Hello There, Baron Fukushima!
By STRIX HAD completely forgotten about Baron Fukushima. Yet there he is in the front row, seated in a vaguely simian posture next to Major the Reverend J. C. Chute and clutching in his White-gloved paws an enormous sword.
Now I come to think of it, there was a sort of minor plague of Japanese notabilities during mY last year at Eton. The present Emperor, then Crown Prince, paid us a visit, and when he took his departure Lord Hailsham and I had the in- vidious task of leading the entire school in a deep-throated roar of `Sayonara!,' which is Japanese for 'Farewell!' Lord Hailsham and I were, of course, word-perfect; but Etonians have never been demonstrative, and many of our felloW pupils expressed their disapproval of what they felt to be a rather fulsome ceremony by departing from the authorised version and bawl- ing Toodle-oo!,"Any old iron?,' Six to four the field 1' and other expressions of an even more inappropriate kind. I thought His Imperial High- ness looked a shade baffled as the deep-throated roar died away. Baron Fukushima looks a bit baffled too. I do not find this surprising, for it is clear on in- ternal evidence that he has just witnessed the annual inspection of the Eton College OTC by General Sir G. F. Milne, GCMG, KCB, DSO, who occupies the centre of the front row. I am sure that our evolutions were carried out with the customary dash and precision, but there is (or there was in those days) a je ne sais quoi about the Corps which might well have engen- dered perplexity in the scion of a warrior-race. Except for P. V. F. Cazalet, who wears an expression of astonished indignation, and Captain and Quartermaster H. K. Marsden, who has a lycanthropic crouch and seems to be about to hurl himself on the photographer and tear out his throat with long, sharp teeth, the rest of us merely look glazed. The photograph is headed `E.C.O.T.C. Officers and Sergeants 1926.' There are forty-nine of us, counting the Baron. Taking the age of the boys in this group as eighteen, and assuming that they went to their private schools when they were nine years old, I calculate that the average number of group- photographs in which each had up till then featured was round about thirty. For a good all-round athlete the figure would be higher. The eleven-year-old who makes his debut squatting on the ground in front of the First XI is going to be constantly before the camera through the ensuing years, and by the end of his University career will have accumulated enough stuff to fill a small picture gallery. What happens to all this junk?
Junk may seem an over-disparaging term to apply to what are in a sense hard-won trophies. It is however scarcely possible that a lower art- form than the group-photograph exists. Unless you happen either to have been or to have be- gotten one of them, a picture of eleven stony- faced louts and a football is not a picture that can be contemplated with pleasure; and when, as often happens, it hangs beside another picture depicting eight of the original louts with three new recruits the effect is painfully monotonous.
Nor can its possessor derive any very lively satisfaction from it. He may, when he was first given his colours, have gloated in private over the bright, new, long-coveted cap; but he does not feast his eyes on the photograph of the First XI, indeed once he has hung it on his wall he practically never looks at it again. It would be different if he had won a point-to-point and had framed a photograph of his horse getting its nose in front over the last fence; that picture, im- mortalising an event, a crisis, and deriving beauty and urgency from the horses, would give him en- joyment whenever he saw it, and he would like other people to see it too. The group, even in the lavatory, is merely a waste of wall-space.
• • I suspect that it is often Mum who starts the rot by initially encouraging a trend from which she will be the chief sufferer in the long run (Darling, do you really want me to get the glass mended? It's ndt a bit good of you, and it's only the Second XI'). When George comes home after his first term and she finds in his trunk a photo- graph showing the pupils and staff at Otis Court huddled in a great, grey, blancmange-shaped phalanx, she shows or simulates an eager curiosity.
Here, she first thinks, is something that ought to get him talking; for she longs to break through the silence-barrier, to tear aside the veil of polite taciturnity behind which the infant has hidden the decifive and doubtless alarming experiences of the last three months. The photograph proves useless for this purpose. 'He looks rather nice. Is he a friend of yours?' No."Isn't this the boy who was in the next bed when you all had 'flu?' 'Yes.' What's he like?' Not bad.'
Stalemated here, she turns to the idea—widely prevalent among ladies whose first male child has just returned from boarding-school—of buttress- ing his status as a Big Boy. She believes that this purpose will be furthered by having the school photograph framed and hung in his room; and she is influenced in this by the undoubted fact that the interior decoration of a bedroom occupied by a small boy presents problems of taste which are not easily solved in the early stages. So up it goes—`Otis Court, 1957'—the first of a long series in its deadly genre.
* * Nobody can prevent these photographs being taken. It would be wrong if anybody tried to. They have, in the school, the athletic club or the regimental depot, the status of archives; and oc- casionally, when some dim man goes berserk in Patagonia or makes mincemeat of his mistress in Moulmein, they help our great national news- papers to discharge their duty to the reading public.
But this in no way lessens the administrative problems connected with their display, disposal and storage. The only helpful suggestion I can offer is based on my'fortuitous re-encounter with Baron Fukushima and my other, closer com- rades-in-arms, which has given me true though abstruse pleasure. This is that group-photographs should be laid down like pipes of port, and con- cealed among the general detritus of a household so effectively that they will not be seen again for a minimum of thirty years.
If, indeed, ever.
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