Had you been cruising round the Forum in Rome on 18 July AD 64 [ and I am informed with reasonable reliability that this particular activity was not uncommon there and then ], you might have stumbled across the Emperor Nero, resplendent in glittering stage costume and looking upon the scene of the city engulfed in flames as a backdrop to his dramatic activities. Had you then asked Nero what was the most favored spell of his short life, he might have replied it was his brief educational period for it was then that he learnt to play an antique version of the violin, thus enabling him now to fiddle with flamboyant sensitivity as Rome burned around him.
I took a slightly contrary line when giving advice to young people leaving school, counselling that ‘ I am sure my schooldays will turn out to be the happiest days of my life ‘ was not only rash but defeatist, implying as it did that life thereafter would be downhill all the way. Similarly, those of us preparing foir a chat with the reaper of grim disposition followed, one hopes, with a more cordial encounter with St Peter, might be tempted to remember those long, hazy, smiling, summer all the year round days of school time as a spell in paradise. Largely free of health problems, financial difficulties and relationship tensions those times might be but absent too may have been the joys of young family, the satisfaction of jobs well done, the pleasures of doing well and doing good.
If you were to ask me -- and I am going to tell you anyway -- when in my life I experienced the strongest balance of happiness and fulfilment, I would hesitate only momentarily before declaring the eleven years at Sevenoaks School from age 32 to 43. I am especially weak on the quality of emotional intelligence, which I have always advocated -- and attempted to foster -- in others. Indeed a French lady who knew me quite well back in the day [ as they say ] described me with a degree of pitying affection as an emotional pigmy and she was not wrong. This unenviable state of being combined with a single track determination to complete a task once embarked upon, meant that giving any sort of even weighting to family and profession was out of the question. Only a blending of saint-like tolerance and oodles of common sense has Jenny been able to cope with this impeding deficiency and ensure that some degree of sanity prevailed with three young children, all born during the Sevenoaks years, enjoyed some sort of proper upbringing.
For eight of those eleven years I was housemaster to fifty five teenage boys and, without that bruising, often rewarding experience I could never have been head of a boarding school at the next stage and certainly could not have aspired to effect a modicum of social reform in that role. However, I was also able to do the job as a family figure at the same time. Son Robin from age zero accompanied me around the sleeping quarters at 7.15am as I tried to prise reluctant adolescent bodies out of bed. So much did he value the experience, he decided thirty years later to do it properly himself. Daughter Sarah, aged three, could charm the crudest thugs into playful submission halfway up the vast Victorian staircase. As I tripped over her, I never dreamt that she too would enter this strange world but as a fundraiser rather than a teacher and employ those same charms to elicit contributions from similar rogues once they had at least superficially reformed and created a modest pot of loot. Alice was only one when we left Johnsons House and thus still at the stage of doing her own very definite thing regardless. Thirty four years later nothing has really changed as she has studiously avoided any contact with schools, preferring instead to run a business looking after dogs with rare whispering skill. In any case I was able to maintain reasonable contact with both my own children and other people’s.
Never one to play by the rule;
Just experiment
Whatever your bent,
So Vista, IB, VSU.
Indeed Sevenoaks was a pioneer in education from 1950 to 1990 [ and may still be in 2023 ] and working there we felt a remarkable career freedom, an unusual degree of trust shown to the staff to do their own thing and do it really well. People later frequently remarked what a substantial change the move from Sevenoaks to Gordonstoun must have been. Not a bit of it; both majored in true independence for individual and school alike; both therefore engendered a powerful camaraderie among the staff. I might note in passing that assuming senior leadership [ or management ] status in schools does not impede the development of friendship. I have never been particularly adept at fostering that condition but two of the strongest ties -- with Mike Bolton and Casey McCann -- emerged from Sevenoaks. When you move onwards and upwards to become a Head, everyone is amicable but all have a box of chocolates and a harpoon gun simultaneously at the ready and true friendship within that environment is not possible. Here is another reason perhaps for looking back on those years in Kent with affection.
I could write volumes on my time in that boarding house but I will resist the temptation. I will not talk either about my modicum of amateur Latin teaching [ never above GCSE ] nor my life as Registrar, responsible for admissions and a degree of marketing, vital work but essentially repetitive and even more grindingly dull for the reader. If you are still there, Moriarty, I will give you a taste of the other two strands of my life at Sevenoaks, in both cases through accounts written at the time for the sschool magazine.
The School’s administration was based in Claridge House, a previously reasonably elegant building in the Upper High Street; at some stage rendered rather less so by the addition of brown harling to the exterior and inevitably a surfeit of office paraphernalia within although the long garden leading down to Knole Park had retained its historic attractiveness. Headmaster, cleaners, Bursar, secretaries, porters, lost property specialists, prefects and all the rest were housed here and my job was a sort of catch-all majordomo in this establishment of educational support to the extent that a parent once addressed me as ‘ Claridge House man ‘. Considering myself alongside the Piltdown and Selsden varieties, I was happy with that. The following was written when I had been in post for about eighteen months.
A View from the Office ( reproduced from The Sennockian 1982 )
"There's no heating in Swanzy, the cleaners refused to touch the Concourse last night and the telephone's already ringing in the Office".
Ritson lifts his other leg ponderously and deliberately from the floor of his trusted Morris Minor, eyes the very tarmac of the Claridge House forecourt with defensive suspicion and braces himself for further disillusionment. Comfortable thoughts of executive serenity, coffee in hand, friendly and irrelevant con- versations, contemplation of the length of grass on the lawn outside and the thickness of the carpet within, rapidly evaporate as apprehension of unwelcome conflict replaces them. Heating, the Porter said. Oh dear. The Boilermakers' Union may be powerful but for sheer formidability you will find it hard to beat the boiler- makers' wives union at 7.55 a.m.
Letters, notes, lists....To whom it may concern. Dear Sir, I live in Hopgarden Lane and have recently lost my parrot (turquoise in colour and capable of quoting the Koran at length). I wonder if you could ask your boys if they have seen it.... 'Dear Mr. Ritson, I am writing to you on behalf of the Naturist Movement, Clackmannanshire branch, requesting use of the Aisher Hall for a performance on Saturday 20th May which will include the production of some original work...
'Charles, the following missed Private Study yesterday. I think they may have been busying themselves in questionable pastimes at the bottom of the garden. Please investigate."
With senses now dulled, but vaguely conscious of hot air rising from the very paper, Ritson exhales the final semblance of freshness from his lungs, shuffles these and a plethora of other documents in the customary anti-clockwise direction round his desk, muses momentarily on the disquieting contraction of the Amazonian jungle and prepares for the real demon, the internal telephone, to make its mark.
There is not long to wait. "Is that the Office?" Ah, he thought, how I appreciate the impersonal touch.
"No this is the Vatican and his Holiness is in Castel Gandolfo".
Deathly hush; clearly stony ground for early morning humour. "Is Smetherington absent today or not? He's on your (of all the possessions he counts most dear this is certainly among his most treasured) Absentee List but I have just seen him in M7".
"No, he came in late, after the list had been prepared, as his father had a puncture".
"But his father's in Borneo".
"That's probably why he was so late...". On second thoughts perhaps it wasn't.
"Well I need to see him".
"Hold on, I'll just look at his timetable card".
"That will be useless as they (the imprecise and disparaging third person plural) have lumbered us with so many room changes this week in connection with the new mural in the computer lab; anyway I think he's doing Swahili Oral in one of those cupboards at the top of your empire," Mr. Disgruntled of Sevenoaks added with inimitable candour.
When in doubt, Ritson hadlong ago decided, don the propaganda/ promulgation mantle and dream up a few witticisms for the next day's Bulletin. But what's this? Simultaneous resuscitation in the dissimilar forms of a call from the local garage to discuss a faulty condenser on one of the school's minibuses, and a statistical print- out from the computer (trusty exponent of the esoteric art of condensed faultiness) for checking and dissemination. Now why should anyone want to know the number of girls born on the 17th day of each month who have suffered from scarlet fever?
Enter, stage right, the Headmaster's Secretary, a ship in full sail. "An undernourished Inspector of Education from Baluchistan is visiting the school at half past eleven. He wants to learn about our school administration. He doesn't speak English. Over to you". "Hello," Ritson regrets that invariably in this egocentric age no more elaborate telephonic introduction is deemed necessary. "There is a lot of undesirable spitting in the school at present," Ahah; the moment for a semantic discussion as to whether spitting is ever desirable. But probably not. "Yes. Without wishing to sound brusque, so what?".
"Well, I assumed you (significant shift to second person) ought to know."
A steady stream of bright-faced youngsters meanwhile trail in and out, in urgent search of bus passes, early lunches, change for telephone calls and so on. "Where is the Bursar?" "How is the Headmaster?" "What is the Undermaster?" "Why is the Chaplain?". Ritson's mind wanders nostalgically back to his own school chaplain who was in the habit of attracting the attention of disinclined adolescents at the outset of indifferent sermons with a remark such as 'Have you ever been through Finsbury Park on the tube and tried to spell the name of the station backwards?" An explosive entrance: red-faced disciplinarian, stout bastion of a passing order, drags reluctant, leather-jacketed youth into the room.
"I have never seen such disgracefully dangerous driving; across the flat at 70 m.p.h. with a pillion passenger. Is he even registered as a driver? He should be whipped and banned for life. He's already coming to you for Conduct Detention on Friday." Ritson wonders whether physical castigation had been added to his multifarious responsibilities without his being informed, when a punctilious voice with a ring of artificial humility emanates from behind a filing cabinet, "Speaking of vehicles; Mr. Gumbleton has been parking his car in my space for two weeks. I would be most grateful if you could see fit to request him to attend to this indiscretion".
Lunchtime heralds a genuine break from routine as a parade of celebrated rogues, scruffy, surly and gated for a week or two, are obliged to be in attendance at various times. 'Was I ever that ill- kempt and bolshy?' he asks himself. Doubtful, but they will probably be high-fliers in fields industrial, political, ecclesiastical even, in twenty years time when some of us are still... 'Know then thyself, as Alexander Pope was wont to remark.
One of the more progressive members of staff, eager for extra computer usage, arrives only to be thwarted without apology as the word processor is churning out scores of disappointing head- magisterial refusals for aspiring members of the tapestry department. Last laugh for him however with a parting shot about broken: chairs in Cottage Block and alterations to the design of report forms:
"On whose authority were they changed?".
"Well I thought they might benefit from a slightly more futuristic style".
"Here we go again, Admin. throwing its weight around, making unilateral decisions. No thought of consultation." Ritson bites on his Bic with inadequately concealed self-restraint.
... There's a St. Bernard on the running track; a boy is dispatched homewards with diptheria, the telephone system ceases to function-blessed relief-and...
"Why hasn't a timetable for school exams been posted yet?". "Because the staff hasn't yet decided whether they should spill over into Saturday."
"Good Heavens ! Why don't you take a bit of initiative, stop all this consultation nonsense and make a decision. What are you administrators paid for?".
The afternoon wears on. Ritson accomplishes one of his occasional forays into the classroom. "One is barely entitled to voice an opinion about education if you don't gain some experience at grass roots level. Bit of chalk dust, felt tip or whatever under the finger nails, you know." so he occasionally tells himself, and is told by his colleagues much more frequently. However he is relieved when his amateur attempt at this daunting pastime is over and he can return to the reassuring womblike security of his office, there to encounter a balding stranger, intense and diminutive, leaning over a typewriter.
"Oh good, how kind of you to come so promptly. The carriage return on this one has been giving endless problems. If you could sit down; no really; please do; and try for yourself. That's it. Now you can see the problem. Can I suggest you take the back off? No, please feel free to take it to bits here."
"But I am Marmaduke Godfrey, Social Democrat M.P. for Sixpenny Handling.
Caernarvon and I have come to address your Sixth Form on the recent walrus cull on Anglesey."
Embarrassment, grovel, exhaustion. Ritson finally relaxes, looks with modest satisfaction through the elegant Georgian windows at the impressively flourishing copper beech in the garden.
'Hey ho', he thinks, 'another one knocked off, now for an hour or two's indulgence in drab domesticity. Rumblings above in the Headmaster's Office however warn him that the mountain may be in the process of descending to Mohammed.
"Hello, old boy. Glad to catch you. I have just heard that the site for the 1988 Olympics hasn't yet been finalised. I've put our name forward and I think it's in the bag. Leave all the administrative arrangements to you. Cheerio."
28th August 2023
No comments:
Post a Comment