“And where are your children?”
The man sitting on my left asked me, and I was feeling bolshy. I knew what he meant, but I affected not to understand his question.
“Do you mean where are my children at this moment, or where do they go to school?” I asked, raising my eyebrows and tilting my head with a smile of challenge.
He looked at me, surprised. A bit indignant.
“Well, I suppose you could tell me where they are now, but I meant where do they go to school.”
“I know you did”.
And I told him. That’s what that question always means in that upper middle class environment. There’s nothing else it could possibly mean. And my response left him still guessing. It is a school that is neither one thing nor the other, a social chameleon, a synergy of class. A school that bridges the divide between me and my husband.
Earlier that evening I’d been asked the same question of myself, by the man on my right. Where did I go to school? Perhaps he’s smelt a rat, wanted to make sure I wasn’t a fraud. I’d replied with the name of the town I’d been bussed to, and the man had expressed surprise. Cognitive dissonance flashing across his face sending his brain into a whirring frenzy as he tried to reconcile my answer with his value system.
“Ah ha!”, he said, I must have been one of the first intake of girls.
“No”, I replied.
I went to the state grammar school in the town, not to the independent boys’ school that hogs the name of the town for itself, and my school only had girls.
“Oh”, the man said flatly, and put me in a pigeonhole. My school was a reliable marker of my social class, and I now had a badge to wear for the rest of the evening.
So, by the time the second question arrived I was fed up. Fed up with the initial assumption that because I happened to be sitting at that particular dinner table I must have been privately educated and vote Conservative. Fed up with the multiple conclusions drawn about me when those assumptions turned out to be false.
But then a nice thing happened. The man who asked about my children read me correctly, and he dared to take off his disguise and showed me who he really was. A moment of recognition. I could almost see him peeling off the mask, taking off the garb, and was that a sigh of relief? A man who’d been educated in a “crap” grammar school in Wales. A state school man under it all, masquerading as something else.
But then he had also been a spy. An MI6 operative working throughout Europe. A talented linguist fluent in languages that defeat most people, enjoying a retirement re-translating opera librettos and researching the diaries of a gay German cavalier who bequeathed to the world a momentous opera but died unrecognised.
For a while we considered taking our conversation down the Monty Python Hole in the Road street, but nicely agreed a draw. They had both been equally bad.
From his not-very-good grammar school he’d won a place at the usual recruiting ground for men and women like him when our enemies were white and Christian. Oxford and Cambridge University. He’d received the tap on the shoulder from his tutor, had responded to the follow-up letter, passed the Civil Service exams, had been trained, and had taken up a post in the field. His sons had been educated at Eton as a nice gesture of secret state gratitude and he now claimed a place at that dinner table as his own even if he had to hide his real identity. Social mobility and a surprisingly interesting evening.
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November 9, 2008 at 7:03 pm
ismini
I have lived in this country for nearly 20 years and I still don’t get this distinction…I value people for who they are and what they achieve not because of their background and where they went to school. When I first moved in Ipswich I met a woman, a nice person and a good mum & a good friend. It took her a long time to finally talk to me about her parents. She came from a broken home, the father left her and her 3 siblings with an unstable mother and a little later they all ended up in a home where she spent most of her childhood. She thought that I would see her differently after she told me; in fact I thought she was brave and a survivor. I really don’t get it, why does it matter so much the school that someone went to. Does it make them better or worse persons?
November 10, 2008 at 9:11 pm
adifferentvoice
No. Not to you, Ismini, which is a blessing, but to quite a few others.
I just get tired of the same old assumptions and the same old pigeonholes.
November 19, 2008 at 10:34 am
The Tragedy of Carmen « A Different Voice
[…] The Spy was there, with his bird-like wife. They had seen the very first productions of this version of Carmen, in Paris in 1981, and were so engulfed by the performance that they went again the next night. Brook had his own theatre, the Bouffes du Nord, dark, intimate, down at heel. It is still open. The very English sounding Brook had been born in England to Russian parents. Bryk becoming Brouck, then Brook. He was educated at Westminster, Gresham’s and Magdalen College, Oxford and moved to live in France in the 1970s. In 1971 he set up the International Centre for Theatre Research (CIRT – Centre International de Recherche Theatrale) with Micheline Rozan, funded by the French government and private foundations. The troupe travelled the Middle East and Africa, performing and trying to extract the essence of theatre from the muliplicity of forms and experiences that were native to each country they visited. He was inspired in his work by experimental playwrights, by Antonin’s Artaud’s concept of Theatre of Cruelty, that “Without an element of cruelty at the root of every spectacle, the theater is not possible. In our present state of degeneration it is through the skin that metaphyics must be made to re-enter our minds” (Artaud, The Theatre and its Double). Cruelty was not violence, but the courage to strip away polite masks and show the audience raw truth instead. […]