To Wake the Nations Underground

When I was going to school there was one thing I couldn’t stand – the men who used to stand up in the assembly hall and spout about how school was the best time of your life. By Christ, I’d say, that’s one thing I’ll never do. Not in a thousand years. But now I’m coming to think different.

Perhaps you didn’t have the benefit of a secondary school education. Well, you didn’t miss much. English, French, Latin, History, Science, Mathematics. And none of it any use to you if you wanted to be a doctor or a radio-mechanic. At university you learn more in three months than in three years at school. Still, it keeps them out of mischief. And sport’s a good thing for a growing boy. It keeps his mind off unhealthy things like girls and what he was made for.

My school was on some land reclaimed from the harbour, with wide green playing-fields around that were very soggy when it rained. Four years I got off the bus in the morning and walked across them to the school. It looked new and hygienic with the sun flashing on the window panes. I’d sit on a bench till the doors opened and do the homework I should have done the night before.

I didn’t have many cobbers because I never joined in much with sports. In summer I’d tell the tennis master I was taking cricket and the cricket master I was taking tennis, and go off in the afternoon to swim in the town baths. I thought I had them fooled, but maybe they didn’t think it worthwhile chasing me up. And I didn’t do cadet drill either, partly because my people didn’t think it right and partly because I couldn’t be bothered anyway. Still, by the time I’d been there a year or two I was counted all right and a bit of a dag. And I made friends with one or two that were a bit like myself.

English was the only subject I really liked, and I could always get top marks for essays if I liked to try. It wasn’t bad either playing about in the lab, though I never had my science notes written up. Most of the other subjects gave me a sick feeling. They said Geometry and Latin were good for mental training. The parsons and school-teachers can always find an excuse for making you do what you don’t like doing. Anyway, most of it went off me like water off a duck’s back.

But there are some things that still stick in my mind. Not dates or verbs, but moods and smells and colours. For instance, there was Singing. We’d sit for an hour in the hall on benches. And we’d sing the same songs overpage 26 and over again. The music teacher was a bit excitable. I suppose it got on his nerves the way the boys shuffled their feet waiting till they could get out to football. I’d sit and watch the clock and open and shut my mouth soundlessly, and think about poems and how much longer I was going to live and the cigarette I was going to smoke after school. Once I was put in the choir by mistake for a whole term, before they found out I couldn’t sing in tune. Most of the songs they sang made me feel tired, but there was one I always liked, a negro spiritual with two lines in it – ‘. . . hear the trumpet sound / To wake the nations underground.’ There wasn’t any more to it than what I’ve said. The feet shuffling, the different smells from the skins of different boys, the afternoon light coming in the windows, the clock crawling round, and the high voices singing. At the time it was something to get over quickly, but now it makes me feel sad. Those adolescent voices, the boys all waiting to grow up, thinking all the best times were still coming to them. And not knowing that in spite of all the guilt and uncertainty, they had something right then that they would never have again. Maybe the old fools spouting from the platform about schooldays were telling the truth after all.

Then there was Friday morning with the sound of the bugles, and myself chipping grass around the edges of flower-beds. Or playing chess in the classroom after school. Or reading Carlyle for the first time, up in the library. My last year at school I began to like it a good deal. There were always the masters saying, I don’t expect fourth-form behaviour from sixth-form boys, but even they were human at times. There was no one to bully you any longer and a lot of the time you could do what you liked. In a way I was sorry to leave.

I’ve been round a couple of times to see the school. It looks pathetic, a small, rather meaningless world putting up barricades of Honour and football scores against the outside life. And not long ago I met some of my old school teachers in the pub. They just looked rather tired and nervy men. I had a yarn with them, but we hadn’t much to talk about except what had happened to certain old boys. It was a bit embarrassing to them and to me, as if there were rusty wheels that couldn’t start moving again.

1948 (19)