A letter to my godson

PERSONAL COLUMN STRIX

DrAR X

You are in luck. If Mr Simon Raven had not recently published in the SPECTATOR 'A letter to my son' I should have forgotten that your fifteenth birthday was, like Master Raven's, looming up, and you wouldn't have got the present which I have now ordered for you. I hope it is the sort of thing you like.

In his letter Mr Raven laid down 'the rules of life and conduct' which he wished his son to follow. I suppose it's just possible that your father, if he were still alive, would have attempted to do something of the sort, but he would not have made the attempt in public and. if he had decided that he ought to say some- thing about sex, I doubt very much whether he would have addressed you as if you were a minor character in a Restoration comedy. 'Don't get a bastard and don't get poxed' is perfectly sound advice as far as it goes, but these words, manly and insouciant though they sound to an adult reader, are capable of puzzling, embarrassing and even alarming a boy of fifteen.

If your contemporary is in need of advice, you may be in need of it too; but even if the advice I gave you had any value, would you hoist it in, let alone take it? Were I, like Mr Raven, to exhort you never to part in anger— 'however much someone you know has annoyed or even injured you, if he is going a long way away you must have him to yOur table and drink his health'—how would you interpret my words? They can hardly apply to the odious who lives in the same county as you and, until his parents take him ski-ing next winter, is unlikely to go a long way away. If the words did apply, have you got a table to invite him to? What would you drink his health in, and would he understand what you were up to? I can't help feeling that a directive on these lines might go over your head.

I doubt, as a matter of fact, whether fifteen is an age at which a boy can profitably be lectured about how he should behave when he grows up. His head is already bursting with rules of every kind—school regulations, the rules of the games he plays, the rules (to some of which he is ex- pected to learn the exceptions—'Common are to either sexl Artifex and opifex,' and all that stuff) of Latin and French grammar, of algebra and geometry and goodness knows what else; his masters, his seniors and the clergy through whose sermons he is required to sit in chapel subject him to a fairly continuous stream of more general admonition; and I don't see how he can—or indeed why he should—be expected to concentrate his mind on a lot of precepts which won't come into force for several years

yet.

There is one way (short of endless repetition, which may defeat its own object) in which an adult can hope to make his long-term advice stick in a boy's head, and that is to give it in as few words as possible. The only Field-Marshal to rise from the ranks in the First World War was a man called William (known as 'Wully') Robertson. Soon after that war ended, and long before anybody realised that the men who won it were a bunch of clueless boobies, Robertson was asked to make a speech to a school at which they were giving away the prizes. The headmaster introduced him at some length, perhaps fulsomely. Robertson rose. 'Boys,' he said, 'I have a great deal to say to you but it won't take long: so remember it. ,Speak the truth. Think of others. Don't dawdle.' Then he sat down.

Hardly memorable as oratory, but unfor- gettable—and difficult to fault—as advice.

(Another, more frivolous example of the advantages of brevity in this sort of context is provided by a friend of mine, who overheard his grandfather laying down the three basic rules which must never be broken. The first was 'Never drink port after champagne.' The second was 'Never hunt south of the Thames.' The third, I am afraid, was slightly indelicate. None of these rules, except the first, was of the slightest use to my friend at any stage of his career; the point is that he remembered them.)

I wish I could think of something sage and pithy, a sort of cracker-motto for your fifteenth birthday which would lodge in your mind and perhaps one day stand you in good stead; but I can't. There is, however, one abstract notion which I strongly recommend to you, and that is the notion of chivalry. I am sure you have heard of it, in the same way that you have heard of proportional representation and the Sargasso Sea, but I don't suppose you regard it as any more capable than they are of affecting your life and the way you live it. If I were you, I would let it try and do this.

Don't be put off by the dictionary's definition of the chivalrous man; 'the ideal knight, gallant, honourable, courteous, disinterested, quixotic' sounds a bit high-falutin. Don't be disillusioned when you discover that the code of chivalry as practised in the Middle Ages was bedevilled by pretensions and snobbery and all sorts of questionable tricks. The point about chivalry was that, despite all its fripperies, it worked; because of it people who would nowadays be called trend-setters behaved more decently— showed more mercy, betrayed each other less readily—than they would have if chivalry had never been invented. I dare say China and Russia, in whose traditions chivalry plays no part, would be more agreeable places to live in if they had had a dose of it.

Anyhow, I should give chivalry a try. You don't hear much about it nowadays—it's not a word that finds its way with any frequency into television scripts or politicians' speeches—but things are seldom any the worse for being out of fashion. Not, at any rate, things like chivalry.

Sorry to have written such a long letter.

Good luck from your affectionate godfather

STRIX