A little carved dog

It was a little carved dog -- a Scotty and stained to a nice deep brown look --  and apart from the time spent in doing it which I can appreciate it represented something very important to me. It connected me with my grandmother and through her to a German prisoner of war I never met.

I always remember going to my grandmother's house. She had a corner shop across the street from a steel works in Sheffield and in the nature of life back then the corner shop was both the supplier of cigarettes for the workers, sweets for the local kids and above all the pantry for the people who lived around the shop.

Back then people didn't have freezers or fridges and couldn't really afford to keep food stocked in the house. The nearest most came was a few shelves at the cellar-head and perhaps a cold table in the cellar, which was a slab of marble that kept meat cool. Most people, not having the money for a big shopping trip (and in any event, shops were local and there were no supermarkets) tended to go and buy what they needed when they needed it. I am not getting dewy-eyed here and extolling the virtues of the local shop and wishing we lived back then. My grandmother had to close at least one and a half days a week and she in turn could only stock so much food. She didn't have a fridge either so the food on her shelves had a limited shelf life.

The shop was convenient for a number of people but there were plenty of them: halfway up the street was another shop on an opposite corner and I used to wonder what made some people walk down the street to my grandmother's shop and not cross the road, which frankly had almost zero traffic.

Each to their own, as I say.

I was born after the second world war and I didn't live then in Sheffield, so visits to my grandmother's house were magical even if people didn't have much. I recall eating Yorkshire pudding (square, you southern softies, not round!) in my hand fresh from the Yorkshire range (a cast iron oven next to the open fire) in the living room/kitchen behind the shop. It was perhaps the most delicious thing I have ever eaten.

I also recall playing with the takings (all small change) when my grandmother was counting up after close of business and I suppose it gave me a small handle of basic economics; it was all about supply and demand and at a price people could afford. Stacks of threepenny bits made wonderful, if small, castles. I also recall the tin in what was called my toy cupboard which was overflowing with cigarette cards. It would be worth a fortune today. There were footballers and cricketers and warships and biplanes and film stars and a whole bunch dealing with air-raid precautions. I remember looking at an illustration of a man in a steel helmet with a stirrup pump. For putting out small fires, the card told me.

How did my grandmother amass such a fine if random collection? When the men from the steel works came into the shop to buy cigarettes often they would immediately open the packet (which were flimsy and the cards were I  believe there to strengthen the packet) and toss the card on the counter. The cards were put into the box in the toy cupboard to eventually amuse me and my younger cousin. I just wish I had kept those cards, but that's why things become valuable. Not everyone saves everything.

I also remember the little carved wooden dog, and that was made by a man who came into the shop to buy cigarettes too.

He was a German prisoner of war and like a lot of low ranking captured soldiers was put to work in some minor task, and he was given something to do at at the steel works nearby. These priosners were guarded by a couple of Tommies with their standard Lee-Enfield rifles but I imagine the Germans didn't want to make trouble. Just getting out of the camp where they were detained was much better that being stuck behind barbed wire. They did have an officer who came with them who my grandmother said was a Prussian, and he stood very stiffly and apart from the other ranks and would click his heels when spoken to. Very proper.

I have no idea how closely these prisoners saw themselves associated with Nazi cause. Possibly not very much; they had done their duty and now just wanted to go home.

These prisoners would gather on the large patch of pavement outside my grandmother's shop and wait for the army lorry that would come to collect them and take them back to the camp on the edge of the moors. I think the PoWs were paid something because they had a little spending money and would go into my grandmother's shop as they waited for the lorry to buy cigarettes and sweets (war-time rationing meant that all the sweets were locally made, and that meant liquorice allsorts and nothing else; Sheffield people would have given anything for toffees!)

The Germans didn't speak much English but they tried to be polite and one day a lad named Fritz (or maybe that was what they were all called) presented my grandmother with this little carved Scotty dog. He must have had a penknife of some kind because it was a beautiful little crafted dog, sat on its haunches with head turned slightly to one side. It wasn't an expensive piece of wood and I have no idea how he got it; perhaps he found it in the steel works or at his PoW camp. What he had created from that was astonishing. He had even got some boot polish and stained the carving into a rich walnut brown, and I loved that dog and now I even love more the idea that he spent time to do it and gave it away to someone who he had been told was his enemy. Just a little thank you from one person to another that went nowhere near undoing the damage between two warring nations, but had a resonance that touches me now.

I imagine when the war was over he went home and time being what it is he probably is no longer with us. I hope however he made lots of lovely carvings for his own family when he got back. They would have loved them.

The point of this, if there is a point, is that war may be terrible beyond belief but ordinary people don't stop being people. They still care in little ways and even leave small legacies behind that reach through the years.

Wherever you ended up, Fritz, thank you for that wonderful gift.

Sitting in corridors

I think, if I boil down my essential approach to life, there is quite a bit of learning in there. I have for reasons utterly beyond my ken always wanted to find out more about things. Not on a technical note for though fascinating as descriptions of overwarped longshafted threadfold offset-line code may be, the fine detail loses me along the way. Well, I was never a genius so that lack of understanding is predictable.

But what I have long been fascinated with is the broad sweep of things, and in particular how we get to where we are and why we took that particular route -- including why we turned away from other paths. I wanted, and still do, to know more about life (no, not the biology of it as dissecting a frog's eyeball revolts me) and the people who made it happen. To me it is fascinating and even an essential component to the task of being a human being, if you see what I mean. Therefore I am always slightly amazed when I encounter people with no such interest.

I encountered it for a spell of about three years before I retired from the hurly-burly of watching management screw up and unions stumble towards oblivion, during a period when I taught at a college. That was where I found young people who had been shoehorned into an educational process when they had no interest in life as such. Oh, the young people understood mobile phones as they all had one and they eagerly sought out information when some beat-em-up version of Whack-a-mole (even if it did have a more lurid title) was due to hit the shelves of their local video game store. But they never were interested in the broad sweep of life.

Of course, as I try to read and listen and above all look around I learn things, but --- and who'd have guessed it -- these teenagers didn't. I once asked a class of 28 yoofs what was the last book they read and among the blank stares and sagging jaws one witty lad (or what passed for wit) said "Thomas The Tank Engine" though when pressed actually couldn't remember the plot. Still, he was aware there was a book so called, so there was at least a spark in there...

I accept I was teaching youngsters about computers, or rather the soft side of the business, and books were something that never entered the equation of learning. The subject was computers and the work was done on a computer between playing games on a computer and moaning that the college didn't have the latest spanking-new up-to-the minute computers that would allow them to play the latest mindless games and surf for the latest fashions in baggy pants even faster. And fighting for chairs; until you have seen the scramble for the two best chairs in the classroom you haven't seen wild life in action. Chairs were the prize for those kids, and complaints that 'he's got my chair' and 'I'm not sitting on that one' permeated every lesson start. Yes, it was like musical chairs without the tune.

So, once seated and uninformed about life unless it was handed to them shrink-wrapped, they set about doing mundane tasks and answering lightweight questions on their chosen career. They all wanted to be in computing as it paid so well (£30,000 a year at least, they estimated, as a starting wage) though they really didn't have any idea about what the process of work required. Nor were they bothered about finding out.

You could say that many of them thought that work and therefore generous recompense would magically appear and if not, someone would provide for them anyway. They had no need to worry.

The over-riding feeling I had though was, judging by my students lack of enthusiasm for the subject (though I concede it may have been my teaching style) and their disinterest in the broader sweep of life as we know it, was that they didn't want to be there. College, and hence a future, was an option taken because there was no other immediate or easy prospect in sight. But it wasn't seen as a springboard to better things; it was something to be endured. They hoped to endure on better chairs and in front of smarter computers, but there was no great urge to be there.

The yoofs I taught were a mixed bunch as you would expect. Some charming, a good few unpleasant in a sneering way, some funny and even witty, some idiotic, one or two frisky, several with chips on their shoulders, a number of them gormless. But, they were the future. They were, and are, people.

Yet for the most part they didn't want to be there, but worse, the education system didn't really want them either. Or rather, it didn't want to teach them about life. The system merely demanded their attendance. What they learned was really of no great importance, and therefore if you handed out passes like confetti then the appropriate boxes could be ticked.

This system called them students but they didn't study. No need when wikipedia has it all in reach and copy and paste is your friend. Hey, you don't even have to read it too much.

Someone in the higher realms of the great and good had decided that da yoof needed further education. It was an admission that the years spent they had spent in education beforehand had not actually worked but it also, politically, got the unemployment figures down or at least delayed them. Nothing like postponing armageddon for that really good feeling deep inside.

The colleges therefore offered courses to kids who didn't think they needed them, but they came anyway because it was a social event. They could make friends, continue gang wars, meet people of the opposite sex or in one case, someone of the same sex, and show off their latest underpants as the male fashion was for trousers halfway down the buttocks. It may have been disturbing to see the flags of nations peeking out above a loosely fastened belt but good that it was hiding a cleft from view. No matter, because they were young people and that's what young people do.

So this mish-mash of youngsters came, and they came in their free bus-ride droves. I even had one class (32 kids, not 28) that didn't have enough chairs for all of them. No, not even enough broken ones. At least if I stood all the lesson one of them could have my seat.

The college though was pleased if the courses were full, or in some cases, overfull. The college was paid by the state if they got lots of bums on seats. They were only paid however if those bums remained.

It soon became clear the main thrust of the college then was not the quality of education, but attendance. We had charts and meetings about this; there was even a display in one of the corridors that showed the weekly attendance percentages. It was gripping viewing, like waiting anxiously to see the latest top ten music charts. Retention then was everything: the cold grip of fear that permeated the place was that a student, realising that the course was crap, would leave and the all important HMS Stayput was holed below the water line. Yes, that philosophy even applied to students who left to get a job. No excuses; they had to be persuaded to stay. Their future wasn't the issue, it was whether they stayed for the whole course.

The college was rewarded not for educating them or providing an avenue to employment (and hence, you would say, more income taxes for the great and good to put on their own display charts) but keeping them there. I even had to hustle a student through a shortened course so he could get a pass because he was off to join the navy. Only a twisted knee from a failed previous admission test prevented him from leaving earlier, so I had a chance to get his work through in time.

So we fought to keep students who shouldn't be there and struggled to persuade students who couldn't cut it to stay and help them through the maze of simple questions and undemanding projects. They all had to pass (though one student did want a distinction award for being there all the time even if he never did any work and spent the lesson chatting to his mates) and every effort was made to keep them and pass them.

Boxes had to be ticked, after all.

(I shouldn't say this but some tutors grumbled that if they did the work for the students not only would it need less marking and no need for endless re-submission of wikipedia pasting but would hit a decent standard of presentation, possibly readable English between copied bits and save time all round. Of course, that never happened and never would but, oh Lord, the temptation...)

Yet the college had another problem, and that was all these kids had nowhere to go between lessons and at lunch time. So, as college was a social event rather than a place to learn, they wandered off to the canteen (sorry, refectory) for their hourly intake of fizzy sugary drinks or they sat in the corridors and chatted.

This presented a problem for the management of the college. So many sitting yoofs with drooping pants littering the corridors constituted a health and safety issue. The order went out that the teaching staff had, in their breaks, to patrol the corridors and tell the students to stand. They could lean against walls but not sit on the floor.

The students resented this and hey, the tutors who had spent their lesson standing so another student could sit on a broken chair, resented that they couldn't get ready for the next lesson but had to find time to wander the corridors issuing reminders that corridors were for standing, not sitting.

You see, this was the essence of the college education system where I was. The students had to stay no matter what though they didn't have to learn much. Above all they had to stand in the corridors between lessons.

I was surprised there wasn't a chart for standing percentages, too. It would have made good reading for the students near that particular display board who slid back down the wall when the tutors had passed by.

But that's kids for you today. Rebellious.