• SPECTATOR COMPETITION FOR SCHOOLS Three prizes of eight guineas each
were offered to boys and girls at school in the United Kingdom or Eire for (a) a story, (b) an essay, or (c) a sonnet. The winning story was published last week.
By K. E. MeGARVIE THE remarkable thing about present-day education is that one can, under pressure, produce a certificate to prove that one has got it, or, at least, has come into its contact. For every fifth- and sixth-former, future social and economic security is darkly threatened by GCE. Indeed, one suspects the existence of a neurotic minority whose waking hours are haunted by the vision of some brisk, managerial angel flipping through a pile of general certificates before recommending their final inspection at the Judgement Seat itself. But for the healthier candidate the modern examination is a cause less for anxiety than for nostalgia. Perhaps he feels that the twentieth century, blushingly conscious of nationalisa- tion and hire-purchase, had resolved as a final concession to individual rights, to pat him on his personal head. The act of sitting for the GCE takes on a new and profound signifi- cance: he is a living memorial to Private Enterprise, his pen scratching its Last Post. He is a young Jason striving for a Golden Fleece. His imagination boggles at it. . . .
But there is also, on a less celestial plane, a very real sense of melancholy about those funereal and rather draughty examination halls where this annual ritual takes place. Candidates wait, pens poised expectantly, as black-gowned- and,,possibly, somewhere, masked—invigilators gravely clatter down echoing, sunlit aisles between rows of dusty, brown desks. The very silence is calculated to make the occasion an impressive one. The assembly watches for one pregnant moment the white face of the loudly ticking clock. Then, sud- denly, the seals are torn away. The pursuit of Education is on! Hearts beat; hands wave; papers circulate. But after the first panic-stricken flutterings .of thb candidate's mind, his imagination begins to reassert itself. . . .
The first page of a French paper instantly transports him from the narrow confines of the examination hall to a half- Gallic and half-Thurber world where the inconsequential is king. He stumbles, sight suddenly acutely myopic, but fate quite as certain as that of (Edipus, into the apartments of incredibly deaf old ladies with—of necessity—a very limited vocabulary, who immediately suspect his every motive and either scream for a gendarme or set large dogs on him. The candidate can exercise no control over these old ladies—or their dogs—for although recognisably of this world they exist in a twilight dimension quite insusceptible to rational thought or action. By the fairly simple phrase: 'Racontez cc qui se passe ensuite,' Miss Lucy Somebody, MA, has unwittingly opened endless vistas where the imagination may wander— in English, of course—at will, unfettered by the mere techni- calities of language.
Even on the other side of the Rhine, the hallucinations persist, Subtly changed to match the national character. The leitmotiv of a German paper is less fantasy than downright witchcraft, and the candidate ceases to be the short-sighted hub of the world's disaster and falls himself a victim to what Browning somewhere in the syllabus has called 'the powers at play.' Finding himself hiking in the thickest and blackest of German forests, he may be assured that his torch will flicker out by nightfall. Owls will hoot—with the aid of foot- notes—and distant dogs will bark. The witch, when eventually discovered, thinly disguised as an old woman in a shawl, will invariably be collecting wood, although to an Englander it may seem a strange thing to be doing in the small hours of the morning. The candidate will hereupon, with a sense of fitness born perhaps of some experience, hand over a few marks for her associates, thinly disguised as two threadbare orphans. The Teutonic powers of darkness are somehow more tractable with a little trinkgeld in their pockets, and it ensures for him not only the normal quota of golden apples in return, but a free passage to well over the required 150,words as well.
Back in his native tongue, of course, the candidate may return to linguistic sanity. Beyond the printer, there is no margin for error. It is inevitable that an Eng. Lit. paper will seem irredeemably prosaic, after the glorious, surrealist con- fusions of a foreign language. He cannot build castles in the air of his imagination when his 'set books' have provided him with the actual weight of bricks and mortar. Moreover, the syllabus, beyond instilling in him a lifelong aversion to the major poets of his own country, is cunningly networked with hundreds of minor characters from Shakespeare. He is con- fronted with a host of names so bewilderingly alike that he is convinced they could only have existed in the most obscure suburbs of the artist's mind, and laughingly asked to give concise studies of any four.
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