alton

So I found myself in Alton, a small market town in North Hampshire. Twenty one years old and just a suitcase for company. I thought that finding a room would be easy, after all, at college the rooms came by themselves and I hadn't even needed to look. Alton was different. Having arrived, I booked into a hotel for the night and left my suitcase there while I walked the streets looking for somewhere to stay. Term began in three days, so I was pretty desperate.

The first place I found was a room in a family house that was offered for a meagre sum of money. Calling it a room, was a bit of an exaggeration but it was cheaper than the hotel, and having found nothing else, agreed to take it on a day to day basis. I moved in the following day and found that there wasn't room for both myself and the suitcase. The room was as long as the bed and I was longer than both. The lady however was very kind and it was a place to sleep. After a long search, i did find a bedsitting room, above a photographers shop in the high street, and within 24 hours i had moved in to my new abode, where i was to live in semi squalour for the next year. It was an attic room with sloping ceilings, a leaky roof, a streetlight next to the window, and furniture that had seen better days a long time since. However it was home and I could begin my new career as a responsible classroom teacher.

The annexe to which I had been appointed was a good mile away from the main school and I arrived in plenty of time to meet my new colleagues and to be shown around. May I say at this point that in those days we were not interviewed by a school. Having finished college, we had applied to local Authorities and my only interview had been with hampshire county council. They had a list of vacancies and I was given a job at a school that I had never seen.

The annexe was a large victorian house and grounds, in which were prefabricated classrooms, gardens and tennis courts. The main house was largely out of use, but we did have a staffroom and a library of sorts. there were three of us in the full time team, and one or two others who popped in on a part time basis. This was the place where those about to leave school, with no qualifications, were to spend their last 12 months. Needless to say, they were not the most highly motivated students in the world. Most were nice kids from tough families and a few were just barking mad.

I now had a class of my own, for whom I was in some ways responsible. I learned quickly how to mark a register and all of the other little tasks that they never bother to teach you at college, and settled into a routine that I soon found was teaching me a lot more than i was teaching them.