Plymouth Keys

by Jane Seale

I’m 52 now, but I still look back fondly on my student days at Plymouth Polytechnic in the mid 80’s. Those days at Poly represented a certain kind of freedom for me- freedom to express my growing self-confidence, freedom to go out and party, freedom to get a Captain Jack burger from the Barbican (best burger joint in town) after a night out in the Quay club ….and so on, I was no different to any other student of my time. Several of my significant Plymouth memories however, do not involve an excess of alcohol or burgers- instead they involve keys.

In my first year at Plymouth Poly I ended up in lodgings, quite a way out of the city, in Plymstock. Being a country girl at heart, I quite liked the fact that I could take a short bus ride from where I lodged down to Wembury beach. It reminded me of home. So it was natural that when mum and John came to visit me, I would take them to Wembury beach too. 

We spent a lovely couple of hours sat on the sand and walking along the shore. When it was time to head back, we strolled back to the car only for mum to innocently ask; “where are my car keys?” For those of you who know mum, you will know that this was not an unusual occurrence! However, normally looking for mum’s keys involved searching around the house. This time, it involved scouring a whole beach. Luckily we were able to re-trace our steps and find the keys buried in the sand where we had been sitting. As always mum was a picture of calm and serenity- somehow assured in her knowledge that we would find the keys. She never ceases to amaze me at how unalarmed she is at the prospect of having to walk back from some remote place she has parked, because she has mislaid her keys. The last time she did this to me, was a few years back, when we were walking up some ancient Dorset hill fort a few miles outside of Blandford. The grass was really long and Sheba was enjoying jumping through it as she chased rabbits. When once again mum announced that she could not find her car keys, she simply turned around and walked unhurriedly back the way she had come. I was busily calculating how long it might take us to walk to the nearest place of habitation. Unbeknown to me, mum was busy calculating where she had stopped along the way to take photographs. Sure enough, at the bottom of the hill, she stops by some field flowers and there, in a clump of tall grass are her keys!

In my second year at Plymouth Poly I shared a flat with two friends, Julie and Kathryn (Ryn for short). Early on in the academic year, Julie had made friends with a chap called Alan who shared a flat with his two mates, Mike and Nevil. The six of us became inseparable on weekends, partying away at the Students Union and one another’s houses. On one occasion, we were at the boys’ house when Julie, Kat and I took it upon ourselves to purloin one of their door keys. It sounds rather childish now, but it gave us weeks of fun at the time. The boys would ask us if we had their key and with straight faces, we would deny all knowledge. Eventually they stopped asking, still puzzled where it had gone, but unable to figure out what had happened to it. That was when we struck. It was Nevil’s 21^st birthday and we were, as usual, all going out to party and celebrate. 

Before we hit the town, we invited the boys around for a drink and sat them down on our sofa with Nevil in the middle and gave him his present. I shall never forget the look of ‘oh you got us’ on Nevil’s and Mike’s face as Nevil unwrapped his key-to-the-door!

Towards the end of my second year, the key came to represent less happy memories. One night, at a nightclub my purse got stolen. It did not have a lot of money in it- but it did have the key to my bedroom in my flat. So I was locked out of my bedroom for a night until I could get a lock-smith to come out and cut me two new ones, one for use and one for spare. Unfortunately, a while later my landlady evicted me because she did not like the fact that Mike spent so much time round my place. Although I was compliant enough to give her one key back, as an act of symbolic defiance, I kept the spare one and took it down to the Hoe late one night and chucked it into the raging sea. What I rebel I was (not!).

In my third year at Plymouth Poly, I shared a flat with Mike and for my 21^st birthday we decided to get engaged. We invited my old school friends from Blandford down for the weekend and planned a big party in the Students Union (classy!). Before we went out for the evening we were all gathered in the flat, chatting, eating and getting ready. There was a knock on the door. Nothing unusual in that. Except when I answered the door, who was standing there, but my adoptive father, Bob, whom I had not seen or heard of in over five years. Since he and mum had got divorced, he had never been very good at being a consistent presence in mine or my brother’s life. Tonight, of all nights he had decided to drive all the way down to Plymouth to surprise me with a birthday card and present (a necklace with a key pendant to represent coming of age at 21). I am afraid I was not very hospitable to my surprise visitor. I gave him a drink and explained that I had a party planned with all these people and so could not spent time with him. Shortly after he left, and I don’t think I ever saw him again. That was 31 years ago. So 29^th November 1986, was the night that one man left my life for good and another man entered it for good. Keys let people in and they shut people out. You have to use them wisely.