I escaped 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 student, at best. The glorious great 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 doesn’t know about it), whereas I got to be rather good at making doorknobs shine fairly brightly. As I said, a misfit.
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 school music groups: 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–boys 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 a single mother. She sent me there because my father, who died when I was little, wanted his sons educated there, and she saw it through.
Honestly, it wasn’t me that burnt the school down a couple of years after I left. Actually, I shed a tear at that: it felt like someone had put a match to my memories, of the place, of a stable centre of my childhood. (The current British government are doing something similar to 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 unreadably 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 I got very much used to being laughed at when attempting to speak foreign. This really helped when I had to learn various 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 computer club with a PDP-8/E, incredible for its time, and significantly less powerful than a dumb phone today: this gave me my career.
I was recently invited to join a Old Boys WhatsApp group for those of us who left the same time as me, who aren’t dead yet. I’m looking forward to speaking with the remaining guys. 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 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 odd to me. When I visualise it, I imagine an old Old English Sheepdog, with aging dirty fur, still wet, enthusiastic, and very doggy smelly from the rain. I suppose, in my case, that’s not entirely inaccurate.
It’ll be most 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.