The Way I Was: I was a swotty little prig: Austin Mitchell tells Nicholas Roe about his early loneliness as a long-distance swot at Bingley Grammar School in Yorkshire

THIS IS me when I was about 16 or so, working on books in the living-room at home in Baildon, near Bradford. I was in the sixth form at Bingley Grammar School and what the picture says - and it's depressing for me to look at now - is what a little swot I was.

Both those words are applicable: I'm now six foot two, but I was much smaller until I was about 18, when I suddenly shot up. Smallness always made me kind of anti-sport in a way that lingered: on cross-country runs I used to slope off to the C and D Milk Bar in Bingley; in the sixth form, I managed to avoid being in the gymnasium for a whole year before anybody noticed.

The point is, I excluded everything apart from work, and I suppose I've been reacting against that ever since. I spent my first 30 years head down, working hard, and the next 30 catching up on all the things I'd missed - you know, life, relationships, sex, the world outside . . . everything I'd cut out in that head-down phase. It was useful in that it brought me exam results, but it was also pretty narrow and blinkered.

We lived in a semi built in 1933 on an estate. The school bus used to collect all the kids every morning and take us 10 miles to Bingley. It was a double-decker and it was always girls downstairs, boys

upstairs.

We'd get there a bit late for school assembly, but we'd leave pretty promptly at four to come back again. Then I'd do my meat- round, cycling around Baildon on one of those bikes with a huge basket on the front, then have a - not what you'd call 'knife-and- fork tea', but bread and jam, then work. I think that was about it.

Dating? Well, it must have been later by two or three years, really at university. There wasn't the teenager culture which becomes all-exciting and all-absorbing - that didn't exist then, and since we didn't know it, we didn't miss it.

So I look at this and I say, 'what a swotty little prig', and it isn't regret, it's a kind of wistfulness, I suppose. I wish I'd had a more balanced, rounded development, not been such a workaholic, which I still am; I mean, that still lingers. I say I'm more interested in life now, but I've still got the Protestant work ethic, and still got, in a sense, that distance from people, the distance of the academic.

As a politician it's very difficult to actually connect with people, because there's a gulf there in the first place - people don't like politicians. It's a kind of 'shake- hands-how're-you-doing?-goodbye' culture. I'm good at communicating, not so good at relationships, and I suppose that's part of the loneliness of the long- distance swot.

No, my family wasn't at all academic. The very opposite really. My father was a textile dyer, my mother used to work on a stall in Bradford market. I think both were keen that I should get on, but it wasn't the form of encouragement that meant there was an interest in music or writing or reading - they were personally encouraging, but the environment wasn't.

I think the strength of my background was just the feeling of confidence it gave me: a background noise of life, sustaining rather than a pressure to succeed.

My own children have all grown up pretty sane and well-balanced as far as I can see, although I think politicians' children are peculiarly deprived because the politicians are never there.

I think they've had a better all- round existence, they're much better at relating to people than I ever was, and, yes, I do, I envy them the greater opportunity, I envy them the greater interest in life. I envy them the fact that they've done what they wanted to do rather than, as I did, what the system ordained.

Austin Mitchell is Labour MP for Great Grimsby.

(Photograph omitted)