Back Story

by David Mitchell

  However irrelevant, discredited or penurious Britain becomes, London will always have been the first modern city, the place where the method of life now favoured by most of mankind was devised. And the Victorian schools, the old board schools, are a symbol of that – a symbol of hope and pragmatism delivered in brick. It’s inspiring that there are so many of them and that lots of them are still schools. (I get a bit depressed when I see one that’s been converted into flats.) That’s why I’m so proud to live here. London, more than any other city on earth, is the new Rome – so much so that Rome is in some ways just the old London.

  So I make an exception for primary schools in Victorian buildings but, in general, I view them with distaste.

  It’s just a feeling. I don’t want anything to be done about it. I know we need to have primary schools. I know some of them will have to be in modern buildings and that, broadly, that’s a good sign as it suggests that money is being invested in education. So I’m not against this school I’m walking past, any more than I’m against sewage plants. And by making that comparison, I don’t mean to liken children to sewage. But, as with a sewage plant, when I pass a primary school I acknowledge that it’s an important facility without being particularly pleased to see it.

  I wonder why. Is it because, despite the jolly colourful classrooms, the evidence of fun projects and well-motivated teachers, we all know what they really are: the means by which we introduce infants to the idea that their time is no longer their own? For your whole life, primary school is teaching them, you will have to go somewhere every day and obey other people’s instructions. Today, painting or nature table, to lure you in. In twenty years’ time: the company accounts, a Cornish pasty production line or an OHP presentation on ‘Corporate Goals Going Forward’.

  Or is it just because I hated primary school? I absolutely did. At the age of four I started to attend Napier House, the primary day school section of Headington School, a private girls’ school in Oxford. They took boys only until they were six. Up to that age, they must have been convinced, there was little or no chance of a boy instigating any sort of sex incident. So, whether I’d have gone sex-crazy at eight if I hadn’t been segregated from the girls for their own safety, we’ll never know.

  Now, this place wasn’t Dotheboys Hall. The staff were probably trying their best. I’m sure many, if not most, of my contemporaries were perfectly happy. Also, the place improved markedly in the five years between my leaving and my brother starting there, because Dan seemed to have a very happy time and he’s just as neurotic as I am. So, you know, perhaps it was a lovely school.

  That said, I found Napier House a vicious, bitter, judgemental, cold, cruel, jealous and mediocre institution presided over by thoughtless, self-important, misandrist crones. It is one of my tragedies not to have known the word ‘cunt’ (as an expression for a very unpleasant person rather than a woman’s genitals, you understand) at the time in my life when I would have had most use for it. I’m sure those cunts would have expelled me and it would have been a relief.

  The key issue I had with them was over food. At lunch they had a rule, not uncommonly for the time, that you had to eat everything that was put in front of you. You were also not allowed to refuse anything that was on offer. Now, for most adults, eating something you don’t like is easy – and far preferable to social awkwardness, on occasions when someone’s well-meaning dinner party preparations have led to a plateful of soap-flavoured gravel. You just swallow it politely and say it’s delicious. Any bishops or actresses reading will know what I mean.

  But it’s different for children. Their palates are more sensitive, their feelings of discomfort keener. When I had to eat one of the four things I found utterly disgusting from the school’s rotation of dishes – macaroni cheese, gooseberry pie, rhubarb crumble and croquette potatoes – I found it horrific and I would always be sick.

  That’s not a disaster and you wouldn’t think primary school teachers would be fazed by seeing pupils throw up after meals – particularly since this one was attached to an all-girls’ secondary school. I wasn’t fazed by it either. It had happened to me many times before, admittedly only when ill, but still: once it’s over and the period of stomach-lightened commiseration begins, then all is well.

  So it really came as a horrible shock to me that they were so angry about it. They thought I’d been sick on purpose, as an act of insolence. They weren’t standing for it, let alone allowing me to change my clothes. I would spend the rest of the day in a state of disgrace – and caked in my own vomit.

  Now, if that’s the worst thing that ever happens to you, you’re a lucky person. But you could say the same thing about being kicked in the balls by a sommelier and you’d still ask to see the manager. It just seems so unnecessarily unkind, such a failure in empathy on the part of those teachers. They made me so unhappy, and all they had to do to fix it was excuse me from eating things that made me throw up or (even if they couldn’t bring themselves to so lower their standards) to be nice to me if I did throw up. My whole life, I have always been nice to people when they throw up.

  And the thing that makes me even crosser and more uncomprehending is that I know I wasn’t a difficult child to keep under discipline. I have always responded with slightly lamentable obedience in the face of authority. I am no rebel – I will do what I’m told when my gag reflex permits it. If I was to be unhappy at school, it should have been because of bullying from my peers, not because I came to blows, or rather heaves, with authority.

  Neither am I, nor have I ever been, a fussy eater. There were just a few things I couldn’t stand when I was tiny. I think that’s normal. I don’t know how the other children coped with this rule. Maybe some of them hid food they didn’t like – which I would have been afraid to do because it was against the rules – and maybe some others threw up as well.

  So, for my first three years at school, I thought I was one of the naughty children – it was something that I couldn’t help. My stomach had ordained it. At school, it seemed, I was destined to spend a certain amount of time standing in the corner facing the wall, despite my sincere desire to do exactly as I was told. And I spent every day dreading the lunch hour and was only ever able to relax afterwards, if I’d been lucky enough to be given food I could keep down.

  I moaned about all this to my parents, of course – and on several occasions, when they collected me, I’d be caked in sick. They complained too, but the school’s response was very firm. I could be specifically excused certain foods in advance, but that was as far as they were willing to bend from their policy. But I wanted to be excused more things than my parents felt able to specify without embarrassment, so the problem continued.

  I think they were swayed by the school’s argument that this rigid approach to lunchtime discipline was important to a child’s development. This was a fee-paying school, which was a stretch for my parents – I think my grandfather helped them out – and they probably felt that they should respect the educational judgements of the professionals they were paying, however counter-intuitive that must seem when your five-year-old son is stinking of his own stomach lining. To ignore the educational specialists would be like throwing away a doctor’s prescription.

  There’s a dutiful middle-class approach for you! – laced with the Protestant notion that you have to be cruel to be kind. It’s very different from the approach taken by those parents in the Jamie Oliver series about school food who protested at the school gates against fresh vegetables and passed bags of chips through the railings. The exact opposite, really. But my parents just didn’t feel that sense of entitlement – they were paying too much money.

  The school I went on to when I was seven – New College School, a small prep school originally established for the choristers of New College – was, by most standards, strict and old-fashioned. But their take on lunch was that, while you had to eat everything on your plate, you didn’t have to put anything on your plate that you didn’t want to eat. There we
re stricter lessons, lots of homework and regular exams at that school, but to me, thanks to their liberal lunch policy, it was like escaping to the free West. I never had to stand in a corner again.

  - 4 -

  Summoning Servants

  The houses round here don’t contain enough servants for my liking. I’ve turned off Quex Road onto West End Lane, which is lined with large houses that have been converted into flats. The life that was lived in them when they were built would seem bizarre to us today – when every one of the hundreds of thousands of buildings like that, all over London, had a version of Upstairs, Downstairs going on inside. Not quite as grand as that perhaps, but along the same lines, with the presiding family on the middle floors and servants cooking in the basement and sleeping in the attics. Each building probably accommodated about the same number of people then as one household as it does now all divided up. In a way, it’s a nice metaphor for how society has become comparatively more egalitarian – certainly the country’s property is divided between many more people now.

  That’s not how I saw it as a child. I was aware of the concept of servants from an early age. In fact I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know what servants were, which is odd because I can remember when I didn’t know what a tumble-dryer was. And we had a tumble-dryer while I’ve never even met a servant. Nobody is a servant these days – apart from a few anachronistically trained ‘butlers’ who wear fancy dress and work for Texans. Rich people might have cleaners, gardeners, nannies and au pairs, maybe the occasional housekeeper. But no one has maids, valets or footmen any more. The profession of servant has pretty much totally disappeared and it wasn’t much more prevalent in the late 1970s and early 1980s when I was a small child.

  Yet I was very servant-aware. I was growing up not long after the era of bells and butlers. Millions of Britons spent their lives ‘in service’ until the Second World War – and it must have remained a significant profession for much of the 1950s (I’m largely basing that assumption on what I gleaned from episodes of Miss Marple), which is only twenty or so years before I was running around Staunton Road pretending to be a king.

  Perhaps it’s Miss Marple’s fault. Not just Miss Marple, but Upstairs, Downstairs and Brideshead Revisited and Dynasty and the dozens of other things on TV that seemed to be full of uniformed and obedient domestic staff. They definitely caught my imagination; I was disappointed that people with the twin dignities of wealth and ‘being from the olden days’ had servants while we did not. It didn’t occur to me that a damned sight more people were servants than had them.

  Don’t get me wrong – I think if I’d actually lived in a house where you rang a bell and an adult employed by my parents appeared to do my bidding, I would have found that weird. (Although there was a time, at my grandparents’ house in Swansea, when I did have a little bell which I’d ring if I wanted to be given more orange squash. This was humiliatingly revealed on Would I Lie to You? and, I must stress, was a temporary arrangement and basically just a game linked to all my dressing up and pretending to be other people. So I hope that goes some way to expunging the image you’re forming in your head of me as a spoilt and snobbish little brat. That’s what I hope, not what I expect.) I wasn’t thinking about servants as individual people but about the overall concept, which seemed so smart, so grand, so posh.

  At Napier House, which being a private school wasn’t purpose-built by visionary Victorians but had once been someone’s home, there were still bells on the wall for summoning servants. The fact that they no longer worked and, even if they did, no one was in the kitchen to hear them ring seemed to me a step backwards for civilisation. The world – and certainly Britain – was not what it used to be.

  I know that, as economic analysis goes, this is a heady cocktail of the nonsensical and the heartless. But, in my defence, I was forming these ideas as a very small child and most very small children have in their psychological make-up many of the personality traits of the tyrant and the megalomaniac. And I had a natural liking for hierarchies. ‘Who’s in charge of who’s in charge of who’s in charge of who?’ is what I always wanted to know. And of course I imagined my future self being in charge of everyone and everything.

  Having said that, I think I wouldn’t have minded the thought of only being in charge of some people while others were in charge of me. I found the thought of that sort of military-style order of precedence quite satisfying. It might even be worth being a servant, just to live in a world where some people had them.

  Much as recalling these thought processes is quite embarrassing, I can still feel the attraction of the pyramid-shaped institution. I mean metaphorically pyramid-shaped – architecturally I prefer a nice Georgian square.

  After all, complete meritocracy, complete social mobility, of the sort that we in the West sometimes flatter ourselves we live in, doesn’t really exist or work. In Britain, most of us know that, while merit and application can help in life, a lot of people get on because of who they know, how much money they’ve already got and other pieces of luck: being born intelligent, talented or having the ability to apply yourself are also pieces of luck. We think society is probably more meritocratic than it was fifty years ago but that doesn’t mean things are actually completely fair or ever likely to become so.

  But some Americans seem genuinely to believe they’re living the meritocratic dream. There are two problems with this: first, it’s nonsense. While it’s of course possible to transform your life by hard work and talent in the United States, there are millions who live in miserable circumstances with few chances of escape. Not none, but few. The ridiculousness of the notion that the United States, wonderful country though it basically is, is a level playing field for opportunity is demonstrated by their political system which, much like Britain’s in the nineteenth century, is dominated by a small number of rich and influential families. We had the Russells, the Cecils and the Churchills – they have the Kennedys, the Bushes and the Gores. At least our Victorian leaders didn’t claim to be egalitarian.

  The second problem is that a proper meritocracy would be a heartless place. In such a society, those at the bottom of the heap not only have to cope with poverty, boring jobs or no jobs, they are also denied the solace of considering it unfair. This is such a hapless state of affairs to contemplate, it’s actually funny. History has a recurrent theme of the down-trodden rising up and overthrowing their oppressors (or in Britain, gradually extracting concessions over hundreds of years), and of injustices which had kept people in penury being swept aside. In this scenario, people aren’t kept in penury by injustice, but by justice. The poor sods deserve it – like Baldrick in Blackadder. And their chances of overthrowing their oppressors would be pretty slim because presumably they’d cock everything up. Their betters would run rings round them because – well, the clue’s in the name. Those unhappy Baldricks would just have to hope that merit and kindness go hand in hand, just like aristocracy and kindness seem to in Julian Fellowes’s vision of early twentieth-century England.

  As a child, I was much of Fellowes’s mind. I simply thought that servants were good because they came from ‘the olden days’ – and everything from the olden days was better and more glamorous than my own time.

  I liked the thought of kings and emperors, kingdoms and empires; people in old-fashioned clothes being in charge of lots of other people. A mixed-up world of treasure and swords, steam engines and suits of armour, castles and wing collars – as cheesy and incoherent as a historically themed Las Vegas casino.

  Cars used to be better, I thought, with shiny round headlamps on either side of the bonnet like eyes. Trains were better too: how could drab diesel boxes ever have been considered preferable to those brightly polished steaming metal tubes with massive and magnificent wheels?

  The only thing that matched the olden days for style and excitement was the future, by which I basically meant space. If I were to trade in my hopes of crowns, castles, steam engines and servants, it would be for a
spaceship – preferably a massive one like the Starship Enterprise, which must surely have had as many rooms as a palace – and a laser, a communicator and an opportunity to visit other planets.

  Somehow my own time had managed to fall between those two glittering stools. We had neither penny-farthings nor matter transporters. NASA’s rockets and shuttles were pitiful objects that could barely go as far as the moon. They didn’t even have gravity inside them, for God’s sake. The astronauts spent the whole time floating around in their pyjamas, eating disgusting liquidised food. In order to leave the ship, they seemed to have to don motorcycle helmets. It all looked extremely undignified.

  Two school subjects, history and science, were poisoning my enjoyment of the universe by lacing it with regret. History made it seem as if the magical world of kingdoms and castles, although admittedly not dragons and wizards, had once existed and had only been eclipsed because humanity had collectively lost its sense of the aesthetic. Similarly, the word ‘science’ in science fiction made me consider that world to be attainable if only humankind got its shit together. I quietly blamed the people of my own era for its stolid, unmagical mediocrity.

  I don’t remember any of my friends sharing this frustration. I can’t recall much of what I did when friends came round. I think there was an afternoon when Adam Bryant and I pretended to be Superman and Batman who’d teamed up to fight crime, with a comparable disparity of actual capabilities to Angel-Summoner and the BMX Bandit.