'A' Level English 1977

New Month Old Post: first posted 19th May 2016

Park Lane College tried to put me off. They maintained the one-year course was only for re-sit students and that the two-year course was more suitable, especially as I had not studied English Literature at any level. Somehow I talked my way in. 

It was one of the most difficult courses I have ever done. Selecting and organising all the quotations, literary criticism and conflicting viewpoints into examination-usable form was gruelling, but it was interesting and enjoyable as well, and developed useful skills for later. It was certainly an intense experience because I can still picture the classroom and where we all sat: me at the back.

Most on the course were indeed re-sit students, mainly girls in their late teens, and as late as 1977, in Leeds, there was only one non-white student. The token teenage lad worked at the tax office and told gleeful tales about the persecution of wayward taxpayers. But there were other older first timers. There was an aloof social worker who gazed contemptuously out under her Joanna Lumley ‘Purdey’ fringe and exchanged hardly more than a dozen words with the rest of us all year. There was a bearded chap in his early thirties who said little more, yet managed to give the impression he knew everything already. And luckily, there was a kindred spirit also aiming for university. His grasp of the coursework, huge vocabulary and sweeping command of the English language put mine to shame. It was enormously helpful to be able to discuss things with someone of similar aims and interests.

The syllabus in those days offered enormous, some would say excessive choice. You could get away with covering just two out of three Shakespeare plays, one out of three longer poetic works and four out of sixteen set books. So that’s all we did. It would have been silly to try to cover everything. The course leader, Jonathan Brown, pared things down to what could be achieved in a year. Even within these bounds the exam paper offered a choice of questions.

Do they still let you take the question papers home? They did then, so here they are (click to enlarge images, or get them in PDF form here).

ENGLISH LITERATURE PAPER I (3 hours)

Section A: Shakespeare – Julius Caesar, Othello and The Winter’s Tale.  

The rubric was complicated but essentially you had to answer three questions covering at least two of the three plays. In other words you could get away with studying only two. We did Julius Caesar and Othello.

First, you had to answer either Question 1 or Question 2, above, which quoted passages from the plays and asked you to address specific issues relating to them. It looks like I did the Julius Caesar part of Question 2.

Then, questions 3, 4 and 5 were discussion questions on the three Shakespeare plays. You had to do two, but each offered an either/or choice. I did 3(a) on Julius Caesar and 4(b) on Othello.

From the notes made after the exam on the first page, it seems I estimated I had got no more than a C in this paper.

Section B: Longer Poetic Works.

There were three set texts: Pope’s Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, Wordsworth’s The Prelude and T. S. Elliot’s East Coker and Little Gidding, with one question on each. As you had to answer just one of the three questions, we only studied Pope’s Epistle.

Again, there was an either/or choice within each of question. It looks like I did 6(a).

ENGLISH LITERATURE PAPER II (3 hours)

Novels, Plays and Poetry: four from sixteen set texts.

The syllabus offered sixteen different works, but the examination only required you to answer questions on four, so we covered only four: Jane Austen’s Persuasion, the selected poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, the poems of Wilfred Owen, and Arthur Miller’s plays A View from the Bridge and All My Sons. Again, the paper had an either/or choice within each question. I think I answered questions 7(b), 10(a), 12(a) and 14(b).

The other twelve items on the Paper 2 syllabus were parts of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, Metaphysical Poetry, Defoe’s Moll Flanders, Sheridan’s The Rivals and The School for Scandal, Keats Lamia and other poems, George Eliot’s Middlemarch, James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Poetry of the Thirties, Patrick White’s The Tree of Man, and Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.

ENGLISH LITERATURE PAPER III (2 hours)

Literary Criticism. Two compulsory questions quoting passages from unnamed works followed by lists of points to be addressed.

Paper III was the joker in the pack, impossible to prepare for fully in advance. I really thought I had messed this up.

Question 1: two poems. With the help of the internet I can now identify them as John Stallworthy’s A Poem about Poems About Vietnam, and Seamus Heaney’s The Folk Singers.

Question 2: a passage I recognised in the exam as being from George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier. I remember timidly deciding not to say I knew what it was. I don’t know whether you got extra marks if you did. 


Looking back over forty years, Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poetry left the strongest impression. I can still quote Pied Beauty by heart. A lot of people find his poetry dense and unintelligible, so it was a real privilege to be able to take time to dissect and understand his ‘conglomerate epithets’ and obsession with the different roots of the English language. His lines still come back both in moments of elation and despair.
 
Wilfred Owen too, remains familiar from his regular outings in television programmes and newspaper articles about the First World War. Years later, attending a conference at the Craiglockart campus of Edinburgh Napier University, I could not help but be aware that this was where Owen and Siegfried Sassoon had been treated for shell shock almost a century earlier. Sitting on the lawn in front of the main building, eating lunch in the sun, I imagined they might once have done exactly the same, discussing poetry during Owen’s brief respite from his doomed youth. Sadly, the topic of our own lunchtime conversation was computing.

Arthur Miller revealed a great deal about how plays are put together. I later felt there were more than just situational similarities between the film Saturday Night Fever and A View from the Bridge, although to be strictly accurate they were different bridges.

I was astonished by Alexander Pope’s verbal dexterity and can still remember chunks of the Epistle.

On the other hand, despite my enthusiasm at the time, I am ashamed to say I read no more Shakespeare. I know he was myriad-minded, but it takes effort, and I became too tied up with other things to try.

The same is true of Persuasion, despite the once-or-twice stand-in teacher at Leeds Park Lane College, Mr. Trowbridge, declaring that whenever he felt disheartened there was no better remedy than to go to bed with Jane Austen. He even got a laugh from us with that one.

Doreen

My vision issues make reading and participating in comment quite challenging just now, but I continue to enjoy your blog posts which the computer reads for me.

Today, I want illustrate life's vicissitudes through the story of my mother's lifelong friend Doreen. They are the kind of things we like to pretend do not happen.

Shortly after my parents married, they rented the two-bedroomed terraced house where I spent my first years. It needed thorough cleaning, so Mum busied herself scrubbing floors, washing windows, scouring the kitchin, sweeping the yard and hanging curtains. I can imagine the hot, damp smell of soap flakes, coal tar soap, scouring powder and disinfectant. There were few detergents. She had escaped her claustrophobic village and mother for her own little house in town, where she built a new life and blossomed.

In the back-bedroom of the house across the lane at the rear, a woman of similar age lay in bed-rest at her mother-in-laws', heavily pregnant with twins. She watched my mother at work and wondered who was this energetic and pleasant-looking young woman she had never seen before. Her mother-in-law came across to make contact, and Mum went across to meet Doreen. They had lots in commom and talked for hours.

They became lifelong friends. We visited each others' houses all the time. I called her Aunty Doreen. I have a lovely photograph of my pregnant (with me) Mum with Doreen, her husband and the twins walking along the promenade on a sunny day-trip to the seaside. They are all laughing and happy.

A few hears later we moved to a bigger house in the next street, so saw a little less of each other, but still visited often. It did not therefore surprise me on returning from school one afternoon to find the twins at our house. They were a girl and a boy then aged around ten. I was around seven. What I did not know was that they were there because their father had been taken seriously ill at the mill where he worked. He had had a massive heart attack. After a time someone knocked on the door and my mother sat the twins down at the table because she had something to tell them. "Your daddy's died" she simply said. It must have been almost impossible to say. They both burst into floods of tears. I didn't really understand but knew it was awful. People at the mill remembered how disturbing it was to see his overalls and shoes still at his peg. His body lay at rest at hone in the front room until the funeral. Doreen was still in her thirties.

But life goes on. With support from relatives, friends and neighbours Doreen brought up the twins into teenagers. A few doors along the street lived Maurice, a railway engine driver who had lived alone since his parents had died a few years earlier. He was a good-looking, gentle giant of a man, shy and quiet. The twins thought him wonderful and he became like an uncle who played with them. He formed a close friendship with Doreen and eventually proposed. Doreen was forty-two, Maurice about thirty-four.

"But he's so much younger than me," Doreen told by mother.   

"Gerrim married," Mum replied.

So she did, with my mother looking radiant and lovely as Matron-of-Honour. She had never been a bridesmaid before.

The photographs show a happy day, although as I have seen in other families including ly owm, her late husband's mother does not look entirely behind the idea. The marriage worked and lasted over thirty years.

On his days off, Maurice liked to do odd-jobs, and I sometimes found him round at our house quietly washing the windows.

Then at around the age of sixty, Doreen became very ill with bowel cancer.

"They'll be taking me out of here in a box," she told my mother visiting her in hospital. And we all thought that was true.

And yet, against all the odds, she survived. She had an ileostomy operation and it was successful. It was my mother who died two years later of breast cancer and Doreen survived her by twenty years before falling into old-age and dementia. Maurice lived on for another ten years.

To get through life without encountering such dreadful ups and downs is very fortunate. For the rest of us that do, I don't know how do manage to cope. We must be very resiliant. It's not all rosy, is it!