Michael O'Sullivan

Michael O'Sullivan interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 24th May 2019

0:05:11 Born in Birmingham in 1958; of my family, I know a bit more about the Irish side than the English side; my paternal side is Irish, but having been born in Birmingham I have always felt mainly British; my father was born on a farm in County Galway, Ireland; recently some of my family have done some ancestor research and discovered that the O'Sullivans of that part of Ireland were the remnants of the scattered defeated army at the Battle of Kinsale, the last big military defeat for the Irish; the O'Sullivans originally came from the south-west of Ireland, but many were displaced, and I believe three ancestors moved to what is now County Galway, married locally and therefore acquired land; many generations of O'Sullivans have farmed the same corner of northern County Galway where my father and his brothers, were raised; during the Second World War the economy was rather depressed and my father took the opportunity of war work in England where young men from Ireland were assigned work but guaranteed a job; he was assigned to Birmingham to work at the Lucas factory producing munitions and also keeping fire watch on the roof; so although a neutral as an Irish citizen, he found himself with a bucket of sand on the roof of the Lucas factory; he always regarded Ireland as home, he never acquired formal British citizenship, but he married my mother, an English Catholic whom he met at a parish dance and therefore never returned; so they settled down in Birmingham and had children; he was a practising Catholic all his life, as was my mother; she was the daughter of a woman who was an English Catholic; I don't know much about the ancestry on my mother's side; they were Herberts so I would guess that somewhere there was a Norman lineage, but they came from the Birmingham working class as all my Birmingham relatives were; as far as I could tell they were all 100% English whereas all my close paternal relatives were in Ireland, although I gather that branches of the O'Sullivans went to America and Australia; I was the second of four children, living in a semi-detatched house in the north Birmingham suburb of Erdington; in those days children were mostly born at home, unlike now; I think the policy was that the first child was born in hospital, and if all went well and all seemed regular with the pregnancy, subsequent children were delivered at home by a visiting midwife whom I recall, from subsequent births of my siblings, lived around the corner

5:04:05 My mother was a very clever person; she was one of a large family, and her mother died early in rather sad circumstances, and her father, I suppose, had a low income job doing factory work, so she had to give up her education around the age of seventeen in order to be a surrogate mother to her younger siblings; she was the oldest daughter in the family; I discovered my mother's educational excellence as a teenager when rooting through a cupboard at home, when I found a book prize that she'd won for coming top of her class at the age of 16 or so, shortly before she had to give up her education; she was the sort of person who certainly nowadays would go to university and do well; of course, in those days it was much less common; she learnt typing and shorthand at a commercial college, and even when I was small and had one older sister and a younger sister and brother, she still used to take in typing work from a local law firm and copy-type; I remember her tapping away on an old manual typewriter, copying documents with rather impressive red wax seals, and occasionally going with her to pick up or return work to the law firm which was about a mile away; my father always worked, but my mother worked at home on a piece-work basis; my father completely changed his work; he started as a farm boy but they did own land in Ireland, but then after the war he joined a financial company so was involved in loans and hire purchase; he rose to become the manager of a branch; I think it was an extremely small branch, my father and one or two other people, but I do remember when we travelled back to Ireland as we did most years, it was made to sound very good; I think it is usually the case with the diaspora that when they go home they make it sound a bit bigger than it really is; when I was small I recall the firm was called Practical Credit Services, and was later bought by something larger and by the time he retired at 65 it had become Provident Financial Services; I think he was quite good at it as he had the famous Irish charm, could talk to anybody of any background; he was a very honest person, and rather kind, but I think it stood him in good stead persuading hard-up people that they oughtn't to get into arrears; I think it was done with a good deal of charm and sympathy; after he retired he actually worked a lot for Victim Support, the charity that looks after the victims of crime, helps elderly people improve the security in their homes or file insurance claims and so on; he used to claim when he was about 70 that his Victim Support work had put him in such good standing with the local police that he was in no danger of ever receiving a parking ticket or being apprehended for any other misdemeanour

9:33:16 My mother certainly encouraged me in my early education, and I remember well she used to talk to me a lot, read to me a lot when I was small, which must have been quite difficult considering the load of housework and typing at home; later when we children were a little older she took part-time work as a school lunch supervisor at a nearby school; she was always working, and went back to work quite late in life as a full-time typist at the County Courts in Birmingham; so she must have made quite an effort, but I do recall her reading to me a lot and encouraging me to use the local library; I don't think I needed much encouragement; on the other hand, both my mother and father were not directive in regard to my education, so I don't recall them ever expressing an opinion, never mind any instruction, as to what I should study at school or nagging me about homework; they assumed I would do the right thing, and as I progressed in education to a formal level beyond where they had reached they became even less likely to offer advice or instruction; my father on the other hand, while he was not at all directive about my education, loved to take hold of any certificates that I brought home from school to show that I had achieved anything, and these certificates would disappear for several days and we realised that they were being shown round in the pub in the evening; his Irish generation had the social habit of going to the pub after work, usually not for very long but for one on the way home, and these certificates would be passed round; I still don't know what commentary was given, I can only guess, but they would come home slightly crumpled or dog-eared several days later, but they were always returned; I suppose that gave me a sense of what is now called "positive feedback", but we used to joke about it; the only time they influenced my educational choices, and quite significantly so, was when I reached the age of eleven, the point of moving from primary school to a secondary school; this was the age of the 11+; naturally I went to the local Catholic primary school, took the 11+, and think I did quite well, certainly passed, and my form teacher who was not a Catholic, told my parents I was very promising and ought to apply to go to King Edward VI school in Edgbaston, a famous school with an excellent academic record; the alternative was to go to the boys' Catholic Grammar School, St Philip's, attached to Birmingham Oratory, also a good school, but not so intensively academic; as I recall, my parents were not of a strong view one way or the other, but the Headmaster of my primary school, Mr Hennigan, a staunch Catholic, certainly informed my parents that I would risk burning in hell if I went to a non-Catholic school, so I think they then took the position that I really ought to go to St Philip's given this firm advice, so that is where I went; I think that was their only decisive intervention in my education

14:28:11 I think my earliest real memory was indeed in my pram; whether I was of pram age or a little older and crammed into a pram, I am not quite sure, but I was certainly in a pram being pushed by my mother; I think I was kneeling or sitting up in the pram because I saw a dog sitting on the pavement, blocking the pavement; my mother slowed down and I remember saying to my mother "run him over mum"; I'm sure we didn't; it is a very short memory but I know exactly where it was; I can't describe the dog but know only that it definitely was a dog of a medium size and that it was squatting on the pavement directly in the path of my pram; I have quite detailed memories of my primary school; I remember two or three of my teachers reasonably well; I remember that I liked school a lot; I went briefly to another school for a few weeks because there was no space at the Catholic school, and I even remember that first school where I went at five and a half, but all I remember is playing in the yard; I moved to St Mary and St John Primary School in Gravelly Hill, Birmingham, which I think is still there; it was a school right behind a large, then fairly modern, Catholic Church; while I was there it expanded and some things were built on an adjacent plot and we spread out, and I remember finishing primary school in rather newer buildings; what I particularly remember is that I enjoyed school a lot; I think I was quite naughty, quite good at most things that were academic, not good at games - partly motivation; I have still got my old school reports so I can look back for documentary evidence, and the reports generally tell a tale of someone who showed a brightness and interest in study but was quite hard to control, clumsy at games, sometimes too questioning to the liking of some teachers; I think this rather depended on the teacher whether that was seen as a virtue or a character flaw

18:42:24 I remember quite a lot of things I did other than go to school and then home, a one mile walk each way; one thing was that at the time is was quite normal to allow quite young children to walk on their own some distance to school; we never considered it to be a danger; I mention that because I link those things to what I think is the development of independence, quite an important thing to develop and I've tried to follow that with our own children; I remember playing a lot; I had a number of friends, mostly a little older than me, one year above me at school, and some from other schools because they were not Catholics, but lived in the neighbouring streets around our house; we used to spend a lot of time building dens, trespassing in other people's gardens, stealing fruit, scrumping as we called it; we used to fish a little and catch tadpoles; when we got a bit bigger we used to trek to Sutton Park which was about three miles away; as we didn't have much money we would usually walk the distance, occasionally take the train; Sutton Park was wonderful as it was, I think, the remnants of a royal hunting ground on the fringes of Birmingham, with miles of fairly natural woodland, bog and gorse bushes, and it was a paradise for young kids; in our sort of micro world it was the equivalent of being on the great savannah to go to Sutton Park; it ended further than you were likely to go, to be limitless to someone aged 11 or 12; we used to sneak off there for hours on end; I remember joining the Cub Scouts, in fact the Cub hut was sandwiched between the school building and the church; I remember getting my uniform and paraphernalia you have to buy to be a Cub Scout; I think my mother always found it a stretch when I needed something else bought that would cost money outside the normal weekly household budget, but she would generally oblige me if she thought it was necessary; unfortunately, before I progressed to the Scouts somebody burnt the hut down and no one could find the money to build a new one, so I never got very far in Baden Powell's organization; another thing that I did from about the age of 12-13 was to become an Altar Server in our Catholic Church; I'm not quite sure why because I think I was particularly poor at it; I would bear candles and do other things to assist at Mass and other Services; I was so bad at it that I was eventually dismissed for repeated errors of behaviour which I think were partly careless, partly deliberate mischief-making, but I did find it very boring; I don't remember my parents pressing me to do it but probably somebody I knew did it so you go along with your mates

22:57:23 I remember teachers much more at my secondary school; it was a big change in life going to Grammar School; for one thing I had to cross the city every day using a free bus pass from the City Council, which I rather enjoyed which gave me a great sense of independence; in my first year I had a very peculiar form teacher who was also our maths teacher; he was an Irishman by the name of Butler - I presume he had been in England some time but certainly spoke as an Irishman; he was quite a disciplinarian in that we would hand in our maths homework and then he would lay it out in three piles when he had marked it; one pile he would be satisfied with, usually a very low pile; on the other side of the desk were the pile of those who were going to get whacked; it was just the last period in which corporal punishment was not only allowed but widely used; then there was a larger pile in the middle of ones that were just about satisfactory, but he thought he would whack them anyway; you could play this story if you wanted to as an example of our minds being bent out of shape at an impressionable age by terrible abuse, but I can't say that this instance had that impact, certainly on me, and as far as I know, not on the others; it became a badge of honour to get whacked frequently; he would whack with an old gym shoe which he called Excalibur; he obviously tried to terrify us but, as I recall, we used to vie with each other to provoke him in order to gain kudos with our friends by being whacked in front of the class; I think he got wise to this so he didn't actually do it all that often, only when he was in the mood, but none of us really took it seriously but thought it was all jolly good fun; I don't approve of it at all; it couldn't have been very painful; I was usually in the OK pile because I was quite good in maths, so I had to resort to other means to make sure that I got a reasonable number of whackings so that I wasn't seen as teacher's pet; I was quite keen on humanities and science; I did 'O' levels in physics and chemistry, but also in addition to French, which was compulsory, I took German from the age of 14 as an option; I did Latin for a couple of years but dropped it because you couldn't do Latin and German; I rather liked Latin but liked German more; I might have been able to do Latin but they I wouldn't have been able to do a plausible science range, and I wasn't sure later whether to continue with sciences of humanities, so I tried to keep my options open; I enjoyed all my subjects except Religious Instruction which was compulsory, which I found quite boring, but also I didn't care for the teacher; I didn't like what I have now learnt to call the curriculum; all the syllabus at that time seemed to consist almost entirely of memorization of passages from the Bible with not very interesting interpretation; I think that was the problem more than the subject matter; I don't think I was particularly anti-religious at that age, but just found the idea of a subject that consisted of learning passages by heart very unengaging for me

28:36:08 I was Confirmed but I never had a strong religious enthusiasm in my life; my parents were always good Catholics in the sense that they not only went to church, but were pretty good examples of following the moral tenets of the Church; on the other hand they never gave me any evidence of a deep philosophical or theological commitment; I don't know whether that meant they didn't have one or couldn't articulate it or didn't want to foist it on me; I rather think it was because they were Catholics in the same way that whole populations adhere to a faith because everybody else does; that is something I have intellectually struggled with, I don't find it easy to understand as I've noticed that quite a lot of people are like me in that they tend to take opposite positions to the majority around them as often as not, or certainly not feel any obligation to fall in with majority opinion; that has been my self-observation and yet I also see situations now and in the past where whole populations at least appear to adhere automatically to whatever the prevailing tenets of faith are; I rather think my parents were Catholics in that way; I do recall one conversation with my father around some awkward period between 16 and 18, that I sometime appeared to be arsey about it, sometimes making anti-religious or anti-Catholic statements to see how my parents or teachers would react; I remember once saying to my father to tell me one good reason why we should be Catholics; he responded by asking me to tell him of a better religion; it is difficult to argue with that, but I can never recall my parents trying to argue in a academic way in favour of the Catholic faith, nor did they try to sanction me or put any pressure on me when I made it clear, about the age of 18, that I was going to have nothing more to do with it; I must have been going to Confession up to that point; I do recall genuinely feeling a sense of guilt which comes from disobeying the tenets of the Church whereas I don't recall ever having faith, and my particular recollection of feeling guilt is when I once inadvertently missed Sunday Mass; I always went to Mass on Sunday, it was drilled into me as one of the absolute rules, and I once missed it, possibly due to a school trip which overlapped the weekend, and remember realizing on Monday that I hadn't been to Mass and that no one had noticed; I felt absolutely terrible, but I think I then reacted to that by thinking what an awful business Catholicism was that I should feel bad having inadvertently failed to go to a church service on a Sunday, so I think it rather fed my eagerness to get away from all that; I think there was quite a long period from 15 or 16 where I was rather sure that I didn't believe the tenets of faith, I didn't believe that Catechism, but didn't agree or disagree fully with the codes of behaviour demanded by the Church; I was at a Catholic Grammar school where we had regular religious events; I was in the choir so went to all services; I actually think I joined the choir partly so that I would have a more interesting time at the compulsory religious services because at least I would have something to do, have a chance to show off a bit rather than having to endure the ritual; so I think it ran on auto-pilot for a couple of years, despite the fact that I didn't believe I was apprehensive of what punishment I might face if I were to abandon the whole thing without being absolutely sure; so two years of maturation, reflection, and then at 18 feeling it was really a cop-out to go on practising something that you really hadn't believed in for as long as you remembered thinking about it; there was a growing sense of pride in intellectual honesty which compelled me to live as I thought rather to simply live as I'd been told to, or pretend to believe because it would please other people, or because there might be some incalculable, unforeseen punishment ahead; once a week we had compulsory P.E. at school and had to walk about a mile to the school playing field; I remember on one of those afternoon walks thinking, that's it, I'm not going to go on pretending any more; I am going to refuse to go to Mass because it's no good to anyone to go if you don't actually believe, and I'm not going to Confession any more - Confession was the worst thing as you had to come up with something to say, and I found it very difficult to confess to sins although it wasn't hard to come up with sins you had committed because so many things were regarded as sins, and you usually confessed to impure thoughts, but I just thought it was dishonest to reel these things off to the priest through the screen when I didn't really feel any sense of guilt; certainly I didn't think there was anything wrong with having impure thoughts, but had just come to regard it as inevitable; so I remember the moment when I made the decision that I was not going on with it; again, it is rather like the dog; I can remember the exact point on the pavement, the exact street, I can find the place where that occurred and that decision formed in my head; now I would categorise myself as between agnostic and atheist; I regard an agnostic as having 50% belief in some form of deity, but as you can't settle the matter either way that is what you call yourself; an atheist is right at the other end, denying any possibility of a deity, so I place myself between the two; I'd say the chances of any faith having any kind of basis in truth, or there being an afterlife, is less that 50%, but feel it would be arrogant to state that the possibility was zero

39:14:00 After leaving school I had a gap year but that was somewhat inevitable because I was trying to get into Oxford; most boys from my school went to neither Oxford nor Cambridge, but in most years a few got in; I was doing quite well academically and got good grades in 'A' levels; I remember one teacher particularly, who wasn't actually my teacher, a teacher of economics whom I think had been to Oxford; he said he thought I had a good chance of getting to Oxbridge and should give it a try; I was quite influenced by that advice; no one in my immediate family had been to university; around the time that I went to Oxford one of my Irish cousins joined the Jesuit training program in Dublin, and we were the first on either side of the family to go near a university, so I had no one to follow; a good friend who was at school with me in the same year, of a similar background to me although both his parents were Irish, was also given similar advice; I had always regarded him as more clued-up than I was, and he seemed to be able to work out what the advantages of any course of action were; he said it was a really good idea as if we did well we would get paid lots of money and have relatively easy lives, according to his cost-benefit analysis; I had no idea how to differentiate between Oxford and Cambridge so I looked at the map and decided that Oxford was a better bet as my father hated long drives and I thought he'd be more willing to take me to Oxford because he'd be able to get back the same day; that was my only reason for preferring Oxford; I also had no idea about colleges so I got hold of the prospectus, closed my eyes and flicked the pages and it opened on Brasenose; I read it and learnt that it was one of the few colleges that had already started admitting women, which was quite good as I was rather fed up being in an all boys school; so Brasenose it was and I applied on that basis not for any other, and they let me in; at that time you had to take the entrance exam which was in November each year; in some private schools they would accelerate children and put them in in their upper-sixth year, but at my school that was not available; we wouldn't have been prepared well, but the school did say that if you were applying to Oxbridge we should come back after 'A' levels for most of the term and they would give us some extra preparation classes; so we had to do a seventh term which meant that you effectively had to take the rest of the year as a gap year; in the end I had a full gap year because after 'A' levels I only went back to school for a week and then decided I couldn't bear it any more; it was an unexpected reaction as I had been very settled at my Grammar school up to that point, it was some sort of resistance to being institutionalized any longer; I went home and announced that I wasn't going to university and needed to get out and get a job; I still don't know what it was that led me to rebel against myself and no one was compelling me to follow this course of action; I got a job as a casual waiter which I had already been doing in evenings over the Summer, so I just asked for more hours; the time came round for sitting the entrance exam which I had been entered for before rebelling; I wasn't sure if I should actually take it or not, but I met up with the friend I mentioned; we went out to a pub in the centre of Birmingham, drank too much, and emerged from the pub having made a pact that we would both do it; I think my friend recapped the economic reasons for going to Oxford; the following week we sat the entrance exam so I went back to school for however many hours it took to write my papers; I wasn't really sure I wanted to do any of this, but a few weeks later I was summoned to Brasenose for an interview; I went down to Oxford on the train and I quite liked it; they put me up for one night in College, and I had a couple of interviews, and they let me in, gave me an Open Exhibition, which was slightly better because you got a longer gown and a better room in your first year, but I was actually quite surprised that they took me

48:38:05 Before I started rebelling I had filled in an application to an organization called The Central Bureau for Educational Visits and Exchanges and asked if I could go to France between January and the Summer as an English language assistant; this was available to gap-year students who would be studying modern languages; that came through and I went to London for an interview and they assigned me to a secondary school in Toulouse where I spent from January until June, which I rather enjoyed; it was a bit lonely at times as I lived in a cavernous lycée which was empty at weekends; the work-load was light, but I had a very good time; I had three-day weekends and I used to hitch-hike all over the south of France and it was quite a good way of learning to speak French; so it was a pleasant gap-year - much better than pouring wine in Birmingham

50:12:18 At Oxford I read German and French; I found the whole program very engaging and interesting, and I enjoyed Oxford a lot; it was a very big change for me; I went up in 1978; my main tutors were Richard Cooper who is still there as an Emeritus Fellow and the late Raymond Lucas in German; I got on well with both; they were interesting, gave good tutorials; I went out to other colleges occasionally when I took a paper that was outside their area, so did some linguistics and twentieth century French literature at other colleges; I didn't go to many lectures; I spent more time in the library reading, and read a lot around my subject; fortunately for my academic prospects I rediscovered my self-discipline in the Summer before I went to Oxford; after coming back from France I was mostly living with my then-girlfriend and her family in Suffolk and she was about to go to another university; I recall receiving a reading list from Oxford and I got all the books and read them all; when I arrived at Brasenose I was one of the only persons who would admit to reading everything on the list, so I think I had quite a good start as it helped to have read a lot of the material, otherwise you have to read a huge amount each week doing modern languages at Oxford; I did well in Prelims, the exams after two terms; I think I worked less hard in my second year as I got into all sorts of other non-academic activities, and put in a bit of a spurt in my final year; I really enjoyed Oxford, liked most of the literature we studied and we could choose what we liked; that was thing about Oxford as opposed to school, you more or less did what you liked as there were so many choices; after the first two terms I studied what I thought were interesting and, apart from work, did the things I liked; I discovered I actually liked sport which I hated before; at Oxford it was entirely options so discovered I enjoyed cross-country running and rowing, but still very resistant to organized sport; I did row for the College in the second boat for two years, giving it up in my final year to concentrate on study; I did a lot of music as well; I had learnt to play the cello from the age of 11-12 under the influence of a musical friend, and the school lent me a cello and provided a teacher; by the time I got to Oxford I could play reasonably well and played in the University orchestra, and played a lot of chamber music, so I had quite a rich musical life at Oxford; I stayed right out of student politics as it didn't interest me; apart from one shouting match with members of the Monday Club who woke my up one night having a raucous meeting across the corridor, I don't recall any other encounter with student politics; music has continued to be important for me; these days I don't play although I'm always thinking that when I have more time I will get the cello out of the loft; I sing with Wolfson Choir every week in term so I do keep music up; I most love the classical period but also the nineteenth century romantics; I suppose my interests have got somewhat wider but I still prefer those periods; when I was about 15-16 I was so enthused by this music which we did little bits of in the school orchestra, and I did 'O' level music so we did some appreciation, but I would buy the vinyl recordings and then borrow the full score from Birmingham Central Library, and I would sit for hours just listening to the music and relating it to the score; I became quite knowledgeable about the parts played by other instruments; I love musical scores as I love maps, even though my field was languages

57:11:03 I got a 1st and was quite surprised; I think I took the right options in things I was relatively good at, but I remember finals being quite an ordeal; the really hard thing was remembering texts in sufficient detail to quote from them when most of the papers were about literature; I am probably quite good at exams in that I and quite good at writing structured essays and making a little knowledge go a long way; before I took finals I gave some thought to what I should do next; I think it was suggested that if I should do well enough I might want to stay on and do post-graduate studies, but I really felt the need to move on; I had had a good three years at Oxford with a year in Germany in the middle, but I had no idea about what sort of job I might do; I didn't actively look for a job in my last year; it wasn't that I was against any particular job but just found it impossible to see how I could commit myself to any repetitive form of work for the rest of my life, because the way we thought then was that whatever you choose to do you would probably do that until you retired; that is what most people did - went into the BBC, the Civil Service, or banking - and I just thought it impossible for me at that point to make such a long-term choice; one notion that I had was that I lacked experience of the world; I had spent time in France and Germany but had never been to a developing county, the Third World as we called it, never been outside Europe; I had heard about V.S.O. (Voluntary Service Overseas) which in those days quite commonly sent fresh graduates out to developing countries as teachers; I got hold of an application pack - I don't recall you were asked where you wanted to go but what you wanted to do, and why; I was called for an interview in London some time before I took my finals; I was interviewed by a couple of bearded chaps who asked questions designed to elicit my interest in development, my sincerity as it were; I had rather been hoping that if I landed a job it would be in a Pacific atoll with nice weather all the year round, and a nice beach where I would contemplate the meaning of life and have a jolly good time; in the interview they ambushed me with a question on whether I would like to be part of their pilot program in China; I had no idea about China and it wasn't what I had in mind; I think my image of China then related to my stamp collecting hobby when I was a young child, and I remembered the Chinese stamps that I had got hold of which had pictures of Red Guards waving little red books at Chairman Mao, which sounded pretty grim; in fact I was very ignorant about China but confronted with this question I thought that if I didn't answer with enthusiasm they would simply conclude I was not seriously interested in volunteering but looking for a cushy number somewhere; so I rather faked enthusiasm as I had nothing to lose, and was duly offered a two-year assignment to Central South China, which came through a few weeks later; it wasn't what I had in mind but by then I'd had a chance to reflect a bit; I thought that maybe learning Chinese would be useful and would certainly be interesting as it sounded as though it would be really hard; I had one friend at Brasenose who was doing oriental studies and she had explained to me a little bit about Chinese characters; I was so impressed that she could read these things and had learnt to do so at Oxford in a year, that was quite tantalizing, and I decided to do it; I think I responded positively although not sure that I really wanted to do it, imagining that I could back out before getting on the plane; what I think confirmed me was that after I had accepted the offer and had more details of the work I was going to do, I got a report by someone in the British Council who was sent down to vet the place where I was about to be sent and described it as "an oasis of urban squalor in a desert of rural backwardness"; I rather liked the sound of that as really interesting; then I got a letter, the first I have ever got from China, covered in postage stamps because in those days you could only buy very low-value stamps because domestic postage was so cheap and hardly anyone sent letters abroad; it was a letter from the V.S.O. volunteer who was then at the college that I was about to go to; she had been the first one there and had been there for a year, and it was in rather cranky language telling me at great length why I should on no account accept the offer; she said she was being spied on, having a rotten time, the place was terrible, and judging by the letter it had certainly had an impact on her; I read it several times and it really enthused me as it sounded so terrible that I really had to go and see it for myself; it made something that might have seemed a bit boring or remote really interesting, if for negative reasons; so I went off to China with some enthusiasm; I was given a three-week training course in teaching English, of which I had a little experience having done so in Germany, and a two-week course in the basics of Chinese, then I was put on a plane to Beijing, met, and taken on to Hunan with another volunteer from England; we were placed together in this college and I had a very interesting two years; it was in a city called Xiangtan, quite well-known in China because Chairman Mao was born nearby, and about 30 miles south of Changsha, a small industrial town in the middle of the rice belt of Central China; I was there at an interesting time (1982) because the Chinese had just started to seek foreign teachers in large numbers, to teach English; there was a policy of teaching everybody English so I was involved in training students who would become English teachers and also helping middle-aged language teachers to improve their English; in some cases they had been Russian teachers but now needed to retrain as English teachers, so I had quite a mixture of students of different ages and backgrounds which was very interesting; I did like the Chinese; I have to say that it was very weird at first, I was obviously unprepared, had never been to Asia or to a Socialist country, and I think for the first three months after arriving I endured some form of culture shock; I wasn't depressed but I used to sleep and inordinate amount of time, if I taught from 9am to 11am I would then go back to bed and sleep for two or three hours until my next class, and it about three months before a normal sleep rhythm and starting to find a normality in life

1:07:48:00 Many things shocked me; the complete lack of privacy or any value placed on privacy in China at that time was quite striking; people constantly talked about other people and interfered in other people's lives; I recall the first time I went to see the doctor at the college clinic because I was feeling unwell with a minor stomach complaint, I was shocked when the whole leadership of the college turned up later to commiserate; they had obviously all been briefed on my symptoms in great detail whereas I was used to the idea of medical confidentiality which certainly didn't exist in China; in that position in a small town in a Chinese unit that wasn't used to dealing with foreigners, you were so bombarded with the unedited realities of Chinese life that after a time it became normal, it took about three months I think; I was given a rather large apartment with three rooms; it was rather basically equipped but quite spacious, but I was given a colour television which only I and the other foreign teacher had, everyone else had black and white TVs, and I think they had sent someone specially to Shanghai to buy the colour TVs; it wasn't a lot of use to me because there were only two channels and both awful propaganda and very monotonous singing performances, but it was colour and enormously popular with young children on the campus; I would find that almost every evening around 6pm there would be a tapping on my door and there would be a gaggle of small children, usually with snotty noses, and in winter they would come in padded, slightly malodorous clothes as they'd been out in the rain, and very politely ask to watch the television; I rather suspected as I got more insightful about the society that their parents often encouraged them to do this in order to get them off their hands for a few hours as they lived in very cramped conditions, but as the flat was spacious and I had no interest in watching television I would leave them with it in one room and go and mark books or do lesson preparation or learn Chinese in another room; no one ever came to get them back so I would shoo them out at about 10pm, but with anything like that everybody knew what was happening, there were no secrets; I rather liked it as it was quite nice to have the company

1:11:27:16 One of our classes - we would have two classes in two years - had many members who were around my own age or a little bit older with a few middle-aged people, were qualified teachers who had been sent for retraining and to improve their knowledge of English, and we used to socialize quite a lot, so a couple of times a week they would come along and drink beer which we would provide for them, occasionally we would organize dances, occasionally go on trips out together; so that was quite nice socially; then there was a couple of staff in the college - if an individual Chinese sought to cultivate a special relationship with the foreigners they were at great risk of being criticized, not that we were seen negatively but would be seen as too individualistic, trying to stand out too much; so the very small number that wanted to do that were welcome to do so from my point of view, used to sneak in after dark because the campus had no lighting outside and even the internal lighting was quite dim, so relatively easy to do so without others knowing; mostly it was group socializing which was much safer; the class monitor would report back if necessary but people were not going to get into trouble for socializing as a group with us; so it was socially OK; I was quite busy and spent a lot of time learning Chinese, which I loved and enjoyed going out and using it; I initially asked for a teacher but there were a couple of problems, one was that everyone spoke in Hunan dialect and I thought I better learn standard Mandarin pronunciation, so I got hold of some cassette tapes from Beijing Language Institute and the college got me some books; the other problem was that their idea of how to teach a language was very different from my idea of how to learn it, so I mostly learnt it independently although I occasionally asked someone to help me, and just go out and try and speak it; I decided that I should learn to write it at the same time as learning to speak; I suppose partly the books were structured in that way, but also because learning to read and write was as useful as learning to speak; I couldn't write home to anyone in England without putting the address in Chinese as well as English as the post office wouldn't accept it in those days; if I couldn't read I wouldn't know what anything was because everything was written only in Chinese in the city where I was living, and you would have been lost without it; so I put a equal effort in learning to read and write and learning the spoken language

1:15:30:08 It was the early opening and reform period and that was one reason we were there; I remember, for example, there had been a recent change prior to my arrival which was still being commented on which was that farmers were allowed to bring surplus produce into town and sell it themselves directly on the streets; so every morning very early, bicycle carts and wheelbarrows would come in from the fields and you could get a much better selection of fresh food by buying directly from the farmers along the street; one of the impacts of this was that although city people benefited from improved supply, my students and fellow teachers used to moan a lot that the reforms were more beneficial to the farmers than anyone else because they were all getting rich; this was quite ironic considering what subsequently happened as people in cities have done much better from the reform period, but in the early stage it appeared to be the opposite; there was also a certain amount of political uncertainty about where things were going, and I was there for the last Leftist campaign in 1983; it was a campaign to eradicate spiritual pollution which broke with an article in the Peoples Daily saying that China was in danger of being undermined by culturally polluting Western influences; the Left had gained the upper-hand briefly in Beijing; this was quite a troubling period because briefings were cascaded down to every work unit, including my college, and every work unit was instructed to go and fulfil a quota of discovering sources of spiritual pollution, and there were some rather vague instructions about Western influence, all couched in very ambiguous language; we were told about it by Chinese friends and it sounded rather worrying, so we decided to tackle it head on; my fellow British teacher, Tania and I, marched off to the college foreign affairs office and asked for guidance on whether in the light of the campaign to eradicate spiritual pollution we were likely to be considered sources of it; they said they didn't know and were trying to work it out, but thought we were probably OK and would ask the higher leaders; I suppose the same thing happened in the handful of colleges and universities in Hunan that employed foreigners because a couple of days later we were informed that we were invited to a banquet in Changsha, the Provincial capital, to be briefed by the education authorities on the Province's campaign; we had the banquet and there followed a speech from a senior dignitary who waffled on about the campaign and the importance of it and concluded with a reassuring statement that in no way should we be concerned that this would target us; we were not allowed to ask questions as the dignitary had to leave and he was busy; I was quite worried because I had recently started teaching 'Sons and Lovers' with my teachers' class of young adults, and this was because we had run out of interesting things to study and D.H. Lawrence definitely wasn't on the proscribed list, but I had managed to borrow a set from the British Council in Beijing; they absolutely loved it and lapped up every page and I was just a bit worried that I was going to get nailed; I remember being asked while the campaign was going on; it only lasted a week but they had obviously had a sniff around to see what I was teaching, and one of the Communist Party people who didn't speak English enquired about D.H. Lawrence; I responded by saying that Lawrence's work should be encouraged as an exposé of the evils of capitalist mine-owners and how they oppressed the English workers of the time; I knew enough about China to wrap it up in an appropriate Chinese-Marxist language and it seemed to convince them that they didn't need to enquire further into 'Sons and Lovers'; a week later the campaign collapsed as the anti-Left gained the ascendency, and there was another editorial in the Peoples Daily announcing that the whole thing was called off; it was a very odd week, and the last of a series of left-wing campaigns going back to the fifties; it was quite interesting to live through that but in some ways a rather zany experience

1:21:45:09 While there I didn't feel I was under surveillance; what there was was a general lack of privacy which applied to everyone and was the culture at the time; most people slept in communal dormitories - the teacher training class were four to a dormitory, the student, six; living accommodation units were small so I don't think people set much store by privacy; at that time in China, and when I was back in the late eighties with the British Council, I recall a number of cases where I encountered very distressed foreigners, non-Chinese teaching in Chinese institutions, who became quite mentally ill, and it seemed quite symptomatic of this that they believed that they were under constant surveillance when it was clear to me that they weren't; many of the teachers that went to China at that time, like me, found it quite a positive experience and subsequently returned to China or came back with largely happy memories, as it was for Chinese who came here in the eighties to study - a deeply challenging experience because of the huge cultural difference and how ill-prepared we mostly were as there was really no one who could tell us much about it before we encountered it; my experience was that a minority became distressed or mentally ill as a result and had to leave; I had to deal with some of those when I worked later in the British Embassy for the British Council; although I have no data I speak with authority that it did happen and my observation was that in those situations people tended to believe they were under surveillance but some of the examples they would give were so implausible that I was something in their head and they were paranoid; I was never troubled by surveillance at all and got used to the lack of privacy and learnt to manage it, and learnt how to disappear and go off radar which for my sanity I needed to do

1:24:43:00 I came back in 1984, and did an M.Phil. in Cambridge; learning Chinese was interesting and I learnt quite a lot in the previous two years in Hunan; I had started to become interested in linguistics when I was at Oxford and did some optional papers towards my degree; I thought it would be quite interesting to go back to university and do some linguistics, and maybe I would find I liked it enough to follow an academic career; I was quite pragmatic about it; it was difficult to see how you could apply for a job back in the UK in those days if you were living in China because there was no e-mail, the journey was long and expensive, and you weren't likely to persuade anyone to employ you by writing letters from the middle of China; it wasn't even fashionable or normal to be living in the middle of China wearing a Mao suit, so I thought it was pointless trying to apply for any attractive job, not that I really knew what I wanted to apply for, but it made a lot of sense to go back to university; I didn't go back to Oxford because the linguistics Masters course was two years long and I didn't want to make a two year commitment; I learnt that Cambridge had a one year course and thought I would find out whether I liked the subject enough to contemplate continuing with academic work; if not I could apply for jobs as an Oxbridge student, not as some sort of weirdo in the middle of China, writing letters with stamps all over the back of the envelope; there was another reason that I hadn't thought of at the time which was a good reason for going to Cambridge, and particularly going to Wolfson, as I thought I would enjoy a mature modern college more having already been to a Medieval college at Oxford, and that as an older student with some life-experience I might not fit in at a place with people like I had been three or four years before; at Wolfson there were lots of international students and quite a few from China and the wider Chinese world; this turned out to be very valuable to me because I found that my experiences from China were so strange to most people here as to lose their attention after a minute or two; they would ask you politely what it was like and as soon as you tried to explain it people would switch off as it was so much outside their frame of reference; I think I would have been distressed if I hadn't had a few people around who could listen sympathetically and actually believe that what I was saying was accurate and not some sort of paranoid fantasy; I enjoyed the course and got my M.Phil. but did conclude in that year that I didn't want to settle down to university life, but I did find my next move which was joining the British Council, really more from a love of working in China than the council itself; I had got to know it while working as a teacher in China because they lent us books and were generally helpful, and I thought it would be a very interesting way to go back to China so I joined the British Council as they said I would be guaranteed a posting there within a couple of years of joining; that made me drop other ideas for various careers and decide to give that a try

1:29:09:04 I worked for eighteen months in Headquarters on a trainee posting; I was assigned to the department that oversaw relations with Communist countries which included China but otherwise East European countries; that was quite an interesting job; I was briefed by the relevant departments to brief British lecturers who were going to Eastern Europe behind the Iron Curtain, advising them on the various perils that might await them in Prague and so on, and I had a little bit to do with China; after eighteen months I was given a posting to Beijing which would begin a few months later, and I was allowed to take six-months off for language study to improve my Chinese ahead of working in Beijing; the British Council was very flexible; they let me go to Taiwan, which I arranged myself, for six months and enrolled as a student in a university in Taipei; I chose to go to Taiwan simply because I had found out that there you could live normally amongst Chinese speaking people, whereas in China at that time as a foreign student you were in a certain category, would be put in a building full of other foreign students, eat with them etc., but in Taipei at that time I could lodge with a local family and have all my social life with local people; during the six months I spoke almost entirely in Chinese, and arrived in Beijing as a British diplomat with a suspicious Taiwanese accent, but I was quite fluent; this was in 1987; I was with the British Council until 2007, so just over twenty years

1:31:47:15 In 1987, the first thing that I found was that it was quite frustrating because in my previous two years in China I had been in a Chinese unit so had really been in China; at that time when I had briefly stayed with the British Council staff member in Beijing who had kindly put me up for a couple I days in Beijing, I had been taken by the, what seemed to me, luxurious quality of accommodation provided; when it became the reality for me I found it very frustrating because I was in a ghetto of foreign diplomats who socialized with each other round the pool at the Embassy compound at the weekend; although we had some Chinese staff who supported us, it was a bubble, and I didn't find most of the people in it particularly interesting; what frustrated me also was the incuriosity about China of quite a lot of the people working in the embassies generally; there were some who were genuinely interested but for others it was just a step in a global career, with no particular interest in finding out about China or knowing much about it outside the narrow confines of their duties; I took every opportunity to escape; I remember the first long weekend I got which was a few weeks after I arrived, a Chinese holiday weekend, I simply walked to the train station and took a train at random and went a few hundred miles and climbed Mt. Tai in Shandong Province, and tried to mix with Chinese people, and finally began to feel that I had arrived back in China six weeks after I returned; I stayed in a local Chinese hostel where both foreigners and Chinese could stay; as a foreign diplomat that that time in China there were limits to how close you could get to Chinese people without risking getting them into trouble, so much of my social life was with the international community; fortunately my work involved supporting Chinese students to go to the UK, it brought me a lot into contact with Chinese academics, student, so once I got into the job I found it was actually quite interesting; it wasn't all office-based, or in the diplomatic bubble, and it was one of the most interesting jobs in the Embassy at that time; there were also quite a lot of opportunities to explore; I got a car which was quite a rare thing in China in those days to have a private car, and we were allowed to drive to quite a lot of places; it was quite interesting to drive deep into the countryside, to the mountain areas, and to go an chat to farmers and so on; so I got enough of a real China experience once I had worked out how to do it, to quite enjoy the nearly four years I was in that posting; I left in December 1990 so I was in Beijing on 4th June 1989; I had met my wife-to-be, Moira, who was in Beijing on a sabbatical year studying Chinese dance at the Dance Academy, so on that day we had taken some visiting friends from England out to see the Eastern Tombs, outside Beijing, and heard on the BBC Home Service that there had been trouble, so it took a few hours to drive back into the city; things had been going on for weeks; I didn't have friends involved with it; what I do recall is chatting to some of the students during the previous weeks, students from the universities that I knew about, and what struck me was the great vagueness of whatever they were demonstrating for; I say that simply because that is what I encountered; when I asked people why they were there, what was it about, it was a bit like me and Catholicism, they were just doing what everyone else was doing as far as I could see; that was my wife's experience as well which she shared with me; at the Dance Academy in Beijing and one day some students said let's all go to Tiananmen Square as it's what everyone's doing; these things are in the past and I don't really have a huge amount of evidence, but I would say with some confidence that quite a lot of people were involved because imitative behaviour; I would say that the leaders where not really sure about what they wanted; also I don't think there was ever a particularly cogent agenda set out or any intention to set one out; I don't recall it; they seemed very normal students but also very unclear about why they were there; they had a number of complaints, from the quality of food on campus to the cost of living and general dissatisfaction, but they didn't seem to me to have signed up to any particular vision of the future; I was very surprised it ended as violently as it appears to have done simply because it seemed to me to be diminishing in intensity in the weeks prior to that; my expectation by the end of May was that it would quietly fizzle out as things often do; I didn't expect it would be ended abruptly; afterwards, things were somewhat tightened up, particularly so in Beijing and in Peking University; I recall that for about a year afterwards we weren't able to go into some of the university campuses; we were still able to do our job; I stayed for a few days after 4th June with a reduced Embassy staff as quite a lot of British students wanted to leave because they weren't sure what would happen; there were a few who refused to leave contrary to the wishes of their parents and their home universities in the UK, which was quite a dilemma; there was quite a lot to do for a couple of weeks and then there was really nothing to do as things got very quiet; so I went early on Summer leave and got married, as it happens; Moira and I went back to Beijing in the late Summer-early Autumn of 1989, and to some extent for us life returned to normal fairly quickly; I think university programs were quite affected for about a year but most of the routine of diplomatic life and the British Council became normal again, perhaps quicker that we had felt it would; I did three postings in China; the second one was in Hong Kong in the mid-90s; I was living in Hong Kong with the family but my duties were mainly in the south of mainland China; I travelled a lot; the final posting was as Director of the British Council from 2000-2007, so back in Beijing; in between I worked in British Council H.Q. in London, generally dealing with the Council's relationship with Whitehall, so mandarin or mandarins thus ending my twenty-year career

1:43:21:21 On the phenomenal growth of China, as early as my first time in China in the early 80s things were changing with the very small beginnings of what became the Chinese market economy; nevertheless most people, including myself, expected China to remain a society based on the bicycle for the rest of my lifetime; we used to joke about what the place would be like if all the cyclists had cars - can't possibly happen, unimaginable, would never work; but that was precisely what happened except many of they have two cars; on the other hand I do remember my British colleague in Hunan, Tania, who had done a degree in Chinese at Leeds and previously spent a year in Beijing as a student, and certainly wiser to China than I was, saying that this was all going to change, and she actually broadly foresaw that China would become a rising economic power; that that would happen under the leadership of the Communist Party, that China in our lifetimes would be massively influential and rich; she was quite clear about this, and precisely right; so that at least opened my eyes to the possibility but I don't think I was a confident believer in China rising to the extent that it has done in the last three decades; I was back in the late 80s; I think it wasn't really until the mid-90s when I was back in Hong Kong, and looking at what was happening in South China, noticing how much money quite a lot of people seemed to have, that it occurred to me that all this stuff which was being stated in the West at the time about a Socialist country without democracy couldn't possibly become very wealthy, was probably about to be proved wrong; it was the quite dramatically growing affluence of individuals that made me feel that; it seems to me there have been two quite different sides to the rise of China as an economic power; the one that is rather more talked about and commented on in the West is the role of the State, so massive national champions that have been built, gargantuan infrastructure projects, which is very important, but another aspect which is commented on a little less has been the release of Chinese entrepreneurial energy which has depended on a somewhat more permissive policy which was gradually being implemented, not driven by Government but by individual enterprise in China; without that there was no way that China would have achieved the economic strength that it has in such a short time; being in South China in the mid-90s I was very exposed particularly to that side; as you got further south in China it appears to me that the proportion of the State in economic growth diminishes somewhat and the rise of the private sector grows; it was seeing how creative, energetic and successful people were becoming in large numbers in Guangdong and elsewhere at the time; I already knew that the Chinese Government could organize large projects as I'd seen that in Beijing; when I saw how smart at business the Cantonese had become then I began to put two and two together and decided that it might equal more than four

1:48:01:01 I find the question of what will happen in the next ten years, difficult, because I think there is a problem with predicting the future which is not predictable because a number of things might happen; prediction if it is right is purely by chance; I am more optimistic about the future of China; I actually think that a great deal has been achieved in the last 40 years; I was arguing with a British friend the other day who was teasing me because I'm now working part-time for a Chinese State company as part of my retirement consultancy work; I was being quite defensive about the more positive aspects of modern China, the economic progress and the freedom that most people enjoy to travel the world, choose educational pathways for their children in a way that they couldn't in the past; he said he knew they had lifted millions of people out of poverty but...and I couldn't resist pointing out that millions was a huge underestimate, actually hundreds of millions fewer people are poor in China than when I first went there thirty years ago; these aren't small things to be dismissed with a "but", it seems to me, whatever one feels about any other aspect of China, these are the difference between misery and some degree of well-being and prosperity for quite a significant proportion of our species, and we shouldn't belittle it for the sake of political correctness; I feel that quite strongly; I think also that rising educational levels in China, like the economic progress has been a combination of quite well-organised top-down policies and huge individual effort and commitment; so that commitment to learning from families and young people combined with policies that have made many years of state education free and of reasonable quality compared to many countries, is actually leading to significant advances in educational level for very large numbers of Chinese people; that, I suppose, is my main basis for optimism; China has huge problems, particularly of environmental degradation, and problems also that it's well-being has depended on the high levels of economic growth which hardly anyone, including in China, thinks is sustainable for much longer; those are enormous challenges that China faces but I think the best basis for optimism is simply that most people are much smarter than people were thirty years ago; they know a lot more, they can do a lot more, and that to me is very important as I have worked in education for most of my life