I Survived Huddersfield Polytechnic, a Reminiscence

[Slim]

Link here

[Thenop]

Lovely Slim, full of fond memories you kept which I think is quite precious. All those little details bring the story alive.

I never went to college, that rite of passage was not for me but I can imagine what a student house would feel like and from what I know, this sounds quite peaceful.

As an aside: I heard of Huddersfield only after purchasing a 12" of Adrian Smith's penned Maiden classic Wasted Yeard which has, on side B, a track dedicated to their manager: The Sherriff of Huddersfield.

[Slim]

Thanks but it is in essence a dark and difficult memory. I've long wanted to write about it, to crystallise it in a short memoir. But I dug up something really toxic here, I surprised myself when I confronted what had happened and it's taken me a couple of days to get over it.

I posted this on the I Went To Huddersfield Poly and Survived page on Facebook and had this response from a woman who attended the Poly in the early '80s.

James - thank you so much for writing this. Not everyone makes it through and having the courage to mark that and show how the rest of your life helped you work through it and come back to it with understanding is really something.
I have a story to tell too, but not ready yet. All I can say is that I was diagnosed 3 weeks ago with combined ADHD - at 61 years old. Young women in 1983 didn't have ADHD. Processing this now but finally understanding and letting go of the shame I felt back then.

Your story has helped enormously. Thank you

[Slim]

I've selectively rewritten and polished this and published it to https://medium.com/ so I removed the text and substituted the link instead (first post).

[The Picnic Wasp]

How did I miss this in June? Did I read a different version and post about it then? Perhaps it was a late night thing through beer goggles. A fascinating and touching read. In all honesty I experienced a few eerie parallels with my own experience at a similar, if slightly younger age.

I'm pleased that you enjoyed the satisfaction of achieving a rebirth in a vocational career. I didn't get that for various reasons that perhaps me writing them down might be somewhat cathartic. I don't know if I'm brave enough for that yet.

Also spooky was your girlfriend's name being Janet. If I did post a reply then I bet it is predictably similar.

[Slim]

I'm pleased that you enjoyed the satisfaction of achieving a rebirth in a vocational career. I didn't get that for various reasons that perhaps me writing them down might be somewhat cathartic. I don't know if I'm brave enough for that yet.

I understand that completely. The episode I wrote about here has lurked in the dark reaches of my psyche for my whole life. But writing it down as a finished, composed piece seems somehow to have put it in a box. Also the empathy I got from other people who remember the Poly on Facebook was somehow reassuring. Shallow as it might sound, to get a boatload of thumbs up and heart emojis for recounting an experience which I'm ultimately ashamed of was a comfort, even after all these years.

[Slim]

As an adjunct to this: on Monday night I had the idea of seeing if there were any old British Rail timetables online. I thought I'd try to work out which exact trains I usually used to take between Huddersfield and Hartlepool back in '79/80.

Well there aren't any historic browsable timetables online unsurprisingly, but I did find this:

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.. in downloadable PDF form. Paid £10.

The format is kind of hard to understand for journeys with connecting trains. It's a lot different from the National Rail journey planner.

But I uploaded screen shots to ChatGPT and it figured it out. I was able to see exactly what time I left Huddersfield on the way home to the North East usually, what time I'd arrive in York, how long I'd have to wait for the connecting train to Darlington and so on. And I worked out why I used to change at Thornaby sometimes - if I took a later train, it saved a longer wait for a direct train to Hartlepool from Darlington.

This was my usual journey, as tabulated by ChatGPT:

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You can now do the same journey from Huddersfield on a weekday afternoon 40 minutes quicker. Leave Huddersfield at 12:46, arrive at Hartlepool at 15:06, changing only at Thornaby. Progress! Would have been very handy back in 1979.

[Slim]

So finally, I worked out my depressing return journey, from Hartlepool to Huddersfield. There's only one plausible option, and it's this:

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I had forgotten about that long wait at Darlington but I do remember it now. I remember staring at the brick wall on the other side of the tracks at Platform 4, waiting for the train to York. It took nearly four hours to get back to Huddersfield on a Sunday. It always felt so dismal.