Not academic, by Denise Farrow

An original contemporary memoir extract.

In this extract from her memoir, a former factory worker describes returning to education in her fifties.

The last thing my maths teacher ever said to me was, ‘Some people just aren’t academic, Denise.’ I was sixteen. I believed him for thirty-five years.

I left school that summer with nothing worth writing on a form and went straight onto the packing line at Iddon’s biscuit factory, where I stayed until the day it closed. I was good at it. I could spot a broken custard cream at forty paces. I trained every new starter on the line and ran the staff social fund for twelve years without losing a penny. But whenever anybody mentioned exams, or courses, or going back to learning, something in me shut like a door.

When Iddon’s closed, the woman at the job centre looked at my application and said, kindly enough, that most of the jobs I wanted asked for maths and English GCSE. I said I was fifty-one. She said the college ran evening classes. I said I would think about it, which was what I always said, and went home and cried in the bath, which was not.

It was my daughter, Courtney, who filled in the form. She was nineteen and training to be a midwife, and she was having none of it. ‘You did my homework with me for eleven years,’ she said. ‘Now I’m doing yours.’

The first evening, I sat in the car park for a quarter of an hour, watching teenagers in hoodies go in through the glass doors, and nearly drove home. Room C14 smelled of whiteboard pens and somebody’s crisps. There were twenty of us: most of them sixteen and seventeen, retaking, and three of us old enough to be their mothers. The tutor, a young man called Mr Bello with a cardigan and endless patience, asked us to write down one thing we were good at. I wrote ‘biscuits’ and wanted the floor to swallow me.

Algebra nearly finished me. For weeks the letters swam about on the page as if they were trying to get away from me. I did practice papers at the kitchen table until midnight, with Courtney testing me over her toast in the morning. And then, one Tuesday in January, a lad called Rhys, who was seventeen and sat behind me, leaned over and said, ‘Denise, how did you get that?’ And I showed him. I explained it, out loud, to another human being, and he understood. I drove home singing.

The exams were in a sports hall full of desks in rows, and my hands shook so badly I could hardly write my name. Results day was worse. Courtney came with me and opened the envelope, because I could not. I got a 6 in maths and a 7 in English. She screamed. Mr Bello, who was standing by the door, shook my hand for about a minute. Rhys, who had passed too, hugged me in front of all his friends, which I am told is not something seventeen-year-olds do.

I am fifty-four now and in my second year of training as a teaching assistant. Next month I start a placement in a secondary school, in the maths department. I have already decided what I will say to the first child who tells me they are just not academic. I will tell them about the biscuits.

The writer’s return to education is described as life-changing. How does the writer try to show this?

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