mental-health – NOTTINGHAM CREATIVE WRITING HUB

Claire Suzanne and Laura De Vivo met when they started the BA Creative Writing at NTU in 2022. Here, they reflect on joining the course, and on an enduring friendship.

Claire and Laura, arms around one another, looking at the camera. Laura wears a Nottingham Forest shirt, and Claire holds a Notts County certificate. — *Laura (left) and Claire (right). Both are Premier League, in our opinion.*

It was Open Day, January 2022. I remember it well, squinting in the sun as I pulled into the Clifton Campus car park for the first time.

I’d driven twenty miles to get there and was surprised to find the drive quite relaxing. I turned off my trusty sat nav and followed the directions to the Pavilion building, where my first port of call awaited – a free cuppa! I browsed the vibrant pink stands, chatting to friendly staff and feeling a happy, welcoming vibe, before finding what I was really there for: the BA Creative Writing taster session.

Prospective students chatted loudly, yet the atmosphere was peaceful. It wasn’t a big lecture theatre like I had imagined at uni, a place where I would be lost in the crowd, just a number, unknown to lecturers. No, NTU seemed different, and I became increasingly hopeful that the uni I’d written off as being too far from home could be a reality for me after all.

This was confirmed when I noticed… another mature student. She was at the front, me at the back, yet we both put our hands up to ask the same question: ‘Are there many mature students on the course?’

Like me, Laura had been out of education for a long time, and we hit it off immediately. After pairing up for our poetry task, ‘I come from’, we found out we were both parents, in the same age bracket, and that we’d had a similar life experience.

Afterwards, we headed over to the refectory for another free cuppa, where we exchanged numbers. Chatting to Laura was natural, authentic – it felt like we’d known each other for years. ‘You’d better choose NTU,’ she said before she left.

Her words resonated as I sat on a bench, later on that warm winter’s day, surrounded by trees and cradling my third cuppa. I distinctly remember looking around at the clean, modern, sunlit campus and feeling content that this was it, NTU was where I wanted to be. So, I rang my husband.

‘I love it!’ I squealed down the phone.

Before I knew it, I was enrolled – I was a uni student about to embark on what I knew would be a challenging but exciting journey to my degree. Laura and I got on like a house on fire and another student, Sam, regularly joined us for lunch. Sam is twenty years younger than us, but, at uni, age doesn’t matter. Like when the campus SU venue The Point was playing 90s music and Sam laughed when I told him I had the single on cassette!

As well as for lunch, Laura and I regularly met for a pre-lecture coffee after a hectic school run. We laughed together, moaned together, shared ideas and gave feedback on each other’s work. We were similar in our determination to succeed: both perfectionists, chasing a First in every assignment and revelling in the fact that, for the first time ever, we’d both found where we wanted to be. We even shared the same interests, hitting the gym in our joint determination not to age gracefully, and we joined WRAP, the university-wide reading and writing group, where we were published and read our work to an audience – something I thought I would never do, but being with a friend made everything easier.

When I was on campus with Laura, I wasn’t just a mother, just a wife, cleaner, tidier, payer of bills. At uni I could be me, the version of me that hadn’t been through years of stress and burnout. I was young again.

Laura will graduate this summer, whereas I will stay on as a part time student. It will be strange not seeing her around campus anymore. But I know she will be successful, wherever the future takes her. And I know I have made a friend for life at uni, something I didn’t think would happen when I was a forty-year-old first year!

CLAIRE SUZANNE

I had been checking, checking and re-checking my email for weeks. What I was expecting to see was something like ‘Sorry you don’t fit the criteria for our university,’ because I am an introvert, always convinced I will lose out. And then there it was, and all I had to do was open it and I’d know. I paced my living room a few times, hands on my head, as I waited for my dream to come crashing down on top of me. I clicked the email open and instead saw a big green circle saying congratulations.

I’d done it! My foot was in the door, so now I needed to have a good look at the place. I pulled in the car park, my husband and children in the car with me, and as much as I wanted to share this with them, I needed to do it alone. I watched the car drive away, leaving me standing there.

With my heart pounding I walked in the direction of the Pavilion – my new dress, bought for the occasion, billowing in the wind. I joined the queue of young people entering the building, many with their parents, and was handed a pink NTU tote bag filled with information. I quickly found the room I needed for the Creative Writing chat, slid into an empty seat, and waited. Everyone looked so young, I thought. I must be insane.

More people sheepishly arrived and found seats at tables that were empty. Everyone seemed to look a bit nervous. Then the lecturer, Anthony Cropper, appeared in his glasses, loud shirt and big smile [editor’s note: judge for yourself here!], and I quickly warmed to him. He introduced us to a poem exercise he called ‘Where I come from’, and said it was important we paired up. I had spotted a lady behind me and asked if she might like to work with me.

That was the start of it, and soon it felt like I’d known Claire my whole life. Later that day, we shared lots of facts about ourselves, the many hats we wear and how big this dream was. We both needed practical answers and so went in hunt of lecturers to ask our multitude of similar questions.

Just as we were about to leave, I asked if she’d like to swap numbers and learnt she had other options open to her. I didn’t, and I’d found someone I already knew I didn’t want to lose. ‘Make sure you chose NTU!’, I joked.

A few days later, Claire texted, telling me she’d chosen NTU. I was ecstatic. Now I knew I could do it. On our first day we found our spot in class, our spot on the balcony, our spot in the refectory. Over the first few weeks we found that some other students migrated towards us, and us to them. Slowly, Sam became one of our little group of fast friends, and it has remained so for three years. A lecturer refers to us as the Thrilling Three, a title I’m happy to take!

Life at uni as a mature student has been made wonderful by making friends. At our induction we were told, jokingly: ‘look at the person next to you, they might be at your wedding’. I’m married, so that won’t be the case for me. But in a place where I didn’t expect to find anyone, I found people who will be me my friends for life. And that has helped to make this life-altering decision priceless.

LAURA DE VIVO

Jonathan Taylor, A Physical Education: On Bullying, Discipline and Other Lessons (Goldsmiths, 2024), reviewed by NTU Creative Writing PhD student Julie Gardner.

In the first chapter of A Physical Education, Jonathan Taylor – an author, editor, lecturer and critic who lives in Leicestershire – writes: ‘I want to explore the hall of mirrors that is criticism and autobiography […]. I want to explore the uses and abuses of educational power from a subjective, rather than pseudo-objective, perspective.’ In a book that wears its evident scholarship lightly, Taylor reflects on his own experience in educational institutions, referencing literary criticism, philosophy and sociology – and achieves his aims with clarity and grace.

Having been a victim of workplace bullying myself, at a large primary school where I was deputy-head, perhaps I was looking for some kind of validation of my experiences as I read this book. I found it, but not until Chapter 7, ‘Politics’, when I recognised in Professor Caligula many of the behaviours that had broken my physical and mental health to such an extent that I finally resigned from a job that I had loved. As Taylor says, ‘most bullying is complex, nuanced, full of incongruities and ambiguities.’ As I read the earlier chapters of the book, I found myself thinking, sometimes uncomfortably, about my own behaviour as a teacher, and that of my colleagues. I remembered an incident in the mid 1970s when I had witnessed a boy being asked to remove his plimsoll so the headteacher could hit him with it, and the irony of the child’s ‘thank you sir’ as his shoe was returned to him. As Taylor notes, corporal punishment was banned in British state schools in 1986, when he would have been in his early teens: ‘I was there’, he writes, ‘at that watershed moment. I witnessed the change from a system based on caning to a system based on surveillance, one that attempted to act “on the heart, the thoughts, the will, the inclinations.”’

As is evident from its title, this book is not just about bullying, but also about discipline. Superficially, these are two separate concepts, one acceptable, the other not. ‘Discipline is the legitimate exercise of authority, bullying is illegitimate, abusive, verboten’ – but, as Taylor points out, ‘the problem is that the line between them can easily seem hazy, even arbitrary.’ This haziness can result in a climate in which ‘disciplinary systems reflect, even enable the bullying they were meant to deal with’, and this, Taylor argues, is ‘institutionalised bullying.’

The book is obviously of particular interest and importance to anyone who works in schools or universities, but it does not confine itself solely to educational institutions and is accessible and engaging enough to appeal to a much wider audience. There are observations and memories about family (‘in general’, he writes, ‘the nuclear family is a little machine for bullying’), including a description of Taylor trying (and failing) to cope with the demands of two-year old twins while his wife was out for the afternoon. Ideas from Foucault, Freud, and Hegel are weaved in, alongside characters from Dickens, Kes and the Harry Potter books – all contained within what is essentially memoir. But A Physical Education is more than memoir: it is an invitation for the reader to think about the nature of power, to consider, in the words of Mary Beard, ‘what we mean by the voice of authority and how we’ve come to construct it.’ It challenges the status quo of our (still) overwhelmingly patriarchal and hierarchical society. ‘After all, to question someone’s authority in any hierarchical system is implicitly also to question the system itself, which is responsible for raising that person up according to its own criteria.’

Towards the end of the book is a brief account of a time when Taylor’s experience of being bullied by a particular boy was at its most intense: ‘After being whispered at a hundred times about my lack of British patriotism, defective testicles, and similarity thereof to Adolf Hitler, I lost my temper, stood up, and threw a chair at Lee. He threw one back, accusing me of bullying him.‘ Like most teachers, I can well imagine this scenario. Indeed, I have faced something similar on several occasions. To say it is challenging would be an understatement. Not only does the teacher have very quickly to establish his or her authority, because to fail to do so could lead to complete chaos, there is also (and arguably more importantly) the need to keep pupils and staff safe in a situation which could escalate quickly. The teacher in question in Taylor’s anecdote was a Mrs Dee, by implication someone ‘who refuses to be ventriloquised by the system bearing down on them; someone who understands that violence, discipline, and bullying are not entirely deterministic – that the bullying cycle can be broken.’

It is principally in these many moments of thoughtful unpacking that Taylor challenges ‘commonplace British wisdom’, arguing that ‘less discipline can mean less misbehaviour; less violence can equal less violence. Sometimes, not punishing, not disciplining, not bullying can actually be a sign of strength rather than weakness.’

This is an important book. I hope it is read widely by teachers, academics, and politicians, and by anyone who is still haunted by past bullying.

If you are a Creative Writing student at NTU and would like to contribute a book review to this website, please get in touch with Rory Waterman.

Tag: mental-health

FRIENDS FOR LIFE AT NTU: FORTY-SOMETHINGS CAN HAVE SOCIAL LIVES TOO!

BOOK REVIEW

Jonathan Taylor, A Physical Education: On Bullying, Discipline and Other Lessons (Goldsmiths, 2024), reviewed by NTU Creative Writing PhD student Julie Gardner.