How my university days at Aber opened and closed doors in life

By HILARY GAVIN

IF THERE is one scene that sums up the central message of the 1980s’ movie Educating Rita, it is – for me – when the titular character Rita, a working-class Open University student, can’t open the door to her university tutor’s study.

It’s been many years since I last watched the film adaptation of playwright Willy Russell’s stage comedy, but I think Rita delivers the immortal words: “I’m comin’ in aren’t I? It’s that stupid bleedin’ handle on the door,” in the opening scene.

As far as I can recall Rita, a practical, quick-witted Liverpudlian hairdresser, has troubles with the doorknob before she stumbles into her tutor Frank’s study, and admonishes her lecturer by saying: “You should get that fixed.”

And when the hapless, alcoholic academic Frank gives Rita the lame excuse that he’d meaning to do so, Rita hits back, saying: “We’ll that’s no good, always meaning to, is it? Y’should get on with it because one of these days you’ll be shouting ‘come in’ and it will go on for ever and ever because the poor bastard at the other side of the door won’t be able to come in and you won’t be able to get out!”*

Of course, our modern-day society is very different to the Britain of the late Seventies and early Eighties when very few university undergraduates came from working-class backgrounds or had been educated at comprehensive schools.

I was lucky because I went to Bishop Luffa CofE Comprehensive School in Chichester, West Sussex, when I received a good education in classrooms where pupils, on the whole, behaved themselves and knuckled down to study.

In hindsight, I don’t believe I would have achieved my good A-level grades if I’d been brought up in the urban sprawl of Britain’s inner-cities and had had to run the everyday gauntlet of bullies in unruly, anarchic classrooms and playgrounds.

I was lucky too because my family, on my Welsh side, valued schooling and knew that a good education could help you to escape poverty and workplace drudgery.

If you’ve been reading my WordPress site, you’ll know that I didn’t study at OxBridge but rather I read history at Aberystwyth, University of Wales, in the early Eighties – a centre of learning that some snobby academics might eschew.

Like many people of my generation from ordinary blue-collar backgrounds, my sister (a talented artist in her teens) and myself were the first members of our immediate family to gain entry to study at university.

Sadly, it was also the first time I fully appreciated the pressures that some parents from upper-crust families imposed on their public school-educated children to “get top marks at uni”. If I’m honest, I steered well-clear of the plummy-voiced undergraduates who would pick you up on any little academic slip-up.

Luckily, I was drawn to a close circle of down-to-earth university friends who laughed at life’s absurdities and didn’t let them grind them down, and, rather than revere academic snobs, I pitied their straight-jacketed, joyless lives.

If I remember rightly I was sitting my A-levels in Chichester forty-five years ago in June 1981 when a young student called Andrew Alder shot his parents dead at their home in the nearby village of Oving because, according to the court reports, they were angry that their son had failed his exams at Hatfield Polytechnic.

Still, I wished that I’d cottoned on earlier in my life that only the right graduates from the right public schools and universities still got top jobs in the Civil Service, British politics and business in the Eighties, Nineties and Naughties.

Signing off, I should say that I’m writing this blog post in memory of one of my university friends who sadly lost her battle with cancer this week. She left uni and went on to become an English teacher somewhere in the West Country.

Willy Russell wrote the stage play for Educating Rita in 1980 and the movie starring Julie Walters as Rita and Michael Caine as Frank was first shown in 1983 so no doubt my late pal and I discussed the play’s motif in depth as we did other plays, novels and poems as undergraduates at Aberystwyth.

A long time ago now – but still a good grounding in life.

By HILARY GAVIN

Copyright Wednesday, June 3rd, 2026

*Educating Rita (1980), stage play copyright Willy Russell, Commissioned by the Royal Shakespeare Company

Hilary Gavin

Freelance Journalist & Writer

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Hunston

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Tel: 07940 444664

Email: grumpywoman@hilarygavin.blog

Hilary Gavin

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