Читать книгу Seeing Things - Oliver Postgate - Страница 21

When I told people I might be going to Dartington Hall School they would sometimes go ‘Ooooh!’ and look at me coyly, as if there was something slightly risqué about the idea, because Dartington Hall was what was called a ‘progressive’ school. They had heard tell, they said, that there was no uniform and people sometimes went about with nothing on! From some I heard that there were no rules and no proper classes, that the pupils were in charge of the staff and there was fun and freedom all the time. From others I heard that it was licentious, and surely a sink of sin. Everything that was said about the school was charged with strong feeling. It may seem a bit odd today but in 1939 the very idea of educating people in an unconventional way was slightly outrageous.

Now it was the first day of term and as I rode down the hill towards the school I realised that I had absolutely no idea what I was going to find when I arrived. It might of course be a quite ordinary place like Woodhouse School, with uniforms, prefects and an Assembly. I think I was rather hoping it would be.

I couldn’t see anywhere to put my bike so I leaned it against the wall, opened the front door and looked in.

I heard a lot of noise and saw a lot of people milling about. They weren’t all children, some of them seemed to be grown-ups but none of these were wearing academic gowns. In fact they were dressed in all sorts of different clothes and were just chattering away together and looking at notices.

I stepped in and stood just inside the door. People smiled at me as they brushed past but didn’t say anything. After a few minutes of standing about I realised that nobody was coming to find me, so I had better find somebody myself. I moved along a corridor to the right and saw a door marked ‘Office’. I knocked but nobody answered. So in the end I pushed the door open and walked in. A lady was sitting at a typewriter.

‘Hallo,’ she said, ‘I’m Sarah.’

‘Postgate,’ I said, ‘Oliver Postgate. I am here.’

‘Yes, I can see. What can I do for you?’

I’m sorry. I don’t know what to do.’

Sarah sighed with resignation, arose and led me back into the foyer. There she pointed to a gigantic timetable. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘you’re in C Group. In half an hour you have Art.’

‘Yes, but what do I do?’

‘Why, whatever you like! You are free, absolutely free! Aren’t you lucky!’ She lifted her arms in joyful freedom and swirled away, back to her office.

I stood there, stunned. I looked at the board. I turned and looked at the doors. I looked at the people milling busily about, oblivious of my existence. I have never felt quite so lonely and baffled in my life.

How long I stood there I don’t know. I remember finding a man looking out of a window and asking him if he knew where Art was. He must have told me because I came at last to the Art Room. It was deserted. I sat at a table.

After about twenty minutes a large girl in trousers walked in. She dumped her things on a table and said: ‘ ’Lo, who’re you?’

‘Postgate,’ I said.

‘What?’

‘Postgate.’

‘Poached egg? You a poached egg?’

‘No …’

Four or five more people came in, all dressed differently; then a thin young man wearing a brown jersey.

‘Hallo,’ he said in quite a friendly tone, ‘I’m Mark. Who are you?’

‘He’s a poached egg!’ shouted the girl.

‘No, I’m not,’ I whispered.

The Art class didn’t seem to begin at any particular moment. Some people had rummaged around and found paper and powderpaints but the rest just chatted. The teacher chatted with them. Nobody spoke to me so I found a piece of paper and a crayon and drew a fish. The class must have ended at some point because everybody left.

For the rest of the day I kept my head down and did my best to follow on behind the others. I clung on to the hope that somebody official would come along to acknowledge my existence, but it didn’t happen.

Late in the afternoon I noticed that people were going into the dining room to eat. I wondered whether I was supposed to join them. I didn’t know who to ask so I went to the Office to ask the typing lady if it would be all right to go home. The Office was locked, so, feeling cold with misery, I got on my bike and rode back to Kay Starr’s house.

John had had a different but equally daunting time. Notice had been taken of him and he had been told to wait for some sort of ‘tutor’, who simply didn’t turn up. So where I was feeling baffled and lost, he was healthily angry. He noted in his diary that it was a silly school and he asked to be taken away from it as soon as possible. Very soon he was staying with our uncle Richmond in Exeter and going to a school there.

*

My first day at Dartington Hall School had not only been very different from my first day at Woodhouse School, it had been quite different from anything I had been able to imagine. In all my conjectures about what Dartington might be like I had always wondered what sort of school it would be, how we, the pupils, would be controlled and directed. It had never occurred to me that there mightn’t be a school there at all, that I would have no desk, no place to go, and that nobody would tell me what to do next. But that’s how it was.

From the moment I had arrived at Woodhouse School, I had been fully involved in the organized life of the school and had felt quite secure in the place I held in that benevolent authoritarian hierarchy. At Dartington there seemed to be no benevolent authority, nobody to notice what I did or didn’t do. I might as well not have existed.

Although I didn’t realise it at the time, I was completely desperate, frantically trying to find a place for myself in a social order that didn’t in fact exist. In this I was of course unsuccessful but my behaviour must have been observed, because it was mentioned in my first report:

Oliver … started off by showing off in ways that did not endear himself to either children or staff … both in class and in his written work his chief motive seems to be to gain admiring attention.

Ray passed that report to me with a contemptuous gesture and I remember it hitting me like a body-blow, not so much because it was so casually damning as because it was the only comment that had been made. During the term I had been given no clue as to whether or not my behaviour was acceptable. I had spent my time in a sort of ongoing panic because I hadn’t been able to get anybody to acknowledge my existence, let alone admire it.

Looking back, I can get some really embarrassing pictures of the obnoxious way I carried on in that first term. During the first weeks I think I went in for a bit of the formal thuggery and armtwisting that had been customary at Woodhouse. That simply didn’t work. I remember trying to be funny in class. That was a waste of time. Answering back at the teachers provided no thrills and was just ignored. I can see myself clowning and nobody taking any notice. I pretended to be clever and know everything but all that brought was mockery – all these were the standard reactions to a smart-arsed git trying to grab attention. That was fair enough but it was the response, or rather the lack of response, of the teachers to this carry-on that I found completely incomprehensible. At Woodhouse they wouldn’t have put up with it. I would have been put in my place in no time (and so would have known my place). Here they took no notice at all. They suffered the inconvenience and looked away. Needless to say, this discouragement simply caused me to redouble my efforts.

In contrast to this rather frantic school life my current home life was very quiet, if not exactly homely. Kay Starr was, I think, kindly disposed towards me, but I knew that she felt very keenly the intrusion and disruption that my presence caused in her life. She was also, in herself, a righteous person, very conscious of the shortcomings of the rest of the world, which she did not hesitate to condemn.

In the evenings Kay would often say: ‘Don’t let’s bother with proper supper, let’s just have some scrambled egg on our knees.’ Then there would be small pieces of thin toast covered with reconstituted dried egg and perhaps an apple to follow. I would sit very carefully and eat it neatly and when I had finished she would look at me anxiously and her face would tell me that she couldn’t think what she was going to do with me for the rest of the long evening. Neither could I.

At weekends I was, as Kay’s protégé, allowed to partake of her life in Dartington Hall itself. This was a completely different world from the school. This was an essentially civilized, artistically sensitive foundation which had been created by Mr and Mrs Elmhirst to provide a centre of excellence, where individuals and groups engaged in the arts could be encouraged and supported in their work. There were painters, musicians, sculptors, silversmiths, even a ballet company, all busy working away at their arts, sustained by the loving generosity of Leonard and Dorothy Elmhirst.

The collection of people drawn to that cultural magnet was amazingly varied and interesting. The atmosphere seemed to be very free and easy but Kay, being perhaps conscious of her position as Leonard Elmhirst’s private secretary, was at pains to emphasize the need for me to be as unobtrusive as possible. So I walked on tiptoe through that part of Kay’s world, as I tiptoed through every other part of her neat house and her neat life, because I was steeped in long-term apology for being there and being a nuisance and because I was totally intimidated by her, even though she had told me, quite firmly, that we were close friends.

Getting used to life in Kay’s cold house was not easy, but it was my life at school that was causing me the most bafflement.

Looking back I can see that what I was having trouble with was the freedom. Freedom was assumed to be the aim and joy of life, and I was sure it was, but I didn’t seem to be very good at it. Freedom was presenting itself to me as a succession of choices that I had to make. These were not just choices between set alternatives like: ‘Will you have jam or marmalade?’ These were more basic choices like: ‘Do I want to bother to get out of this chair?’ or ‘Do I want to find out what the next class is and go to it?’

This unsettling responsibility was complicated by the fact that I truly believed that I was supposed to make decisions that reflected my fancy. If I asked somebody which option I should take, I was asked in reply: ‘Well, which do you want to take?’ – a question to which I had no answer, because I had no fancy and no purpose of my own. Today I can see quite clearly that all I really wanted was somebody to be there and mind enough to tell me what to do – and that, alas, was not on the menu.

So I think I just soldiered on and, as children and chameleons do, began to take on the colour of my surroundings. I started to affect the arrogant unconcern that I imagined was the convention, disdained the timetable and tried to follow what I hoped was my fancy. I must emphasize that I was not doing this as a real affirmation of personal independence. Quite the contrary, I was simply doing my best to conform, to do what I imagined was expected of me.

Absurd as it may seem, I think that may have worked. It seems that I did become what was (for Dartington Hall School) a socially acceptable person, because my next report said that I had ‘settled down’, was ‘becoming more popular ’ and that my time was ‘for the most part being profitably occupied’.

There was some truth in the last of these observations because I found a microscope in the biology lab and became fascinated by the underwater life that seemed to appear by itself in ponds and puddles when they became stagnant. I would cycle around the estate collecting smelly jars of it and bring them back to the biology lab. I sometimes think that could have become ‘my subject’ if I had managed, or even been encouraged, to organize my studies a bit, but that didn’t happen. At one time I became very interested in pottery and spent some months doing very little else, but here again my activity was quite solitary, random and disorganized. For a few months a craze for small theatricals swept through the school. At another time people collected pieces of tubing and blew bullets made of modelling-clay at each other.

These peripheral activities were engrossing enough to ensure that the academic side of school life was neglected. I was supposed to spend half an hour each week with my tutor, Boris, to talk about my work. He was the Chemistry master and, like me, an inveterate small-joke-maker. At our tutorial meetings he was icily polite and punctilious but I’m sorry to say he was unable to conceal from me the fact that he disliked me intensely and found the task of discussing my educational future distasteful. I didn’t care a lot for it myself because I, being fifteen years old, had found other interests, so I tended to miss tutorials. When this happened Boris would remind me of the possible academic consequences of neglecting my studies, but he did so more in resignation than in hope.

The other interest I had found was not pottery, pond-life or play-acting. It was sex, or rather, the distant prospect of sex.

Many people tended to assume that because Dartington Hall School was ‘progressive’ and free of restraints, the life of the pupils would inevitably be an ongoing orgy of sexual indulgence. That wasn’t true.

Quite a lot of fairly heavy petting went on but, as far as I remember, not much else.

The general policy of the school seemed to be one of noninterference. There were no organized house-based activities, so the pupils were mostly left to stew in their juice, which probably explains why the social life was so obsessively sex-centred. Looking back I can see that although it may all have been a bit overwrought, I don’t think it was unhealthy, just children growing up.

My position in this social life was marginal. Being a day-pupil meant that I was always a sort of visitor in the boarders’ houses. This made me slightly uncomfortable. Also I was still very much in awe of girls and knew that if they were not treated carefully they could give you a nasty bite, though their bites were of scorn and derision.

At Dartington, girls began to take on a new light. They became objects of desire and they glowed with thrilling but unspecific allure. I became infatuated with girls in general but I was also in love with one girl in particular. This girl shone in my sky like the full moon. Every ordinary movement she made was steeped in sensual magic and as I watched her I knew that my sole aim in life was to approach her and be as near to her as possible. My infatuation was made all the more intense by the fact that I had no clear idea where my feelings were supposed to lead. I had hardly reached puberty and, although the rabbits had taught me that the sole purpose of courtship was sexual intercourse, the very idea of having to do anything so ungainly seemed to me quite unthinkable and I quickly put such thoughts from my mind. Doing this did not diminish my ardour, it allowed it to be pure, which was a relief. It also allowed it to be private, something which nobody else knew about. Thus it came as a shock to discover that everybody, including the beloved, knew all about my feelings, and that her very natural efforts to avoid my cowlike gaze were being aided and abetted by most of her friends, who were watching the farcical carry-on with derisive amusement.

This was a disappointing introduction to romance, but not surprising. The idea that a girl might value my attention and be pleased to receive it had simply never crossed my mind. I knew for certain that girls were by nature always hostile to advances and I assumed that my role as a suitor could only be that of the plaintive lovelorn swain, ever hopeful but always unworthy. The assumption may sometimes have been accurate, but it was never attractive.