If you live in the UK, you'd have to have been hiding under a stone all your life not to have heard of Pam Ayres. If you don't -- well, she presents radio and TV programmes, appears on quiz shows and even in a sitcom, but above all she is a poet of a most original kind -- simple in form, very funny, and very perceptive, her poems are hugely loved by millions of people and she was awarded an MBE a few years ago. Mostly she performs them herself, in her distinctive Oxfordshire accent, and you can see her doing that on youtube if you want to -- here's one called They Should Have Asked My Husband, for example.
You might, I suppose, find her silly or irritating, but I've always loved her, which is why I agreed to review a copy of her "eagerly awaited" memoir (not eagerly awaited by me, as I didn't know anything about it, but there you are). It's not the sort of book I usually read -- as you probably know, my present preference is for modern classics of the Virago/Persephone/old Penguin school with the occasional foray into crime -- reading it, rather than committing it. Anyway, be that as it may, the book arrived a week or so ago and I have just finished it, and I enjoyed every minute of it.
I knew very little about Pam's life beyond the fact that she came from somewhere in Oxfordshire and had won a TV contest called Opportunity Knocks in the 1970s. That victory, which launched her on the spectacularly successful career she has pursued ever since, is more or less where this book ends. So, as she was born in 1947, here we have the first twenty five or so years of her life.
Pam grew up in Stanford in the Vale, a pretty village in the Vale of the White Horse. While not destitute, her parents lived dangerously close to the poverty line, and bringing up their six children, of whom Pam was the youngest, was a constant struggle. Their home was a council house, unattractively situated on the edge of the village. I was actually astonished to read that not only did it not have a bathroom but that the lavatory consisted of a bucket with a seat over it, poorly concealed behind a door in the kitchen, which had to be emptied periodlically into a hole dug at the end of the garden. In my middle-class ignorance, I thought that kind of thing had disappeared before the second world war. But despite this and other privations (not, of course, perceived as such as they just seemed normal), the young Ayres led a generally peaceful existence, cared for by an obviously loving and intelligent mother, even though the greatest treats available were the occasional poached pheasant or a wobbly bicycle ride around the local countryside.
That Pam turned out as she did is something of a miracle, really, given the disadvantages of her childhood and her schooling. Having done well at primary school, she somehow failed the eleven-plus exam and thus ended up not at the grammar school, but at the secondary modern. This distinction was massively important in the 1950s -- while a grammar-school child might well go on to university or at least to a good job, anyone attending a secondary modern would probably leave school with no qualifications and be doomed to a live of drudgery. Pam, who is clearly extraordinarily bright, slid even further down the scale at first, ending up in the C (lowest) stream, and though she soon got herself back up to the A stream, she left school with little to look forward to in the way of a working life. Several more or less dead-end jobs followed, in which Pam did not exactly excel. In fact she frequently encountered rejections on the grounds of lacking 'the necessary aptitude'. Even when she managed, with the help of a boyfriend, to qualify as a draughtswoman for the RAF, she found the work a huge struggle as she really had never got the hang of it. This pattern could have continued for the rest of her life, but Pam loved both writing and performing, and slowly this became increasingly important in her life, starting in small folk clubs and local venues and ending, of course, with the appearance on Opportunity Knocks, since when she has taken off like a rocket.
All this is extraordinarily encouraging and inspiring, and makes the most enjoyable reading, narrated as it is with great honesty, charm and quiet wit. You'd have to be a terrific curmudgeon not to warm to Pam and to rejoice in her success, her apparently happy marriage, and her continued optmism and enthusiasm. She really appreciates what life has brought her, and good luck to her, I say.
