by Rick Gekoski
Unfortunately, my experience at Oxford had been good for my self-esteem. I am told that one should feel proud of oneself and one’s achievements, but I frequently value the wrong things for the wrong reasons. Pride resulting from, say, academic achievement, is a kind of false pride based on false goals. Does high academic achievement make one happy, or good? Does it fill you with laughter and goodwill towards man? Look round the universities, and despair. No, I rather prefer moderate, vigilant self-esteem, scepticism directed inwards, self-doubt: those qualities of mind that lead to humility, and to that irony which wryly registers the differences between the apparent and the real. And, ironically enough, I still feel proud of my academic achievements, when I’m not mildly ashamed of them.
I may have been a success by academic standards, but that was a sign of some inner weakness in me, a capitulation, a failure of ego strength. If I’d had the guts I would have abandoned my studies, and sought a way to have fun, to play a lot and to be happy. In 1967 I was offered a summer job as assistant professional at a tennis club in Mykonos. I should have taken it, and stayed, given lessons and played in local tournaments, learned Greek, eaten in the taverna, drunk the local wines (except Retsina) and entertained the local women. I could have rented a little villa overlooking the sea, got brown as a berry, kept my own hours, read whatever took my fancy, tried to write a novel. I might have become like that Lawrence Durrell. He seemed to be having a lot of fun.
But being ‘in school’, as Americans continue to call it even while one is at university, was all I had ever done, and it rather frightened me to think of leaving it. I had no experience, indeed no memories of not being in school. And the only genuinely happy ones were from my time at Burgundy Farm. It was the only school where I ever felt comfortable.
But schoolteaching wouldn’t have suited me. I haven’t the patience, the sheer grind would have worn me down. What I needed Neill for, I recognized, was not as a guide to good teaching, but to good parenting. In 1973, reunited after a second separation, Barbara and I decided that, to make things work, we ought to have a child. My father, told the news, was rightly sceptical. ‘But I feel biologically ready to be a father,’ I said, pulling myself up to the full height of my twenty-six years. I could virtually hear him not saying, in the ensuing silence of that long-distance phone call, that it was psychologically ready that he was worried about.
Nothing prepares you for the birth of your first child, but I had been heartened by Neill’s description of the childhood of his daughter Zoe, raised with the freedom and generosity that her father demonstrated and recommended. According to her proud father ‘scores of outsiders from all over the world’ had said of her: ‘Here is something quite new, a child of grace and balance and happiness, at peace with her surroundings, not at war.’ Do we get a glimpse of the magi hovering round the Christ child here? I don’t mind the proud hyperbole, it is wonderful for a parent to feel like that. I hoped I would too, and with equally good reason.
Anna entered the world as if reluctantly, struggling towards the light from a posterior position, almost as exhausted as her mother was. I’d done my bit at the top end with Barbara, joined her in breathing exercises, massaged and encouraged, but when the going got rough, and the forceps came out, I was banished to the waiting room, and was chagrined at how relieved I felt. She had a hard time, a stressed and unsympathetic doctor forcing the pace, and by the time I returned, baby Anna had been mysteriously removed, and Barbara was beyond consolation. Twenty minutes later I was presented with a tiny red-faced bundle, and clutched her to me almost dangerously.
She had matted black strands of fine hair, a grumpy, rubbery little face, forehead skewed from the trauma of birth, and, magically, when she caught my eye she looked at me steadily for a long time, as if to inquire what had just happened, what might have been done to avoid it, and who the hell I was. They say babies can’t focus, but it’s new born fathers who can’t. I wept, squeezed her involuntarily, then gave her back to the hovering nurse, who was anxiously diagnosing a possible case of squashed baby syndrome, kissed Barbara good-bye, and went out to buy an Indesit washing machine. We’d prepared a pink nursery with an adorable crib and lots of girly bits for Anna to come home to, which took a good few days while both she and her mother recovered. I wandered the house, restlessly, reading Dr Spock, and thinking about A.S. Neill.
We’d agreed on the ground rules: baby Anna would eat when she wished, sleep as nature guided her. If she cried it would be for a reason, and we would comfort her, whenever. We had terry towelling nappies, not having discovered disposable ones, and vowed that she could use them for as long as she wished: no toilet-training for her. She could grow up in her own way and in her own time. I bought a blue corduroy sling and pouch, imported from California, that fitted round my back, so that she could rest comfortably on the porch of my stomach. I walked the house with her in the early hours, as Barbara tried to sleep and Anna wept with colic, and later the pains of teething. When she wished, whatever the hour, I would take her for a ride in the car, which was often the only thing that would soothe her. I pretended I was a taxi driver preparing for the knowledge, and learned many of the obscure byways of Leamington Spa and Warwick.
It was wonderful and awful. It wasn’t long before I was claiming, ruefully, that until having a baby I hadn’t believed in original sin. I hadn’t expected the confrontations, the tears, the relentless neediness, the constant desire for attention, the unrelenting egotism. Not her, she was a baby, they’re like that. I mean me. I’d never been asked so much, had to give up so much. My life was dominated by fatherhood, and I wasn’t (as my father had feared) entirely ready for it. Too much for them, not enough for me. I was so overwhelmed that this palpable selfishness hardly even embarrassed me. I was too tired to be embarrassed. What happened to my sex life? What was it like to sleep for a full night? To see my friends? Play snooker or tennis? Go out to dinner? Travel somewhere, anywhere?
None of the above. Just the daily grind of unbearable love. We had given Anna her head, in the best Neillian manner: she lived at her own self-regulated pace, and we accommodated ours to hers. Barbara was better at it than I was. But within a year we agreed that maybe good old A.S. Neill had overstated his case (or maybe he was just better than us), and we decided occasionally to let Anna cry herself to sleep, and began gently to insist that she ate what, and when, we wished her to. It was a bit of a compromise, and it made life easier. After all, Neill insists that the innate selfishness of children lasts well into the teenage years, and it was exhausting merely to contemplate the carnage. Surely we could be a little selfish too?
But Neill is an absolutist here: freedom is not to be compromised, standards and regulations not to be imposed. It wasn’t enough that little Anna, by the age of three, was utterly gorgeous, talkative, charming, pretty much self-regulating, and swore like a trooper. I wouldn’t call her an entirely happy child, that would have been difficult in the context of her parents’ marriage, but she was a considerable live wire, and a source of joy for us both. There are, Neill insists, no problem children, only problem parents, and we could see Anna paying some of the price in sleeplessness and anxiety. Was Neill wrong, or were we? I don’t know, and there is no way to find out. The world in which Barbara and I found ourselves hardly allowed the rearing of free children, and to raise a Neillian little person in a relentlessly directive, frequently ugly, social environment is nigh impossible, as Neill acknowledges. We certainly would not have allowed her to go to Summerhill, however much we believed in it. Even if the home environment and schooling were worse for her, we wanted her with us, and she would have hated leaving home. She went to the free-est schools Leamington could provide, and years later Bertie spent a few years at King Alfred’s School in London, where Neill had once taught. He loved it, and the kids were as free as birds, and almost as flighty as Mayzie.
In that very period, though, Summerhill was under attack, in a way that seemed to me shocking and inexplicable. Neill had b
een dead for many years, but much honoured in his time with honorary degrees and citations, and his works were required reading in education courses. Summerhill was a world famous school, and England should have been proud of it.
As early as 1949 the (rather enlightened) school inspectors who reported on the school praised Neill as a man of unusual integrity, described the children as ‘natural, open-faced, and unselfconscious’ to a remarkable degree, and gave their blessing to the school’s ethos and continued existence. But it was a constant source of anxiety, at Summerhill, that one day the wrong inspectors might just turn up. Fifty years later, they did. A teacher at the time described their visit: ‘I think the first image I have of it was when they came down the drive and there were eight of them marching with clipboards and suits. They were in twos.’
This ominous, robotic precision suggests a military attack – eight was an unusually large contingent – by bureaucrats who had clearly made up their minds before they arrived. The eight of them snooped about, quizzed teachers and children in a hostile manner, sniffed, looked down their educational noses, harrumphed in disapproval. The children didn’t even have to attend classes! Lazy little buggers! They could play all the time if they wanted! How were they ever going to pass exams?
This was hardly news. It had been like that since 1921, but the disapproving inspectors were determined that, after seventy-eight years, something was going to be done about it. They recommended the closure of Summerhill unless it modified its practices. Estelle Morris, then Secretary of State for Education, gave a typically Blairite account of the matter: of course Summerhill was entitled to its own philosophy, how marvellous, they just shouldn’t practise it. Surely the children could at the very least be encouraged to attend lessons? Otherwise, they might (in the inspectors’ words) ‘confuse the pursuit of idleness for the exercise of personal liberty’.
Summerhill was hardly likely to capitulate to such an attack, and the inspectors soon ruled that it be shut down. The school appealed, citing the report as manifestly biased and incompetent in a remarkable number of ways. The details of the ensuing battle are disturbing, and comical, but the essential case was simply and eloquently put by Geoffrey Robertson QC: ‘It is freedom or nothing, because if it is less than freedom it is not Summerhill.’
The loss of such a school, such a national asset, should not be contemplated. Summerhill fought and fought, and won. Distinguished educationists and former students spoke up on its behalf. Statistics were produced that showed that Summerhillians, in fact, did rather better than the national average at examinations. The ensuing case cost the school £130,000, and contributions flowed in from round the world. An attack on Summerhill was an attack on one of the foremost incarnations of the very idea of freedom. Freedom to be and to grow as one wants, freedom not to be directed, freedom to have one’s own voice. Freedom from schooling, as it is usually understood. ‘We are faced,’ said Bertrand Russell (who founded a progressive school with his wife Dora in 1927), ‘with the paradoxical fact that education has become one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought.’
Called ‘the oldest children’s democracy in the world’, the school has always been run on a one-person one-vote basis, and at school meetings the five-year-olds had as much right to speak, deliberate and vote as Neill did. (They fired him once, and he pottered about contentedly in his workshop until he was rehired a couple of weeks later.) The system works wonderfully well, and has been a model for those mitigated examples of student representation in the student councils that are now commonplace in most schools.
But that’s just a sop, and everyone knows it. Administrators and teachers actually run schools, and though they claim to be keen to hear student opinion, it is their own that counts. All animals are equal, Orwell’s Animal Farm reminds us, only some are more equal than others. Except at Summerhill. I wish I’d got that job. I would have loved it, all of it, even – particularly – the voting. But I’d bet that Summerhill graduates are even less likely than I to vote for politicians. How could you participate in such a farce when you have direct experience of what a real democracy feels like?
The answer to this sceptical dismissiveness may be found in a single word: Obama. I had managed, in my fastidious withdrawal from political engagement, to resist the political attractiveness of Bobby Kennedy (spoiled rich kid), George McGovern (boring), even of Bill Clinton (rather fun, but smarmy). But Obama? I began my engagement with him in ignorant scepticism, and was gradually won over, and finally converted. He was both one of us and different. He carried himself with perfect ease, was not disfigured by either ideology or a need to be liked. If anyone could make one less embarrassed by America and Americanness, it was this remarkable hybrid. Though obviously highly ambitious, he struck one not as a politician, neither on the make nor (like Tony Blair) in love with the mere taking of power, but as a complex and highly admirable person, offering himself wholly and humbly. How could one not vote for him?
I did.
13
MATILDA, ALICE AND LITTLE RICK
Matilda longed for her parents to be good and loving and understanding and honourable and intelligent. The fact that they were none of these things was something she had to put up with. It was not easy to do so.
Roald Dahl, Matilda
The winner of the Booker Prize in 1988 was Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda. A great romp of a story about an unlikely couple of émigrés from Victorian England to Australia, the novel has epic proportions, is crazily engaging, perfectly wrought, felt, and visualized. But Oscar and Lucinda, much as I love it, was not the best novel published in 1988. That honour should have gone to Roald Dahl’s Matilda, which is more likely to be read in a hundred years’ time, even, than Peter Carey’s great novel. Matilda is Roald Dahl’s masterpiece, and loved by everyone who reads it: by children, by parents who read it to their children, and by adults themselves, all on their own.
That is how I first read it, anyway, when I bought a copy in December of 1988. It was intended as a Christmas present for Anna and Bertie (then fourteen and eight), and I duly inscribed it, wrapped it up clumsily, and added it proudly to the vast mound of other presents Barbara was stashing away under our Christmas tree – a ghostly glittering object teetering uneasily in a bucket of dirt in the kitchen, having been thoroughly ‘vulgarized’ by Bertie, who thought it essential that no bit of green emerge from the decorated object. The finished tree was submerged in tinsel, chocolates covered in gold and red foil were attached to every branch, baubles and hanging glass balls, both clear and coloured, balanced precariously and, at the top, a painted angel panned its unconvincing eyes spookily over the proceedings.
On Christmas morning the kids tore through the wrapping paper with scant regard for the enclosed contents, so anxious were they to get on to the next present. ‘A football? Oh, thanks.’ Tear, tear. ‘Nice blouse, mum, thanks.’ What else, what more? ‘Oh, is this the new Roald Dahl? Cool!’ The book, with the winsome Matilda staring out from the dust wrapper, was cast aside like an abandoned child.
As the gluttonous procedure went on, I was hardly able to suppress my usual spasm of distaste. I didn’t grow up celebrating Christmas, and the sheer excess of it has always disturbed me. I was in constant conflict with Barbara about this, me trying to rein her in, she trying to get me to unbend a little and curb my rampant scepticism about the holiday. She was, after all, right. Christmas is what one does, everyone does it: it’s not for enjoying, it’s for getting on with. I consoled myself, on this particular Christmas morning, by picking up Matilda, and coiled in a chair next to the fire, still half-asleep, looking up occasionally in what I hoped was a benign manner, sipping coffee and reading. The book was wonderful, utterly engrossing from the first page.
The presents were soon opened. We stuffed the fire with the wrapping paper – hours of wrapping paper – and started making pancakes for Christmas breakfast.
‘Will you play Cluedo with me, dad?’ asked Bertie, tearing th
e cellophane off his new game.
‘Sure,’ I said, with a lack of enthusiasm that Barbara and Anna both noted, but which Bertie was too young to register.
‘Great!’ he said. ‘Teach me how to play.’
‘You want to play too, Anna?’ I asked.
‘No thanks,’ she said. ‘I’ll help mum with the dinner after I get dressed.’
Lunch was served at two. The Cluedo game was put away, the presents stashed in a sad and still unregarded pile in the corner, Grandpa Freddie and Grandma Catherine tucked in to the mounds of food, Barbara hunched wearily but benignly in her chair, the kids and I wolfed our portions and came back for more. Glasses were refilled, the wine flowed more freely than the conversation. Afterwards they would eat their sweets – I hate mince pies and Christmas pudding, if I had my way they would be banned, or executed – and then waddle across the room to watch the Queen’s Speech on the telly.
‘Excuse me for a second,’ I said, drawing my chair from the table. I went over to the pile of presents, picked up Matilda, and headed upstairs to the loo.
I knew I’d have twenty minutes before the alarm bells started even to tinkle. By that time I was already on page 45, and had not the slightest desire to go back to the festivities.
Ten minutes later – page 63 – there was a knock at the door.
‘Dad,’ came Bertie’s voice. ‘I need the loo.’
There was little urgency in his tone. I suspected somebody had sent him.
‘Use the downstairs one,’ I said grumpily. ‘I may be some time.’
‘Grandma’s using it,’ he said.
‘Piss in the garden then,’ I said stiffly, turning to page 64, ‘because I’m not coming out, not soon. Then go and watch telly.’
‘I’m bored,’ he said grumpily.
‘Well, I’m not.’ I said. ‘I’m having a great time.’