Introduction
"Whoever writes about his childhood must beware of exaggeration and self-pity." George Orwell
I was much moved by reading Orwell's Such, Such Were The joys and amazed by the many symmetries I perceived between my own experience of childhood and Orwell's.Here I hope to reflect on these similarities, the experience of childhood and, to a lesser extent, how much Orwell's beliefs may have been influenced by his childhood experiences.
Throughout the essay Orwell is seeking to convey the strange texture of childhood,
"Here is a little boy," said Flip, indicating me to the strange lady, "who wets his bed every night. Do you know what I am going to do if you wet your bed again?" she added, turning to me, "I am going to get the Sixth Form to beat you."
The strange lady put on an air of being inexpressibly shocked, and exclaimed "I-should-think-so!" And here there occurred one of those wild, almost lunatic misunderstandings which are part of the daily experience of childhood. The Sixth Form was a group of older boys who were selected as having 'character' and were empowered to beat smaller boys. I had not yet learned of their existence, and I mis-heard the phrase 'the Sixth Form' as 'Mrs Form'. I took it as referring to the strange lady. - I thought, that is, that her name was Mrs Form
Still, however, despite his prayers, Orwell did wet his bed again, which resulted in a beating, then another when he told someone the first hadn't hurt.
this was the great, abiding lesson of my boyhood: that I was in a world where it was not possible for me to be good. And the double beating was a turning-point, for it brought home to me for the first time the harshness of the environment into which I had been flung. Life was more terrible, and I was more wicked, than I had imagined.
For my own part I also went to one of these types of school, though only as a day pupil, it was a sort of "poor man's Eton"mainly aimed at the son's of farmers, London commuters and small businessmen. Although only a day pupil and slightly older I soon built my own irrational tapestry, which dwarfs Orwell's. I recall being powerless in the face of my character. I could not resist causing trouble any more than Orwell could resist wetting his bed.
There was a memorial wall imported from the old building - listing the names of cadets, boys, killed in World War I. I used to gaze at it often in complete amazement that a school could send of its children to be massacred in the trenches. More trivially than that I just could not believe some of the characters, teachers, they put over us. Any form of self-discipline was impossible when confronted by them. I arrived about aged eleven. By the age of twelve I was firmly marked out as a disruptive influence.
Orwell was a "gifted boy" with a scholarship, his attendance was subsidised, to an extent, by the school, as personified by Flip and Sambo. As such "the scholarship boys were crammed with learning as cynically as a goose is crammed for Christmas". He was there on his subsidy on the expectation he would do well and improve the prestige of the school. As a child I was never really aware of the importance of exam results. It never occurred to me that in disrupting my classmates education, and my own, I was actually sabotaging the whole purpose of the school, it was just good fun to do so. However, our school had an assignment, in those days, of a given number of places at Oxford and Cambridge universities and I think the headmaster was continually striving for more.
Nor did I see, until very late in the day, that internal exam results were inherently political. Looking back, at least twice I remember getting a high forty of fifty in English comprehension, then a mere seven or so in the creative writing, thus stripping me of a top grade and giving me a near bottom one, to match my attitude. It was only when we started studying science that I began to notice I was sometimes being ripped-off for marks.
By this point I was trying to disrupt the school and simultaneously do well in exams, just to prove a point, and scrutinising every precious mark. I was also trying to manipulate my grades so I'd get the most ridiculous teachers I could. By the start of my third year I was in the lowest set for absolutely everything that had a set at all, the highest being best. I deliberately came last in the cross-country and once second to last, accidentally letting this fat boy lose, he never forgave me.
The boys of the scholarship class were not all treated alike. If a boy were the son of rich parents to whom the saving of fees was not all-important, Sambo would goad him along in a comparatively fatherly way, with jokes and digs in the ribs and perhaps an occasional tap with the pencil, but no hair-pulling and no caning. It was the poor but "clever" boys who suffered. Our brains were a gold-mine in which he had sunk money, and the dividends must be squeezed out of us. Long before I had grasped the nature of my financial relationship with Sambo, I had been made to understand that I was not on the same footing as most of the other boys. In effect there were three castes in the school. There was the minority with an aristocratic or millionaire background, there were the children of the ordinary suburban rich, who made up the bulk of the school, and there were a few underlings like myself, the sons of clergyman, Indian civil servants, struggling widows and the like. These poorer ones were discouraged from going in for "extras" such as shooting and carpentry, and were humiliated over clothes and petty possessions.
I too remember this sort of thing. Every Thursday we had charity collection. I was in a class full of aliens, none of them had been friends in the first two years and the same fat boy I'd beaten into last in the cross-country was the charity collector. This was done with a degree of violence. There was also a weird kid from my neighbourhood, who used to pay this fat kid, I think, in sweets to beat me up. By now school was a nightmare.
My Father's business was failing, at least one term and parts of others I went without lunch rather than ask for the money for my meal ticket. I often used to steal my lunch by jumping through the line. I just couldn't understand why, when our door was being smashed in by bailiffs, why my parents would waste their money on this stupid school.
I also remember being laughed at because my second-hand trousers were flared, when the fashion was for tighter trousers, drainpipes really. Unable to get a pair of drainpipes I had my Mum take in my flares. I ended up with the creases that should have been at the front down the sides, and thus looking even more ridiculous than if I'd tolerated my flares.
Beyond all that, the trappings of wealth, I had one thing that couldn't be corrected, stigmatism, one eye being slightly larger than the other. I was really sensitive to this and fairly often, I think, taunted about it.
I can't remember what happened first, the stabbing or "Headmaster's Report", I suspect it was the latter. The kid who I suspect was sponsoring my bully, his brother was a local tyrant too, he put Canadian pond weed in my hair while I was dissecting the same in a biology experiment. I snapped and the scalpel, without any intent or even recollection on my part, ended up in his back. I just remember the blood running down his shirt. Apparently I chased him round the class first. I don't remember that at all if it happened.
The boy I stabbed, his family were friendly with the Head of Games, and a wanna-be headmaster, who lived down their street. They were frequently campaigning against me at the school.
After that school was a complete hell. I was pretty phobic about violence after the stabbing and a target for a lot of people because of it. Everyone forgot, or had not seen, my own systematic bullying prior to this. The teachers looked the other way as I received beating after beating.
This was when I resolved to formalise my disruption of the school and began waging a one-child war against it. My days consisted of a morning meeting to be harangued by the Headmaster, over yesterday's report card, existing and such, followed by a series of beatings, having my intellect generally insulted, being called, "Bug Eye" etcetera. At the end of the day it was off to the headmaster's office again, perhaps a detention or two.
I was broken inside but too proud to ever show it to that headmaster. I remember being outside his office and him ranting and raving at thin air, he was in there on his own shouting about me at the top of his voice. I found it more funny than anything. He threw a punch at me once and I didn't even flinch.
Very early it was impressed upon me that I had no chance of a decent future unless I won a scholarship at a public school. Either I won my scholarship, or I must leave school at fourteen and become, in Sambo's favourite phrase "a little office boy at forty pounds a year". In my circumstances it was natural that I should believe this. Indeed, it was universally taken for granted at St Cyprian's that unless you went to a "good" public school (and only about fifteen schools came under this heading) you were ruined for life.
I was told, "You'll only ever be good for manual labour." It was at this point I became interested in my internal exam results, only as a vehicle for attacking the headmaster, and started to notice there were all sorts of shenanigans going on in the internal marking. I once succeeded in reclaiming two or three marks and a grade. The fat charity collecting boy was informed, in my presence, that I had cost him his grade by contesting my marks.
Like, Orwell, I was caned. I recall being struck by the intense oddity of the experience. Once there was an spectator there, this repulsive Head of French and my year. He was rocking back and forth, in a manner I'd now, with the benefit of adult hindsight, regard as sexual. As my third and fourth year progressed I came to understand that the adults responsible for me were all, pretty much without exception, flawed in some way.
However, I was developing my own private neurosis by now, my life was so hellish - and my stigmatism was in part a focal point of this. I believed I was cursed in some way, for a previous life or something - that my stigmatism was a mark of this. A symptom of the disease became the disease itself. I just got on with the business of being "evil" after that, toward adults, mainly teachers. I fell in with an older kid at home and started listening to Sex Pistols, Dead Kennedys and bands like that. I had found a voice.
If I contrived to seem callous and defiant, it was only a thin cover over a mass of shame and dismay.
Increasingly I drifted into a private world of Dungeons and Dragons. I used to daydream I was a wizard. I had a fantasy that a wizard would come for me one day and teach me magic. I never expected this to come true, I just enjoyed daydreaming it. In a way, I guess, I felt only magic would be sufficient to overcome the forces arrayed against me. I used to read books about Colditz, believing some day I'd need to escape from somewhere or other.
To grasp the effect of this kind of thing on a child of ten or twelve, one has to remember that the child has little sense of proportion or probability. A child may be a mass of egoism and rebelliousness, but it as no accumulated experience to give it confidence in its own judgements. On the whole it will accept what it is told, and it will believe in the most fantastic way in the knowledge and powers of the adults surrounding it.
Seeing no other realistic solution to my problems I resolved to get myself expelled. For the atmosphere of my childhood was fairly similar to that described by Orwell.
You could only have defended yourself by sneaking, which, except in a few rigidly defined circumstances, was the unforgivable sin. To write home and ask your parent to take you away would have been even less thinkable, since to do so would have been to admit yourself unhappy and unpopular, which a boy will never do. Boys are Erewhonians: they think that misfortune is disgraceful and must be concealed to all cost. It might perhaps have been considered permissible to complain to your parents about bad food, or an unjustified caning, or some other ill-treatment inflicted by masters and not by boys.
I'm still not sure what it was which got me expelled. There was once when I was forced to do rugby against my will. I was a late developer physically and had not entered puberty like most of my peers. After rugby the "head of games" came and paraded me through the changing room in front of my generally more grown-up peers, humiliating me in the process. He then followed me into the shower, where I was alone, and watched me, laughing, while I showered. He even ordered me to turn round. This incident I had my Mother report to one of the few teachers I still trusted. Like the stabbing the whole thing was hushed up, the teacher, there and then, without consulting anyone at all fobbed my Mother off.
It may well have been me threatening to torture the headmaster to death when I grew up, during one of his tirades, that finally got me out of it. I don't care, all I know is that I escaped.
I went to the local comprehensive after that. I was put on headmaster's report again after a few days, My old headmaster had not forgiven me and took the trouble to phone my new one to inform him that I was an all-round bad type, Besides, I only knew one way of being and school was just a holiday camp compared to the horrors of the last.
I remember vividly the sensation of leaving, my final day at the public school, perhaps it's my imagination but I somehow felt I knew I was never going back again. I remember being in an almost trance-like state as the sun streamed through the main doors.
My parents were formally told it was in their best interests to seek alternative arrangements for my education, by second class post. I remember my Mother's outrage that it had been second class post.
This new headmaster soon presided over the closure of that perfectly good comprehensive school, got himself a post as headmaster at a local private school that "fed" pupils to the one I'd come from. The comprehensive school was later sold to the trust which administered the one I'd been expelled from.
The legacy of my schooldays are a deep-rooted preconscious anxiety about my appearance, a lack of self-confidence, and alcoholism. I turned to alcohol for comfort at about the time these nightmares started, plus out of bravado.
I understood to perfection what it meant to be Lucifer, defeated and justly defeated, with no possibility of revenge. The schoolmasters with their canes, the millionaires with their Scottish castles, the athletes with their curly hair - these were the armies of unalterable law. It was not easy, at that date, to realise that in fact it was alterable. And according to that law I was damned. I had no money, I was weak, I was ugly, I was unpopular, I had a chronic cough, I was cowardly, I smelt. This picture, I should add, was not altogether fanciful. I was an unattractive boy. St Cyprian's soon made me so, even if I had not been so before. But a child's belief in its own shortcomings is not much influenced by facts. I believed, for example, that I "smelt". But this was based simply on general probability. It was notorious that disagreeable people smelt, and therefore presumably I did so too. Again, until after I had left school for good I continued to believe that I was preternaturally ugly. It was what my schoolfellows had told me, and I had no other authority to refer to. The conviction that it was not possible for me to be a success went deep enough to influence my actions till far into adult life. Until I was about thirty I always planned my life on the assumption not only that any major undertaking was bound to fail, but that I could only expect to live a few years longer.
The focus of my "Lucifer" was my stigmatism. Like Orwell, I have also lived my life expecting not to last too many years longer. In part possibly because I have "revolted" against the environment for which I was being schooled, utterly. I have sought out the company of the mad, the dispossessed and the underclass all my life. I have deliberately avoided the comfortable, safe, side of life. This has left me stranded right now.
In the short book Orwell, Raymond Williams writes of Orwell as a man who deliberately sought to provoke personal invasions. I guess that could apply equally to me. Not so much on the conscious level but in the situations I've explored and the people I've surrounded myself with.
It could be a lot worse, I could have ended up as a pervert who enjoys caning young boys and is unable to control his temper when faced with their defiance, like, my old Headmasters, both of them. Even the one at comprehensive, where it wasn't permitted at all, threatened to cane me. They were truly pathetic, the pair of them.
Orwell devotes a great deal of space to discussing confronting a bully. I do not know how much this incident is highlighted by Orwell the political writer and how much real significance there really was to this event in Orwell's early life. I suppose he must be taken at his word. Throughout Orwell's political essays is a strong anti-pacifist thread. It may be that his anti-pacifism has some roots in his retaliation toward this bully.
I think it's fairly obvious that Orwell's dislike of Totalitarianism and the English "blimps" probably stems, to a large extent, from his childhood experience of injustice.
All this was thirty years ago and more. The question is: Does a child at school go through the same kind of experiences nowadays?
I would personally say, undoubtedly yes. The fact is that my own particular irrational childhood nightmare occurred over thirty years after the time of Orwell's writing. Only the other day there was a story in the news about childhood witchcraft abuse. There's more peer pressure than ever to posses the right gadgets and clothes. More and more children are carrying knives. Whole families, now days, get demonised with ASBOs.
Orwell thinks the proliferation of at least some rudimentary knowledge of child psychology may be a positive phenomena but one has to wonder if this is really true - doesn't that same proliferation potentially enable those who wish to abuse children, for whatever motive, to become more "sophisticated", i.e., cruel?
We now live in an era where a naivety about the sufferings of childhood is impossible.
For my own part, how do I feel about the people I've mentioned in this text, in relation to my own biography? They are probably mostly dead, or soon will be. They were utterly pathetic human beings. They ruined my education and distorted my whole life but I'd sooner be myself than them.
Ironically, we were fed Orwell as if he were "one of us" at that school, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty Four, the attacks on Communism, yet we never touched on any of his other political writings, for example, Such, Such Were The Joys.
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