Mature student, sixties style

I've been thinking about blogging for some time but not got around to it till now, when my new Bangor Uni MA course in Writing says I have to, so here goes.

The course began this month and one thing has ama-a-a-zed me - nobody I've told about it so far has said, 'Why are you going back to college at your age?' (I'm 66). Amazed, because when I began my BA as a mature student loads of people said it. And do you know how old I was then? I was all of 26. But I was married with two children, teaching full time and had a third child during the 5 year course. In those days, before the OU began, being a mature student was very unusual and even more so if you were a woman. There was only one way to do it and that was through University of London external. No continuous assessment in those days. You had to study for five years then take ten exams in a week at the end of it. One three hour exam Monday morning, another in the afternoon. And the same for the next four days: 9 till 12, then 1 till 4.

I'll never forget that first day when I joined a mixed bag of around 30 total strangers in a grotty old school somewhere in Nottingham, a place I'd never been to before. I didn't drive then. We'd all had to get up at six so my husband could drive me the twelve miles into Lincoln to catch the train for Nottingham before taking the children to school and going to work. I'd managed to find our exam venue with the aid of a Nottingham street map and stumbled in panting with 3 minutes to spare. And the first thing I noticed was that they all looked even more nervous than I did. Two or three really were a nasty shade of pale green. So maybe I was lucky not to have time to hang about. Sitting at the old-fashioned oak desk, just like the Victorian relics of my own childhood, I was flooded with a sense of well-being, as if transported out of my unhappy marriage back to the calm security of my schooldays. Each exam required 3 essays, each to be around 500 words in length. That worked out at 3000 words a day, 15,000 for the week. Many professional writers are able to work at this pace, but I never have been able to replicate the feat.