by Mark Tully
… the last thing left in me and the best: the ultimate discovery at which I have arrived, the starting point for a fresh development. It has come to me right out of myself, so I know that it has come at the proper time. It could not have come before, nor later. Had anyone told me of it, I would have rejected it. Had it been brought to me, I would have refused it. As I found it, I want to keep it.
Humility came to Oscar Wilde; he did not take credit for discovering it.
What I have learnt in India seems to me relevant not only for our personal lives but also for humans as a species. If we had properly cared for balance in the first place, we would not have put nature as seriously out of balance as it is now. If we had been more humble, we would not have treated nature as inferior to us, as a resource for us to use. We would have realised sooner how dependent we are upon it. We must remember that we neither created the system that sustains us, nor do we sustain it.
It may seem contradictory to speak of humility and then write a book in which my own life features. Certainly I have never thought of writing an autobiography because I do not want to give the impression that my life is particularly important. But for the last ten years I have been presenting the Radio Four Programme Something Understood. The title is taken from the last line of George Herbert’s poem ‘Prayer’. In the programme we discuss the boundaries of our understanding and how certain we can be in life. As a result of Something Understood, I have been invited to speak in many different parts of Britain. The reaction of these audiences, the conversations and correspondence I have had with listeners, and the many conversations I have had with my colleagues, who contribute so much to Something Understood – particularly my producer for the last ten years, Eley McAinsh – have led me to believe that there is an interest in the ideas discussed in this book. So much of what is written about the way we live our lives is in the third person, and I often want to ask how the ideas put forward have affected the author’s life and how they fit into his or her own experience. By writing in the first person, I hope to answer that question and perhaps make my arguments more authentic. It would have felt wrong to me to write in any other way, since I advocate learning from personal experience.
I start with my schooldays because it was at school that I learnt much of what I later had to unlearn in India. I came to believe there was only one way, that life was all about winning and that academic ability was the only index of intelligence. Humility was not a virtue that was encouraged.
MARLBOROUGH: AN EDUCATION IN ABSOLUTES
I WAS EDUCATED at Marlborough College, a traditional British public school. I returned there recently with Richard Wilkinson, a good friend who shared a study with me in my last year. I had come back to Marlborough with Richard to discuss the impact that the school had made on me. Although I had gone on to Cambridge and then to theological college, I felt sure that I had been most profoundly shaped by my school days. I also wanted Richard to help me determine whether I was justified in looking back on Marlborough in the way I did. Not only had he been very close to me during my time there, but he had ended his teaching career at Marlborough, having earlier been the headmaster of two other schools. Although he had retired from teaching full-time, he still kept in touch with Marlborough by teaching at the summer school there.
Now, the two of us stood in the spacious courtyard, or quadrangle, that lies at the heart of the school. At the far end of the courtyard stands an imposing early eighteenth-century mansion, which was built for the Duke of Somerset and later converted into a coaching inn for passengers travelling from London to Bath. The college then turned this magnificent building into a boarding house for boys and it became known as ‘C House’. At the other end of the courtyard, near the gates, stands the college’s other notable building, the chapel. Tall, thin and long enough to accommodate nearly nine hundred worshippers, the chapel is an inspiring example of high Victorian Gothic architecture. When I was a boy at Marlborough, we were obliged to go to chapel every day, where we regularly got down on our knees and confessed our sins in the words of the Anglican Prayer Book, begging God ‘to have mercy upon us miserable offenders’.
Opposite the chapel is one of the less impressive buildings surrounding the courtyard, a late Victorian block of classrooms. Richard recalled how a scripture teacher had strutted up and down one of those classrooms, with his thumbs in the waistcoat of his tweed suit, bawling at the boys, ‘I don’t understand all this rot about Christian humility. I’m not humble and I don’t have to be. I’m Colonel Harling and I’m a damn fine fellow!’
Marlborough was founded in 1843 for the education of the sons of the clergy, but, in spite of its ecclesiastical origins, it did little to convince me personally that the best way to live life was to ‘humble myself in the sight of the Lord’, or to be confident that ‘He shall lift you up’ (James 4.10). Rather, it taught me that life was all about striving to be ‘a damn fine fellow’ and lifting myself up without help from anyone else. Preposterous though Colonel Harling seems to me now, to my mind he truly represented the ethos of my school years at Marlborough, an ethos in which humility seemed to have little or no place. Success was what counted, and the only successes that really seemed to matter were those that were athletic or academic. What’s more, our successes were ascribed entirely to our own efforts. The gifts we had been given at birth, the circumstances of our lives, and the advantages of our earlier education were not taken into account when our achievements were considered.
In spite of its religious tradition, Marlborough also seemed to be a place where learning was confined to the dictates of reason. I didn’t come to understand until much later in life what imagination and other forms of perception could teach me. Nor did Marlborough encourage questioning in my experience. Everything was black or white. Religion appeared to be more about morality rather than experiencing God, and the school’s particular brand of morality left me with a heavy burden of guilt about my burgeoning sexuality.
I realise that this description of my school days must present a very black picture indeed, and, as I have said, if there is one thing I have learnt from India, it is to appreciate how little in life is totally black or, indeed, purely white. There are many men of my generation who look back with gratitude at Marlborough, and it is certainly in part my own fault that I don’t. But all I can do is describe honestly the influences that Marlborough had on me personally. Those influences stayed with me until I began to understand something about Indian philosophy, religion and culture. Indeed, it was partly as a result of the extent to which those influences had unsettled me, destroyed my self-confidence and undermined my religious beliefs that India eventually made such an impact on me. So if I was to write a truthful book about the influence of India in my life, it seemed necessary not only to discuss these earlier influences but also to authenticate them, as I am attempting to do now.
Richard and I started our visit by walking to our old House, which was tucked away in a corner of the courtyard. The Marlborough website describes ‘B’ house as a square building built around a court. However, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that dark green and black were no longer the dominant colours on the walls and that the ground floor had light, modern furniture. But nothing could disguise the layout of the interior, which reminded me of a prison, with high railings piled floor on floor, surrounding what we pupils had called a ‘well’ rather than a ‘court’. It had seemed like a grim place to live, but – now I thought about it – had life there really been so grim?
Before revisiting Marlborough, I had re-read John Betjeman’s long poem ‘Summoned by Bells’, which is about the poet’s childhood and undergraduate days. Luxuriating in his bath and looking back on his days at Marlborough, Betjeman ‘reflects in comfortable retrospect’:
… ‘thank God
I’ll never have to go through them again.’
As with my toes I reach towards the tap,
And turn it to a trickle, stealing warm
About my tender pe
rson, comes a voice,
An inner voice that calls, ‘Be fair! Be fair!
It was not quite as awful as you think.’
These words came back to me now as a timely warning about my own memories of my schooldays. ‘I must not,’ I thought, ‘exaggerate their awfulness.’ In fact, once I had got over the tears without which I never succeeded in leaving home, I had enjoyed school life. I had been good at being ‘one of the lads’, aided and abetted by my crude sense of humour. I had never been short of friends, nor had I been over-awed by senior boys. Beatings were unpleasant but – as Betjeman said – ‘brought us no disgrace only a kind of glory’.
When I was there, Marlborough had a reputation for being a tough school, but I think it was probably less harsh than many other public schools of the period. When I mentioned this to Richard, he agreed with me. ‘I think there is more bullying now,’ he said. ‘When I was teaching here not so long ago, one poor boy was accused, wrongly, of reporting a senior for coming back drunk and stuffing juniors’ heads into the lavatory. He was so badly bullied, had his bed stripped every night and other things, that he left the school.’ He continued, ‘Sometimes senior boys were bullied too. There was also a case of a boy who was not allowed to work, as his tormentors kept on banging on his door. I put that kind of bad behaviour down to money,’ he explained. ‘Marlborough’s a rich children’s school now, but it wasn’t in our days – what with all those sons of badly paid clergymen. Rich boys think they can do anything they like. They have far less humility.’
‘Isn’t this part of the whole modern business of worshipping success?’ I wondered. ‘Because their fathers are revered for being rich and successful, the boys think they have the right to do whatever they like?’
‘You know,’ Richard sighed, ‘I think it also comes back to what we have often talked about in the past – competition and the school going in for this encouragement of success.’
Success in our days had always seemed to be very narrowly defined, such as coming top of the class or being on the first team. But what about those poor unfortunates who weren’t going to achieve either academic or sporting honours? Richard agreed with me, reminding me of the lists of marks and places in classes that used to be read out at the end of term in front of the whole school. In the case of the lower forms, the bottom place could be as low as 120th. A friend of ours often used to come near the bottom of the lists, and Richard believed that the repeated humiliation of this experience had gradually destroyed his self-confidence. But Richard was not criticising healthy competition, nor was he of the view that results aren’t important. He firmly believes that teachers should encourage children to get the best results possible.
I had not been in the top flight at Marlborough, even though I passed the entrance exam well and had initially been put in the same stream as those who, like Richard, had won scholarships. Surrounded by my new companions, I was at first ambitious to win the accolade that was the highest mark of success at Marlborough: a scholarship in classics at Oxford or Cambridge. But I was soon told I wasn’t up to that. After our first term specialising in classics, my year was divided into sheep and goats – fast stream and slow stream. Demoted to the slow stream, I felt that my peers and I had been condemned to failure, and there seemed little point in doing more than the bare minimum of work. In this attitude I was certainly not alone, as our class of goats became renowned for being a bolshy lot. Being bolshy and rebellious became the means through which I established my identity and attempted to satisfy my need to stand out, to have other boys take note of me. I didn’t realise that this behaviour was a form of egotism, that finding myself and my own sense of destiny was what should have mattered, not worrying about being judged by others
Richard had timed our visit to coincide with one of the rare compulsory chapel services. The pews run parallel with the nave down the length of the chapel, and we sat in the back row, which was reserved for masters. Above us were plaques displaying the names of those men of whom Marlborough was proud. One of them had been a hero to both Richard and me: Sir Nigel Gresley, Chief Mechanical Engineer of the London–North Eastern Railway. He had designed the streamlined locomotives that pulled the London–Edinburgh expresses, one of which still holds the world speed record for a steam engine.
Pre-Raphaelite paintings of biblical scenes ran along both walls of the chapel. Opposite me, a particularly ferocious Abraham was depicted, his hand raised and his dagger poised over his son Isaac, who was strapped to an altar. A nervous angel fluttered above them. When I was a boy, this picture had added to my confusion about the nature of Christianity. I couldn’t understand why God would have wanted Abraham to be so afraid of Him that he was prepared to offer his son as a sacrifice. How could this version of the Almighty tally with a God of love? It already seemed to me then that love and fear did not go together. However, the chapel was nevertheless a place in which I found a lasting meaning in life. It gave me a faith I have never lost (although I have come near to it) and an abiding love of the Anglican Church and its liturgy.
To me, the liturgy is like poetry. It inspires rather than explains. It is like a mantra too, a permanent and always reliable source of comfort and strength. It was at voluntary evensong on Sundays, the most peaceful service of the week, with a small congregation and a full choir, that I started to understand the strange paradox of liturgy. It is familiar yet awakens a sense of a mystery that is beyond all understanding. In a school where the emphasis was mostly on rational thought, evensong was the one time when it seemed to me that there might be some level of comprehension beyond reason.
In later life, John Betjeman also came to appreciate the liturgy he had absorbed at Marlborough. For him, it was an antidote to a form of religion that was too rational and which put all its emphasis on understanding rather than experiencing. ‘With age,’ he confided,
… I find myself enjoying more and more the words and rhythms of the Book of Common Prayer. Apart from their meaning, they sound right and they are not talking down by being ‘matey’, and where they are a bit vague and archaic, that makes them grand and historic. The words give me time to meditate and pray; they are so familiar, they are like my birthplace, and I don’t want them pulled down.
Seated in the back row with Richard, I was disappointed that this service was not liturgical. I had hoped to hear the familiar words sung, but they were not. There was also something about this particular service that Betjeman might have described as ‘matey’. For instance, when I was a pupil, the chaplains used to wait in the vestry until the organist pressed a bell to tell them that everyone was seated and silent. Then they would emerge and process solemnly to their pews. In contrast, this Sunday the chaplains busied themselves in the body of the church, doing I know not what, as the boys and girls straggled in, chattering. The preacher didn’t mount the pulpit to preach, but walked up and down the nave, as if he were in conversation with the congregation. The chancel was filled with students seated on ugly red chairs that detracted from its sanctity and the majesty of its golden reredos. But for all this ‘mateyness’, the boys and girls didn’t seem to sing the hymns with the same vigour and assurance as we had done. I thought this was perhaps just an old man’s nostalgia, but Richard agreed, saying, ‘They don’t sing like we did because they think it’s not “cool”. What’s more, they don’t have the congregational practices that we had.’
One of the chaplains later explained to me that a liturgical service would have no meaning for those children who only went to chapel when it was compulsory. But then, were those same children were not being given any opportunity to learn to love the liturgy, to acquire a treasure that they might not appreciate at the time but which they would perhaps find valuable in later life? It seemed to me that Marlborough had retreated in the face of the secular onslaught. I couldn’t help regretting that a school with such a strong religious tradition did not appear to be putting up a robust fight to save its Anglican inheritance.
When I was young, my u
nderstanding of Christianity led me to believe that it was immoral not be a socialist. So when we used to sing the popular hymn ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’ in chapel, I was offended by the suggestion that ‘the rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate, God made them, high or lowly and ordered their estate’. Surely it was the rich man’s greed that had made the poor man poor, and it was our duty as Christians to ensure that the poor man would no longer have to sit around outside his gate waiting for the crumbs from his table.
My socialism was also, I admit, another rebellion against what I felt was the dominant ethos of the school, and as such it became something that gave me an identity and made me stand out from most of the other boys, who were Conservatives. During the 1950 general election, the school held a mock election and we socialists barely got into double figures. I took my socialism home with me, telling my father it was unjust that I went to an expensive boarding school while most of the boys where we lived had to go to the village school. He was not amused and would tell me angrily, ‘You don’t appreciate the sacrifice I’ve made to send all of you children to good schools!’ As there were six of us, my father’s sacrifice was considerable, but I am afraid I didn’t take that into account.
On leaving school I was conscripted into the army for two years’ National Service, during which I was commissioned, much to my surprise. But that achievement did not remove my sense of inadequacy and I remained a rebel. My socialism gave me the doctrine to justify my actions, and the privileges of an officer gave me yet another cause to rebel against. I defied the tradition of drinking fine wines on mess nights and made a point of ordering beer, which was regarded as the working man’s drink. There were very many other minor and, in retrospect, rather stupid rebellions, but the Adjutant only gave up on me when I wrote an essay claiming that the morale problems of the army would be solved if the distinction between soldiers and officers was abolished. The Adjutant returned my essay with ‘The red flag flies …’ scrawled in red ink at the bottom of the page.
