I started writing a journal on Saturday, 9 May 2009, about two months before I left school. As I write, sixteen years later, the journal’s word count stands at one million, two hundred and fifty-five thousand, six hundred and ninety. It is a record of events but also a commonplace book and confidante. But once every few years I return to those first entries, hoping to find something in the only authentic record I have of my experiences at school. Why do I do this? Cyril Connolly once proposed what he called
The Theory of Permanent Adolescence. It is the theory that the experiences undergone by boys at the great public schools, their glories and disappointments, are so intense as to dominate their lives and arrest their development.
I did not attend a ‘great’ public school, and there were girls as well as boys; but Connolly’s point about how intense the experiences were resonates. Intense and distinctive. School felt a certain way. There are four periods of my life that I would describe like that, and the first and longest is school. It was our little world – like hobbits in the Shire, we and school were in proportion. ‘School’ itself is such an evocative word – ‘school days’, ‘school years’. And so I return to the start of my journal in search of what ‘school’ evokes, in search of lost time. But the journal is unevocative. I wrote things such as – on that first Saturday – ‘Stayed half an hour late after mountain biking to finish a Faustus essay’. Even were that less prosaic, I would still have no record of all the time before.
In Philip Roth’s novel American Pastoral, the narrator, Nathan Zuckerman, writes a speech for his high school reunion:
Am I wrong to think that we delighted in living there? […] Am I mistaken to think that even back then, in the vivid present, the fullness of life stirred our emotions to an extraordinary extent? Has anywhere since so engrossed you in its ocean of details? […] It’s astonishing that everything so immediately visible in our lives as classmates we still remember so precisely. The intensity of feeling that we have seeing one another today is also astonishing.
‘No, you’re not mistaken; and yes, it is astonishing’, I would want to say, if I heard such a speech. And so I want to recall to communicate what it felt like. What it felt like, going to chapel five mornings a week for seven years; or cold red hands in a steaming shower; being unsupervised in the remotest corners of the school; yearning after girls.
We used to have something called ‘winter routine’, whereby games would be after lunch and then, as it was getting dark, we’d shower, put our uniforms back on, and return to lessons. What it felt like was sort of… cosy, and sleepy, and intimate. Hot from the shower, maybe sitting on a heater waiting to go into a classroom, dark outside, everything lit by warm yellow. I was and am naturally quite solitary, and sex didn’t begin for me until later, but I find there’s something erotic about the sheer proximity of school, at least in my memory. We were always together, in every season, every time of day, sitting, clattering up and down stairs, queuing for lunch or tea, standing around.
There are things I will miss out, which others would remember as being central. Some of these I simply did not experience. I cannot write about boarding except as an intrigued outsider. And, not being a big joiner-in, I have little to say about team sports, and did not go to the outdoor centre at Mallaig in Scotland. I didn’t go to pubs and clubs in town in sixth form, or hang out in the sixth-form centre. I wasn’t part of the gossip that goes with being in a relationship. But the following is what I can remember about what school felt like. There’s only one rule: include nothing that falls outside the little world of school time and school place.
