Where Did It All Go Right? by Andrew Collins

Author:Andrew Collins
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781409020271
Publisher: Ebury Publishing

1. Early in 2001, Pap wrote a piece about his schooldays for an anthology published by the National Organisation For Adult Learning. It makes fascinating reading. He writes vividly of life in the 1920s, his father a clerk in the goods yard at Northampton Castle Station but still unable to afford to take the family on holiday every year. His mother ‘cried all night’ when their landlord told them he was selling the house they rented on Glasgow Street, but his father decided to buy it. He recalls in great detail a holiday on the Isle of Bute – travelling there by paddle steamer and visiting a sugar factory at Greenock – and taking his father’s flask to him during the General Strike at his temporary office in a house ‘against the old Star public house’ (he was secretary of the Railway Clerks Association). ‘On Fridays my mother got me to call at the Maypole shop which was close to the school, to buy a piece of currant, rich fruit or cream cake plus a pound of fresh butter. Also on Friday after school, we used to visit Agutters at the corner of Talbot Road and buy a 1d hot sausage.’ Pap sent me a copy of the booklet, Learning Now and Then: Memories of Education through the Years in June 2001, obviously proud of being in print. He should have been writing a book, not me.

2. 11 March 1980. ‘Losing out on his art class’ was the subheading to a letter printed in the Northampton Chronicle & Echo written by my dad. In it he railed against the education cuts that spelled the closure of Nene College’s Saturday morning art classes: ‘My own son is affected by the discontinuance of these classes and I know that he has benefited greatly from the teaching and encouragement he has received not only from the staff but also the opportunity he has of mixing with other children from a wide cross-section of the community … One suggestion is that in future perhaps parents may be prepared to pay on a fee basis … this would be an example of discrimination both on the grounds of ability to pay and also against children gifted in what is perhaps a less publicised pursuit as compared, for example, with sport.’ Way to go, comrade!

3. My rise to fame in the Chronicle & Echo continued thanks to my friend Paul Garner, another Nene Saturday boy, and a far more naturally skilful and fluid caricaturist than I, although we did spark off one another and with so many shared interests – Mad magazine, films and much later, the music of Talking Heads – we formed a symbiotic partnership. Paul had already had some cartoons in the paper, but in June 1980, his dad, who worked in the print room at the Chron, got someone up there interested in the ambitious caricature project we were working on, our 100 Favourite People. They printed 20 of them, all film stars, as a name-the-faces competition.

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