Читать книгу Moving - Andy Hargreaves - Страница 19

The wit and grit of English northerners is not the kind of England that populates the American imagination. The country that gave the world the language of Shakespeare, that founded the ancient universities of Oxford and Cambridge, and that transmits the plum vowels of the BBC World Service across the globe appears to many to be the international epitome of cultured learning and good manners.

Impressions of England’s elite accomplishments emanate from the bits of England that have been selectively portrayed in classical literature, modern film, and televised costume drama. This is the England of the pastoral South: of Pride and Prejudice, Vanity Fair, and other period drama and of anything involving the posh pronunciations of privately educated, multisyllabic actors like Benedict Cumberbatch and Helena Bonham Carter!

But there are other Englands—working-class Englands, Asian Englands and Afro-Englands, and manufacturing Englands—ones that Americans rarely see. These are also often ignored, abandoned, or belittled by the upper-middle classes and southeastern elites of England itself. Until recently, the only place where people from the Northwest appeared on public media was in comedy or as villains, peasants, and fools—unless, like actor Sir Ian McKellen (otherwise known as Gandalf) from Burnley and nearby Bolton, they had almost lost their northern accents altogether. Only in the past few years have we started to hear strong northwestern accents amongst TV newsreaders. And a remarkable thing about the long-running British science-fiction series Doctor Who is not just that, for the first time, Doctor Who is a woman, played by Jodie Whittaker, but that, out of thirteen Doctor Whos over time, she is one of only two to possess a strong northern accent.⁴⁸ The other is Christopher Eccleston. Eccleston, who has also appeared in a number of U.S. movies and TV series, like The Leftovers, was raised in a working-class family in Salford, now part of what’s called Greater Manchester.⁴⁹

Not so many years ago, at an international conference, I had to take a colleague aside who was from the Home Counties around London. At this and other conferences, the first greeting to my wife and me was usually in a parody of a northern accent—“Eeh by gum. Ecky thump! Ello luv!” My colleague didn’t mean any harm, of course, and is a good friend to this day. But in England, I responded, a couple of years before Brexit and Trump, why were the northern white working class in this person’s and others’ comments still fair game as the last acceptable prejudice of middle-class intellectuals and elites?⁵⁰

In classical literature, apart from the windswept romance of Emily Brontë on the blasted heaths of Wuthering Heights, northern England has been either neglected altogether or portrayed as a grime-ridden world of pitiable monotony. This is how Charles Dickens depicted the Lancashire town of Preston, near to where my wife, Pauline, and her family come from, when he visited it in 1854:

It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but, as matters stood it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage. It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled…. It contained several large streets all very like one another … inhabited by people equally like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours, with the same sound upon the pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and tomorrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and the next…. You saw nothing … but what was severely workful.⁵¹

In the Depression of the 1930s, privately educated George Orwell indulged his acquired socialism by spending several weeks in the lodging houses of Northwest England to write The Road to Wigan Pier.⁵² With graphic depictions of working-class poverty in settings such as tripe shops and mining communities, Orwell had what one of his biographers, Thomas Ricks, described as an olfactory obsession.⁵³ Compared to his own fortunate distinction, the working classes, like the “natives” of the Indian subcontinent where Orwell started his colonial career, were disgusting. They stank.

Socially successful individuals often have either inherited or acquired what the late French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu termed distinction—the “pure taste” that enables a person to see him- or herself as separate, or distinct, and able to determine what should be refused or avoided.⁵⁴ In his book The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith—better known as the author of The Wealth of Nations—explained and approved of this sense of taste:

It is the acute and delicate discernment of the man of taste, who distinguishes the minute, and scarce perceptible differences of beauty and deformity … who excites our admiration, and seems to deserve our applause; and upon this foundation is grounded the greater part of the praise which is bestowed upon what are called the intellectual virtues.⁵⁵

Wherever they are on the political spectrum, those who have distinction set the very standards of disgust, deciding what people should reject or find repulsive: “the tawdry, the cheap, the fulsome.”⁵⁶

Those who are socially unsuccessful, or fail to possess distinction, can then turn into the objects of others’ disgust. According to Charles Darwin, in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, disgust “refers to something revolting, primarily in relation to the sense of taste as actually perceived or vividly imagined.”⁵⁷ In its simplest sense, Darwin observed, disgust means “offensive to the taste.”⁵⁸ Disgust is an elementary as well as an alimentary emotion. It makes the nose turn up and the lip curl.⁵⁹

Disgust is also a moral emotion, as Darwin himself acknowledged when he commented how disgusted he felt when he was in Tierra del Fuego and “a native” touched his food. People and objects can be the source of our disgust. And in our reactions to people who disgust us, “we seem thus to say to the despised person that he smells offensively” [italics added for emphasis].⁶⁰ People disgust us not only when they are grotesque but when their actions seem vulgar or cheap, when they fail to possess discernment and appear to embody all that is indelicate and obscene.⁶¹

Disgust and distinction, then, are the emotions of social exclusion—the means by which people may shrink from those who are disabled or express contempt for those whose race, ethnicity, or social class is different from their own.⁶²

Distinction recoils when presented with expressive emotionality, labelling it as gauche or trash. Those few of us who somehow manage to achieve social mobility while hanging on to our own emotionality often report feeling out of place in our education and our lives. Profound depictions of this dilemma can be found in Strangers in Paradise, a collection of autobiographies of people from working-class backgrounds who went on to teach and work in the university setting. These narratives reveal that no matter what these individuals achieve, or how successful they become, even when they are presidents or vice chancellors of universities, they still feel like imposters who don’t belong.⁶³ Often, this is because of their language; their “vulgar” speech, as others interpret it; their emotionality and direct manner of communication; and their lack of restrained humility, which, they find, embarrasses, offends, or disgusts their colleagues.⁶⁴

I am definitely amongst them. For more than fifteen years, Boston College has been extremely supportive of me. I could scarcely have asked for more, and I remain one of its biggest supporters. But one thing I have never got the hang of is quiet humility. If you are congratulated on your achievements, what you are supposed to say is “It wasn’t me, really; it was all the others.” Most do say something like this. Many even mean it. Where I grew up, however, humility was a tool of oppression to keep the accomplishments and aspirations of the poor down. We were proud of what we could do against the odds. We were underdogs. We were not deferential. We were defiant. We celebrated every victory against authority, adversity, and exclusion. We trumpeted our own and one another’s achievements gloriously. It’s one thing to choose poverty or humility. It’s another thing altogether to have it thrust upon you.

My northern exposure has given me a lot professionally. It’s made me outwardly animated and inwardly grounded. It’s affected my habits and my hobbies of engaging in popular culture, which often help me establish a connection with teachers—many of whom also came up from the working class. But it’s also put me at a distance, sometimes, from my colleagues in the academy. Take TV as an example. I have good friends and colleagues in U.S. universities who will watch little else than American public broadcast TV that is viewed by around only 2 per cent of the U.S. population. There are other academics who proudly possess no TV at all. I can and do watch the costume dramas and intellectually oriented programmes of my academic peers, but especially when I am travelling and doing a bit of casual hotel viewing, I will, without a shred of guilt or irony, also watch many things that are part of popular culture—Deadliest Catch, Ice Road Truckers, Strictly Come Dancing, The Bachelor, Naked and Afraid, The Amazing Race, Eurovision Song Contest, anything with Bear Grylls, and all kinds of sitcoms. I do draw the line at Keeping Up With the Kardashians, however (even though I once found myself with Kim Kardashian in a casino elevator in Australia!). I love karaoke and a chance to belt out “Sympathy for the Devil” or “Total Eclipse of the Heart”! On a good night, I bowl better than 160, and I can usually hold my own in a game of pool in almost any bar in town (though it has nearly got me into trouble on more than one occasion).

I love these things about popular culture not because I am curious about them from an anthropological distance or because I somehow think I should be but because I genuinely enjoy them. My wife calls it my Blackpool gene. Blackpool is the coastal town where my grandma and her magnificently named sisters, Primrose and Bertha, grew up. It is now one of the poorest towns in England (also fifth on the Express’s worst-towns list), a casualty of easily available air travel and cheap foreign holidays.⁶⁵ It is and was a town of funfairs and gambling, of bawdy postcards and silly hats saying “Kiss Me Quick.” It’s where we used to visit our endlessly talkative auntie Vera and my illiterate and innumerate uncle Ted (who nonetheless had a successful business installing fireplaces that his wife did the accounts for). Their loud teenage daughters ran around their council house in their over-the-top outfits, the TV was always blaring in the background, and uproarious laughter, as well as repeated brews of hot tea, reminded us always that we were very welcome. Take me back home, and I’ll talk to anybody and everybody on the bus, at the football game, or in the pub. I sometimes ask my wife to wear a bit more bling than she has on, even though I know I really shouldn’t, and then I quickly apologize, claiming it was my Blackpool gene that made me do it.

Oddly, all of this helps me connect with educators, with my students, and in workshops and lectures around the world. After a few public spats about targets and testing, I sang “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’” to my colleague and old friend Michael Fullan in a debate in Toronto in front of more than a thousand school principals from all over the world (something he writes about in his own autobiography too!).⁶⁶ Many years ago now, I received positive workshop evaluations from head teachers back in Lancashire saying, “I really liked the swearing.” After my family and I had become Canadian citizens in the 1990s, I even did a fake striptease in front of a hundred school principals and my visiting mother-in-law to reveal a T-shirt saying “My Canada includes the Hargreaves” (this turned out to be the only thing I ever did to improve my relationship with my mother-in-law).

Some of this is theatre, of course (we will see more of this later), but some is also what I grew up with—being quick on your feet, emotionally direct, and brutally honest; being prepared to stand up for yourself and for others who can’t; kowtowing to no one; telling it like it is; connecting to everyday life; being a bit irreverent or even utterly shameless sometimes; and, as John Lennon once put it in an interview with the Beatles, just “havin’ a laugh.”⁶⁷ My humour that can be an asset in my presentations has a bit of Monty Python about it but also, like Sir Ken Robinson—if not quite so brilliantly—a touch of the end of Morecambe Pier, a place where in the 1950s and early 1960s comedians would perform for working-class families during their seaside summer holidays.

There are times when I look at the strange skill set I have and rejoice in my Blackpool gene. But the very things that can enamour me to my classes and audiences at home and abroad can, however, also sometimes alienate me from colleagues who express and experience their emotions differently than I. This is my failing as much as theirs. Like the lyrics of an old Everly Brothers song, sometimes people think I “talk too much” and “laugh too loud.”⁶⁸ In meetings amongst American colleagues, my staccato voice with its northern vowels can sound to me and to them like an interruption and an intrusion, so I sometimes end up contributing less rather than more than I really should. American norms of middle-class conversation, at dinner or elsewhere, are to ask a question, receive a considered response, and politely wait your turn while listening to the next person. Northern-English banter, like French conversation, or chatter between twins, though, is to talk over people, overlap, make a comment, and interrupt, not because you’re not interested but because you are. This can come across as rude or just mansplaining in the United States, but where I come from, the women, including my wife’s formidable sisters, do this as much as or even more than the men.

So now you know a bit about my family and community and the origins of my specious way of being. There’ll be more about them later. But for now, it’s time to go to school.