Jeremy Bowen: You’ll never get into journalism, they said
My father worked for the BBC in Wales. He was the editor of the Welsh equivalent of the Today programme called Good Morning Wales. My mother was a sports photographer – the only woman on the touchline at Cardiff Arms Park. She fitted that in with having quite a lot of children: three boys were produced in rapid succession, and then a sister came along when I was 11, and when I was in the sixth form my parents had another daughter because my mother wasn’t even 40.
I was quite ill as a child. I had asthma until I hit puberty, and if you had asthma in those days they told you to stay in bed for weeks at a time, and then when I was 11 I got meningitis and missed nearly a whole term. So I had loads of time off school but I used to read a lot, and I ended up being quite good at English and history. The downside to missing so much school meant I didn’t make that many friends until I was in my fourth year. I was much happier after that.
We lived in a suburb of Cardiff called Cyncoed, which was a nice place to grow up. Cardiff High School was my local comprehensive school and I was there from 1971 to 1978. I walked to school, which took 10 or 15 minutes depending on how much I was dawdling. It wasn’t a bad school, but it wasn’t brilliant either, somewhere in the middle probably, although it’s apparently quite good now. It was a mixed school, which felt completely natural; I think mixed schools are better because the world is mixed – and girls are a moderating influence on testosterone-fuelled, pimply boys. Some snogging went on, but it was pretty innocent – and anyway the girls our age would tend to go out with older boys, especially if they had cars.
There were one or two really good teachers. My history teachers, Dr Davies and Mrs Williams, were very good, and there was a wonderful English teacher, Mrs Fox, who drummed into me the importance of the apostrophe – and used to dock marks from essays if anyone screwed them up. Actually it’s pretty simple how to use an apostrophe correctly, but it’s amazing how many people can’t, and now, thanks to Mrs Fox, I’m something of an apostrophe fascist. Everyone liked my economics teacher, Mr Francis, but I got an E, so I don’t think I picked up much economics from him: it was all about the Demand Curve and the Multiplier Effect and that sort of incomprehensible stuff, although I never really applied myself there. I was probably a bit lazy.
Mr Palmer produced the school plays and I was very enthusiastic about them, although I wasn’t much of an actor, so I never had a very big role. The Christmas play one year was JB Priestley’s When We Are Married and I played a local journalist called Fred Dyson and was just saying things like “Ey up” and other Yorkshire mannerisms in the background. I also played Pedant in The Taming of the Shrew. I only had 20 lines but I still remember most of them: Sir, by your leave: having come to Padua/To gather in some debts, my son Lucentio/Made me acquainted with a weighty cause/Of love between your daughter and himself.
This was south Wales, so rugby was something all boys would play. I was very keen on sport and used to love playing rugby, and eventually got into the second XV – never the first XV, mind – but I was a very enthusiastic member of the second XV. Our fixture list was against some pretty tough comprehensives from the Valleys who thought we were an effete bunch of pushovers in Cardiff, so some of the games were rough, real grudge matches, and if anyone on our team got punched we’d punch them back, which was regarded as part of the game. I got injured a bit, nothing serious, a couple of broken bones and some cuts and bruises, but someone hit me once and I hit him back so hard he had to go off, and I was very happy about that.
On the weekends I’d meet up with my school pals at the local pub, the Three Arches. We were all underage but no one seemed to mind. The girls would have halves of lager and lime and the boys would mostly drink Brains SA, Best Bitter – people didn’t drink fancy lagers in those days, I mean you could buy a lager, but I think they were meant to be for diabetics.
When I was about 15 the council sent a careers officer to talk to people at the school. He asked what I wanted to do, and I said I was thinking of being a journalist: the jobs your parents do are familiar, so it didn’t seem at all exotic for me to work in the media, plus I always wanted to travel and see what the world was like. His response to me was, “First of all you’ll never get into journalism, forget that idea,” it was just not within his ken. And then he said, “If you want to travel, these are the jobs for you, my boy: join the Navy or become a hotel manager.”
I applied to Oxford and didn’t get in, I basically screwed up the interview. I was super nervous and hadn’t thought it through very much, and started talking about the Demand Curve – which is one of the key parts of economics that I had never really understood in the first place.
UCL and Bristol both made very low offers and I chose UCL since Bristol was a bit too close to home, although I probably would have had a better time there, because being an undergraduate in London with no connections or money was not the easiest thing. One day I was walking to a lecture and saw on a noticeboard someone had stuck up a little flyer saying “Study in Italy: Scholarships available”. Sportingly I ripped it off the board so no one else could take it, and I did a two-year MA at an American graduate school called the School of Advanced International Studies, SAIS. They were based in Washington DC but also had a school in Bologna, Italy, and I did a year in both, which was a fantastic experience, it really opened my eyes to the world.
A lot of my friends from school never left Cardiff and when I go back home – I still call Cardiff home as my mother still lives there – I go for a couple of pints with them, and we still go to the Three Arches, and still drink Brains SA. In the last few years there’ve been a few reunions, which have been quite fun actually. We’re not as young as we were, we’re all in our 60s now with a few more wrinkles, and a lot of my contemporaries have retired, so they’re in a different phase of life as I’m a worker still.
The Making of the Modern Middle East: A Personal Story by Jeremy Bowen is published by Picador
