September 1973 and I travel from Sheffield to Manchester by train to start a new job. It’s a journey I know well but my notoriously poor sense of space and direction kicks in and I get off the bus from Piccadilly Station at the wrong end of Prestwich.
A fatherly chap sees small, ungainly me struggling with an outsize travel bag, stops his car and offers me a lift. I accept and 10 minutes later after a chat in which I learn his own daughter is a Blue Bell dancer I’m dropped outside the front door of my first digs.
Several years and not much to yack about later, I’m still in North Manchester and walking down Bury New Road very late evening after a reporting job. A seedy character slows his car and offers me a lift. I keep my head down and trot home - by now a Salford bedsit – as fast as my pudgy pins can carry me.
Yeah, I’m still here - and so is journalist Lynn Barber who, 12 years before me, was picked up by an attractive guy twice her age while waiting for a bus in the pouring rain. But her story is glamorous enough to have made into a glorious film.
An Education — with a screen adaptation by Nick Hornby — is a semi-fictionalised account of her memoir so before I do the forensics, I’ll give you the official synopsis:
It's 1961 and attractive, bright 16-year-old schoolgirl, Jenny (Carey Mulligan) is poised on the brink of womanhood. Stifled by the tedium of adolescent routine, Jenny can't wait for adult life to begin. One rainy day, her suburban life is upended by the arrival of an unsuitable suitor, 30-ish David (Peter Sarsgaard). Urbane and witty, David introduces Jenny to a glittering new world of classical concerts and late-night suppers. Just as the family's long-held dream of getting their brilliant daughter into Oxford seems within reach, Jenny is tempted by another kind of life. Will David be the making of Jenny or her undoing?Neither my own tale nor the blurb even begin to scratch the surface of the film or the real-life story behind it, whose narrative is set just before the '60s really begin to swing. Not only is the unsuitable man shifty Jewish wide-boy, David Goldman, but wildly precocious Jenny’s parents encourage her to marry him as they see it as a cheaper, easier alternative to earning a degree at Oxford.
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