As winter came, it was Rugby Union season once again and I was lucky enough to be in Francis’s team, the Under-14Ds which, in an As to Js competition, was a good team. Here Francis displayed his gem toughness, the kind of boy they never make ‘Captain’ of the team as he already has an unofficial role: that of Match-Winner. Seriously, the kind of boy who, when the chips are down, can turn the whole game single-handedly. Sometimes from his key position of ‘breakaway’ he’d pass the ball out to me at ‘wing’ position as he knew if I could do nothing else I could run explosively fast in a straight line. And so it was that more than once he spun it out to me on the wing and I was the blue-and-white-striped thing gone in the mist down the field, boys from magnificent opposing sides like St. Joseph’s College and The King’s School mouthing ‘ What the fu-?’ in my wake.
Despite Riverview along with ‘Joeys’ and ‘Kings’ being termed ‘private schools’ in the Australian educational system, the competition in which we played was and still is named the ‘GPS’, standing for ‘Great Public Schools’. Given that in Australia a ‘public’ school means a fee-free ‘State’ or government-run school, I can only assume that this complete terminology reversal in our case was laid down to instil in us a sense of historical and cultural continuity with the great English private schools like Eton and its ilk which are called ‘public’ schools for reasons lost in time. In the Riverview Chapel we sang no less than the Eton Boating Song complete with glorious pipe organ accompaniment and in rugby our coaches drilled us with the notion of ‘the Battle of Waterloo having being won on the playing fields of Eton’.
If this culture of aspiring to somebody else’s seems peculiar, I can only assure you that it was an effective culture: Though I personally was not and still am not a Conservative, this culture at Riverview felt wonderful because on our playing fields it made us feel part of a living history. On those misty mornings so rich in white-knuckle struggle and with more than one shining moment, we felt as if on the end of a direct line going all the way back to the playing fields that won Waterloo. And that was exhilarating. We just hoped that our own future battles would be as successful. For that year the Under-14Ds were undefeated.
‘He’s Not the Messiah…’
* * *
Back at my infants’ school, I was lucky enough to have been introduced to Christianity by the Sisters of Mercy, a teaching order of nuns known for their ‘enlightened’ Catholicism: For example, despite being ‘Roman Catholics’ as in being directly obedient to the Pope and his Vatican church establishment in Rome, Epping’s Sisters of Mercy led us to see ourselves simply as ‘Catholics’. Rather than stressing that God existed in biblical ‘chapter-and-verse’, they stressed, by contrast, that God is Love. (Certain delightful younger nuns of their number whom I’d met through my mum were featured in the closing story of the first ever episode of 60 Minutes in Australia: Shock horror! At the beach in their bikinis! Nuns!! A world first, apparently.)
By the same progressive token, the priests and brothers now educating me at Riverview were Jesuits, an order traditionally described as the ‘thinkers for Christ’ by contrast to the Marist and Christian Brothers orders as the ‘soldiers for Christ’. And thinkers they were, on the whole, and wherever a great deal of thinking goes on, concepts such as ‘Original Sin’ and ‘Limbo’ as the place where babies conveniently go when they die ‘in a state of Original Sin’, well, these concepts don’t exactly go out the window as the sort of pathetically human constructs that Christ came to free us from yet by the way the Jesuits sidelined such concepts they were effectively put out with the trash.
However…
It was apparently typical even within such a progressive order as the Jesuits (just as it is in the Catholic Church generally) for the attainers of ‘high office’ to be those individuals promoted to it due to their conservative credentials. One such man was Riverview’s new Headmaster. Father Dominic O’Reardon was a decent man but at age 13 I couldn’t agree with him on a few things. Nor, it seemed, could some of his direct subordinates — a clear indicator of Riverview being a community of Christian ‘thinkers’ at the time…
One hot morning a School Assembly was called. The whole school. All students. All staff. No exception. Out in front of the Headmaster in the hot sun. I do not recall whether it was a scheduled or an unscheduled assembly but I do remember the salient point of Headmaster’s address to us being his vehement condemnation of the recent film, Monty Python’s Life of Brian, which, as far as I remember Headmaster’s words, he decreed was a film not to be defended or apologised for in any way, shape or form as it was nothing but ‘a clear parody of the life of Christ’. Those particular words I remember.
At the knowledgeable age of 13, I would have loved to have been able to sit down with our new school principal one-on-one and say, ‘Look, Father, with all due respect I am bound to ask whether you have actually watched this film. Because your condemnation of it suggests you haven’t, not properly anyway, which is such a shame as to say Life of Brian is simply a blasphemous parody of the life of Christ misses the whole point of the film.
‘Father Headmaster… Monty Python’s Life of Brian is a scathing satire on Human Nature and how humans misuse Religion, the film using shiningly intelligent comedy to make this so serious historical point. In fact, far from there being anything seriously blasphemous about the film, it is actually quite reverent in Christian terms while still a comedy: This ‘reverence’ is clear from the film’s opening scenes where the ‘Three Wise Men’ follow the ‘Star of Bethlehem’ to the wrong manger (Brian’s), a subtle comedy of errors then ensuing, after which the holy trio exit and promptly realise their mistake when they see the right manger (Jesus’s) just down the street (surely enough, the one all aglow with the Holy Spirit and angelic choral music) which they then approach.
‘Indeed, Headmaster, the very next scene opens with serious Biblical epic-style music, an afternoon scene which is clearly that of the famous ‘Sermon on the Mount’. Here we see a by-now 33-year-old Jesus projecting His so formative words of all Christianity to the assembled masses in an on-screen atmosphere that brings a genuine lump to any Christian’s throat. But the camera then tracks back until it’s Jesus delivering his sermon in the far distance as seen by the people on the very edge of the assembled masses that day who, as a result, can’t hear Him too well — ‘Blessed are the Cheesemakers?’, these people in due course getting into a nasty little fight on the periphery of this most holy occasion. Hence my point about the film’s ‘scathing satire on human nature’, Headmaster.
‘The film goes on from there with Brian, Jewish and also aged 33, being set upon by mistake by an ever-growing rabble of locals convinced through their own obsessive need for ‘a messiah’ that Brian is in fact The Messiah. It’s a portrait of human ‘group psychology’: our human capacity to convince ourselves of anything when as part of a group. And that’s the whole point of the film, Headmaster, specificially that most humans can’t do Religion without stuffing it up: As history demonstrates, we humans take any great idea and turn it on its head, including Christianity. That’s the film’s essential point, Headmaster, a criticism of human nature, of organised religion certainly, but not of Christ or God in any way.’
Yes, I would indeed have loved to have been able to sit down with the Headmaster and set out the above but I got the feeling somebody had already tried to… At that hot morning assembly I got the feeling that the Headmaster’s public condemnation of the film was in response not to students defending the film but in response to teachers, possibly even religious staff, defending it in the Staff Room. And I cannot claim certainty in this but my instincts did stand to reason…
What student would have been defending this well-known allegedly ‘blasphemous’ film to a well-known conservative Headmaster?
The answer is no student at all.
The Best Teacher in the World
* * *
Riverview kept teling us that our key mission in life was to be
‘Men for Others’. One of its teachers truly was.
A life-long bachelor with never a single grey hair out of place, he wore old-school spectacles and a subtly pin-striped black three-piece suit every day of the year. 100 degrees in the shade? He wore it, waistcoat and all. Apparently he had a whole wardrobe-full of the same suit. Going by his archaic and completely inflexible mode of dress, coupled with a face that looked as if breaking into a smile would be considered an immoderate act, it appeared my English class was set to encounter no mere Conservative (one who resists change) but a Reactionary (one with an aversion to change of any sort). My God, some ultra-conservative freak was bearing down upon us!
The man’s first lesson to us was to demonstrate how simply delightful it can be to find one’s self completely wrong: Mr Evelyn Leigh-Barnett was a gentleman, teacher and open mind of the first order. We were stunned when this conservative-looking man told us that he disapproved of certain values that the school by default upheld: chiefly, ‘competition’ at the expense of ‘education’.
Mr Evelyn Leigh-Barnett lifted us: You didn’t feel like a tortured, awkward adolescent in his classroom; you felt relaxed and empowered as this Natural Educator and modest Baron of Humanity knew exactly how your budding brain should be nurtured so as to best flourish and bloom. Just as with the legendary Mrs Grace back at my infants’ school, I never saw Mr Leigh-Barnett have the slightest disciplinary problem with any boy and though a ‘school bully’ type would automatically have latched onto him as ‘soft’ and so to be saboutaged, I don’t think any bully type was ever smart enough to make it into Mr Leigh-Barnett’s class.
He confided in us that he hated his name ‘Evelyn’ though recommended we seek out and read the work of one surnamed Waugh. And in encouraging us to find a passion for reading, our dear teacher had his work cut out for him as, due to their brain chemistry being temporarily ideal for a Carribean voodoo ritual, adolescent boys become ‘reluctant readers’. Yet our dear teacher weaved some sort of quiet magic of his own which turned reading from ‘something you ought to be doing’ into something you wanted to do just as naturally as making a new friend or going on holiday.
Mr Leigh-Barnett was so immaculately mild-mannered that I used to imagine him as the softly-spoken superhero arch-rival of the ‘Voodoo-Raging Witchdoctor’, Mr LB the perfect opposite for such a whirling baddie. Indeed, if Mr LB’s career had been as an actor instead of as a teacher, though he might not have been quite right to play ‘Obi-Wan Kenobi’ in Star Wars in place of the wonderful Alec Guinness, he’d certainly have been right in the role of ‘George Smiley’ as played by Guinness or by Gary Oldman in the recent film, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Think ‘George Smiley’, you’ve got Mr Leigh-Barnett.
Yet to our eminent good fortune he became a teacher and not only did he encourage us to absorb cultural riches through reading but to get our own riches out through writing, even if our ‘riches’ at that age were gems in the rough. (Okay, in the very, very rough.) This was the last, golden year of our young lives when in addition to writing essays our English teachers asked us to write stories. It’s often said you write from experience. It’s less often said you write to live out your unlived fantasies. Suffice to say to this day I never run out of material. In my Year 9 winter school holidays, most of my friends went skiing. I went to the pictures. And so wrote a story about skiing.
Its title was Allez. Mr Leigh-Barnett read it and asked me to come and stand up on the platform and read it out to the class, and this was the ‘top’ English class so my audience was not an unsophisticated one. The story was set in Switzerland, about an Australian downhill alpine ski racer who, being from Australia, nobody thinks can win. Yet 3 — 2 — 1, he’s off, the story following him from start to finish in his race against the clock, the world’s best having already set their stunning times down the mountain ahead of him. On this last run of the day, the crowds still lining the downhill course don’t expect too much from the day’s expected wooden-spooner yet, being Swiss, they ski from birth and know a good downhill skiing effort when they see one. From stage to stage to stage down through the course the Australian racer’s effort so impresses the seasoned local crowd that their alpine cowbell ringing rises and rises in intensity as he shusses by close past them, their massed chant as in the French part of Switzerland ‘ ALLEZ!-ALLEZ!- ALLEZ! ’ rising too and spurring him on. Just before the final straight there is a mid-air leap in which time seems to stand still, our nameless hero lands, crosses the finish line and wins, the loudspeaker race-caller gobsmacked in French.
When I’d finished reading my story aloud, the class was dead silent and still, Mr Leigh-Barnett putting it to them, ‘Now, boys, how did that make you feel? Anybody?’
A boy put up his hand, Mr Leigh-Barnett indicating for him to speak.
‘I felt like I was flying,’ breathed the boy.
I was so encouraged by this that I just kept writing and writing such stories, my magnus opus being a James Bond style epic and was it good? WAS it good…
It was completely derivative. Intensely flawed. An unintentionally unsubtle, plagiaristic nightmare of voodoo blow-dart-filled excitement under the sea, off the cliff, over the falls, into Orbit, So, it seems the tables have turned, Dr X, and Now You Shall Die wall-to-wall laser-firing, hero-gets-the-girl-in-the-end excitement. It rocketed Cliché to new heights.
It was, however, over a hundred hand-written foolscap pages long — I used to write it on my six buses to and from school each day — and I finished it and re-wrote it, then handed it to Mr Leigh-Barnett for his sage opinion.
Put quite simply, if not for the wisdom of my Year 9 English teacher, you probably wouldn’t be reading this now: He could have told me everything that was wrong with my James Bond rip-off, or even just half of all that was wrong with it and he would have been within his rights to do so. But if he had, given how hyper-sensitive 14-year-olds can be, I quite possibly would have been crushed and given up writing before I’d even properly begun. Rather than risk this happening, my teacher looked at me hard across the top of his spectacles and said, ‘ Promise me you’ll keep writing.’ As a result I did, in time learning how to turn a story, then a book into the book it should be and here you are reading my fourth in which I can now say a long overdue THANK YOU to the best teacher in the world.
One day I was passing the Riverview school chapel whose magnificent pipe organ was magnificently played by Mr Leigh-Barnett to accompany our massed singing. As the path rounded a corner I saw I was drawing up on the man himself knelt down in some serious gardening along one side of the chapel. It was a hot, hot summer’s morning and, yes, Mr LB was in his usual garb minus only the suit jacket but still in black waistcoast and trousers, white shirt and tie — the only ever time I saw his sleeves. They weren’t even rolled up and right in the middle of this physical work he wasn’t even breaking a sweat. And in the moment I couldn’t help it. I asked him how, in these clothes he always wore, this day and all the other days, how could he possibly cope with the heat?
He didn’t look up, just kept working as he said evenly, quietly, ‘I simply don’t think about it.’
Agogos
* * *
I described in Goodbye Crackernight how in kindergarten I threw myself with a passion into ‘show and tell time’ where, every Monday morning, I would mount the platform in front of the class and reel off the most elaborate tall stories of my weekend adventures, miraculously never being heckled or sending anyone to sleep. In Year 9 Mr Leigh-Barnett instituted a similar activity for the purpose of immersing us in the art of ‘Rhetoric’ or effective public speaking. At the beginning of every one of our English classes, any boy who felt inclined could have five minutes on the platform up in front of the class on any subject he liked.
Whatever subjects I spoke on now escape me and no known record exists but Mr Leigh-Barnett christened me a ‘demagogue’
in front of the class. He had already filled us with a practical enthusiasm for the ‘derivation’
of words as, even though you might look up and learn the ‘definition’ (meaning) of a word, your most precise and powerful use of the word stemmed from the true handle on its meaning that you can only get by understanding the word’s fundamental parts (its ‘derivation’): ‘Demagogue’, he explained, derived from its two Ancient Greek roots: Demos — the People, Agogos — leading. ‘It means,’ he smiled in my general direction, ‘one of dubious principles who leads the masses astray via clever oratory.’
‘Agogos’. The word rang the strangest bell within me, why, I couldn’t put my finger on. So at lunchtime I went to look it up in Riverview’s excellent library where from a dictionary set taking up an entire shelf I hefted out the enormous, dusty volume marked ‘A’ and began to leaf through it.
Only to hit upon the wrong word entirely and have a life-defining moment…
A go-go. adj. 1. galore, in unrestricted supply. 2. spontaneous, esp. physically. [ orig. uncert., poss. French: à gogo = ad lib . See also Go-Go Dancing. ]
I made a beeline for a well dog-eared reference book of which I’d recently been made aware by my childhood friend, Steve, as featured in Goodbye Crackernight. Now with me at Riverview, it would suffice to say that my friend with the wavy hair and soulful eyes of hazel was already emerging as the quiet ‘hippy’ of Year 9.
The reference book in question was on American popular music and culture post-1945, a book bequeathed by an ex-student as per the inside cover inscription. To this day I have unsuccessfully wracked my brains to remember the book’s title yet I keenly remember what I found within its covers that day: a small article, though including a picture, on something called ‘Go-Go Dancing’, briefly described by the article as a worldwide dance craze, circa 1965-6, as performed in nightclubs called ‘discothèques’ after the vinyl disk format of the recorded music that club patrons danced to, such establishments since known as ‘Go-Go’ clubs.
Memoirs of a Go-Go Dancer Page 2
