A Naked Ape in the woods
Exhibit: Nigel Lawson, Beechwood Park and Westminster independent schools
Extract…
He is very young (5 or 6), but he doesn’t know that yet. His parents take advantage of the Sunday morning baby-sitting scheme run by the local church, “Sunday School”. In return for a couple of hours off, a couple of hours of peace and quiet, the church gets the opportunity to indoctrinate impressionable young minds. It’s not a heavy-duty church, more of a C of E church “lite” that consists largely of biblical fairy tales involving talking snakes, giant slaying and boatbuilding that are indistinguishable from those about beanstalks and children in ovens.
He experiences a rites of passage only religious upbringing whereby the church provides sanctioned rituals for births, marriages, molesting and funerals plus the odd service commemorating something or other – or not. It was all based-on assumption. Not, ironically, “The Assumption” lauded by some theologies, but just the assumption that there is a god (who is obviously English), who lives in churches and whom you should pop along to placate (mildly) every now and then. That’s just the way it is, and should be, for ever and ever, amen.
Kent College is a Methodist school. Religious observances are required. These comprise:-
- Daily chapel assembly weekday and mornings (checking that god is up)
- Attendance at local church soul washing services on Sunday mornings
- Wearing of penance shirts all day Sunday (starched collars with studs)
- Writing a letter home on a Sunday morning
- Interminable school chapel on a Sunday evening
- R.E. classes
In the beginning, this all seems to require far too much time. But that’s just the way it is, that’s the system. Eventually, he, along with everyone else, complies without a thought. Sunday morning: get dressed (studded shirt collars, studded with what feel like sharpened neck rivets), breakfast, set-off across the fields to the local C of E church in Harbledown. A very high church into gowns and intoning.
Initially, he is fascinated by the incense burning swinging censer bowl carried by a man almost hidden beneath a gold encrusted carpet suit compèring the mood-setting incomprehensible chanting. Initially only lasts a few minutes before uncomfortable tedium sets in. In the early years, every Sunday morning is swallowed by the same ritual. And apparently, despite all this, we all remain incorrigible sinners. Result.
…
The school entrance exam days are Independence Days. Exam day is an annual event when the whole school has to go forth into the wilderness (or alternatively, Whitstable). Each child is given a small purse with which to buy food and drink for the duration. They then expedition off in clumps to go places and to do things. Peter, a uni-clump, hates these days, days when loneliness bursts out through the school gates into the outside world.
Learning from his previous eviscerating experiences of solitary wanderings in both geographical and psychological wildernesses, this time he has a plan. At the school book fair he had bought a copy of the Naked Ape by Desmond Morris that he has been saving for humiliation day.
The sun is shining. He buys a bottle of cider and a sandwich and retires to a clearing in the woods to read and to avoid the rest of the human race. He reads that baboons live in hierarchical troops ruled by an alpha male. He reads that the alpha male retains his place through aggression and violence. He reads that, when approached by said alpha male, the other baboons make submissive gestures to avoid becoming leopard meat. He reads these things and sees a chapel full of naked (but uniformed) apes where all go to make submissive gestures towards a virtual alpha male to avoid an eternal roasting. In that instant, he understands completely – and religion dies.
He lies on his back in the clearing in the woods in the expanding clearing of his mind. He feels the reality of the bunched vegetation pressing into his back. He feels the reality of having been bullied yet again. All those services with threats of punishment if unattended, all the threats of damnation. All based on bullshit. He lies there, feeling a creeping “safe” anger. This is an arena in which he can allow anger to rise and to show as it is a socially unimportant element of school life, unlike the anger he feels about the treatment from his peers. It is a safe domain like science or facts. The sun flickers through the trees, glinting on the NHS glass glazing that enables him to see clearly. He sees clearly, and what he clearly sees are baboons.
In chapel that Sunday evening he defiantly sits up straight during the kowtowing and says nothing, looking across the bowed heads, bowed in obeisance to the imaginary Alpha male in the sky. He feels liberated, he feels insightful, knowledgeable. He has seen through the trick to which they all remain in thrall. He can safely rebel, albeit a silent and ironic rebellion that sooths his soul.
…