I am not good at expressing myself in speech, so I beg you to read this instead.
I think I ought to leave this school at once for several reasons.
1. I have utterly failed to be happy here, I do not quite know why. But I think there must be some great underlying difference between North & South which makes people with Northern manners comfortable & easy to deal with, but people with the Southern manners are, for me, utterly impossible & hateful. Yet the rules of this, as of all schools, compel me to associate with them.
2. They seem to have no conception of any but physical pain, & put me thro’ hourly mental torture without probably knowing it. Also (tho’ this hasn’t happened to me) there is some bullying. At supper without a prefect last night, the whole school turned on one helpless & harmless little new [chap]. And, of course, when the master came in, the new chap got an equal punishment with the rest And I had to sit by, impotent to stop it.
3. Last night in your speech you said “LPS has public school fees so as to get the public school class of men”. That means, so as to exclude all boys who are unable to pay public school fees. I consider this as typical of the school. They have borrowed from the public schools all that there is bad & vile in that system; whether they have borrowed the good or not I cannot say, but I have only seen the bad. There is a system of making new boys sing in the dormitories. There is no real harm done, & it would be reasonable in a school with long traditions of it. But L.P.S. is too young to have traditions, & the pain and torture to the new boys should have been sufficient to prevent this feeble imitation of the public school.
4. They have no respect whatever for property. Every Sunday hats are jumped on. Every day coats & mackintoshes are torn. And I am sorry to say that things have disappeared from my locker. I do not know whether wilful destruction is ever pardonable, but if someday they should turn on my coat it is a fact that I cannot afford to have it maltreated. I could scarcely have come here at all but for the hope of a scholarship from Ackworth.
For all these reasons (and there are many included under number one), I think it is your duty to give me my fare to Newcastle with whatever shreds of character you can give me.89
It is hard to imagine a private school student delivering a rant like this is 2013, let alone 1916. Some fascinating ‘boy-is-father-to-the-man’ themes emerge from it – the uncompromising distaste for the South and bad ‘southern manners’, the non-intervention (in the bullying episode), the acute sense of fairness, the revulsion against capital, the lack of respect for ‘tradition’, the studied poverty (one of the most celebrated medics in the North of England could probably have been leaned on for a coat repair), the need for truth (‘tho’ this hasn’t happened to me’) and, above all, the sheer bloody-minded nonconformity of it. I’m a northerner, get me out of here.
Evans annotated Bunting’s memorandum. It appears that it was Evans who underscored ‘the whole school’, adding in the margin ‘25 boys present’. About the bullying he asked ‘Why so? Why not stop the bullying?’ and about the ‘equal punishment given’ he notes ‘no punishment given’. His only remark on Bunting’s assessment of the previous night’s speech is ‘mis statement’ and on Bunting’s fourth point he notes ‘public position of coats’ regarding the lack of respect for property and ‘eatables?’ regarding the alleged theft. ‘Prefects to enquire’ is his last note. It all points to a bout of hysterical paranoia on Bunting’s part.
Bunting had delivered his memo to Evans early on the morning of Monday 23 October. Shortly afterwards Evans wrote a file note to himself about Bunting’s outburst and about another recent ‘episode’ (an unauthorised trip into Reading the previous Saturday). The note starts:
Glad he is safe – there satisfaction ends
16½ juvenile escapade?
Want of manliness – of backbone cowardice. Reason given for going down town.
A stupid thing to do.
He needs grind & pluck …
Had he any real grievance? I am quite open to think he had but evidence at present is against it
Ackworth success
F. A’s letter
Miss Hartley’s letter
Bernard Shaw touch.
This last is a perceptive observation.
The following day Evans wrote to Thomas Bunting and Thomas wrote to Evans, their letters crossing in the mail. This is Evans’ account of Bunting’s busy weekend:
I wonder what sort of letters Basil writes to you. My impression is that he gets along satisfactorily for the most part with periodic outbursts or nerve storms, which make him very miserable. I have known of two such definitely since you were here. One of them came to a head this last week-end, and sent him to me with the enclosed document in his hand (please return this). This was early on the Monday morning, and the boy was evidently suffering very great excitement. (The extraordinary thing, however, is that I found he had come straight from an interview with another master, in which he had not appeared at all outwardly overwrought, and at which he had made arrangements to read an essay here next month). I gave him a general word, and told him to come to see me last evening. I then went through the document, first of all from the point of view of the things he said about the School and showed him how time and again he magnified small things into great. I think it took him a little by surprise to find that I know quite well to what he was referring in saying that some bullying took place, and could tell him just who was responsible for the small things that have occurred. It was also a new point of view to him that he and another big boy had any responsibility with regard to stopping “ragging” at supper when many other boys happened to be away.
I then adopted quite another tone in addressing myself to the seriousness of the position he was taking up; I told him plainly that if he allowed these outbursts to continue, and to master him, he would find in time that he could not live with any of his fellows, North country or South country, and that he would become a recluse, separated from others almost altogether. I showed him into how many things he was already fitting in the School, and begged him to face life and not to be so absolutely self-centred as he is. I put before him several ways in which he could reasonably let himself go and give himself to others, and said that in this is his great hope in preventing these disturbances wrecking his life.
The net result is that for the time Basil was quite re-conciled and saw the commonsense of what I was saying. We shall make continued and increased efforts to help him in right ways, and to see that he has companionship that he can enjoy. A great difficulty is that he is so conceited about the value of some of his work, and therefore notice of it and interest in it (for it is good) will do him harm if we are not careful. I am glad to say that he is showing considerable concern for all his work, including the less interesting subjects such as Latin.
Meanwhile Thomas expressed similar concerns:
Mrs Bunting is considering the advisability of spending a week end in Reading about Nov 10th. But we feel uncertain of the effect on Basil. It might help him to settle down, on the other hand it might disturb him just as he is beginning to settle. You will probably be better able to judge than we, will you kindly give us your opinion?
Judging from his letters Basil is still unhappy, though not so violently as at first; & it seems to depend more on his state of mind than on anything external. In fact he seems hysterical.
“I don’t know” he says “exactly why I am unhappy. If I did know I might get it put right, but it’s something indefinite that is in everything about Leighton & Reading, something poisonous in the atmosphere, something foreign & unfriendly in even the nicest of the people” – “I’m never happy – except when I get away alone into the country” – “I can’t get my work done for thinking. I’ve tried every way to stop thinking. I’ve tried whistling at my work, reading back numbers of Punch; I’ve tried working a double rate, & working at Fabian essays, or economics, but I can’t stop thinking.”
These extracts will perhaps illustrate his pres
ent way of thinking – or at least show his interpretation of himself, which is possibly a very different thing. I should not like him to know that I have sent you extracts, but they may aid you in deciding whether Mrs Bunting should come to Reading.
If you think she should come would you mind mentioning what you think the most suitable hotel for her to stay at, or would it be better to stay in London, & come up to Reading in the day time?
Thomas answered Evans’ letter on 26 October, reporting that Bunting had written them two ‘quite reasonable, and not unhappy letters’ when he returned to school, but that on 3 October he had sent one in a different tone:
very unhappy, & unreasonable. “I think I’m going mad here I can’t work, nor anything – just dream of home.” “I’m sure I shall die slowly here, first my sense, then my body”. His mother replied to this, and immediately there came a Telegram telling us to disregard his last letter. The next day there came a very curious letter from him. He said that he vastly preferred to stand alone to fight the devil Despair, “who has been at me ever since I can remember”, in privacy. That for a time, at Ackworth, he had tried to tell us what he really felt; but as it did no good, and was called whining, he left off telling us, that he had now tried again to tell us how he felt, but that as we didn’t want to know how he felt, and how he ought to feel, he would try once more to stand alone. He ended by saying that we were not to worry, he would beat everyone to everything yet, & he quoted ‘Peer Gynt’ “to myself enough, & Emperor of myself ”. It was a theatrical letter, after this came one or two quite reasonable, & ordinary letters, perhaps rather high strung; and lastly Sunday’s letter which began by saying that he must whine, though he had promised not to do so. I gave you the essence of the ‘whine’, it was followed by two or three pages of reasonable, though perhaps hypercritical, matter. Even the ‘whine’ was less unreasonable than some previous letters. I certainly agree with most that you say of him. There is brain storm, or hysteria; with intervals of what is probably nearly normal thought, though he may perhaps regard the intervals as having been periods of self suppression. I think too there is some semiconscious posing. I can’t help feeling that in the midst of it he stands outside of himself, and admires his own attitudes, which may nevertheless be quite sincere.
I was very sorry to observe the tone of his note to you, particularly of its last paragraph. One phrase I disliked for another reason. Basil knows that his going to Cambridge or Oxford depends on his getting a Scholarship. But no such condition applied to his going to Leighton Park. That was definitely decided before we were aware that there was any prospect of a Scholarship from Ackworth, & I thought that Basil knew this.
On the whole I am inclined to be encouraged by your report, & the improved tone of Basil’s letters home; I am extremely pleased to hear that he seems to be working even at the less interesting subjects. It does look as though his nerves were quietening, and that he may yet settle well in his new surroundings.
Thomas’ letter ends by expressing genuine regret and surprise at the trouble Bunting was causing Evans and gratitude for the ‘care and insight’ which Evans was applying to the case. The record of the correspondence on the subject ends with a letter of 30 October from Evans urging Annie to visit her son as she had planned and reassuring Thomas that Bunting had ‘made no demur to the fact that there are many exaggerations in what he wrote’.
I have dwelt on this episode because it throws so much light on Bunting’s state of mind as he faced the challenge of adulthood in a world at war. Bunting’s parents had clearly feared for their son’s sanity for some years. Evans, no doubt familiar with homesick boys, took a pragmatic line but applied it with sensitivity. There is more than homesickness in Bunting’s cri de coeur though. Hysteria, histrionics, self-absorption, exaggerated showmanship and depression all jostle to the front of Bunting’s ‘explosion’. We need to keep this episode in mind when we come to his exploits in the 1920s and 1930s.
Matters clearly improved though and Evans (the son of a previous Ackworth headmaster and himself a former teacher at the Yorkshire school as it happens) clearly treated the episode with the firm-but-fairness characteristic of the time. Indeed, Bunting went on to become a prefect.90
Towards the end of term Evans filed a note on Bunting for the forthcoming reports:
1916 Decr. G. There is no doubt [‘in our mind’ erased] that he is making a
place for himself in the school
A. Might devote himself more keenly
B. Essays (needs a hobby) – but not much to show
It could have been a lot worse. The end of Bunting’s first term at Leighton Park was considerably better than its beginning.
Essays and debates
On 5 February 1917 the sixty-ninth meeting of the school’s Literary, Historical and Archaeological Society was devoted to ‘a discussion on what should be the terms of a just and permanent peace’, with eighteen members and three visitors present. Bunting’s contribution was held to be ‘easily the best in point of literary style, it was also quite witty’. Bunting argued that
i. The guilty must be punished as
ii. Justice includes punishment.
iii. There must be no more war waged for money.
iv. All men must work for their own living.
v. The Moslem empire should centre at Baghdad.
vi. China must reform.
vii. Manchuria (?), Egypt, and India must be independent.
viii. Racial leagues to be formed (e.g. Jewish (?) League, Latin League, Slav League)
More witty than logical by the sound of it. Unfortunately this paper has not survived; it would be interesting to know how Bunting worked his Fabian point three into his proposed peace treaty.
The Leightonian of April 1917 reports that at the Senior Essay Society of 26 February ‘B. C. Bunting read an essay on “Blake”, whom he admired as a prophet rather than as a poet, and whom he considered to be a genius of the type that creates, as opposed to that which perfects. The essayist showed a great command of language.’91 Blake was clearly considered exotic enough to warrant his own blanket of inverted commas. We can detect Skipsey’s influence again in Bunting’s essay on Blake. In the introduction to his edition of Blake’s poems Skipsey had also pointed out that, at least in the Book of Thel, Blake was a better prophet than he was poet: ‘for though he poured forth a multitude of writings – his so-called prophecies – many passages of which are written with absolute sincerity … yet as there is in these, according to those most competent to judge, a lack of organic, not to say a lack of harmonic organic unity, and cannot in any just sense be termed poems …’92
In fact the conclusion that Bunting used Skipsey’s edition of Blake in preparing his own essay is inescapable. By the end of Bunting’s life Blake had fallen from grace almost entirely. Blake’s mysticism was ‘spurious’, he wrote to Tom Pickard in 1974, and about as ‘authentic as the current gurus in the USA. Or Madame Blavatsky … he was too lazy to write poetry properly once he’d learned that he could get away with the sort of stuff Macpherson put into Ossian.’93
At Meeting 141 of the Debating Society (date unrecorded but probably in the final week of February) Bunting seconded the opposition to the proposition that, ‘In the opinion of this house the savage man is happier than the civilised man’, seemingly with an element of belligerence: ‘he said that his opponents had misrepresented the savage that he really was lean, hungry, cold and afraid and in short miserable. He also accused his opponents of insincerity.’94 Bunting had probably seen more lean, hungry, cold, afraid and miserable people than most of the boys at Leighton Park, though he wouldn’t have described them as savages.
Bunting proposed the motion that democracy is a better form of government than aristocracy at the Debating Society meeting on 12 March 1917 and generally Bunting’s second term seems to have gone well for him. Evans’s file note written on 17 April reports that Bunting’s ‘appointment as a prefect shows that we recognise [‘a’ erased]
great development in character: he knows that we regard the appointment as something of an exp/t. & we trust he will respond thoroughly to the confidence we are reposing in him’.95 He had come a long way in four or five months.
In July 1917 the school suspended the normal timetable for a week, as it had done for several years in the summer term, while the boys pursued a communal project, in this case a social survey of the local village, Shinfield. Bunting joined the ‘Social Section’, doubtless looking for ammunition for his budding Fabianism, and was also appointed the group’s reporter. His report, ‘The Present Social Condition of Shinfield’, again evinces a remarkably assured prose style for such an apparently troubled young man. He bristles at one local capitalist in particular:
It would be well if the Village Hall were under village control. But Mr Curtis rules it for the adult school, & refuses to allow dancing & whist drives. His terms are, £5 until 10 o’clock at night, exclusive of chair hire, & after 10, 10/- hourly. This is in effect a prohibition against its use for parties of any sort. Even ‘refined concerts’ cost £3 per night. The Parish Council cannot buy it, & is unwilling to build a new one, while there is a hall in existence. The Fire Station is under the same control, and is without either firemen or horses.96
Bunting casts a cold eye on local politics, health care, schooling and housing and there is an observation that the local church is, ‘sufficiently ritualistic to drive a few parishioners into dissent’, that is an early manifestation of the authentic Bunting voice. Wages in the village were low because agricultural trade unionism had ‘barely touched Berkshire yet’. Towards the end there appears a passage which could have been lifted directly from Robert Tressell’s The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, which had been published three years previously: ‘The land is owned by various farmers, by Mr. Cobham, & by a mysterious company for whom Mr Curtis has done building. The chief employers of labour are Mr. Cobham, Mr. Ravenscroft, and Mr. Penington, of farmhands, & Mr. Lucas of farmhands & mechanics, who look after the agricultural implements which he hires out.’ It’s hard not to see Sweater, Rushton, Grinder and Didlum of Mugsborough Council lurking in the background, preparing a bid to take over Shinfield’s entire assets for £1 and sell them back for thousands.
A Strong Song Tows Us Page 7