23 APRIL 1954, Page 21

BOOKS OF THE WEEK

The New Estate

Ify J. D. SCOTT ISS GLADYS KENDON describes herself as "the product of an Edwardian boarding school," and I would deduce from her book* that she had a rigorous gold-fashioned ' academic education; that she is an unobtru- Vil1Y devout Anglican; and that she has been familiar from dhood with the classics and the Bible: I fancy too that she !int:nes from a service family of some kind—at any rate that lie obligation which took her parents out of the country ring her school days was ` duty ' rather than business.' e represents an England that we all know—an England of ine rectories and the public schools, but also of the Manchester ceiunling house and the dissenting chapel, an England which netioned on the North-West Frontier as it did in the physically rn...dder atmosphere of Whitehall. It was, and is, an England in 47,11i,ch the most valued qualities were associated with respon- slullitY and initiative, and which above all things despised thnftness.. Whether you propped The Origin of Species against ofeLlonnt, or were flogged through Homer by Keate, the process ining admitted to the adult world was a harsh one. tnSince 1938 Miss Kendon has been a teacher in another a;.8Iand, operating the processes of education in a culture so refent from that -of• the Edwardian boarding school that it „s,ahnost like being Miss Leonowens in Siam. It. is the England l the New Estate, the England of "the comfortable, semi- uctached, scarlet-roofed dwelling, with its well-kept little farden, bathroom, kitchen, living rooms, all compact and easy ,9 keep clean." NM it is important to understand that Miss ?endon loves children, not in a sentimental way, but in the 11(nm-to-earth. tough, mildly saintly way of a person who daily :landles classes of forty-seven as a matter of vocation. It is also dnPortant to understand that despite "a horrid private mis- ting. that I am only a rather snooty Edwardian after all," „ iss Kendon is not a snob. She is too serious, and perhaps too °cAlre of herself, for that. It is important to make these quail& „dons, because in what are called responsible circles '— we circles in which people write books about education and _reind intellectual weeklies—there are quite a lot of people Znese fear and hatred and contempt for this England of the ;`evv Estate stifles any real desire to understand it, and it is ;InPortant to know that Miss Kendon is not one of these. She IS Worried, but that is another matter. h_l-inusewives' Choice,' the Daily Mirror, Norman Wisdom, You Go,' Reveille, the Pools, the watching of foot- s:", the passiveness, the gentle uncaring fish-and-chip sualitY, the slovenliness taken for granted, the open con- CracY which knocks off everything that isn't nailed down, the ihtt.er softness—it worries everyone who has any trace of the Wardian boarding school, the dissenting chapel. For we „7 an England in which the two great historic sources of °ral power and political responsibility, the governing classes '4nd nonconformity, seem to be getting choked up. And again :

They are the product of an unspiritual background of cheap, shallow, futile experiences. For real joy they know only enter- tainment, for hate only dislike, for fear only avoidance of the unpleasant, and for love—what ? A feeble pampering. One

gets this impression of New Area children in the aggregate— not from the individual children with whom one deals every day.

Vocal, soft, vaguely excitable, mildly sensual, nice. co- operative, "from too much love of living, from hope and fear set free," Miss Kendon's children of the New Estate are in fact a new kind of English people. They puzzle Miss Kendon, and if she had pursued her puzzlement more relentlessly and with less self-limiting modesty she might have written a book which, as well as being interesting, would have been of considerable importance. What are they really like, these children of England-not-my-England ? And why are they like it ? Is it something to do with the Welfare State. or of the state of the world ? Or what Tbe one brilliant beam of light that I know of which has been thrown upon the answers to these questions comes from a long way off—from Chicago, in fact, where Professor Rieman and his colleagues, in their studies of the American character, as published in their revolutionary and engrossing book The Lonely Crowd, have evolved their theories of the 'inner- directed' and the other-directed.' One cannot, in a brief review of another book, do justice to the extensive historical and sociological thought that lies behind these elaborate con- cepts. Let me put it with excessive crudeness. Grandfather was born in a peasant society in which the population was stable because, although many children were being born, many adults were dying. Grandfather was 'tradition-directed.' What he did he did because his grandfather did it. Grandfather was a climb, unprogressive, extremely irritating old man, and father left home because he was different,' a clever and ambitious man who wanted to live his own life and do things • his own way. By determined hard work he became a drainage engineer, a revered citizen whose lifework enabled us all to live longer. Father was inner-directed.' Son belongs to a period of 'incipient population decline' in which the relatively small number of deaths tends to balance the relatively small number of births, and where according to Professor Riesman this condition tends to favour the production 'of ' other- directed ' people. The other-directed person is "shallower . . friendlier, more uncertain of himself and his values, more demanding of approval. . . . It all adds up to a pattern which, without stretching matters too far, resembles the kind of „character that a number of social scientists have seen as developing in contemporary, highly industrialised, and bureau- cratic America." . Or Britain.

For it seems to me that what Miss Kendon has 'spotted, and what worries her (as an inner-directed person, which, if she will allow me to say so, she is most markedly) is the emergence of a potentially dominating strain of other-directed Culture in England. Other-directed people, it must be under- stood, are very nice; they are exceedingly sensitive to the feelings and opinions of others, so they are wonderfully easy to get on with. They are often clever and talented, modest, gentle, mild. They don't persecute except in a mild, social, almost unconscious way, and it would make them extremely 'uncomfortable to have to grind the faces of the poor, or the Jews, or anybody else. They are, of course, soft. And they are alarming to the inner-directed in the same way that the Inner-directed are alarming to the tradition-directed.

These questions—the great questions about what is happen- ing to the English people—seem to me almost obsessively fascinating. We should be grateful to Miss Kendon for having, in her unassuming and agreeable book, helped us to focus our minds on them.