In 1968, when I was seventeen 'and a bit', at the time when I was about to graduate from High School, my school gave me a copy of Dylan Thomas's Choice: An Anthology of Verse Spoken by Dylan Thomas (Ralph Maud and Aneirin Talfan Davies, eds), New Directions, New York 1963.
On the face of it, it was an unusual thing to do, as there was no formal reason why anything I had done should be commemerated. My father had been killed in December, 1967, and this was only a few months later, and one or two of my teachers had I think been keeping a kindly eye on me.
I had been writing poems for about eighteen months by then, and in the school Library there were booths where one could sit and, through headphones, listen to language tapes or records, and other recordings. One recording, I was delighted to find, was one of DT reading a selection of his poems to an audience. I studied his work avidly at this time, and to hear the pauses and inflections he brought to his work gave me a greater insight into the performance aspect of Thomas's work.
My High School, named Model Laboratory School, was considered to have the greatest academic standards in the area, being as it was an affiliate of a State University there. The latest teaching methods, TV training links for teachers who used us as an experimental student population, and facilities that were state of the art, meant that there was always a big waiting list to get in, made more restrictive by the fact that principal places were given to children of the university lecturers and professors.
When I was nearly fourteen, I think in the 1964 summer period before I would start High School at the big County High School on the outskirts of town, I walked into Model's reception and asked to see the Principal. The place was quiet; school was finished for the year. A bemused secretary returned and ushered me into an office where stood a man in his forties, casually dressed, and with a smart crewcut. He introduced himself as the Principal, and I explained to him why it was important that I be allowed into Model to start High School in September. I still remember that he smiled the whole time I was with him.
In any case, a couple of weeks later, I was walking down our road, back to our house, which lay across a large meadow from the University. My Mother and Father must have been watching the road, because they came out into the yard, waving a piece of paper - a letter from Model, stating that I had been accepted to start High School there. Equal to their amazement that I could have undertaken such an action independently, was the fact that, for my Mother, it was a kind of social coup, that her son now was 'in Model.' My sister was unconcerned. Nearly four years older, she had been a straight-A student at the County school and didn't see the point.
In fact, I had been to the County school, for one year, two years previously. The place had been built in the 1930s, looked it, and was crammed full of all the people you imagine were in the film, Grease, but were the real deal: knife-carrying greasers, jocks and layabouts, and shoals of dim, pony-tailed farm girls drifting through the cavernous hallways (except my sister, of course, who was beautiful, bright, and popular), and a perfunctory little kid (me) routinely slammed into the lockers by Ronnie Horn, Donald Kelly, and Alvin Grey. A couple of years later, my friend Mike and I showed up at a baseball diamond where Ronnie Horn was practicing. I was twenty pounds heavier by then, and six inches taller. Ronnie thought we'd come to get him; we had.
That was the last year Junior School students were put in with the High School population. A new Junior School opened in the town and I spent my final JS year in new buildings with great friends, but knowing, too, that I would have to return to County to begin High School there in September. Cue my mission to Model.
And, in 1968, when I was seventeen 'and a bit', I was given the book. After my initial confusion, it was explained that because poems I had written had been published in the University literary journal that same Spring, accepted because of Model's University affiliation, the school thought it right that I should receive some recognition.
I still have the book, in its tattered slipcase. I was dusting down a bookshelf and noticed it tucked up in a corner. I hadn't looked at it for decades.
I did an Internet search on Model, and found an article from last year stating that a new £85m school was being proposed, to be sited at the heart of the University. I guess that would mean the old place (as it now must be) would be moth-balled. Their website carries a mission statement:
To teach, to learn, to help others teach and learn.
I can live with that.
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