Age 21 to 36 ... Play
Pre-Marriage
I left full time education in July 1972 and the following September, began my 36-year teaching career at Bickley Park School near Bromley, Kent. This left me living in a part of the country I did not know, and I had no local friends (see Work> and Home>). As luck would have it, another new teacher - Phil - started at Bickley Park the same time as me. Phil's home was in East Sussex, and he was straight from University, so being much the same boat as me, we soon struck up a friendship. Other than our age and the situation in which we found ourselves, Phil and I did not have a lot in common. However, we spent a good deal of time chatting and occasionally would visit a pub together, often also being joined by Celia, the young Matron at the school. Celia had also started working at Bickley about the same time as Phil and I, and was also living away from her childhood home for the first time. I kept up my guitar-playing, and Phil enjoyed singing-along when I took my guitar down to the boarder's Hobbies Room in the evenings, and we jointly entertained the boarding pupils on occasions.
I wasted no time in finding a girlfriend. I achieved this by going along to meetings of the Bromley 18+ group. This was a bit like a youth club for young adults, and met weekly in the back room of a pub. The group arranged walks, talks and other recreational activities, and from time to time held a disco. It was at one such disco, in December 1972, that I met Marian. (See Marian>). I spent many of my evenings with Marian at Stockwell College in Bromley, where Marian was a student, and many of her friends became my friends too.
Phil was something of a fanatic regarding English Country Dance. This activity has a close association with folk music, which I enjoyed, and being a dance activity, which was something else I was very familiar with, it seemed logical for me to get involved as well. So, Phil, Marian and I joined a Country Dance Club which met in Otford once a week, where we soon became reasonably proficient dancers. Within a year or so, Phil had set himself up as a Dance Caller and started doing gigs around the local area. I would often attend these too, occasionally taking my guitar along and doing a singing spot in the interval.
Throughout this time, I also kept in touch, often by letter, with a few of my closest college friends who were now all scattered across the country and working in various teaching posts. I don't recall any of them ever visiting me at Bickley Park.
Post-Marriage
With our marriage, Marian and I left Bromley behind and set up our first married home in suburban West London (see Home>). Having our own home to invite our friends to visit made it easier to keep in touch, and weekends would often see us either visiting friends in other parts of the country, or entertaining friends who came to see us. We kept in touch with Phil and Celia from Bickley Park, too. We also made regular visits to each of our parents, usually for Sunday lunch. Just occasionally, they would come to visit us.
Marian and I had become enthusiastic folk dancers, and we joined a group local to us called Ashford Folk Dancers. Like Otford, this was a friendly and diverse group of people of all ages with a common interest in having a bit of fun and a dance once a week, plus occasional bigger events at which a live band would be booked to provide the music. It wasn't long before I was invited to join the management committee of the club, and I later became club treasurer, which mostly entailed collecting the subs from everyone at the weekly club night. One week another young couple came along to a club night, and Marian and I were pleased to chat with them. This was Chris and Valerie, and we became good friends, meeting regularly at the folk dance club, and also on Friday nights, when we would spend the evening in one of several of our favorite pubs in the area.
Another activity which took some of my time was looking after our little home and garden. I had grown up watching my Dad decorating, and had done a bit of painting, though hanging wallpaper was a skill I had to learn. I also undertook some fairly basic DIY woodworking jobs, putting up shelves and making fitted cupboards for the living room. As for the garden, although it was small, I managed to create a vegetable plot and produced a few crops, and Dad kept us supplied with bedding plants to keep the borders colourful in summer.
I fed my passion for motor cars by regularly cleaning and servicing our cars. Marian leaned to drive soon after we were married, and we became a two-car family. Cars of that era were mechanically fairly simple, and only very rarely did any car maintenance task have to be entrusted to a garage. (See My Motors>)
Our folk dancing activities became slightly more serious with the creation by the club of a display team, who would perform at summer shows, school fêtes and the like. Marian and I, as well as Chris and Valerie, who had also become competent dancers by this time, were all in the team, so now in addition to the weekly weekday Club Nights and occasional Saturday night dances, we had display team practices to attend as well as weekend performances. It kept us busy!
Cars and folk-dancing aside, another interest began in the later part of this period of my life. The home computer had been invented, and I developed an interest in these wondrous machines. The government of the day decided that all schools should be given one computer, and I was given guardianship of the machine that arrived at Busch House. The computer was a BBC Model B. The monitor was a cream metal box with a black-and-white screen, size about 12inches. Software was loaded from a cassette tape, and had to be freshly installed every time one wished to run a program. The machine was considered to be so valuable and steal-able, it had to be dismantled and stored overnight in a specially purchased safe. This would have been about 1984. How fast computer technology has developed since then!