It was Mrs Defonseca what done it. She was my English Language teacher at Briz School back in another century. Briz, or Brislington School as no one who went there called it, isn’t called Briz School these days. It’s the Oasis Academy Brislington, a bit of pretentious mouthful, if you ask me. That’s progress, apparently, but not as we know it. I digress. Mrs Defonseca. The teacher who, just about, made school worthwhile.
Oasis is appropriate in terms of my education because English Language was the small, fertile area in a desert of the world I wasn’t vaguely interested in. Mrs Defonseca came along, a shrill-voiced Portuguese woman, who instilled in me, as the best teachers do, a sense of wonder, a better understanding of the possible. She saw something in me and inspired me to be creative. It was a revelation.
Everything, and I do mean everything, at school was a blur. Literally nothing made sense, from woodwork to maths, from geography to the sciences. I loved words, but mainly when I was using them. The other English, Literature, was someone else’s words, the turgid prose of Shakespeare which could be so complex you would spend hours just trying to work out what the fuck he meant. How, I thought, even back then, could this be regarded to be ‘good writing’? Surely good writing would be clear and concise?
While I flunked everything else at school, at least I had my English Language O level. What was that good for? Absolutely nothing! Say it again. Certainly not in a civil service ‘career’ which I somehow managed to get through despite my many limitations. Why, then, didn’t I venture down the road of writing, maybe journalism?
Simples: no one encouraged me to. It’s all very well being a teenager with alleged talent, but no clue of how to use it isn’t ideal. And anyway, there was the need, an urgent requirement, to help put bread on the table. It is worth pointing out that my mum, who brought me up as a lone parent, did not tell me to go out and get a dead end job for life but I only had to take a look around to see that we had no money and I really needed to contribute something substantial to the kitty.
We did have careers evenings at Briz and once I remember the Bristol Evening Post having a stand, staffed by actual journalists. My mum was never able to attend this evenings because she worked long and hard, often not finishing until well after 6.00pm. And we had to get everywhere by bus. I had to make my own choices. Is it any wonder I ended up in the civil service? For me, it was the place where people like me went because they had few skills to do anything else.
I carried on writing, although only occasionally and fitfully; mostly poems and, I am not making this up, songs I kept in my head. Some are still there. For someone who can struggle to remember what I did yesterday, to find myself singing a song I “wrote” 40 years ago is slightly mad.
It’s far too late now, though. I’m far too old to embark on a traditional writing career and in any event, the traditional media of the past no longer exists. Yet, via the wonders of technology, we now have blogs, where everyman and everywoman can write whatever they want whenever they want – and publish it themselves. We can even self-publish our own books. The only slight downer is that where newspapers reach hundreds of thousands of people, us bloggers reach hundreds, if we are very lucky (I am not always that lucky).
Mrs Defonseca started the ball rolling for me and, happily, other writers have inspired me along the way, not least the late, great Clive James, Australia’s greatest wordsmith in my opinion. He had the gift of writing in the same way he spoke. See also Billy Connolly. Stuart Maconie writes like I would like to write, John Crace, the Guardian’s sketch writer, writes with a level of wit I’d die to possess. I take bits from all of them and many others and have, eventually, come up with a style of my own.
It’s always said that you remember your great teachers and in my case it’s true. I had at least one and I am lucky for that. Many more of the teachers may have been as good as her, too, but my head wasn’t attuned to what they were teaching me. It turned out all right in the end, sort of. Obviously, I never made it in the writing profession but at least now, in my dotage, I can write until I drop. And it was Mrs Defonseca what done it.
