Author Louis de Berniéres Inspires Learners
It wasn’t exactly Hay-on-Wye, but the audience at the union learning centre Brighton & Hove’s recycling & refuse depot, was just as avid as they listened to Louis de Bernières telling his secrets of how to be a writer and what it’s like to have your novel turned into a film.
More than a quarter of the staff at the Cityclean depot, responsible for refuse, recycling, street cleaning and parks services for the city, use the learning centre, supported by the Union Learning Fund. It has 100 students this year and since it opened five years ago, 224 members of staff have achieved national qualifications in Skills for Life , computer skills, ESOL and NVQ’s up to level 3.
It was GMB union learning rep Wes Lee Emond who had invited the author, most famous for Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, later made into a film starring Nicolas Cage and Penelope Cruz. Also in the audience were Carol Theobold, councillor and former mayor of Brighton and Julie Cowell, mother of impresario Simon. The centre is used to celebrity visitors: Vera Lynn, Heather Mills and Lord Lieutenant Peter Field have called in on GMB/unionlearn partnership learning centre to see how the workforce has been transformed into keen learners thanks to the efforts of the centre’s ULRs.
Louis de Bernières explained how he recycled his life experiences into fiction, for example his brief spell in the army and living in Colombia, which provided the background for his Latin American trilogy, and listening to the tales of his former flatmate, a retired Yugoslav prostitute, which provided the basis of A Partisan’s Daughter.
He said that he had been lucky. He had lived in a house full of books and his father loved to write poetry. He also had a series of inspirational teachers. He said: “I had teachers who made us read all sorts of things that were not on the curriculum. That wouldn’t be possible now because of all the targets and league tables teachers have today.”
He also provided writing tips to the Brighton refuse, recycling and parks staff: if you want to write a book, you have to go ahead and do it; if you can’t think of a good beginning, go back to it when you can; and treat every chapter as if it is a short story.
He explained that he has no writing routine; he writes when he feels like it. He said: “An idea will niggle me, until I have to write it.” He also explained how his characters develop: “When I was writing The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman, I had to re-create a new baddie because I became to like the Cardinal the more I wrote about him.”
Declan MacIntyre, GMB Project Worker and former ULR at the depot, can thank the learning centre for helping him cope with his dyslexia, and has since won a NIACE award for his learning.
He said: “A staff survey carried out in 2000 showed that morale at the depot was rock bottom. We had staff with such low reading skills that they could not understand basic signage around the plant, never mind communication from the management. The learning centre has turned that round. Once the staff saw that they were being listened to and the management was investing in their skills, absenteeism dropped and so did turn-over. They were also more open to changes in working practices. We are now seeing staff that came here to improve their literacy and numeracy go on to become team leaders and supervisors. It is an incredibly cost-effective way to develop the staff. And it’s fun; we all enjoy the learning, the events and meeting people such as Louis.”
