Rotting Hill (35 page)

    This shirt-sleeved man, standing just inside his door, looked at me as I came up with some severity, indeed with suspicion and animosity. (I had not announced my arrival.) He stood there, his small head thrust forward in displeased enquiry. “Yes?” he said. “Mr. Laming?” said I. “That is my name,” said he, and stood frowning at me. And this is where I reach the part this young clergyman was playing in the civil war between the old order and the new order. He was in the midst of an encounter with the Socialist Government: the issue that of the continued existence of the Village School. In respect to that he stood for the old order: for the Family against the State, and he mistook me, at first, for an emissary of the Socialists. Such persons were often despatched from the offices of the local education Czar, and even from London itself, to harry, to intimidate or to cajole. How he received these officers might be judged from his bellicose attitude as in the present instance he stood on guard just inside his front door.

    It is amusing to compare the
weight
of the respective parties to this battle. On the one side is the terrible colossus of socialism: on the other this frail, impecunious,
clerc.
It is extraordinary how this small animal, without I expect any serious backing, can defy the omnipotent State—even if it is only as yet omnipotent-in-the-making. But he is possessed of a great deal of will and his entire being has been hardened into a resistant human particle in the social body by the agency of an economic creed both aggressive and unorthodox. It is, of course, the Christian ethic, as interpreted by this professional of religion, which has produced an unbreakable belief, at once mystical and practical. He
believes
—in as radical a sense as that of physical apprehension—that it is an evil impulse on the part of the Government to break up the villages and to turn
all
of England into a factory—to break up the home of the peasant—to work for the destruction of the Family. Two creeds combine to assure him of the malignity of this action.

    Laming is much younger than the other clergyman of whom I have written, much more the modern intellectual. His wife is a very handsome young woman, with the brave and simple carriage of the head, the fresh fair skin, of a pre-Raphaelite creation. So he is not, after all, alone in his village-school battle. And he has a perfect army of chickens, geese, ducks, and goats. This host is visible the moment you step out of the road into the Vicarage precinct. A background as reassuring as a private army. His wife rather weakened this impression for me, however, by complaining that he would never allow any of the birds to be killed!

    The London papers had most of them carried accounts of the struggle going on in the villages—for the vicar of Ketwood was not the only resister—against the closing of the village schools and setting up in their place of the “Central Rural Primary Schools”. Press photographs had made me familiar with the “dauntless breast” of this village champion. I had read how when the village school had been closed in accordance with the decree of the central authorities, the vicar, acting for the parents of the children, had set up a village school of his own in the Church House. That was about all I knew concerning my host (for as soon as we had reached his living-room he asked me if I would have lunch, and I most gratefully agreed to do so). My sociological curiosity had been aroused by this showdown between Family and State, one of the major issues in the present collectivization of our society, if it is not the greatest of all. Laming’s own words may be quoted in this connection. “In this small matter of the Parents’ School,” he writes, “we can see huge issues at stake.” And this is certainly no exaggeration.

    Later I shall be making use of his circumstantial report more fully, but at this point I will quote from the opening pages. It will provide what is needed by way of background to this storm in a tea-cup. Here are his words:

    “During the war, the village schoolmistress and her assistant were reinforced by a third teacher to deal with the evacuees. They had a hard struggle with the uncultivated city children. There is no one rich in the place, and the local people had known many years of acutest depression, but they retained a culture of the fields which had no trace of servility, or of city slickness. After the war, the headmistress was specially commended for her notable work. When we came to the village, the evacuees were leaving and the third teacher soon took another post. A scullery had been added and a sand-pit.

    “It would have been in 1946 that the children over eleven were suddenly told that they were to attend a central school, at Blatchover, to which they would be driven by car. This event caused little stir in the village, and mothers felt that their children would have better opportunities at a larger school. As it turned out, we should probably have been wise to have made a strong protest at the time: this would have been, I suppose, good politics.

    “This left about thirty children at the village school, and they were divided into two classes, the upper of which held children between seven and ten. The children left when they reached eleven. Several of the older children have told me, without being asked, that they would much rather have continued their education at Ketwood. I believe the head-master of Blatchover at the time, a man of great experience and ability, thought that they would have been as well in their own village. But working teachers have little say in educational policy. Some of the parents complained about their children having to wait for the car in bad weather. But parents have even less say in their children’s education than the teachers. The whole organization is in the hands of a few experts, assisted by an army of clerks. We were to learn what ‘Stateism’ could mean, and to hear a great deal about the ‘expert’ whose word was law.

    “But on the whole no one was very worried about the more distant education of the children over eleven. We still had our headmistress and her assistant, and the school was in excellent repair. When school time was over, the children had the freedom of many acres for their playground, and rarely abused it.

    “Early in 1947 we read in a local newspaper that Ketwood Council School was scheduled for closure in the Ladbrokeshire Educational Committee’s Development plan. This was the first warning, and the village reacted sharply.

    “It might make matters clearer to explain briefly the educational set-up of this county. The County Council has many committees, and one of the most important is the Education Committee. The Education Committee has power to co-opt, and divides the county into three for educational administration. The committee appoints an Education Officer for the County, whom we will call Mr. Ladbrokeshire, and officers in charge of each division. Ketwood falls into the mid-Ladbrokeshire division, and the immediate supervisor for education is the Mid-Ladbrokeshire Education Officer. These officers, needless to say, have a tidy salary, and the mid-Ladbrokeshire officer alone—Mr. Mid, we can call him—has thirty-two secretaries, housed in a Georgian mansion.

    “The teachers have no effective organization that deals with educational policy, nor do the parents. In other words, the children’s education is in the hands of a few ‘experts’ with a nominal check that the committee can apply. Committees usually back their paid officials, we found. The teachers have, if not a fear, at least a great respect for these officials, in whose appointment they have no voice and over whose policy they have no control. This, of course, robs the teaching profession of its integrity, and the officials doubtless know how to indicate the big stick of finance in their cupboard. All of the committee might be, or have been, practising teachers, but this does not prevent the profoundest cleavage between ‘expert-teacher’ and ‘working-teacher’. The expert is, in fact, master of the situation instead of servant, while the parents who might be allowed some ‘representation’ have no voice whatsoever.

    “The announcement about Ketwood brought a crowd to the Parish Meeting in March. Ketwood was then considered too small to have a Parish Council, so an elected chairman presided over our civil affairs assisted by a clerk. The previous year the parish meeting had been drowsy and poorly attended: a few desultory remarks about drains, an unhopeful question about electricity, and the re-election of the chairman had practically completed the business. It was the shadow of a lost autonomy. But in 1947 we had a topic, and all agreed that the school ought not to be closed. The Welsh fire of the schoolmistress’s husband had its rousing effect. He and I were selected to go into the matter. The meeting decided to send a protest to the Ladbrokeshire Education Authority, and to hold a parents’ meeting.”

    For the documenting of this account of mine I have happily been able to avail myself of the log of the dissident young parson. And wherever I can with advantage use the authentic delivery of the central figure in this little drama I shall do so. The above extract shows us exactly how the storm broke. We see the official army of secretaries, in their Georgian mansion, on the one side, and the handful of villagers, and the ill-paid clergyman upon the other. For we cannot suppose that Matthew Laming received any very substantial support from his diocesan superiors, since his bishop advised the diocese in a speech that “the lion’s tail must not be twisted too hard”. The lion, of course, in this case, was Britannic socialism.

    Let us now go back to the living-room of the embattled Vicar, where he sat curled up in a monstrous chair, like a squirrel in the bole of a tree, but unlike a squirrel surrounded, frame to frame, by a gallery of dismal Victorian portraits; there was not much in this poor Vicar’s living-room, except for the panelling of the portraits. Outside the windows swarmed all the cook-pot animals he has collected but refuses to kill—which is why there are so many. He will devour their eggs, but declines to murder them, which relates this Ladbrokeshire divine to St. Francis and I suppose the “Sons of Freedom” (Canadian Doukobors). Alas he is thin, very much too thin. As I gazed at this aesthetic, under-nourished figure I hoped that Providence would strike down a goose with lightning and his wife, pouncing on it with alacrity, carry it in triumph to the kitchen. In a lengthy circumstantial report of his struggle with the Government over the village school, he writes that he was “cleaning out the chickens” when I arrived. He was taken off guard, looking as present-day clergymen must always do except when wearing their Sunday suit. At first he was shy. When a little later he learned from me that I knew other clergymen he was more at ease, and ceased endeavouring to conceal a hole in the elbow of his shirt. He actually smiled with a flicker of mischief while I was narrating the sartorial plight of Rymer—not of course revealing my friend’s name nor the part of England where he has his vicarage.

    “Are you proposing to go through with this?” I enquired.

    He started as if I had awoken him by sticking a pin into his leg.

    “With…? Yes. At—at least I hope I can, you know.”

    Under similar circumstances what would be the attitude of a minister in the United States? It is, of course, not difficult to imagine the pugnacious poses, the jutting chin, the eyes narrowed to slits, the boastful words. He would “lick the pants off” the administration. This little Ladbrokeshire vicar had with great determination and considerable skill disputed the right of a well-nigh totalitarian government to start the work of liquidating the family in his village. But he allowed no trace of aggressiveness to appear in the deprecating angle of his head and the quietest, almost apologetic expression of his personality.

    His wife came in to say that lunch was ready. Her beauty looks as if it had been rarefied in the atmosphere of some mountain valley. We (which includes one of their two delightful children) ate our spam, an egg, an apple, very simple fare, though I was ashamed of eating it as I was well aware how limited was the larder of a poor clergyman in the Crippsian Ice Age. Battalions of geese waddled around outside, while fat hens pecked around the kitchen door, and the cocks crowed at the tops of their voices. Food on two legs was triumphantly vocal. It was like a meal with St. Francis in a time of dearth, but haunted by edible birds, which one knew to be a mischievous device of Satan.

    “So Cotton is your M.P.?”

    We were on our way back to the sitting-room, and I remembered I had intended to ask him about this.

    “Unfortunately, yes,” he said in a voice of resigned regret. “Cotton had a lot to do with framing the bill, in a pre-socialist administration, and with seeing that eventually it found its way into the statute book,” he told me mildly, and a little sadly.

    “However, there are just as many socialists all of whose instincts are Tory, as there are conservatives who would change England into a quite different country.”

    “I suppose so.”

    “Have you seen this mis-cast King’s Man, this conservative with socialist leanings?” I asked.

    “He came over here,” he told me.

    Apparently as a member for the Halchester division he thought he would come over and find out exactly what was happening in Ketwood. One day Laming found him on his doorstep. The politician asked the vicar to step outside and have a talk. Laming answered no—you come inside if you wish to speak to me. The politician preferred outside. He beckoned the frowning clergyman (for the Laming that is shown to me is not what a man whose foolishness had opened the gates to Abstraction would see). For some moments this “you-come-out—no-you-come-in” continued and then the “great man” became a little less great and went inside. There Laming reminded him of the part he had played in the passing of the Bill which decreed the centralizing of the rural schools. But here Mr. Cotton protested that he had not intended schools for the younger children to be interfered with. Subsequently in all Ladbrokeshire papers Cotton published the following statement: “In my view it is most undesirable that children of ten years old and under should be removed from their villages for instruction in regional Schools. It is most important that in those earliest years they should remain in the neighbourhood of their families, and not be taken away to an abstract centre where they become alienated from parental disciplines. This has always been my view: and it was the intention of those of us who were responsible for the act decreeing the new organization of rural education that the village schools where children of ten years and under receive their instruction should remain intact. It is for me a matter of great regret to see these original plans overridden.”