Briefing for a Descent Into Hell (20 page)

I was restless and irritable—extraordinarily and unreasonably so, about the whole thing. And I was angry with myself for being like this. I liked what was being said. I liked the fact that all these young parents were proposing to put themselves out in time and expense to educate their children in ways the ordinary school system could not or would not do. I approved of you, the speaker, insofar as it was possible to see what you were like, behind the professionalism of your delivery. Yet I was seething with rebelliousness, with emotion—why
should
one always have to sit on hard chairs in a characterless hall to hear ideas discussed, why, when one wants to be a citizen and act with others, does it always have to be like this—and why should there always be this phenomenon, people weary and angry with what is provided by society, why did we take that for granted—that it was so
always
, always had been so, must be so. Why is what happens, what is provided, always so dull and flat and negligible compared with what any ordinary person in the street can imagine as possible and desirable—let alone these young professional parents, all rather highly educated, in the hall. Twenty years ago I had been part of such a group of young parents, on
behalf of my own children. Recently again, on behalf of friends’ children. But what we had dreamed of, and then discussed, and then planned, and then tried to put into action, had not taken the shape we had originally dreamed of. Not anywhere near it … There had been results, but nothing that even approached what we
knew
was possible. Why? What went wrong? What always went wrong? I was sitting very still between my host and hostess, sizzling with exasperation and rebellion and impatience, emotions all quite unsuitable for a retired head-mistress, when you said what struck me so deeply. I remember exactly what you said, because I was in a state of concentrated attention on what you are saying, in spite of my physical restlessness.

“Everybody in this room believes, without knowing it, or perhaps without having formulated it, or at least behaves as if he believes—that children up to the age of seven or eight are of a different species from ourselves. We see children as creatures about to be trapped and corrupted by what trapped and corrupted ourselves. We speak of them, treat them, as if it were possible to make happen events which are almost unimaginable. We speak of them as beings who could grow up into a race altogether superior to ourselves. And this feeling is in everyone. It is why the field of education is always so bitter and embattled, and why no one ever, in any country, is satisfied with what is offered to children—except in dictatorships where the future of children is scaled to the needs of the State. Yet we have become used to this and
don’t realise how extraordinary it is, and what the fact of it is saying. For it should be enough to teach the young of a species to survive, to approximate the skills of its elders, to acquire current technical skills. Yet every generation seems to give out a bellow of anguish at some point, as if it had been betrayed, sold out, sold short. Every generation dreams of something better for its young, every generation greets the emergence of its young into adulthood with a profound and secret disappointment, even if these children are in every way paragons from society’s point of view. This is due to the strong but unacknowledged belief that something better than oneself is possible. It is as if the young creatures of humanity grow towards adulthood in a kind of obstacle race, beset by hazards, with the adults trying futilely but gallantly to provide something better. Once adulthood is reached the newly grown ones join with the older ones, their parents, as they turn about and look back into their own infancy. They watch the infancy of their own children with the same futile anguish. Can we prevent these children from being trapped, and spoiled
as we have been
, what can we do … ? Who has not at least once looked into a young child’s eyes and seen the criticism there, a hostility, the sullen knowledgeable look of a prisoner? This happens very young, before the young child is forced to become like the parents, before its own individuality is covered over by what the parents say he is. Their ‘this is right, that is wrong, see things my way.’ This meeting tonight, of young parents joining together to try and provide something better, a better
‘education,’ was nothing more nor less than this phenomenon that repeats itself in every generation. Every person sitting there on hard chairs in front of you felt as if his or her potential had been left unfulfilled. Something had gone wrong. Some painful and wrong process had been completed and had left them, and even after an expensive schooling—most of those present were middle-class people—defective, unfulfilled, if not warped. And so we were doing only what every generation had done; we were looking at our children, as if they had in them to be—that is, if we could think of the right ‘education’ to give them—beings quite different from ourselves. They could be better, braver, gayer. Oh, and more, much more—we thought of them almost as if they were the young of another species, a free, fearless species, full of potentiality, full of that quality which everyone recognises, yet is never defined, the quality which all adults lose, and know that they lose.”

These were the things you said—and more.

It is odd that I can hardly remember what you looked like as you spoke. I know I was awake enough—but even so I didn’t have enough energy to take in what you said, and to calm my own restlessness, and to watch you closely. Yet it was a night when I was prickling with energy, vitality, interest—just because I was angry (if that is the right word) at being there
again
. What you said explained the feeling of sameness, the
againness
. Yet the words you used, the energy you put into them, what you were feeling about it all—and it was what we felt too, for the young parents were stirring and awake and
while they leaned forward on their chairs to look and listen, kept glancing at each other, even at people they hardly knew, to nod and smile as if to say: Yes, yes, that’s it, it is desperately true and we must not fail, we have to succeed this time … all this; the emotion or recognition in the hall was suddenly making us all alive. The sameness was gone. Our day-by-day selves were held at bay for a moment even while you said: Education means only this—that the lively alert fearless curiosity of children must be fed, must be kept alive. That
is
education. And, listening, we were lively and alert and fearless. Every one of us was soaked for that time with those qualities. Still stimulated, my friends and I drove back to their house. As we entered the living room, still warm and smoky from the early evening before we had left for the lecture, we began yawning. The stimulation was already gone. One of the children cried out in his sleep, and the father went up, while the mother said that she should take the child to a doctor, he was sleeping badly, was restless and had bad dreams. I understood that there was no connection at all between what was happening now—father going to soothe child, mother talking about doctor and medicines, and what these same parents had been feeling and aiming for even half an hour before, or even a few minutes before, in the car. It was all over. The time of being awake, of being receptive, of
being energetic
—had consumed itself. We don’t have much energy. Your words—or rather, what you had put into the words—had fed us, woken us, made us recognise parts of ourselves normally well hidden and
covered over—and that was that. The evening ended as it had begun, some adults in a livingroom, talking, drinking, smoking, discussing the projected weekend school for children, but as if it were just another of their far-too-many chores and burdens.

But I was awake. I was as if stung awake. I did not sleep. And I sat by the window that night and I thought: Don’t let it go, don’t forget it. Something extraordinary did happen. Perhaps during that night while I sat looking into a suburban garden, I was like a child of three, four, five, a creature quite different from the person she was doomed to grow into. I was certainly remembering what I had been as a small child. I remembered things I had forgotten for years. Before those “prison shades” had come down. Before the trap had shut.

And when I returned home to my flat in London it stayed with me. What stayed? Not the words that you used. It was the feeling of the quality of what you said. It went with recognition, as if I had been reminded of something I knew very well. I was possessed with a low simmering fear that I would forget again, let go—what I had been as a child. It was the same feeling one has after waking from a strong dream which one knows has importance for oneself, or for a friend. You wake fighting to keep the dream, its flavour, its texture. Yet within a few minutes of waking, that country of dream has gone, its taste and reality has drained away into ordinary life. All you have left is an intellectual conviction held in a set of words. You want to remember. You try to remember. You have a set of words to offer your friend,
or repeat to yourself. But the reality has gone, evaporated.

But I was remembering. It was as if, in any moment of the day that I chose to revive it, there was a bridge across from that heightened moment when you were saying things about the children, about all of us, and the pulse of the time I was in. I began consciously looking about me for that quality in other moments of life. Like testing one metal with another, ringing one substance on another apparently dissimilar. I had been stung awake by that night, and now I was restless and searching, and I was in a fever in case this restlessness might drain away like the afterglow of a useful dream and leave me tranquilly dead again.

Then, after weeks, something else happened. I’ll write it, but I can’t do more than put the words down. But it was another flash of recognition, of joy, of “yes, that’s it,” and again, this quality of matching, of ringing together, of substances being in tune, was here in this incident, exactly as it had been in those five or ten or thirty minutes when you were speaking of keeping aliveness and awakeness in children and at the same time you were feeding a whole room full of people with liveliness and wakefulness. If only for a few minutes.

I had been, as I’ve said, half unconsciously, looking, watching, trying to find that “quality” again. The quality to which I’d given the tag, “the wave-length.” For it was like suddenly touching a high tension wire. Of being, briefly, on a different, high, vibrating current, of the familiar becoming transparent. Well, and when it happened, I did not immediately recognise it, for perhaps I
had already made too much of a fetish of what you had made of that moment in the lecture room—I wanted the same thing to happen. When it did happen, it was ordinary, just as it had been with you, talking about education in a routine lecture. And of course, I did not expect it just there, was halfway through the moment before I recognised it, and might even, if I had not been suddenly stung into attention, have missed it altogether.

And again, I suppose it won’t seem much when I write it. Sometimes when you read a book or story, the words are dead, you struggle to end it or put it down, your attention is distracted. Another time, with exactly the same book or story, it is full of meaning, every sentence or phrase or even word seems to vibrate with messages and ideas, reading is like being pumped full of adrenalin.

Ordinary everyday experiences can be like that.

I was walking down the street outside London University. It was a late afternoon. May I think it was; at any rate, it was not yet summer. It had been raining. Things were glistening in the street lights. Do you find too that about the time the sun goes down the world gets brighter, and more intense. And sometimes very sad. Particularly when it has been raining. Well, I’ll get on—I know that atmospheres or sights that move one person leave another cold. I had been walking briskly to keep warm; it was a typical English spring day, as cold as winter! Outside the University entrance, which I pass often enough, since I live near there, I slowed and began glancing in at the great porticoes and pillars, the formal
pompousness of the place, and I was thinking that such impersonality, formality, is how one can most easily identify a place of learning—school, university, college, and that this atmosphere in itself must set a condition of thinking for a young person being educated in it. I saw a man come down those steps, but this was a time for people to be going home, and there was a steady stream of them coming across to the gates. I was looking at them idly and thinking how tinily unimportant these human beings looked beside the great cold buildings that were supposed to be their servants, and that no young thing learning there could ever believe that human beings are more important than their institutions. Words, teachers, textbooks could say one thing: the building itself shouted the opposite.

I was watching this man for some reason, and thinking that as I stood still I was getting cold. This was my strongest thought—that I was cold. At the same time I thought that I knew this man. All at once there welled up in me a strong feeling of knowledge of him—no, not just friendship, and remember that I am sixty years old, and not a romantic girl. I can’t say more than this: I can’t remember a time when I’ve felt so powerful a kinship with someone, as if I really knew someone through and through, and was linked deeply with him. As this feeling faded, leaving me rather astonished and even amused at it, I realised that of course I knew him: it was Frederick Larson. Perhaps you know the name? No, he is not a well-known person, but I do not think it is really a foolish question. For one thing, how often does one
say to a friend or acquaintance about another, Do you know so and so, and he does—improbably. But in this case there is more. It turns out that as we—I’ll explain the “we” in a moment, meet each other, and attract others, in fact we are already in the same orbit, if I can put it like that. We know each other, or have friends in common. The actual meeting is only a confirmation of an existing link. Anyway—Frederick knows your name, and your work, and he says that in fact he met you once, but there were people there—another lecture, it is doubtful you will remember, if you ever heard, his name.