‘The scholarship boy,’ writes Hoggart, ‘has been equipped for hurdle-jumping, so he merely thinks of getting on, but somehow not in the world’s way … He has left his class, at least in spirit, by being in certain ways unusual, and he is still unusual in another class, too tense and overwound.’ I had forgotten this passage until I found it quoted in Injury Time, one of the commonplace books of D.J. Enright, who must also have found it relevant to his own case.
Things have changed since Hoggart was writing, and the boys in the play are more privileged than Hoggart, Enright or me, but I suspect hurdle-jumping hasn’t much changed, or the strain it engenders, though maybe it shows itself less in terms of class.
At Oxford in the late fifties some of the teaching I did was for Magdalen (which explains why it is occasionally mentioned in the text). One year I was also drafted in to help mark and interview candidates for the history scholarships. It didn’t seem all that long since I had been interviewed myself, and I was nervous lest my marks should differ from those of my more experienced colleagues by whom I was every bit as intimidated as the candidates were.
I needn’t have worried, though, as apart from the papers of authentic Wykehamist brilliance, the other promising candidates were virtually self-selecting, one’s attention always caught by oddity, extremity and flair just as Irwin foresees. Whether these candidates were genuine originals or (like the boys in the play) coached into seeming so, the interview was meant to show up, but I’m not sure it always did. It was the triumph of Irwin.
Candidates do well in examinations for various reasons, some from genuine ability, obviously, but others because doing well in examinations is what they do well; they can put on a show. Maybe it doesn’t work like that now that course work is taken into consideration and more weight is given to solider virtues. But it has always struck me that some of the flashier historians, particularly on television, are just grown-up versions of the wised-up schoolboys who generally got the scholarships (myself included). Here is R. W. Johnson, himself a historian, reviewing Niall Ferguson’s The Pity of War:
Both The Pity of War and the reception it has enjoyed illustrate aspects of British culture about which one can only feel ambivalent. Anyone who has been a victim, let alone a perpetrator, of the Oxbridge system will recognise Niall Ferguson’s book for what it is: an extended and argumentative tutorial from a self-consciously clever, confrontational young don, determined to stand everything on its head and argue with vehemence against what he sees as the conventional wisdom – or worse still, the fashion – of the time. The idea is to teach the young to think and argue, and the real past masters at it (Harry Weldon [Senior Tutor at Magdalen] was always held up as an example to me) were those who first argued undergraduates out of their received opinions, then turned around after a time and argued them out of their new-found radicalism, leaving them mystified as to what they believed and suspended in a free-floating state of cleverness.
(London Review of Books,18 February 1999)
I had friends at Magdalen who went through this dialectical debriefing in their first year and it used to worry me that nothing remotely similar happened at Exeter. Nothing much happened at all until my third year, when in the nick of time I began to get to grips with it myself. Still, I never thought of this as a proper education, just a way of getting through the examinations.
These considerations have acquired a general interest as history has become more popular both on the page and on the screen. The doyen of TV historians, Simon Schama, is in a league of his own, and his political viewpoint is not in the forefront, but the new breed of historians – Niall Ferguson, Andrew Roberts and Norman Stone – all came to prominence under Mrs Thatcher and share some of her characteristics. Having found that taking the contrary view pays dividends, they seem to make this the tone of their customary discourse. A sneer is never far away and there’s a persistently jeering note, perhaps bred by the habit of contention. David Starkey sneers too, but I feel this is more cosmetic.
None of this posing, though, is altogether new. A. J. P. Taylor was its original exponent, certainly on television, and was every bit as pleased with himself as the new breed of history boys. Still, with nothing else to put in the frame but his own personality and with no graphics and no film, he had perhaps more excuse for hamming it up a bit. His pleasure at his own technique, the flawless delivery (no autocue) and the winding-up of the lecture to the very second allotted were reasons enough for watching him, regardless of whatever history it was he was purveying. Even with him, though, the paradoxes and the contrariousness could get wearisome, certainly in the lecture hall, where I remember nodding off during one of his Ford Lectures.
Irwin’s career path might seem odd. Schoolmaster to TV don is plausible enough, but from lecturing about the Dissolution of the Monasteries to government spokesperson is a bit of a leap, though there are odder episodes in the early career of Alastair Campbell. No subject was further from my mind when I began to write the play, and it was only as I sat in on Irwin’s classes, as it were, that I saw that teaching history or teaching the self-presentation involved with the examination of history was not unrelated to presentation in general.
The rehearsals for the plays were unusual in that the eight young actors playing the sixth-formers had to learn not only the parts they had to act but also what they meant. The play is stiff with literary and historical references, many of which, at first reading anyway, meant little to the actors. The early stages of rehearsal were therefore more like proper school than a stage version of it.
They read and talked about Auden, a favourite of Hector’s in the play (though not of Mrs Lintott). Auden keeps being quoted, so we read and discussed some of his poems and the circumstances of his life. Hardy was another subject for tutorials, leading on to Larkin much as happens in the last scene of Act One. The First and Second Wars figure largely in the play, as they seemed to do on the classroom walls of the schools we visited to get some local colour before rehearsals started, so the period 1914–45 was also much discussed. I normally get impatient when there’s a lot of talking before rehearsals proper start, but with this play it was essential.
Maybe too, it says something about the status of the actor. Half a lifetime ago my first play, Forty Years On, though about a very different sort of school, was as full of buried quotations and historical allusion as The History Boys. Back in 1968, though, there was never any question of educating the score or so boys that made up Albion House School. We never, that I recall, filled them in on who Virginia Woolf was or put them in the picture about Lady Ottoline Morrell, Sapper, Buchan, Osbert Sitwell – to the boys these must have been names only, familiar to the principal players, John Gielgud and Paul Eddington, but as remote to the rest of the cast as historical figures in Shakespeare. This omission was partly because with only four weeks to rehearse there wasn’t time to tell them more, but also because in those days actors were treated with less consideration than they are now, at any rate at the National Theatre.
But these early rehearsals with Nicholas Hytner taking the class were a reminder that good directors are often good teachers (Ronald Eyre is another example) and that theatre is often at its most absorbing when it’s school.
Always beneath the play you write is the play you meant to write; changed but not abandoned and, with luck, not betrayed, but shadowing still the play that has come to be.
It is to Nicholas Hytner that I owe, among so much else, the idea for the original play, the one I didn’t quite write, as it first came to me when I was listening to him being interviewed by Michael Berkeley on BBC Radio 3’s Private Passions. Nick had earlier told me of his schooldays at Manchester Grammar School and how, having a good singing voice, he had sung in a boys’ choir with the Hallé under Barbirolli. I was expecting him to talk about this on Private Passions, but rather to my disappointment he didn’t. However, one of the records he chose was Ella Fitzgerald singing ‘Bewitched’ with its original Lorenz Hart lyrics, and it occurre
d to me at the time how theatrical this would sound sung by a boy with an unbroken voice.
This in turn took me back to my own childhood when, though I was no singer, I had been very slow to grow up, my voice still unbroken when I was well past sixteen. So one of the history boys as first written was a boy much as I had been, a child in a class of young men. Nick (whose own voice broke at twelve) thought that these days a sixteen-year-old boy with an unbroken voice was both unlikely and impossible to cast. This I could appreciate, though at the time I abandoned the notion with some regret.
The casting difficulty I can understand, but I don’t entirely agree that such late development no longer occurs. It’s true that today most children develop earlier, but the few who don’t suffer more acutely in consequence, and it certainly still happens. I knew one boy, the son of a friend, who matured every bit as late as I did, though he coped with it much better than me. Looking back, I see those years from fourteen to sixteen as determining so much that I would later wish away, particularly a sense of being shut out that I have never entirely lost.
As it is, Posner is the heir to the character I never quite wrote, a boy who is young for his age and whose physical immaturity engenders a premature disillusion. Watching Sam Barnett playing the part, I wince to hear my own voice at sixteen.
Radio and TV
Hymn
In 2001 the Medici Quartet commissioned the composer George Fenton to write them a piece commemorating their thirtieth anniversary. George Fenton appeared in my first play Forty Years On and has written music for many of my plays since, and he asked me to collaborate on the commission. Hymn was the result. First performed at the Harrogate Festival in August 2001, it’s a series of memoirs with music. Besides purely instrumental passages for the quartet, many of the speeches are under-scored, incorporating some of the hymns and music I remember from my childhood and youth. The text is printed here but not the musical directions.
And so through all the length of days,
Thy goodness faileth never.
Good shepherd may I sing thy praise
Within thy house forever.
Up the words come, unbidden, known but never learned. Some of that weightless baggage carried down the years, not from piety or belief, and more credentials than creed, a testimonial that I am one of those boys state-educated in the forties and fifties who came by the words of Hymns Ancient and Modern through singing them day in day out at school every morning in assembly.
It’s a dwindling band; old-fashioned and of a certain age, you can pick us out at funerals and memorial services, because we can sing the hymns without the book.
Alleluia alleluia,
Hearts to heaven and voices raised,
Sing to God a hymn of gladness
Sing to God a hymn of praise.
With me, there are hymns at home, too, because my father is an amateur violinist and on Sunday nights plays along to the music on the wireless, warming up with Albert Sandler and his Palm Court Orchestra then taking off with the hymn singing on Sunday Half Hour.
So hymns are him playing his fiddle. At one period Dad’s thoughts turn to something larger than the violin and he invests in a double bass, thinking to augment his butcher’s wages by working nights as a player in a dance band. One of the several burdens of wives are the hare-brained schemes of husbands, and my mother was never other than sceptical of my father’s money-making enterprises. Another had been the manufacture of home-made herb beer. This was referred to by Mam as ‘taking on Tetleys’ and the double bass period as ‘your Dad’s Geraldo phase’.
It means, though, that as a change from Sunday Half Hour the family are now mustered round the wireless and made to listen to Henry Hall and the Andrews Sisters.
Mares eat oats and does eat oats and little lambs eat ivy,
A kid’ll eat ivy too, wouldn’t you? Pom pom.
‘Did you hear that?’ Dad would say. ‘That’s the bass giving the beat! That’ll be me!’ It was difficult to enthuse.
To no one’s surprise, he never got far with the bass. Quite literally, as they often wouldn’t let him even put it on the tram. And just as the homemade beer saga had ended in the explosion of half a dozen bottles that practically wrecked the scullery, so the double bass era ended with a succession of rows with tram conductors after which Dad reverted to the violin.
Praise to the holiest in the height
And in the depths be praise.
In all his works most wonderful,
Most sure in all his ways.
The words are those of Cardinal Newman’s hymn but they are also part of Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius, heard first in Leeds Town Hall in 1952. I thought Elgar had missed a trick by not using the familiar tune and at its first outing in 1900 the audience had thought so too, and the general feeling then that this sublime work was a bit of a dud.
Most of my musical education was in Leeds Town Hall at weekly concerts by the short-lived (but to me always memorable) Yorkshire Symphony Orchestra. They excelled in English music – Delius particularly whom I was astonished to find had been born in Bradford. And George Butter-worth, too, from York who died on the Somme in 1916.
The cheapest seats and the school seats were behind the orchestra and here the double bass raises its ponderous voice again as our chosen perch was behind the basses. It was rather like watching the circus from behind the elephants. Hardly a lyrical instrument, the bass tends to attract players of a like disposition, dogged and even disenchanted with a robust no-nonsense approach to performance. Indifferent to applause, if we go on too long at the end of a concert, the principal, a Mr Campbell, turns round and says ‘Have you no homes to go to?’
At that age, though, we find this work-a-day attitude to music-making infectious. Sitting looking down on the conductor, we fifteen-year-olds are alert to pretension and subject the sometimes eminent musicians to our sceptical schoolboy scrutiny, grading them by the degree of their self-regard.
It isn’t just a matter of histrionics with the baton, as both Barbirolli and Sargent, for instance, go in for a good deal of that but they are not the same. Urbane, Brylcreemed and always with a carnation in his buttonhole and a wolfish smile, Sir Malcolm is an obvious showman. Sir John, unkempt and in a rumpled tail-coat with his bow tie on the skew and sometimes without his bottom teeth, seems entirely unselfconscious but he is a showman too – both of them putting on a performance. For me, always a sucker for the unassuming, it is Barbirolli who touches the heart and serves the music, unlike Sargent, who merely presents it.
So it is not just music that I learn, sitting on those harsh benches, Saturday by Saturday. Music in the concert hall is also a moral education, and watching the musicians at close quarters I realise that it is not just ecstasy and inspiration but that there is drudge to it too. Sometimes, the players would be on the same tram coming home, and I see that they are just like everybody else – shabby, in dirty raincoats and sometimes with tab ends in their mouths; ordinary people who, half an hour ago, were artists and agents of the sublime.
That music had nothing to do with showing off was, I see now, one of the lessons my father had been wanting me to learn when I was ten years old when he tried to teach me the violin. He knew instinctively that art has not much to do with artistic, and that there was no need for a lot of carryon, or, as Dad always put it, ‘a lot of splother’.
His violin case is deceptively ordinary, battered even, and kept in my parents’ bedroom, which is where my father generally does his practice. Having made sure that he is out, I lay the case on the bed, unflip its two catches and open the lid to reveal, snugly couched in velvet, this glowing tawny thing. It is like coming on a newly fallen horse chestnut, the neat housing split to reveal the conker’s wet gleam. I stroke the coved back, grained as if with spine and ribs, hold the scrolled head in my hand and feel its weight, running my fingers round the piped and scalloped edge and peering through the S-shaped holes into its dark interior.
Mounted on the underside of t
he lid is the bow and that too is finely done, the handle inlaid with mother-of-pearl, the end tipped with ivory; so pampered this instrument seems to me to be, so lavishly appointed, with nothing spared for its protection and comfort, that even my looking has to be hurried and furtive knowing that if my father catches me at it, I shall be in trouble. ‘It’s not a toy.’ But I don’t think of it as a toy either. It is the most luxurious object in the house, and sensitive to the spell it casts, I see myself playing it – even pretend to, in front of the dressing-table mirror.
So I ask to learn. I’m a clever boy. I am sure it will not be hard.
‘To begin with, you don’t hold it like that, you hold it like this.’ He takes the bow out of my ten-year-old hand. ‘Just do it naturally.’ He bends my fingers round the handle of the bow, covering my hands with his big butcher’s hands, standing there in his shirtsleeves and shop trousers and smelling of meat. We are in the hot attic under the roof with the half-size violin I have to learn on, nothing like as glamorous as his, a chipped, unpolished brown little thing that looks as though it can’t produce a note.