If you had asked me then whether I thought it possible that schools like this would survive into the twenty-first century, I should have answered with a resounding ‘No.’ I was with Bernard Shaw, who believed that the public schools of England should be ‘razed to the ground and their foundations sown with salt’. But that never happened. Instead, they not merely survive but flourish, and have somehow retained their charitable status. The schools stand foursquare and confident across the land, an ivy-clad rebuke to the notion that advancement in Britain is based purely on merit. The country has perhaps never been as class-bound as caricature likes to suggest. But for all the high-minded notions of ‘a classless society’, perhaps 7 per cent of children are still educated privately.
The essential thing to remember about these institutions is that whatever their pretensions, they are all first and foremost businesses, and no school will survive for long if the business is unstable. Though they are not necessarily the most academically rigorous, the public schools consider themselves an elite, and have overcome the Tom Brown’s Schooldays image problem by what some head teachers call ‘getting the mothers’ vote’ and appearing warm and caring: the improved comfort of the schools is the direct consequence of the increasing importance of the maternal role in families. But what is still striking about many of these schools is the assumptions they feel entitled to make. To take one very small example: of the fifty or so talks I have given to teenagers in the last ten years, only three have been at the invitation of state schools.* I shared my schooldays with the children of doctors, lawyers and professors, but the fees at many of these schools are now becoming so astronomical that they are quite beyond the reach of the ordinary middle class. The empty desks are filled by the children of Chinese billionaires and Russian oligarchs. A high occupancy rate no doubt pleases the governors, but it is quite absurd to suggest that the schools do anything much for social cohesion.
The fact that these institutions are so successful in attracting overseas students testifies to their reputation. It is not surprising that a school like Eton sails on from decade to decade. The remarkable thing is how many of the Second (and Third and Fourth) Division schools also flourish. They do it by a clever combination of fear and flattery, and an insidious moral pressure on domestic parents which goes as follows. Most of us are not going to leave our children anything much when we die. You may be able to give them a sense that they’re loved, but don’t you think you should do what you can for their education? The key figure in this is the head teacher, who is increasingly a public relations smoothie.
It would be unfair to call ‘the Dome’, who was headmaster during my time at Malvern, a smoothie. But he was a visionary. Throughout my childhood and adolescence most of the British Empire, for which the school had been churning out young men, was being hastily returned to its rightful owners. Left to its own devices, the school would doubtless have succumbed to irrelevance. But Malvern embraced change in the nick of time, and the place I left at the age of eighteen was not the place I had entered as a thirteen-year-old. It became the first independent school in the country to have a language laboratory, in which we sat, wearing Bakelite headphones, in front of great reel-to-reel tape recorders. A few years later, new science courses were introduced. Mr Blumenau was encouraged to teach an art history course. The black jackets and pinstripe trousers were replaced by grey suits. Personal fagging was abolished. A few years after I left, the school went co-educational.
Too late for me, of course. As the Canon of Coventry Cathedral had recognised, all adolescent boys are sex-obsessed. So when my study-mate Richard Atkins and I advertised ourselves in the pen-pals slot on the music station Radio Luxembourg as ‘two frustrated schoolboys’, it seemed just the small-change of life. We forgot all about it until one morning a furious housemaster came into breakfast with dozens of letters and postcards cascading from his arms to the floor. He had better things to do with his time, he said, than to carry around all these stupid letters (and many of them, in pink envelopes and reeking of cheap perfume, were clearly very stupid indeed). He didn’t know what we’d done, but as punishment we were to reply to every single one of the letters tumbling onto the floor. Since this would have taken most of the rest of term, we pulled out the half-dozen that looked most promising and sold off the rest as ‘red hot dates’ to junior boys at a few pence a time. One or two of the letters – particularly one from a couple of girls which began ‘It would be unladylike to commit our feelings about you to paper’ – came from local schools, and led on to rather bizarre dates in the hills. How other letter-writers reacted when they received a letter from some thirteen-year-old confessing his passion, one can only guess.
Some months later I managed to make a date with Georgina, the head girl, no less, of one of the local schools. We arranged to meet at midnight in one of her classroom blocks, and on the appointed night I crept out of my boarding house, having stuffed a couple of pillows beneath the stripy rug on my bed. I was undone by Scribe, yet again, who noticed my bed was empty during a late-night tour of the dormitories, and discovered where I had gone from a friend. He immediately telephoned the headmistress of the girls’ school. The head girl and I were just getting acquainted when suddenly all the lights came on.
‘You again!’ shrieked the old crone, as if she was about to throw a bucket of water over some wailing tomcat.
‘But I’ve never even been here before,’ I protested, bizarrely outraged at the thought of being considered a repeat offender.
The following morning I was called before the headmaster, who generously explained that he didn’t think I was a bad person, but he really couldn’t have boys slipping out of the school at night – that way there’d be chaos. I had to be punished, so he was rusticating me for the rest of term. Again.
‘Why did you do it?’ my mother wailed when I finally reached home that night. She made it sound as if I had murdered someone. There was really no way of satisfactorily explaining what had happened. I was just a teenage boy. My father was, mercifully, away on business, but when he returned there was a curious sense of déjà vu about our conversation. Again, he said I should have to return to Malvern for a further term, so as not to ‘leave under a cloud’.
A couple of days later a letter arrived from Georgina. ‘My headmistress has explained to me that I have ruined your life, that you will never go to university or be employed by anyone respectable,’ she wrote, ‘and I am very sorry.’ As it happened, had it not been for our midnight assignation, I would not have had to return for one final term at Malvern, during which the only thing I could do was to sit the special exam required to get into Cambridge.
Many decades later, my old housemaster’s widow showed me a note she had discovered while clearing out her late husband’s desk. It was from George Sayer, the head of English. He thought I was ‘neither stable nor industrious’, and ‘would not make a satisfactory university student’ because ‘his enthusiasms are short-lived, and he is very bad at working when he does not feel emotionally involved with the subject of his study’. It was a fair criticism, though Sayer did believe that in a year or two I might grow out of it, because I had ‘a good mind, logical as well as intuitive, with a literary imagination and genuine, if rather narrow, appreciation of great writing’. Reading the note so long after the event made me fondly recall his endless instruction to enjoy life – ‘Do it!’ – and all the marmalade on the returned essays. I was embarrassed by the contrast between his sensitivity and my own boorishness. He was a model for all teachers.
That last term at school made up for all the years beforehand. There were half a dozen of us taking the Oxford and Cambridge scholarship exams in English. We sat