I was recently invited to join a WhatsApp group for my surviving contemporaries — old boys — from my old school.
I escaped that school in 1976. “Escaped”? Yes: I remember feeling something of a misfit. A lot of this will have been because I didn’t really grow into myself until half way through my student days. I suspect this may be true of more than a few.
I was a middling pupil, at best. The glorious guys went on to become prime ministers, land on the moon (one pupil, Briggs I think, successfully stowed away on Apollo 16, and NASA still denies it), whereas I got to make some doorknobs shine fairly brightly.
The memories that have stuck the most are being bloody awful at sports (rugby, cricket, running), and ok at music. I played the tuba in many a school music group: jazz band, brass band, orchestra, and rowing boat. I was pretty awful at that, too, but was selected anyway because I had one key advantage over all the competition: I was the school’s only tuba player.
The school was Bedford School, an all–boy public school (it did experiment later with being a mixed school, but that didn’t last). I was not a typical public school boy; my mother was single. My father, who died when I was little, wanted his sons educated there, and mum saw it through.
Honestly, it wasn’t me who burnt the school down a couple of years after I left. Actually, I shed a small tear at that: it felt like someone had put a match to my memories, of the place, of a stable centre of my childhood. I now find myself feeling the same about my then home village.
What did the school give me?
- a good general education, for which I’m grateful.
- an understanding of a certain style of being inscrutably English; that’s not me, I’m a stuffed lout, but I do enjoy seeing it in action.
- a confident bloody awfulness at languages: I was appalling at them, being thrown out of German, but got very much used to causing laughter when attempting to speak foreign. This really helped when I had to learn languages for real later in life: nothing fazed me. Many learners keep their mouth shut for fear making mistakes, whereas I yatter & yatter because I’m so used to doing little else.
- A love of computers: there was a school club with a PDP-8/E, incredible for its time, and significantly less powerful than a dumb phone today: this gave me my career.
- A dislike of conservative politics: the school was conservative, partially because many pupils’ backgrounds preloaded them so. I hid my liberal instincts to avoid becoming even more of an outcast, which put me off conversatives for quite a while (I’ve since learnt it’s usually better to be honest and outspoken than to be a hypocrite and a coward). I now know, of course, that most conservatives are just as caring about the world as liberals like me, and others, but that they simply have a different perspective and understanding. I have no clue about the politics of my generation’s old boys today, although I suspect many will have stuck with convervative attitudes throughout.
I have to admit I’m looking forward to speaking with other ex–pupils — old boys. Some will have gone gloriously grumpy, some will now regret building a mansion on the moon and want to come back home, some will be running small countries in their spare time, and maybe one will have gone on to true greatness. Most, like me, will have achieved a proud non–entity–dom. At least I am no parasite!
Actually, that term ‘old boy’ has always sounded a little dodgy to me. When I visualise it, I imagine an old Old English Sheepdog, enthusiastic, agéd, dirty greyed fur, wet, with a strong doggy smell from the strong doggy rain. I suppose, in my case, that’s not entirely inaccurate.
The thing is about being at school is, rather obviously, one is a child there. Moreover, I was immature for a kid; I didn’t grow into myself until college days. In particular, I hadn’t recognised, let alone faced down, my fears: I was a coward. In consequence, at school, I did not control my fear of difference, of different sexualities, of different skins, and, for that matter, my fear of things that go bang. The school had a military style corps which my cowardice meant I determinédly avoided, something I now regret.
Life will have changed those who were at school with me in many ways. We are all now old men, yet we will be very different. I have to remember, respect, & enjoy. It’ll be very interesting to see what my fellow pupils did in life: what kind of man each grew into, what kind of grumpy old man each may have become.