Author, musician and poet Julian Gough on miserable school days that inspired a love of reading and writing to escape to a better world
Where did you go to school and when?
I started at St Michael & St Martin Catholic Primary School in Hounslow from 1970-73, moving on to County Tipperary schools. I spent a year at Ardcroney National School, then the Christian Brothers Primary in Nenagh followed by Saint Joseph’s Christian Brothers Secondary in the same town.
What were your schools like?
Hounslow was great. The teachers were extremely kind. The few nuns wore miniskirts and there was an anti-bullying policy. At break time, I was the leader of a group of boys; I planned wholesome adventures which we carried out (crawling the length of a tunnel of rose bushes, climbing a tree and throwing snowballs). I felt safe and I was safe.
Then my dad got a job back in Tipperary, where he was from. School in Ireland came as something of a shock. My first school had outdoor, long-drop toilets, which I never used, because I was afraid of falling through the hole in the plank. My teacher had no teaching qualification, and when I pointed out she had made a spelling mistake, thinking I was being helpful, she punished me. The kids had been brought up to hate the British but had never actually met any – till I arrived, with my west London accent. My name didn’t help; my Irish parents had christened me Julian thinking it would help me fit in in London. So, every lunchtime and break, the other children would avenge 800 years of Sassenach oppression by methodically beating me up.
“In each Rabbit & Bear book, I try to solve a problem that I couldn’t solve myself when I was a child – in a way, I’m going back in time”
When my parents built our house, eleven miles away, I moved to the Christian Brothers in Nenagh. The headmaster, Brother Creevey, was a sadist who enjoyed beating children with a leather strap. Many years later, he was finally jailed for sexual offences against boys. The vice principal was also later jailed, for similar offences. The beatings in the playground continued. Teachers never intervened. On one memorable occasion, I was knocked to the ground and stabbed with a protractor. The kid fled, leaving me with a steel protractor sticking out of my buttock, like a flag on a hilltop. I pulled it out, cleaned off the blood, and kept it.
Did you love school, or hate it?
Hated it like you wouldn’t believe. But boy did it give me material! In each Rabbit & Bear book, I try to solve a problem that I couldn’t solve myself as a child. In a way, I’m going back in time and giving my child-self useful advice. My hope is that the books will help other children navigate the difficulties of childhood better than I was able to. The feedback I get from parents tells me that it’s working; that their kid can now handle their emotions better, or trouble in school better. That might be the achievement I am proudest of.
What were your favourite subjects?
I didn’t have favourite subjects. All subjects were ruinable, with a little effort from a motivated teacher. For example, I loved reading, I loved writing, I loved science fiction… so I once wrote a time travel short story in English class, as a homework assignment. (We had been asked to write about the future.) The teacher didn’t understand the title, so he refused to read the story and gave it zero out of ten.
Who were your most memorable teachers and how did they influence you?
There were two or three good teachers, a few mediocre teachers, and several genuinely malign ones who should not have been let near kids. The best was Tim Brophy, who taught me physics and higher-level maths. He was a terrific teacher, extremely kind and utterly fair, with total control over his class. We respected him because he respected us. He never hit anyone. Never even had to raise his voice. He loaned me his own science fiction books and enjoyed having speculative conversations about physics.
I still remember my disappointment at learning that my idea for how to transmit information faster than the speed of light (by pushing and pulling a rigid metal pole a light year long, to send a kind of Morse Code), wouldn’t work, because no material is rigid enough. As he explained, the compression wave when you push the pole can never travel that fast, and so the other end won’t move for years.
Where was your favourite place at school and what did you do there?
There was a ‘computer room’, which was just a classroom that had two computers at the back. Instead of going to sport, which I hated, I would head straight to the computer room, shut the door, and write my own extremely primitive computer games in BASIC. I had taught myself this at home, on a ZX81 (with 1 kilobyte of memory). If a teacher looked in, I would act as though I had permission to be there. I wouldn’t say that I had permission – one of my big rules was, never lie, because I felt the whole society was built on lies and I didn’t want to be part of that. Pretty soon everyone assumed I had permission. I never did sport again. Bliss.
What beliefs did your time at school give you?
That an entire society can be wrong. I was extremely popular in London and extremely unpopular in Ireland, and I hadn’t changed so one society was wrong, and it didn’t matter which one. That insight has been remarkably useful.
What was your proudest school moment?
I was forced to go to a hurling match, to support the school. I didn’t want to go, but I was hit with a hurly (hurling stick) and made to go. When we got to the game, I got off the bus, climbed the 15-foot concrete pillar of the main gate, and sat at the top with my back to the pitch reading my book. Some of the kids from my school threw stones at me; I protected my face from the stones with the book and kept reading. Eventually the teachers from the other school intervened (which forced my embarrassed teachers to also intervene) and I was left alone for the rest of the match. I thoroughly enjoyed the whole experience, and I never had to attend another game.
What was the most trouble you ever got into at school?
My friends and I decided to produce a school magazine – the school had never had one before – and I was editor. We managed to produce one edition, while the headmaster was on holiday. Then he came back, read it, and banned it. He objected to three articles: I had written all of them. In another incident, my first band managed to get permission to practice in the school. After our first gig, the headmaster banned us from ever practising there again – he objected to the lyrics. But I was essentially in trouble all the time.
What is your most vivid memory, looking back?
Too many to mention. Here’s one, that sums up the general dysfunction. We had a teacher who was so incompetent, and as a result disrespected, that kids would laugh at him even as he hit them with an iron bar. One day, a boy set another boy’s hair on fire. A group of kids beat out the fire, then wouldn’t stop slapping the boy’s head. Everyone else was by now running around the room screaming, for the fun of it.
The teacher threatened to go and get his metal bar (kept in the staff room) if we didn’t return to our seats. We got louder and ran faster. He pulled open the door to run and get his weapon, and our elderly headmaster toppled into the classroom – he had clearly been listening at the keyhole. That teacher, by the way, later ran away from school. He just didn’t turn up one morning and was never seen again.
When and how did your love of words and music begin?
I didn’t bother learning to read in London, because I was happy, and we had television. But in rural Ireland we didn’t have any TV reception for months – just snow on the screen – so I taught myself to read. And then, when school turned out to be a catastrophe, books became a place I could hide. I loved science fiction because it took me the furthest away: I didn’t want to be on Earth. PG Wodehouse offered another kind of escapism, to a sunny, comedic world. I would read books in class, while eating dinner, walking down the street, crossing the road… And as soon as I started reading books, I started writing books (or trying to). I loved the strange magic of literature, and wanted to work out how it was done.
As for music… I saw David Bowie’s video for ‘Ashes to Ashes’ on Top of the Pops and I was transfixed. I wanted to live there, wherever he was. Do whatever he was doing. If that was a job, I wanted it. I wrote the lyrics to five songs the next day, in the front row of Irish class, while the teacher was distracted trying to deal with other kids rioting at the back.
What other key influences/passions shaped you growing up?
It was mostly just books and music. I first attempted to write a novel at 15, and I put together my first band at 16, and that was where my energy went for the next decade. My second band, Toasted Heretic, released four albums, had a top ten hit. Great way to spend your late teens and early twenties.
What projects and challenges are coming up next for you?
I’m writing a book called The Egg and the Rock. It explores the theory of cosmological natural selection – the idea that our universe is the result of a Darwinian evolutionary process, which has fine-tuned the basic parameters of matter so as to produce this complex, self-complexifying and reproductively successful universe. It’s an unfairly neglected theory that radically changes how we understand the universe, and our place in it – and (which is terrific for my book) the James Webb Space Telescope keeps coming up with new evidence that it is likely to be true.
I’m writing the book online, in public, both to get feedback and to build an audience. Subscribe on the website and I’ll send you the chapters as I write them. I’m completely obsessed with this project. I think, if I get it right, it can jolt us free of our current cramped, limited view of our universe.
How would you sum up your school days in three words?
Pile. Of. Sh**e.
Rabbit & Bear: This Lake is Fake! by Julian Gough, illustrated by Jim Field, is out now (Hachette Children’s Group, £10.99). To subscribe to The Egg and The Rock, visit theeggandtherock.com
Further reading: Dwayne Fields on school days in Jamaica and London
You may also like...
