Becoming an Official Youth Leader.- Half chicken half human and Bikers rampant

The National College For The Training Of Youth Leaders was a most extraordinary place full of totally off the wall adults - both students and staff.... We played at studying sociology and youth development and all manner of sensible sounding subjects, but with that weird bunch of misfit adults who were the teachers and students the whole thing took on the feeling of some sort of theatrical farce.

To give you a flavour of it, one student who was a retired policeman from Brighton whose main concern was what would be the product should any kids in his youth club have sex with a chicken.. Would some sort of half human half chicken result from that activity? He went on about such things at great length all through the course. The bit that really depressed me about this was that the teachers allowed him to ramble on about such things and actually entered into serious discussions with him about such unlikely possibilities.....

We also had a nun, who was totally obsessed with bringing the kids to her particular version of God, come what may, and everything she did would have to be subservient to that central drive of hers...   She was Maltese and hardly spoke English. Another was a Sikh who spent a lot of time being rude about The Hari Krishna idiots, as he felt that they were devaluing the Hindu religion...  Odd I thought..   And the rest were all equally weird in one way or another.. and what appalled me was that they all passed at the end of the course, and were thus officially OK to work with kids......

However, all that aside, What did we actually study and how did that go?

Well we were required to work our way through amazingly thick and turgid text books on all aspects of teenage behaviour, with titles like “The development of angst in young adults', written by deadly serious Americans, generally with names like Gretsch, Gretsch and Grutschfeld. Most of these text books took about 1000 pages to demonstrate something that everyone already knew to be true.. Rather like writing a PhD thesis to demonstrate that a circular wheel rolled better than a square one.

Unlike most of my fellow students, I had actually worked with real kids, and thus had a certain amount of practical experience to call upon, but I found very rapidly that if I averred something in one of my “papers” to be the case, it wasn’t accepted by my teachers as it wasn't backed up by several years research. So one day, being fed up with getting my work slammed as unfounded supposition, I for the hell of it, stated my personal opinion on something, but attributed it to some totally imaginary American researchers, quoting the name of my imaginary sources and their equally imaginary books....

And suddenly, lo and behold, I got good marks....

Once again my innate cynicism was confirmed – my teachers had never read any of the text books they insisted we used, or at least no more than the chapters we were discussing in class...

So the class work was pretty hard to swallow, but I soldiered on as I still felt I wanted to be able to work in Youth work and needed their diploma in order to do this at the level I wished to operate at.

One thing in this course, that I did enjoy, and that was the couple of months we were all sent out to do some field work in a real youth club.

In my case this meant working in a youth club in Huddersfield – about 14 miles from Leeds where my sister Sandy, happened to be at university, conveniently, so I stayed with her for that period and drove in my trusty 325 cc Citroen 2CV to work every day over the hills and moors... Beautiful country up there.

Sort of on the edge of this club were a gang of what are now called Bikers, who rode around Huddersfield on their, by British standards, huge motor bikes and looked fierce, and were generally feared by everyone in Huddersfield. I was given this group as a sort of project, and asked to see if I could somehow get them to join the youth club and become civilised members of society.

So, drawing on my experience with street kids from Interaction days, I started to hang out in their chosen cafe, and in due time started to talk to them. And found them to be a bunch of really friendly country kids in fact, not at all fierce and dangerous.. No Hell's Angles them. In fact even though they roared around Huddersfield on those noisy bikes of theirs, they had only dared once to ride the 14 miles to Leeds, which scared the hell out of them....

And I actually did succeed to a degree to get them to join the youth club, and whilst they didn't become exactly civilised, they calmed down markedly... I liked them a lot.

And about 3 months after I had finished my course at that college they suddenly turned up (en masse) at my parent's house in deepest Surrey, having ridden all the way down from Huddersfield, a truly epic trip for those guys.. I was enormously pleased to see them down there, as I really did like them, and was also both impressed by their daring and deeply touched that they were prepared to undertake such a long trip merely to drop in and say hi.

That was the only good thing in that whole experience.

On the other hand, I was severely bollocked once by the Leader of the youth club I was working in, for giving a lift to 2 of the girls from the club who I saw hitchhiking just outside Huddersfield.   He said that I should NEVER do something like that (be alone with teenage girls in a closed place) as I opened myself to a possible charge of rape or at least sexual harassment....  I must have really been pretty innocent in those days, as I had never thought of such a possibility, and it saddened me a lot to have to think like that....

As is always the case, in due time the whole silly experience of learning to be a youth leader was over, I took the exam, and like all the others, I passed with flying colours, and was a fully qualified youth leader....

Hurray!

So the first thing I did when I got home with my shiny new Youth Worker diploma was to nail it to the wall of my studio in my parent's land, take my 9mm pistol and shoot it to shreds,and never used it or looked at it thereafter I was so disgusted.

Many years later, when I needed some sort of proof of my academic qualifications for my work visa in China, I tried to contact this benighted college to get a copy of my diploma, only to discover that the place had been closed for years - not surprisingly - but also that the relevant Ministry had thrown away all their records of who had passed the exam.....

I then returned to Interaction for a while.