Scholarship Revisited

July 5th 1976

I have just read through what I have written, and think I ought to say a little more about the two attempts at scholarship for a better education.

It reads, as I have written it, that I was sore about having failed. At this time I was disgruntled about the first exam for Whitehaven Secondary School. My youngest sister was attending that school, being paid for of course by our parents, and there were one or two other village boys who who went there each day by train. Perhaps the train attracted me at the time, I hardly remember but I would have liked to go to school there.

I was not at all jealous of Watson winning a place, although I and Parker and the rest of our school knew that he was quite the worst scholar of the three of us. He won and we lost and as far as I was concerned he must have done better than we two.

Looking back from 1976 I am not so sure. I've lived a deal longer and I've known some odd things to happen in relation to the way people are selected for various posts, and it isn't quite all fair and above board in commerce and industry. I doubt very much whether it was any different in the case of scholarships like that one.

However although I now realise what a vast difference it could have made to my life, I have never felt disgruntled or perturbed about it.

The Watson family were newcomers to our village and lived at a rather different social level to most of our school children, and we thought they sort of had a right to these kind of things. We lived a little in awe of them. There was still something of the squire and serf existing then, when one was supposed to touch the forelock as they passed. It died out very soon after in the north of England, but still existed here in Sussex when I first came to live here.

The other exam I remember more clearly, it took place twelve months later and once having done a thing, no matter what it is, one has a different approach to the second time.

I remember the maths I was asked to do in the headmaster's study, where we three boys sat, a little overwhelmed by the apparent grandeur. The maths were simple, and I was quite sure I had done very well in that subject.

The essay was on "Mining", a subject my father always avoided, not wanting me to be a miner. I remember quite well what I wrote about mining. How ill paid it was, how dangerous, what a poor job it was, in fact I gave quite a good impression of the just budding Labour Party's views about the whole subject. Quite the wrong attitude. But the attitude Father had instilled in my young head. Not the kind of attitude one would expect to hear in a school where only gentlemen's sons went. As I have said Father was the leading light in the local Labour Party, was Secretary and Treasurer and Chairman all rolled into one, and gave I believe a good account of himself on the various platforms, answering questions and such like.

I was always top of the class at school for essay and reading among a few other things, so I was not at all worried about that part of the exam at the time. The oral part only lasted about a quarter of an hour and I'm sure I would be very nervous about that part. Though not more so than the other two boys.

However I lost, and if I speak the truth now, it was with a sense of relief.

The Grammar School boys wore Eton jackets, and in summer a straw boater, and they were not allowed to mix with the village boys or even speak to them. How could I have lived in the midst of boys and girls I'd mixed with all my years at school and then suddenly not be allowed to speak to them? So you see I was glad I had not won, and foolish as it may seem to you, whoever you are who read this, it is just a simple fact.

True enough I wanted to play their game of rugby and cricket, and small bore shooting and golf and tennis and hockey, and swim in their baths and play a bugle in their Officer Training Corps. But walk up our village street wearing an Eton jacket and pinstriped trousers or a straw boater? Never.

Leave that episode for now, and if John wishes to tear this last bit out and burn it well do so, but it is more or less how things happened.

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