Forty years on

PERSONAL COLUMN

ARTHUR BARTON

'When afar and asunder, parted are those who are singing today,' the song goes on, as any old Harrovian can tell you, and any old Jarrovian too, for by a curious coincidence this was our school soh also—Jarrow Grammar School's, where I spent four mute inglorious years in the 'twenties. It is now 'forty years on' and even the young gentlemen of the Harrow of 1928 cannot be scattered farther than their pro- letarian contemporaries of Jarrow—the town that was seven short years later to be, as Ellen Wilkinson put it, socially and economically `murdered.'

The school still looks the same, decent Geor- gian brick, sloping green lawns, a touch of perpetual east wind from the North Sea. When you look again, you can see that it is more than twice as big, but that's inevitable nowa- days. In my time we were something under 300 boys and girls. About 20 per cent were `scholarship' children; the rest paid modest fees. We were inevitably socially divisive—there were cleverer boys and girls than we who could not afford to take up their 'scholarships.' The cost of uniforms and equipment, not to speak of the agreement to stay on until you were sixteen when you could have been adding eight or nine shillings to the family income for two whole years, absolutely prohibited it. Some of them wrote to me when I had a kind of autobiography of those years published a while ago, and I was astonished at the quality of the writing, the intelligence and the sensi- tivity shown in those letters from people who (I'm ashamed to say) I'd have once dismissed as 'down the street' children.

However, we were not to blame for the way pupils were chosen for grammar schools forty years ago, and my time there, though I was poor, badly dressed, idle and incompetent in everything except English and French, was extremely happy. There is, to my mind, nothing better educationally than a reasonably homo- geneous smallish mixed school (and I speak from twenty-five years of secondary teaching), but I fear that with the growth of the com- prehensive school we shall not look upon their like again.

Our little grammar school had the faults of its period—mild snobbery, gentility, a stressing of the classics; but our minds were lined with fine poetry and prose, and opened to Shakes- peare and Beethoven and Italian painting. Be- cause of a preponderance of pretty girls, we avoided any temporary phase of homosexuality, and if romantic love blossomed somewhat too early and proved a distraction from the 'Oxford,' it had its compensations. I spent four years there; most of my memories are happy, some ecstatic, and I doubt if anyone, staff or pupils, remembered me when I left.

The school I went to before that is still there too, though in the new Jarrow—a curious non- town that has replaced the grim but warm- hearted community I was brought up in—it will soon be demolished. Its cracked bell no longer terrorises the children of all the streets named after trees and admirals and European kings and queens that surrounded it, though Gothic letters still spell out `Boys,' Girls' and 'Infants' over the hated gates. I spent seven years there; most of the time in fear of teachers and boys. I suppose the infant department wasn't so bad. I sat next to Rita who smelled nice, and Miss Macintosh wore starched pattens on her fore- arms, and Miss Nicholls drank whisky behind the blackboard and called me a 'daft German sausage' (everything German was bad in 1916) and the cane went 'swish' against Miss Law- rence's floor-length skirt when you jerked your hand away, and sometimes we had lessons on hot summer days on a narrow strip of garden where the smell of crushed grass and daisies intoxicated us.

It was into this relative Eden that Isaac Tweddle used to come illegally from the 'big boys' yard' and say, 'GP us summick.' Gradu- ally I parted with all my smaller toys to him, and then one day we were marched along a dark ink-smelling corridor into the Big School and were in Standard One and I was in his power for ever.

I escaped into a world of fantasy. Just at that time the BOP was running a serial called `Sabre and Spurs; a Tale of the Light Dragoons' and for several years I was, not the handsome young officer, but Kitten, his chest- nut mare which only he could ride. I galloped everywhere, champed my bit, snorted, turned the dash to get to school before the bell stopped into the charge at Quatre Bras. Dozens of Tyneside boys must remember my capers up and down the schoolyard in a desperate attempt to unseat my imaginary rider. They occupied many a feared and hated playtime when Isaac or Howard Spoors, his friend, would otherwise have been twisting my wrists, or in the reeking solitude of the lavatories doing things that I felt might impair the pro- creative powers I had just heard about (but couldn't yet believe in).

There was a good deal of boy-to-boy cruelty, but it was only for fifteen minutes twice a day. At four o'clock I could always out- distance anyone home to the peace and safety of Grenville Street where my mates would protect me—even if they thought and said I

was `dooly- (not knowing that they were using Hindustani for 'daft' almost correctly)—and there were blessed long evenings by the fire with White Fang and The Gorilla hunters.

The teachers, however, were fairly brutal all the time. Most of them used the cane on an average twenty or thirty times a day. I was a mild, nervous boy, very obedient, eager to please and fairly intelligent, but if I could tell my mother I hadn't been caned for a week it was a matter for congratulation. What sur-

prised me even then was why they caned the dull and backward, and even those marked `MD' (mentally deficient) in the register for fail- ing to improve at a reasonable rate. Some of

them were nice men, none was unintelligent, all were very conscientious, but their perpetual flight to vigorous corporal punishment seems odd—especially in these permissive days when (as recently happened) a county official thought half a dozen entries in the punishment book during a term somewhat excessive: not that they bore much relation to the amount actually given, but even that, if it had been honestly recorded, would not have totalled a day's canings in my elementary school.

Fear made me learn a lot, but though I was often praised I was never happy. There were too many torture sessions when we were free, too much totally unmerited punishment in the classroom. When I think of my first school I remember the clank of the doleful bell, the smells of ink and sweat and worse, the feel of a hairy masculine fist against my head, the tingling of swollen fingers. Worst of all, the poor grubby faces buried in jerseyed arms on the desk top, and the hour-long sobbings that racked my heart and were to make me an indifferent disciplinarian (by those standards) when I began to teach years later.

At the grammar school no one caned but the head, and he very seldom, and I had no fear, and was happy and idle; and would press my face to the iron gates of the yard towards the end of the long summer holiday and yearn to be back. When I think of those four short but formative years I think of the smell of burning leaves drifting in from the garden, and some form singing 'Linden Lea' far away in the music room while we translated Victor Hugo, and the adored blonde head of Molly Lynn—absurd to think that she, too, must be fifty-six now!

That school made me a lifelong liberal, an intellectual snob, a 'posh talker,' a lover (too earnestly for many years) of culture. It lost me the common touch if I ever had it, but did not teach me to 'walk with kings'—the nearest I ever got was being orderly sergeant to a duke. But like Belloc's Oxford, 'all that I had, she gave me again.' Englishmen are said to belong all their lives too much to their schools. I suppose E. M. Forster would say it was part of the tragedy of the undeveloped heart. It decreases as you go down the social scale, and even in these days when there is nothing to fear there is little love for the average secondary modern, or even the over- large grammar, and none, I fear, for the insti- tutional comprehensives.

But people like me have been marked for ever by those little oases of culture, the small, friendly, mixed grammar schools, some old, some, like Jarrow's, owing its existence to Balfour's life-enhancing Act, that used to be scattered about rural and industrial England `forty years on.'