AFTERTHOUGHT

Out of step

BRUCE LOCKHART

L. Bruce Lockhart is the headmaster of Gresham's School, Holt.

The middle-aged schoolmaster's heart sinks into his boots as the pressure for 'school dan-

ces' is renewed. 0 ternpora! 0 mores! But

there is no way out: the Spirit of the Time demands its sacrifices. Segregation is con- demned by the psychologists and educa- tionalists. Boys and girls must get together, and if they are frustrated all the resultant complexes and perversions will be blamed on their schoolmasters.

Why (such a schoolmaster asked himself) did he dread- those occasions so much? Was he really jealous of their enthusiastic if in- competent display of pullulating sex? Was he as mean as the row of soured spinsters whose disapproving eyes spurred him on to his reluctant duty as a spoilsport? And were these hot and sweaty teenagers with their spots, their messy clothes and their vulgar noise really the frank and free heralds of a golden age?

How much sweeter were his own memories of swirling, fragrant evening dresses and kisses stolen in the rose garden.

The middle-aged schoolmaster supposed he ought to feel ashamed of his class-conscious, overprivileged youth. Yet it was nothing to the shame he felt over his hopeless failure to find for school dances a compromise between contemporary standards of relaxed enjoyment and a schoolmaster's conception of civilised good manners ... Prayer and the pill? Or barbed wire and machine guns? The problem was still unsolved.

Compromise was possible. In the holidays many middle class parents hand over the keys of the drinks cupboard, provide mat- tresses and blankets for the `snogging room', suffer the installation of psychedelic lighting, stand by sheepishly to greet guests invited or uninvited and then clear out in obedience to the unambiguous instructions of their children. Meanwhile the rites within follow their usual pattern. Flickering lights, heavy rhythms and an intolerable volume of noise hypnotise the susceptible victims into a state of automation. All conscious thought and in- dividuality is submerged in a community ex- perience of basic, unrefined sex. Flirtations, communications, and relationships are im- possible, for even the hottest words of passion are inaudible to the most receptive of feminine ears. Eyes are closed, but not, alas!

in ecstasy! It is just to avoid seeing whom one is kissing. The sexual 'trip' is as im- personal and trance-like as any drug-induced state, and does not often result in rela- tionships of a complete kind. Does it free the British young more or less harmlessly from their traditional inhibitions? Does it cheapen their whole attitude to relationships? Do they grow increasingly limited and bored in any other context?

The answers are not simple. Some believe that the young are learning to look at sex more naturally and will be saved from the starry-eyed mistakes of their parents. Many girls, however, resent being expected to ex- change passionate kisses with any and every partner; even some of the boys feel the lack of graciousness and style. Some parents regard their children's willingness to indulge in intimate caresses in public as immodest, unchaste and even exhibitionist, and resent being expected to absent themselves from the party at which they are hosts.

`But sir,' said a house captain to his housemaster, 'it was both more dangerous and more hypocritical for you to kiss your girl friend in the rose garden than it is for us to kiss "in public" amongst a hundred others equally oblivious of their surroundings: Maybe; but the housemaster's girl friend was taken into the garden because she was someone special, to whom he wanted to say special things. He was, moreover, quite prepared to be rebuffed, without dropping her like a hot brick with the childish but hurtful accusation that she was frigid.

After the permissive holidays it is not easy for boys to return to a monastery or girls to a convent. Hence the pressure for more dances in term-time. How can the generation gap be bridged? If the older generation's standards are to be exacted, all the teenagers must be imprisoned in one large building guarded by chaperones. They must be tap- ped on the shoulder if they are behaving too sexily, busied with Dashing White Sergeants, eightsomes, quicksteps and waltzes, hustled out of trouble with competitions, illuminated by lights of puritan intensity, jerked out of temptation by cheerful, unlangourous rhythms and accompanied by lots of junior masters and mistresses of exemplary presence and behaviour. It can be done, but few of the younger generation will admit (ex- cept in private) that they enjoy such a dance. For the adult chaperones it can be sheer hell.

If, on the other hand, the schoolmaster lets the teenagers run their own show. he not only runs the risk of damage, drunkenness, or promiscuity, but he will face the bitter reproaches of parents who, on coming to fetch their young, are horrified by the brothel lighting and the closely entwined couples in hall and shrubbery who have given up all pretence of dancing. Parents do not take kindly to schoolmasters who reflect their own laxity.

Some compromises are possible. Fortified by secret glasses of scotch the elderly can twist and shake within the limits imposed by corpulence. Brave teenagers can fumble and stumble their way round the unfamiliar in- tricacies of an old-fashioned waltz. Appeals to the young to respect the priggishness of their seniors can be more or less effective. Yet something is wrong. That 'something wrong' is a fashion which cuts right across class and environment.

The schoolmasters are not just resisting change. The pill may well be ushering in an age of greater happiness and sexual freedom. If, however, it leads to substituting com- munal sex for genuine and selective love something of eternal value will have been sacrificed to the broiler-house society. Perhaps there is nothing wrong with massed kissing in public, but there is something wrong with massed copulation in public. The line between is not easily drawn. Should we not draw it short of passionate kissing in public? Not only to avoid inciting lust in ac- cordance with Christian morality, but in the interests of glamour and romance and in defence of the dignity and preciousness of real love.

Of course we all like kissing; there would be something wrong if we didn't. Of course we change our affections from time to time.

But what of the pleasures of the chase? If we are expected to kiss any or everybody as a public duty it will turn the exquisite dawn of love into a humdrum and repetitive exercise in mild lust.

'When everybody's somebody, then no one's anybody.' God save us all from this ultimate egalitarian hell.