Becoming a Dragon
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BECOMING A DRAGON Alan Macfarlane CONTENTS Introduction 5 Origins 1 Whence I came 13 Going to School 2 Landscapes 21 3 Material Live 26 4 Sickness and Health 33 5 Dormitory Life 39 Dragon Alchemy 6 Philosophy 42 7 Culture 49 8 Society 61 9 Ceremonial 75 Passing Through 10 Early Years 84 11 Paradise 95 Classwork 12 Learning 107 13 Knowledge 123 14 Geography 131 Oral Culture 15 Lectures 143 16 Speaking 151 Creating Meaning 17 Arts, Music and Performance 160 Games for Life 18 School Games and Sports 172 Private Worlds 19 Reading and Films 190 20 Entertainments and Clubs 197 Recreation 21 Autumn 203 22 Winter and All the Year Round 214 23 Crazes and Hobbies 220 2 Reflections 24 Reflections on Myself 224 25 Reflections on the School 239 26 Afterwards 248 Bibliographic Note 251 Visual Essay 253 3 INTRODUCTION There are several questions behind this account of my five years at the Dragon School Oxford. One concerns who I was and how I came to be as I am. So this is the autobiographical quest for personal roots and identity. A second question concerns my family and its history. It seems that I come from a well-documented and interesting family whose tentacles spread across the world and can be traced in detail from the later seventeenth century. A third question concerns England and Britain. I came back from India when I was six and encountered a new land. I needed to start to understand its distinctive history and culture. My final question concerns the British Empire. Britain was just the small hub of a great empire for more than a century. The British created this empire, but equally it created Britain. It has a very distinctive character which makes it different from other empires in the way it worked and imagined itself. I am particularly interested in what held it together and how the identity of those who were involved with it, such as my ancestors, was constructed. Knitting all these questions together is an interest in how we are educated, in the broadest sense. So this book is part of a larger project to understand in a comparative way how education works around the world, and in particular in England and China. * I seem to have been interested in the evocation of memory from a relatively early period in my life. This partly explains why I have been reluctant to throw anything away. From my teens I had the idea that I would try to construct an ‘archive’ of my life and perhaps that of my relatives. So I hoarded toys, photographs, letters, writings, anything I could. This desire to hold on to the past is shown in an essay that I wrote when I was eighteen entitled ‘The past’. I shall just include the first paragraph to show my awareness, even then, of the importance of memory. ‘People often find tremendous pleasure in reliving the pleasures of past events, partly as I have already explained, because they are surveying it from a safe peak of knowledge. It is only when we are not fully conscious, however that we can be truly transported there again and feel every emotion that we once felt. We must not worship the past. It is dangerous to idealise it, and useless to live continually in it. It can be utilized as a springboard to the future, and for those who have had an unhappy life it may be the dim backcloth to the glorious future, but that is all.’ There is a comment by my teacher in red ink at the end: ‘One angle left out – the aged. What does it feel like, I wonder when all the major experiences of one’s life lie in the past? The sole adventure left, death.’ As I read this fifty years later it seems a pertinent remark. * In constructing this book I first wrote down everything I thought I could remember about this period when I was aged six to thirteen. I then checked this against the diaries, letters and school reports. This has thrown some light on the way in which my memory works. It shows that for this period, or at least before I was ten, without 4 supporting documentation almost everything would be irretrievable. There would be just a very few lightning flashes of memory, usually moments of high excitement or pain or effort. A.C. Benson beautifully describes these isolated moments. ‘Early impressions are like glimpses seen through the window by night when lightning is about. The flash leaps out without visible cause or warning, and the blackness lifts for a second revealing the scene, the criss-cross of the rods of rain, the trees shining with moisture.... So it is with memory; my early blinks are exceedingly vivid, but they are sundered, and though the passage of time does not dim them, as it dims the more fading impressions of later life, they do not form part of a continuous picture.’1 A second thing I have found is how faulty memory is, not usually in the experience itself, but in the surrounding details of when or where the event occurred or who was involved. I have re-contextualized many memories, when I caught my first fish at Oxford, when I learnt to cycle, when I stole from my grandfather. I have also had to revise my whole assessment of the degree to which I was unhappy at the Dragon School. What I regret is that even with the detail in the documents, so little new memory has been triggered. I have sometimes managed to capture again the ambient smells, sounds and feelings surrounding a photograph or a letter. Yet very often I feel I may be forcing or imposing memories now that I know an event happened. For, on the whole, I can recall very little of even major events of that time, like going to India for my eleventh birthday holiday, or singing in ‘Iolanthe’ when I was twelve. Yet gazing at my past as it unrolls in photos and comments it seems mainly to be the life of a slightly familiar stranger. I feel a little affinity, some ghostly overlap. Yet mostly it seems to be a different person. I recognize the little boy as someone I knew a very long time ago but have almost now forgotten. The past is not just a foreign country where they do things differently; it is inhabited by half-familiar ghosts of one’s younger self who seem disconnected strangers, yet are also part of oneself This again emphasizes the good fortune of having the photographs, letters and other documents. There are clearly some people who seem to be able to remember their early years in vivid detail – Lord Berners, Roald Dahl, W.H. Hudson, Naomi Mitchison, Muriel Spark to name but a few. I cannot do this and would never have felt it worth attempting this study of a growing boy if it had not been for the chance survival of these documents, the ‘paper trail’ as it is now called in our audit-ridden culture. Without the contemporary photographs, letters, diaries, school reports and other materials, I would be like an anthropologist who had done fieldwork in another society some sixty years ago and had destroyed all the fieldnotes. It would be an impossible task to write the ethnographic and anthropological account without the primary materials. Yet even with these sources, one needs constantly to remember that each of them is biased. Just to take one example, an over-riding first impression is of how insular the letters were. While Indian Independence and its aftermath rocked India, the Cold War and the Korean War rekindled fears of nuclear war in the late 1940s and early 1950s. These events, let alone the two elections which took place in Britain, there is only a small amount in the documents suggesting that they impinged on us. Yet I soon realized that, along with a slightly head-in-the-sand attitude which my mother admits to, there were also good reasons for this. Personal letters and diaries are not usually where you will find discussion of international or national politics or events 2 Naomi Mitchison, Small Talk: Memoirs of an Edwardian Childhood (1973), 63–4. 3 Vyvyen Brendon, Preparatory School Children: A Class Apart Over Two Centuries (2009), 29. 4 The Skipper, 11. 5 Mitchison, Small Talk, 60. 5 – unless they directly impinge on plans. This is worth remembering. The sources I have, like all historical documents, create a bias - in this case away from the general to the particular. Another bias lies in the letters that I wrote to my parents and grandparents. Addressing an adult, especially when one is still learning to control language, can lead into a kind of writing which conceals as much as it shows. How much of my own views and voice comes out of the letters, especially those written within the scrutiny of the Dragon School? I don’t notice much difference in my letters from home and from school to my parents. * The English preparatory school is a very unusual institution and it is difficult to analyze it from within. Though a number of authors have used a scattering of letters and diaries of preparatory school children, these are usually used illustratively and from a wide variety of different children, different schools and different periods in order to create a collage. This is a useful approach, but it is different from this account. In searching through my papers I have found over a hundred letters I wrote from the Dragon to my parents and grandparents.