Important to Me

by Pamela Hansford Johnson

  On the question of selection, I am greatly relieved that the Eleven Plus is on its way out. This always seemed to me a rough and ready procedure which proved precisely nothing: except that the child was good at Eleven Plus examinations. Heaven knows how many children were misdirected in their educational lives by this piece of tomfoolery. (Though I know this view is disputed by a great many people, who think it has a certain selective value.) I believe the old examination, an essay, some mathematics, a general knowledge paper, was far better.

  I should say that the question of ‘streaming’ was a vexed one, if I believed that it was a serious question at all. Yet, if there is no streaming, the class objections to grammar schools recur with exactly the same force. Further, the opponents of streaming claim that the child in a B or C stream will be humiliated because others are in the A stream. So what is the alternative? That all are to be educated on the same level, and at the same pace: which, to the more energetic and academically-endowed children, will be an intolerable process. Unfair, if any form of selection is made? What is ‘fair’? And whom are we to be fair to? It is often said that one cannot expect justice in this life. But what is justice?

  Obviously, there are things most of us are simply unfitted to do. If I had practised since infancy, I could not have been a gymnast on the scale of Olga Korbut. Nor could Charles ever have run a four-minute mile. It does look as though aesthetic skills of the highest order, at least, are largely ruled by the genes.

  The effort should be in the direction of mobility, from getting the child from the C into the B stream, and hopefully from the B stream into the A stream. Here I can hear again that ghostly chorus of furious teachers. Have they, in many cases, any time to do anything but keep order? They have my deepest sympathy, there are many things wrong with our public education, and this is among the many. I hope it may ease itself in time, though I confess I don’t know how.

  There seems a lot to be said for sixth-form colleges. Nobody would be compelled to attend them. But others would jump at the chance, since these should be, by their nature, more fitted to the nascent dignity of the young adult, and a preparation for university life.

  Here I would say, before passing to another aspect of education, that it seems to me as wicked to hold back a bright, enthusiastic child, as to force one who is less so, like a goose intended to provide pâté de foie gras.

  I must now declare my own interest, and probably can’t do better than by running through the education of my own children. I taught Andrew myself from 3½ to 4½ to read, and to do simple arithmetic. (The latter had to be simple if I was teaching it.) He proved very good at both. On returning from Staines to Chelsea, I followed my social principles and sent him to a local primary school with the unappetising name of Cook’s Ground. This proved a complete disaster. Among the uproar of forty children in a class, he learned nothing. Indeed, he began to regress. So I took him away after two terms – and sent him to a pre-prep school in South Kensington. It was a heavy strain on my resources: but I was only paying £3 per week in rent, I had no car, and did without many other things. I suppose my heaviest personal expenditure was on cigarettes. Here his work returned to standard form: but now another problem arose. He wanted to go on where his friends went, and so, from school to school, he did. After that the strain on me eased. He won an industrial scholarship in engineering to Cambridge. He then spent two years in America, one at Harvard, one at Columbia: but returned to England to work for his Ph.D. – this time in solid state physics. He is now a lecturer in Theoretical Physics in the University of New South Wales.

  Lindsay, unlike her brothers, had no real academic inclinations, though she has her own very different and varied skills. Charles and I, then in Clare, Suffolk, sent her to local private schools. When we returned to London, she went to St Paul’s Girls’ School, but had to leave at sixteen since we were going to California, and she could not stay behind. There she attended a private school in down-town Berkeley, and having fallen in love with the United States, would not be budged. She finally found a place at the College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia, where she spent two years.

  By three, Philip was reading nicely, by four fluently. When we returned to London, we sent him first to a nursery school, then to that rigorous pre-prep school, Wagner’s, which has since disappeared. I have never met, anywhere, with such intensive teaching. Not everyone enjoyed it. Far from it. But when Philip left at eight to go to California, he had an excellent grounding in Latin and French.

  We were at a loss to know where to send him to school when we got there: we did not want him to lose his languages, or to be at a disadvantage when we came home. It was, oddly enough, the wife of Admiral Rickover who recommended the Three Rs, thirty miles away in Marin County, and the oddest educational establishment I have ever come across. It looked like a collection of Nissen huts. There were no games – the children could play those at home. No lunches – they took their tin boxes. But the Three Rs was determined to teach. No nonsense about forcing you into your age group: if you were good at a subject you went into a high form. If poor in another, into a low one. The result was that Philip found himself, for Latin, in a class of enormous Californians, some of them seventeen and eighteen, being coached for Stanford.

  He liked this school well enough, even though it meant a very long bus ride and a mile’s walk almost vertically uphill on the way back. California had completely cured four years of miserable bronchitis.

  When he returned to England, Philip went to Cumnor House, in Sussex, a somewhat eccentric, but kindly and academically accomplished prep-school. (For American readers, this means a school for children between 8½ and 13.)

  He won a scholarship to Eton, and entered College as a King’s Scholar. Eton may sound a place for plutocrats. Curiously enough, for the academically skilful, it isn’t. (College houses precisely seventy boys.) From now on, our educational costs decreased. In College you may not, even though your father is the Aga Khan, be charged more than half the normal fees. If your parents are really broke, you will be charged nothing, not for keep, food, teaching, even the very odd school uniform. (I think this attractive: and something will be lost aesthetically from the High Street of Eton if the boys go – as they eventually will – into grey flannels. Just look at Boudin, and see the use he makes of black.)

  At sixteen, Philip won an exhibition to Balliol to read Classics. He did not go up till he was eighteen, but filled in the time travelling first right up East Africa, the second year spending a semester at Trinity College, Toronto, and then exploring much of Canada and the United States by Greyhound bus. At Balliol, he read for Honours Moderations, having decided to finish Classics decently before switching to Chinese.

  Privilege? To an extent, certainly, though both boys, by means of scholarships and grants, and in Philip’s case journalism, were able partly to pay their own way. But still, to an extent, privilege. And I am still a Socialist. Although I remain so, I am maddened by the short-sighted education policy of the Labour Party.

  But one point I am going to make, not in justification of what I have done – since to the committed nothing will justify it – because there is a freedom that remains to me. Charles never inherited a penny but won his way from grammar school, first to the University of Leicester and then to Cambridge, by scholarships and grants. I inherited a meagre sum from my mother and aunt – a few hundred pounds. The money I have consists purely of my earnings: and I reserve the right to use my earnings as I please. Pop-stars use their (often astronomical) earnings, as they please. Why should I be more frowned upon than they? I don’t want lavish country houses, I don’t want Rolls-Royces, Jaguars, or whatever is the ‘in’ car now. I am ignorant on this subject.

  Before I married for the second time, and before more help came to me, I spent that money on giving my children the best I could afford. Strangely, if the boys had been potential tennis champions instead of good academics no one would have raised a whisper if I had spent thousands on h
aving them coached in California. Believe me, money, however strained it may at one time have been, did buy one privilege: in the main, the privilege of small classes, which I wish profoundly could be the heritage of every child.

  Eton? I can speak only of College. Here no class distinctions were recognised, no snobbery paid to money, no racialism tolerated of any kind. It has changed very much since Cyril Connolly’s day. No one beat Philip within an inch of his life, or, indeed, beat him at all. Rotten at games, he played the very minimum he had to: and a blind eye was turned to his lack of prowess. At one time, he was encouraged to go and dig an old lady’s garden once a week – just to give him some fresh air. I shudder to think of that poor old lady, and what happened to her bulbs.

  Here, I must make a point upon which Philip insists. Eton, as a whole, is an aristocracy. College, a meritocracy. Both may sound equally dirty to some ears. But I believe we must have merit, if we are to survive. Life is becoming increasingly complicated, and people with various definite skills have to cope with it. Imagine that our education, as is probable, goes wholly comprehensive, we shall still, as with the Soviet Union in their special schools, have to make proper provision for the very bright.

  I want, practically speaking, to see more opportunities for all children, not less; for the bright as well as the not-so-bright. Of course we must try to raise the level all round. But not at the cost of any one section, even if that section has the impudence to be exceptionally able.

  I do not want to abolish the public schools, but I should like them, if they can, to make far more scholarships available. Actually, to survive, they’d have to go much farther than this. There has been a quiet revolution, that has practically passed unnoticed. Some of the scholarship examinations for the great public schools have abolished Latin and Greek as compulsory subjects, and have offered a far wider range. The real ‘privilege’ has always lain rather deeper. Hitherto, the only boys who could hope to compete must have had a classical grounding: which means, with the exception of a few grammar schools, that the children must first have attended private schools. And this, of course, means a sizeable parental income. I do not know whether the change-over is yet having its effect, but if it does, it will open some of the best teaching to more of our academically gifted, no matter what their parents’ income.

  I daresay my own brief education has had its effect upon me. Any scholarship I could have won, at that time, would have carried derisory assistance. I have wanted my children to have better luck than I. I have no sympathy with parents who fear that a higher education than they had, will alienate their children from them. It is the height of selfishness. For parents are likely to die, and the young are likely to go on: with the responsibility of improving this deplorable world laid upon their narrow shoulders.

  We need the best children we can possibly get: and so long as the child in the ‘C’ stream has an honourable and full fighting chance of making his way upwards, we shall get them.

  25. The Pursuit of Happiness

  ‘Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’ From the Declaration of Independence. (It read originally ‘life, liberty and property’, but perhaps this was felt to be tactless.) A noble statement if ever there was one, but like many noble statements, with an element of nonsense in it. We cannot pursue happiness: the thought of it has been a chimera that has deluded Americans ever since the Declaration was penned. Happiness comes to one unpursued.

  It comes suddenly, and may not even be for our own good: but it comes irresistibly.

  What is happiness? Someone said it was the absence of pain, and I think he may be right in essence: but it is a drab and incomplete conception. Happiness must have its element of pure excitement. I think only the mystic poets, Crashaw certainly, and George Herbert, really understood it. But, so much the worse, most of us are far from being mystic poets.

  The happinesses of a good childhood are manifold. Buttercups on a common, blazing, lubricated yellow, to the height of a child’s breast-bone. The discovery of little, transparent green crabs in sea-pools, of sea-anemones, seeking to absorb – fear in this, but there is often fear in happiness – the timid touch of a finger-tip; a field of bean-flowers, black and white, and strong-scented, near a Dorset village. Rarely is childish happiness associated with the social event, the birthday party: this can bring apprehension, and even misery. Childhood enjoys its wildest happiness in solitude.

  In adolescence, and into maturity, happiness may show itself in reciprocated love. Calf-love, or grown-up love: it is all the same. ‘Love’ is, I suppose, now a four-letter word in the most suspect sense. But anyone who denigrates it, is ignorant of how life works. If he has not experienced love himself, he has the greatest part of world literature to explain to him what it is. Did Dante write nonsense? Did Shakespeare? Did Robert Burns, or Robert Browning? Love is the holding-process of happiness. It is, of course, rooted in sex; but it can outlast the sexual function. It is as powerful as that.

  In love, it is almost incredible that one can be loved in return. For in that way, one cannot love oneself, or see one’s reflection as it would appear in a lover’s eyes. What does he see in me? What does she see in me? These are the perpetual questions. Very vain women, and very vain men, the narcissists, may be able to answer by a glance in the mirror. For most of us, the process is mysterious.

  To be in love is to lose self utterly: at least, in the beginning. It is the desire to serve utterly: on both sides. It is a departure of the soul from its clay, and may never again be experienced until death.

  Sexual indulgence is simply not enough. Taken casually, it can be as agreeable, though no more satisfying an amusement, as masturbation. For sexual experience to be worth anything more than a night out, heart and mind and tenderness must be involved.

  So much for sexual happiness in love, which is by far the most important happiness we fellows, crawling between heaven and earth, will ever know.

  There are, however, other sources of happiness. The scientist devoted to his work: the musician, to his: the painter: the theologian: the priest: the nun. I except the writer: he must have a great experience of all things good and evil available to him, and sex, in whatever form, heterosexual or homosexual, must have its sizeable part.

  Soldiers often take great joy in war, and its disciplines. (I make no judgments anywhere here.) I have sometimes met civilians, exposed to danger from the air, who will say that their war, with its comradeship, was the happiest time in their lives. They have meant it.

  The good are always the merry,

  Save by an evil chance,

  wrote Yeats, in a euphoric mood. This is by no means always true. I have met some merry people who concealed malice in merriment. Goering, so far as I can judge, seemed to be a man of high-spirits. It is a remarkable fact that when this evil fat man cheated the gallows by means of a cyanide pill, most of us could scarce forbear to cheer.

  Happiness cannot be pursued. What can be pursued, is a certain freedom from discomfort. This lies at the bottom of all the social work ever attempted. Those who give their lives – many of them young lives – to the derelicts, the drop-outs, the drug-ridden, are attempting to free them from a degree of discomfort. And when this happens, the social worker knows happiness, and his unfortunates perhaps a degree of it. I have seen Skid Row, in New York: the drunks propped up in doorways, or lying on the pavements and in the gutters. What happiness for them? I suspect the brief one, of another bottle of Red Biddy, or whatever their pathetic tipple is. I have heard people say (though not so often, in these socially-conscious times), ‘I’m not giving to that beggar. He will only drink it.’ Precisely: if that is what he chooses to do, make your donation. We do not make a gift with the proviso that only a certain use shall be made of it.

  Let me describe a moment of intense childish bliss. The family were having a ‘musical evening’, I had been put to bed. My mother, guessing that I might sneak out and sit on the stairs, had left the drawing-room door open. I heard the first
performers through ‘The Wolf’, ‘The Moon has raised her Lamp above’, ‘Maire, my Girl’. No pleasure there. And then arose a glorious voice. (One of the professionals who sometimes came to us.)

  Ah, Moon of my Delight, who know’st no wane,

  The Moon of Heav’n is rising once again;

  How oft hereafter rising shall she look

  Through this same Garden after me – in vain!

  For the first time, I retreated to bed voluntarily, without having to be chased there. After that, I wanted to hear nothing else. An underrated poet, Fitzgerald. But that voice! A tenor, perfectly controlled, upsoaring with the ease of a lark. I never found out who the singer was.

  Happiness is found by many in religion. Sometimes, I find it: more often not. I am too bad at it, too lax. I have found it in a single psalm. But isn’t this partly the delusion by art? For the psalms are art. The musical setting makes all the difference. Some settings are superb, others the apogee of tedium. So what am I worshipping, God or Art? (Though He has a great deal to do with the latter.) All seems the same, when delight rises.

  He who bends to himself a Joy

  Doth the winged life destroy;

  But he who kisses the Joy as it flies