AFTERTHOUGHT
JOHN WELLS
I have no idea why it is, but whenever I see even a photograph in someone else's newspaper of a schoolteachers' conference I inevitably
feel myself bowled over by a great wave of boredom. As far as I can remember it was even worse from the inside. When I was teaching in Germany we went so far as to have a Konferenz every morning. The children spent
their mid-morning break laughing and running about in the sunshine, and we sat inside, dipping unhappily into tin bowls of blood sausage and plates of bread and cheese and salami, drinking mint tea from thick white mugs and listening to one colleague after another painstakingly entwining us in the slow thread of his mono- logue until we were cocooned in tedium. Per- fectly reasonable men on the surface, they could be relied upon to weave the simplest issue, like a slight adjustment in the timetable or the mending of a window, into an intricate cat's cradle of speculation and reminiscence, enriched with little jewels of observation such as a note that Werner Giebel had seemed listless of late and was therefore probably devoting his leisure to solitary vice.
Certainly all committees are extremely boring. But whereas committees of soldiers or clergy- men, however absurd or quaint they may be individually, save themselves from the ultimate pomposity by acknowledging some higher authority, schoolteachers recognise none. Like anarchists and successful revolutionaries—also immensely boring in conference—they have tasted freedom, never having to worry about finding another job or being re-elected, and see themselves as the professional philosophers and moulders of the growing society, entitled to long and rambling deliberations of unlimited length.
Admittedly their life in term-time is more minutely subdivided into hours and half-hours than that of any member of the strictest con. templative order. But like the religious they naturally develop a contempt for time as a whole simply because all the illusions of progress that a man creates between himself and his death have evaporated. Other men dream of increasing maturity, of an imaginary escalator carrying them up into a middle and old age in the luxury goods department, or of fighting their way up a ladder with the intention of unseating the clown at present occupying the top rung. The schoolteacher sees instead thirty more summer holidays, thirty more classes, probably of about the same age and -stage of advance- ment, thirty more annual reports to write, a level path leading on to retirement and blessed release. There is of course the illusion that one day a hated headmaster or head of department w111 fall over a cliff or be crushed under the wheels of an articulated lorry and that his job will then become vacant, but the pattern of existence will always remain the same.
This gtanding aside from life, or standing in a part of life where everyone is always eleven, can only encourage a feeling of free suspension in time and a taste for the philosophical ex- change of irrelevances. Any solid question of reform or improvement is unavoidably swept up into this vacuum, as it is among those who despise time on religious grounds, and spun into a fine candy floss of enjoyable debate, losing its substance and eventually floating away in hot air.
Another factor that contributes,to the Olym- pian tedium of discussion is the schoolteacher's own slow-moving and heroic nature. Conscious of the potentially hostile band of infants throng- ing about his knees, he has learned from his earliest encounters with children to build up a thick and impenetrable system of defences. The children, in most cases, are both physically and mentally inferior to himself, but he must guard against a surprise attack when his mind is on other things. He therefore develops small peculiarities of dress and curious habits of speech, used like beads to dazzle and delight the little underdeveloped people, working out a strict pattern of movements, places to pace and places to stand still, times to rage and times to beam benevolently, as well as a defensive, and socially speaking quite unnatural silent pom- posity behind which the still active mind can dwell on the runners in the 2.30, the legs of the headmaster's secretary,' or what is for lunch. Any ruse to conceal from the little prisoners the jailer's vulnerable humanity. '
This fantasy life, in which the schoolteacher becomes a lonely district commissioner in a wilderness of pygmies, sometimes dancing for them until they shriek and scream with laughter, sometimes pulling on a devil mask so that they cover their faces and cringe back in horror, and always boss-man, master and great white father, eventually convinces even the teacher himself. Telling stories of life in Darkest 3C to an adult audience he will emphasise a child's use of the word 'Sir' in reported dialogue, just as missionaries' wives returning from heathen
lands will-go out of their way to mention the terms of reverence with which they were
addressed by their native servants. His position in the child's mind, or so he believes, is infinitely more elevated than, let us say, that of the child's father.
All this bodes ill for the conference hall. Dragging themselves from their own classroom lair, insensitive and heavily armoured against the child slaves on whom they have grown so fat and self-important, the monsters meet their equals. They know each other for their super- human sarcasm, irony, or flamboyant display of learning, recognise that they are twice the size of their usual infant prey, and circle one another warily. Haunting their frightening beards, coloured woollen waistcoats and shock-
ing bow ties, they drone on with their terrible primeval tedium; utter the unexpected squawks of rage, and assume the sudden benign leers that in the past have reduced their child victims to shivering jellies. Finding this has no effect, they lock themselves in ponderous debate, mill- ing round and round like dinosaurs wrestling in mud for a million years. In fact for real, flattening, brain-rotting tedium I can think of nothing better than' a full meeting of the tour. Except, possibly, and -for all the same reasons, a conference of professional writers.
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