Autobiographical StatementI was born at the end of the second world war in the home I continued to live in at Great Barr, Warwickshire, England, until I left it to study psychology and sociology at Keele University in Staffordshire in 1968. My main interest and talent had always been in English literature and writing according to my schoolteachers, but this was never pursued by them or me since my mother died of lung cancer when I was fifteen. (She had never smoked.) It is only my surmise that had my mother lived I might have been encouraged by her to pursue writing, but the fact is that it was only as a kind of afterthought years later that my father mentioned how one of my teachers had told him that I should have been urged to study English at university. Ignorant of this I had stuck out a five year engineering apprenticeship to no great purpose before deciding to kickstart my education once again myself, on my own terms. The apprenticeship route was a standard kind of career trajectory for the lads lucky enough to be born into the industrial Midlands of England at that time. I am being ironic: at no point did I ever feel lucky. In fact I tried to escape by applying to be an RAF jet pilot half way through my training, but was rejected after the five days of tests for aircrew selection at Biggin Hill - for political reasons.
I'd applied to study psychology and sociology at Keele instead of English mainly because studying English at UK universities was then such a dull and dry prospect: the social sciences seemed a livelier and trendier option. Several momentous things happened in the year I spent at Keele, one of which was profoundly influential: I set up and conducted a taped interview with John Lennon at the Weybridge home he was now sharing with Yoko Ono. Joining the staff of the contemporary arts magazine UNIT based at Keele, I had wanted to make an impact with my first feature. So I wrote to John Lennon expressing interest in his political views and in the art projects he was undertaking with Yoko - earlier in 1968 they had planted acorns for peace at Coventry cathedral. We might now call this a piece of installation art 'with a future' (much installation art has a limited life). I've no idea whether the acorns grew, but the piece obviously embodied conceptual and performance elements - from little acorns are oaks meant to grow. It was from such beginnings that the peace movement John and Yoko pursued from 1969 onward began. The interview I did with them on December 2 1968 (aided by my friend Daniel Wiles) also played a part in helping their peace plan moves to evolve - but that is a story (as yet untold) for another time.
Another momentous event at Keele was my discovery of anthropology by reading a book by Malinowski: studying other cultures to escape the straitjacket of Western cultural and thought patterns now seemed the way to go for a creative mind. I was offered and accepted a place to study for an honours degree in anthropology at Durham University. At Durham I got involved in many extra-curricular activities, besides the usual pursuits undertaken by a young man discovering life in that vibrant period 1969-72: editing the arts pages of the university newspaper Palatinate for a year; writing and performing poetry at readings; co-running the university film society; co-founding the Buddhist society (which my friend and I left after a month when other members became ridiculously pious about the two Thai monks we had invited to attend our meetings); performing in a Martha Graham style modern dance group; spending a summer living with gypsies to teach their kids in Becontree, East London (part of my anthropological studies) - and many other things. I also kept up with my literary studies, in particular reading the whole of Thomas Hardy's works. After graduating from Durham I moved to London to share a flat with a friend, and I worked as a social worker in the East End borough of Newham for a year.
When the opportunity to live in a large stone built ex-church house, rent-free, on the side of a beautiful valley in mid-Wales arose in 1973, I grasped it, and for two years led an enjoyable bucolic existence: gardening, keeping chickens, playing in the local darts team, hill walking, painting. It was a delightful and creative time in many ways, for I shared the house with two friends, one a painter, the other a musician. We all managed to survive doing various jobs, but also found time to pursue our own creative work: Ruth played flute in a local orchestra, David painted large canvases out in the barn, and I, looking out across the Wye valley from my little desk of deal wood, began work on a book called Dracula's Magic. This I finally completed in 1983, and although it was never published, through my agent at that time it did bring me my first proper publishing contract, to produce the Penguin Classics edition of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Published in 1985, by 2003 it was in its third update. My country sojourn in Wales ended when the death of my father took me back to Great Barr in Warwickshire, where the various family and estate arrangements needed to be dealt with. By the autumn of 1975 I had moved back to London and in early 1976 I was teaching for Bethnal Green Adult Education Institute in the East End of London, while living in a 'squat' with friends at Whitechapel, behind the London Hospital.
At first I taught English to young male Bangladeshis. It was an uphill task since they were frequently involved in political meetings and could not attend classes. Nevertheless when we did meet they learned fast - which was just as well. I also began teaching reading and writing classes as part of the first British adult literacy campaign, and when the Montefiore Community Education Centre opened to bring education to the working classes of Spitalfields, I was hired as a tutor to encourage local companies to release their employees to learn basic study skills in study groups. That was an uphill task too, since many employers had no interest in promoting the education of their employees, one clothing manufacturer openly declaring that 'if they get educated, they won't want to work!' Extraordinary. In Wales I had been inspired by reading Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed to work in adult education, and I now found just how political a task being involved in that kind of work could be. This was a time of great political radicalisation in the UK (punk displaced glam rock at this point) and I found myself signing up as a member of a left wing Leninist group called the Revolutionary Communist Tendency. I remember well the edginess of the representative who called to interview me for membership in my Whitechapel room, and his solemn warning that if I paid by cheque to join, I could be putting myself in danger, since ultra-left political groups like the RCT were monitored by the police. He could have been right, as this was also the time of the protest of the Greenham Common women against locating American nuclear missiles in Britain. I got to know several of these women, who were neighbours of mine in the 'squat' where I lived for about a year.
1977 was the Queen's Jubilee and her 25 years on the royal throne were celebrated with vigour in London's East End, whose docks were heavily bombed during the second world war, and the regular visits of the Queen Mother to give moral support to the local population were still remembered. The two other events that stand out for me that year were that I got married, and over a single weekend I shot a Super 8mm film which I called Sights of London, a series of movie images exploring bits of the City of London, Wapping and Spitalfields in what I thought of as a kind of critical art documentary. It is currently mislaid, but when it is tracked down perhaps I will discover whether it really is the early art film I like to think it was. My marriage was to a nineteen year-old Bermondsey beauty called Maxine, the mother of our son Matthew, who was born in autumn 1978. We spent our wedding night among bales of hay on the upper floor of a barn in mid-Wales. This was on a small holding near Rhayader owned by my friend Ben, who continues to live there so far as I know. Maxine will always remember Ben for the time we visited and stayed with an old friend of his near Guildford, Eric Clapton, and she talked to Patti Boyd ('Layla') who was by then Eric's wife: again, another story. The other event Maxine is bound to remember is when we set off by motorbike on a three-week honeymoon trip to Romania. By this time I had written more of Dracula's Magic, had joined the London based Dracula Society (attending its inaugural dinner, where Maxine and I sat opposite the actress who had played Lucy the vampire in Terence Fisher's 1957 Dracula), and had the idea of combining pleasure and Gothic research by heading toward Transylvania on two wheels. In the event I'd had enough of motorcycle riding by the time we got to the Black Sea, and was happy to keep a log of the trip, turning my notes into another never-to-be-published (and only half-written) opus: From Bethnal Green to Black Sea. The writing experience nevertheless felt valuable to me and although Michael Shaw of the Curtis Brown literary agency who read my work felt unable to act for me on such a book, I was delighted by the final sentence of his letter: 'If you are planning anything else do please get in touch because I think you write well.' All writers need encouragement, and I took great heart from these comments, coming as they had from a director of an internationally renowned literary agency.
I now need to leap forward ten years to 1988, not because little happened in my life and the world around me in the intervening period - quite the contrary! I have a deadline to complete this statement and therefore some abridgement is necessary. I should say first of all that married life with Maxine and our little boy Matthew went well and even happily enough for the first couple of years in our spacious mid-Victorian upper floors housing co-operative flat close to Victoria Park in Hackney. Sadly, it became apparent that we were not compatible partners after all. We separated in 1981, and divorced in 1983. Although there was never any acrimony between us, the hostility expressed by her new partner toward me and my desire as Matthew's father to retain a strong social connection with him, had already led to an agreement that the boy would come to live with me. He continued to spend time with Maxine at weekends and holidays, but I had met someone new by 1982, and Sharon more or less became his weekday mother for the next ten years. That situation was borne with practical buoyancy if not ecstatic happiness by the two women principals, and in many ways I fulfilled the role of mother as well as father in relation to Matthew. Maxine tended to be anxious about the demands being made on Sharon as a mum whose son was not her own, while Sharon tended to get jealous of the preferential treatment I seemed to be giving Matthew. Nothing unexpected in any of that. For his part, in his early twenties Matt told me how for him it felt over these years that I was always working and leaving him in the care of Sharon. I also sang and played lead guitar in a rock band that was moderately successful in south London. I am glad to say he is more sanguine about those times now, even if he has had knots to undo and will refashion in his own way for the future. Life can be tough at any time for children growing up, and for adults making and sustaining family life; with the pressures of the momentous social, commercial and political shifts going on in the eighties and nineties, the challenges were perhaps even more signal.
Nevertheless some of the challenges were met, and I made progress; I felt I had to work hard if I was going to get anywhere and make a mark in this world. By 1984 in my job as full time lecturer I had established some pioneering and highly successful adult education programmes in Tower Hamlets: 'O' level English courses for unqualified adults, Second Chance and Fresh Start Courses. All of these were supported by daytime creches for the many women wanting to study, but who needed child care for the time they were doing this. My single father experience had no doubt radicalised my sensibilities in this direction, the agitation for establishing creche facilities being led by me. 1984 also saw me setting up and teaching on a collaborative scheme at Bethnal Green, a set-up whereby students coming off our Fresh Start courses could begin studying for a degree with the Open University: thus began my work with the OU, which still continues today. In 1984 I also achieved a year's sabbatical leave from the Inner London Education Authority (ILEA) who paid my salary, and began a Ph.D at Essex University on William Godwin, which I completed part-time, gaining the doctorate in 1989. 1987 marked two advances for me: publication of the Penguin Classics edition of William Godwin's Caleb Williams, and the selling of the taped interview with John Lennon at Sotheby's for £23,000. Dan Wiles had tracked me down because he needed my permission to use a clip from the tape in a programme he was producing for Melvyn Bragg's South Bank Show on Lennon's music (as opposed to that of The Beatles). He had been working for some time on the Show, had managed to get the sound quality of the tape improved, and in a conversation we had soon after about the tape, we decided as joint owners to market the thing via Sotheby's Rock 'n' Roll memorabilia sale that summer. We felt that Lennon would have wholeheartedly approved. (One of my forthcoming writing projects will embody many of the vivid ideas and thoughts of his that I recall from this earliest of serious Lennon interviews, undertaken that second day of December, 1968 - part of what we discussed had been his feelings about money: 'it got me out of Liverpool, but it didn't get me out of my head'.) I bought a new piano with part of the proceeds from the sale, the Young Chang that I helped Matthew to learn to play on; he got as far as Grade 7, I am proud to say.
By 1988 I had decided to leave the ILEA to complete my Ph.D and to seek 'pastures new' as a free-lance writer and teacher. When Margaret Thatcher's radical Toryism had demolished the Greater London Council (GLC) in 1986 I saw the writing on the wall and felt the ILEA was next in the firing line since much of its work was seen as too left wing. A good number of my friends and colleagues said how much they admired my courage for moving on. For myself, I have never quite decided whether jumping ship like that with a relatively small one-off severance payment was a foolish or a wise move. In the longer run strained finances became a continuing headache, until I gained more substantial employment once again with the Open University from 1998. On the other hand, cutting free certainly brought me the freedom to pursue a range of independent projects in a way that would not otherwise have been possible. For example, as early as the summer of 1988, having become increasingly interested in films and screenwriting, I attended Robert McKee's three-day Story Structure seminar, which provided an instructive demonstration of the dynamics of successful Hollywood movies. Shortly after, a screenplay treatment of mine was shortlisted for discussion at another McKee seminar, and his conclusion that he could envisage Jeremy Irons playing the male lead of my piece was encouraging, to say the least. That autumn I then decided to use some of this new-found freedom to take ten year old Matthew for a week's holiday on the Isle of Man. We had a great time, and I also was able to further my research work on The Manxman, the screenplay project seen and discussed by McKee: my idea was (and still is) for the adaptation of Hall Caine's novel to be filmed on location in the story's home setting on Manxland, in the middle of the Irish Sea.
By 1990 I'd been commissioned to write a book-length Penguin Critical Study of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1994) and also to edit William Godwin's last two novels for Pickering and Chatto, Cloudesley (1830) and Deloraine(1833). I was then asked to produce a Penguin Classics edition of Bram Stoker's Dracula, and it was while I was working on this in the middle of 1992 that the sad decision was taken for Sharon and I to part company, she deciding to move on to live with a female friend of hers. I was a lone parent again, and income became a more pressing issue. Luckily, part of my recent screenwriting self-education programme had entailed a regular reading of American film trade papers like Variety and Hollywood Reporter. So when I learned that Francis Ford Coppola was in the final stages of making a new movie version of Bram Stoker's Dracula, I immediately thought what a good South Bank Show subject this could be, so sent an outline of my idea to Daniel to pass on to Melvyn Bragg. By Halloween I found myself with Daniel and a researcher interviewing the likes of Coppola and others in a New York hotel for a programme on Dracula of which I was the Associate Producer! At the same time, I had been taken on to teach English literature at Middlesex University, so for the moment, although my capacity to provide social support for a teenage Matthew at home now became rather limited, at least finances were in a healthier state for the time being. Something else that was now in a healthier state was my love life: I had re-connected with a woman I had known previously in London but who now lived in the east Midlands and quickly fallen in love with her. Her marriage had been shaky for some time, so when after about eighteen months she separated (and finally divorced) from her husband, we became partners, albeit at a distance. It was the most loving relationship of my life, thriving for ten years.
After the Dracula South Bank Show aired in early 1993, I persuaded Melvyn Bragg that we should do a programme on Frankenstein, as Coppola's company was backing Kenneth Branagh to produce a new film version of Mary Shelley's novel. He agreed, and again I was to work with Daniel as producer/director, so I set about researching and structuring what I thought should be in the programme. Before long, being considered an authority on Frankenstein I was also asked by Ken Branagh to give a talk on the topic at Shepperton Studios to him and some of the cast as part of their pre-production work on the film. Thus it was that I found myself sitting around a big table in a brightly lit conservatory in the precincts of Shepperton answering questions on Frankenstein, Mary Shelley, her history and times. The questions were mostly Branagh's, but they also came from Helena Bonham-Carter, Ian Holm and Cherie Lunghi. Cherie was particularly interested in the history of the period out of which the novel sprang, and we were able to continue our conversation later while sitting in the back of a stretch limousine that sped us back into central London. She was appearing in a new Tom Stoppard play at the National Theatre and in its Green Room introduced me to various members of the cast, including Bill Nighy.
The Frankenstein South Bank Show was most interesting to make, and involved us again going to New York and beyond to conduct interviews that I had arranged. This time arriving at our hotel at midnight, Daniel and I proceeded to collect Leonard Wolf and his wife from their apartment at 2, Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. Leonard was a prolific writer on Frankenstein and the official adviser in that wise on the film. We all took a hair-raising yellow cab ride down to Robert de Niro's Tribeca restaurant in Greenwich Village. De Niro was playing the part of Frankenstein's Creature in the movie and we had been invited to dine at the Tribeca (TRIangle BElow CAnal Street) by De Niro himself. We didn't get to meet him. Throughout the time of making the programme I entertained high hopes of securing an interview with him, but Daniel was always sceptical, De Niro apparently always reluctant to do interviews. I talked to his assistants many times during the week we spent in New York, and continued to speak with them by phone back in England, but to no avail.He was filming Frankenstein back to back with Heat. Also back in England I conducted interviews with two other actors in the film, Richard Briers (De Lacey the old blind man) and John Cleese (Professor Waldman) both of whom I interviewed in the back gardens of their houses in London. Richard Briers was a fascinating interviewee and became a friend whom I saw and interviewed again later for another project. The meeting and interview with John Cleese in the back garden of his Nottinghill house was memorable for various reasons. First of all, while he was having a shave in preparation for the interview I looked out of his window into the garden, and to my amazement saw a huge wooden carving of a dodo, the famously extinct bird, which was the unmistakeable partner of a carving done by my old friend Ben Palmer in Wales; Ben was a professional wood carver who then went in for making expensive and exotic objects out of wood (he also made a giant rocking horse for George Harrison I remember seeing once). Then, as we settled into our garden chairs to start the interview, Cleese leaned forward to confide to me how happy he was to be doing all this, saying that he regarded we South Bank Show people as highly professional and a joy to work with. This was reassuring, as there had been some talk that he could sometimes present difficulties as an interviewee. My enduring memory is of the interview itself, for during the thirty or so minutes from when the camera started to roll to the end of our discussion, not once did John Cleese take his eyes away from mine. It was a bit unnerving - but I am not easily unnerved. We talked about many things: disturbed adolescents, mad scientists, genetic research etc, but perhaps the most fascinating piece of information he gave was the following: in order to avoid producing laughter among the audience as a Python character when he appeared on screen for the first time in the film, it was decided he should wear a special set of protruding teeth. Apparently, whenever he appears in his comedy roles, audiences typically only have to look at the upper lip area of his face and they invariably begin to laugh: Professor Waldman is not meant to be a comic character.
After completing the South Bank Shows, I concentrated most of my efforts on literature teaching in higher education: continuing my work at Middlesex university, undertaking a two year stint teaching Shakespeare and contemporary literature at Leicester University, as well as a year or so teaching the Gothic and Romanticism at Anglia Polytechnic University in Cambridge, and at the same time continuing to teach for the Open University. It was a busy time, and it was all I could do to keep everything going. I realised how I now needed to obtain more substantial work with one employer, and, concentrating my focus and efforts on the Open University I was finally rewarded by gaining a two-year post with the OU in London. By 2001 it was gratifying to have been appointed Faculty Manager in Arts, from which I was later promoted to the post of Senior Faculty Manager in Arts. At the time of writing this is still my full time job, my commitment to the open policy teaching ideals of the Open University being as strong as ever, despite what I consider to be the undermining of academic leadership and expertise across most British universities by the cult of empty-headed accountant-led managerialism and the hideous prospect of 'customer' driven mass online higher education.
Long live the arts, in all their forms! And long live teaching and learning on a human scale and pace between a teacher and a student: the rest is humbug and dumbing down!
(I obviously speak for myself out of my own experience and not on behalf of the Open University... )
Thus far, the meanderings, achievements and frustrations of both my personal and professional lives have been varied and frequently engrossing, but what seems to matter most at present, as I finish writing this on January 1st 2007, are two things. The first thing of importance is my hope that I will be able to pursue writing and other projects in the next phase that extend my creative skills, deepen my understanding of the lives of myself and of those around me, and also, in bringing this process about, hopefully offer some measure of pleasure, entertainment or even learning opportunities to those who read and use my works.
The second thing that matters is that both I and my son may be able to gain more happiness in our lives, lives that have not always been easy to negotiate - but then, whose lives are easy to negotiate! We all face difficulties and challenges, but it is best to aim to meet these with vigour and creative thinking, regardless of age or situation.
Tomorrow Matt and I take a short vacation together at the seaside and South Downs town of Brighton, Sussex: it should be fun.
Above all, my aim is to be as honest as possible in what I do, and to tell and write the truth as I see it.
© Maurice Hindle 2007