Teaching

I spent nearly thirty years of my working life teaching. As my colleague Bernard Kerr captured in this portrait, the experience gave me grey hair and deep wrinkles across my forehead, yet I loved the job, particularly the key part of it - which was, of course, to be in a classroom teaching thirty or - too often- more young people, and feeling that, perhaps, I wasn't too bad at it.

However, I considered myself fortunate that the subjects I taught most, geology and geography, enabled me to work with my students in very different circumstances from the classroom. So field trips took us to Dorset, Shropshire, North Wales, Hastings, Essex, and even central London, where we took the whole of a comprehensive school's third year for a trip on the Thames - and to do a bit of geography as well.

But I was angry, for it seemed to me that teaching was a fundamentally important job yet teachers in the UK were, almost throughout my career, treated like dirt - at one point I was so poorly paid that my two primary school-age daughters were eligible for free school meals - so I became involved in a union, the NAS/UWT, which took me to marches in London and annual conferences in places like Eastbourne and Harrogate.

Through the union other opportunities opened up. I found myself as a teacher representative on things like Essex County Council's eduction committee, and on examination boards, such as the London East Anglia Group which took me, as a director, to meetings at the University of London. 

Teaching was a great job. I have never regretted the many years I spent working in it. I worked hard at it. But I knew that, if I did the full forty years for my pension, it would kill me. So I left, and found something completely different to do....

....like run a shop in a remote village on the west coast of Scotland.