The asylum has taken over the lunatics
Exhibit: Jeremy Hunt, Charterhouse independent school
Extract…
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Nothing Rhymes with Oranges
Firstly, “nothing” does not rhyme with oranges.
Secondly: Gorringes (after Frederick Gorringe, see below) does rhyme with oranges.
It’s 1964. He’s 11 and on the slippery slope to Kent College. This involves a visit to the school outfitters, Gorringes of London (a Harrod-esque establishment that closed in 1968), highlighting that the aspirations of the school were well above the actuality. The purpose of the visit was to purchase extremely expensive school uniform clothing, to wit:-
- Blue tweed jackets
- A badged cap (for purposes of embarrassment)
- A boater (see cap only more so – not be used until the 3rd year – which was confusing called the 4th form)
- White shirts and school ties
- Grey trousers (called “trysers” by the humble humbling shop minions)
- A full set of sportswear (some with badges), including the earliest recorded sets of striped woollen Ugg boots that are apparently supposed to be socks
- • Brilliant white circular garrottes with matching spikes (passed-off as “studs, young sir”). These were honed starched cloth collar knives intended to be attached to shirts for use on Sundays, both as a form of chastisement and as a statement of school pretentions. The word “chafing” did not do justice to the effect of the design. It was more akin to an attempt at a very, very slow circumcision by sawing with a piece of string. On the plus side, there wasn’t one. This weapon was discontinued after 2 years when the headmaster finally realised that the 20th century had already begun…
- Etc
He walks into the sizing area of the gentleman’s clothes department already feeling a foot shorter than when entering the building due to the smell of privilege pervading the place. The place is a dark wood-lined premonition of a new world where everyone is pinned in place on a disconcerting socially structured butterfly board he doesn’t understand and where even some of your clothes are your enemies.
Kent College, Canterbury
Founded in 1885, it was originally established as a Methodist boys’ public school (11 to 18 years). It admitted girls into the sixth form in 1973. “Girls, in the school, where you can see them, talk to them, get to know them? Surely not…”, and since 1975 it has been fully co-educational.
The senior school occupies a 70-acre semi-rural site on the edge of the city of Canterbury. It also owns the nearby Moat Estate, where there is a farm, managed by staff and pupils, with sports (punishment) pitches. These are adjacent to Blean Forest. Linked, though remotely, with a very long stick to prevent unsupervised contacts between boys and girls, with Kent College, Pembury, the equivalent all-girls school.
The buildings were a mixture of Victorian, classic concrete science block and one classroom block contrasting with the cloister corridors of the older block and “could have been built at any time” brick buildings arranged around inner and outer quads. A large green prayer mat in the form of a beautiful, pride of place hockey pitch and three similar standard grass tennis courts wrapped round two sides of the buildings. “Hear us, oh parent. These, the best hockey pitch and tennis courts in Kent, await your child. Render your child unto us.”
School motto: “Lux tua, via mea”, meaning “Good luck, you’ll need it…” [No doubt those who look up Latin will strike again…]…
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Reunion
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There’s a tea and cake event for returnees and a few ex-staff from our, and other era in a common room overlooking the playing fields. Unsurprisingly, the staff exes are now much older and much smaller. I listen to conversations, hearing renewed links between old boys and old teachers who had influenced them and supported them. I’m isolated by the lack of such experiences.
In a chair by the window, a sunlit wizened old man is holding court, enthusiastically oscillating his walking stick handle in reaction to having an audience. I drift towards this attractive scene, until I recognise the sadistic bastard that he was all those years ago. I’m tempted. I am oh so tempted to walk over. I am tempted to make my way over to them and say to him; “I knew you. You were an evil, sadistic bastard as a teacher”. To look him in his watery blue eyes as I overturn his twee and biscuit tableau.
But I don’t.
He’ll be dead soon.
We stand on the gravel outside the main entrance, most of my historical peers and I, milling a little, chatting a little. Some rekindling friendships or echoes of old acquaintance. I could enjoy the company of a few of them, and maybe I will try. Or maybe that would be too much of an effort. I leave early to catch up with Silvia in an old haunt pub in Canterbury.
“How was it?”
She has opened with a very difficult question that has a complicated set of several answers….
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