Human Flower Project

Thursday, August 13, 2009

A Walking-Think ~ Shaw’s Corner

Head to walking shoes, John Levett has what it takes to relish Shaw’s Corner. 

The home of George Bernard Shaw, Ayot St Lawrence

Photo: John Levett

By John Levett

In 1972 I left London and went to live in the small market town of Hitchin in Hertfordshire. I’d taken my first permanent teaching job in Watford the previous year and moving somewhere closer to work was a life-preserving move. For eight months I’d motorcycled the twenty-five miles from south London to Watford & back each day. Falling off the bike at Hyde Park Corner one evening rush hour was the closest I ever got to believing in messages from god. God came in the guise of a Jack Palance figure urging me in the nicest way to get out of town before sundown.

At that time I would have preferred to be moving to Stevenage New Town. As I was a product of the 1945 Labour government, it seemed somehow more heroic and Brave New World, more right-on for a young(ish) visionary teacher who believed with the fever of a Jesuit Stakhanovite in the virtues of education as social engineering. But Hitchin it was. I still had the bike ride to work each day but now it was countryside most of the way. Six months later I passed the driving test, got a car (of sorts), got more protection.

And so it went. By the end of the decade I’d moved schools and for the first time could see green fields from my classroom window. I’d started teaching in temporary jobs on Merseyside and even today I have a quiet regret that I never stayed in Liverpool during the turbulent times in that city in the ‘70s and ‘80s. It wasn’t the centre of the universe any more but for any teacher (and there were multitudes) who carried within them a ‘mission to the city,’ Liverpool was a place to head for. I got used to green fields instead.

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