The Wilderness Year: How Barren Seed Fell upon Good Ground

Why, I cannot remember, maybe it was peer pressure within my parents’ generation, but we moved from a large independent preparatory school, when I was the penultimate year and aged 10. It may, of course, have been their fear that I would fail the 11+ examination and thus bring humiliation upon the family. Anyway, both my brother and I transferred to the preparatory department of the town’s only private school for boys, an institution housed in a very leaky and generally decrepit Nissen hut. It comprised three rooms: the first, the cloak room, the second larger, a classroom and the third another classroom divided by a curtain to accommodate two forms. In the furthest area, an white-haired Miss Clwyd taught the youngest boys with a degree of testy but determined efficiency. This side of the curtain, there was a much younger Miss Pitkin-Pratt, who occasionally sported a photograph of her graduation, mortar board, gown, diploma and proud smile emphasising her intense black eyes. She, too, had a degree of efficiency though often her form and the most senior form used to gather in that first classroom for instruction of some kind or other under joint tutelage or none. In that first teaching space was Mrs Latent-Orient, the head of our august academy. I am compelled to write this entry owing to a Nickleby urge, i.e. the need to record the memorable modus operandi of that latter lady. I was in her charge, i.e. in the senior form and my brother under Miss Pitkin-Pratt’s tutelage.

   We ‘miserable offenders’ started our day with prayers for all three classes in which the General Confession of the Book of Common Prayer featured large – 'We have erred, and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep. We have followed too much the devices and desired of our own hearts. ... We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; And we have done those things which we ought not to have done; And there is no health in us. ... Spare thou those those who confess their faults.' Lo, there happened to be in our midst one boy, the son of a prosperous townsman, who was a Roman Papist (an ‘Arsee’, as in the puzzled imaginings of benighted youngsters). In those strict days when accompanying Protestants at prayer might lead straightway to hell, he was unwillingly excused from morning worship and went into the second room with reading material. Mrs Latent-Orient’s prayerful ministrations were thus unavailable to one lost sheep, and she would oft times challenge him in front of all as to whether he listened to prots at prayer through the thin partition, and he honestly but unguardedly confessed that he ‘listened for the end’ which in her view constituted the nonsense of his excusing himself from the act of worship. The boy’s mother was deployed, and no more was said directly about his departure during divine prayer. I had an interest in things religious and so the mystery of that Roman exclusivity played strongly on my imagination. Thus, I used to question the tradesman’s boy to the extent of getting him to show me the inside of the town’s small, stone Arsee church. My interest apparently led to more stress for the poor lad, and his mother paid a further visit to complain of a new kind of harassment. Mrs Latent-Orient with some satisfaction at being able to pick at the festering scab took that chance to reopen the Arsee issue and asked who had been inquisiting him. With uncommon courage, I thrust up my hand, and was rewarded by Mrs Latent-Orient with an acknowledgement of my honesty. It seems that I had become her proxy challenger. No case to answer. Charge dismissed!  

   After prayers, we proceeded to the first lesson which was always Scripture. It seemed that Miss Pitkin-Pratt was learnèd in Divinity, and I seem to recall that she was some kind of deaconess at a local Baptist church and from 9:00 a.m. to about 10:00 a.m. the Bible was expounded on our behalf. That was fine for me since I excelled as a boy in matters religious. Despite our tender age, she introduced us to such terms as koinonia and glossolalia. In tests, I always came top, but on a Saturday morning, Miss Pitkin-Pratt announced that our weekend homework was to learn a passage from the Bible by heart, not a couple of verses, but a chunk, a solid length of King James. I well recall Psalm 8 in its entirety, in fact, a shorter passage – recall being bidden to learn it, but not succeeding in recalling it verbatim. Sunday became an agony climaxing in the evening as each weekend commitment to member of another passage was demanded. Monday morning’s Scripture class was given over in part to scratching from failed memory the required passage on a piece of paper. My scores were very poor. I cannot recall what our Arsee did during that time.

   Following Scripture, there was a break. Afterwards we proceeded to other lessons the pattern of which was usually dictated by the BBC and its broadcast lessons. The wireless was switched on, the accompanying slim BBC  pamphlets were opened, and Mrs Latent-Orient and Miss Pitkin-Pratt settled back in their chairs to gossip behind the former’s substantial timber desk. On one occasion, Mrs Latent-Orient summoned one of the least academically gifted boys to run down to the sweet shop, perhaps 250 yards away, to buy some Cadbury’s milk chocolate, a lad least likely to experience much benefit from BBC educational policies. He was given a 10/- note, and returned in about 15 minutes with 20-odd chocolate bars of the smaller size. Mrs Walton and Miss Watkins were quietly aghast, though with a grin of embarrassment passing across their faces, and the boy was despatched back with the bars, minus two, to undo his misunderstanding! The two ladies proceeded to eat their chocolate as we pretended to absorb BBC wisdom on Lepidoptera metamorphosis.

Lunch, the best school food I ever had, was eaten in a classroom in the senior school under the tutelage of Miss Pitkin-Pratt, Mrs Latent-Orient departing for a while from school, and then we resumed BBC listening or had lessons of a more conventional kind. In our previous school, ‘sums’ or maths had been an unwelcome and insistently daily occurrence, but at the new school it was a rarity and was left until after 3:00 p.m., taught by Mrs Latent-Orient with Miss Pitkin-Pratt back in her own classroom with her charges. I seem to recall that sums may have occurred once or twice a week, sometimes less often than once a week and was speedily curtailed by the tolling of the school bell for the ending of the school day.

Wednesday afternoons were devoted to some kind of sports, football, cricket, running and athletics. We were usually ‘taken’ by a prefect or senior boy from the upper school, but occasionally, perhaps if one was not available, Miss Pitkin-Pratt ‘took’ us. I well recall on a couple of occasions that she attempted rather unsurely to referee soccer in mid-height high-heel shoes, with frequent glances down at the increasingly caked footwear and bespattered nylon stockings.

Mrs Latent-Orient knew that she faced some parental criticism and sought affirmation of her status by quite frequently demanding of me in open class which I liked better, my previous school or hers. Somehow, my complaints must have reached her ear. Each time my courage failed me and I lied affirming that her setup was better. That familiar look of satisfaction passed across her face as the scent of vindication or victory was apparent and she allowed a pause for the declaration to sink in among the boys.   

   Some parents complained bitterly at the failings of Mrs Latent-Orient. The headmaster, one Major Corbey, such a martinet with the senior boys and sometimes us too, could never find it within himself to address one of the deficit elements in the school’s good name. He always told those who felt concern that he was looking for a ‘nice way’ of handling the problem. Nothing ever happened until Widow Latent-Orient remarried and was whisked away by a man who used to hang around at lunch time and after school to a new life at the end of that school year. Miss Pitkin-Pratt was left free to realise her potential as the more efficient teacher which she was when left to her own devices and desires. A new male departmental head replaced Mrs Latent-Orient and in due course a romance blossomed between him and Miss Pitkin-Pratt, duly consummated in holy matrimony.   

Ian David Stafford Beer

Freshmen Ian Beer, my brother and I arrived at Ellesmere College for the first time at the start of the new academic year in 1961. I, perhaps Peter, too, had been apprehensive since Ellesmere had the reputation of being a ‘tough’, indeed a ‘flogging’ school, but Pa was determined that we follow him. Yes, Ian David Stafford Beer… who could forget such ringing, quadripetal nomenclature after its frequent repetition during his installation in chapel in that first Michælmas term. The ceremony was insinuatingly impressive for a twelve-year-old farmer’s son open to the splendours of its Gothic-revival Anglo-Catholic ritual, a tradition bequeathed by our founder, Nathaniel Woodard, and faithfully maintained. The rite was performed by the mitred Provost, and the Eucharist concelebrated by the refined, ascetic, revered and too-soon-to-be-lamented Skene Catling.

IDSB – he often went by his initials as did all common-room members – introduced a catalogue of reforms. One of them was a declaration that he did not wish beating to be the corrective choice of automatic resort. In actuality, the phrase which I remember was that it should not be the ‘punishment of last resort’ which led one wag to ask whether the new headmaster proposed to introduce thumbscrews. Well, I was flogged but twice, on both occasions somewhat unjustly and that due to the resisting residual tendencies of the ancien régime, but I feel that I should be grateful to IDSB that it happened so infrequently, and that thus I did not develop the English public school product’s taste for it.

   Another reform from which we benefited was his decision that masters (what a fine mot compared with that slumdog word ‘teacher’) should retire at sixty. Indeed, it was considered an outrage by some of his common-room, the end of a freehold hitherto guaranteed to the age of sixty-five. Evans-Prosser, Beer's predecessor, had employed many bachelors of whom duty could be demanded ‘24-7’, as, horribile dictu, the modern vernacular puts it. IDSB brought in a new generation of competent and ambitious young men. For the most part, and, one supposes, when the field of applicants allowed, he had an unerring eye for ability, energy and normality. We had to be grateful to him for having employed inspiring and dedicated men such as Hony, Scorer, Beadles, Mayes, Mel Jones and Foster. Although I went on to Oxford to read History under tutors possessed of very great names, Mel Jones was one of the most stimulating history instructors under whose purview I ever fell. I base some of my own teaching upon his style. Ian Beer had picked and appointed him, and those several others.

    IDSB also had the wisdom to plan a program of scientific instruction and understanding for those taking Arts A Levels, and modern historical studies for those studying the sciences. I, as a classicist, was introduced to Evolution and Genetics taught by the man himself, IDSB, the Cambridge Zoologist, and what an educator! As general knowledge what he taught became permanently invaluable – Gregor Mendel, the Galapagos Islands and their finches, natural selection, phenotypes 1 and 2, Watson and Crick, DNA and its double helix, gonads and zygotes…. Yep, I remember, in the following year an immensely successful vegetable marrow, the product of genetic manipulation, which self-seeded in our garden. My parents enthusiastically gave seedlings to their friends, ignoring my declaration, from information stated on the front of the original seed packet which illustrated what I had been taught, that the next generation would not breed true, would be duds. I was dismissed, my new scientific knowledge unheeded. Even though the recipients roundly declared that their marrows did not crop, I was still given no credit. It led me to question the value of an expensive education paid for by the very people who rejected its fruits. What was lacking? I suppose it was skills of presentation of which Margaret Thatcher was keenly conscious when her ‘Poll Tax’ was so agressively rejected. My failure is a paradox since IDSB was, and I imagine is, even more, a doyen, a fortiori, among exponents of the arts of persuasion. I could not have been sufficiently exposed to observation of his skills, but thank you, Headmaster, for all that you imparted to us. We were in the presence of a dimension of greatness. 

Bourgeois Achievement, Lordly Continuity

On having watched the French film La Tourneuse de Pages, it struck me that French directors indulge their countrymen’s liking for the retreat of the successful bourgeois to his leafy château for weekends and fêtes civiles et nationales. We get the sense that the characters float, sometimes race, between tasteful Louis quinze or designer offices in Paris and the reward for their successes, that rural retreat with its exquisitely appointed drawing rooms and creeper-covered walls. Such background patterns emerge in film after film, and, indeed, very, very pleasingly so for English viewers, too.

The coincidental French view is that the English have a cinematic nostalgia for country houses. There is, though a contrast. Whereas, as I have stated, the French characters inhabit a mansion which probably came into the family as a result of sharp wit, talent or hard work in the current or immediately preceding generations, the English country house represents continuing old blood, inherited fortunes and long-held land transmitted by means of the Norman Yoke, or maybe inherited from a hard-headed guy on the look out and on the make in the sixteenth century. In such films as Women in Love, The Go-Between, Brideshead Revisited, the Remains of the Day, Gosford Park and Atonement, dramas of more or less bitter consequence unfold among the members of aristocratic and gentry milieux and their acquaintances, set largely in rural piles. To stop all gaps, there is even the London house, as in Upstairs Downstairs and Brideshead.

The French prolong and relive the bourgeois victory of their revolution – you are asking which one – the 1798 one, and present us with their French Dream, so very much more subtly understated that its American counterpart – no whiff of un marquis detestable ou Monsieur le Comte degoûtant... . The English, I fear, by contrast, still ‘love a lord’, despite that rash of popular films which took as their anchor, the working-class experience of the coalminers’ strike during the Thatcher era.