Anglomania (22 page)

This was a little odd, to be sure, even then, even in The Hague. None of my schoolmates had any desire to be sent to a boarding school. Boarding schools in Holland were for juvenile delinquents, or “difficult” children. They were institutions that smacked of prison or the army. We enjoyed the freedom of a coeducational, secular school system. Perhaps “enjoyed” isn’t the right word. We took it for granted, just
as most parents took it for granted—thanks largely to Napoleon’s educational reforms—that you didn’t have to pay for a decent education.

And yet no institution has held such fascination for Anglophiles as the English public school. More than Parliament, or the common law, or the Stock Exchange, the English public school represents the Anglophile’s idea of England. For it is there, in those neo-Gothic cloisters, that the English gentleman is created, as a new breed of aristocrat in a bourgeois age. In 1974, two years before his death, André Malraux, so ill he could hardly hold his head up, told the writer Bruce Chatwin that Western civilization was faced with the most serious crisis since the fall of Rome. His facial tics, disconcerting at the best of times, grew more violent as his excitement mounted. What was needed, he said, was nothing less than the reformation of man. The Romans had created superior men who managed a great empire for centuries. The Soviets tried the same, but with much less success. The only nation to have produced a national elite as powerful as the Romans was England. It was not the aristocracy Malraux was thinking of, or medieval knights. No, England had created the gentleman. The English gentleman was one of the greatest creations of Western civilization,
“la grande création de l’homme.”
The question was whether England could ever produce such a specimen again.

In fact, Malraux was being a little too grandiose. When Wellington said that Napoleon was defeated on Eton’s playing fields, he was saying something more profound than the glib phrase suggests. Napoleon—like Malraux—stood for grandeur and revolutionary progress. The public school man is conservative, the guardian of an anti-revolutionary society, where progress does occur but is always viewed with the deepest skepticism. The public school man didn’t invent or create an empire, he administered it. He is the English version of the Confucian “man of culture,” for whom moderation is the highest goal. But Malraux was right: as with the Chinese Confucian, the greatest attraction of the English gentleman is the fact that he is made, not born.

All I knew about English public school life as a child was based on hearsay and fiction. I had never been inside such a school. I
had
heard family stories: my grandfather and two uncles had been to a boarding school with a particularly rugged reputation. My grandfather and one of my uncles claimed to have enjoyed the experience. For my other
uncle, who lacked their heartiness and taste for sports, it had been a torment.

Apart from the family lore, my knowledge came mostly from British comic books, which celebrated the heroic feats of little blond boys in shorts and striped blazers. The most heroic ones looked a bit like my friend Victor. They represented a fanciful world, but it was the only one I knew. Perhaps they helped English boys put up with the hardships of boarding school life by making it seem exciting and patriotic and helped those fortunate or unfortunate enough to be spared the experience to enjoy it vicariously. The difference between the heroic schoolboys, winning games against all odds through sheer pluck and native valor, and the Spitfire pilots featured in the same comic books was negligible. They were part of the same imaginary world in which British is best, Germans are both funny and wicked, and all other foreigners just funny.

Some of this stuff—Billy Bunter comics, for example, or the Biggies stories, or books about a schoolboy named Jennings—was translated into Dutch and widely read. I don’t think anyone was put off by the chauvinism. After all, we also thought Germans were wicked (though not necessarily funny), and it was soon enough after the war to bask in the afterglow of Anglo-Saxon triumphalism without a feeling of absurdity or distaste. I find it hard to imagine English boys reading comics about French heroics. Maybe it is all to do with the war. But it is also the fate of those growing up in small nations to share in the jingoism of larger ones.

But no one, to my knowledge, read
Tom Brown’s School Days
except me. I took to it in the way some young girls take to books about horses. This idealized account of life at Rugby School in the 1830s represented a glimpse of heaven. Thomas Hughes wisely kept Dr. Thomas Arnold, the formidable headmaster, in the background. He must have realized that Arnold’s earnest preaching about “muscular Christianity” and saving boys from the clutches of Satan would be unattractive to most of his young readers. Sex and violence, on the other hand, are always appealing. On one level,
Tom Brown’s School Days
belongs to the same fascinating category as movies about prisons: males fighting for survival in a cage.

The story of Tom Brown, entering the strange world of Rugby,
learning its secrets and codes, being bullied by Flashman, worshiping old Brooke, taking care of sensitive George Arthur, and winning the cricket match for his house, is exotic—especially to those who never went to boarding school—yet not so outlandish that one can’t identify with the characters. There is enough violence—the bullying, the boxing, the “fagging,” the caning—to satisfy a child’s thirst for blood. And the master-slave relations between senior boys and their “fags” have an erotic charge that I’m not sure Hughes intended, but I certainly felt as a boy, without quite grasping why.

Here was a world of perfect order, with a clear hierarchy and a moral code. Like a prison, it was a cloistered universe, governed largely by the senior inmates, a boys’ Utopia, with its own language, customs, rules, and government. Villains, like Flashman, threaten to upset the social order, but heroes, like Tom, always prevail. To me, Tom’s world was at once vivid and fantastical, like all great romantic epics. The adults are peripheral, or, like the Greek gods, they influence the actions of mortals only from the distance of their Olympian heights. Nothing is better designed to appeal to an insecure, rather philistine schoolboy whose longing for freedom is matched by a need for rules, a code of behavior, and heroic role models. The fact that this boyish Utopia was English was an added bonus.

I loved
Tom Brown’s School Days
because it was a story about good and evil in a boys’ world. But for me it was more than a moral parable. I took an almost anthropological interest in Tom Brown’s Rugby. I wanted to decode it, know all its rituals and customs. Accumulating useless expertise about English schoolboy life was a way to distinguish myself from my peers. Arcane knowledge was a way to be different, to hold a kind of power, even if the others didn’t know it. Just as American geography—Memphis, Nashville, Route 66—can take on a sexy, iconic significance for European lovers of rock and roll, the names of public schools had a magical ring: Marlborough, Winchester, Charterhouse …

Long after the magic had worn off, on a bleak December day in 1996, I actually went to Rugby. I parked my car opposite the school library, where a pale statue of Thomas Hughes stands guard, holding a flamboyant piece of headgear, rather like a cowboy hat. The grass on the rugby field was frozen hard. An icy wind was blowing in a gray sky. My mind drifted back to the interminable football games I had to
endure as a boy, mostly inactive, far from the ball, my hands numb with cold. My friend Victor also took part in these games, but he was faster and warmed by action. Near Thomas Hughes, on the edge of the playing field, was a small hill. The librarian, Mr. Maclean, a friendly, bearded man, dressed in jeans, told me this was called the Island. There used to be a moat around the Island. In 1797, the year of the French Revolution, the Island had been the scene of a minor rebellion.

The school was a brutal place then, under a headmaster called Dr. Ingles. There was a portrait of him cut into the stained glass windows in School House: a long, aquiline face, a feeble mouth, and small, humorless eyes. He was loathed by the boys and not much liked by the masters. Terror and an ever-expanding number of rules were his tools for keeping order. Beatings were frequent and administered with unusual ferocity.

So the rebellion against his regime must have been the result of a long string of grievances. The particular incident that sparked it off, however, was a small explosion outside the school gate. One of the boys had let off a firecracker. Dr. Ingles heard about it and accused the culprit of making his own explosives. The boy denied it and said he had bought the cracker at a nearby shop. The shopkeeper, who supplied the school, naturally claimed innocence, and the boy was told he would be expelled.

The senior boys were furious. It was too unfair! The “Beak” was a brute! Something had to be done! And so the rebellion began. The Island became the rebel campaign headquarters. The masters found convenient excuses to look the other way. Dr. Ingles, screaming with rage, was left to handle the incident himself. When the boys continued to occupy the Island, Dr. Ingles, reduced now to a state of babbling hysteria, called in the local militia. The armed townsmen, glad to show off their prowess against the haughty young gentlemen of the school, read the Riot Act—the last time this was done in British history, according to Mr. Maclean. When the boys still refused to move, the moat was forded, guns went off, and bones were broken. That was the end of the Rugby rebellion. The boy was expelled, and Dr. Ingles stayed on.

Rugby School is fairly typical of its kind: a mishmash of Victorian Gothic buildings around a quadrangle, porridge-colored walls, and a towering redbrick chapel by Butterfield, the specialist in this kind of thing. It was the chapel I had mainly come to see. For I wanted to stand
on the spot where, in 1883, Pierre, baron de Coubertin,
Rénovateur
of the modern Olympic Games, fell on his knees on Dr. Arnold’s tomb and had his extraordinary vision. By promoting the
régime arnoldien
, by teaching French boys to play cricket, by making French schools more like Eton, Marlborough, or Rugby, he, Pierre de Coubertin, would “rebronze” French manhood and thus reinvigorate the French nation, which was badly in need of rebronzing after its humiliating military defeat against Prussia in 1871.

Inside, the chapel, with its predominance of orange and brown tiles, looked a bit like a jar of marmalade. The milky light outside barely penetrated the stained-glass window above me, which depicted the Resurrection, in memory of the old boys who had fallen for Queen and Empire while putting down the Indian Mutiny of 1857. Mr. Maclean showed me Dr. Arnold’s tombstone set in the marble floor: a small, gray granite square with nothing but the doctor’s name engraved on its shiny surface. According to his own account, the sight of this unremarkable slab brought the French baron to a state of rapture. He heard a young boy, “blonde with the face of a cherub,” sing psalms, as two older boys, dressed in white flannel suits, stood by, listening in silence. He raised his eyes to Dr. Arnold’s monument, an overdecorated Gothic affair, in the center of which was a marble sculpture of the doctor’s corpse, his hands folded in prayer. Coubertin was in ecstasy as he gazed at the hands—“large, thin, nervous” hands, “which were not made to be cast in rigid stone.” Here he was at last, in the sacred heart of the place where the English gentleman was made, here, in this school, by this great man, Dr. Arnold. Effortless Anglo-Saxon superiority was molded by his magisterial hands. Worshiping at the doctor’s tomb with one more lingering look, Coubertin fancied that he saw in front of him the “cornerstone of the British Empire.”

Next I was shown the place where Flashman roasted Tom Brown half to death by pressing him to the mantelpiece over a fire. And I saw the slender tower where the doctor flogged the most mischievous boys in the privacy of his study. We passed the cricket ground, where Tom, on the last day of school, captained School House to victory. And I was shown the old wooden desk tops, the color of dark beer, with the names of countless boys carved in them. I noticed the name Chamberlain and later saw the words “Peace for our time” written on the wall of the school museum, as though they were heroic words.

We ended up at the museum souvenir shop, where Mr. Maclean took his place behind the cash register. There were postcards and copies of
Tom Brown’s School Days
and poetry books by Rupert Brooke (an Old Boy), but nothing by Salman Rushdie, who had been unhappy at the school. I could buy rugby football shirts with the school colors and striped neckties with the school coat of arms. There were Rugby School pencils and Rugby School fountain pens. A tea towel with the Rugby football rules. And Rugby School teaspoons. It seemed a sensible way for the school to make some extra money. But, for me, after all these years, the mystery had gone. Once these items would have contained magic. Now they were just souvenirs, like the usual tat on sale at English Heritage or National Trust venues.

I returned to London, where I had to pick up my daughter from her North London school. She was waiting for me, dressed in her school uniform: blazer and school badge, school tie and gray flannel skirt. The school was a typical product of the Thatcher era: a few enterprising women had started it in a few rooms on the second floor of an office building in Tufnell Park, to provide traditional English education. About half the girls were Jewish or of Indian origin, but they all sang hymns. To foster competition in sports, and in the classroom, the school was divided into houses, even though there were no houses. Silver cups, named after Old Girls whose parents had sponsored them, were awarded for academic and sporting achievements. The largest cup, for “creative writing,” was donated by a tabloid reporter who had made his fortune exposing scandals in the royal family.

All the trappings of British school tradition, so painstakingly re-created by the entrepreneurial headmistress, were familiar to me. And yet, as I stood up after the Christmas play, together with the other parents, to sing (or pretend to sing) “Jerusalem,” I never felt more like an outsider in a society that manages, generation after generation, to mimic itself.