Englishmen abroad

God and garlic

John Organ

A storks' nest teeters on the tower of the long, low baroque building in a dusty backstreet of Valladolid, central Spain. The unknowing passerby would never guess that this is a most curious corner of a foreign field that is for ever England.

The English College at Valladolid was founded in 1589 to train Roman Catholic priests in safety before dispatching them home in secret as missionaries to their native land, where many were executed on the scaffold at Tyburn and elsewhere.

Today it still trains English priests, in happier circumstances, and continues to cultivate a reputation for glorious English eccentricity. The present Rector, Monsignor David Greenstock, sixty-three, apart from running the college and writing theological books with titles such as Death the Glorious Adventure, has spent much of his life carrying out scientific research on the 'medical virtues of garlic. He believes he is on the verge of an important discovery in using the oil of the pungent herb to cure the Mysterious mycotoxicosis diseases caused by a poisonous micro-fungus in mouldy grain.

Monsignor Greenstock is only the latest in a long line of larger-than-life characters who have flourished at the college. The previous Rector, Monsignor Edwin Henson, stayed on his. own at Valladolid when the students were evacuated during World War Two. No sooner was the Nazis' defeat known, than he took a mule cart through the streets of Valladolid, drew up at the German Consulate, and claimed it in the name of King George VI. Frocked in purple-piped cassock, he seized Nazi documents, shields and trappings, and threw them into the cart. "An extraordinary character who still spoke Spanish with a Yorkshire accent after nearly forty years in the country," says Monsignor Greenstock, with relish, of his predecessor, who died in 1961. "It can now be revealed that throughout the war Monsignor Henson had a special wireless set with direct communication to the British Embassy in Madrid so that he could warn them immediately if he saw German troops appearing on the horizon." The college records contain many references to other English priests who seem to have stepped from the pages of George Borrow or Evelyn Waugh, and the archives detail wrangles and intrigues. ("God send we do not get some excommunication against us", wrote one Rector in the eighteenth century; and in 1809 the students got involved in the Spanish uprising against Joseph Bonaparte.) Delightful details are given in the records of an aeronautical experiment: 1779. On April 1 the Rev. John Greenaway began to lecture on philosophy ...

1781 . .. the Rev. John Greenaway became Vice-Rector and began to lecture on theology ...

1784. Greenway, at Valladolid, was experimenting with some sort of a flying machine, which seems to have been on the lines of a rocket balloon. In May he wrote: "I have made no experiment as yet on my flying bladder, as I had proposed. For it to take flight, we ought, 1 fancy, to inflame the gas either with some Electric fire or some other way, and I presume in this case when filled, it would burst with a report capable of frightening half the city; we must therefore wait until we learn to make globes, and then begin our experiments."

In June he wrote,: "the misfortunate exit of flying in Aranjuez will deter me in our flights." Monsignor Greenstock's experiments with garlic are of a more serious nature. He received me in a study adorned with baroque paintings and an ivory crucifix. In the corner was a large green hutch containing a pair of red squirrels.

("They are dying out in Spain and I hope to succeed in breeding them in captivity so that we,can let them loose at our summer house outside Valladolid.") Then he opens a cloth' leading into a modern laboratory. He produces colour photographs of blood slides to show how garlic-essence can thin the blood to reduce the risk of blood-clotting and thus prevent thrombosis.

"One of the many mediaeval legends about this garlic business was that a string of garlics round the neck would keep vampire bats at bay, and now science has shown that there was something in it after all," he says. Monsignor Greenstock reports that he has discovered at least four natural antibiotics in garlic, showing why it has been used for centuries in hot countries to prevent internal disorders; he produces four volumes of correspondence with research establishments around the world, and describes his experiments on garlic as an insecticide. "Mark you, to be most effective the garlic must be grown in natural conditions with natural manure." He explains how the garlic oil is extracted, and holds up a phial of pale golden fluid: "The result is this rather evil smelling liquid." Monsignor Greenstock says his passion for applying biology to agriculture began as a boy with a shed and a microscope on his grandfather's farm outside Winchester (he studied for the priesthood at Valladolid from 1930 to 1936, and returned as Vice-Rector in 1945).

Valladolid, a sprawling city which hides old churches and splendid sixteenth century polychromed wood sculptures among brash new apartment blocks, was the birthplace of Philip II and lies a three-hour train journey from Madrid. It is the capital of the wheatlands of the Castilian plains where tiny and shabby villages are dwarfed by gothic churches and the landscape dazzles, at this time of year, with fields of sunflowers. The college today houses thirty-two priests. ("No, we don't experiment on them, but they do volunteer blood samples In the corridors hang paintings of the College's twenty-three martyrs, nearly always Portrayed against a background of gibbet and Other gruesome details showing how they were hanged, drawn and quartered. Six of the martyrs have been canonised as saints by Pope Paul VI. The college's most notorious student, Titus Oates, spent four months here in 1678. A renegade Catholic who betrayed his former classmates, he returned to England with four Pages of the college registers which he used as evidence in one of the last periods of bloody persecution.

Pride of the ornate gold altarpiece in the college church is a mutilated Madonna hacked and battered by the swords of English soldiery who sacked Cadiz under the Earl of Essex and Sir Walter Raleigh in 1596. A solemn liturgy is sung at the college every Saturday evening in reparation for that act of vandalism so long ago. The students' common room is decorated with English jokes and beer signs. An announcement on the notice board proclaims: "Drink wonderful super-chilled vino. Now only five pesetas a glass." But college life is spartan: the student priests live in small monastic cells, and the austere corridors are bitterly cold in winter.

The college prides itself on a cricket pitch, a concrete wicket with a slow outfield, surrounded by pine trees, which make a boundary difficult. Monsignor Greenstock

describes it as "one of the strangest cricket pitches in the world and a constant source of amazement to Spaniards passing by on the road."

Gifted Children. But complacency at having fathered the conference shouldn't blind us to the fact that Britain is doing less than many countries for her gifted children. Only a handful of authorities have taken tentative steps towards making special provision for the exceptionally able child. But simultaneously the government support for direct grant schools has been withdrawn. And special facilities for those who are gifted in the visual arts scarcely exist. Perhaps we get the architecture we deserve.

We have long taken it for granted that backward children need special education, and their teachers special training. There is an awareness of the problems of these children who are not like other children and the parents of a backward child have the sympathy, if not the assistance, of society. We have been less sensitive to the needs of those at the other end of the intellectual spectrum who are equally unlike other children. Their problems are as great and their needs as special. Yet the suggestion that they should have special educational opportunities often brings forth protests that they are privileged enough already.

The privilege is a dubious one. Whether he is budding Einstein, Beethoven or Austen the gifted child finds himself the odd one out. The lucky ones gain acceptance by excelling at sport or from force of personality. The less fortunate may echo the words of one brilliant child mathematician who replied in an interview, "Friends? I only have enemies." And he was at a grammar school. But these are not the only alternatives. To gain acceptance the gifted child may suppress his ability, stop asking questions, learn not to put up his hand, and in the end conform so totally to the academic standard of those around him that his teachers never realise that he is above average. In a recent study of children with educational problems, less than half of those with IQs of over 120 were thought by their teachers to be at all able. They had simply channelled their ability into disruptive behaviour.

Contacts with adults may be no easier. His ability may alienate him from his family and, paradoxically, may make him unpopular with teachers. For teachers, by and large, like children who are bright enough to give the right answers but not bright enough to ask the wrong questions. An adult needs exceptional confidence to deal with a child whose ability puts him in the shade. Sadly, universal education, which is the corner stone of democratic, western society can be the millstone of the exceptional child. How many of the great creative minds of the past could have come unscathed through the pulping machine of contemporary education?

Comprehensive education, with its theoretical emphasis on opportunity for all, and its large units which should have provided a chance to bring together both groups of gifted children and teachers with special talents, might have been the most practical step towards solving some of these problems. But too often comprehensive education is, like Christianity, a splendid ideal which has dwindled into ritual acceptance and been bent to meet the needs of old Gods. It has also fallen victim to the contemporary cults of mediocrity and woolly liberalism which confuse equality with sameness. To give every child the same work and the same education can never provide equal opportunity for children of unequal ability.

Mixed ability teaching which. emphasises individual progress has been put forward as a solution to the teaching of gifted children. But once again there is a gulf between theory and practice. Oversized classes and inadequate equipment create problems. But even if these were overcome it remains a fact that while you can become a teacher with only five '0' levels many teachers won't even be bright enough to stimulate the clever children, let alone the gifted ones. Gifted children need gifted teachers and teachers who are specially trained. Neither are generally available.

We have no way of knowing how many exceptional children are failing to achieve their potential. Research is patchy and the existing tests of some aspects of giftedness, such as creativity, are largely inadequate. But in some studies less than half of those who have been identified as exceptional have even gone to university. For centuries Britain has lived on her brains. Can we afford this wastage?

In a world which is teetering on the brink of crisis we not only, as was repeatedly pointed out at the conference, need every gifted man we can get. We also, need to ensure that those who will be tomorrow's scientists and politicians are educated to have more foresight and breadth of vision than some of their predecessors. This cannot be done by simply moving the gifted through the school system faster nor by providing more complex work sheets for them to use in ordinary classes. Only systems such as those operating in parts of America and Israel, which withdraw these children from ordinary lessons and place them in special classes for at least some of their education, begin to meet this need. There are obvious pitfalls here, but it is the only way in which such children can be faced with the challenge of working with their intellectual equals and can encounter teachers with sufficient ability and training to stimulate them to the full.

There is a certain paradox in the fact that communist countries manage, in education, to come close to their credo of "to each according to his needs, from each according to his ability" by providing special education for the intellectually gifted as well as for musicians, dancers and athletes. While we in the west, who claim to believe in the rights of the individual, are beset by quasi moral qualms when it comes to meeting the needs of individuals who are gifted. • If yesterday's wars were won on the playing fields of Eton, is it too much to hope that tomorrow's wars can be prevented in the classrooms of today? This will not be achieved until Governments take more responsible attitude to the education of tomorrow's leaders.