Barry Hines is a survivor of an educational system that has no time for academic runts. He was an average, working-class grammar school boy of the fifties, when clever workers’ lads could win through, and average middle-class sons could be pushed through. But to be average, socially and academically, was to be offered a glimpse of a brighter world before being ground into the unrelieved monotony of the colliery weigh office, the town hall, or any of a hundred repositories for boys too sharp to be plumbers but sharp enough to appreciate their fate.
Football and athletics were the saving of Barry Hines. He was an England Grammar Schools footballer and an even-time sprinter, which gave him his only reasons to continue attending an establishment which, otherwise, he found an incomprehensible bore. Even so, he left at the age of 16, and became an apprentice mining surveyor, and with any luck, he might have been a colliery undermanager today. But surveying seemed to involve maths, at which Barry was very average, and since he only wanted to kick the ball and dash about, he returned to school after six months, where, to put it mildly, he played a blinder.
He was still playing a blinder two years later, when time to go out into the world came round again; this time he had it all worked out, He went to carry on footballing and running at Loughborough College, where he would be trained as a teacher of PE, a career which offered unlimited opportunities for a lifetime of football and running.
When he was 21, he read his first novel, and, rather late in terms of the system’s timetable, he developed. Seven years later, he thought he would like to write a small, unsensational novel about what it’s like to be a non-academic kid. He wrote it, and it became the basis of a small, unsensational film; Kes.
Today, Hines still lives in Hoyland Common where his dad was a miner, and he was a teenage football star. It’s a nondescript settlement between Barnsley and Rotherham, much like any other northern mining village - mixed gritstone and brick in a ribbon, with the colliery tip levelled after its heyday, and fields between for dogs and rabbits. And people who think little of literary success, and won’t talk a man silly with praise.
Hines is a quiet, Yorkshire-voiced man of 31, who has two nice kids of his own, and teaches physical education to secondary children in Barnsley. He is the sort of lad I used to fight on the way home from school, out of respect: vigorous looking and a straight talker, who speaks his piece in your teeth and no messing, He recalled how he first realised that there was more to life than sport.
Read a book
“I was in digs with a chap who took English as a second subject, and he had some books like, and one Sunday afternoon, I said, ‘Have got anything worth reading?’ because I was a bit bored, and he said, ‘Have a look at that,’ and it was Animal Farm. I think it was the first novel I’d actually read in my own time, and of my own volition. I’d actually sat down and read a book, and I was 21. Ridiculous. I can’t remember reading anything before.
“Well, I enjoyed that book, and we had this English course at college, and I started doing a few short pieces, descriptions and that kind of thing, and I got decent marks and a bit of encouragement, so then I did one or two stories, and got them in the college magazine, and I started doing a bit of reading of my own in the library. And, I know this sounds like a cliche, but it was like a whole world opening up. I could see. Wheels started turning. I’d never heard of Ernest Hemingway, but when I read his stories I realised there was something special about this simple style, but I couldn’t understand how he got the effect. I realised there was something underneath it, and that’s how the whole thing started to unfold for me.”
He decided that he would write seriously when he was settled, and after two years at a London comprehensive, and a further year at Loughborough, he returned home at the age of 24, married, and started writing Billy’s Last Stand, a play based on the village coalman. Hines was intrigued that the man should live an apparently unrecorded life, untroubled by forms, letters, or officialdom. He wrote with no medium in mind, and at epic length, completing the work in three months, and dispatching it to Alfred Bradley, head of Northern BBC radio drama, because “he sounded like a good bloke to send it to.” The play was eventually produced on the Third Programme in 1966, and today has just finished a run at the Royal Court’s Theatre Upstairs.
On the strength of this success, he gave up teaching full-time, and spent five days a week writing his first novel, The Blinder, which was the story of a schoolboy footballing wizard who also happened to be brilliant academically - autobiography and wish-fulfilment combined, which started life in the unlikely guise of a Loughborough College third year thesis.
“I produced this thing about a lad who discovered aesthetic pleasure in physical education, all very pretentious and important. I didn’t know how the hell they accepted it, because it was nothing to do with physical education, but I couldn’t stand the thought of doing the usual thesis, you know, esoteric subjects like the roll of the intercostal muscles in weightlifting and all that carry on. Anyway, the lad was very average in this thesis, so I thought I’d heighten it a bit all round, and in the novel I made him good at everything, with the result that a lot of people who read the book hate that lad. But I don’t find anything nasty about him; he was just an honest lad.”
There followed a Home Service play about a football fanatic, Continental Size Six, which Hines considers to have been poor melodrama, and then Kestrel for a Knave, which Tony Garnett and Ken Leach used for the film. Hines says he simply tried to show what the life of a non-academic child amounts to - a story with no happy end. And that’s all.
“I thought I would like to show that these kids can do something which is in fact very skilful - not the old tale about them being cobblers and joiners, but something that means they have to get books out of the library. And it’s a technical skill; they’ve actually got to read about it before they can do something like training a hawk. My brother trained a kestrel in these fields at the back, and I wanted to show that kids can do this kind of thing. They can do all kinds of things if only they’re given opportunities.”
Dead end system
“The trouble in school is that you can do so little to help kids because you come up against this dead end of the educational system. I think a comprehensive system is the only answer for these kids, if it is carried through properly. But education reflects the system, rather than changes it. People say it’s an instrument of social change; well, if it is, it’s a bloody slow one. I think education reflects the class system, and the system has to change before education can.”
“The function of a school is to realise the potential that all kids have, and to make them happy. To fit the curriculum to them instead of the other way round. At the moment, we just condition kids for their role in a competitive society, and the old guard insists that school is a different world with all this ‘yes sir, no sir’ stuff. It’s absurd.
“The change will have to come through some kind of revolution, I’m talking about an educated workers’ revolution, and I feel almost embarrassed to talk about it because it sounds as if I’m jumping on a band-wagon. But I’m not; I don’t know much about Marxism, and it’s mainly a conclusion I’ve arrived at personally, through observing the way things are. The problem is, what do you do? Do you write about it, or get on with it? I mean, I wrote a book that was made into a decent film. It showed what it was like, and set the problems out, but does it actually do anything? It rallies the committed I suppose, but what is it actually doing? Sometimes I think I would like to be a full-time writer, but teaching is such a valuable job, and I feel strongly about it. So I think, well, stay in it then. Stop bloody complaining about it and get something done.”
Hines realised a few weeks ago that he no longer opens the Guardian at the sports page first. He starts with arts, and follows with the leader. Now that he has lost the excitement of being a performer, he is concerned with other things than football. Otherwise, he thinks he has changed very little since he was a boy, and he is glad that his life continues to be unremarkable to the folk in the village.
“I’m still Dick Hines’s lad here, and that’s all. There’s no literary talk here, and when I talk to people it’s about people, and about their work. I prefer this kind of existence; it keeps you sane; it keeps the temperature down, and makes you realise what’s important. You see, like my mother, she likes it that I’m a writer and all that, but she prefers the fact that I’m a teacher. That sort of thing brings you down to reality.”
Barry Hines’s ambition is to go on writing and teaching. He’s working on a new novel at the moment, and there’s no sport in it. There’s a bit about teaching in it, but generally he says, it’s just about finding an honourable way of life. He doesn’t have to look too far.
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