First Confession Page 6
I remember in particular two female teachers. Mrs Williams would sit us on her knee when we were upset; when I was aged about seven, she read The Wind in the Willows to me and the class, as I snuggled against her capacious bosom. I had a crush on Miss Lynch, who taught us when we were a little older. She always looked elegant, pastel-coloured cardigans and a single row of pearls or other beads. She had beautiful hands. She opened the door from Badger, Mole, Ratty and Toad to Enid Blyton’s adventuring ‘Fives’ and ‘Sevens’ and even Richmal Crompton and the William stories, surely subversive stuff for eight- or nine-year-olds. I am not sure that in those days I would have known why William’s father was always having trouble with his liver, or what brought down on the heads of Violet-Elizabeth’s parents the patronizing disdain of their neighbours. What was wrong after all with making a fortune from ‘Bott’s Digestive Sauce’, especially when your own father made his living trying to sell the songs of the weeping crooner, Johnny Ray? After that came a great leap forward in reading, which began at primary school and continued into my early teens. I read Jeffrey Farnol’s pirate adventures Black Bartlemy’s Treasure and Martin Conisby’s Vengeance, in both of which much buckle was swashed. Then it was on to the great Conan Doyle historical novels of the Hundred Years War: The White Company and Sir Nigel. Distant sightings of King Edward III and the Black Prince stoked a passionate interest in the Middle Ages, just as Rosemary Sutcliffe had engendered a fascination with Rome and Roman Britain. After that I embarked on the Hornblower novels by C. S. Forester, which took the eponymous hero from his first voyage as a midshipman all the way to the House of Lords and an admiral’s tricorn hat. There were more than ten Hornblower books; I read them all several times. As for comics I was bought the Eagle from the first edition in 1950, and followed enthusiastically Dan Dare’s struggles with the Mekon, whose modest ambition was domination of the universe. This even exceeded the aim of my own imaginary conquests. I was not a fan of The Children’s Newspaper, but readily concede that it was more intellectually demanding than some of today’s adult fare.
The eleven-plus exam, confusingly taken usually by ten-year-olds, had been brought in by the 1944 Education Act, one of the most important contributions made by my frequently ambivalent Tory hero Rab Butler, about whom I will say more later. The exam was built on pre-war studies which suggested that the break between primary and secondary education should come with the onset of adolescence at the age of eleven or twelve. It was intended to direct pupils in their onward education to the sort of school that most suited their abilities. State secondary education was divided into three streams: grammar for the most intellectually able, and secondary modern or technical for the majority of pupils. True to British form, the provision of technical education was very limited. We always admired what the Germans had done to develop technical education since the nineteenth century; recognized its economic benefits for that country; and set our sights on replicating this in Britain. But we never really managed to achieve it. Perhaps our heart was not really in it. Certainly our public, tax-funded investment in the parts of the tripartite system that catered for the majority of pupils – indeed that were supposed to suit best their needs – failed to materialize in the required quantities.
A Cabinet memorandum by the intelligent Conservative Cabinet minister David Eccles, in April 1955, succinctly discussed the problem faced by the government at a time when the post-war bulge in the school age population was increasing pressure for the provision of more school places. Eccles pointed out that under the 1944 Act the selection of the sort of school to which children should go after the age of eleven – 20 per cent to grammar schools, 5 per cent to technical, and 75 per cent to secondary moderns – was determined by an exam. This would decide the state education that suited the ability and aptitude of individual pupils. ‘It was hoped,’ he wrote, ‘that the modern school would attain “parity of esteem” with the grammar schools’, and that as a result ‘the disappointment and jealousy felt by parents when their children failed to qualify for a grammar school would disappear. But this has not yet happened, and the result appears to be growing.’ Eccles concluded his admirably clear-cut, brief paper, by noting that ‘the feelings aroused by the 11+ exam, both justified and unjustified, force a move either towards selection for nobody or towards selection for everybody. Selection for nobody means comprehensive schools with grammar schools abolished and parents’ choice practically ruled out. The Socialists support this policy on the principle of fair shares for all. Selection for everybody means developing in each secondary school some special attraction and giving parents the widest possible choice. I hope that my colleagues will think that selection for everybody is the right policy.’ Of course they did; but the words were not accompanied by actions or money. So they failed to provide then or later ‘parity of esteem’ to the part of the tripartite system that educated eight out of ten pupils. Parents and voters drew the obvious conclusion.
The result was that by the time of Conservative governments in the 1970s and 1980s, ministers (including Margaret Thatcher) were closing down grammar schools and approving new comprehensives – non-selectives – as fast or faster than Labour ministers. They probably had little choice. If there was no ‘parity of esteem’, parents were being asked to support a system in which their children were likely to be provided with a second-best education on the grounds that this was appropriate for them. Second-rate schools for second-rate children was not much of a slogan or aspiration. Nevertheless, the result was the destruction or total identity change of some great schools, grammar and direct grant (the type of selective school to which I went, in which a quarter of the places were directly funded by government with the rest paid for by fees). There had been nothing quite like it in England as an act of institutional destruction since Henry VIII’s and Thomas Cromwell’s dissolution of the monasteries in the sixteenth century.
It is true that the grammar and direct grant schools privileged the middle classes, whose ability nowadays to buy more expensive housing in areas with better state schools almost equally privileges them under today’s largely comprehensive system. It is also true that selection at eleven was far too rigid – this way goats, that way sheep – with little traffic of pupils from one part of the system to another whatever their subsequent development. A goat at ten remained a goat until sixteen or eighteen, and perhaps for longer. But grammar schools in less well-off areas did provide a way out of cycles of deprivation for clever children; it has subsequently been more difficult to discern any similar exit or ladder. Comparisons conducted by the OECD between teenagers’ attainment levels in numeracy and literacy in developed countries (and some emerging countries in Asia) give a dreadful picture of the outcome of the educational revolution in Britain in the final quarter of the last century, despite eclectic and sometimes frantic efforts to reverse the downward drift. The introduction of a national curriculum, the abolition of the local education authority and teacher union monopoly of control over education, the empowerment of parents and local communities, numeracy hours here and literacy hours there: nothing yet seems to have worked very well, though perhaps we need more time to escape from an era in which alleged social equity appeared to trump issues like educational quality and competitiveness, discipline and traditional teaching methods. An age which allowed too many to fail and to be seen to fail – when, to borrow from David Eccles, ‘parity of esteem’ withered away – has turned into an era when, since no one is allowed to fail, the prospects of success have been cut back for everyone. I do not believe that the sort of working-class aspiration reflected in autodidactic diligence in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain has completely died out.
I was lucky. I did not suffer from the pre-exam nerves which clearly affected some ten-year-olds, and probably touched parents just as much. For a start, I had sat so many mock exams in mathematics, language and reasoning that I took the real exam in my stride. Having passed that, I went one Saturday morning to sit the entrance and scholar
ship exam at the local independent, Catholic direct grant school, St Benedict’s, Ealing. If I did well enough in the exam I would qualify for a local authority bursary from Ealing Council and indirectly the government. I think there was also a small top-up by the school itself, a Benedictine foundation run by its monastic community. My parents were thrilled when I got a scholarship and therefore a free place. They had resolved, they told me later, to pay for me if I passed the selection exam even if I did not do well enough to get a bursary. This would not have been easy for them to afford, but they both believed in education opening to possibilities of wider horizons and larger opportunities.
Before starting at St Benedict’s, we had to go to Peter Jones in Sloane Square to get me fitted out: elasticated indoor shoes with my number (119) in tacks on the soles, a herring-bone suit, green cap and blazer, rugby shirts in the colours of my house, Gervase, named after the English Benedictine missionary priest who was hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn in the early seventeenth century. I was to learn much more about the martyrs of the Reformation in later years – inevitably more about the Catholics than the Protestants. We often sang a hymn by Frederick Faber, a Balliol graduate who like the Blessed John Henry Newman abandoned the Holy Orders of the Church of England to become a Catholic priest in the middle of the nineteenth century. Father Faber’s famous hymn is less jolly than his portraits make him appear. The tune thunders along to support some pretty sombre words:
Faith of our fathers! living still,
in spite of dungeon, fire and sword,
Oh how our hearts beat high with joy
Whene’er we hear that glorious word!
Faith of our fathers, holy faith!
We will be true to thee till death.
The Middle School, which I entered at St Benedict’s, was housed in a large Edwardian villa and a couple of prefabs in residential Ealing with no sign of the ‘dungeons dark’ in which Faber suggested in another verse that Catholic boys might one day (if they were lucky) be chained. My first encounters with the other potential martyrs among my classmates brought out the diffidence in my character; these days I identify to some extent with the anti-hero of one of my grandchildren’s books, The Wimpy Kid. At first, I was terrified of committing some unfathomable schoolboy solecism. I was then, and still am, more shy and nervous than most people would believe.
I soon discovered that my fellow pupils had surnames and initials but no forenames. It was rather like the members of the England cricket team who refer to one another by surnames to which they invariably append the letter ‘Y’ – Broady, Stokesy, Rooty and so on. I can still remember the initials of the other boys – there was Quinnen P. J. (a friend whom I later, much later, called Peter), and Bradford P. W., the first boy I talked to. He was in Powell House, whose rugby shirts were red, like the blood of another English Benedictine martyr, whose name the house carried. Powell was one of those martyrs who, like St Thomas More, faced death with a nonchalant joke, in his case calling for a last glass of sherry. We were not taught history from a wholly blinkered Catholic viewpoint, though it was not really until university that I learned much about the Protestant martyrs who, like their Catholic brothers in Christ, had also died bravely for their Christian faith. With a now-retired Lord Lieutenant of Oxfordshire, I later raised the money for a stone plaque in the University Church at Oxford commemorating all the martyrs, Catholic and Protestant, who were tried there before being burned on pyres in Broad Street. Conscience, I think, is ecumenical.
From the very beginning I learned a lot of Latin and Greek – at the expense of much science – and was taught history by the first in a succession of teachers who made it lively and often contentious. In my early years, Mr Wilding gave us the whole of English history in the school year from September to the following July and then repeated the story in a different but no less memorable way beginning the next September – AD 43 to 1939, and no stopping. It was history which, like the frescoes in the Westminster Parliament, moved Whiggishly from one story of great men, victorious battles and the ascent of liberty to another. I do not really understand how later generations cope with the slight knowledge which they seem to have of the way stations of our national journey. It is probably useful to know about the history of medical instruments or the wickedness of twentieth-century dictators. Yet it is surely a pity to know a lot about Stalin and Hitler and almost nothing (or perhaps absolutely nothing) about Disraeli and Lloyd George. Alarmed and doubtless blimpish, I once discovered that most of a secondary school history class to which I was talking as an education minister thought that Henry VI came after George IV. It spoke well for their numeracy I suppose. There was a lot to be said for the David Wildings of the teaching profession.
Later on at school, I was taught history by three very different men – a monk called George Brown, a charming Cambridge cricketer, Steve Walker, and a Christian Socialist, Paul Olsen. Father Brown had a certain Friar Tuck look to him, jolly, red-faced and kind. As passionate a Middlesex cricket supporter as Clement Attlee, he managed to import sporting metaphors into the discussion of most historical topics: King John had his stumps flattened by the barons at Runnymede; and memorably Henry II was bowled a googly by Thomas a Becket. (The metaphor came back to me years later when I first visited the site of his murder in Canterbury Cathedral: some googly.) Steve Walker was another cricket lover and used to wear the sort of blazer for matches which put striped deck chairs to shame. He liked your essays to have a bit of literary flourish to them; this was the time when I learned words like ‘nugatory’ and ‘vicissitude’. Paul Olsen was a serious fellow whose sheets of notes showed how hard he worked. But his main impact on me was to remind me of my real shoe size when I got too big for my boots. I think in my own defence that this was partly because of his encouragement of my slightly accidental but successful choice of university and college.
This happened because of a peculiarity of timetabling. My best subject at school was thought to be English not History. This was above all because of an exhilarating teacher called Ken Connelly, whom we nicknamed Jack for reasons I cannot now recollect. I am not sure he really liked schoolmastering. He had lost a leg in the war, after which he had been taught English at Cambridge by F. R. Leavis. He could be bruisingly sarcastic; charitably we used to assume that the stump of his amputated limb caused him occasional pain and in turn triggered acerbic put-downs. The sound of his approach, his squeaking prosthetic leg sending signals down the corridors of his imminent arrival, silenced the rowdiest class. I remember, aged about thirteen, having to go back to a room which my own class had recently vacated to pick up a homework book. By this time the room was occupied by another class, which Mr Connelly was teaching. I knocked nervously, entered and asked, ‘Please, sir, can I pick up one of my books?’ ‘I’m sure you can,’ he replied. ‘But the answer to the question you should have asked, “May I pick up my book?”, is definitely “No”.’ I left shaking.
But I was also left shaking in due course by the excitement he brought to teaching us about the authors he loved and about the language in which we wrote about them. He introduced us to John Donne, Christopher Isherwood, Graham Greene, George Orwell and the poets of both great wars. We puzzled over T. S. Eliot with him and learned to love the magnificent dramatic rhythms and sounds of Shakespeare. Aged sixteen, I lay in bed one night declaiming over and over again the coruscating speech of Coriolanus.
Cut me to pieces, Volsces,
Men and lads, stain all your edges on me.
Boys!
False Hound!
If you have writ your annals true, ’tis there
That like an eagle in a dove-cote
I fluttered your Volscians in Corioli,
Alone I did it.
Boy!
Oh to be able to utter that ‘Boy!’
Words, words, words, in the most beautiful, subtle and supple English language. Connelly taught us to love words, and the way in which simply putting them together in different ways created di
fferent effects. Think of P. G. Wodehouse, he would say, whose best jokes are jokes of language. ‘I could say that, if not actually gruntled, he was far from being disgruntled.’ Or ‘Her pupils were at once her salvation and her despair. They gave her the means of supporting life, but they made life hardly worth supporting.’ I suppose that is what he came to feel – that life as a teacher was pretty insupportable. So he went off to write civil service memos, punchier than the usual ones I would think. He left me with what have become some of my lifetime passions.
The calendar, however, meant that he missed out on determining the next stage of my education. In those days the entrance exams for most Cambridge colleges were held in January, the exams for Oxford the month before. You could sit both. Paul Olsen, not really thinking I knew enough history to make the cut, suggested that when I was sixteen I should try for Oxford first in order to give me some experience of the whole Oxbridge entrance process, the cold halls and the hot competition. He advised me to try his own old college, Balliol, where I suspect his post-war socialism had been fired up when he was an undergraduate there by the great Marxist historian Christopher Hill. So I applied to read history at Balliol, went up for the exams full of my English revision (lots of memorized lines of poetry) for the exam at Peterhouse, Cambridge, which I planned to sit in January. To general amazement I was offered a Domus Exhibition at Oxford; with perhaps a dash of indolence I decided there and then to cash in my chips and take what was on the table. Ken Connelly did not seem to mind, and Paul Olsen reckoned that Balliol would knock some of the shine off me.