Yesterday I was having a clear out of my bedside cabinet and found an old school report from spring 1978. It was my A level year. My masters in maths and physics seemed quite pleased. They thought I was working hard, and might do well. What is interesting for me is that it was before the breakthrough. It pre-dated the mock A levels. The breakthrough I’m talking about was the run up to the mock A levels. We were being given past papers, but I noticed that we weren’t being given the 1977 papers. Why not? They’re the only papers that are actually on our syllabus. Then it clicked. They’re saving them for the mocks!
So I took the train to London, went to the University of London Publications Office, and bought them. Over the next few weeks my friend Dave Taylor and I went through them. When we were in the school hall, sitting the mocks, and were told we could turn over the papers, Dave turned and we exchanged thumbs up. I scored 100% in every paper, way better than the 53% to 71% that my masters had been quite pleased with. Strangely they simply didn’t guess what had happened. Suddenly we were the brightest children that had ever passed through the school gates, and how could they not have noticed.
Dave was dead set on Brunel University, but I was happy that the school wanted me to try for Oxford. They set me to work on past papers of the Oxford Entrance and Scholarship Examinations back to about 1920. They didn’t change much, and when I did get to sit them, I did well and was offered an Exhibition, just shy of a scholarship. Enough to get my name on the school honours board.
Of course none of this could help me with the actual A levels, but what had changed was that I was being treated as intelligent, and that changed me. I really believe that if you tell a child it’s stupid, it probably will be, and that if you tell it it’s intelligent, there’s a chance that it might be. Education is the theme of Cade’s Point, the yet to be published sixth book in the Sir Anthony Standen Adventures. It’s with Claire for review at the moment and I’m hoping to publish the fifth book, Serpent’s Teeth, before Christmas.