There Is Nothing for You Here, page 8
Despite her intellectual and political skill and her evident accomplishments, Margaret Thatcher was not a role model for young women in the North of England. How could she be, given her singular role in closing the coal mines, the shipyards, the steelworks, and all the associated industry, or, at the very least, in presiding over all these losses as prime minister? Thatcher’s working career as a research chemist and then as a barrister (attorney) had been fairly brief. She launched herself into politics not long after graduating from Oxford and was financially supported by her businessman husband. As far as we could tell, she had little insight into or empathy for the travails of the working class, women or men.
Red Dot and Uncle Charlie
Several factors in the 1980s—not gender—shaped my decision to try to study Russian at university: my local member of Parliament (MP), major world events, and two close family connections. Bishop Auckland’s MP, Derek Foster, who became the chief whip of the Labour Party under Prime Minister Tony Blair, and later Lord Foster as a life peer in the House of Lords, played a seminal role in offering encouragement to apply to university in the first place. After he was elected in 1979, Lord Foster visited Bishop Barrington School on numerous occasions. He relayed, then reinforced, the same general message: “You don’t have to be defined or held back by where you are now. Work hard and you can do something with your lives.”
Derek Foster had started off life in Sunderland. His father was a fitter in the shipyards and was frequently out of work and on the dole, much like Grandad Hill. Lord Foster joined the Salvation Army at age eleven and passed the eleven-plus, securing a free place at Bede Grammar School. From there he won a place at Oxford University. He eventually pursued a passion for youth and adult education and joined the local council in Sunderland as assistant director for education before running for election as MP for Bishop Auckland. Despite his childhood brushes with poverty, Derek Foster told us that education was not just about acquiring information but about doing something with it. If you were lucky enough to get a good education in a place like the North East of England, you needed to give something back to people who were not so fortunate. You needed to guide others to the same opportunity. Getting an education was a right, but it was also a privilege.
Lord Foster made a big impression in those visits to the school. He also made a point of following up with our families, through his parliamentary office in Bishop Auckland or the local Labour Party offices, to see how we were getting on. He saw a key part of his role as MP as strengthening the infrastructure of opportunity for his constituents.
The MP’s work in trying to bring new opportunity to Bishop Auckland was greatly complicated in the 1980s by geopolitics. Larger forces and developments exacerbated the social and economic upheaval, and diverted attention as well as government funding from addressing the consequences of postindustrial decline. The travails of places like County Durham seemed to pale in comparison with the exigences of national security and the perils of the Cold War.
My time at Bishop Barrington was dominated by the so-called Euromissile crises and periodic war scares. For an entire decade, essentially from 1977 to 1987, the Soviet Union and the United States confronted each other over their respective decisions to station new SS-20 and Pershing ballistic missile systems in Eastern and Western Europe. In my last year at school, in 1983–1984, the United States and the USSR teetered on the brink of a nuclear confrontation after both misread the intent of a series of respective military exercises.
As I later learned from declassified archives during my work in the U.S. National Intelligence Council, the 1983 “war scare” was real. But even without any formal validation, the international tension was palpable. Popular culture in the UK and Europe, as well as in the United States, was filled with rock songs like Nena’s “99 Red Balloons,” about the beginning of a missile strike in a divided Germany, and films like The Day After in the U.S. and Threads in the UK, about ordinary Americans and Brits trying to deal with the aftermath of nuclear Armageddon. Bishop Auckland was close to a couple of airbases and the UK’s ballistic missile early warning radar station in Fylingdales in North Yorkshire. Discussions at school would frequently touch on the prospect that we might not even be around to take our A-levels, let alone apply to university. We could be ground zero for a missile strike.
When we were at Etherley Lane sometime in the 1970s, Angela and I had both sat through a public service announcement about the risk of a nuclear missile strike. It was sent around on a film reel from school to school in County Durham to be projected onto a screen during assembly. The announcer, in classically clipped BBC tones, helpfully ran through the various warning and all-clear sirens. He advised where we should take cover if we were at home—preferably in an inner room without windows. Given how tiny most homes were in Bishop Auckland, there weren’t many rooms in the first place, and none without windows in our house. We wondered if we would all fit into the cupboard beneath the stairs where Mam stored the vacuum cleaner and ironing board, or if we’d be okay if we pulled the curtains tightly shut. The announcer told us that if we were caught outside far from shelter in a missile strike, then we should lie down in a ditch. For years after this, until well into our teens, while we were out on a walk in the fields, Angela and I would scope out somewhere to throw ourselves in case we heard a siren.
Right in the middle of this major international crisis—at least at the local level—was Mam’s cousin, Dorothy, who had been the bridesmaid at her wedding. Dorothy was active in both the Labour Party and the anti-nuclear-weapons and war movement, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). She was a town councilor and the mayor of Darlington as well as a “Greenham Common woman,” part of a group of women antinuclear protesters who set up a long-standing peace camp to demand the removal of U.S. cruise missiles from the British air force base, RAF Greenham Common, in Berkshire. We would sometimes see her on the TV news, chained to other women (some of whom were topless) and the fence of the airbase in the South of England. I later found out that Dorothy’s nom de guerre was “Red Dot.”
Before Red Dot, Dad’s older cousin Charles Crabtree, Uncle Charlie, had lived an unlikely life that had taken him into the thick of things. In his teens, he (albeit briefly) fought in the Spanish Civil War. During the Second World War, Uncle Charlie served in the merchant marine. One ship, HMS Eagle, was sunk in the Mediterranean by a German submarine in 1942. He went down with the ship but was then blasted to the surface by depth charges. Battered and barely alive, Uncle Charlie floated on his back until he was rescued. Later in the war, he was on a minesweeper, HMS Lyme Regis, escorting Russian convoys through the mountainous seas of the Arctic during battles with the Germans. In his middle age, back at home, he was blacklisted by British business for being a union agitator. In his old age, he mellowed and turned to writing copious self-published poetry and letters to the local newspaper. When I was on an exchange program in Moscow in 1987–1988, Uncle Charlie had also started writing poems for Mikhail Gorbachev. He received a commemorative medal from the Soviet embassy in London in honor of his wartime service. I almost had a heart attack when I saw him referenced in an article in a Soviet English-language newspaper along with one of his poems.
During the war scare in the mid-1980s, Uncle Charlie became obsessed with trying to figure out how the USSR had gone from wartime ally to mortal enemy. Running into Dad one day down Bish, he told him that he had heard there were scholarships for the children of former miners: “Your Fiona’s good at languages, Alf, she should get one and go and study Russian and figure out why the bloody hell they’re trying to blow us up!”
Red Dot’s activism and Uncle Charlie’s question helped to inspire and launch me off on my educational odyssey. Sadly, Uncle Charlie died just as I moved to the United States. I was never able to give him a detailed answer to his question. And I also almost went in another direction and didn’t study Russian at all.
Many of the universities I looked at didn’t accept students who hadn’t studied Russian at O-level or A-level. St. Andrews was one of the few that did. It had a set of requirements for supplemental summer language courses that I would have to factor in. As it turned out, I had selected an eclectic set of A-levels, which did not easily set me up for other programs. I had inadvertently made things harder for myself. Again, thinking of how I might be able to maximize my opportunities, I thought I should now consider joint degree programs—a language plus something else. I applied to study French and geography at a couple of places, but St. Andrews didn’t have a Russian and geography option, so I opted for history.
At Bishop Barrington Comprehensive School in the 1980s, there were all kinds of impediments to applying to university. It was hard to access even basic information about the various colleges, their courses and requirements. We were not well versed in the names and locations of all the UK universities and polytechnical colleges, nor did we have much insight into other options like specialized colleges of art or journalism or apprenticeships and industry training programs. There were no online resources. Most of the teachers had been to local teaching colleges, starting there straight out of school themselves. They could not offer any insight. Dr. Marshall, the English teacher, was the exception. Although he had studied at Durham University, he advised me to apply further away from home. Given the short distance and shrinking budgets, the local Durham County education authority might not pay for me to live in campus accommodation. I might have to stay with my parents if I went to Durham University and commute in on the bus. I would certainly miss out on the full college experience.
Dr. Marshall and the sixth-form head, Mr. Everett, collected some university and polytechnic brochures. There were others in the local library. It was all quite random. I put together my long list to whittle down for the centralized university application form based entirely on the availability of brochures. St. Andrews looked beautiful in the brochure. The others . . . not so much. Partly this was because St. Andrews had printed its material in color (a clever marketing move). Everything else was black-and-white with tiny, daunting print. I put St. Andrews at the top of my list. Mam’s godson, Jeff Goodman, my de facto older brother, who had been partially raised by Grandma Vi in Billingham, offered to drive me around to some of the places on the list in his beat-up Mini to help me figure it out.
Without Jeff and his Mini, I would not have gone anywhere. Which is ironic, as Jeff himself had left school for an apprenticeship with British Shipbuilders in Middlesbrough. As I was figuring out the application forms, he was working in Cammell Laird shipyards in Liverpool and also Appledore in Devon, filling in for labor shortages and fitting out new vessels.
Schopenhauer’s Theory of the Will
As I was touring around in Jeff’s Mini scoping out my opportunities, Mr. Davidson, Bishop Barrington’s headmaster, decided that someone should apply to Oxford. His motivation seemed to be competition with King James I School, which was still benefiting from its former grammar-school status. King James was able to send the occasional student to Oxbridge even as a comprehensive school. Mr. Davidson wanted to make his mark, at least with one. He turned to me and a couple of other students with a “nothing ventured, nothing gained” proposition. The others refused. Oxford required a general entrance exam, and there were a whole host of individual colleges to contend with. How would we select one? After some consultation with Mam and Dad, who were also of the opinion Why not?, I agreed to try.
Apart from Derek Foster, we didn’t know anyone who had been to Oxford. He had studied philosophy, politics, and economics (PPE), which seemed to be the thing to do for members of Parliament. Not knowing any better, I made a note of that as a possibility for studying there, as well as French and English. Again, taking Russian from scratch did not seem to be an option. There was, however, the problem of the entrance exam. From what we understood, most schools had special preparatory classes for this. No one had seen a sample of the exam before, but Mr. Davidson and Mr. Everett got hold of an old general exam, so we knew that it came in a little booklet form and involved a series of essay questions. I ended up taking the exam at a table in the library surrounded by the poetry anthologies, with no preparation whatsoever and Mr. Everett supervising me.
It was indeed the exam nightmare come to life. I still dream about it. The first question was something to do with “Schopenhauer’s theory of the will.” At the time I had no idea who Schopenhauer was. I had never come across him in my perusals of the encyclopedia. I figured he was a German. At first I thought he might be a composer. I have no idea what I actually wrote or what the rest of the questions were. The ideas are long gone, but I have never forgotten the physical feeling of humiliation and panic, and the realization that this exam was not designed for someone like me. It was utterly mortifying.
The fact that I failed the entrance exam did not come as a surprise when the letter arrived in the mail—but I was completely shocked to get an invitation instead of an outright rejection. I was asked to come to Oxford to Hertford College for a “matriculation offer” interview outside of the regular process. Either someone had taken pity on me or they had seen a glimmer of hope in my exam attempt. In any case, here it was, an entirely unexpected second chance—another opportunity.
I was given a date and time to present myself for interview. If I needed to stay the night, I could stay in a college room for free, but I had to buy a train ticket and get myself to Oxford. This was not straightforward from Bishop Auckland. It required several changes. It was also expensive. The ticket took up all the money I had saved from my part-time jobs at this point. And I had to find something to wear. What exactly did you wear for an interview at Oxford? Mam whipped me up a dress from a bolt of fabric with a heraldic pattern—Dad joked I could probably blend into the wallpaper in one of the paneled rooms if I needed to. Grandma Vi bought me a “nice” (if you were eighty) cardigan to wear on top of it from Marks & Spencer, which was having a sale. It wasn’t completely terrible, although my little black ankle boots looked a bit out of place with the outfit. I just didn’t have any money left for anything else, so I would have to make do.
I managed to make it to Oxford on time for the interview. Hertford College was near the Bodleian Library. Its buildings were joined together by the famous and iconic Bridge of Sighs. It was beautiful, but so clearly out of my league.
A college porter at the gates directed me to the interview, which would take place in one of the professor’s studies, up a narrow, paneled flight of stairs. At the top of the stairs was a landing with a long wooden bench built into the wall, facing the professor’s door. Three girls were already sitting on the bench. They looked me up and down, eyes taking in the heraldic pattern but fortunately not lingering on the boots. I recognized one of them, although I blanked on her name in the moment (and it has never come back to me). She had been on my German school exchange program. She was from one of County Durham’s remaining grammar schools and already sounded more like she worked for the BBC than someone from the North East of England. And she was one of the kids who had decided not to speak to me again after we ran through the three questions about place, father, and school. Nonetheless, she recognized me too and was shocked—seemingly not in a good way. Oddly, she had remembered my name.
“Fiona Hill! What are you doing here?”
I stated the obvious answer and asked her how she was, noticing that the other two girls winced and smirked slightly when I spoke. I squeezed on the end of the bench and tried to make conversation with them to smooth over the evident awkwardness, prattling on about the weather and how beautiful Oxford was and asking where they had traveled from. One girl looked at me quizzically: “I’m so sorry, I have no idea what you just said.” My “friend” from Germany immediately jumped in: “Oh don’t worry, I can translate for you. North East accents are impenetrable!” That was me put in my place—and by someone else from County Durham at that.
At this very moment the professor’s door opened. A girl came out, said goodbye to the others, and went down the stairs. I heard him call my name. By now I was feeling flustered and out of sorts. I stood up to lunge toward the door. One of the girls had her foot out. Either it had been stuck out there all along and I hadn’t noticed, or she stuck it out just as I rose to go. Whatever the case, it didn’t really matter, because I went flying over her foot and struck my face and nose on the doorframe.
My nose started to bleed. I fumbled for the handkerchief Grandma Vi always made me stick up a cardigan sleeve, just in case. One of the girls snickered. No one asked if I was okay. Holding the handkerchief to my nose, I went into the room, apologizing to the professor for having tripped and the nosebleed.
My interviewer turned out to be very kind. He had some materials in front of him in addition to my application. Instead of asking me academic questions, the professor probed what I wanted to do and where else I had applied. He asked about my school. I got the impression he might have heard some of the exchange outside. It was more like a life counseling session than an interview. I was a bit surprised.
