Untold Stories (56 page)

These days getting into Oxford or Cambridge or indeed any university is only the beginning of the story. Money has to be found, earned, donated by parents, borrowed from the bank or wherever student loans currently come from. It's a sizeable hurdle, and one my generation were happy to be without, if we ever gave it a thought. At that time acceptance by a university or any institution of higher learning automatically brought with it a grant from the state or the local authority. The names of the recipients of such grants would be printed in the local paper, occasionally with their photographs, the underlying assumption being that the names of these students should be known because they had done the state or the county some service and would now go on to do more. There was genuine pride in such achievements and in the free education that had made them possible – particularly perhaps in Leeds, which had an outstanding Education Department.

I am told that I am naïve or unrealistic, but I do not understand why we cannot afford such a system today. As a nation we are poorer for the lack of it, the latest round in that lost fight the bullying through of the bill on top-up fees with this so-called Labour government stamping on the grave of what it was once thought to stand for. Though there is much that is called education nowadays that is nothing of the sort and doesn't deserve subsidy, yet I still hold to the belief that a proper education should be free at the point of entry and the point of exit.

Some of these views can be put down to the circumstances of my own education but also to a book which made a great impression on me as a young man. This was Richard Hoggart's
The Uses of Literacy
(1955), and in particular his account of growing up in the slums of Leeds, going to Cockburn High School, and eventually to Leeds University, where he was taught by Bonamy Dobrée. It was a harder childhood than mine (and an earlier one) but it was reading Hoggart forty years ago that made me feel that my life, dull though it was, might be made the stuff of literature.
The
Uses of Literacy
spawned a series of books, one of which,
Education and the
Working Class
by Brian Jackson and Dennis Marsden, included a study of sixth form boys who had made it to university but not done well there, the conclusion being that the effort of getting to university often took so much out of working-class boys that once there they were exhausted. This is one of Posner's complaints in the play.

‘The scholarship boy,' writes Hoggart, ‘has been equipped for hurdle-jumping, so he merely thinks of getting on, but somehow not in the world's way … He has left his class, at least in spirit, by being in certain ways unusual, and he is still unusual in another class, too tense and overwound.' I had forgotten this passage until I found it quoted in
Injury
Time
, one of the commonplace books of D.J. Enright, who must also have found it relevant to his own case.

Things have changed since Hoggart was writing, and the boys in the play are more privileged than Hoggart, Enright or me, but I suspect hurdle-jumping hasn't much changed, or the strain it engenders, though maybe it shows itself less in terms of class.

At Oxford in the late fifties some of the teaching I did was for Magdalen (which explains why it is occasionally mentioned in the text). One year I was also drafted in to help mark and interview candidates for the history scholarships. It didn't seem all that long since I had been interviewed myself, and I was nervous lest my marks should differ from those of my more experienced colleagues by whom I was every bit as intimidated as the candidates were.

I needn't have worried, though, as apart from the papers of authentic
Wykehamist brilliance, the other promising candidates were virtually self-selecting, one's attention always caught by oddity, extremity and flair just as Irwin foresees. Whether these candidates were genuine originals or (like the boys in the play) coached into seeming so, the interview was meant to show up, but I'm not sure it always did. It was the triumph of Irwin.

Candidates do well in examinations for various reasons, some from genuine ability, obviously, but others because doing well in examinations is what they do well; they can put on a show. Maybe it doesn't work like that now that course work is taken into consideration and more weight is given to solider virtues. But it has always struck me that some of the flashier historians, particularly on television, are just grown-up versions of the wised-up schoolboys who generally got the scholarships (myself included). Here is R. W. Johnson, himself a historian, reviewing Niall Ferguson's
The Pity of War
:

I had friends at Magdalen who went through this dialectical debriefing in their first year and it used to worry me that nothing remotely similar happened at Exeter. Nothing much happened at all until my third year, when in the nick of time I began to get to grips with it myself. Still, I never thought of this as a proper education, just a way of getting through the examinations.

These considerations have acquired a general interest as history has become more popular both on the page and on the screen. The doyen of TV historians, Simon Schama, is in a league of his own, and his political viewpoint is not in the forefront, but the new breed of historians – Niall Ferguson, Andrew Roberts and Norman Stone – all came to prominence under Mrs Thatcher and share some of her characteristics. Having found that taking the contrary view pays dividends, they seem to make this the tone of their customary discourse. A sneer is never far away and there's a persistently jeering note, perhaps bred by the habit of contention. David Starkey sneers too, but I feel this is more cosmetic.

None of this posing, though, is altogether new. A. J. P. Taylor was its original exponent, certainly on television, and was every bit as pleased with himself as the new breed of history boys. Still, with nothing else to put in the frame but his own personality and with no graphics and no film, he had perhaps more excuse for hamming it up a bit. His pleasure at his own technique, the flawless delivery (no autocue) and the winding-up of the lecture to the very second allotted were reasons enough for watching him, regardless of whatever history it was he was purveying. Even with him, though, the paradoxes and the contrariousness could get wearisome, certainly in the lecture hall, where I remember nodding off during one of his Ford Lectures.

Irwin's career path might seem odd. Schoolmaster to TV don is plausible enough, but from lecturing about the Dissolution of the Monasteries to government spokesperson is a bit of a leap, though there are odder episodes in the early career of Alastair Campbell. No subject was further from my mind when I began to write the play, and it was only as I sat in on Irwin's classes, as it were, that I saw that teaching history or teaching the self-presentation involved with the examination of history was not unrelated to presentation in general.

The rehearsals for the plays were unusual in that the eight young actors playing the sixth-formers had to learn not only the parts they had to act but also what they meant. The play is stiff with literary and historical references, many of which, at first reading anyway, meant little to the actors.
The early stages of rehearsal were therefore more like proper school than a stage version of it.

They read and talked about Auden, a favourite of Hector's in the play (though not of Mrs Lintott). Auden keeps being quoted, so we read and discussed some of his poems and the circumstances of his life. Hardy was another subject for tutorials, leading on to Larkin much as happens in the last scene of Act One. The First and Second Wars figure largely in the play, as they seemed to do on the classroom walls of the schools we visited to get some local colour before rehearsals started, so the period 1914–45 was also much discussed. I normally get impatient when there's a lot of talking before rehearsals proper start, but with this play it was essential.

Maybe too, it says something about the status of the actor. Half a lifetime ago my first play,
Forty Years On
, though about a very different sort of school, was as full of buried quotations and historical allusion as
The
History Boys
. Back in 1968, though, there was never any question of educating the score or so boys that made up Albion House School. We never, that I recall, filled them in on who Virginia Woolf was or put them in the picture about Lady Ottoline Morrell, Sapper, Buchan, Osbert Sitwell – to the boys these must have been names only, familiar to the principal players, John Gielgud and Paul Eddington, but as remote to the rest of the cast as historical figures in Shakespeare. This omission was partly because with only four weeks to rehearse there wasn't time to tell them more, but also because in those days actors were treated with less consideration than they are now, at any rate at the National Theatre.

But these early rehearsals with Nicholas Hytner taking the class were a reminder that good directors are often good teachers (Ronald Eyre is another example) and that theatre is often at its most absorbing when it's school.

Always beneath the play you write is the play you meant to write; changed but not abandoned and, with luck, not betrayed, but shadowing still the play that has come to be.

It is to Nicholas Hytner that I owe, among so much else, the idea for the
original play, the one I didn't quite write, as it first came to me when I was listening to him being interviewed by Michael Berkeley on BBC Radio 3's
Private Passions
. Nick had earlier told me of his schooldays at Manchester Grammar School and how, having a good singing voice, he had sung in a boys' choir with the Hallé under Barbirolli. I was expecting him to talk about this on
Private Passions
, but rather to my disappointment he didn't. However, one of the records he chose was Ella Fitzgerald singing ‘Bewitched' with its original Lorenz Hart lyrics, and it occurred to me at the time how theatrical this would sound sung by a boy with an unbroken voice.

This in turn took me back to my own childhood when, though I was no singer, I had been very slow to grow up, my voice still unbroken when I was well past sixteen. So one of the history boys as first written was a boy much as I had been, a child in a class of young men. Nick (whose own voice broke at twelve) thought that these days a sixteen-year-old boy with an unbroken voice was both unlikely and impossible to cast. This I could appreciate, though at the time I abandoned the notion with some regret.

The casting difficulty I can understand, but I don't entirely agree that such late development no longer occurs. It's true that today most children develop earlier, but the few who don't suffer more acutely in consequence, and it certainly still happens. I knew one boy, the son of a friend, who matured every bit as late as I did, though he coped with it much better than me. Looking back, I see those years from fourteen to sixteen as determining so much that I would later wish away, particularly a sense of being shut out that I have never entirely lost.

As it is, Posner is the heir to the character I never quite wrote, a boy who is young for his age and whose physical immaturity engenders a premature disillusion. Watching Sam Barnett playing the part, I wince to hear my own voice at sixteen.

Up the words come, unbidden, known but never learned. Some of that weightless baggage carried down the years, not from piety or belief, and more credentials than creed, a testimonial that I am one of those boys state-educated in the forties and fifties who came by the words of
Hymns
Ancient and Modern
through singing them day in day out at school every morning in assembly.

It's a dwindling band; old-fashioned and of a certain age, you can pick us out at funerals and memorial services, because we can sing the hymns without the book.

With me, there are hymns at home, too, because my father is an amateur violinist and on Sunday nights plays along to the music on the wireless, warming up with Albert Sandler and his Palm Court Orchestra then taking off with the hymn singing on
Sunday Half Hour
.

So hymns are him playing his fiddle. At one period Dad's thoughts turn to something larger than the violin and he invests in a double bass, thinking to augment his butcher's wages by working nights as a player in a dance band. One of the several burdens of wives are the hare-brained schemes of husbands, and my mother was never other than sceptical of my father's money-making enterprises. Another had been the manufacture of home-made herb beer. This was referred to by Mam as ‘taking on Tetleys' and the double bass period as ‘your Dad's Geraldo phase'.

It means, though, that as a change from
Sunday Half Hour
the family are now mustered round the wireless and made to listen to Henry Hall and the Andrews Sisters.

‘Did you hear that?' Dad would say. ‘That's the bass giving the beat! That'll be me!' It was difficult to enthuse.

To no one's surprise, he never got far with the bass. Quite literally, as they often wouldn't let him even put it on the tram. And just as the homemade beer saga had ended in the explosion of half a dozen bottles that practically wrecked the scullery, so the double bass era ended with a succession of rows with tram conductors after which Dad reverted to the violin.

 

The words are those of Cardinal Newman's hymn but they are also part of Elgar's
Dream of
Gerontius
, heard first in Leeds Town Hall in 1952. I thought Elgar had missed a trick by not using the familiar tune and at its first outing in 1900 the audience had thought so too, and the general feeling then that this sublime work was a bit of a dud.

Most of my musical education was in Leeds Town Hall at weekly concerts by the short-lived (but to me always memorable) Yorkshire Symphony Orchestra. They excelled in English music – Delius particularly whom I was astonished to find had been born in Bradford. And George Butter-worth, too, from York who died on the Somme in 1916.

The cheapest seats and the school seats were behind the orchestra and here the double bass raises its ponderous voice again as our chosen perch was behind the basses. It was rather like watching the circus from behind the elephants. Hardly a lyrical instrument, the bass tends to attract players of a like disposition, dogged and even disenchanted with a robust no-nonsense approach to performance. Indifferent to applause, if we go on too long at the end of a concert, the principal, a Mr Campbell, turns round and says ‘Have you no homes to go to?'

At that age, though, we find this work-a-day attitude to music-making infectious. Sitting looking down on the conductor, we fifteen-year-olds are alert to pretension and subject the sometimes eminent musicians to our sceptical schoolboy scrutiny, grading them by the degree of their self-regard.

It isn't just a matter of histrionics with the baton, as both Barbirolli and Sargent, for instance, go in for a good deal of that but they are not the same. Urbane, Brylcreemed and always with a carnation in his buttonhole and a wolfish smile, Sir Malcolm is an obvious showman. Sir John, unkempt and in a rumpled tail-coat with his bow tie on the skew and
sometimes without his bottom teeth, seems entirely unselfconscious but he is a showman too – both of them putting on a performance. For me, always a sucker for the unassuming, it is Barbirolli who touches the heart and serves the music, unlike Sargent, who merely presents it.

So it is not just music that I learn, sitting on those harsh benches, Saturday by Saturday. Music in the concert hall is also a moral education, and watching the musicians at close quarters I realise that it is not just ecstasy and inspiration but that there is drudge to it too. Sometimes, the players would be on the same tram coming home, and I see that they are just like everybody else – shabby, in dirty raincoats and sometimes with tab ends in their mouths; ordinary people who, half an hour ago, were artists and agents of the sublime.

 

That music had nothing to do with showing off was, I see now, one of the lessons my father had been wanting me to learn when I was ten years old when he tried to teach me the violin. He knew instinctively that art has not much to do with artistic, and that there was no need for a lot of carryon, or, as Dad always put it, ‘a lot of splother'.

His violin case is deceptively ordinary, battered even, and kept in my parents' bedroom, which is where my father generally does his practice. Having made sure that he is out, I lay the case on the bed, unflip its two catches and open the lid to reveal, snugly couched in velvet, this glowing tawny thing. It is like coming on a newly fallen horse chestnut, the neat housing split to reveal the conker's wet gleam. I stroke the coved back, grained as if with spine and ribs, hold the scrolled head in my hand and feel its weight, running my fingers round the piped and scalloped edge and peering through the S-shaped holes into its dark interior.

Mounted on the underside of the lid is the bow and that too is finely done, the handle inlaid with mother-of-pearl, the end tipped with ivory; so pampered this instrument seems to me to be, so lavishly appointed, with nothing spared for its protection and comfort, that even my looking has to be hurried and furtive knowing that if my father catches me at it, I
shall be in trouble. ‘It's not a toy.' But I don't think of it as a toy either. It is the most luxurious object in the house, and sensitive to the spell it casts, I see myself playing it – even pretend to, in front of the dressing-table mirror.

So I ask to learn. I'm a clever boy. I am sure it will not be hard.

‘To begin with, you don't hold it like that, you hold it like this.' He takes the bow out of my ten-year-old hand. ‘Just do it naturally.' He bends my fingers round the handle of the bow, covering my hands with his big butcher's hands, standing there in his shirtsleeves and shop trousers and smelling of meat. We are in the hot attic under the roof with the half-size violin I have to learn on, nothing like as glamorous as his, a chipped, unpolished brown little thing that looks as though it can't produce a note.

‘You're holding the bow wrong again. Nobody holds it like that. People will laugh at you.' He purses my fingers again round the bow handle, his own violin held casually under his chin, jutting out from his shoulder as he tightens the silky hair of the bow. Even at ten, I know this is showing off, ‘Look! No hands!' the kindest labelling of it. But holding this scrolled extension of himself is also him being a man and doing something that with my puny neck and chin I know I can't do now and probably ever.

‘I've written you on the notes: E, G, B, D, F. What do they stand for?' This, at least, I know. Every Good Boy Deserves Favour. I know it too, because this favoured boy is not just an aid to memory but to me almost a creature of flesh and blood. It is as if the very structure of the stave has been rigged against me and this good boy deserving of favour is all the things I am not – capable, modest and quiet, who holds the bow with his small fingers just as my father does in his big ones and does not scrape it agonisingly across the strings as I do, but extracts from this unpromising almost plywood fiddle something sweet and tuneful. This good boy, who is not me, deserves favour from my father, as I never shall.

Violin still jutting, Dad puts a sheet of music on the gunmetal stand. ‘Now the Day is Over', copied out from
Hymns Ancient and Modern
in a hand as square and blunt as his fingers.

I start on the first note, dragging the bow across the strings.

‘Nay, Alan! Frame yourself. Look at your fingers!' Once again, his big butcher's hands come over mine, gripping the bow for me, so that now it is he who is playing the tune, not me. I let go of the violin and it falls on the floor.

‘You dateless article! What is the point?' At first, I think that he is going to hit me, but, golden violin in one hand and bow in the other, he can't, and instead he charges off down the attic steps. I know that I am a disappointment to my father and that this disappointment will outlast the violin and my childhood and go down into the grave.

The attic door bangs shut. Through the open skylight I hear the trams hurtling down Otley Road and the bell-ringers over at St Chad's beginning their practice. I climb up on the chair and look out at the evening sky.

 

I've always liked looking in churches and though I'm not quite one of those who, in Philip Larkin's words, ‘tap and jot and know what rood lofts were' I do know what rood lofts were and it has brought me to Hubberholme at the top of Wharfedale and the very tip of the West Riding.

The church is broad and low, like its liturgy, I imagine, but unique in the West Riding – its rood loft survives. Put up in 1558, it was perhaps salvaged from Coverham Abbey and brought over the tops on a farm cart. But they were behind the times at Hubberholme. They did not know in 1558 that Catholic Queen Mary was dead and that, as they were putting up their loft, everywhere else the lofts were coming down. But amazingly, it survives and is still here and a proper loft it is too, slatted as it could be for hay and straw as much as for candles and the cross.

Centuries pass – births, marriages and deaths – the church's next
moment in history recorded in a picture frame hung slightly askew on one of the pillars – a roll of honour with the names and, unusually for England, the photographs of the young men of the parish who died in the First War.

The harvest in, they go off on a farm cart, too, probably, down the dale to join those queuing to enlist outside Skipton Town Hall. And four years later, in Wilfred Owen's words:

One who does come back from that war, and years later has his ashes scattered here, is J. B. Priestley, and on another pillar is a plaque to say so.

The rood, the roll of honour, the ashes of a writer – the remnants of history, the random trig points of time.

I have never found it easy to belong. So much repels. Hymns help. They blur. And here among the tombs and tablets and vases of dead flowers, and lists of the fallen, it is less hard to feel, at least, tacked on to church and country.

Amen. Or, with that lilting interrogation with which young people nowadays cast doubt on any certainty, Amen?