INTRODUCTION

- Berkhamsted School -

 

The sleepy town of Berkhamsted nestles in a valley through the Chilterns, on the route of what the Romans called Akeman Street, but very little has ever happened here - apart from one day in December 1066, when the Saxon nobility came out from their beleaguered capital, and offered the English crown to William the Conqueror.

He had a motte and bailey castle built - probably on an ancient Saxon site - and this was home in later years to the Black Prince, who also presided over much of the building of St Peter's Church. Over the hill top, a monastery was founded at Ashridge. Chaucer came and lived at the Castle. Very little else - just the turn of the seasons, the ebb and flow of centuries.

In the reign of Henry VIII - in 1541 to be precise - Berkhamsted School was founded by Dean Incent of St Paul's. But although its roots go back five centuries, it only grew to a significant size in the later years of Victoria. How should I describe it - a public school (which to American readers means, private) of the second order. Not an Eton or a Harrow, but with its own traditions and aspirations.

Because of its second division status, it thankfully escaped the greater pretensions of the ruling classes, accommodating more paradox, under less scrutiny, more relaxed and open to eccentricity, offering that sublimely English tension that builds up between the formal impassive establishment and that anarchic suppressed feeling and emotion, that people of my father's generation were so reluctant to set free.

 

INTRODUCTION

- My Family -

My father and his cousin had both gone to Berkhamsted School. My mother had gone to the private girls' school in King's Road, but her brothers had been through the system. Uncle Sandy went straight from Berkhamsted School into the Gordon Highlanders, and was killed in action in Burma. Uncle Leslie was a rear-turret gunner in a Lancaster during the last years of the war.

The School was, therefore, a place of origins for my family - but not their true origins because my mother's family were Gordons from Aberdeenshire and my father's family were from the Borders. No matter what wealth or privilege my father encountered, he knew that his own father had come from the peasantry on a bleak Northumberland farm, thirteenth child of a thirteenth child, who had been sent to London to make his own way in life, because there were too many mouths to feed.

I was one of five children who attended the School. When the time came for us to get some education, it seemed reasonable to my father to send us all to Berkhamsted School - though it was actually far from reasonable, because we never had enough money to pay the fees, and the accumulated debts run up from sending us all through Berkhamsted were only paid off in the end when my father died early and a large life insurance cancelled out his bills.

He was the very best of men - gentle and never de-humanised by the system. Devoted to his family. A lover of beauty. An extremely passionate man. A complete romantic. He had little athletic ability, which was something of a disadvantage at a school like Berkhamsted, but one thing he could do was walk - he walked daily to school from Potten End, and he and his cousin David once won a walking race - the zenith of my father's athletic career.

We enjoyed a fifties childhood which was supremely privileged, not because of wealth, but because of love and innocence and incredible security. To his death, my father was reluctant to demonstrate his passionate emotion and feelings, which teemed and surged just below the surface, but we grew up with that openness that comes from emotional safety.

He was a liberal-minded man, who did not believe in privilege and status. I'm telling you this because as brothers we all grew up with a certain scepticism and detachment from the School's more formal conventions, and never really "bought into the package"... and yet, in a deeper sense, I feel I did - thanks to a few inspired teachers and staff whose humanity could not be suppressed, not for all the pompous airs and graces of the establishment.

 

 

INTRODUCTION

- In Those Days -

 

My brothers and I were incredibly lucky to "hit" Berkhamsted School when we did, in those post-war years : because we escaped the diminished vision and numbing conformity of the modern education system. I should know: I'm a teacher now myself, though I wasn't always.

But in those years after the Second World War, there was an influx of teachers who had actually seen a bit of life, and not all of it particularly pretty. We were taught by people with more variety of life experience, who did not think that existence began or ended in the classroom. It was an age when education had not yet been reduced to Attainment Levels, when "fun" could be an end in itself, and laughter was relevant simply because it was good to be exuberant sometimes.

And yet I was taught by scholars rather than teachers - by a group of men (there were no women, alas) who were in love with their subjects from the inside out, whose standards were often exacting, and whose knowledge was broad and far from superficial.

In contrast, I often feel my own children's generation gets a kind of "soundbite" education, taught by people who are 'professional educators' who go on courses to plan "how to deliver the curriculum". Even the reports are soundbites today, often generated from a bank of phrases on a computer. One click here and there, and that's it - your child summed up (in appalling impersonal language) for another term.

Many of my teachers taught from spontaneous enthusiasm, which was infectious, fired by scholarship and emotion. I guess, in those days when the British had not yet learned to sob over Diana and yet many had seen far more to really cry about, emotion had to be channelled somewhere - and so it came at us in all kinds of ways... in shouting, in laughing, in lessons where you could hear a pin drop and the teacher's feelings were like a shimmering on the surface of water, and you knew it... a knowledge that sometimes came imparted whole...

But emotions repressed were also emotions dangerously unpredictable too : one day there was the anarchic hilarity and laughter overflowing from a teacher's intensity and who knows what emotions - those sunny bubbling over lessons, where humanity was shared, and learning was a joy; another day the inexplicable outbursts of violence and repressed impulses, that you learned - as a child - to watch out for and avoid... if you could.

And, although I look back on my days at Berkhamsted School with gratitude, they started particularly badly when - as an eight year old boy - I was sent to Berkhamsted Prep School as a boarder.

The violence was indeed inexplicable, and the abnormal became normal, and gradually dulled the emotions because there was no way out of it, and blocking off feeling was the only way to handle it.

And yet, still, it suddenly comes back to me like a sob. I may be watching a scene in a film, or reading a book, and suddenly a panic sets in once more and I am there again and it is a wound that has somehow failed to heal over completely, although it was over forty years ago.

That was the beginning but it wasn't the ending. I'm so grateful to the good and decent men who I later encountered, who gave me so much, of themselves, their ideals, and whose values prevailed in my mind against those first dark offences and tawdry secret assaults.

I remember John Davison, speaking to me from the heart in my final year : about the darkness and the light, and how sometimes it seems the light will be overwhelmed, and yet just one flickering flame may keep it going. I think he saw the power of learning that way and (though he disliked too much demonstrative emotion) the power of love.

Or, as the gospel writer put it: "The light shines out in the darkness, and the darkness will never overwhelm it."

The light of that man's idealism and moral fervour - I carry it with me still. The dark irrational behaviour of another has not overwhelmed it.