I have been spending time with my childhood self and giving him some of the care and attention he did not have while at school. I tell him how grateful I am to him that, at school, he dealt, as well as he could have done, with the cold wind, the caning, the name-calling and the loneliness.
I thank him for having been a ‘tough little soldier’, because that is what was needed at the time. The idea of ‘resilience’ lay a long way ahead in an adult world, but when the headmaster pulled down my trousers to cane me on the back of my legs, I needed to grow a hard skin round my heart which can now be shed – like the locusts kept in the school science block used to shed their skins (they were harsh pets for a schoolchild to observe). They would sit in their heated-up cages laying waste to any vegetation, as it felt like the school was doing to us – ravaging our little lives.
As a child, I was number 60; now I am 61 years old. As a child, I was pushed into a fight just because I was large (Bouncing Blubber was my nickname). As a child, I was taken to another boy’s bed who writhed around on top of me.
As a child, I can’t have done too badly: another schoolchild told me that I was like Zebedee from The Magic Roundabout in the way that I dealt with things that went wrong, springing up from off the ground each time. My brother and I shared the experience together, and I was glad for him being there.
I tell my childhood self that now, half a century later, there is no need for him to look after me, his adult self: his job is done.
He has taught me valuable lessons of pragmatism and coping, but he doesn’t have to worry any more about me. He can let me go and I will be all right. The child becomes the adult; the adult cannot stay as the child.
I reassure him that I am not looking to leave him on the school steps once again, and drive off as happened all those years ago. He is I and I am he; we can have home time together without the school terms in between.
There are life lessons, that I learnt at school, which have stayed with me ever since. “If you can’t finish one job, try finishing another and then return to what you were doing before”, said a sports-master, watching me as I hunted for a missing games sock. “Excellence in one sphere encourages excellence in another”, would be the regular refrain from the headmaster – without a regular rhythm.
There are things I have learnt, as an adult, that I never knew as a child. Women are friends. They no longer wave you off to school but lie beside you in bed. Men are friends; they no longer name-call you but call you by name. ‘Home’ is a place of sanctuary – to return to not to be sent away from.
There are lessons from school that I still have to unlearn: life is not a competition. There is no need for the adult to compete for attention in the way that the child had to do in the rarefied loveless boarding school air. A child has to prove himself, an adult has simply to be himself.
Farewell and thank you dear child – you have been a good and faithful friend. After school-time adaptability comes adult acceptance. “It is as it is”, say the prisoners where I work as chaplain. I had epilepsy for 30 years and fell down but got up and ran 15 marathons. I married, and then married again: and I settle down with Sylvie’s faithful love.
I found my home in the church. The life that had been taken away in grey Sussex stone corridors, a dormitory bed and cold playing fields, became a life that was given away to the young, lonely, sad and hopeful.
I glimpsed God with Isaiah (chapter 6) on the steps of the Jerusalem temple, “Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God of Hosts… Woe is me for I am a man of unclean lips and my eyes have seen the Lord God of Hosts”. Isaiah, on the steps of the Temple, was I on the steps of the school watching my parents drive away. I could understand Isaiah’s God who was powerful and all-knowing and in the face of whom I quaked; that was my schoolboy self.
“Jesus loves me this I know, because the Bible tells me so”, “Gentle Jesus meek and mild” did not come to me so easily and maybe never has.
You can be proud of yourself my dear childhood self; “in my beginning is my end”, wrote TS Eliot, and it is no coincidence that the child, left on the school steps, crying, is now me, an adult caring for those left in prison.