Old School/New School

I'm going with a literal approach to theme this week in blogging about my old school - which also happened to be a new school in premises barely three years old when I enrolled, as I'll explain shortly.

First a bit about me and how I got to go there. When my family arrived back in England from Nigeria (where I was born and spent my formative years), we lived in Peterborough for some time. My dad was a Methodist minister and I went to infant and junior schools in the city between 1958 and 1964.

Methodist ministers move parish about every six years (it appears to be a bit of a tradition to keep things fresh) and so in the summer of 1964 we were about to move to Cambridge.  My parents were faced with sorting out a secondary school for me in a new city. I'd recently turned eleven and had just sat the 11+ exam, as all children in their final year of primary education did in those days. (I believe it was finally phased out in 1976.) It turned out I did quite well. I not only passed but earned a county scholarship into the bargain.

When my dad enquired as to what the best secondary school in Cambridge was, he was told that it was The Perse School. The Perse was originally founded in Cambridge in 1615 by a wealthy benefactor, Stephen Perse. Born in Norwich and educated at Norwich School and then Gonville and Caius College Cambridge, Perse became a Doctor of Medicine and a shrewd businessman. In his will he left money for the founding of a Free School in the city, originally in Free School Lane (as it came to be called) from 1615 until 1890. Free School was a bit of a misnomer as it was a fee-paying school. The fees per pupil when it relocated to newly acquired and built premises on land in Gonville Place in 1890 were £3 per term. (Nowadays they are up to £7,500 per term, excluding VAT.)

From 1945 until the mid-1970s, although still a Public School it was also classified as a 'direct grant grammar school' meaning that though the majority of boys were fee-paying, it also offered free 'assisted places' to bright boys from poor families -   and that's where my county scholarship came in handy as it entitled me to go there, covering the fees that a lowly paid Methodist minister would simply never have been able to afford. 

Off to the Perse I went, in September 1964 in my purple and black striped blazer and purple and black cap, a new boy at literally a new school, for The Perse had recently relocated again away from its cramped site in Gonville Place in the centre of the city to its current spacious location in the outskirts, to elegant but functional premises designed by the architect Stirrat Johnson-Marshall, set among acres of playing fields, and officially opened by Princess Alexandra in July 1961.

artist's impression of the new school façade

I think even at the time I realised how very fortunate I was to benefit from such a good education in such well-appointed surroundings. In addition to the relatively small population (approximately 400 pupils compared to the 1,000 + that many schools contained) we had small class sizes in clean and bright classrooms and well-equipped labs. We even had our own theatre for drama lessons complete with sound system and lighting console, a lecture theatre, a music room, a library, a geography room complete with wave-tank, a  gymnasium, a hall with a balcony, a refectory, a cloistered walkway and a vivarium in the grounds, plus the usual playing fields (with cricket pavilion), tennis courts and a parade square for those who liked to march about.

It was a privileged education, but were school days the happiest? Probably not. For all the setting and facilities, I had to go nearly four miles to get there and back and sometimes envied my brothers who could just walk around the corner from home to their Secondary Modern school. I went by bus (two of them, changing in the city centre as I lived to the north of it and the school was to the south), and sometimes walked home if the weather was good - but never walked to school as that would have meant getting up an hour earlier than I already did. Even so I was quite often out of the house before anyone else was up.

The only real downside was school every Saturday morning, on account of us having two games afternoons in the week...and if you ended up playing for a school team as well, as I sometimes did, well that was your Saturday afternoon gone as well. Oh, and it was a rugby school, so football (as in soccer) was not an option, though it was rumoured that headmaster Stanley Stubbs had once been on the books of Stoke City. 

fresh fodder in the refectory ;)

It was also quite a regimented existence and I think there were regular instances of bullying, not that it really impacted me but I used to hear fairly macabre stories of stuff that went on in the boarding houses (for although I was a day boy, the school had quite a large number of boarders). And there was sometimes a subtle divide between cliques of fee-paying boys whose parents were obviously wealthy and the rest of us. 

Curiously though, The Perse was probably more like the soon-to-be Comprehensive Schools that would arrive in the 1970s than the other Grammar schools in Cambridge in that there was a true mix of abilities. Yes the 40% of non-fee-paying boys who, like me, had come in on 'assisted places, were all academically minded, but among the 60% of fee-paying pupils, there were more than a few perfectly pleasant but not terribly bright youngsters who were only there because their parents had money, and they struggled - though we all got along fine and they certainly benefitted from challenges and opportunities they wouldn't have got in a Secondary Modern school.

The regimentation wasn't too irksome while we were young, green first and second years, but as we grew older and the permissive ways of the sixties began to hold an attraction for us, issues around length of hair, dress code, illicit smoking and drug use caused conflict with the establishment which wasn't kindly disposed to change or challenge. I was never compliant enough to be a prefect and would probably have declined the offer if it had been made, but in my upper sixth year I was chairman of the school council, a consultative body that had recently been established by a new headmaster, (Stanley Stubbs having retired  in the summer of 1969). So we passed through and out into the wider world, in my case to read English at university and then to become a teacher of English and drama in my own right at a London Comprehensive school.

Since my time there, The Perse has undergone more significant transformations. From 1976, when the 'assisted places' scheme was ended and state funding ceased to flow, it went completely independent. It also went co-educational in the 1990s, expanded both its intake and its facilities with more classrooms, a sixth-form block and an arts centre, and is now ranked regularly among the top independent schools in the country. It holds reunion events for Old Perseans, though I have never been tempted.

an imposing skyline

I've not had time to write a new poem this week, though ideas are percolating. I was planning to do so today, but I've ricked my right knee somehow and spent the afternoon in bed  asleep, dosed with painkillers and with a hot-water-bottle pressed to the knee (probably should have been an ice-pack but I couldn't face that idea).

I've gone with this poem by John Clare because the first poem I ever had published was something I wrote back in 1964 in that junior school in Peterborough as part of an English project marking the centenary of Clare's death, as he was local to the area. I don't have a copy of what I wrote. Neither do I have copies of any of the poems I wrote at The Perse and which appeared in issues of the school magazine 'The Pelican'. When my parents moved on from Cambridge, I was away at university, and they just threw out boxes of my school magazines, exercise books, project folders, essays, notebooks et cetera without even asking me if I still wanted them. Brutal.

I never walked to school, for reasons I explained above, but here is John Clare's delightful poem about doing so...  

Schoolboys In Winter

The schoolboys still their morning ramble take 

To neighboring village school with playing speed,
Loitering with passtime’s leisure till they quake,
Oft looking up the wild-geese droves to heed,
Watching the letters which their journeys make;
Or plucking haws on which their fieldfares feed,
And hips and sloes; and on each shallow lake
Making glib slides, where they like shadows go
Till some fresh passtimes in their minds awake.
Then off they start anew and hasty blow
Their numbed and clumpsing fingers till they glow;
Then races with their shadows wildly run
That stride huge giants o’er the shining snow
In the pale splendour of the winter sun.

                                                         John Clare (1793-1864)

                 

              Qui facit per alium facit per se 

Thanks for reading, S ;-)

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Forelegs Good!

Quite how we ever learned to balance so well on our hind legs without the assistance of a powerful tail we shall never know. That secret (along with the tail) lies lost, several millions years back along the evolutionary trail, in the East African Rift Valley of our distant ancestors.

We've gotten to be pretty useful with our forelegs though, more so than any other species on the planet. We learned how to make tools and clothes, how to dress ourselves, how to tear our hair out, how to draw, paint, write, play musical instruments, pick our noses, drive cars, fire guns and press nuclear buttons.

Of course this week's theme of Four Legs Good (which I've wilfully misinterpreted so as not to repeat what others have already written) derives from a slogan coined by George Orwell - 'Four legs good, two legs bad' - in his political allegory of the Russian Revolution, Animal Farm, a story in which the animals of Manor Farm rebel against their two-legged overlord, Farmer Jones.

Orwell, born Eric Blair in India in 1903, chose his pen name for his love of the Suffolk river Orwell. He could conceivably have gone for Horatio Stour or Rudyard Gipping (for the Stour and the Gipping lie in close proximity), only he didn't - and that's enough about him for now, although he remains one of my favourite English authors of the mid-20th century.

In his famous farm fable, Orwell wrote about how the pigs, leaders of the revolution, gradually became more like the oppressors they had overthrown as power began to corrupt their ideals. The slogan was amended to read 'Four legs good, two legs better' as the pigs took to aping men (ding! - pun intended) by strutting around upright  on their rear trotters - a wicked satire, though fanciful, of course.

It got me researching four-legged creatures that actually do stand on their hind legs at times so as to put their forelegs to good purpose. The list is a long one, when you think about it: bears, meerkats, squirrels among the most obvious. I knew about hares boxing on hind legs but I was intrigued to discover that foxes do the same.


Fox Boxing Day!

They rear up on hind legs and face off in feats of strength, usually resting their forelegs on their opponent's chest or shoulders and pushing as hard as they can. In truth, it's probably closer to wrestling than boxing - and even closer to plain shoving, but fox boxing has a ring to it (ding again!) so I'm going to stick with the more resonant phrase.

Cubs acquire this behaviour as early as ten weeks old; it forms part of their learning play, is used to settle sibling squabbles and to establish a hierarchy. Male foxes occasionally indulge in the practice to settle territorial disputes (though they more commonly resort to ground-level tussles involving much rolling and nipping).

Sometimes a dog fox and vixen act in this way (as photographed above) and the almost dance-like quality of such performances has given us the term foxtrot for the lively ballroom dance consisting of quick and slow steps. However, I was delighted to learn that fox boxing is most common among vixens. Go bitches!


Vixens Mixing It!

The females of the species resort to fox boxing to settle domestic squabbles, competition for male attention and general uppityness. The rules of the game appear to be very simple: you rear, you engage, you snarl (as shown above) and you just keep pushing until one or other fox falls over. A single fall or submission decides the bout; last fox standing wins; and there is rarely any physical injury sustained, merely loss of pride for the loser.

I thought I'd have a go at writing a poem about boxing foxes with foxgloves off, inspired by my research - but it's not made the cut, so will get completed at a later date. In its place, a brace of foxy loxy poems by a couple of poets I admire. I hope they serve as adequate substitutes.

The first is from the wonderful John Clare (1793-1864).

The Vixen
Among the taller wood with ivy hung
The old fox plays and dances round her young.
She snuffs and barks if any passes by
And swings her tail and turns prepared to fly.
The horseman hurries by: she bolts to see
And turns again, from danger never free.
If any stands she runs among the poles
And barks and snaps and drives them in the holes.
The shepherd sees them and the boy goes by
And gets a stick and progs the hole to try:
They get all still and lie in safety sure
And out again when safety is secure
And start and snap at blackbirds bouncing by
To fight and catch the great white butterfly.

                                                               John Clare

The second is from the equally wonderful Ruth Padel (1946 -     ) from a series of twelve monthly poems about her urban neighbours 'The King's Cross Foxes'.

Excavation

Travelling ends. Fur's losing condition.

Each ginger hair-tip will snap. Rubbed patches appear

on the rump as they squeeze into underground tunnels,

flatten themselves under fences in wet sieve of rain,

scuff through concrete holes, four inches square.

Greeting the year with a clear soul, the looks

for a family earth. Her mother, her grandmothers, dug

in cement - under lock-ups, a doorstep, a grave;

this tower of Ford Capris in a breaker's yard.

Try these twigshadow brambles, back door to the Free

Metal disco, a narrow space in Argyle Walk above

a fourth-floor false ceiling; the architects' office.

Flub in through an air-brick and broken pane

to some under-the-kitchen haven in Brill Place.

Go on, sweetheart, look, all dry; and warmed

by the cladding and pipes. Room for the cubs to play...

No way. Fifty days pregnant, three to go, she's eeling

under a flatpack shed on Coopers Lane.

                                                                Ruth Padel

Thanks for reading. Have a happy Bank Holiday weekend, S ;-)

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Magical Creatures

When I think of furry little creatures I go a little bit squishy. I think of the characters that were so beautifully illustrated in the Beatrice Potter stories. Tom Kitten, Peter Rabbit and Squirrel Nutkin: Surely the most adorable and best loved creatures in children's literature.

Naturally, in real life, farmers see many of these animals as pests. As a young girl I often saw little men in black velvet - better known as moles, fastened to barbed wire fences along the edges of fields. Boys on the school bus teased us, saying that the farmer put them there so cruelly to warn other moles to move on but of course moles are blind so it was a bad joke. The true reason for impaling the dead moles was to dry them out so that the skins were easier to remove. Farmers sewed them together to make warm lining for their coats. Living in the countryside can be very upsetting.

One small furry animal that I am particularly fond of is the hare. I have only been lucky enough to encounter a hare once, driving along a country lane late at night. The hare was running directly towards me and froze my headlights beam. It was a magical moment. What a noble creature. Long, black-tipped ears, a white tail and strong back legs. Brown hares either live solitary or in pairs. They are incredibly fast, running at up to 45 miles per hour when evading predators.

The Romans are credited with introducing brown hares to Britain more than 2,000 years ago. If we are to believe the story of the Iceni queen Boudica consulting the entrails of a hare as an augury of victory in her uprising against the Romans in AD61, the animals had established themselves quickly. The brown hare is now considered naturalised. Curiously they are not found in Scotland or the Scottish Islands. 

Unfortunately for this magnificent animal, it is considered game and the hare season begins on the so-called Glorious Twelfth of August, when it is acceptable to take to the mosaic fields of Britain and shoot them. Like all game, there are many ways to cook hare - jugged is the most traditional method. Although I have eaten rabbit, I have never been tempted to eat hare. I recently switched off a cooking programme on TV because the cook was using hare in a game pie recipe. I cannot understand it at all. It should be a crime to kill a hare. 

In hare mythology, the hare is a creature with pagan, sacred and mystic associations, by turns benign, cunning, romantic or, most famously, in its March courtship rituals, mad. It is largely silent, preferring to feed at night or, in summer, as the last light fades from the day, a shadowy existence which adds to its mysteriousness. 

In Alison Uttley’s Little Grey Rabbit stories the character of Hare is superior and strutting, occasionally pernickety, always aloof – a rendering for children of the animal’s natural reserve as well his appropriateness as a denizen of that world of aristocratic entitlement evoked by Sackville-West. For example, it is Hare who keeps Grey Rabbit up to scratch in the matter of housekeeping: “Where’s the milk, Grey Rabbit?” asked Hare. “We can’t drink tea without milk.”

As with so many forms of British wildlife, today’s hares are threatened by changing agricultural practice. Larger fields with a single cereal crop a year curtail hares’ year-round food supply while offering them diminished cover, and their forms – shallow depressions in the ground – offer limited shelter and, potentially, a degree of exposure and vulnerability. A survey in 2008 estimated current brown hare numbers in Britain in the region of 800,000, a figure which represents a consistent if gradual decline since the Sixties. Unlike rabbits, hares are resistant to myxomatosis and have suffered no equivalent cull.  

As with so many forms of British wildlife, today’s hares are threatened by changing agricultural practice. Larger fields with a single cereal crop a year curtail hares’ year-round food supply while offering them diminished cover, and their forms – shallow depressions in the ground – offer limited shelter and, potentially, a degree of exposure and vulnerability. A survey in 2008 estimated current brown hare numbers in Britain in the region of 800,000, a figure which represents a consistent if gradual decline since the Sixties. Unlike rabbits, hares are resistant to myxomatosis and have suffered no equivalent cull.

During the mating season hares have boxing matches, standing on their hind legs. It is a sight that I would love to see. 

Hares At Play

The birds are gone to bed; the cows are still,
And sheep lie panting on each old mole-hill;
And underneath the willow’s gray-green bough -
Like toil a resting - lies the fallow plough.
The timid hares throw daylight's fears away
On the lane’s road, to dust and dance and play
Then dabble in the grain, by nought deterred,
To lick the dewfall from the barley’s beard,
Then out they sturt again and round the hill
Like happy thoughts - dance - squat - and loiter still
Till milking maidens in the early morn
Gingle their yokes and sturt them in the corn;
Through well known beaten paths each nimbling hare
Sturts quick as fear - and seeks its hidden lair.

John Clare

Thanks for reading. Adele

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