UP IN THE MORNING & OFF TO SCHOOL
Part Two : Wennington School
For those of us born during or just after the War, the trek from the black and white austerity of its aftermath into the digital age of today and tomorrow has been a varied and fascinating one. Arguably no generation has covered such challenging social, cultural, spiritual and political territory within what has been, in historical terms, a very brief period of time. The 1950s were, in many crucial ways, as remote from the 1960s as were the days of Queen Victoria. And the ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s were decades each with their own strikingly distinctive characteristics. So there exists within our generation a sense of having been rushed through the latter half of the 20th century with barely the time to absorb each mighty shift in perspective before the next has come along.
For me Wennington School was the environment, social, cultural, spiritual and political, within which I emerged from that smoggy, uncertain era that followed the War - a time that belonged almost entirely to our parents’ and teachers’ generation – into a new, exciting era, one that belonged to my generation. And my principal consciousness of that time is of fierce resistance to those changes from that sometimes benign despot, headmaster Kenneth Barnes and his wife and ideological ally, Frances. Here was found the paradoxical conflict that faced those 1930s/’40s ‘progressives’ who found themselves no longer in the vanguard of change and innovation.
So my experience of Wennington is underpinned by that friction and I perceive my five years of education there entirely within its context. But, they were, by and large, a very positive five years. The conflict, far from being enervating or distracting, was of great educational value. Although I frequently found myself squaring up to both Kenneth and Frances, the lessons learned in pragmatic withdrawal and subsequent reflection were invaluable. I discovered that the sparks that were sometimes struck between my teenage quest for freedom and Kenneth’s demands for order ignited more substantive ideas and values that caught fire then and remain with me now.
This evolving of raw adolescent rebellion into something altogether more considered and structurally sound was due in part to the robustness, even aggression, of the Barnes’ beliefs and practices. Kenneth spoke and wrote with passion and eloquence and his utter sincerity and consistency was unimpeachable. Nor would many of us have quarrelled at that time with his fundamental liberalism and the humanity of his world view. But where his sometimes dogmatic certainty, impatience and even insensitivity rubbed many of us up the wrong way, there were others within the community whose flexibility and capacity for humour and tolerance provided a less abrasive experience. Were it not for English teacher (and renowned poet) Brian Merrikin Hill’s altogether broader articulation of progressive philosophy and innovative French teacher Roger Gerhardt’s cosmopolitan interest in the world beyond our fences and fields, the ideological environment would have been much the poorer. I suspect that Kenneth was well aware of the benefits of the leavening presence of those two men, in spite of the conflicts that I feel sure must have sometimes taken place between himself and them.
Times have changed greatly since the early 1960s. Much of the raw material of rebellion that so excited some of us at that time has now become 21st century protocol – ‘revolt into style’, as George Melly so succinctly phrases the phenomenon. Much of the optimistic dynamism that drove so many of us to march to and from Aldermaston against Britain’s nuclear weapons has atrophied into the very acquisitive cynicism against which Kenneth spoke as a socially aware Quaker. But at the time that material captured our imaginations and persuaded us of the possibility of new worlds and we marched and sang and leafleted and campaigned.
I remember a mock general election one year in which, amongst the grey predictability of Conservative and Labour, I devised, with a wonderfully sardonic 6th Former named, rather poetically, Richard Moody, a political party that would sweep all before it in a tidal wave of socialist renewal. I called it the New Left Front and I pursued its vague and rhetorical policies with vigour, seeing myself as a combination of George Orwell (in the photographs of him fighting in the Spanish Civil War) and those firm-jawed, muscular workers who, in socialist-realist posters, stride towards red suns rising over the wreckage of capitalism. Sadly, my proletarian thunder was stolen entirely by another friend of mine, Andrew Brighton (subsequently a well-known art critic and senior executive in the Tate Gallery Modern) who stood as an anarchist protest candidate. So convincing were his arguments against the varicoloured patchwork – from pale pink to deepest crimson - that constituted the manifesto of the NLF that I ended up voting for him along with everyone else. But for all my chagrin at having my revolution firmly spiked, I absorbed thoroughly certain principles and perceptions then that doggedly persist today. Whilst I no longer throw the curtains back eagerly in the morning to check whether the anarchist uprising has occurred overnight, I still can’t take seriously the promises of politicians; I still rail against an education system that has no interest in children; I still view the manoeuvrings of big business with mistrust and disgust.
Because of the nature of those times, many of us were forced to consider carefully the constitution of the larger world within which we were living. The Cuban missile crisis is a vivid memory for all who wondered for twenty-four long hours in boarding schools many miles from home whether they would ever see their families again. Our parents’ tales of the days of the blitz and the buzz bombs and our acute consciousness of the possibility of nuclear holocaust made for a precarious sense of security at a time when it was most needed. So we were a generation with an acutely developed sense of mortality. Small wonder that protest became so dominant a motif for us.
But the school establishment largely legitimised the broad political dimension manifest in widespread support for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the Anti Apartheid Movement, for the Movement for Colonial Freedom. Kenneth and Frances and several staff were, after all, active Quakers and pacifists and they had campaigned vigorously against war in the ‘20s and ‘30s. So there was little currency for would-be rebels at Wennington in opposition to the establishment through the wearing of CND badges and the dissemination of leaflets publicising marches and demonstrations.
So if one was impelled to oppose that establishment, other outlets had to be sought out. And they were easily found. For me the principal target was the Barnes’ dogged early 20th century commitment to the uniform of green corduroy shorts as symbolic of health, wholesomeness and the outdoor life. I hated them with a passion. I saw in them a symbol of repression that married ingenious physical discomfort and personal humiliation. There was absolutely nothing that one could do with a pair of green corduroy shorts either to moderate their unique lumpy, pre-pubescent unattractiveness or to render them somehow stylish. All the boys at the local secondary school in nearby Wetherby had to do to their terylene long trousers was take the bottoms in from 18 to 15 inches and lose the turnups. Even the sullen youths at the borstal next door had classy bib-and-brace overalls that make them look like convicts on a Mississippi county farm. It was always me that led the small party to the middle of the courtyard on an icy Yorkshire winter morning to take the temperature. If it was below freezing then we could wear ‘longs’ and so share at least some aspect of day-to-day normality with the outside world. One of Kenneth’s end-of-term reports grumbled that ‘Richard would rather spend the day standing around in longs than running around in shorts’. Which was true.
There was rich potential in another area of rebellion against tyranny and exploitation by the Oligarchs. Sex was a subject of such constant and intense scrutiny by the Barnes’ that it lost much of its forbidden glamour for us. (Which is not to say that it wasn’t investigated comprehensively in both theory and practice - but that is another tale). Drugs were known only to those of us who listened avidly to jazz and read Jack Kerouac, and – one nauseous tealeaf smoking session apart – that knowledge was strictly theoretical. Which left only rock and roll. In the early ‘60s the first great wave of testosteronal rock and roll had broken. Presley was in the army; Buddy Holly and Eddie Cochran were dead; Cliff Richard already had his sights set on Housewife’s Choice and church on Sunday.
But in whatever diluted form it emerged, Kenneth loathed pop music. He viewed it not simply as sentimental tosh that debased the currency of relationships; he imbued it with almost diabolical significance, seeing it as an active force, an aural opiate, that sapped the vital energies of boys and girls, rendering them torpid and apathetic. And he drew no line between Cliff and The Shadows and the jazz and blues beloved of Roger Gerhardt and, via him, of a small, dedicated group of pupils). For this genuinely liberal and enlightened Quaker, it was all the Devil’s Music. During the one or two grudging spins at an end-of-term dance permitted to Billy Fury’s latest, he would glower from the sidelines, focussing balefully on those doped degenerates who were clearly enjoying themselves the most. And as soon as musical health was restored in the form of Victor Sylvester or Jimmy Shand, he and veteran Art teacher and brother square Louis Jones would sweep onto the floor with girls in their arms to show us all how it should be done. All of which meant that we aficionados of the jungle beat had to smuggle what passed in those days for portable radios down the woods for Saturday Club and Easy Beat and under scratchy blankets at night for Radio Luxembourg and the American top twenty. Rock and roll became our music of resistance. We listened to it with all the avidity and defiance that French households listened to the BBC during the War. Our samizdat journals were Melody Maker and New Musical Express, sneaked in under cover of the morning papers, fetched from Wetherby by one of our couriers on a bike. And from time to time Roger – our man on the inside – would accidentally leave his Ferrograph tape recorder open in the French Room on a weekend. We would relax in the Gallic café ambiance, playing his recordings of cutting edge jazz by Charlie Mingus or Roland Kirk, imagining that we were out there in the ‘Big Bad World’ (as it was universally and ironically known).
…………………………………………………………………………………………..Continued
9:48:03 PM 
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