How church buildings learn

From where I am sitting in my house, I can see through the winter trees to our parish church. St. Peter’s Church in Martley was built in the 12th Century, from red sandstone, quarried nearby. The church was extended in phases over the next 200 years, with a fine tower added in the mid-15th Century. The latter contains a ring of six great bells, cast on the site in 1673. It is claimed that these are the oldest complete set of bells in England. At some time after the Reformation, pews and an West gallery were added to the church, but these were removed when the church was restored in 1909. What remains after all these changes is a standard medieval English village church, made of local stone, shaped like a long box with a tower at the West end. From a stroll round the building, between the ancient gravestones, it is easy to see how parts have been added and taken away over the centuries.

The church at present is warm and welcoming. More important than that, it exudes a sense of holiness, accrued from generations who have prayed and voiced the liturgy. Despite the nine centuries of its existence and the many changes in the styles of worship over that time, the parish church serves its purpose well.

Eight miles away, the Church of England is demolishing a much younger building. Holy Trinity and St Matthew’s in Worcester was built in 1965, in what was then a fashionable circular form. Problems accumulated with the building. There were boiler failures, condensation and leaks. The church closed for worship in 2012 after part of the roof collapsed. The Parochial Church Council found that it would have cost half a million pounds to fix the building, and decided on demolition and replacement.

A faulty round church built in the 1960s is a minor example of crapitecture, but it also illustrates the wisdom of Stewart Brand, set out in his great book How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built . Brand proposed that buildings should be made from low-cost, standard designs that people are familiar with, and which can easily be modified. People are then able to gradually change their buildings to meet their changing needs. Martley parish church is an example of a simple design (a stone box with a wooden roof) that was a widely-understood standard design for a small church in the Middle Ages. Bits were added over the centuries. If Martley had grown into a town instead of remaining a village, aisles would have been added and the roof raised. Perhaps the nave would have been lengthened. All of this would have been carried out by skilled stonemasons who occasionally experimented, but usually employed tried-and-tested methods.

Brand contrasted his preferred approach with that used in much of architecture today. The modernist idea that ‘form follows function’ (ie buildings should be designed according to how they should be used) is wrong because the functions of all buildings change (often before construction is completed). Designing a building for a specific set of functions can thus impede necessary adaptation. The use of exciting new materials and techniques may win architectural prizes, but it makes the building an experiment in which its occupants become the guinea-pigs. The round drum-like building of Holy Trinity and St Matthew’s was designed for a specific purpose and could not easily be adapted. It used new techniques which failed to keep the building dry. Let us hope those who design its replacement learn from church buildings which have stood for 900 years.

See also: A guide to crapitecture

Xenophobia against who?

Xenophobia occurs in all societies. There are always those among us who hate and fear people they see as fundamentally different. They may do so because they or their family have suffered at the hands of people similar to those they dislike. But xenophobia is usually an expression of a person’s inner anger, directed outward to a group of people they regard as an acceptable target. There are many candidates for being a target-group: people from different religions, people with a different appearance, people with a different sexual orientation, and of course foreigners. The selection of targets for xenophobia depends on local circumstances, or, more specifically, the availability of people to hate. An unscrupulous leader can then build a following by legitimising the  persecution of this target-group. This gives his followers a shared sense of purpose, relieving them of the sense of guilt they might otherwise experience when they express hatred and act cruelly. Attacks on targets can even have a joyful quality. Philip Dray’s research into the lynching of Afro-Americans in the Southern USA (published as At the Hands of Persons Unknown) shows how ‘Lynching was an undeniable part of daily life, as distinctly American as baseball games and church suppers. [White] Men brought their wives and children to the events, posed for commemorative photographs, and purchased souvenirs of the occasion as if they had been at a company picnic.’ The souvenirs in some cases were body parts from the lynched man.

Joyous horror of this kind arises when there are available targets who, in the opinion of the dominant group, need to be kept in their place. Lynching was celebrated by the white population in the Southern USA because it confirmed their sense of superiority and hence their very identity. In other circumstances, xenophobia can instead be associated with a sense of inferiority to the target population. This seems a characteristic of some anti-Semitism, which involves a strange combination of fear of the different religious practices of Jews (including the invented blood libel) and suspicion of the distinctive dress of Orthodox Jews, but also a resentment at the astonishing success of Jewish people in many walks of life.

Inferiority may also arise because of a fear that a person’s culture and way of life is threatened by a dominant neighbour. The English are, for the Scots, the most available and conspicuous group of different people. They not only dominate the island and the state, but are present everywhere in Scotland and every night on television. Scottish xenophobia takes the form of sullen resentment (shown in the way many Scots support any football team playing against England) combined with a strident assertion of the distinctive nature of the Scottish people. SNP politicians may attack the ‘Westminster system’, but their followers know this a polite code for getting at the English.

English xenophobia, on the other hand, rarely involves a dislike of the Scots. Instead, African-Caribbean and Muslim populations provide a more identifiable set of targets, and fringe political parties like the BNP and the EDL aim to mobilise hostility against these groups. However, the most successful political party in England to use xenophobia is UKIP. This has a formal policy of opposing UK membership of the European Union, but its basic appeal is a dislike of all foreigners, irrespective of race. Indeed, the European Union is regarded by UKIP as the supreme committee of foreigners, eclipsing in their mind all the other international organisations like the UN, NATO, the OECD, the World Trade Organisation and so on. The European Union is therefore seen as being responsible for all the unsettling changes in the lives of many older people, from decimal currency to mosques in our cities. The leader of UKIP has even said that he feels uneasy hearing foreign voices on underground trains. Well I was a student in London in 1965 and I remember lots of foreign voices then, even before we entered what was then referred to as the ‘Common Market’.

A key part of being a xenophobe is a sense of betrayal - in particular the belief that our people have failed because our leaders have betrayed us. Hitler (and many others on the right-wing in the Weimar Republic) argued that the German Army had lost the First World War because it had been ‘stabbed in the back’ by a conspiracy of communists and democratic politicians, secretly orchestrated by the Jews. UKIP and many Conservative politicians claim that Britain only voted to remain a member of the forerunner of the EU in the 1975 Referendum because the politicians of the time told them that they were only being asked to support a trading alliance. This is about as true as Hitler’s ‘stabbed in the back’ argument. The official leaflet issued by the Government before the Referendum discusses the need for the UK to be part of a wider alliance:

    “... in the modern world even the Super Powers like America and Russia do not have complete freedom of action. Medium-sized nations like Britain are more and more subject to economic and political forces we cannot control on our own. A striking recent example of the impact of such forces is the way the Arab oil-producing nations brought about an energy and financial crisis not only in Britain but throughout a great part of the world. Since we cannot go it alone in the modern world, Britain has for years been a member of international groupings like the United Nations, NATO and the International Monetary Fund. Membership of such groupings imposes both rights and duties, but has not deprived us of our national identity, or changed our way of life. Membership of the Common Market also imposes new rights and duties on Britain, but does not deprive us of our national identity. To say that membership could force Britain to eat Euro-bread or drink Euro-beer is nonsense.”

At that time, the ‘Yes’ vote for remaining in the Common Market was supported by most of the Labour Party, all the Liberal Party and almost all the Conservative Party. But there was a vigorous ‘No’ campaign led by sections of the Labour Party, a few Conservatives and the Scottish National Party. This argued strongly that the Common Market meant a loss of British sovereignty. This view was countered by the Yes campaign, which said that policy in the Common Market was decided by the national governments acting together, and that in a community of only nine members, Britain could veto any measure with which it did not agree.

At the time, this was true, but the European enterprise has changed greatly since 1975, partly because of British pressure. The UK Government, then as now, regarded the European Union as primarily a trading organisation, regulating a large free market in goods, capital and labour. Inter-European trade was impeded before 1987 by border controls and petty regulations in each individual country designed to protect their local industries from the products of other member-states. The Thatcher Government supported what was essentially a new treaty called the ‘Single European Act’ which was aimed at overcoming these obstacles. This brought in qualified majority voting (voting weighted in favour of the larger countries) to speed up the process of standardising product regulation. Customs post came down, and steps were taken to facilitate the free movement of labour.

It is ironic that it has been this very drive to create a more effective single market that has caused most political opposition. The European Union remains an astonishingly powerless organisation, nowhere near the ‘superstate’ of right-wing mythology. It has no armed forces, police force or inspectorate. It relies totally on its member states to enforce (with varying degrees of thoroughness) its regulations. The various crises on its borders, in Yugoslavia and the Ukraine, show it to be ineffectual in foreign policy. But the single market has meant that every regulation, even those passed unanimously by its member states, can be presented by the opponents of the EU as a ‘dictat from the bureaucrats of Brussels’.

But the greatest political opposition to the EU is a result of the free movement of labour, which followed the Single European Act. This coincided with a massive expansion of the European Community from a club of a few prosperous Western European nations to an association of almost all European states West of Ukraine. Before the banking collapse of 2008 and the subsequent Greek debt crisis, there was a rough balance in the number of British citizens leaving this country to work and live in the rest of the EU, and the number of citizens from the rest of the EU coming to these shores. But massive unemployment in Southern Europe in the last five years has resulted in a rising number of people seeking work in the UK, coming mainly from Spain, Portugal and Italy. At present, the excess of people arriving over people leaving is about 200,000/year. This sounds a lot, but the UK population is now over 64 million, so net migration amounts to an increase in population of a third of one percent/year. At present, there are 2.34 million people from the rest of the EU living in the UK, compared with about 1.8 million British citizens living in the rest of the EU.

Of course, immigration is never spread evenly over a country. Huge international cities like London have always attracted diverse populations, but smaller communities can be profoundly affected by a rapid increase in strangers from other countries. This can, at least for a time, cause fear and concern about greater competition for jobs and houses and even for sexual partners. Xenophobic politicians can use this fear to build support. So we now get tirades in the press about foreigners who are supposed to be taking our jobs while mysteriously also living in idleness on our welfare benefits. UKIP leaders suggest that foreigners may also be disease-ridden, bringing HIV and now Ebola Virus to this land. These unpleasant claims are rarely challenged by our cowardly Government, which appeases UKIP and thereby continues to strengthen it.

Those of us who are not xenophobic do not hate and fear people because they are different. Instead, we find that people from different lands come with new ideas and experiences, and can therefore be stimulating company. They also bring their own tastes in food, which over time has greatly improved our own once-deficient cuisine. We do not automatically fear change, but believe that it may bring welcome improvements in our life. We think that the diversity of nationalities and cultures in our largest cities is far more exciting than the dreary grey places remembered from childhood. We do not talk of the past as being ‘in my day’, but believe we live in the present, whatever our age.

Of course, I am biased. Like many English people, I am the descendent of an immigrant. Two of my cousins have retired to live in other countries of the EU and, thanks to EU regulations, are eligible for local health services. My son completed a masters programme at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, and paid the same (very low) fees as a local student. The EU has given us the chance to cross borders with ease to work, retire, trade and study. This is unsettling for those who prefer the idea that the world is divided into distinct and totally-separate nations, each restricted to own piece of territory, each a prison of the mind.

In Coromandel

The Coromandel is a long peninsula in the North Island of New Zealand, named after a ship named after a coast in India. The ship was built in 1798 in Calcutta for the East India Company and named the ‘Cuvera’. She was bought by the Royal Navy in 1804 and converted into a warship as HMS Malabar. After action in the West Indies, she was converted two years later into an armed storeship. In 1815, she was re-named as HMS Coromandel, and was fitted out to transport convicts to Australia. To make this voyage less costly to the Exchequer, she was refitted again to enable her to carry a return cargo - in this case, timber from the tall straight kauri trees of New Zealand. In 1820, HMS Coromandel called at a small harbour on the North Island to load lumber, and gave its name to the harbour, the small town that developed around it and eventually the entire peninsula.

My wife and I visited Coromandel in 2010, as part of a family holiday. We drove from Rotorua, up the coast of the Bay of Plenty, and then across to Coromandel town by the unsurfaced (and rather exciting) 309 Road through the deepest wooded hills. We stayed in the Gold Miner’s Cottage on a hillside overlooking the vast Hauraki Gulf. The cottage had a secret: behind the sofa was a door, which opened into the old goldmine. A short way along, there were glow-worms.

Goldminers in the Coromandel have now been replaced by artists and people seeking an ‘alternative’ lifestyle. One such incomer in 1973 was an Englishman, Barry Brickell. He set up a pottery collective North of the Town, but found that he needed to fetch clay and timber (for fuel) from up the hill. The answer was to build a 15-inch gauge railway. This was slowly expanded over the next quarter of a century to become a public attraction. Now called the ‘Driving Creek Railway’, it zig-zags up the steep slope, through tunnels and over bridges through kauri plantations. The line ends high above the pottery at an large octagonal wooden building with vast wide views over the tops of trees and across the Gulf. More than 30,000 people visit the Railway each year, showing the enduring attraction of scenic railways - even ones built in the recent past. It is bizarre that New Zealand, like Great Britain, destroyed many of its scenic railway lines because they were  not profitable. Perhaps it was just that the wrong people were running them.

There are many other things to see in the Coromandel, and details are at this website:
http://www.coromandelfun.co.nz/

Some reasons people do stupid things

Network Rail has issued the video above, which shows the stupid things people do at railway level crossings: people who ignore flashing red lights, loud sirens and descending gates (or descended gates) and still cross the railway line. All the people in the video escaped death, but only just. In fact, level crossings are still the main location for fatalities on the British railway system. In 2013/4, there were eight deaths on level crossings, none of which were found to be ‘industry-caused’ according to the subsequent enquiries. There are many other kinds of hazardous stupidity on daily view in our city streets: cyclists on busy roads who wear earphones and are thereby unable to hear traffic behind them; people who start walking across a road junction just as the lights change; people who walk out into the road looking at their mobile phone and not at the traffic; and people who drive their car while on their mobile phone or even while reading a map.

There are many explanations for stupidity of this kind. One is alcohol, which magically robs us of the burden of thought. Drunks have been seen sitting on the railway tracks in the town of Poole, where there is a level crossing between the high street and the shopping centre. A second explanation is that some people (especially young men) enjoy the sensation of danger, while at the same time believe themselves to be immortal. A third explanation is the simple failure to appreciate danger. For instance, children may not understand why it is important to wear a seatbelt until they see a re-enactment of an accident. Many adults too respond more to visual than written information, and hence may not appreciate that their behaviour is dangerous until they experience its consequences, personally or vicariously.

But I think that the main reason people behave stupidly is because of they way in which they process information. More specifically, many people typically to respond to only one stimulus at a time. So the people who crosses the road even though the pedestrian light is on red do so because they have glanced ahead and seen stationary cars in front of them. They then react to that information and walk, ignoring other contrary information (such as the red light). At level crossings, the one dominating piece of information is a clear road ahead, which eliminates awareness of the red flashing lights and the descending gates. Mobile phones are an extreme example of a dominating piece of information because they emit an alarm signal (their ringtone). When hearing this, people are tempted to suspend all practical activity, such as driving a car in busy traffic or even speaking to another person in front of them.

For some people, the dominating piece of information is not what they see in the road or the level crossing, but what other people are doing. This means that they cross the road despite the warning signs because they see other people doing it. Indeed, some people live their entire lives as an act of imitation. This can be a successful life-plan, for people who are wrong with the crowd are usually more popular than those who are right by themselves. But crowds can err, can panic, can even carry out acts of violence and cruelty. Saying “I did it because everyone else did” is no defence in law. Nor will it protect you from getting run over by a train.

See also: Not staying focussed

The secret geography of childhood

All children have a personal geography, of places they know well and regard as their own familiar territory. There are the usual roads, streets and fields, but also special hiding-places, places for exploration and places with their own names, unknown to adults.

It is strange to visit these places as an adult and realise how small the houses are and how compact are what once seemed limitless fields and woods. But for me, the biggest difference between my childhood memories and the world I now see is not size, but the absence of children playing in the roads. I attended Haslucks Green Primary School in Shirley, a suburb of Birmingham. My family lived in Stroud Road, one of several long straight roads of semi-detached houses, each with front and back gardens. There were no garages attached to the houses because, when they were built, few people owned cars. Instead, there was an unpaved access drive leading along the rear of the properties, and some families had built small garages at the end of their back gardens.

Stroud Road and the surrounding estate in the 1950s was astonishingly free of cars. I could look down the road from my front gate, and could see no parked cars, let alone moving ones. The lack of traffic also applied to what are now busy main roads. On the way back from primary school one dinnertime, I walked along Haslucks Green Road. One boy at school was notoriously naughty (we would probably now regard him as having a ‘challenging behaviour’), and one day sat in the middle of this road. “Come back”, we shouted at him, “a car might come”. No traffic meant safe places to play, and I spent a lot of my childhood in the street outside my home, among large groups of local children. There was a craze at one time for trolleys, and my father made one for me from pram wheels and planks. It could be steered with strings attached to the movable front axle. There was of course no brake. It was possible to lie head-first on the trolley and speed down the middle of Stroud Road.

Sometimes, a small group of boys would head off on an expedition, usually visiting the long stretches of waste ground that lay between the back gardens of neighbouring roads. These could be accessed by numerous small alleys: old rights-of-way across what had once been farmland. A longer expedition was to the River Cole, which was then a brook between open fields. We would fish for sticklebacks and eels. Even further was the Aqueduct. This is a vast brick construction which carries the Stratford-upon-Avon canal over both a road and the River Cole. We could get to the top of the Aqueduct via some gravel yards, or along the tow-path. This was all amazingly dangerous. There were no guard rails or fences on the top of the Aqueduct, and the canal was at that time semi-derelict.

How has modern traffic affected children’s personal geography? In the village in which I now live, children still seem to wander around the streets and nearby fields. But it is possible that they do so less often in the Stroud Roads of today. It has become less safe for children to cross main roads, and children (and even adults) are increasingly seen as ‘vulnerable’, in need of permanent oversight. So some parents drive their children even quite short distances to school, thereby increasing the danger on the roads and the risk of child obesity. It is also possible that children may be less eager than in the past to explore their neighbourhood in each others’ company. Homes are now full of personal entertainment. Children need no longer stare out of the windows with frustration on rainy days, but can instead look at the little flashing screens of their toys. Parents may also prefer to see their children in front of a computer screen than exploring their locality or noisily playing football in the park. Parents too play with their toys. I often see parents walking with their children, not talking to them but instead giving all their attention to their mobile phone. In this new world of electronic toys, children may lose the social skills they would otherwise have learnt in play - more will be diagnosed as having an ‘autistic spectrum disorder’. Indeed, this has already happened.

The strange story of the murky mayor of Worcester

And now for another municipal horror story. Earlier this month, Worcester City Council elected a new mayor. This is usually a quiet matter. Like almost all English towns and cities, Worcester operates a parliamentary system of government. The political party (or coalition of parties) with a majority elects a cabinet and a leader of the council, who is a sort of prime minister. The mayor is therefore not the executive leader, but rather a regal figurehead, responsible for promoting good causes, visiting local events, and generally representing all that is worthy in the City. Being a mayor is regarded as an honour and an envied reward for good service. As a result, the job is shared around and a new mayor is elected each year, usually from the most long-serving councillors. After election, the mayor is inaugurated in his or her robes and chain of office at a special service at the Cathedral.

Until this year’s May elections, Worcester City Council was controlled by the Labour Party with the support of two Liberal Democrat and one Green Party councillors. One of the Liberal Democrats was defeated in the election by the Conservative Party, with the result that the new Council had 17 Conservative, 16 Labour, 1 Liberal Democrat and 1 Green. The last three parties came to an agreement to maintain the Labour leadership of the Council for the annual general meeting on 3 June. But to (almost) everyone’s surprise a Labour councillor, Alan Amos, defected from his Party to become an ‘independent’, voted to give power to the Conservatives, and was elected Mayor. This all smacked of a deal, in which Amos had abandoned his party in exchange for the mayor’s robes. The local paper, the Worcester News, began referring to him as the ‘murky mayor’. To make matters worse, he announced that he would not attend the mayoral inauguration service at the Cathedral because he had booked a holiday for that date.

This is not the first time that Amos has switched parties. In 1978, he was elected as a Conservative councillor in the Borough of Enfield near London. Nine years later, he advanced to became Conservative MP for the Constituency of Hexham in the far North of England. Amos was notable in Parliament for his extreme right-wing statements, including advocacy of flogging criminals and his opposition to abortion. All fell apart just before the 1992 general election, when he was arrested and cautioned by the police for an act of alleged indecency on Hampstead Heath. His local Conservative Association deselected him, and his Parliamentary career ended. An approach to the Conservatives in Enfield was rejected, and he joined the Labour Party. In 2002, he was elected as Labour councillor in the London borough of Tower Hamlets. He lost his seat at the next local election in 2006, but reappeared only two years later as the successful Labour councillor in the Warndon Ward of the City of Worcester. He was later also elected as a county councillor.

Amos’ transition to Labour was accompanied by an apparent change in political beliefs. These now were on the extreme left and republican. On a television programme on the monarchy, he shouted that the Queen was responsible for “this nation’s dreadful decline”. She was “head of a rotten, class- ridden, corrupt social and political environment”, and the royal family were “parasites and hypocrites”.  As a Worcester City councillor, he proposed that the City be twinned with Gaza. It will be interesting to see whether Amos will now become an extreme independent.

In the meantime, there have been two other examples of murkiness in Worcestershire politics. The Conservative deputy leader of Wychavon District Council, Councillor Judy Pearce, has also been elected (in May 2014) as a district councillor in South Devon, 185 miles from her other council post. South Devon does indeed seem to be her main place of residence, although she does rent a flat in Wychavon. Her Wychavon work includes chairing the committee that has prepared the appalling South Worcestershire Development Plan. This proposes to cover large areas of the County with new houses - a fate Pearce has escaped by moving to South Devon.

The final murkiness is more mundane. Dave Small was elected as a UKIP councillor in Redditch at the May elections, but resigned after six days. His party had disowned him for bringing the party into disrepute, after it was revealed that he had posted comments on his website that were allegedly racist and homophobic. Small was 81 years old at the time of his election, and does not seem to have had any previous experience of public service (apart from editing a football fanzine called ‘Zulu’, named after a hooligan gang which supports Birmingham City Football Club). UKIP councillors and MEPs have a reputation for being expelled or resigning from the party, but Small’s six days must be the current record.

These cases of murky politics could be seen as a disease of politicians. But outright opportunists, chancers, and people with antediluvian opinions exist in all occupations. So do people who fiddle their expenses. In these respects, politicians are probably typical of those who elect them. But I suspect most people wish our leaders to be more capable, honest and public-spirited than the average citizen. If we are to achieve this, then more people must take some interest in their community and be prepared to serve it. After all, how many people In Redditch knew about Dave Small before his election, had any idea of his opinions or even what UKIP stands for beyond its policy of blaming the European Union for all the ills of our society.   

Read also: The Dark Heart of Suburbia

My father and the books

The 6th of June 2014 was not just the 70th anniversary of D-Day, but also the 100th anniversary of my father, George John Cumella. My father died as long ago as the year 2000, but I think about him every day. I had considered writing here about his life, but it has proved difficult to make a narrative of a mass of incoherent memories of my father, from when I was a child and an adult. Almost all of these are fond memories of a kindly man who loved his wife, children and grandchildren. But there are also memories of the quirks of behaviour that mark one personality from another. I can not fit these into a single short account, and so I will speak instead of one part of my father’s life that says much about him and his influence on me.

My father came from a reasonably prosperous family that lost its money. The only secondary education available was at a local fee-paying school. He passed the exam for a free place, but ‘failed’ the interview. As a result, he left school at 14 with no qualifications and did not become apprenticed. He worked in a wide variety of unskilled occupations, including lorry driving (before any driving test was required), chauffeuring, coal-hauling, and being a clerk in the local workhouse. He had psoriasis, and so was found medically unfit to serve in the forces in the Second World War. At some point after the war, he completed a trade qualification as a welder, and from then until retirement worked at the Land Rover factory. I remember him cycling to work through rain and snow, with his sandwiches in an old bag across his shoulder and a beret on his head.

Nowadays, my father would have gone to university and been a good student. He had considerable powers of application, loved reading and had a great respect for learning. In the absence of formal schooling, he educated himself by reading the books in our small local public library. Each Saturday afternoon, he would visit the Shirley Library and stay until the desperate staff begged him to leave at closing time. He was initially limited to the maximum of four books/lender allowed by the library. But as first myself and then my brother went to university and left home, he took over our tickets (as well as our mother’s tickets) and would return home on Saturday with a collection of 16 books. No-one could read this many at once, and so they were renewed from month to month. I suspect that he took pleasure from simply having the books around him.

My father’s respect for learning combined with his own lack of educational opportunity  made him transfer his frustrated ambition to his children. My brother and I were sent to the best local grammar schools and were encouraged to apply for university. Secondary school was for me a miserable experience, but I still became a sort of educational guided missile, eventually collecting three university degrees. My father did not seem to have any clear ambitions for us after we left university - it was sufficient that our education gave us the chance to escape work on an assembly-line, and he was very pleased that we had escaped his fate and had succeeded in finding well-paid white-collar jobs.

See also: Surviving school