of self-doubt, and with my old teachers mocking laughter ringing in my ears, I re-entered the field of education.