To Serve Them All My Days

"Perhaps so. If Waugh is absolutely anarchic, then in Delderfield you can overdose on earnestness. But I really do admire David Powlett-Jones, the hero, who takes up school-teaching after army service in World War One. He’s such a good bloke, but he’s a good bloke of another era. He’s a keen Labour man, but he’s a thoroughly conservative thinker. Delderfield writes of an era when manners tended to operate within pretty narrow limits. I admire the book so much because it goes so deep into the life of a particular kind of school — not a grand school, but still an independent school, full of Devon farmers’ sons who aren’t particularly rich. Well, I don’t see any useful tips for running a school in Decline and Fall! It’s a conceit in all kinds of ways. But in To Serve Them All My Days , absolutely. Powlett-Jones exemplifies qualities that are not lost, but are sometimes forgotten. One is resilience. When things are tough, and yet you really believe in the value what you are doing, then hang on in there. I remember at least one point in my own career when I took real heart from that example. Another is a certain egalitarianism. Independent schools should not be something just for the very smart and the very affluent. I like that. I certainly do passionately believe in many of the virtues of liberal humanism, but, that doesn’t necessarily mean that you need to be an individualist. Teamwork and self-abnegation don’t come easily to me, but I see their value. I spent a good deal of my time as a teacher trying to mute or at least to qualify the drive for individualism. I want people to think of others. I want them to weigh the voices and the wishes and the needs and the realities of others as deeply as they do their own. That may be my Jesuit upbringing but I think it’s absolutely correct. And never mind how hard I tried to impress the need for it on my pupils, as an adult now – 59 years of age – I find it’s a daily slog. No, certainly not. It’s hard now to imagine how, even during the First World War, you could reconcile yourself to saying: “I’d like you to stay in the classroom until you’re eighteen and then I want you to push off to Flanders and get shot.” I don’t know how you do that. I absolutely don’t. But, of course, the pressures of conformity are enormous. If you want to earn your monthly salary cheque then you’ll do what is required. As a schoolmaster I learned to abhor corporal punishment; but if I were teaching 50 or 75 or 100 years ago, and such was the school practice, would I have thrashed the boys in my house?"