The Cantuarian 2017

CANTUARIAN | 2017

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King’s Week Drama 2

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CONTENTS Rat Race Flossie Walker 6 Double Act Graham & Charlie Sinclair 14 Powell to the People Ned Allen 16 A Week in the Country Sebastian Barker 23 75 Years Since Braving the Blitz Oscar Saarbach 24 Who Wears the Trousers? Various 28 The Day Canterbury Turned Red Mark Bäcker 30 Other Lives (The Army) Adam Vintner 36 Desert Island Discs Music Department 38 Chef’s Table Interview with Andy Snook 40 Pets As Therapy Katie Zuo 46 The Good Life Rachel Phipps 50 We’re Buzzing Helen Cunnold 56 In the Blood: William Harvey Jebin Yoon 60 Mint Yard Ed Barlow 63 No Cheating Stuart Ocock 67 A Brave New Caledonia Lily Begg 70 Articles from the Archive Mark Bäcker 80 No Place Like Home Alfred Lindman 84 Cathedral Graffitti Matt McCardle 88 Reformation 500 Eimear Pickstone 90 The Chilcotts The Chilcotts 94 60 Not Out: David Gower 95 The Bookseller’s Tale Martin Latham 96 Literary Quotations Caspar Latham 102 A New Age Jim Boyd 106 A Musical Life Nick Todd 110 Development: International College Geoff Cocksworth 114 The Art of the Bookbinder Isabella Snow 116 Other Lives (Law) George Harrison 122 The Big Smoke Jessica Madavo on Hermione Sharp 125 Walpole’s Hidden Gems Sophia Putterill 126 Jewels from the Archive Peter Henderson 132 Development: The Malthouse Rebekah Beattie 134 Other Lives (Television) Alanna Fraser 139 Granta Rupert Davis 140 The Red Shop Charles Griffin 142 Development: New Science Building Louise Comber 144 A Sealed Box for Xanthi Sebastian Barker 146 Wyndham Le Strange Buys the School Alex Preston 149 Against Seriousness Sebastian Barker 160

CONTRIBUTORS Editors Mark Bäcker, Anthony Lyons Photographer Matt Mcardle Designer Cobweb Creative Archivist Peter Henderson Illustrator Jason House Printer Lavenham Press Editorial Advisors Holly Barton, Will Flint Three Wise Men Ian MacEwan, Kieran Orwin, Peter Roberts Cobweb Creative yvonne@cobwebcreative.org www.cobwebcreative.org @cobwebcreative Lavenham Press 01787 247436 www.lavenhampress.com Matt Mcardle Photography mattmcardle13@mac.com Jason House jason@greydogdesign.co www.greydogdesign.co @grey_dog_design The Cantuarian info@cantuarian.co.uk CANTUARIAN | 2017

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editorial Mark Bäcker

Continuity is widely thought a good quality. Having seen their summer cricket ground, The Mint Yard and its impeccable wicket, bulldozed to serve as a base for building projects, the residents of School House and Galpin’s would certainly agree.

However, when it comes to the last few editions of The Cantuarian, whether in their unfailing praise for sports teams who lost all their matches but showed great spirit, or their long-standing service as door stops, continuity takes on a different meaning.

produced equally good articles. Many contributors explained that their enthusiasm sustained them when writing, and their mercenary motives, once undermined, made it harder for them to get going again. As a result, the difference came only in the punctuality of their submissions rather than their quality. I won’t say which type of contributor I am.

This year also heralds the involvement of parents and sees many more OKS contribute than in the past. This is something I find weird, but am slowly coming to terms with. Speak to most 6a (Year 13) pupils and I expect most will deny any chance of Like the girls who welcome the new rule allowing their return to or involvement in the school once them to wear school trousers, The Cantuarian they have left. I’m also assuming that they would has embraced change. To give a more fulfilling probably laugh at the prospect of writing something account of our school and community, this edition for their son or daughter’s school magazine, if looks into history, the lives and work of former they even considered it within pupils or members of staff as the realms of possibility. So why well as features of Canterbury ‘Like the girls who are parents and OKS getting considered important. In what involved? Funnily enough, when we hope will combine to prompt welcome a new rule a parent working as a QC offered student praise of the highest to write something I didn’t ask, order, such as ‘That Cantuarian allowing them to ‘Wait. Really? You actually want thing is actually alright, isn’t it?’, wear school trousers, to?’ Without going too far into even ancient religious graffiti is cheesy territory, this suggests in the mix.

The Cantuarian has that our school is quite special.

The same can be said about For the first time in The embraced change.’ our community, considering Cantuarian’s history, current our local MP Rosie Duffield’s school pupils have been able to willingness to be interviewed and the readiness of contribute freely. The resulting dialogue between establishments around Canterbury to welcome in my peers and myself has been interesting. Some The Cantuarian’s writers. wrote altruistically and were able to reconcile the task with other commitments. Others, hit This edition also sees members of staff sharing harder by university applications, were attracted things about their past lives outside school. This by a confused desire to spice up their personal promises to offer a refreshing perspective and will statements and a genuine interest in writing. hopefully confirm the saying that everyone is good Members of this group often suffered a crisis at something. If the sight of temporary classrooms of confidence when they realised that writing outside the Shirley Hall shocks you, why not restore an article is not a free pass to their university calm with one of Mr Ocock’s Maths questions? Or of choice (sorry, future editors). Yet contrary to maybe try comforting your senses with one of Mr what one might expect, these circumstances Snook’s menus.

Less successful sporting teams aside, should you want to read about this year’s extra-curricular stuff, it will be online in all its glory. To name but a few, the successes of Millie Knight, the Crypt Choir and the School Play await.

Mark Bäcker (6a School House) Student Editor The Cantuarian

Andy Snook (Page 40) 4

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Rosie Duffield MP (Page 30)

Flossie Walker (Page 6)

The Art of the Bookbinder (Page 116)

Charlie Sinclair OKS (Page 14) CANTUARIAN | 2017

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T A R R AC

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Flossie Walker OKS never

expected to become a classic car journalist but she says life is better without a map.

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t’s 1.30am and I can’t remember how long I’ve been awake. I’m straddling a fence with my foot hooked around a tree root for balance, holding a camera up to my face. I can hear the low grumble of a finely tuned engine muscling its way up the steep road behind me. I twist to track the headlights diffusing the darkness of the mountains. Time speeds up as the car gets closer. Now I can see it’s the car I’ve been waiting for. I hold my breath and hold my finger down, taking a continuous stream of shots. The red Mini slices through the icy corner and vanishes into the pine forest of the French Maritime Alps.

‘content’ free on the internet. Most editors who get to go on trips like that one (they very rarely send their freelancers on stuff like that, saving the best for themselves) ignore the one thing they tell their writers – find the unique angle. I try to do it, literally, with my photography and my writing. It’s what will make my work stand out and ultimately be more engaging, and should make me invaluable to a media organisation.

I had wanted to become a writer for years but I wasn’t sure what I wanted to write about and I was also keen on making a living. I spent most of my 20s doing neither – ‘Everyone else has bouncing around and having gone to bed but I’m ‘experiences’ that have I check the photos. This wasn’t the right camera for up, huddled next to ultimately made me and the job. The glass is fast, my writing more varied. In a power outlet to but not fast enough for the end I played off the fact charge my phone, working in pitch black with I wasn’t being paid to get only one street lamp and further than I ever imagined uttering curses snow to reflect its orange I could. By agreeing to work under my breath.’ glow for light. But I’ve got for free, or for very little, I something. It’s not a clean learned to live off my charm image – some of my practice and my energy. In the end, shots were cleaner – but it’s good enough. it’s turned into a full-time job. I work for a I download the image onto my phone, edit company (owned by one Jeremy Clarkson) out the sodium orange tinge and attempt to as the point of contact for manufacturers, send it off to my editor in California, 5000 but it’s difficult to give my day-to-day job a miles away. Everyone else has gone to bed definite description.  but I’m up, huddled next to a power outlet to charge my phone, uttering curses under my breath while I try to send 3.2 MB with a patchy internet connection.

I’m an auto-journalist but I feel like a fraud saying that. The night I was trying to get a shot of the 1967 Monte Carlo rally car passing through Col de Turini is a pretty typical experience for a car journalist, or has been for me, anyway – far from home, ill equipped and lacking what is vital to all new media journalism, WiFi. The press is old school and competes with a rising tide of

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‘I began to hustle with aplomb. I went to the Cannes Film Festival with a press pass, a small suitcase full of evening gowns and nowhere to stay.’

Officially I’m Key Accounts Manager, but I could easily be called Head of Marketing or the CEO’s executive assistant. My job means that I write, take people to dinner, act as a senior sales person, travel, train people how to take beautiful pictures with their mobile phones, organise large fancy dinners, learn German, produce videos, present to camera, and race cars.

This is not what I wanted to do when I left school. I wanted to read PPE at Oxford, join the Foreign Office and become Chancellor of the Exchequer, or something incredibly dry like that, in order to please my father.

After I didn’t get into Oxford, I read Anthropology at UCL but it was really an education in London. I took my Anthropology degree and got into Bristol to read Medicine because I decided that if I wasn’t going to be Chancellor of the Exchequer I would be Chief Medical Officer in the British Army.

That also, somehow, didn’t happen. Then I thought maybe leaving everything serious behind would be a good idea and got married to a musician, which ended in divorce. With no professional training to speak of and a reluctance to spend money I didn’t have on training, I began writing film reviews, unpaid, for a blog. They sent DVDs to me and me to

press screenings in exchange for 800 words that were sometimes sensical, occasionally funny and rarely professional. I loved it.

Maybe it was the divorce that made me realise the only person who was going to look after me was myself and that, if I wanted to get anywhere, I’d have to begin taking what I wanted for myself and be extremely selfish. I began to hustle with aplomb. I went to the Cannes Film Festival with a press pass, a small suitcase full of evening gowns and nowhere to stay. I stayed the entire two weeks and ended my trip partying on an F1 team yacht in Monaco for the beginning of the Grand Prix.

As they say, one thing led to another. A book review I wrote got picked up by GQ, who offered me a weekly slot. It paid £50 a week and was the first time I was paid for my writing. In exchange for the abysmally low wage I was promised I’d be sent on fun press trips. I could write about anything, my editor told me, as so long as it was about sex. I dissected my Socio-Biology essays from university and picked out anything that tried to explain any aspect of sex (most of it) and applied it to humans.

I wasn’t happy with being identified as a sex writer. It draws the wrong sort of attention.

During a press trip to interview John Malkovich for GQ in LA I met the Editorial Director of a classic car magazine who suggested I try writing about cars. I resisted for months. I didn’t know anything about 

‘I had no idea I would end up working within 18 months for one of the most well-known personalities in autojournalism.’

8 in white CANTUARIAN Flossie

| 2017

The 2016 Mille Miglia vintage car race passing through San Marino, Italy (Flossie snapped this with an iPhone) CANTUARIAN | 2017

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‘The vast expanse of possibility was better than the harrowing certainty of knowing exactly what would happen tomorrow.’

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cars. But after a drive in a Porsche 356 from St. Tropez to Nice I decided they were worth learning about. I had no idea I would end up working within 18 months for one of the most well-known personalities in auto-journalism. I think if I had I wouldn’t have agreed to drive the car.

Having spent so long being worried and anxious about not following a traditional career or set path because I would disappoint my father, the other week he told me a story. When he worked in the Foreign Office and was on placement at the embassy in Washington D. C., he stuck his head out of his office one day and looked down the corridor. The offices were laid out in order of seniority, with four offices in between him and the ambassador. He saw his career stretch out in front of him. He went back to his desk and filed his papers for resignation. He wasn’t sure what he’d go and do but the vast expanse of possibility was better than the harrowing certainty of knowing exactly what would happen tomorrow. 

Florence Walker was at King’s from 2002

to 2007. She read Anthropology at UCL and has tried working in finance, the art world, the charity sector and architectural model-making.

In 2016 she went to the Cannes Film Festival on a forged press pass and has never looked back. She’s written about film, sex and cars for GQ Online, Petrolicious, The Times and The Evening Standard. In October she will start an MSc in Epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and hopes to focus her journalism on global health.

@floxxiewalker

2017

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Flossie Walker OKS

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‘I didn’t know anything about cars. But after a drive in a Porsche 356 from St. Tropez to Nice I decided they were worth learning about.’

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GRAHAM

C

harlie was a curious and sociable boy.

When he was three it was common, after we had briefly lost sight of him, to find he was chatting away with strangers on the campsite or engaged in deep conversation with someone in the supermarket. So it was a pleasure taking him to the junior gym, while he was still at nursery school, where he made friends quickly. His birthday parties were always full and fun. At prep school in London sport and music became the centre of his life. A member of Teddington Rugby Club, under my coaching I am proud to say, Charlie first played in Twickenham Stadium at the age of seven.

Double Act Charlie Sincliar OKS and father Graham, former Director of Drama and Head of Admissions, each consider the other’s role in Charlie’s education.

As a family we made the happy move to Junior King’s when Charlie was in Year 4 and the trumpet was his main instrument, having moved on from the piano and violin. Singing and acting also featured heavily and so it was that Charlie auditioned for the part of Gavroche in The King’s School production of Les Misérables and played the part happily at The Marlowe Theatre. I had no influence on his casting, leaving the decision to Howard Ionescu, the Director of Music. Charlie then became Head Boy at The Junior School before embarking on life at King’s. Acting, sport and music were always Charlie’s main enthusiasms and he took a full part in the opportunities King’s presented – and there were abundant opportunities. I had the great good fortune to teach Charlie throughout his five years at King’s and we had great fun in classes. The banter was relentless. King’s Week was big for Charlie and the number of performances he gave grew year by year.

In the end he had to decide where to put his energies, and the electric guitar came first. With Jazz and Rock in his background, he realised that to compete with the very best and get into The Royal Northern College of Music, he would need to make sacrifices. Rugby was the first to go – a good decision when Crypt Choir, King’s Men, Madrigalia, Big Band, Jazz Band and Rock Band, alongside his A Level subjects of Music, Music Technology and Theatre Studies, meant his diary was already full.

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Charlie has settled very quickly into life at The RNCM, the only conservatoire for electric guitar in the country.

His training at King’s means he’s been ready for the challenges Music School has thrown at him and has so far made the most of his chances. His own band, Sylvette, performs often now, and he has already been on stage with the legendary New Order.

I’m sure some day we’ll find him once again chatting to strangers on a future campsite.

CHARLIE

M

y earliest memory of dad supporting me is when he coached my first rugby team. I was only six but rugby was my passion and he found that exciting.

Indeed any passion of mine quickly became his, and the same went for my brother, Toby. Dad just loved seeing us find enjoyment in life. It was brilliant having him back me on the sports field because I could talk to him about the game to an extent that would bore most people. It was the same when, in the end, music took over my life and I became obsessed with the guitar.

It was important to be able to talk to someone who understood.

At the age of ten I auditioned for the part of Gavroche in my dad’s production of Les Misérables. I got the part but he was brutal. In my very first rehearsal he made me perform, in front of the cast of 100, who were all at least ten years older than me, the scene in which my character is shot dead. But the harder he worked me the more I fell in love with the production and I really felt like I was involved with something special. Of course, I got the theatre bug and all I wanted to be was an actor.

My dad really changed my life when he bought me a guitar. I had just turned thirteen and was getting more and more proficient at the ukulele. I didn’t ask for a guitar, but he could see that for me it was the next stage. From that moment on he was with me every step of the way. At every gig he was the first person there, helping me set up and (embarrassingly) taking control of the sound-checks.

Charlie Sinclair was at When I moved into producing my own songs I asked him for advice all the time and he never once said he didn’t want to listen. As soon as I had something I wanted to share I would seek him out, whatever he was doing, even if it meant waking him up from a nap to show him a new idea for a bridge! He always made me feel that my art was more important than anything else and he often put it before things in his own life.

And so I came to believe that making music was vital, and that spending whole days doing so wasn’t a waste of time. Now that I am a third year at The Royal Northern College Of Music, he is no less helpful and influential in my career. During the last year I have recorded my first full-length LP, and every time I’ve been unsure of anything he

was the first person I called. Whether the issue is personal, commercial or musical, he always gives the best advice.

Without this support from my dad I wouldn’t be where I am now. I just wouldn’t have the confidence in my artistry. As an actor he has spent a lot of his life thinking about his artistic philosophy and he shared this with me even when I was tiny. So I have thought about such things from a very young age and now all the music I create is at the centre of my own artistic philosophy. Because of my dad, everything I create has to be something with real meaning, and with true emotion at its heart.

King’s between 2010 and 2015.

While still at school, he began composing a score for the feature film Marriage. In 2017 he was awarded best score at the New York and EIFA film festivals. He formed the band Sylvette after being accepted into the Royal Northern College of Music to study guitar. On 20th April 2018 Sylvette will release their debut album and embark on their first UK tour. While at the RNCM he also played with New Order at the Manchester International Festival as part of the Synthesiser Orchestra. In May 2018 Charlie will go on tour with New Order to Austria and Italy.

‘His training at King’s means he’s ready for the challenges Music School has thrown at him and has made the most of his chances.’

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P

to the

e l p eo

NED ALLEN (6b

Carlyon) claims the finest

film by his favourite film director is a tribute to Kent and its finest city.

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A Matter of Life & Death

F

ilm director Michael Powell OKS (19051990) is widely considered a genius. Most of his famous works – The Red Shoes, Black Narcissus, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp and A Canterbury Tale – were produced in collaboration with Emeric Pressburger.

I was introduced to Michael Powell at the age of 11, when my family forced me at Christmas to watch my first black and white film. Back then I didn’t feel entertained by A Canterbury Tale at all. I had to watch it only because I happened to go to school near Canterbury at the time. However, it stuck in my memory, then grew on me, and here I am.

Unlike most filmmakers, Powell captures characters that fully mature only in afterthought. Many modern filmmakers, attention spans being limited, merely shock and thrill to maintain healthy box office. But Powell, though he too can shock and thrill, was less concerned with ticket sales and relies on subtle suggestiveness to engage his viewers, even in his most experimental filmmaking.

Powell is also unusual because many of his finest works were collaborations. The relationship between Powell and Pressburger was remarkable, not only for the quality of their work, but also for how long their partnership lasted. Over the course of 23 years they produced twenty films, which constitute most of Powell’s influential work, except perhaps Thief of Bagdad and Peeping Tom. All of their films are credited as ‘written, directed and produced

by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’ but the truth is that Pressburger wrote and Powell directed. Little is known about the exact workings of their unique partnership, except that each artist 18

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‘Powell, though he too can shock and thrill, was less concerned with ticket sales and relies on subtle suggestiveness to engage his viewers.’ was known to value highly the talents of the other.

Powell claimed, ‘Pressburger fuelled my desire for film. We had a marvellous relationship in which we could bounce ideas off each other and always come up with something.’ Although as a director Powell had the more powerful and marketable role, the fine balance between technical cinematic finesse and literate dialogue depended on a collaboration of true equals.

Although he said, ‘I am not a film director with a personal style; I am the cinema,’ and his style is indeed Black Narcissus

‘This study of ballet’s fatal intensity, and the tyranny of artistic perfectionism, breaks the bounds of conventional cinema.’ varied, Powell’s use of colour, especially red, and a sparing use of shots, are the trademarks of his approach. Also, his camerawork is always deliberate and considered. Many filmmakers use excessive shots to create dramatic effect but Powell uses, in many of his earlier films especially, little camera movement, almost as if the camera is painting a scene.

Powell experimented throughout his career, with mixed results. Ill Met by Moonlight sticks to a solid plot with few innovative cinematic techniques, which results in a pleasant but ultimately unremarkable Second-World-War film that is conventional and unadventurous.

But Powell’s ideas always come across most remarkably when the film challenges its audience. For example, in The Red Shoes there is a fifteen-minute ballet sequence devoid of dialogue halfway through the film. The idea behind this soon becomes clear. A young aspiring ballet dancer is offered her first lead role in a ballet called The Red Shoes. She plays the part and becomes a star able to pick any role she likes but this role grasps her with almost supernatural power, and a desire to re-perform The Red Shoes takes hold of her with demonic intensity. Possessed by a need for perfection, to achieve artistic heights ever higher than the previous performance, she is wholly subsumed by the role. Faustian possession then destroys the key relationships in her life and crushes her spirit. She ends her life before the final performance.

This study of ballet’s fatal intensity, and the tyranny of artistic perfectionism, breaks the bounds of conventional cinema, drawing a unique analogy between dancing and acting, choreographing and directing, and ballet and cinema, until the film meditates paradoxically on the inherent destructiveness of the creative impulse. The shoes that dance the lead dancer to her death are shoes that she coveted and yearned to wear, but they are ominously bloodred. Early in the film this red is bright and lively, full of hope and energy, but later on the red contrasts strikingly with dark backgrounds and becomes over-saturated and sinister. An object of passionate desire has become the agent of destruction.

his viewers to judge. This unique neutrality is consistent throughout his work. For example, the stupid Colonel Blimp has redeeming features. He maintains a friendship with a German, formed earlier in his life before the war, which reveals a gentle and endearing decency that saves the character from buffoonery. Indeed no Powell character is ever portrayed in metaphorical black and white, and no characters in his films are evil. Even the most extreme character, Mark in Peeping Tom, who is a psychotic, murderous man, is not damned by an intrusive moral slant but presented in the round as a morally complex organism. The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp succeeds in a frank and authentic presentation of an aging officer because of Powell’s entirely objective approach to characterisation.

Female rather than male characters dominate the equally remarkable Black Narcissus, the end of which is more tragic than uplifting. But Black Narcissus is also deliberately melodramatic, exploiting claustrophobic, violent imagery designed to thrill. Watching this after Blimp shows just how versatile Powell really is. Yet both share magnetic, faulty characters (Blimp and Sister Ruth), who are the anti-heroes of both films and part of a naturalistic balance Powell always adopts where human foibles are concerned.

The Red Shoes

The Red Shoes

‘Black Narcissus is deliberately melodramatic, exploiting claustrophobic, violent imagery designed to thrill.’

Black Narcissus

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp is epic in proportion, the depiction of a man’s whole life in just over 2½ hours. Powell’s characterisation in this film is unusual for the time because, although the main character shows abject incompetence as the leader of men going to war, Powell eschews a moralistic stance and leaves CANTUARIAN | 2017

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‘I feel a close connection to this Powell masterpiece, since it shows what my life might have been like 75 years ago.’

But in the end no Powell film rivals the emotional sway of A Canterbury Tale, a film dedicated to the Kentish countryside and its ancient city, where Powell spent his childhood. The film depicts the pilgrimages of four main characters who journey to Canterbury and experience miracles in some form. Through an explicit nod to Chaucer’s works, their journeys explore Powell’s childhood memories of sweeping English countryside.

And this is where I come in. Shots linger over hills I have climbed, train stations where I have waited and a cathedral I have visited many times.

The fictional Chillingbourne, an imaginary blend of Sittingbourne and Chilham, is a village with characters unaccustomed to outsiders and a police force unaccustomed to crime, producing an affectionate satire on bumbling Englishmen and their eccentric rustic lives.

At the start of the film a woman is attacked by The Glueman, who pours glue in her hair. This odd crime catapults the action into motion, with the pursuit of The Glueman the initial impetus and focus. But the ideological thrust, which is in fact an admiration for the beauty of Kent, quickly marginalises and then dismisses this plotline, so our investment ends up being irrational, spiritual, supernatural and emotional. This odd

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development has provoked critical disdain but the true brilliance of the film lies not in plot but in soul. This film is a tribute to Canterbury, which grows lofty and ends with social and psychological divisions resolved through the optimism of a fairy tale that captures Powell’s magical and ideological view of Kent. In some places it is almost as if Powell has shot a promotional film celebrating the county.

I feel a close connection to this Powell masterpiece, since it shows what my life might have been like 75 years ago. A particular shot in the film anticipates the view I see every day when my train pulls gently into Canterbury West Station: a series of clustered, mangled buildings flit past the window and a view opens up right down the High Street, revealing Westgate Tower. And there, on the screen and in my mind’s eye, are the fields of Kent where both Powell and I grew up, a city

‘Shots linger over hills I have climbed, train stations where I have waited and a cathedral I have visited many times.’ we have visited daily, a school and a cathedral we have shared. Powell’s film expresses my own deep affection for these places.

Powell’s films remained uncelebrated for years after his career was over. His slow, reflective pace makes many of his films hard to grasp after one viewing.

Although Powell saw himself primarily as an artist and his films as art, all his films in some way pander to the mainstream even though they seek to linger and have meaning. I have often found his works incomplete after first viewing and many of his films I still do not understand. But several contain magic only few filmmakers can achieve, and my quest to grasp the genius of Michael Powell fully has only just begun.

All images: A Canterbury Tale

‘The true brilliance of the film lies not in plot but in soul.’

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King’s Week Drama 22

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A Week in the Country Soon we must be leaving.

The pink sheets are folded On the bed we may never see again.

The crocus in the barrel by the front door Breathes a yellow so radiant We shall remember it Long after the candlelit dinners, And what we said, are forgotten.

And surely, too, the robin, Proud in his livery on the back lawn Under the pine trees, will brighten The dark shadows which fall on our past.

So, until we leave, let us be living And loving, that our regret may be so intense Happiness follows us like a faithful dog.

Sebastian Barker OKS (1945-2014)

Many thanks to Enitharmon Press | 26B Caversham Road, London, NW5 2DU | www.enitharmon.co.uk

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Dr. Hewlett Johnson, Dean of Canterbury Cathedral, surveys damage to the Cathedral Library.

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75 YEARS Braving

Running to a shelter near Westgate Towers

SINCE

the

Blitz Oscar Saarbach (6a The Grange)

St George’s Street

‘We shall go out and bomb every building in Britain marked with three stars in the Baedeker Guide.’ (Baron Gustav Braun von Stumm, German Foreign Office, 24 April 1942).

Cantuarians showed true mettle by saving one of the most important churches in the world.

For Canterbury Cathedral this declaration of destruction caused its most important crisis Four rooftop watchers braved the bomb ever. The Baedeker Blitz, as the initiative showers to kick three dozen incendiary bombs off the roof, putting became known, was out the fires with cast iron designed not only to disable ‘Four rooftop watchers drain pipes. This kept the essential infrastructure but braved the bomb roof mostly intact, although to crush British morale. It the southern section and did manage to destroy many showers to kick three library were destroyed. important buildings and dozen incendiary Some of the damage is still claim many lives, but the bombs off the roof.’ visible today. The brave morale of its victims was men who defended the not crushed. In the end the cathedral, while the pupils of King’s were losses to the Luftwaffe were unsustainable, safely stowed in Carlyon Bay on the Cornish and the costs of the attack far outweighed Riviera, did not expect special treatment  the gains. In fact, history regards the whole campaign as a bit of a disaster and a joke, not least because many iconic buildings like Stour Street Canterbury Cathedral survived the fire from the sky. And we still wonder if the Nazis were even wryly amused at the absurdity of using a famous tourist guidebook to prosecute a war on art, faith and the innocent.

St George’s Street

St Augustine's Gate

On 1 June 2017 the community of Canterbury marked the 75th anniversary of its most famous landmark being bombed. These raids by the Luftwaffe were, as blitzkriegs tended to be, swift and deadly. 10,000 phosphorous bombs were dropped and the whole city was ravaged, with 800 buildings destroyed and 5000 in the region damaged. 40 people lost their lives. But a massive civilian mobilisation tackled the damage and many fires were put out by volunteers. Emergency food and shelter were supplied. Most impressively, for wartime morale and the pages of history,

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View from the roof of Marks & Spencer’s shows the devastated St. George’s Street

when their job was done. Their leader, Thomas Hoare, remained a gardener and plumber until the day he died. When his brother-in-arms, Bill Gardiner, had recovered from a broken neck sustained during the aerial attacks, he kept watch over Mint Yard Gate for the rest of his life.

Above: The Duke of Kent visited Canterbury on June 4th, toured the bombed city and chatted with many people including the girls from Marks & Spencer’s St George’s Street where Fenwick now stands

This terrifying air-raid, and the heroic resistance that made it fail, has featured before in this publication, but to mark seventy-five years after The Blitz and the brave watchers of the cathedral, I just wanted to say that, after I was told this story, I have not looked at my school or its surroundings in the same way again. We should be proud of our school and our city, and strive for excellence by helping others whenever we are able, regardless of the cost.

Above: Clearing bomb damage

‘Raids by the Luftwaffe were swift and deadly.

10,000 phosphorous bombs were dropped and the whole city was ravaged.’

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Above: The Royal Fountain Hotel in St Margaret’s Street, now the Marlowe Theatre

Remembrance Sunday CANTUARIAN | 2017

27

Now girls at King’s can opt for trousers if they wish, we asked those who have done so why they made the change.

are They

.

warm

er long I no rousers t er wear e I pref us beca skirt. a

sier s are ea Trouser around to move keep you in, and Winter. warm in h lem wit The prob school a wearing o aving t h s i skirt e bout th worry a oo t ’s t i If length. s vement i long, mo , which ed restrict nient. ve n o c n is i

r n fo easo rs r y onl ouse The g tr y are n i r wea at the ble. h is t omforta ng c othi more is n r me e r e fo Th hem. ial spec aring t s a t we ust abou feel j kirt.

They l as a s a norm

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Occasion ally I w trouser ear s to sch ool for the simp le prefer t reason that I he It would m to a skirt. be easy fo to pass off my c r me hoice to wear trouser s as a feminis t statem e n t. But honestl y? Th more com ey’re just fortabl e.

I started to wear school trousers because I am a cellist and playing music is a lot easier.

The first time I wore school trousers nobody else had worn them yet, but I had a cello lesson that day and decided to just go ahead. I got quite a reaction because of how new the idea was, but people liked them and it was good to feel confident wearing them around school. They have made my life a lot easier.

I wear tr ousers to school because s kirts mak e me feel insecure and judge wearing t d. When rousers, I don’t fe as self-c el onscious.

The skirt feel and s look too revealin while th g, e trouser s are saf wear. Tro e to users are also more practical for walki ng aroun such a bi d g school. saying I I am not hate skir ts and ju the other dge girls for wearing them. I’m wearing t just saying that rousers m akes ME f comfortab eel le and ma kes ME fe better ab el out the w ay I look .

say I wear ld like to ou w I s a e in the As much of a chang se u a ec b s inity trouser en and femin t oldom w of n io wan percept use I don’t a ec b or , l osed upon in schoo r roles imp de en g ed n I wear fashio different. is h t u r t m and me, the they’re war se u a ec b s r able to trouse like being I e. l b a t pace and go comfor n adequate a t a k l a w e without squat, eps at a tim eone. st o w t s ir up sta ashed som hat I’ve fl spend six worrying t having to ot n y jo en hts.

I also h on new tig t on m y er quid ev

For a Drama studen t, trousers are more practica l for classwork than a skirt. And they are warmer in Winter, quicker to put on in the morning and faster for walking. I al so wanted to support any ch ange that encourages equal opportunities for male and fema le students. As a more senior stud ent, I wanted to wear trousers frequently and thereby encour age younger girls in the scho ol. I really like the girls’ tr ousers and hope similar innovation s continue to be fulfilled at King’s!

ecause ousers b r t l o o h c or I wear s ll a maj t is sti i ocking 8 h s 1 0 g 2 in ethin m o s – t n s and stateme the norm s e l u r r e onal that ov traditi a f o s e no one paradox rls. If i g r o f l views uniform ditiona a r t s t c , contradi ng will change i h ng’s then not all. Because Ki wed m s l hoo , o however ected sc p s e r a origin, is such ancient s t i o t on of partly troducti nce it n i e h t si I think lliant, y s is bri r xibilit e e s l u f o r ’s t l o o h c the s certain conveys gment of maining d e l w o n e and ack while r desires, ’s l . i e p g u a p t its heri loyal to

I didn’t choose to wear trousers as a political statement. I wore them because I was cold! While I like the school opening itself up to gender-equal uniform, and therefore modernising itself, I decided to buy them for the Autumn and Lent terms so I could keep warm. I like the option being there.

I wear trousers be cause they’re comfortable. The English weather outside ca lls for something thicker than a pair of tights. Trousers make getting ready in the morn ing quicker.

But also trousers show me the school acknowledg es girls who want to be free of typical female clothing, that people of any gender should be allowed any form of gender expression.

I’m not out identity.

For me it’s ab nted wa I ople, and like other pe ard kw aw ugh the to break thro ons. ti mp nder assu barrier of ge ar we t n’ y girls ca I don’t see wh ts ir sk ar ys can’t we trousers or bo in le op pe sh. Many if they so wi ed ared to be judg sc school are ’ to rd ei ‘w ents. It’s by other stud rs se ou tr en I wear ce stand out. Wh en id nf co , it gives ’s around school it gh ou s. Even th to other girl tells ng choice, it just a clothi t and en er to be diff people it’s ok ced ti no ve u are. I’ express who yo g in ar we girls more and more ol em around scho th ar we I . rs se trou ing out fear of be proudly with ople pe r he m glad ot judged, and I’ st ne ho be And to are doing so. ble ta or mf co lot more a e ar rs se trou er, so why not? and look bett

use ience, beca ely conven r u p s a w in e n m a ousers for trousers th Wearing tr y mobile in caring l b a ot t n or f ic m t co problema s es l I feel more is g girls tights. It ink allowin h t ’t n skirts and do I , lthough I Personally novative. A in t a h how I sit. t l uality by sers is al of gender eq ea ts if id e to wear trou h t s o pres to wear skir t t h er g ig r ea e h ot was n s have t r trousers. believe boy oose to wea ch I y uniform, I a w e in the sam they like,

There aren’t many girls who wear sc hool trousers, so when I wear them I feel I’m di fferent and maybe even sp ecial (in a good way). Wh en I’m wearing trousers I feel freedom because I can walk at any speed and in any way I like . And winters are warmer in trousers. I apprec iate that we have a ch oice of what to wear at Ki ng’s.

I enjoy wearing tr ousers at school because they’re comfortabl e, warm and they look nice.

The school has made p rogress by providing t rousers fo part of th r girls as e uniform . I wear t rather th he boys’ an the gir ls’ trouse because th rs ey have po better cut ckets and . Trousers a are also w and more c armer omfortabl e. I feel f when I tak ree e two step s at a tim up the Sh e irley Hal l stairs, can sit in a n d lessons wi disturbin th my leg gly wide a s part. I ca how I wish n sit , walk how I wish, an suffer one d so less way b expected b y which I y an obsol am ete patria to emulat rchy e Emily H oward. I t I look bet hink ter, and t herefore f more confi eel dent and p owerful. A perhaps, t lso, rousers ma ke me look like a man more , and that is all any really wa one nts to be – a rich m an.

CANTUARIAN | 2017

29

R

osie says her reaction to this epic win was ‘total shock’. It took several weeks to stop feeling surprised at seeing ‘MP’ after her name on the ensuing flood of invitations. She attributes her victory to a number of factors, some national, some local. Disillusionment with the current government, a clear choice between the policies of the two major parties and a desire for change in Canterbury itself top the list. Sir Julian Brazier had occupied the seat for some thirty years but he supported Brexit and his views on LGBT rights and equal marriage were ‘not very Canterbury – an open-minded, thinking kind of place where those ideas are pretty old-fashioned.’ Being the only woman on the platform may have helped. ‘Students did come out. They were very engaged this time around.’

It has not all been plain sailing for Rosie since the election. The first few days were nerve-wracking and she often lost her way while walking from her office to the Chamber in the House of Commons.

She has since been working seven days a week, which means she does not see enough of her children. And like many MPs, especially female MPs, she has been the target of online trolls – a topic she chose to address in her maiden speech. She has escaped some of the nastiest abuse but she has now learned not to look at private messages on chat forums and hopes her children do not look either. She hates it when remarks get personal and is angry about some of the abuse directed at other female politicians, including Teresa May. She believes political debate should be confined to policies and should avoid the personal and unpleasant. But beyond that she is really enjoying the variety offered by the job, such as visits to the Brownies, hospital meetings and giving speeches. ‘I do not like to get bored and I do not like routine so it is perfect for me. I am loving it!’

Rosie has many hopes for Canterbury.

Sorting out hospital provision is item number one. She also wants to address a housing situation that she describes as ‘pretty desperate for most people around here. There is not much that is affordable.’

She is also really worried about the impact of Brexit on the Canterbury area. ‘It is not clear how it will affect our economy, our relationship with Europe, and the University.’ She is certain that the solution to some of the problems is more spending.

‘We need to spend more on public services.

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the

day

Canterbury turned red In June 2017 the general election Labour candidate Rosie Duffield made history by overturning 160 years of Tory rule in Canterbury. She ousted MP Sir Julian Brazier by 187 votes. Mark Bäcker spoke to Rosie Duffield MP about her victory.

The site of success

The NHS is key. People ask where the money will come from. In our manifesto we asked for the top 5% of earners to pay a bit more.

We think that is fair because 95% will not be paying.’ She understands that some people in that bracket might be reluctant, but has found that many higher earners are actually ready to take a look at the idea. ‘We are also talking about raising corporation tax a little, but it would still be one of the lowest levels in Europe. We are just trying to adjust to how things have gone. Austerity has affected those who need services the most and the poorest have been suffering. We need to try and address that.’

On student fees she claims it is not and never has been Labour policy to write off historic student debt, despite some people having attributed the idea to Jeremy Corbyn during the campaign. ‘We cannot afford to….

It would be lovely if we could just go back in time and wipe out everyone’s debt, but it is not something we could justify.’ Looking forward, though, Labour would like to abolish the fee system and use other methods to fund universities. Rosie concedes that it was the Labour Party that introduced fees but she says that the way the system is currently working is not fair. She acknowledges there is a debate over whether people

‘I am a remainer and I have never pretended not to be. While I respect people who voted to leave I think it could be awful for us on many levels.’ who themselves have not benefited from a university education should have to fund the studies of the young. She believes that the right response is greater investment in non-university training. ‘I think we need to invest in other kinds of education – things like apprenticeships. We need to see them as just as valid. Other ways into the work force are equally important. We need skilled craftspeople, we need people to fix things and we need people to have ideas and design things that may not necessarily go through the university route. Those things have to be valued and funded appropriately.’

As a staunch remainer in the Brexit referendum campaign, Rosie is disturbed by the outcome and the implications for Canterbury. ‘I think the whole of Brexit is completely confused and confusing and horrible and divisive. And I wish we hadn’t ever called a referendum. But we did. The government did. And while we have to honour a democratic vote, for Canterbury it could be a disaster economically. I am a remainer and I have never pretended not to be. While I respect people who voted to leave I think it could be awful for us on many levels – socially with our neighbours in France and on the continent, but also in Canterbury. We are really diverse now. We have a lot of people from the EU who have settled here and their futures are uncertain.

They are really worried not knowing if they will lose their jobs and have to take their families to places where they have not grown up. Those things are pretty distressing.’

we have now, if possible, and to stay in the single market. But it is horrible and I wish we were not in this situation.’

against my position. There are leavers who just want to get on with it. It’s really tricky, a bit like walking a tight rope, especially for my party. Many Labour voters voted leave. But we know the benefits of remaining as well, so it is a really horrible political situation.’

When asked if we should not therefore be trying to stop Brexit rather than capitulating to a tiny minority, she says, ‘Well, weird as it seems to those of us who did not like the Rosie says she is not worried about being a vote, I think we have to be seen to honour staunch remainer within the Labour Party, democracy. The problem with the vote in even though Jeremy Corbyn has sacked my opinion – and I am not talking down people who do not fully toe the party line and saying people did not understand it – is on Brexit. ‘Thankfully, I can line myself up that something really complex was put into with our policies. Keir Starmer, who leads a binary choice. Even politicians did not the Labour Brexit team, meets regularly with know what went with which choice. We did people like me who are really worried about not know if YES or NO meant staying in the leaving and explains what is going on. I get single market or not, honouring people’s the impression his team is well respected in rights to stay or not, because those things Brussels. They feed back where they think it had not been decided. They were not in the is going and how badly they feel the other positions of either side. We made it simple side has got in wrong. We are kept in the when it is really complicated. It was not fair.’ loop. I feel I could approach Jeremy’s  She thinks it was even worse to push things through when nobody ‘We do not know economically where our really knew what they were voting for. ‘But I pound will be. Small tourist businesses am a democrat,’ she here are already getting fewer bookings. says, ‘and the Labour Party has said we will People are really worried and we can’t plan recognize the result. anything.’

There are people who would really argue The Buttermarket and Christ Church Gate in the centre of Canterbury

Rosie is also worried about the impact on tourism. ‘If you are a Spanish teacher looking to take a school party abroad to England or to Germany, will you want to take those children through the visa application system? We do not know economically where our pound will be. Small tourist businesses here are already getting fewer bookings. People are really worried and we can’t plan anything. I can’t wait until we have worked our way through everything and we know where we stand. The Labour Party wants as close a relationship with Europe as CANTUARIAN | 2017

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‘I feel I could approach Jeremy’s office and say I am not happy with this, or ask how that is going to work. He is really open.’

office and say I am not happy with this, or ask how that is going to work. He is really open. He is one person and we are a democratic party. We do listen to our members. It is tricky and horrible but we do discuss it.’

Rosie attributes the upswing in the Labour vote nationally to a failure of the Conservative government’s austerity policies. ‘I think austerity is something to do with it. The Conservatives have way. But he is not going to be around forever and been pushing that for seven years now and there he recognizes that, and as a party we just have to has been no huge upturn in the economy. Where carry on the values and enthusiasm we have gained is the benefit from that policy? People can see the because of him.’

NHS is on its knees, not just in Canterbury but all around the When asked whether Corbyn country. Schools are suffering. not changing his views on a ‘Schools funding is a Schools funding is a real issue. lot of things over the past 30 real issue. I hear from I hear from parents all the time. years was admirable or just They are being asked to fund parents all the time. They outmoded, Rosie was surprised. books and things, and public ‘I think it is weird that you say are being asked to fund services in general. Housing that. Because the people I meet books and things, and is in complete crisis. We can who are really enthused by him see more homeless people on public services in general. see him as a really young and the streets. People are asking progressive politician. Actually Housing is in complete what we have been through for he is not young. And if he has crisis.’ the last seven years. What is had those ideas for a long time, the end game? Where are we maybe they were ahead of their going? Perhaps there is another time. Maybe he was progressive way. Perhaps we can rethink this. And I think that is even back in the 80s. I think he is very much about where the Labour Party offers another way of fixing looking at things in a more kind, more tolerant way. the problems we have.’

Maybe people are getting behind that. But we are a really broad party with nearly 600,000 members.

When asked if other countries would see Jeremy We all chip into policies and ideas. He is not a Corbyn as ‘a strong and stable leader’ were Labour dictator!’ to win the next election, Rosie says, ‘I don’t know. I think he has built up a lot of respect with Rosie sees the issue of migrants coming to our neighbours over time because he has been Canterbury as difficult both politically and morally. politically campaigning for over 30 years. He has ‘How long is a piece of string? People will always forged a lot of links. He has been criticized for need a safe haven and Britain has always been a speaking to controversial groups, but I think that safe haven. In the 2010 election David Cameron keeping dialogue open is key and he is really good and others said we need to limit numbers coming at that, keeping an open mind and seeing where over but nothing has been done about that. It is a we can go. I think he would gain respect that potential problem if we do not work out a policy 32

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‘Get involved and you will see the bigger picture.’

and that goes for all parties. I do not think we have really tackled it or worked it out. Britain is a very generous, kind-hearted country. We can take quite a few unaccompanied children and give them a new start in life. They will contribute to this country, see it as home, get educated here and pay back our kindness. Rather than just seeing it as us being lovely and benevolent, those people will pay us back and become good citizens. Maybe we just need to change the way we look at things. We have had immigrants coming over here and propping up the NHS. We could not cope without people who have been doing that for generations. But we do need a policy. We all need to agree on what that should be. But we need to stay measured and fair to people who need help. I think that is what Britain is about.’

Rosie sees most migrants as making a positive contribution to life in the UK. ‘Anecdotally I know very few who have come here and rely on the benefit system. Most migrants come here to work.

I have been in taxis where the driver is driving to make money but is actually a trained scientist or a newly qualified doctor from an unsafe country.

I know few people who want to rely on benefits.

They want a job, a better life and they want to be safe above all. I recently met some Christians from Iran. They are contributing to society. They are at university or they have jobs here. They are using their skills to help our country now. It’s kind of give and take.’

But Rosie is not sure her attitude is reflected by all.

‘I think it does not help when we have headlines in certain newspapers that are pretty racist actually, lumping all foreigners and migrants together. There are different kinds of migration. There are people who want to work. There are those we need to make safe. There is no one size fits all. They are

‘We can take quite a few unaccompanied children and give them a new start in life.’ just people like us. Some may need the benefit system, but we can afford that. Some may become brain surgeons. They are just like British people in that sense.’

Rosie attributes the Labour Party comeback partly to what they have done and partly to the failure of the Conservatives. ‘We have come through with very strong traditional Labour left-wing policies again, which we had played down in the last few elections. We have said we are going back to roots in a way. At the same time, the Tories have failed their traditional voters. They claimed forever to take control of the economy but they are not doing a very good job. People can see that. They are not stupid. It does not matter how many times the Cabinet says it is Labour’s fault we are in this position, with the global banking crisis and things.

People can see that is not necessarily true. It does not need a lot of research to work out that seven years is long enough to change a policy if you think it is terrible. So I think it is both those factors – the Tories not doing very well and us returning to our traditional slightly more socialist values. They have come together at the right time.’ 

‘I have been in taxis where the driver is actually a trained scientist or a newly qualified doctor from an unsafe country.’

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Rosie rejects the idea that a Labour shift to left wing values and a Conservative Party move to the right has left people in the middle disenfranchised, but she does see a wider shift in voting patterns. “I think nationally, if you are interested in changing things, we need to be wary of labelling people as ‘a Tory join whichever local party you align yourself with. voter’ or ‘a Labour voter’ or or ‘a Lib Dem voter’ That’s all I did. I went along to my branch of the because I think research Labour Party, got elected shows it is all changing. branch chair and just dived ‘There should not be There is instant information in. If you are interested now and people do go for it. There should not a politician mould or not have to support a be a politician mould or template. We need more party just because they template. You should not or their parents always have to go down a certain people in Parliament, have done. You can find route. Everyone is political people who are ordinary information much more at some level. We need and have come from normal more people in Parliament, quickly to inform choices.

People are not so much people who are ordinary backgrounds.’ disenfranchised as not and have come from normal necessarily aligned with backgrounds and normal the traditional parties. There is much more fluid jobs because we are representing everybody. It is voting now. Parties need to be aware that the not hugely balanced at the moment and needs to future will be about issues. Things are changing. I reflect all of society.’ do not think they are disenfranchised. There may be those who say the parties are all the same but Marks says it was a pleasure to interview Rosie. He I think we stopped that in this election by being so thinks she will make a great MP for Canterbury. very different from the Tories. I am glad about that.

I think people have got engaged and got behind one or the other.”

Asked how we might encourage more people like herself into politics, she gave some candid advice.

‘I think feeling part of your local community and the things that affect you, your community, friends and your family are often based in politics. So investigate that. If there is a problem in your area where does it come from? Who is responsible? Get involved and you will see the bigger picture. Also

Canterbury High Street on a Saturday afternoon 34

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35

A

s a lad I was always wielding a stick or playing with toy guns, and the first time I watched soldiers drive past in uniforms and trucks I knew there was only one career for me. When I was 17 I left home to start officer-training at Welbeck Army Sixth Form College, with its motto ‘Be the Best’.

I intended to prove myself to my peers and nothing would hold me back. In the U6th I held two college prefectships and was top cadet in the country. Sadly my A Level grades reflected my dedication to things outside the classroom, and my final grades spelt DUDE.

Other Lives

The Army

Adam Vintner, who runs the CCF and will be Housemaster of School House, tells us why he loved the Army and why he had to leave.

With a degree out of the question, I joined the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst (RMAS) and spent my 19th birthday being shouted at by one of the biggest and scariest men known to man, and marching with an ironing board under one arm and a rucksack in the other, while dressed in a suit. I was the youngest of my intake by several years and they never let me forget it, but to me I had joined a family of 30 older brothers who would see me right and teach me the real ways of the world. Sandhurst flew by and, while others found it a restriction of their human rights, I saw it as my first taste of freedom. After all, I was being paid to train hard, play soldiers and, for the first time in my life, drink and smoke without punishment. Before I knew it, I’d passed the gruelling assessments and was ready to lead.

‘Just one number in the wrong place could mean the difference between the delivery of a Mickey Mouse watch and gym weights for the garage.’

My first troop command was in Germany at 20 years old, when I was faced with 55 soldiers from various backgrounds. The nicknames said it all: Private Colqhoun was also known as BAD (Big and Daft); and there was Head-Butt Buck, with whom I spent quite a bit of time in court as his defending officer, even on my 21st birthday – and in full ceremonial dress. But these were my soldiers to protect and serve, and by so doing I had the best of times and their full respect.

I reached the desert later than the others, due to a spell defending Private Head-Butt Buck. One day I was shouting at the boys in the cookhouse to turn off the film and get to work, when the look on their faces said this was no film. It was in fact the first television broadcast of 9/11. Our job in the desert was no longer going to be chilling out in shorts and flip-flops, but three months’ shifting containers of kit to secret places where the SAS were caching their gear for future ops.

Despite the seriousness of our mission, there were many laughs, especially where kit was concerned. Like an Argos catalogue, every military item is given a NATO Stock Number (NSN), and just one number in the wrong place could mean the difference between the delivery of a Mickey Mouse watch and gym weights for the garage.

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One of my soldiers decided to be the envy of his peers by ordering a couple of really smart desert hats. Without permission, he keyed in the numbers and sent the order to the UK. Three weeks later a consignment arrived that he had to sign for, so he skulked off to be met with a large container. He opened and quickly closed the door, then asked me if he could have a word. Corporal ‘Douggie’ Douglas had used the wrong code when ordering his hats for the desert. Now he had two snow ploughs instead. I gave him one week.

The desert is a hostile environment that plays havoc with an army’s fleet of vehicles: we were out of filters; the tyres were perishing in the heat; and the drivers had to wear dust masks and visors because stones had broken the Land Rover windscreens. Our remote location

When does a desert need a snow plough? meant spare parts took months to arrive, and the Army was therefore on the brink of being rendered inoperational. This is when Douggie had his light-bulb moment. Why not fit the snow ploughs to the front of two trucks and clear the route of loose chippings between the port and the airport, save our windscreens and tyres, and thereby make sure the Army could fulfil its important international duties? Douggie received a Commendation for his brilliant idea and no one ever asked why he had two snow ploughs in the desert in the first place.

After this stint, Bosnia followed, which proved to me that the human body can cope with temperatures ranging from -30 to 55 degrees within less than 12 months.

But it wasn’t all survival and hard work. I played a lot of sport, from Rugby Union and Rugby League to Athletics and Football, and I was even the reigning Regimental Light Middleweight Boxing Champion. A DVD of me boxing showed my mum how much her little boy had not grown up, but was just choosing bigger guys to beat up. At least there was now a referee.

The infamous Deepcut Barracks came next.

By now I had worked out that someone in the decision-making palace didn’t like me.

Maybe it was the Academy Commandant of the RMAS: I may have made him a little angry once, but that’s another story. Deepcut had been in the news for breaches of duty of care, and I had been sent for one year as the bright young thing who could turn the place around. This I did, but when the time came for me to move on, someone decided to give me a further year for good behaviour. So there I was,

a keen green army machine, training 125 chefs in soldiering, and stuck in the UK when all I wanted was to be on operations abroad.

To get out of there, I filed a posting preference that stated I wanted Parachute Course, Commando Course or Special Forces. They must have got the letters mixed up because I was posted to PCS, the Postal and Courier Services, where I was trained as the Army’s Postman Pat. This was a two-week course crammed into eleven weeks of boring classroom work, accounting and stamp-collecting. The completion of the course, however, meant I was posted back to Germany with an early promotion. So, at 23 years old, I was the youngest Captain in the British Army at the time.

‘I lost friends in conflicts along the way but I gained memories that are pretty hard to beat.’

‘Hard work does get rewarded and respect has to be earned, not just demanded.’

After a further year of playing sport and so on, my career wasn’t heading where I was hoping, so I resigned my commission but had to work a full year’s notice. I had recently fallen in love, too (something I promised never to do until I reached 30), which helped me to make up my mind. I then finished – believe it or not – with a six-month tour of the Falkland Islands, where the population is doubled by soldiers and it is so cold even the penguins have to take a break.

I had a great time in the Army, which taught me that hard work does get rewarded, and that respect has to be earned, not just demanded. The RMAS motto, ‘Serve to Lead’, is one no officer should ever ignore.

It is what you do for others that makes you a better person, and if you are in it for yourself your soldiers will not respect you. They will, in fact, find a way to hang you out to dry.

I lost friends in conflicts along the way but I gained lifelong associates and memories that are pretty hard to beat. I regret nothing and, because the time was right for me to leave, I have no bitter feelings. People make the mistake of staying in a job for too long because it is the known. Sometimes the unknown is the hard, but the more rewarding decision, and direction.

King’s School CCF CANTUARIAN | 2017

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Desert Island Discs

by The King’s School Music Department

We asked full-time music teachers to name their top eight pieces of all time. Andrew and Nick chose to specify their favourite performances.

Stephen Matthews

Andrew Pollock

Shostakovich

Symphony No. 10

Vivaldi

Opera Arias (Cecilia Bartoli: The Vivaldi Album)

Bach

St. Matthew Passion

Beethoven

String Quartet Op. 132 (Takacs Quartet)

Britten

War Requiem

Verdi

Mozart

Jupiter Symphony

La Traviata (Victoria de los Angeles/Carlo del Monte/Serafin/Rome Opera)

Rachmaninov

Symphonic Dances

Tchaikovsky

Copland

Clarinet Concerto

Violin Concerto (Janine Jansen/Harding/ Mahler CO)

Sibelius

Symphony No. 5

Elgar

Enigma Variations (Colin Davis/LSO)

Bartok

Concerto for Orchestra

Stravinsky

The Rite of Spring (Gergiev/Kirov)

William Bersey

Richard Strauss Four Last Songs (Elisabeth Schwarzkopf/Szell/ Berlin RSO) Bernstein

On the Town (Tilson Thomas/LSO)

Bruckner

Symphony No. 7

Rachmaninov

Symphony No. 2

Mahler

Das Lied von der Erde

Bach

Kyrie from Mass in B minor

Elgar

Enigma Variations

Britten

Rejoice in the Lamb

Finzi

Lo, the Full, Final Sacrifice

Howells

St. Paul’s Service

Snarky Puppy Lingus

We Like It Here

Schönberg

Bring Him Home from Les Misérables

Steely Dan

Aja from Aja

Diana Krall

The Girl in the Other Room

Jeff Buckley

Lover, You Should’ve Come Over from Grace

Radiohead

The Tourist from OK Computer

Queen

Keep Yourself Alive

Karine Polwart

Half a Mile from Traces

Greg Swinford

Nick Todd

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Bach

B Minor Mass (Sir John Eliot Gardiner)

Macmillan

Seven Last Words from the Cross (Dmitri Ensemble)

Messiaen

Quartet for the End of Time (Michel Béroff)

Schostakovich

Symphony No. 10 (RPLO)

Prokoviev

Piano Concerto No. 2 (Berlin Philharmonic)

Stravinsky

The Rite of Spring (Philadelphia Orchestra)

Richafort

Requiem (Huelgas Ensemble)

Franz Schubert

Die Schone Mullerin (Fritz Wunderlich)

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Left to right: Jeremy Clarke, Richard Dimarco, Andy Snook, Lazlo Novaki, Marton Toth

With thousands of meals a day to serve, the kitchens at King’s need a cool Commander-in-Chief. We spoke to Andy Snook, Head of Catering, who’s been feeding staff, students and special guests for thirty years.

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hat got you started at King’s?

When I started in 1985 I was a kitchen porter but I wanted to train as a painter and decorator. The Head Chef at King’s knew I wanted to do a college course and helpfully signed me up, but to my horror it was for Catering! I knew nothing about cooking apart from Home Economics and there was little expertise in my family. I sometimes used to help my maternal grandma, who made traditional English food such as beef stew and dumplings, or bacon and onion suet pudding. My paternal great grandmother worked as a cook in a big house over at Ickham, and my maternal grandfather worked as a baker in Hoppers of Canterbury. And that was it. But after three years I qualified as a Chef from Canterbury Technical College with my City and Guilds Catering qualification.

in the Cathedral. I was nervous but the day went well and we were presented to Her Majesty before she left King’s. I don’t drop this event into conversations too often.

Also, my paternal grandfather met my grandmother at King’s. The army had seconded the original buildings when King’s relocated to St Austell during the Second World War. There was a dance held in the Precincts dining hall. He spotted my grandmotherto-be and asked her for a dance. That’s how they met. Every now and then I imagine them waltzing happily around the dining room all those years ago.

Apparently my grandfather was a great dancer.

(Maybe that’s where I get my moves.)

What was your most embarrassing moment?

When I was training to be a chef I also worked as How has Catering changed in recent years?

There is a far wider range of ingredients readily a waiter. There was a dinner in St A’s Refectory and during the speeches we were available now, due to the demands preparing coffee. Carrying the afterof innovative chefs and their creative ‘I was told not to make dinner mints on a metal tray, I missed menus. You have to move with the any sudden moves my step. The tray slipped out of my times and keep up with the trends. because the red dots hands, hit the stone floor and rolled What is life like in Catering? circling the room came round and round on the top landing, There are many choices of careers from marksmen hidden making a load ringing noise. There was nothing I could do. Once I had and a lot of job satisfaction in the in the Cathedral.’ composed myself I walked back into industry today but the level of the Refectory, where the guests gave commitment needed to work at a place like King’s is incredibly high. The hours are long me a rousing reception. and the work is hard – the pressure is incredible – What was your worst experience? but the rewards speak for themselves.

When I was training as a chef, if we made a dish that What are your fondest memories of working at was not up to Chef’s standard we had to serve the food anyway and apologise to the guests.

King’s?

In 2002 The Queen and Prince Phillip came to a Maundy service in the Cathedral, and we were What was your most stressful experience? preparing lunch in the Precincts dining hall. My When I was Junior Manager we were catering for a colleague, Barbra Frost, was due to serve the Queen’s wedding at St Augustine’s. The main choice on the table and I was to serve Prince Phillip but on the day menu was lamb (20 covers) and salmon (100 covers).

Barbara was so nervous she asked me to swap. I was During the drinks reception, due to last two hours, thrilled, especially since this was not usual protocol: I questioned the ratio of meat to fish and was told staff from the Palace usually wait on the Monarch for it was correct. The bride appeared with the menu security reasons, no doubt. During my briefing I was choices written on name cards for ease of service. told not to make any sudden moves because the red When I was putting these on the table I realised the dots circling the room came from marksmen hidden ratio of lamb to salmon was actually the other way  CANTUARIAN | 2017

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‘The hours are long and the work is hard – the pressure is incredible – but the rewards speak for themselves.’

Left to right: Sue Stevenson, Aaron Bradley, Andy Snook, Chris French, Steve Gauden, Claire Bailey

round. At first I had that knotted feeling in my stomach, then a wave of panic and I checked my sanity before I checked the orders with the bride, who asked me if everything was okay. Of course I said no, all was fine, and got on the phone to Laurie Wakeham, a butcher over at Bridge. It was 1.00pm on a Saturday but he answered the phone. By now my boss had also turned up to see if everything was okay and I explained what had happened. It was complete panic. We got the food from Laurie, cooked it on time and, thanks to the two-hour drinks reception, the day went well.

What are the foods to watch?

Street food or hand-held foods like Mexican tortillas and filled wraps are trendy and I think they are the way forward. I’m just wondering how to get fish and chips in a wrap, or roast dinner – ha ha. Rick Stein’s On the Road to Mexico illustrates best where this trend is heading. I recommend watching the series and/or buying the book.

Catering at King’s in the Eighties

What have been your best experiences?

At King’s I’m proud of what the catering team has achieved. It has been a privilege to use the best-quality ingredients and be trained by professional chefs well versed in nutrition. There is a huge variety of dishes to sample across the various events at school so we are all spoilt for choice. But this makes it hard when I go to a restaurant. Maybe I’m a food snob but often it’s tough to choose from a menu outside King’s, although I try not to make comparisons and just enjoy the occasion. I don’t have to cook or wash up, right? And, yes, I do cook at home – even Christmas dinner.

What are your favourite foods?

I will try anything – well, maybe not everything. I can’t imagine eating what they eat on ‘I’m a Celebrity’! I like British and European food and I particularly like steak.

British food is under-rated, particularly regional and locally sourced ingredients. I also like Chinese and Indian foods too. There is a lot of talent, skill, time and preparation that goes into these dishes, which can be very complex.

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Who are your chief influences?

Rick Stein and Mary Berry. I also admire Michel Roux for arresting the decline of the catering industry in the UK. Roux recognised the need to invest in his brigade of chefs through apprenticeships when good quality chefs were dwindling.

At King’s in recent years we have also been investing heavily in the future by training new teams of chefs.

Andy’s Culinary Bibles

Andy’s Reading Menu: Practical Cookery by Victor Ceserani and Ronald Kinton This is the bible for beginners, continually updated.

Le Repertoire de la Cuisine by Louis Saulnier Another bible based on the cuisine of Escoffier.

Complete Guide to the Art of Modern Cookery by Auguste Escoffier Escoffier was a French chef-restaurateur and culinary writer. Much of Escoffier’s technique was based on that of Marie Antoine Carême, one of the codifiers of French haute cuisine. Escoffier’s achievement was to simplify and modernize Carême’s elaborate and ornate cooking style for everyday purposes.

1950s NHS Cookery Manual The beauty of this book is the high-volume catering. The recipes are scaled up from 10 to 25, 50 and even 100 portions. There were a few chefs at King’s in 1985 who had worked in the NHS for years. Not only were they used to catering for huge numbers but they were also way ahead in recognising the nutritional content of meals because they were catering for sick patients in hospitals before the privatisation of NHS catering operations in the 1980s.

Andy h as serv ed five Headm asters; Mssrs Pilking ton Clemen , Phillips, Wil ts and kinson, Robert s And fiv e Robinso Bursars: Cap tain n, Nick Meikel, Lewis, S R u and M obert Brook san es ark Tay lor

s 18 e wa h ; 85

in 19 ing’s K incts t Prec d a Chef e e t h e r t e a s st ain ef at at St A’ b: Tr Andy s Ch u y Jo r o e e S g K a Job: Man First 998 Key to 1 unior d J n 5 o : 9 19 Sec Job Key from ears k d r a i e h r 30 y g T b s ’ a g n in ook ateri at K He t een ad of C b s ’ he He year s as This 10 year Now

‘I’m proud of what the catering team has achieved. It has been a privilege to use the best-quality ingredients and be trained by professional chefs.’

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Andy Snook gives us a look behind the scenes of...

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‘My colleague, Barbra Frost, was due to serve the Queen’s table but on the day Barbara was so nervous she asked me to swap. I was thrilled.’

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Banqu

et

A Selection of Andy’s Precious Memorabilia

‘I was nervous but the day went well and we were presented to Her Majesty before she left King’s.’

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‘We now want dogs to provide not just fresh game or a helping paw across the road, but emotional comfort.’

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Katie Zuo (6b Walpole) tells us why those who usually help us hunt and cross the road, now help us read and even stay alive.

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uman beings have trained animals since the dawn of civilization. Dogs, for example, have helped us hunt for over 150,000 years. They have provided companionship as well, but these days they are also trained to help the disabled. Guide dogs date back to the first century when murals were painted of dogs leading blind men, and these dogs have evolved until the first guide dog school opened in 1916. We all know that Guide Dogs for the Blind has been a roaring success, becoming a household name since it was founded during the Second World War. But what is the next stage in the evolution of man’s best friend? Well, we now want dogs to provide not just fresh game or a helping paw across the road, but emotional comfort. And these are the pets that are trained – well, to be petted.

robot has been commercially sold since 2004 and has taken more than 20 years and $15 million to develop.

The main reason it exists is to simulate all the features of a cute, small animal that brings out the nurturing side of patients. Paro can detect faces, coo like a baby seal when stroked and be ‘fed’ with a pacifier.

It simulates warmth and breathing to copy that of a real animal. Because Paro is a robot, it is well suited to provide affection for dementia patients who could have sudden mood changes that could scare animals.

Not all pets can stand being cuddled constantly and are not available at all times, and animals also have their own emotions which, if they happen to reject the patient, could end up hurting the patient more, whereas Paro is designed only to provide affection.

Some patients could also have allergies so Paro being a robot is more suited to them too.

Even just keeping a pet can improve a person’s life enormously. Studies have shown that keeping a dog Despite all these great benefits, Paro is still a robot or cat almost always reduces high blood pressure and costs around £5000 because of all its expensive and stress. The animal loving us technology and each one being unconditionally is comforting, handmade. Even though it can act combating loneliness and fulfilling very similar to an animal, no true ‘Just as children can read emotional bond can be created our constant need to touch to dogs without fear of something living and warm. Many between owner and pet because, people who suffer from mild to obviously, robots cannot feel being assessed, adults moderate depression keep pets to talk to pets without fear emotions. Every Paro is the same sooth their mental illness. Just as but each pet is unique, and slow of being judged.’ children can read to dogs without development of trust and affection fear of being assessed, adults talk to is what makes the relationship pets without fear of being judged. between human and animal so Pets also make owners responsible because they meaningful. Pets also show empathy for us, as we do need to be fed, groomed and house-trained. This can for them, and studies have shown that keeping a pet make someone who lacks empowerment realize they increases feelings of empathy in children, because are more capable of nurturing than they thought. In they are taught non-verbal communication and focus extreme cases, if a person considers suicide, their pet on taking care of another living being, which avoids needing them to survive can hold that person back. the child becoming self-absorbed.

Keeping a pet also requires a routine that forces people to be more constructive, and makes them Pets as Therapy is one of the biggest of the new healthier through walking the animal. pet therapy organisations springing up across this country. Volunteers sign up their pets to help Pet therapy has been so successful that scientists have those in hospices, hospitals, schools, prisons and started making Artificial Intelligence substitutes. Paro universities who might be in emotional distress. the Seal is a registered medical piece of equipment The charity works on different projects, including in Japan whose function is to act like a baby seal and Read2Dogs and LEAD, which involves collaborating comfort patients, especially ones with dementia. This with the University of Lincoln to see if dogs can 

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‘Volunteers sign up their pets to help those in hospices, hospitals, schools, prisons and universities who might be in emotional distress.’ improve the physiological, psychological, socio-emotional, motor and cognitive behaviour of children and, depending on the results, introduce educational practice into their daily lives. Children are split into three groups – one with a relaxation session, one with a dog they have met before the session, and one with neither. Questionnaires on anxiety, self-esteem and language, or cognitive tests, are taken four times – once straight after the intervention, then at six weeks, six months and after a year. The other project, Read2Dogs, is designed for children to boost self-confidence and public speaking skills. These children often lack self-confidence or have reading or attention problems and are given books to read aloud to therapy animals. Then teachers can work on their issues by adopting the persona of the dog, asking the child to speak more loudly or explain a certain word to the dog.

By practising first on a pet, the child can slowly take the skills learnt and apply them to a human audience. Many schools now boast regular reading to dogs as part of their basic educational provision.

‘Many schools now boast regular reading to dogs as part of their basic educational provision.’

Whether a child is struggling to read or an old patient is only weeks from death, the company of a pet, artificial or not, will help greatly with their happiness. Perhaps it is the animal’s instinctive grasp of suffering and natural urge to heal, the wonder and magic of cross-species understanding, the animal’s utter dependence on us for food, warmth and shelter, or the absence of human flaws from its nature, such as duplicity and hypocrisy, but recently we have acknowledged, on a grand and organised scale, that without pets in our lives our lives are not complete.

www.petsastherapy.org www.petsforpatriots.org www.igdf.org.uk www.robotcenter.co.uk/products/parotherapeutic-robot-seal

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Pets A s

Thera exam py dogs vi s s to h elp re it King ’s d u duce stress ring

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Staff, pupils and parents have been eating and shopping at The Goods Shed near Canterbury West Station since it opened in 2002. Rachel Phipps OKS explains why.

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t is an unusual week when I don’t eat out at least twice. As there are so many new openings in London it is rare if I have time to pay somewhere a repeat visit. Back in Canterbury, I’m a little more flexible; I take time to visit old favourites, and there are some I just keep coming back to.

I have been enjoying the upstairs restaurant at The Goods Shed since I was old enough to be taken to a proper restaurant for dinner. Recently, I’ve spent many a minute (early for the St. Pancras train) among the local produce and artisan bakes traveling back and forth as a food writer. The Goods Shed is somewhere I love as there is always a surprise waiting there every time I visit, be it a delicately striped, gloriously plump aubergine or a mouthwatering small plate of chicken, orange and new season cavolo nero. The Goods Shed is the exception, not the rule.

so popular you had to plan ahead to guarantee a table. Since, I’ve asked local restauranteurs what changed, why they suddenly felt it was the right time to open restaurants, cafes and street food concepts they’d been developing for years. The influx of more and more students accounts for most of the growth, but since the beginning The Goods Shed has been successfully turning out the sort of food only a few others have come in to match. These others will only survive if they can build a loyal customer base, and even then they have competition in some of the world’s best restaurants only an hour away on the high-speed train.

So why is it that The Goods Shed has been able to do what they have always done to such a high standard when, with a few notable exceptions, the rest of the city seemed to need permission to excel? I live in a world of press launches and soft opens: the idea of Excluding a brief stint as a glass warehouse after a restaurant not opened by some already acclaimed line closure made the railway goods shed beside chef or restauranteur achieving what The Goods Canterbury West Station redundant in 1952, the Shed did on their first day, filling 100 covers without building lay derelict except for the getting someone in to shout about odd pigeon or graffiti artist for twenty it first, is an alien concept. First, it ‘Filling 100 covers years. It took a further year and a half would be wrong to think that the without getting of requests to the railway network building is frozen in time. What someone in to shout and negotiations for Susanna Sait, worked when the Shed opened the Shed’s owner, and her husband about it first is an alien in 2002 won’t necessarily work in to buy the property. A few bumps in 2017. Contrary to how it may seem concept.’ the track could easily have halted its from the outside, The Goods Shed rehabilitation. She tells me how the has sat still while the rest of the building would have been demolished if the council Canterbury food scene has grown up around it. The preservation officer had not scaled the barbed wire idea of bringing together a restaurant, independent fence the day before it was due to be pulled down cafe, grocer, baker, butcher and fishmonger together to slap on a preservation order, and of a mad rush to under one roof was a nostalgic rather than strategic courier the contracts and complete the sale on gut instinct the day before the rail network collapsed into liquidation.

Since 2002, when The Goods Shed opened, we have witnessed a local food revolution in Canterbury as the independent food and drink industry has started to break out of the big cities. I remember that there used to be a choice of two nice restaurants to take visiting parents other than Pizza Express. When salad and sandwich bar Canteen opened on the King’s Mile it was revolutionary. The Goods Shed was somewhere CANTUARIAN | 2017

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attempt to recreate a 1950s high street that would serve as a community hub that supported local farmers and producers. Indeed, Susanna admits that their main focus was the restoration during the 18 months it took to obtain planning permission and carry out works - rather than coming up with a business plan. However, while it was not calculated, by its very nature the Shed is not vulnerable to so many of the issues plaguing retail today; the internet is killing our high streets because shopping online is simply more convenient. However, supermarkets are still managing to trump independent stores and online grocery orders because they bring everything together, and most people still want to choose their food themselves. The Goods Shed has created a supermarket for mindful consumers.

‘The Goods Shed has created a supermarket for mindful consumers.’

It may not be immediately obvious how The Goods Shed has adapted, but you only need to look at some of the biggest trends to sweep the culinary world over the past few years to see that not all wildly popular concepts are evergreen. Inspiration from everyday, commonplace Asian street food has spawned gourmet food trucks across the West, an epicentre of which can be found in Los Angeles. I had one of the best meals of my life sitting on a dusty curb in Mid City from a chicken truck run by Ludo Lefebvre, one of America’s most acclaimed chefs, who had himself felt unable to

‘Think of the building less as a shop or a restaurant, and more like an ecosystem and you’re on the right track.’

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‘It is the local community and loyal Canterbury customer base that has not just kept it solvent, but vibrant.’

grow in a traditional kitchen and started one of the first pop-up restaurants, before moving on to trucks and concessions. Food trucks turned into collectives, where the cream of the crop gathered for the waiting crowds at LA’s First Fridays and London’s Street Feast and KERB franchises. Street Feast veteran Bao’s tiny restaurant in Fitzrova, which serves up Tawainese style steamed buns, is now critically agreed to be one of the best restaurants in the country. My first lunch there was certainly another of the best I’ve had. They may still pop up for street food gigs, but they have now grown up and moved on. In this time I’ve come to have better ramen and Korean food in Canterbury than I’ve had in London, but during this period of growth The Goods Shed still appears to be doing the same thing in the same building.

However, profits were not healthy enough so Many of the vendors downstairs at The Goods Shed have the Shed’s meat man moved on, but not before been there since the beginning, such as Enzo’s Bakery Susanna suggested that he hire a butcher. Rather and Amery Court Farm, but others have than just selling people the cuts evolved. Think of the building less as a you think people want, why shop or a restaurant, and more like an not bring in the whole beast?

‘As a recipe developer my ecosystem and you’re on the right track. weekly shop requires almost Instead she hired the butcher A more recent addition, Fermental, herself and ran the stall until it military levels of precision serves up vegetarian and vegan salad was a proven success that could - but the produce on sale is be passed on. Indeed, Susanna boxes made from fermented products still an essential source of such as kimchee that would have been has stepped in several times to considered niche or alternative in the fill in any gaps since opening. seasonal ideas.’ early 2000s. Concessions such as the inhouse butcher have evolved with time.

Secondly it is important that Originally fresh meat was sold farmers-market style, to understand Shed’s success you don’t just see portioned and wrapped for ease of sale and transport. it simply as a shop. It is the local community and loyal Canterbury customer base that has not just kept it solvent, but vibrant. For me, the building is somewhere I go to eat - as a recipe developer my weekly shop requires almost military levels of precision - but the produce on sale is still an essential source of seasonal ideas. A number of local chefs like to take a turn around the stalls just for inspiration; alumni of the mezzanine kitchen have gone on to head up successful kitchens across London and the South East. The Goods Shed is a destination as well as somewhere to eat and shop: it is up there with The Sportsman as somewhere people outside East Kent know and respect, celebrating great, British food. 

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People have approached Susanna about building another Goods Shed, but she thinks there can be only one. That is not to say she does not have other projects in mind, but she recognises how unique The Goods Shed is - and the place it holds in the community. The American Culinary Institute recently announced that it will be teaching Instagram and food photography tips to its students, and new restaurant design is now as much about creating

‘New restaurant design is now as much about creating a space that will go viral as it is about an enjoyable dining environment.’ a space that will go viral as it is an enjoyable dining environment. Yes, some of my most beautiful and popular snaps online come from there, but The Goods Shed has something no amount of visual appeal can make up for: authenticity.

Rachel Phipps was at King’s from 2006 to 2011. After studying English Literature at Queen Mary, University of London and at the University of California, Los Angeles, she worked in Parliament before becoming a food writer full-time.

Her first cookbook, Student Eats, was published

by Ebury in 2017. @missrachelphipps www.rachelphipps.com

The Goods Shed Station Road West, Canterbury, Kent, CT2 8AN 01227 459153 www.thegoodsshed.co.uk @thegoodsshed thegoodsshedcanterbury @The_Goods_Shed

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Dr Helen Cunnold explains why bees are sexy.

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n the mid-Cretaceous period, when giant dragonflies and Velociraptors ruled the skies, the first bee evolved from predatory wasps. One of the earliest species, a tiny stingless bee measuring 5.6mm (Cretotrigona prisca), is preserved in amber 65 million years old. In fact, Cretotrigona prisca bears little resemblance to a bee because it is relatively hairless and wasp-like.

Yet, unknown to many, most bees today still resemble their distant relatives.

‘

In the tropical forests of South America, Orchid Bees (species of the genus Euglossa) compensate for their baldness with fantastic metallic purple and green exoskeletons. Males gather and store oils from orchids in specialised structures on their back legs, using these as aphrodisiacs when attempting to woo a mate. These are just one example of the 20,000 species that exist, with as many still to be discovered, of which over 90% are neither honeybee nor bumblebee; in the UK, honeybees and bumblebees make up just 28 of the 275 native species. The world of these bees is rarely appreciated yet fantastically diverse, and it is one of warfare, parasitism and raunchy couplings.

Amongst insects, bees are the only group to rely entirely on pollen (the plant’s male gamete, rich in proteins, starch and lipids) and nectar (a sugary fluid) for their growth, energy and development of the young. Rather macabre exceptions to this are the small, stingless Vulture Bees (genus Trigona) found in America, which make a sweet, clear honey out of rotting flesh, and the Sweat Bees (family Halictidae) found throughout the world, which are partial to the salt in human sweat. Compared to other flower visitors, bees are efficient foragers with the ability to learn and memorise the location and handling of complex flowers. Researchers in Croatia have exploited the ability of honeybees (genus Apis) to detect floral odours from 4.5km, training them to associate sugar rewards with the smell of TNT explosives. While work is ongoing, the hope is that these ‘sniffer bees’ will detect unexploded landmines.

Researchers at The University of Bristol have recently shown that Buff-Tailed Bumblebees (Bombus terrestris) are able to identify recently visited flowers by changes in the floral electric field, which becomes temporarily positive immediately after it receives a visit, and the presence of ‘smelly footprints’ (cuticular hydrocarbons) deposited by the tarsi (feet) of previous visitors. Together, these clues help to reduce the time wasted by bees on flowers whose rewards have been recently depleted.

length. Ending in a collection of sponge-like hairs, these are perfectly adapted for collecting oils from flowers to feed their larvae. As with the Sandlover, the length of Rediviva legs varies between species according to the particular flowers they visit; the longer the floral spur, the longer the leg – a perfect example of coevolution.

There are many ways in which bees are also morphologically adapted for visiting flowers. The Long-Nosed Sandlover (Geodiscelis longiceps) is a spectacular sight, with an elongated head stretching to half of its body width, while its glossa (tongue) is longer than its entire body. The reason for this size? Geodiscelis lives in the Atacama Desert of Chile – the driest desert in the world. Under these conditions flowers conceal their nectar within deep spurs, protected from the relentless heat and accessible only to those with the longest tongues. South African bees in the genus Rediviva also demonstrate unusually long appendages – this time in the form of their front legs, which may be double their total body

As ectotherms (‘heat from outside’), bees must exploit the warmth of the day to gain enough energy for flight. However, intense competition for nectar has driven some bees to become nocturnal. The Common Northern Night Flier (Megalopta lenalis) in Central America visits flowers just before dawn and dusk. Night fliers require adaptations for vision and Megalopta has adapted unusually large ocelli (photoreceptors on the top of the head that detect light intensity and time of day) that make their vision 27 times more light-sensitive than their closest relatives. The Squash Bee of North America (Xenoglossa fulva) is rather fussy about the flowers it visits, frequenting only the blossoms of Cucurbita flowers, which open at dawn and are closed

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by midday. Squash bees also have large ocelli adapted for flying in poor light, although after such an early morning they often curl up in a flower to take a midday nap, waking to find themselves trapped in the closed blossom. Fear not – powerful mandibles enable them to tear themselves an escape route.

If you have the good fortune to witness bees mating, you belong to a small and privileged group. Though rarely seen, the mating rituals of a few species are bizarre enough to have been recorded. Professor Dave Goulson, a bumblebee expert and avid hill-runner, uncovered a rather strange strategy amongst male bumblebees in Scotland. Excited males could often be found in groups on the tops of hills, eagerly awaiting the

arrival of a single virgin female. Dubbed ‘hill-topping’, this behaviour ensures a female can easily locate and compare suitors, before mating and entering her solitary winter hibernation. Unfortunately, many males remain unmated and die before the winter, having sustained a rather short and unfulfilled existence. In the South of England, two common garden visitors – males of the Hairy-Footed Flower Bee (Anthophora plumipes) and the Wool Carder Bee (Anthidium manicatum) – have a more formidable approach to securing a mate. Both are exceptionally fast fliers and ferociously territorial, guarding flower patches and attacking any intruders that are not female bees; their bomb-diving and head-ramming manoeuvres are spectacular and guarantee them exclusive mating with any females that enter the patch to forage.

“Researchers in Croatia have exploited the ability of honeybees, training them to associate sugar rewards with the smell of TNT explosives. The hope is these ‘sniffer bees’ will detect unexploded landmines.”

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The parenting of bees is the sole responsibility of the female. After mating, queen honeybees and bumblebees initiate their own nest. With honeybees this may grow to exceed 50,000 of her daughters, female workers who sacrifice their own reproduction to raise many more generations of their sisters. In bumblebees, nest sizes are much smaller (typically 50-150 female workers) and, unlike honeybees, all workers perish at the end of the summer, with only the queen surviving into the following Spring. In both groups, males are produced at the end of the Summer with the sole purpose of mating with a virgin female from another nest.

However, most bees (at least 19,500 species) do not demonstrate this sociality; ‘solitary’ bee females lay a small collection of eggs in a purpose-built and well-provisioned nest, but in most cases leave well before the larvae develop the following year. The location of the nests differs and are characterised by the common names given to these species: Mason, Plasterer, Digger and Carpenter Bee. In the UK, Ivy Bees (Colletes hederae) are uniquely striking. Females are similar in size to a honeybee but have a thick carpet of ginger hairs on their mid-section (thorax) and a black and white striped abdomen. Colletes are known as ‘Cellophane’ Bees because they excavate tunnels in loose soil and line these with a natural polyester, providing a waterproof chamber in which to lay their eggs.

The fiery red and furry Osmia bicornis is a common inhabitant of UK bee hotels made from bamboo canes; the stocky females have horns on their face that they use to smooth over a mud-plug that seals each egg chamber. If the gaps in your bee hotel are sealed with tiny fragments of leaf, then this is the work of another solitary group (Megachile) who cut neat semi-circles of leaves (particularly roses) to line and plug their nest cavities.

The

The plum nests are p-bodied Teddy and cons invaded by Cuc Bear Bee’s (Am koo egill ume all of the polle Bees whose eg a Bombiformis) n stor gs em to starvees, leaving the hoerge early . st larvae

st attacks from e defence againgiant ‘bee ball’, a es have a uniqu Asian honeybe workers smother intruders in perature to 46°c Asian Hornets: g muscles to increase the tem t. vibrating their win – enough to kill the horne

As solitary bees increase in size, so do their nesting requirements. The Violet Carpenter Bee (Xylocopa Violaceae) is a robust and completely black bee, slightly larger than a bumblebee and Of all the solitary bees the finest nests found throughout Europe. Although their size are built by Osmia avosetta, native to can be alarming, female Carpenter Bees are Turkey and Iran. Females craft tiny cups wonderful mothers; after mating, she uses her from petals and seal these together with strong mouthparts to excavate mud to create a a tunnel in dead wood, laying unique nest for ‘In scenes akin to Game of several eggs along its length.

Thrones, colonies of Tetragonula each egg. The Once sealed, she guards results are practical Hockingsi bees travel south the entrance, defending her yet breathtakingly to raid and usurp the nests of developing young against beautiful. In South Tetragonula carbonaria, fighting Africa, the black and intruders. Carpenter Bees the resident bees to the death, are exceeded in size only white striped Pillow

by Wallace’s Giant Bee (Serapista) until their own queen has gained Bee (Megachile pluto) – the largest bears a striking entry.’ bee in the world, found on resemblance to a only three islands of the North zebra, yet makes Moluccas of Indonesia. The wingspan of a female its nests from cotton-like plant fibres or can reach 63mm with large and powerful jaws that animal hairs, forming a small fluffy ball allow her to collect bundles of wood and resin for which they attach to a plant stem. Inside her nest, which must be tough considering that this, the larvae develop safely enclosed they are built inside inhabited termite mounds. in a giant pillow. If you are wondering 58

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nt

bita

ha n in mo . om canes c is a oo rnis amb bicorom b a i f sm ade yO furr tels m and ee ho d b y re fier of UK

what happens to male bees once they leave the nest, then do not worry; after a busy day searching for a mate, males cluster together and grasp on to a single plant stem with their mouthparts, with the rest of their body levitating in the air. The result is a comical but relatively safe sleeping roost.

Bee nests do not always confer the protection they suggest; a separate lineage of sneaky ‘cuckoo’ bees have evolved to exploit the labours of their close relatives. In the UK, The Common Mourning Bee (Melecta albifrons) is unmistakable early in the Spring because its head and body are entirely black except for a small number of white markings. This bee is a bad omen if you are a Hairy-Footed Flower Bee; Melecta females are cleptoparasites, which like their bird namesakes locate their host’s nest and wait for the female to leave before entering to lay their own eggs. These eggs

Wool Carder Bee

The challenges faced by bees are numerous: mass agricultural monocultures, overuse of pesticides, emerge early and consume all of the pollen stores, climate warming, pollution, urbanisation, a decline leaving the host larvae to starve. Such a tragic tale in wild flowers, and habitat fragmentation all is repeated in Australia, where the sinister Domino threaten bees on a global scale. In Europe alone, Cuckoo Bee (Thyreus lugubris) 14% of the 1,965 native species and Neon Cuckoo Bee (Thyreus are threatened with extinction ‘Mass agricultural nitidulus) parasitise the nests of while more worryingly too little is monocultures, overuse of the plump-bodied Teddy Bear pesticides, climate warming, known about the diet, behaviour Bee (Amegilla bombiformis) and and range of 56% (1,101 species) pollution, urbanisation, the beautiful Blue-Banded Bee to predict accurately their a decline in wild flowers, (Amegilla cingulata). Even in the population size and extinction risk. and habitat fragmentation Future work is needed to extend Arctic, where only two species threaten bees on a global of bumblebees exist, their size understanding beyond honeybees scale.’ allowing them to fly during cold and bumblebees, particularly summers, one of these (Bombus in Asia and Africa, using DNAhyperboreus) has a tendency to attack and enslave based identification techniques to document the the nests of their only neighbour, Bombus polaris. diversity of this superfamily. If a career in research, conservation, entomology or genetics appeals to Evidently a nest is a commodity worth fighting for, you, then the world of charismatic bees desperately none more so than if you are a Sugarbag Bee. Native awaits you. to Australia, these stingless bees store vast supplies of honey in their hives, making them a target for invasion by other hungry colonies. In scenes akin to Game of Thrones, colonies of Tetragonula hockingsi bees, native to Northern Queensland, travel south to raid and usurp the nests of Tetragonula carbonaria, fighting the resident bees to the death, until their own queen has gained entry. Yet bees are not always helpless when faced with invasion; in Japan, Asian honeybees (Apis cerana) have evolved Droege, S. and Packer, L. 2015. Bees: An Up-Close Look at Pollinators a unique defence against devastating attacks Around the World. Voyageur Press, Minneapolis. from Asian Hornets (Vespa mandarinia) that can decimate an entire colony. To defend their larvae, Falk, S. 2015. Field Guide to the Bees of Great Britain and Ireland.

Apis cerana workers smother intruders in a giant British Wildlife Publishing, London. ‘bee ball’, vibrating their wing muscles to increase the temperature to 46°C – enough to kill the hornet, but just below the maximum temperature Michener, C.D. 2007. The Bees of the World. 2nd edition. John Hopkins tolerated by bees. Sadly, European honeybees do University Press, Baltimore. not demonstrate this behaviour and the recent spread of the Asian Hornet poses a considerable Wilson-Rich, N. 2014. The Bee: A Natural History. Ivy Press, Lewes. threat to European hives.

Helen’s Phd in Ecology came from the University of St Andrew’s. She taught Biology at King’s but left in 2017 to pursue further research.

Further Reading

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Violet Carpenter Bee

‘If a career in research, conservation, entomology or genetics appeals to you, then the world of charismatic bees desperately awaits you.’

In The blood Jebin Yoon (6a Marlowe) says modern medicine would not

exist without the genius of William Harvey OKS.

C

an you imagine a surgeon performing surgery without understanding the circulation of the blood? The mortality rate would be sky high.

Without the simplest of procedures carried out in the medical industry that were only developed once the circulation was understood, such as vaccination through injections, millions of lives would be lost every year to diseases like small pox and measles.

William Harvey’s discovery of circulation is arguably the most important medical discovery of all time. And yes, Harvey House in St Augustine’s was named after the great man.

Padua made it easy to establish himself as a highly qualified physician in the community. And his marriage to Elizabeth Browne, the daughter of Elizabeth I’s private physician, also gave him access to a wider social network within the medical world. Becoming a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and gaining a post at St Bartholomew’s Hospital showed perhaps that luck was on William’s side, and King Charles I started to take interest in his research. In fact, Charles respected his work so much he appointed William his royal physician for life.

Theories regarding blood and circulation had changed very little since Galen nearly two millennia ago.

William Harvey was Considered as the born in Kent in 1578 to greatest physician of Joan Halke and Thomas Ancient Rome, many, Harvey. After King’s he even in the 17th won a scholarship to Century, entrusted Cambridge University. their career to Galen’s Fortunately, travelling theories and practice, expenses were of no often attempting to concern due to his build on his foundations. father’s healthy payYet, in contrast to packet as the Mayor of Galen’s theoretical Folkestone and so, at approach based ‘William Harvey was born in Kent in 1578. After the age of twenty-one, on earlier scientific King’s he won a scholarship to Cambridge University Harvey went on to discoveries, Harvey study Medicine at the disregarded medical and went on to study Medicine at the University of University of Padua text books and made Padua in Italy.’ in Italy. Thereafter his deductions solely he studied under Hieronymus Fabricius, who would through observation and experimentation. First observing the later have a great influence on Harvey’s works. It was flow of blood in the hearts of mammals, he descried two main Hieronymus himself who realised that veins have phases of the cardiac cycle – systole and diastole. valves and, following his death, William continued his teacher’s work to explain the role of valves in the Terms used routinely today, systole describes the active human body – a key turning point in the modelling of contraction of the heart, by which the blood is pumped the blood circulatory system. out into the vessels, and diastole means the relaxation of the heart muscles, which allows the blood to flow into the Eventually Harvey returned to England in 1602 to cardiovascular chambers. Harvey also realised that the put into practice the knowledge he had learnt whilst volume of blood pumped out from the heart was of such a also pursuing his interest in the human systemic great quantity it could not possibly be absorbed by the tissues circulation through dissections and surgeries. His of the body. From this, he theorised that blood was neither Doctor of Medicine degrees from both Cambridge and consumed nor lost. As a matter of fact, in Harvey’s acclaimed 60

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‘In Harvey’s De Motu Cordis, a section of the text reads: ‘I began privately to think that it might rather have a certain movement, as it were, in a circle.’

book, De Motu Cordis, a section of the text reads: ‘I began privately to think that it might rather have a certain movement, as it were, in a circle.’ In other words, he believed that blood must circulate around the body.

Further dissections of animal organs revealed that the volume of blood was ‘much more than is needed for nutrition’, confirming that ‘the blood in the animal body moves around in a circle continuously.’ As with any reliable experiment, however, Harvey knew he needed more information to prove his theory, and he ran countless side-experiments on isolated parts of the heart and pressures in the veins and arteries.

Through his research, he showed that the existence of the septum (a partition made of tissue) could positively dismiss Galen’s theory that blood flowed from one ventricle to the other. In fact, a dissection of the septum showed no perforations, meaning it was physically impossible for any blood to flow between the ventricles.

‘Owing to Harvey, his era saw the first successful blood transfusion, which would take the place of a harmful procedure called blood-letting.’

When Harvey first presented his discovery to fellow physicians, he was met with disbelief, owing partly to human nature’s fear of change but also because familiar science in the early 17th Century ruled out the existence of circulation. Many called his work a fallacy because of controversial doctrine, and criticised the reliability of experimentation, an approach frowned upon until only a century ago. But owing to Harvey, his era saw the first successful blood transfusion, which would take the place of a harmful procedure called blood-letting and treat patients with blood disorders in the future. By the 20th Century, physicians used his theories to determine blood flow using a pulse.

Numerous indirect discoveries had also been made worldwide, notably the role of blood in gas exchange in the lungs. So, despite early disputes, Harvey’s discovery of the blood circulatory system eventually took hold and revolutionised medical practice. 

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What did Harvey prove?

It is then pumped to the lungs

Blood carrying oxygen flows from the lungs to the heart

Harvey showed that blood returns to the heart from the body via the veins

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Blood leaves the heart to circulate around the body via the arteries

t n i

MYard

W Almonry building on the left c1860

Building Mitchinsons in 1979 on the former Almonry site

Ed Barlow (6b Galpin’s) looks into the history of a hallowed space outside his bedroom window that is now a construction headquarters.

hen St. Augustine landed on our shores in AD 597 to introduce Christianity to King Æthelberht and his Kingdom of Kent, he went straight to the seat of power. And so Canterbury became an important site for the Catholic Where Mitchinsons now stands there was a faith in England that would remain a hub of chapel, sometimes used by the school, and cultural importance throughout the Middle beyond this there was no Mint Yard Gate but Ages. At the very heart of this new monastic the Archbishop’s stable. On the East side the settlement was the monks’ halls of Aula Aula Nova, originally the abbot’s guest house, Nova, or New Hall, otherwise known as had an undercroft a bit like the one that Galpin’s. This site became important to the exists now, and the Norman staircase. The whole of Europe not only religiously but also West side, where the Science laboratories economically when a major are, was a kitchen, and mint was established here, where School House later to become the centre ‘This site became important now stands there was an of a renowned educational to the whole of Europe not Almonry, from which alms institution, and still known were distributed to the only religiously but also as Mint Yard. poor, and after which the economically when a major court was named. In fact mint was established here.’ the pillars beneath the By the 12th Century the quad of Mint Yard had School Room are where been built on all four sides. they were in the old Aula To give a rough idea of how it looked I have Nova, and some of its arches remain to this used Pevsner’s Kent: North East and East (a day in the Armoury. (For further details refer brilliant series, offering architectural analysis to Dr Kahn’s Canterbury Cathedral and its of most of Britain).

Romanesque Sculpture.)

Unfortunately the only fully intact parts of the old structure still standing are the Norman Staircase and the Court Gate. This is quite apparent to this day both in their distinctly Romanesque style but also the type of stone used. While the surrounding buildings (Galpin’s and the Dining Room) use flint, the Norman Staircase uses a native Norman stone that is lighter. Its use to this day is mainly attributed to the popularity of 18th and 19th Century engravings sold to tourists. It must also be noted that Mint  Left: The King’s School in 1937 by art master Lewis Fairbank

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Interior of the Almonry building, as School House drawn by James Wallace, a King’s Scholar, in 1843.

Yard was an important part of the complex waterwork system that ran through the Cathedral grounds, and one can find in the Cathedral archives Edward Psalter’s famous illuminated map of the system. So for many centuries Mint Yard acted as a living quarters for generations of monks at the heart of the most important religious site in England since Stonehenge.

The original school was moved from The Mint Yard to The Sacrist’s Yard so the chapel and Almonry would be left vacant, and in 1545 these buildings were taken over by the Crown for use as a new Royal Mint. One can presume the foundation of the mint here was due to, first, the existing archiepiscopal mint in the Palace area and, second, to a bold political statement by the king, who was quite literally stamping his authority on an influential seat of the church. A similar mint was

‘Mint Yard was an important part of the complex waterwork system that ran through the Cathedral grounds.’ set up in York, another seat of episcopal power. At the same time smaller mints were stationed in Southwark and Bristol. The mint in Canterbury also caused the building of an early form of the Mint Yard Gate, which was built, according to a letter from 1545, ‘To assist the transportation of heavy goods, wood, coal and bullion for the Mint Yard.’

One might ask why this history of small-scale industry should be of any interest. Admittedly it was half a millenium ago, but that does not diminish the fact that some of us here today are walking, living and

The Headmaster’s House 1865. Galpin’s was created by dividing School House in 1952.

School House c1950

even, in my case, sleeping in the midst of one of the most important collections of buildings in England.

Just to give a sense of their importance I’ll give an example. This mint, as well as others throughout the realm, was answerable to the King, and its officers were responsible for all offences committed in the coinage of money. Henry I, upon hearing that pennies at a mint had been adulterated, is said to have assembled all the chief coin makers and cut off their right hands, all on the same day at Winchester.

One must also appreciate the role of such mints in the Great Debasement, which occurred when, due to Henry VIII’s lavish spending, he wasn’t able to afford enough bullion to mint enough coins, and with less pure gold or silver in its metal the coin became worth less and caused inflation.

Opposite above: coins produced by the Canterbury Mint include 1. Edward IV Silver Coin, 2. Edward I Silver Penny, 3. Henry III Bronze Penny, 4. Montrave Hoard Penny

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1

4

And how did The Mint Yard become the centre of King’s, the school we know today? The school was, even after its refounding in the 16th Century, a small institution for the education of a small number of scholars.

Like many other schools, it had a singular room for schooling and only one boarding house. But major changes were underway by 1874, with the destruction of the West side of Mint Yard that left a gap between what was then the fives courts and the Porter’s Lodge.

In the next year the Alford Laboratory was built, later to be followed by the Harvey Laboratories in 1905.

2

Despite no signs on the outside, a second storey was added in 1958. We can also see, under Blore in the late 19th Century, an explosion of growth and development with the construction of the Parry Library, among 3 others. During the same period Blore also built a gymnasium where the computer rooms reside today.

This gymnasium building was expanded in 1957 to give As the present Headmaster said in the Summer School House more space. Mint Yard was covered on of 2017, the school is greater than any of its three sides and had an expanse of grass in the middle individuals. And this truth is perfectly expressed with a tall tree that later blew down.

by Mint Yard, from the Roman The Yard was then turned into a quad ‘Those who live here are road that once ran through it to proper in 1982 with the erection of the monks and the mint itself, Mitchinsons. We see here that, in the just some in a long line of and all the way up to the present souls that have breathed temporary buildings that house space of a couple of centuries, Mint in Mint Yard, we are all Yard develops and changes in step the very builders of the school’s with the school. While the school just a tiny seam in a rich future buildings. Those who live acquired more and more buildings, here are just some in a long line of vein of history.’ and as the number of pupils and staff souls that have breathed in Mint grew, so changed Mint Yard. It is the Yard, and we are all just a tiny heart and soul of a tiny school for scholars that has seam in a rich vein of history occupying this small grown up over the years into the famous global seat of space. We should never take for granted being in a learning it is today. place that can tell such a story.

L. L. Razé, The New Schoolroom c1855

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No Cheating!

Head of Maths, Stuart Ocock, is renowned for witty and ingenious scholarship questions. We chose five for you to try.

You have thirty minutes.

No phones!

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A 2008 is, amongst other things, the International Year of the Potato. To celebrate, someone has raided the King’s School kitchens and stolen all the potatoes.

The Headmaster rounds up four people (Burbank, Désirée, Maris and Nicola) he thinks might have committed the crime (one of them has). He asks them what happened.

• • •

Burbank says Désirée is guilty.

Désirée says Maris is guilty.

Maris and Nicola both say they didn’t do or see anything.

Only one person is lying. Who is it? Explain your reasoning carefully.

B When Zebedee sits down to write a scholarship mathematics paper his brain weighs 1.4 kg and is (rather unusually) 99% water.

At the end of the examination all that thinking made steam come out of Zebedee’s ears, and as a result his brain is now 98% water.

There is exactly the same mass of solid brain matter as before.

Should he be worried by this? Show full working to back up your arguments.

C Toots has a favourite number. He gives you two clues as to what it is.

• •

Work out the length of the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle whose other two sides are 189 and 340.

Work out how many days there are in this number of fortnights.

This is Toots’ number. What is it?

D This question is a fourth-century problem from a collection called the Greek Anthology, and concerns the mythological tale of the fifth of the twelve tasks of Heracles: Cleaning the Stables of Augeas.

Heracles the mighty was questioning Augeas, seeking to know the number of his herds, and Augeas replied: “About the streams of Alpheius, my friend, are half of them; the eighth part pasture around the hill of Cronos; the twelfth part far away by the precinct of Taraxippus; the twentieth part feed in holy Elis; and I left the thirtieth part in Arcadia; but here you see the remaining fifty herds.”

The question you must answer is: how many herds did Augeas have?

[Hint: call this number x, use the information in the paragraph above to form an equation in x and solve it.]

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E Here is the South Oculus window in Canterbury Cathedral:

(a)

Let’s look more closely at the ferramenta (the metal frames). Here is a simplified version:

If the radius of the smaller, touching, circles is exactly 1 metre, show that the radius of the larger circle is 1 + √2 metres.

(b) Show that the area of the larger circle is π(3 +2 √2).

From (a) we know the diameter of the larger circle is 2 + 2 √2.

This means that the square in the centre (see below), has diagonal of length one-third the diameter, i.e.

(2 + 2 √2) 3 (c)

1 Explain carefully why a square with diagonal x has area 2 x2. .

(d)

Find and simplify an expression for the area of the square at the centre of the window.

(e)

Find the percentage (to some accuracy) of the larger circle occupied by the square in the middle.

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On her university year abroad, modern linguist Lily Begg OKS found the Kanak tribe in New Caledonia politically caught between a rock and a hard place (or perhaps entre l’arbre et l’écorce).

T

en months from now, New Caledonia, an archipelago in the South Pacific, will have a chance to liberate itself once and for all.

Although the country has been ‘autonomous’ since 1988, New Caledonians still live under French rule, and their education, law and economy are chained to those of France. In November, there is a referendum for full independence, which has been a long time coming, but get this: the polls show that most New Caledonians will vote remain.

A

Brave

New Caledonia

Because it is a country on the verge of a vote for freedom, I decided to visit New Caledonia during my university year abroad. But my first conversations on the island showed the idea of independence was widely thought of as a joke by the French population, and as an unrealistic ideal by the indigenous population, the Kanaks. I was shocked to hear that no one had even stepped up to be leader of the independence party. Soon I realised how naïve I had been to assume a vote for independence was a country’s happy answer to a long history of oppression and suffering. The vote has come too late.

The vote is the bitter product of decades of thwarted referendums and lives lost fighting for each one. In the last century, several Kanak movements who struggled for a precious right to independence were at their height in the 1980s, the bloodiest decade in the country’s memory. The forming of the militant Kanak and Socialist National Liberation Front (FLNKS) in 1984 was a pivotal moment; the movement managed to secure an independence referendum, a step forward quickly snatched back when French gendarmes murdered the leader of the party, Eloi Machoro, before the referendum could take place. His death drew the world’s attention to the South Pacific archipelago, and France was put under pressure to give the country political autonomy, a compromise that was just not good enough for the natives. And so there was even more protest and bloodshed.

‘The vote is the bitter product of decades of thwarted referendums and lives lost fighting for each one.’

Still etched in the New Caledonian memory was the 1988 Ouvea Cave hostage slaughter, when nineteen Kanaks were murdered in cold blood because they protested for independence. France promised to hold a proper referendum by 1998 but, once again, before the referendum could even take place, the Kanak leaders, 70

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New Caledonia is on the verge of a vote for freedom

After so many years of foreign rule in New Caledonia, native ways of life are dying out

passed this on orally, along with all its wisdom, histories, songs and poems. Today there are only 150 speakers left, most among the oldest generation. Jean is compiling a dictionary and grammar book for the language, and trying to inspire French-speaking youths of the tribe to pick up and preserve their ancestral tongue. Many of the tribespeople are on board, asking Jean to record their songs and stories on camera so that CDs can be stored for future generations.

These stories are essential to the survival of the culture, since an oral tradition means they contain all tribal knowledge, history and, therefore, identity.

Nickel is the biggest industry in the country

‘Today, the emotion, bloodshed and confusion of the 90s are back on the surface now the vote is finally imminent.’

Jean-Marie Tjibaou and Yeiwene Yeiwene were assassinated by a Kanak activist who believed they were too friendly with the French state and would be untrustworthy leaders of an independent New Caledonia. The 1998 referendum was delayed for twenty years. Today, the emotion, bloodshed and confusion of the 90s are back on the surface now that the vote, so weighted with fear and tragedy, is finally imminent. But there is a more insidious and distressing reason why the idea of independence is troubling New Caledonians – the realisation that the promise of independence is an empty promise.

This project is depressing to the observer because it all feels too late.

Most of the youth in the tribe show no interest and just laugh when their grandparents mutter away in Vamale. Even the older people, between 35 and 65, are disengaged because they had the ‘privilege’ of attending schools where they were taught only in French, and if any student was caught speaking a tribal tongue they would be beaten, reinforcing the colonial view that Vamale is inferior and vulgar. And so most of those under 65 believe their ancestral language is worthless.

To a linguist like me this colonial brainwashing is shocking beyond words. Of course, the method is tried and tested: disable the pride people feel in their own identity to ensure they will do nothing to protect it from extinction. Although any Kanak today is proud to be a Kanak, pervading the tribe is a resignation that their cultural claim is too weak to restore their country to its pre-colonial past. 

After so many years of foreign rule in New Caledonia, native ways of life are dying out. I helped for a while with a language preservation project set up by PhD student, Jean Rohleder, who is transcribing Vamale, the tribal language spoken for 3,000 years across several tribes in the North-East region of the island. Generations have CANTUARIAN | 2017

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‘The Kanaks of New Caledonia would need to keep mining nickel, despite its destruction of mountains and virgin forests that goes against Kanak respect for the natural world and a belief that every mountain and tree has a spirit.’

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Beyond the gradual extinction of the language, there are even more corrosive elements eating away at the Kanak identity, such as alcohol abuse. The white man first brought alcohol into the tribe, and used it as a tool of oppression by rendering Kanaks drunk and helpless. Beer is easier to buy than milk in New Caledonia and this has caused a chronic alcohol problem. The only attempt by the French state to curb the problem is to forbid the selling of alcohol on certain days of the week, which just encourages a thriving black market. There is no attempt to face up to the social consequences of alcohol abuse and work with the tribe to cure an addiction for which the French themselves are responsible. Alcohol makes it difficult for tribesmen to hold down jobs, increases violence, particularly against women, and in general gives the Kanaks a bad name: visitors are advised not to drive at the weekend in New Caledonia to avoid accidents with drunk drivers, implicitly Kanaks.

Alcoholism is still the most destructive force at work in the tribes, consuming its consumers and rendering them powerless against a world that now blames them for their drinking and claims they are not fit to rule their own land. Although most food and drink is imported, the country is self-sufficient in beer. Through fuelling the alcohol problem, Number 1, the island’s brewery, is doing very well indeed. An independent New Caledonia, of course, would lean even more heavily on its home brand.

It would be impossible to go back to a tribal system.

Independence is still an essential step in giving a country back to its own people.

It is also too late because the current system – occidental and capitalist – cannot be removed just by a vote for independence.

Since 1853, when the French took over, New Caledonia has New Caledonia has a burgeoning tourist industry.

‘In further detriment to their indigenous culture, the Kanaks would be forced to prioritise Western standards to keep the country running.’

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developed such close ties with the Western world it would be impossible to go back to a tribal system. The nickel mines started by the French in the 1870s are still going strong. In fact, nickel is the biggest industry in the country, on which New Caledonia depends for economic survival: the Kanak need jobs in the mines to feed their families, and the mines are owned by international investors who will not just go away if the country becomes independent.

New Caledonia has the second biggest nickel-mining industry after Australia. There is also a burgeoning tourist industry – investors from New Zealand and Japan will pay anything for a piece of land in paradise.

The Kanaks also depend on Western medicine because the practice of herbal medicine has faded, and these days there are foreign diseases, brought in with the colonisers, for which there are no traditional cures. Independence from France would mean waving goodbye to the benefits of the healthcare system, leaving empty hospitals. There is no medical school in New Caledonia and so doctors these days come from abroad on ‘outremer’ contracts.

So independence means keeping a Western health care system that is impossible to replace.

If they go independent, the Kanaks would be forced to take up reins that aren’t theirs and maintain a system that exterminated their own. In further detriment to their indigenous culture, they would be forced to prioritise Western standards to keep the country running. For example, they would have to keep mining nickel, despite its destruction of mountains and virgin forests that goes against Kanak respect for the natural world and a belief that every mountain and tree has a spirit and shouldn’t be touched.

Lily Begg was at King’s

between 2010 and 2015. She is a student of French and Italian at Oxford University, and is currently living in Bordeaux as part of her year abroad.

Apart from drinking lots of wine, Lily is living and working in a self-sufficient village on the outskirts of the town and spends her days building tiny houses.

In the future, she hopes to launch alternative agriculture projects in order to show the world that they way we currently grow our food and exploit those in the agricultural industry is appalling, and that we must do something about it.

The Kanaks should not have to inherit a system that is hostile to their traditional way of life. Independence is just a continuation of Western dominion under a different name. When New Caledonia’s neighbour, Vanuatu, became fully independent recently, it suffered great economic depression and extreme poverty. The obvious solution was to let the tourist industry buy its way into their South Pacific paradise, meaning precious ancestral land that had been returned to the Ni-Vanuatu was sold back to the West for swimming pools and golf courses. This is not independence but a sickening commercial disguise for the neo-colonisation that many countries still suffer.

By saying it’s ‘too late’ I don’t mean New Caledonia’s situation is hopeless. Of course, independence is still an essential step in giving a country back to its own people, who for so long have been denied the right to rule. By ‘too late’ I mean that it is too late for the complete revival of a pre-colonial New Caledonia, and that assigning the political status of ‘independent’ does nothing to protect a dying culture. The focus must be to prioritise more projects like Jean’s, which should be state-funded rather than privately funded, and to inspire empowerment and self-belief that by their own force will regenerate indigenous culture.

Although one cannot revive a pre-colonial state, one can plant the preserved seeds of traditional culture and give them a chance to grow.

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Suspended, an installation in Canterbury Cathedral by Arabella Dorman, uses clothes collected from Lesbos and Calais to showcase the plight of refugees. www.canterbury-cathedral.org for full details.

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THE CANTUARIAN ARTICLES FROM THE ARCHIVE Editor Mark Bäcker flicked through copies of The Cantuarian since it began in 1882 and selected the following four extracts. In ‘Powder and Shot’, from 1885, a smug OKS recalls a prolific hunting adventure in Africa. Another OKS, equally pleased with himself, reports in 1929 on the activities of his fellow Old Boys in Oxford: see ‘The O.K.S. Guide to Oxford’. In 1957 a satirical rogue (still at school) gives his peers advice about how to use King’s Week as a cover for skilful skiving, an art he calls ‘King’s Week-Manship’. (How times change!) And with war all around, a more mature voice in 1940 expresses concern about the future of the nation’s Wooster factories. Enjoy.

KING’S WEEK-MANSHIP 1957

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lattery can seldom have been more readily lapped up than it was when the Editor spoke to me about an article on the subject mentioned above, to acknowledge that I was the peer of slackers, the acme of idleness and that it was not above my ability to prolong this for circa a fortnight was positively playing down to my vanity. Since the amateurs at this game make themselves so painfully obvious, I decided to write a small thesis starting from the beginning and constructing the Ideal King’s Weeker in the hope that some will benefit.

The object, of course, is to do nothing.

Before the reader stops bothering to fulfil his vital function, let me explain that this is not as simple as it sounds. To do nothing (and here I address the reader who is looking for polish) it is imperative always to have something to do; but at the same time this something must have no more than a platonic relationship with any kind of work – the Stress of Life, etc.

Having clearly grasped his object, the potential King’s Weeker must now master this method of approach and finally the actual technique of his magnum opus.

Firstly, it must be definitely decided when school periods are going to be relinquished (this decision is not hard for some) and the date must be rigidly adhered to. A set of suitable clothes have to be found; they must not be too outrageous, for the idler wants to be able to venture far afield in them and they must not conform to any recognisable school attire. If clean, the wearer must go to the storeroom and judiciously sprinkle

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paint on them; some think it is a good idea to employ them as the general-purpose study rag for one week before use. The candidate should also have compiled a list of all those in official positions in King’s Week and should systematically volunteer to them for work somewhere about the beginning of June to enable them to utterly forget to link him with any form of activity in King’s Week. Thus the physical and psychological backcloth has been set; confidence, alibis and personal décor are provided.

We now progress a stage further to general rules that must be implicitly obeyed.

The emotions to be produced are pity in fellows, awe in fags and credibility in masters. The first two can be bracketed and are produced by lateness into everything accompanied by explanation of a general traffic theme (‘Working on the set till two’, ‘Been making the money tally’); hair must never be combed, face rarely washed, hands never in pockets and an air of general dejection-through-overwork produced. If one’s wandering takes one near the common room, Hodgson’s Hall or in the town, some additional fortification is needed; in the Precincts a saw or some similar tool with ambiguous associations (i.e., work/assault) can be carried; in the town it is best to push one of the school carts – this is impressive besides helping to level the odds against one in a crowded city. It must also be remembered that two is the safest maximum number and that something (not heavy) must be carried, which puts division of forces out of the question, e.g., ladder, plank.

It is now that the question of general tactics must be approached and dealt with.

In general, show a lively interest in all other people’s business to divert attention from one’s own (which must only be dealt with under constraint and in the most general and inadequate terms). If the student has nothing specific in mind, he would be well advised to spend the morning visiting all points of interest; thus the ticket booth, office, set, Great Hall and storeroom would each be included in the tour. This prevents the one affliction of idlers – boredom; and if the student is true to type he will now be exhausted. It is recommended that the next two hours are spent in the Cath. Gate having coffee: this is comparatively safe, but if Authority should come in, look faint and weak and mutter something about ‘up till 3 last night’ – this, besides being true, has insinuations of both work and no breakfast behind it – but on no account divulge where you actually were. The afternoon is easily spent – experiment has proved that the best vehicle is the ordinary deck chair.

The evening should be spent in tranquillity + refreshment. When the student has got through his day so far he will not need to have advice on how to spend the very early morning of the next day!

Finally, a word to the faint-hearted: if the term ‘lessons’ at any time crosses the brain either by direct thought or indirect association, the afflicted must take to his bed with four aspirins, sending a fag to inform matron.

POWDER AND SHOT 1885

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n compliance with your request for a short account of a hunting trip in West Africa, I very gladly send you a few notes.

For some time I had been wanting to get a shot at a hippopotamus, and so I sent word to the king of the country in which I had now arrived that I was anxious to set out early, and that I wanted a canoe and twenty-five boys. He agreed to have everything ready in two days time. The reason of the delay was that he wanted at least one day to make ‘medicine’, without which special ‘fetish’ he could by no means be induced to start.

By daybreak all our impedimenta are in the canoe, to the sides of which are strapped my rifles – one a Martini and the other a doublebarreled Express – and my gun. As we shove off the boys set up an unearthly tune, under the inspiration of which they sent the canoe flying along like a race-horse. They can keep the speed up from six to six for days together. The river, for about twenty-eight miles from the mouth, is some ten or eleven miles broad, with islands dotted all over it. But on the second day the stream has narrowed down to not more than a hundred yards across. Here the shooting begins. All singing is strictly prohibited, and we proceed slowly and with as little noise as possible.

Hundreds of monkeys are jumping about among the dense foliage; birds of all kinds – ibis, fish-hawks, ducks, bitterns, plantaineaters – fly within easy range, while on every bank and log alligators are dozing in the sun. Presently, just behind us, we hear a loud snort and see a huge pink head above the water for a second or two. Down it goes, and I stand up in the canoe with my rifle ready.

In another moment half a dozen great heads are bobbing about in the water, not twenty yards from the canoe. I let fly at the nearest, and in a second we are off for dear life, slap over the place where hippo rose. There he is again, just where he expected us to be. As he stares around for us I get another pot at him and away we go, clean over him as before.

After waiting a minute or two we find that he doesn’t come up again and we know that the last shot has taken effect, and he won’t come up to the top till next day.

At the thought of tomorrow’s feast the natives become wildly demonstrative. They hastily bring my bed and mosquito net out of the canoe; fires are lighted and wood collected for the night. Then when tobacco and a ‘tot’ (small glass of rum) have been served out to each as Homer says, ‘having put from them the desire of meat and drink, they bethought them of other things, even of the song and dance.’

I consented resignedly, although I knew that it meant no sleep for me, for when once allowed to dance they go on all night, and

the yelling and shouting that accompanies the performance is positively deafening.

Moreover they insist on a tot all round about once every hour.

In the morning we go and look for our friend hippopotamus. At last we find him a good way down stream. Pulling him to the side we immediately set to work to cut him up. Meantime one of the boys has been to a village not far off and announced the slaughter of an ‘Ejorgo’. I bargain for the head and let them have the rest. They make whips out of the hide by cutting it into strips, twisting them and leaving them to dry in the sun. After they have gorged themselves and slept all day to get rid of the effects, we start at nightfall. Some, however, at first refused to go on, but after flogging one or two ‘pour encourager les autres’, and telling the villagers to keep some of the meat till we return, we got off at last.

Paddling along we come upon a huge crocodile fast asleep on a bank some hundred yards away. The ‘head-man’ of the canoe whispers me to shoot him. He is still asleep for his mouth remains wide open, so we creep up to within sixty yards or so, and then I send a Martini bullet right through him just behind his shoulder. He hardly stirs, and we soon have him in the canoe. Presently I get another shot at one on a log mid-stream. I hit him about his middle and down he goes.

Immediately half a dozen boys are in after him and soon have him ashore. As long as a crocodile is wounded they will dive after him and quickly fetch him out, and as they drag him along they dig their fingers into his eyes.

They are passionately fond of the beast’s flesh. One fellow assured me that to the

black man crocodile is the same as sardines to a white. They think sardines our greatest luxury because we always travel with them, they being the most handy food in the bush.

After feasting over-night on the crocodiles and a monkey which I added to our bag, we are off again at day-break. On the way I drop a couple of large deer as they are crossing the water. Close by was an English Factory, so I sent the deer in and put up there for the night.

Next day we reached the place where I wanted to shoot elephants. I sent the canoe back and pressed on to the king’s village.

We are in quite another country now with entirely different language and customs.

This king is a noted elephant-hunter and a great friend of mine. I told him I was off for a month’s shooting and asked him to come with me. He consented, but a couple of days must needs be wasted in manufacturing a ‘fetish’.

We had capital sport, our bag including elephants, gorillas, chimpanzees, deer, antelope, gazelle, and one leopard. In this village very few of the natives had ever seen a white man before, and they used to come up and cautiously make much of me, and were usually not a little frightened. However, they grew exceedingly fond of my rum.

The life one leads in Africa has only one drawback, and that is its extreme unhealthiness. At any moment one may be struck down with fever, which as often as not proves fatal, and always leaves one as weak as a baby.

Another time perhaps I shall be able to give you some little account of my adventures in other lands.

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THE O.K.S. GUIDE TO OXFORD 1957

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s our train draws into Oxford we observe a large hoarding in a field, on which is written: OXFORD – where Morris Cars are made.

This is correct, but there is also a University which claims a part of the attention for the pilgrim bound for Sir William Morris’s (Bart.) factory, since we must pass through the suburb of the University to reach the city of the motorworks.

We will catch a bus that will carry us to Carfaz, the Trafalgar Square of Oxford. As we descend we catch a glimpse of a familiar tie in a bath-chair. An O.K.S.! Who is it?

It is Janson-Smith, who is going down for good and who has had a most unfortunate last term; he is in a bath-chair because he has appendicitis. He couldn’t have the operation at once because he had to take his Final Schools. However, they are over now, and he is going home soon. We are all very sorry for him, for he has been living entirely on eggs and fish for months, and wish him a speedy recovery. We shall miss him next term. You do not know the man pushing the bath-chair; he is not an O.K.S. but that fellow crossing the street to talk to Janson-Smith is Pegg; Pegg is a hearty rowing man and we shall probably meet him again in the afternoon when we take a stroll down by the river. He and Frend, whom we shall meet later, tried to get some money out of a Travelliing Fund in order to go on a walking-tour in the Black Forest, but they failed miserably. Pegg spent a lot of time in Bethnal Green last vacation, learning the language. He also wields a pretty punt-pole on fine evenings.

Let us leave Janson-Smith and his companions – it is eleven o’clock! Coffeetime in Oxford! We enter the ‘Super’ Café and force our way through a dense crowd to try to find a table; the atmosphere is redolent of black coffee and tobacco; saxophones wail, cymbals crash. Everyone is swaying from the hips upward to the crazy rhythm. Who is that crouching guiltily behind a pillar? That is Scrivenor, one of the lights of Oriel; he is crouching guiltily because he is supposed to be in training and ought not to be here at all.

He sees us, and, stealthily crushing out his cigarette, throws us a wan smile. He is going to the Trinity Commemoration Ball, and is going to hire a car for the night. He has not yet learnt to drive, but is full of confidence.

Look at that fellow grotesquely attired in a white bow-tie, cap and gown. It is Lainé; he is working very hard, taking his Final

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Schools. He has come out early from his paper this morning and from the abandoned way he is putting the sugar in his coffee we can deduce that things have not gone too well. However, we wish him the best of luck.

There is Janson-Smith entering in his bathchair…but we have spoken of him already.

Time is on the wing; we must hurry.

Almost getting away without paying we regain the sunlit street, full of its jostling, bustling crowd. Mind how you cross the road; Oxford traffic has no method in its madness. We pass down the comparative quiet of the Broad until we meet Gostling.

He tells us that he has been rowing most energetically. It is true; his boat (Wadham II.) went up, I think, six places in Eights’ Week.

He has a grievance: his boat’s efforts were not rewarded with a Bump Supper. But, as he admits, they had a gorgeous bonfire, into which old bicycles and even trousers were thrown to feed the greedy flames.

It is lunch-time; we dive into the Mitre Bar and devour some sandwiches. A picturesque place, full of old beams to please Americans, it reminds us of one of those old tea-houses in Canterbury. As we emerge refreshed into the High, which is said to be one of the finest streets in the world, we see a figure overshadowed by an enormous golf-bag hurrying and scurrying along. It is Martin: like Scrivenor, he lives in Oriel. He went up to town by ‘bus one day this term, and will describe the journey to you for a small fee. He is an ardent golfer, so ardent that I knew he would be out if we went to call on him. Sure enough, he is out. There he goes, after that ‘bus. He’s missed it!... No, he hasn’t; he’s clambering on! What’s that he’s dropped in the road? A Mashie Niblick. We will keep it.

Let us go down to where the Thames (here called the Isis – Why? You do ask a lot of questions) wends its way through the fields. The summer air is heavy with hoarse cries from brazen throats, and there is an undercurrent of muttered oaths from the frail craft on the water. There goes Pegg, bending to his work with a will. What do you say? You do not think it is with his own free will?

There on the tow-path is Janson-Smith in his bath-chair…but we have spoken of him already.

Ah, Scrivenor is coaching to-day. See how his bicycle trembles beneath him as he bellows heart-felt encouragement to his painstaking pupils. Does it not remind you

of Thursday afternoons in the Mint Yard in the old days? It does me.

Come, let us go; this confused noise is deafening. As we pass down Longwall Street we hear a din of shouting from Magdalen Grove. It is the O.U.D.S. rehearsing their summer play. Let us creep in. There is Frend; he has joined the O.U.DS. and has to use both hands to count up the number of lines allotted to his part in the play. Here he comes to speak with us; he tells us that he rowed for Trinity’s Second Boat in Eights and that the crew made five bumps, but were bumped on the last night. He is telling us about Pegg and himself failing to get the grant for the walking-tour; we must hurry, or he will give us as detailed description of the play and of his tour with Tripp last vacation.

Let us drink some tea. There goes JansonSmith in his bath-chair…but we have spoken of him already. Will you take another cup?

No? Then, as it is beginning to rain and you do not wish to visit the Museums, let us go to a cinema. Two one-and-ten’s please. Yes, it is a little noisy in here, but Oxford audiences are very enthusiastic. Why do they shout?

I do not know; they just do. There is Pegg, again, who had meant to do some work really in the one-and-two’s, with Frend, who is listening carefully to the trombone-player in order to get some new ideas. And there is Scrivenor in the one-and-ten’s, like ourselves, telling himself and his neighbours that it is the worst film he has seen for years; he has an argument in favour of ‘talkies’ which is so clever that no one really understands it but himself. Where is Martin? Probably at the theatre, seeing the D’Oyly Carte people do ‘The Gondoliers’. He told me that he wasn’t struck with ‘The Mikado’ but that he definitely prefers Gilbert and Sullivan to Musical Comedy. Come; the play, or rather, film, is done. Yes, that is ‘God Save the King’. There is Janson-Smith, with his bathchair parked in the gangway…but we have spoken of him already.

Night has fallen on the university city, as we wend our way through the fast-emptying streets. Here is our hotel. No; it is after ten o’clock. Tomorrow we will proceed to the main object of our pilgrimage, the Morris Works. From our window, we can see Janson-Smith taking a final turn in his bathchair…but we have spoken of him already.

BAEDEKER COOK, O.K.S.

THE FUTURE OF THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS 1940

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veryone knows that this is a question of urgent importance. The Schools are faced with a situation comparable to nothing hitherto experienced. Can they survive? For the most part they are unendowed, many have building debts; prices and costs are rising, incomes falling; fees can scarcely be raised; the overseas connexion must have been reduced to a minimum; evacuation, where it has happened, has added financial burdens; while those who have not moved have none the less been compelled to spend large sums in A. R. P. work. The case is grim enough in 1940; what will it be in 1942 or 1944, if the war continues so long? How and where can the Public Schools raise money, and big money at that? Most of them have already been handsomely supported by Old Boys, parents and friends – a source of help which in the nature of these times must dwindle. Can government subsidy be looked for? It has been open to Schools for many years to avail themselves of Government money in return for which they have had to receive Free Place Scholars, up to a definite percentage. But that subsidy covers, in all probability, not a great deal more than the cost. The question is larger than this. Some suggest that the Government should ‘take the Public School over’, but that would mean the expenditure of millions, and many folk would want to know if it was equitable.

A solution is not at all obvious, yet everyone feels that the loss to English character would be marked if the Public Schools failed to survive. There is no doubt that they uniquely provide a wise and sound education, which played an enormous part in England’s imperial and industrial achievements in the nineteenth century, and officered its armies in the Great War. It comes as a surprise to many people, however, that the nineteenth century was the heyday of the Public Schools. Eton and Winchester had catered for the aristocracy for centuries, but it was Arnold of Rugby who ensured the same kind of training for the middle classes. He was Headmaster of Rugby from 1828 to 1842, and did, as Dr. Hawkins had prophesied, ‘change the face of education all though the Public Schools of England’. A glance through the pages of the Public Schools’ Year Book will reveal, therefore, significant dates of the founding of Public Schools which are now famous. Thus, to take typical Schools at random: Cheltenham was founded in 1841, Marlborough (largely by Charles Eaton Plater, O.K.S.) in 1843; Rossall in 1844; Radley in 1847; Lancing in 1848; Bradfield in 1850; Wellington in 1853; Clifton, Haileybury and Malvern in 1862; Cranleigh, St. Edward’s, Oxford, and Weymouth in 1863; Framlingham in 1864; Trent in 1886; and Eastbourne in 1867. Up to the middle

of the nineteenth century Public Schools, as we now understand them, were relatively few; rich men who did not wish to send their boys to them would employ private tutors, or place their boys with learned country clergy; private ‘academies’ catered for others; but the bulk of the education of the middle class (in all its grades) fell to the Grammar Schools.

Yet in those far-off days there were important features which are not today apparent in our Public School system. Long generations ago these ancient Schools were in a real sense ‘public’. Thus, speaking generally, it is true enough to say that the great Schools founded by pious men, cleric and lay, were charitable institutions.

The Foundation Statutes usually required poverty and brains from boys who aspired to be scholars of a Public School. So, when William of Wykeham was drawing up the Statutes for Winchester, he agreed that a limited number of the ‘sons of gentlemen’ should be admitted; but his Foundation was for the able poor boy. That, by and large, was the same in all anciently founded Public Schools. It was true of our own. Henry’s Statutes required that his Scholars should be ‘poor and destitute of the aid of friends’, withal of sprightly intellect. So Christopher Marlowe could come to school from his father’s shop; so Edward Keete, who cleaned the Cathedral, got his boy John in as a King’s Scholar. John’s brains took him to the University and the patronage of Hatfield, and his pretty sister, Elizabeth, became Marchioness of Salisbury, ancestress of the present Cecils. Not many years after, from the very same cottage where Keete had lived, young Charles Abbott, the son of a barber,

went as a Scholar to the King’s School, and became Lord Chief Justice of England. But today the Public Schools are not ‘public’ in this literal sense of Foundation Statutes and the intentions of pious Founders. Is it a solution for these hard times that the Government should take over the entire system on some such lines as original Founders had, while the well-to-do are admitted on payment of fees and on proof of sprightly brains?

Could the case that the best education should be provided for the best-fitted be more admirably put than it was by Archbishop Cranmer, when he discussed with Henry VIII’s Commissioners what sort of boys should benefit from the Royal Foundation of Canterbury? The Commissioners argued that the plougman’s son should be kept to the plough, and the artisan’s son should follow in his father’s footsteps. The Archbishop replied, ‘I grant much of your meaning herein, as needful in a Commonwealth; but yet utterly to exclude the ploughman’s son, and the poor man’s son, from the benefits of learning……is as much as to say as that Almighty God should not be at liberty to bestow His great gifts of grace upon any person, nor nowhere else but as we and other men shall appoint them to be employed according to our fancy, and not according to His most godly will and pleasure Who giveth His gifts both of learning and other perfections in all sciences unto all kinds and states of people indifferently.’ King’s School, Canterbury, has enriched the life of Nation and Empire by many people and in many ways; but had the Archbishop not stood firm the School’s contribution would have been far, far less.

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untr y f o c y ne m e smell o i g a “I im with th nd the a home ea breeze lls in the the s k of seagu ” e. squaw distanc

The West Coast of Sweden

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NO PLACE LIKE HOME Alfred Lindman (6a The Grange) lives in Hong Kong and studies in England but tells us why Sweden is still his home.

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veryone identifies with a special place in the world. Every child has somewhere they like to call their place.

It is where their warmest memories come from, and it often coincides with where they grew up. For me, this place is Sweden. I grew up there and, even though my family has since moved to Hong Kong, we still staunchly consider ourselves proud Swedes.

Whenever I think of Sweden, I imagine my country home with the smell of the sea breeze and the squawk of seagulls in the distance – not too different from Canterbury in that sense. I think of our trips along the archipelago spanning the West coast, docking at any island we like, hammering supports into the cliffs to tie up our boat. I help unload the food and supplies then explore the island with my sisters and dogs. We might drive off to eat at a seafood restaurant nestled on a far-off island accessible only by boat, the food locally sourced, and end the day with a stroll through the village, eating ice cream. This is my experience of Sweden, one of which most are unaware.

To many non-Swedes, the country means biting cold and long nights, a consequence of being partly within the Arctic Circle. In recent years Sweden has gained another more serious reputation, as a haven for refugees.

This is not all wrong either, since the country is generous to asylum seekers and of late has been one of the major destinations for Syrians fleeing their homes. But this openarms mind-set is nothing new. In the past

decade alone tens of thousands of Somalis, Palestinians, Iraqis and ex-Yugoslavians have found shelter from war and poverty within Sweden. In the wake of the Syrian Civil War all of Europe has faced its largest refugee crisis and it was mainly this event that led Sweden to gain the image it has today of a country populated by immigrants. In 2015 Sweden received 163,000 refugees, which was the largest influx of refugees ever recorded by the OECD, relative to original population – in Sweden 10 million. But whilst Sweden has always been famous for its openness, it struggles to integrate immigrants, something countries like Britain are eager to do. As a result, unemployment is a major problem, which has inevitably led to a rise in crime. International media label Sweden colourfully as the ‘Rape Capital of the World’ but this is a huge misconception easily refuted by statistics. As the late Hans Rosling, Professor of Global Health at Karolinska Institute, stated on Danish television in 2015, ‘You cannot use the media if you wish to understand the world.’

As my experience shows, though, Sweden is far from a turbulent dystopia. In fact, my home country has always been a place of absolute positivity. In my mind, Sweden is the perfect escape for myself. But being born in Sweden, leaving when I was five years old for Hong Kong, then boarding at an English school has made me into a typical thirdculture kid, and the hardest question for me to answer is, ‘Where do you come from?’

So, where is my home? I can never give 

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Stockholm Zoo

Stockholm Old Town

‘Every Christmas I know I will spend a few days in Stockholm. I can roam the city, one of the most beautiful capital cities in the world.’

Sweden at Christmas

a full answer to that question, but I do know where I feel most comfortable at any given time. If I want familiarity, I want England. If I need some time with old friends and family, I want Hong Kong.

And if all I want is escape and relaxation, I yearn for annual family visits, at Christmas and in Summer, to Sweden.

I can always rely on Sweden to deliver a good holiday. Every Christmas I know I will spend a few days in Stockholm with my childhood friends, going out and catching up, and I can roam the city, one of the most beautiful capital cities in the world. Imagine if London was built on fourteen islands, the city gently rising as the buildings get bigger and closer to the centre. Unlike in the Thames, though, you can swim even in the centre of Stockholm, so clean is the water in the waterfront. Many tourists should visit Gamla Stan, the old town where the Swedish Royal Palace stands. Gamla Stan is the oldest part of Stockholm and its original centre, dating back to the 13th Century. Winding cobbled streets surround colourful buildings designed in traditional North German style, and in the centre is Stortorget, a public square right in front of the Stockholm Stock Exchange. The best museum, located on the island of Djurgården, is The Vasa, built around the wreck of the Swedish navy’s flagship of that name, which sank in Stockholm harbour in 1628 on her maiden voyage, and was salvaged 333 years later in almost perfect condition.

The only decoration missing from the ship is its colours.

Another ancient attraction in Stockholm is the renowned Skansen, the oldest open-air museum and zoo in the world. Opened in 1892, it was made to showcase the way of life in Sweden

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before the Industrial Revolution. The museum includes a life-size replica of a 19th Century Swedish village, with people posing as tanners, milkmaids, silversmiths, bakers and so on. As a zoo Skansen presents a wide range of wellknown Swedish animals, such as the wolf, bison, bear, seal, wolverine and even a walrus, along with other nonScandinavian animals such as gorillas.

Skansen is a must-see for anyone visiting Sweden for the first time. I still visit out of nostalgia, since I was taken there often by my parents when I was little.

After a few days in Stockholm we leave for the West coast, where the family reunites. Christmas is the biggest family holiday in Sweden and relatives travel long distances. The main event is Christmas Eve. When the sun has receded by 3:00 pm and darkness envelops the landscape, Christmas dinner swings into action. On the West coast salmon, with different types of pickled herring, is followed by ham, turkey, different salads and hard bread – basically a big smörgårdsbord. A tree we have cut down ourselves lights up with Christmas decorations and piles of presents, and the house smells of hyacinths and mulled wine. I feel content and at ease during times like this, and the traditions that are kept in the country are what leads me to believe that this is where I – even as a third-culture-kid – feel most at home.

LAGOM is the new Hygge The cosy ‘Hygge’ days are making way for cooler Scandi-relative ‘Lagom’.

Lagom - just the right amount - is a way of living that promotes harmony.

It celebrates fairness, moderation and being satisfied with and taking proper care of what you’ve got. Swedish furniture store IKEA has even created its own project, ‘Live Lagom’, to teach people how to make life more sustainable.

THREE Things you probably didn’t know about

FRESHWATER SEA The Baltic Sea’s salinity is much lower than that of ocean water (which averages 3.5%). The open surface waters of the central basin have salinity of 0.5% to 0.8%, which makes the basin borderline freshwater. Drinking the water as a means of survival would actually hydrate rather than dehydrate the body.

SWEDEN...

CHEERS Eye contact must always accompany a cry of ‘Cheers!’ in Sweden – a Viking tradition that made sure carousing did not end in carnage.

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Photographer Matt McCardle found this graffiti hiding in the cathedral. Most of it dates from the 18th Century onwards and features little more than names and dates in a crude bid to say, ‘I woz ’ere.’ But earlier graffiti was more votive than vandalistic, the work of god-fearing church-goers rather than alienated youth. Scant evidence of its erasion suggests it was an accepted way of asking for protection from evil spirits, and was just another part of the magic and ritual of belief.

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Reformation 500 Eimear Pickstone (6b Jervis) explores how, 500 years ago, The Reformation found a foothold in Canterbury and changed the world.

The new religious bodies did not produce freedoms only, of course, but costly catastrophes such as the Dissolution of the Monasteries and the Irish Troubles.

Martin Luther

The Reformation, disastrous for many and beneficial for most, certainly did not lack impact. Like the frenzy whipped up when Kylie Jenner releases a new lipstick, the Reformation is a medieval example of a modern phenomenon – when an unknown person becomes a global sensation. When Luther’s 95 tweets, or rather theses, were nailed to a door in Wittenburg they spread, by pamphlet and ballad, like a viral post on social media of which Donald Trump would be proud. Like an online star trending today, Luther voiced his ideas through articulate

obscenities, and thereby earnt unwonted fame. Accusations of insanity and attacks on the shocking vulgarity of his theses did not arrest their proliferation, perhaps because he was saying what many already thought.

If anything, the deadly denouncements helped spread the word. So should we celebrate the Reformation or treat it like a messy divorce one avoids discussing over Christmas dinner?

The ideas of Luther did change the relationship between a man and his religion: God became accessible and the Bible readable. As propaganda it was so powerful that a colleague of Luther, Friedrich Myconius, claimed that ‘within four weeks almost all of Christendom was familiar’ with the words on the door. Not even Kylie Jenner can claim that victory. However, the Reformation was more than just one of the most successful propaganda campaigns of all time. When we remove it from the equation and consider an alternative course for history, Luther means liberation.

Basic rights such as contraception, which still go against the catechism of the Roman Catholic Church today, would not have been possible. Liberalism begins with the Reformation because it freed Europe from a tyrannous religious authority, and Montaigne, Bacon, Hobbes and Descartes were allowed to be born. The Enlightenment became possible. Science became possible.

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In the context of its time the Reformation was seismically progressive and innovations such as The Bible in English were shocking, but the impact on the people of England was varied. Monarchs after the Reformation had a tricky time.

Elizabeth I adopted a pragmatic policy of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ so, despite a ban on being openly Catholic, few were persecuted aggressively for their religion.

Throughout her long reign, Pope Leo X there was religious stability and what in retrospect amounted to relative religious freedom. Things changed under James, when the suspicion of Catholics intensified. While some of this can be blamed on numerous attacks by Catholics on him as King of Scotland, the Gunpowder Plot provoked outright persecution. It took 150 years for such shock-waves to subside, but The Reformation eventually gave religious freedom to the English people.

Without the Reformation there would have been no Industrial Revolution in England.

This happened among our dark satanic mills, rather than in France or Spain, because of our changed expectations. The reduced power of the Church meant fewer people became monks or priests focused solely on their faith. Great minds found fields of study more fertile than Heaven and Hell. New ideas flourished and, because of a more worldy and worldwide view, capitalism blossomed.

Less dogma and more communication enabled industrial, scientific, economic and political revolution. Literacy and learning became the goals of everyone in The West, after elitist Latin was usurped by English and priests were deposed by books.

Living and studying at King’s in 2018, it is strange to think that a seat of learning established in AD 597 to spread the word of God became a site of literacy in 1541 and spread the works of man, and all because a German monk exactly 500 years ago got cross and dared to say his piece.

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Whatever happened to...

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left King’s in 2013 after doing okay in my A Levels – well, enough to get me a place at Bristol to study Ancient History, anyway.

My love of history is down to King’s and the brilliant teaching of Dr Maltby and Mrs Ardley. I chose to do Ancient rather than Modern History because I am fascinated by the deeds of those who laid the foundations of civilisation. Before my degree began, I had a year to broaden my horizons and try my hand at a proper job, so I did ten weeks’ work experience at Standard Chartered, working in the Financial Crime Compliance team. I got on well with my employers and enjoyed the work. Ten weeks became six months. Skills I had learnt in the history classroom, such as reading documents and exploring their legitimacy, proved useful. I returned to Standard Chartered every summer throughout university, to fill up the coffers and perhaps set myself up with a more permanent job after graduating.

Making friends from all over the globe, this was the most exciting time of my life, and I fell in love with South America. Much more amazing is that Nick, Charlie and I are still good friends even after they shaved off my hair while I was asleep.

Looking like rakes with bum-fluff, back home we freshened up our act and took ourselves off to universities various. Bristol was three years of outrageous socialising, fascinating academia and building friendships that will last a lifetime. The city is beautiful, enriched by a darkly infamous history but full of friendly people. I kept up my rugby, mainly for the 2nd XV but with a few caps for the XV during its ‘worst injury crisis of all time’. University sport can never match the giddy thrills of Birleys, but it was enjoyable enough for me and essential for keeping back the beer gut.

I left university in May 2017, the same month I became an uncle, one When I had saved some money, I of the most joyous events of life to packed my bags and travelled around date. I spent the summer in France, South America with my good friends, Travelling South America with Charlie Charlie Kingsman and Nick Simonds and sitting on Henman Hill. Once Kingsman and Nick Simonds (both OKS) (both OKS). Starting in Lima, we the temperature dropped, I started the Graduate Scheme at Standard travelled through Bolivia, Chile, Chartered who, remarkably, seemed Argentina and Brazil. Our stint in keen on me becoming a permanent Brazil coincided with the finals of the Football World Cup. The electric energy and pandemonium in Rio I employee. The world of finance is stimulating at the moment, but it’s will never forget. We then went horse-riding through the vineyards not something I plan to do forever. I still dream of teaching History of Mendoza, and sat round camp fires chomping rare steaks and and coaching the XV. One day. sampling liberal draughts of Malbec. We also climbed the Peruvian mountains at 4am to gaze, cigars in hand, at the Ancient city of Machu Picchu while the sun rose.

‘Making friends from all over the globe, this was the most exciting time of my life, and I fell in love with South America.’ g lisin

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with more than twenty million people. There are contradictions and injustices everywhere. Huge wealth and heartbreaking poverty exist sideby-side: blacked-out four-by-fours line the pavement outside night clubs while 100 yards away an old woman tries to sell homegrown potatoes and cabbages. The metro is the best in the world, built at great financial and human cost, but everyone who can do so drives, causing unspeakable traffic jams that make everyone late for everything. And yet Moscow is addictively intoxicating.

(LX erton -Pemb eb 2015 h g i e F Tish L ed Square, With ) on R 7 0 2 ‘0

My current life revolves around a weekly trip with friends to the bathhouse – or ‘banya’, as it is known locally – and turning out for ‘Coalition’, a five-a-side football team that plays in the Blitzliga competition every Sunday.

With the football World Cup kicking off in Russia within six months, I’m keeping myself fit for an England injury crisis.

Horse riding across breathtaki ng Mongoli the an steppe

William (2009)

I

f someone had said, on that glorious day in July 2009 when I left King’s, that within a decade I would be living in Moscow, Other than steam and sport, I have got to know unspoiled gems I’d have been surprised but not shocked, for my fascination such as Armenia and Georgia, both a couple of hours away by plane. with Russia had begun at school.

Caucasian food is fabulous and the hospitality Studying Soviet history in the Remove the warmest I have experienced. In Georgia, ‘Blacked-out four-by-fours line the istotal with Paul Taylor was a strong catalyst, as strangers invite you over to their table was the inspirational linguistic tutelage of pavement outside night clubs while for a glass of ‘chacha’ (a local spirit) and then Marcal Bruna and John Pidoux, the latter 100 yards away an old woman tries serenade you with a rousing national song. introducing me in 6b to Russian for the first to sell homegrown potatoes and In Armenia, the wine is as sophisticated and time. Therefore, after a brief flirtation with delightful as the people, many of whom are cabbages.’ the idea of trying to become a professional fluent in several languages and can beat you rugby player, it seemed like a logical choice at chess blindfold. to read European Studies with French and Russian at university, and it was from this moment that I decided to focus on all things Russian. In short, since leaving King’s my less-than-conventional road has had some tough turnings, but in the words of Robert Frost, ‘I took the When my ‘gap yah’ friends headed for the white sands and turquoise one less travelled by / And that has made all the difference.’  seas of South Asia and Australasia, my gaze was fixed East towards the Ural Mountains and the great Russian Steppe beyond. And what better way to explore this vast expanse than by Trans-Siberian Express? My companion for this adventure was my close friend and fellow OKS, Tom Davey, who was heading to Bath with me that October. Our trip was to last two months, and would take us from the opulent palaces of Tsarist St Petersburg to the financial powerhouse that is Shanghai, a distance of 7000 kilometers across six different time zones. We travelled third or ‘hard’ class for much of the way, squashed between cabbage-eating babushkas and drunk teens returning after a year’s national service. We saw Lenin’s body in his mausoleum on Red Square; drank water straight from Lake Baikal; and slept in an open-roofed ‘yurt’ in the middle of the Mongolian steppe.

Back home, I knew I had made the right decision academically.

After four years of fun at university, including a frenetic year abroad in Moscow that strengthened my resolve to forge a life for myself in Russia, I have called the capital my home since January 2015. Over the past three years I have tried a variety of work, from starting up and running an English Language school (failure) to translating documents for the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development (dull) and nowadays working in real estate headhunting (moderate success).

On stage as a universi Professor Higgin s during ty product ion of Py gmalion

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George (2007) ast year I was standing in a hall As the image of me dressed as a croissant not unlike the Shirley Hall – and being crushed by a bowl of Cheerios wooden panelling, paintings of old will testify, the unexpected and uncertain headmasters – to give an assembly nature of my life has not come without to a group of school kids. It wasn’t King’s its hardships. Like Dahl crashing his plane, but Dulwich College, and I was at the end life throws up some painful moments. of a two-year post as Theatre Director in Rejection is difficult. Realising I’m not going Residence. The talk was about one of my to do what I set out to do is difficult. Feeling favourite writers, Roald Dahl. I’d not looked like I’m lagging behind my better-salaried into his life much before, but in preparing peers is difficult. But life has been full of unexpected delights for the talk I discovered too.

I did not expect to the man had a life ‘I’ve not crash-landed a go to Leeds University almost as colourful as plane or worked for MI6 and yet that is where the characters in his (yet) but, like most people I I formed my theatre books. A Norwegian, he went to boarding school know, my life has been full of company and, in doing in England, moved to unexpected twists and turns.’ so, met lifelong friends and collaborators. I Africa to sell oil, enlisted did not think I was in the RAF during the Second World War, crash-landed his plane in a director, but discovered a real a desert, worked for the MI6 in Washington, joy in the craft and went and wrote world-famous novels for children. on to study directing at Dahl’s life was stranger than fiction, but postgraduate level. I did what struck me most was how Dahl didn’t not know that, in order to plan any of it – he just went from one thing earn a crust, I would take up to the next and the only constant in his life teaching part-time. was the enthusiasm with which he threw It seems to me that life will himself into things. always contain a degree of the Now I’ve not crash-landed a plane or worked unexpected. Knowing that fact, we for MI6 (yet) but, like most people I know, can choose to fight against it, to rail my life has been full of unexpected twists against the inconstancies of the world and turns. When leaving King’s, I was set or, like Dahl, we can embrace life’s on reading English at Oxford before training uncertainty and roll with it. Standing on at RADA and joining the RSC. None of that the podium at Dulwich College, giving that happened. I went to Leeds University instead talk to the boys, I was struck by the absurdity and became a theatre director. And because of the situation. If you’d told me, when I was theatre directing doesn’t pay a great deal, a boy at King’s, that at 29 years old I would I have also worked as a receptionist, bar be standing on a stage talking to a crowd of man, waiter and dog walker. I even had to people, I’d have thought of The Globe or The dress up as a croissant and wrestle a bowl National Theatre, not an assembly hall in of Cheerios for a promotional event. On front of a bunch of bored-out-theirthe upside, I’ve run with bulls in Pamplona, skulls 12-year-olds. But at completed four marathons, picked grapes that moment I realised it in the Loire Valley, been to the Edinburgh was the hand life had dealt Fringe for the past seven years, cycled from me, and I didn’t mind one London to France with my good friend (and bit. OKS) Leo Maclehose, directed shows in Hull, Manchester, Leeds and London, and will be off soon to the US to direct my first play in New York. None of this I thought I would do.

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David Gower OBE, who turned 60 on 1 April 2017, entered King’s in September 1970 and left in March 1975. His father had been Head Boy. David started in Riversleigh House (a waiting house in London Road) before joining Linacre. He was a King’s Scholar and Monitor, achieved an A1 in A Level History, and had clarinet lessons for a couple of years. Rugby was not his favourite sport, but he played fly half in the 1st XV for most of the 1974 season: ‘He had a good pair of hands and his place kicking was very useful on occasions,’ said a coach. He was happier in the Hockey 1st XI, for which the Cantuarian noted his controlled stickwork and ability to read the game. He first played for the other kind of XI when he was 14, and later became Captain.

Belated Happy Birthday, ‘Lord Gower’.

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Martin Latham, father of Caspar Latham OKS, reflects on 26 years running Waterstone’s, St Margaret’s Street, and recalls some of his 1000 visiting speakers.

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he old St Margaret’s Street Waterstone’s Canterbury has closed, and relocated to a bigger site in Rose Lane. This too is a fine bookshop, but the old shop merits an essay, if only so that I can thank all the customers who helped make it a great place.

Including a team running the top-floor cafe, I had 52 staff. I hired people who brought their personality to work, not leaving it at home, so my interview technique was designed to break them open. My first question was always ‘Who would win a fight between a werewolf and a vampire in a pub car park?’ If ‘What would you do if you were world dictator for a day?’ elicited trivia, such as ‘redesign the Wincheap roundabout’, the interview was over.

Anyone who answered ‘Tell me about a book that changed your life’ with ‘I wouldn’t say a book could change your life’ was toast. ‘Tell me about a moment of pure well-being not associated with love or exam results’ produced wonderful answers and sometimes tears of joy, whilst ‘Who would play you in a film of your life?’ was inevitably revealing.

For 26 years, from 1990 to 2017, it was a dreampalace of words, a portal to other possibilities. And it was a rebel ship in the Waterstone’s fleet. Tim Waterstone, who hired me, wanted it that way: he cheerfully recounts the tale of my old friend, Robert Topping, the legendary Manchester manager lovingly nicknamed ‘The Major’ by Alan Bennett. Topping was repeatedly sacked by Tim for pushing even the Waterstone’s envelope too far, but simply turned up next day to work as usual. I came to Canterbury after a spell in academia and a few years running an Booksellers meet all sorts of readers. Many people independent bookshop in Chelsea, where I had a free love, really love, not Thackeray but Georgette Heyer rein. Regulars included Francis Bacon or the Flashman novels. The and Anthony Hopkins.

‘Topping was repeatedly commonest answer to ‘Tell me sacked by Tim for pushing your all-time comfort book’ was My independence in the early The Magic Faraway Tree by Enid even the Waterstone’s Waterstone’s days was also Blyton. I tried to find booksellers envelope too far, but extraordinary: I had a shop cheque simply turned up next day who were not literary elitists and book, and on my kitchen table I loved humanity as much as books. to work as usual.’ ordered, by marking publishers’ catalogues in biro, £800,000 worth The first fiction buyer was a young of books to fill a beautiful three-floor building. dreamer who said he was writing. He was David Subsequent ordering was ambitious and eclectic: we Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlas. And James Henry, sold 120 copies of the £140 Art of Florence, more who ran sci-fi, wrote for Bob the Builder and Green than any shop in the country, and championed Wing. The lord of the basement was a published authors like W G Sebald and Neil Gaiman when they poet and anarchist, fluent in Anglo-Saxon and Latin, were known little. Regulars from Europe and the who spent every lunch hour in the Cathedral Archives USA visited annually for decades. Our motto was pursuing a lifelong analysis of medieval Church Court ‘The Best Bookshop between London and Paris’ but records. Annually, he spent eight consecutive weeks secretly I wanted to make it the best bookshop in the in a Provencal nudist camp. A dozen other staff were world, and on the odd day we were. to be published. One went on to run Hatchards, 

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‘Scores of children’s authors gave talks: J K Rowling came for the second Harry Potter book, insisted it was her favourite talk of the tour, and went to the Westgate Kebab House.’

J K Rowling

another Waterstone’s in Piccadilly and Europe’s largest bookshop. Giles and Helen were more recent much-loved booksellers, whose young deaths were mourned across the city. These booksellers relished talking to customers rather than just processing transactions, and they knew stuff.

The building was alive with energies, and a ghost or two. As a trackway, St Margaret’s Street is two millennia old, and a sacred spring under the shop still leaks through a storeroom wall. After hearing locals mumble about a buried Roman bathhouse floor, I commissioned a dig for £3000 – the biggest petty cash slip in Waterstone’s history. The Roman floor is now a scheduled Ancient Monument, still viewable under ‘Closs and Hamblin’, otherwise known as C&H Fabrics, the building’s new tenant. That basement was a Platonic cave of deep thought, housing philosophy, history and Roman remains. I even displayed Roman pottery found on the site.

Roy Jenkins

The special atmosphere of learning and mystery appealed to one temporary staffer in particular. When Umberto Eco’s UK publisher told me that he never did events, I called his Milan publisher. Eco said no to an event, but fancied working in a bookshop for a day. So the pioneer of semiotics manned the basement till, and somewhere there exists the person who unknowingly bought Travels in Hyper-Reality from Eco himself.

In all I invited over a thousand authors to give evening talks on the top floor, with its view of tiled rooftops and big sky. When Keats was feeling blocked he went to Canterbury, hoping that it would ‘set him forward like a billiard ball.’ Virginia Woolf did the same, and I think there is the bat’s squeak of pilgrimage in all authors’ journeying to Canterbury. When I took a Tibetan Lama to the Cathedral and explained the many saints associated with the site, he touched the wall as if reading the building, closed his eyes and said, ‘Yes, of course.’ Historian Antonia Fraser had a different psychogeographical take: ‘Canterbury is the Versailles of England and Waterstone’s is its Petit Trianon.’ She meant not that we dressed in a milkmaid costume as Marie Antoinette did at the Trianon gardens, but that we kept a garden of literature alive amid the turmoil of literary faddishness. More obscurely, David Mitchell called the shop ‘the Piccadilly of his psychogeography’. Peter Cushing said I had brought Hatchards to Kent. For A N Wilson, it was 98

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Nigella Lawson

“For Tony Benn, the shop was ‘the real University of Kent’, because we hosted such diverse voices.”

If bookshops are to survive the digital age they must be agents of change. City Lights Bookshop in San Francisco hosted the Beats, and Shakespeare’s in Paris was a hub for the Hemingway/Joyce era. I phoned Eric Hobsbawm about this once – he was in Directory Enquiries – and he agreed enthusiastically, citing Feltrinelli’s in Italy, a chain with a noble history of agitation.

Hobsbawm was too aged to come and talk, but we did host Hugh Trevor-Roper, John Keegan and many of my history heroes. Just as the audience of traditional Indian music is meant to create much of the performance, driving the sitar improvisation in subtle ways, when Anthony Beevor said that there were no British agents inside the siege of Tony Benn Stalingrad, a quavering voice from the back row said: ‘Actually, I was there, Mr Beevor.’ simply ‘the nicest bookshop in England’. The Beevor persuaded the veteran to take the Dean compared it to the Cathedral, a place stage and speak to a moved audience. And of solace for all-comers. a student who challenged Colin Wilson’s version of Albert Camus’ existentialism had Other visiting writers included Lodge to back down when Wilson explained that and Bradbury, Byatt and Ishiguro, John he was reporting actual conversations with Mortimer and Sarah the philosopher Waters. Colin Dexter, When Anthony Beevor said there in Fifties Paris. We P D James and Ruth used an old were no British agents inside the often Rendell pleased the slide projector siege of Stalingrad, a quavering then, and the kercrime buffs. Scores of children’s authors gave voice from the back said: ‘Actually, chunk sound as talks: J K Rowling came each image hove I was there, Mr Beevor.’ for the second Potter into view primed book, insisted it was her favourite talk of the pump of memory. So there was a silent the tour, and went to the Westgate Kebab pause when Nigel Nicolson pressed the House. Phillip Pullman was little known, forward button and the audience saw a waifbut we got 40 people to his talk. Science like girl playing on the lawn at Sissinghurst; a Fiction has historically been looked down misty voice in the darkness said, ‘And there’s upon and rarely reviewed in the broadsheet little Virginia.’ press, yet it refreshes and renews the whole fiction genre. Some of our best talks were A S Byatt

by Douglas Adams and Neil Gaiman, Terry Pratchett and Michael Moorcock.

For Tony Benn, the shop was ‘the real University of Kent’, because we hosted such diverse voices. Political speakers included Benn, Roy Jenkins, Robin Cook, Alan Clark and Prime Ministers Major and Heath.

During Heath’s talk, the shop was picketed by the anti-EU mob. In 1993 I received hate-mail when I hosted Ronnie Kasrils, the ANC’s military commander. The Home Office initially banned his visit, but relented just days before the talk.

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‘Eco (Umberto) said no to an event, but fancied working in a bookshop for a day. So the pioneer of semiotics manned the basement till.’

The atmosphere in that upper room elicited such memory-bursts. I asked Edward Heath about meeting Hitler backstage after a Nuremberg rally in 1937 – what was he actually like? Heath suddenly remembered something, a vignette not recorded in his autobiography: “Something did happen as we were leaving: we both collided in the doorway and I held his arm to apologise and my hand felt this little arm and I looked at his eyes and thought, ‘You’re just a little man really, aren’t you?’” More temporal vertigo occurred in 1995 when I advertised for Great War veterans to gather and talk – a roomful turned up and were filmed.

The spiritual vibe of Canterbury was reflected in some fairly way-out events. Shakespeare’s ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy’ firmly underpinned my openness to ‘Mind, Body and Spirit’ authors.

I was eclectic: four Tibetan lamas; the Dalai Lama’s sister; two rabbis; priests and vicars; a nun who taught prisoners to meditate; a Wiccan who taught shapeshifting; a Cherokee elder who taught us to reconnect with the earth; myriad mindfulness pioneers; and a wandering Indian Saddhu who had not written a book but I thought what the hell. I suspended disbelief for some oddball pyramidologists, channellers, ghosthunters, alien abductees and a Remote Viewer who had been used by the CIA (who needs drones?). I did not have to believe all they said to relish getting 100 people together for a chakra-opening experience instead of watching telly.

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Umberto Eco

These ‘spiritual’ authors are not ‘literary’, but have a huge readership. Paulo Coelho, author of The Alchemist, has sold a mindboggling 200 million books and has 40 million online followers. I sent him a nice map of how to get to the shop, including which of the three back doors and two doorbells to use. He began his talk by turning my overcomplicated directions into a witty fable about life. In those spiritual events there was some mumbo-jumbo – one seer described the actual furniture in Atlantis – but a lot of catharsis and healing too.

Perhaps culture should be just this, catharsis and healing. Bookshops at their best can provide both, and Waterstone’s St Margaret’s Street did so for a quarter of a century, a memorable panel in the long tapestry of Canterbury’s history. I am often asked what happened to the two rocking horses. They are well in Rose Lane, rocking away every day in the other place, where I work with a few of my old shipmates. In the words of The Pretenders: ‘Something is lost; something is found.’

Colin Dexter

‘Our branch at St Margaret’s Street was one of the most beautiful we had anywhere, and indeed one of the most successful. I was particularly proud of it. Under Martin Latham’s leadership we gave Canterbury a bookselling presence of the highest class, and Canterbury much deserves that.’

Tim Waterstone

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20 Literary Quotations from Caspar Latham OKS Caspar was at King’s between 2011 and 2013. He travelled and worked in Vietnam and Canada for a year before studying English at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, between 2014 and 2017, when he took a First. He is currently doing a law conversion at City University in London, whilst playing guitar in an indie band, Kikoband.

dying, ea. een and ns like the s r g e m ai ld Time he sang in my ch I h g Thou omas Be melting snow, , Dylan Th l’ il H rn e ‘F Wash yourself of ‘Be Melting Snow’, Rumi

I could be boun ded in count m a nutsh yself k e ing of infinit ll and e space.

Hamlet, W illiam Sha kespeare

s ilding uge bu h ir, a w f a s d I t an n i a f p rise u dreams. s like s a p d n a G Wells achine, H M e im T The

Þe snawe snite þat snay red ful snart, ped þe w ylde.

(The sno w fell s harply, and bit the wil d beasts .)

Gawain an d the Gree n Knight

yourself.

ure advent n a y l an on ture is ence is n i e n v e d v a n o n An inc ered. dered; a y consi ightly consid l g n o r w r nience ings inconve ’ in All Th t a H s e n O ing After ‘On Runn G K Chesterton , d Considere

In people’s eyes, in the swing, tramp and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June.

Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf

claws a pair of ragged I should have been nt seas. the floors of sile Scuttling across Prufrock’, T S Eliot ‘The Love Song of J Alfred

hath ft-times o t a the foam h t ] [song ning on e e p m o a , s s t e n h T eme lorn. agic cas ands for l m y ’d r m e r a a f h C , in ous seas Of peril Keats ngale’, John ti h ig N a to Joy and woe ‘Ode are woven fine, A clothing for the sou l divine.

‘Auguries of Inno cence’, William Blake

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Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colo nel Aureliano Buendía was to re member that distant afternoon when his father took him to discov er ice.

One Hundred Years of So litude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez

nd, The fallen leaves that jewel the grou They know the art of dying, hearts, And leave with joy their glad gold In the scarlet shadows lying.

‘October Song ’, Incredible String Band

He was a snea king eavesdro pper, a scraping he dgecreeper, a piperly pick thunk.

The Unfortunate Tr aveller, Thomas Na she

Now up a it’s ja zz n bar d down , the p ten ders the st lace i Jac s ro air k ar , look a s up nd the e the s they aring… a be reg in t hea ula come. ar v h and d, is w e sky enly d r ban The d r a w j eve ammin iling ith bl ummer of ryt g on w b u e h the er-cap e eyes, o the hing i c s w b s a e o sh r the goin at g f bo ith hea beat t enerat g to t egiste ttles r a he o k rt io wor , it’s b eep, it n, it’s beat. nd l It e b ’ d s i lik e in and l ng bea the b eat, it ’s i e ’s t ke o a a boa ldt and do t of th tme ncient i wn me l e serv n row civi in o i ant l s sp ng gal izatio wdown the a inn n ing leys to s the nd Deso s pott a be lav latio e ery a n An to a t and gels, Jack bea t.

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yss, le ab d... b a r u s l immea steful, wi vast a e w h , t k a, dar view’d ton s a se They a s ohn Mil u J o , II e V g k a Boo Outr e Lost, Paradis oloured glass, Life, like a dome of many-c of Eternity, Stains the white radiance fragments.

Until Death tramples it to

‘Adonais’, Percy Bysshe Shelley

er have ill nev , by w d l r o side w me and e of the out s those of ho f o s e ur stor ys i a o y o t t i l d Memor d a e tona s, we a ut alw the sam memorie historians, b othing e s e h t n ng er real n is perhaps recalli are nev o i s lost. e t a w o w m ; e s ur that o dream y d r n t a e , o ets a p near po xpression of e Bachelard n a but e, Gaston c a p S f o s c The Poeti

Melancholy ca n be overcome only by melanc holy.

Anatomy of Melanc holy, Robert Burto n

The gl ory o hair r f her stran a g thread n like a red e throug h thos dark a e nd ill tapest drawn ries o f the night.

The Man Who Wa G K Ches s Thursday terton

e, ct, a star in spac As a lamp, a catara rop, a bubble, An illusion, a dewd ing a flash of lightn A dream, a cloud, things like this.

View all created The Diamond Sutra

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A

NEW Age Jim Boyd, father of Rory (6b Carlyon) and Iona (Remove Carlyon), explains how think tanks shape our political environment and nurture budding careers. Jim is Deputy Director and Head of Research at Reform

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hey say there are two things you must not see being made – sausages and public policy.

Based mostly in Westminster, often in the shadows of the Houses of Parliament, UK policy units or ‘think tanks’ shape any aspect of our lives in which government has a role, from who owns the trains to how health care is run and funded – or whether we will have to pay university fees. In short, they influence public policy.

views on how to improve the NHS were in The Telegraph and The Times, and on the BBC and Sky News, and Ministerial or Prime Ministerial ears soon listen to such views via their daily media briefing.

Think tanks are at their best when dealing with key issues. For example, when Reform was starting out, all of Westminster supported higher spending to improve public services and the economy, but they soon realised what really matters is the quality of public service rather than the size of the budget Policy units can be specialists in areas such as or workforce. Such a shift in political thinking takes defence or foreign affairs, and may align themselves years because there is always resistance, and that with political parties. Reform, where I am Deputy is what makes the battle for ideas in British politics Director and Head of Research, is so interesting. Reform deals with a pro-market, independent think education and healthcare, crime and tank most concerned with value ‘They soon realised what justice, welfare and pensions, and for money from public services. the delivery of digital public services, really matters is the We seek to influence political so it is hardly in the shadows. And quality of public service recently we launched a report, parties by running seminars and conferences, and publishing rather than the size of the with the Chairman of the House of research. Born fifteen years ago, Commons Science and Technology budget or workforce.’

Reform is one of the oldest of such Committee, about the role of bodies and, within Westminster, Artificial Intelligence in better health one of the most prestigious. We choices for the NHS. Another report nurture exceptional talent that goes on to top-flight examined what the best universities were doing to careers in government, the Civil Service and business. attract students from disadvantaged backgrounds.

Think tanks are not unique in forming new policy.

Every major corporation, charity, Non-Government Organisation (NGO), trade body, trade union and professional organisation wants to help shape the political environment in which they work. Many lobby to change the legislative process, create legislation or loosen regulation. As a charity, Reform guards its independence fiercely and never lobbies for commercial interest. Thereby it influences the lives of millions. For example, on a daily basis newspapers report findings from the Institute of Financial Studies, Resolution or the IPPR, revealing the real ‘numbers’ behind economic statements, and this research often comes from a think tank.

Think tanks are media-friendly because showing how to rescue failing policies usually involves a big figure, and is always contentious. Their research teams promote, explain and defend their findings in print and on TV, radio and the internet. This year, Reform’s

Anything that involves better value for money from public services is in our sights. At any point in time, we are pursuing research in many important areas, including education technology to close the attainment gap in schools; rehabilitation of offenders; apprenticeships; mental health; competition and choice in public services; and emergency services – to name but a few.

Why do we need policy units? Some might question the think tank’s role because they assume each department of state has a team of civil servants focusing on the development of new and engaging policy ideas for a minister to promote. But the truth is that civil servants rely on ministers to provide inspirational vision for their departments.

After a government reshuffle, teams of civil servants might follow some senior ministers. While some presume this is to create a protective shield around 

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new ministers while they get to grips with their new roles, others suspect it is to help explain a minister’s future policy. It is into this seeming vacuum, where there is a constant need for big and bold ideas that connect with the public, that think tanks seek to add value. Another important duty is to create a safe environment where politicians from all parties can engage in policy discussions with experts from the private sector and other key stakeholder groups. So we act as a bridge between Westminster and the outside world, and in some cases across Whitehall. In the Westminster bubble it is hard to look beyond political priorities to the real world, especially for ministers who lead big departments. While opposition parties lack the resources of government, they have access to the excellent House of Commons Library, which provides impartial information and research services for MPs and their staff. But it’s always good to seek further advice.

Reform hosts over sixty meetings a year that enable Ministers and Shadow Minsters to meet trade experts, academics, regulators and charities. Civil Servants and Members of Parliament often attend these lively events, which are held under Chatham House Rules to enable free and frank discussion without fear of being named (and shamed) in the press next day. Chatham House is, in fact, just another think tank whose name is used to mean confidential debate. It is a privilege on one day to chair a meeting with the Shadow Financial Secretary about Labour’s fiscal policy, and on the next with the Pensions Minister about the role of the new Single Financial Guidance Body and financial inclusion. These diverse meetings counteract a growing culture of political tribalism that marginalises opposing views.

‘Think tanks provide dynamic environments where people become experts in chosen sectors, before pursuing further fascinating careers.’

‘Most of our people are in their twenties and have a postgraduate degree. They are bright (very bright, actually) and want to shape policy.’

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‘We are pursuing research in many important areas, including education technology; rehabilitation of offenders; apprenticeships; mental health; competition and choice in public services; and emergency services.’

So, how do you join a think tank? Most of our people are in their twenties and have a postgraduate degree. Not all are Oxbridge, some coming from the LSE, SOAS and other universities. They are bright (very bright, actually) and want to shape policy. Many have studied History, or even lectured in History, because giving definitions and providing proper evidence to support an argument are important.

Their youth is good because they seek real change while they have open minds. (If you are about to study science and scorn your arty friends, a word of caution: they might one day design your world of work.)

Reform produces quality research, and this requires academic clout. Each paper takes three or four months with a Senior Researcher, supported by up to two researchers or research assistants, leading a programme that is subject to internal checks and quality assurance from external experts. In a socalled ‘post-expert’ world that has eroded trust in many institutions, a reputation for evidence-based publications with robust recommendations has never been more important. A research report taken seriously by the Civil Service has much more value than a questionable survey that claims a media headline for a day and is then forgotten.

Pensions, initially to support the Welfare Reform Minister, Lord Freud, who is credited with generational welfare change rarely seen in the 75 years since Beveridge created the modern welfare state, and served four Prime Ministers in separate Labour, Coalition and Conservative administrations. He taught me that public policy must be practical to have real value.

Think tanks provide dynamic environments where people become experts in chosen sectors, like education or health, before pursuing further fascinating careers. Reform has distinguished alumni, many of whom have become senior policy advisers within government or the No. 10 Policy Unit. Others have served in government.

One of my predecessors as Deputy Director is now the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, having been Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice. She is far more talented! We are funded by individual donors or corporate sponsors who support events or research reports, and we

‘A research report taken seriously by the Civil Service has much more value than a survey that claims a media headline for a day and is then forgotten.’

Senior members of our team come from other think tanks or from government, where they may have been senior policy advisers. They sometimes return from careers as senior doctors or teachers, which provides huge credibility for research reports in those areas. For example, I am a city-trained lawyer who was a Corporate Affairs Director at FTSE 250 companies. I achieved a long-held ambition when I was appointed an expert adviser at the Department for Work and

guard our independence jealously. Sponsorship does not affect our impartiality. We can draw on the support of our first-class advisory board and guidance from our truly excellent trustees.

Most think tanks will advertise an available role, roughly every six months, in The Guardian and on relevant websites. For further information see the following links: www.careers.ox.ac.uk/think-tanks www.lse.ac.uk www.w4mp.org

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A Musical Life

Nick Todd: Singer, Teacher, Assistant Director of Music

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Cambridge was a huge shock. I was one of those kids who needed the bell to get me up in the morning. Suddenly being left to my own devices was a rude awakening.

Singing in the choir at King’s College was the greatest challenge, but if you can hold firm when the red light flashes before going live around the globe on Christmas Eve, you So you can imagine my delight when I have survived. My battle was to find the discovered that these two lives dovetail confidence for myself in such an unforgiving beautifully at King’s. I have the great fortune environment – a lonely experience. Building of working in a pool of extraordinary confidence is the greatest challenge any talent, where my skills as a performer are young person has to face, and as a mentor at King’s it is my mission appreciated. And I have to help our students rediscovered the joy find their authority. of learning. I also have From a teaching point ‘If you can hold firm the opportunity to help view, my Cambridge students overcome when the red light flashes of experience was difficulties I had to face before going live around instructive in how not alone as a developing to approach things. As professional musician. the globe on Christmas a result I am the better I could be the mentor I Eve, you have survived.’ mentor. never had. always assumed a move into teaching would come at a price: I would be less available for engagements, lose my edge as a performer and find myself replaced in the ensembles for whom I worked. Making music at a secondary school couldn’t possibly be as exciting.

Although Uppingham in the 90s was a different environment to the one our pupils enjoy today, my work at King’s has helped me to appreciate the huge benefits I received, notably in extra-curricular activities. I learned to work wood, and now have a full workshop at home. I make my own windows, service my own cars and do my own electrics. Plumbing is a more recent hobby, courtesy of Youtube, though the boiler is strictly off-limits. Photography was also a passion, especially since the dark room was the only place other than a bathroom where you could lock the door from the inside. The smell of developer is a vivid memory, and watching my pictures appear under a red light was a great joy. I wish I had learned more, especially computing. My passion was science, but I made the mistake of getting a C in AO maths. With my hopes of a career in Engineering crushed, the school shunted me into Humanities and off to Cambridge to develop what came most naturally to me, performing.

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I left university with no idea of what to do with my life. I resolved to move to London and continue with my singing until I had made up my mind. This is when everything took off. Within three months, I was sucked into a world of travelling, performing, recording and broadcasting. In those days, record companies were flush with money, and the European mainland, lacking the breadth and depth of our choral tradition, hadn’t yet figured out how to teach their singers to sight-read. I felt the decision had been made for me.

‘I was one of those kids who needed the bell to get me up in the morning. Suddenly being left to my own devices was a rude awakening.’

‘I left university with no idea of what to do with my life. Within three months, I was sucked into a world of travelling, performing, recording and broadcasting.’

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It was a wonderful time, but for someone like me it was always a young person’s game. I was singing in Japan on the night of my daughter’s second birthday, the day the music temporarily stopped. It wasn’t just that the world of music is a marital graveyard and that I wanted a more normal life. Something was missing, something I rediscovered at King’s – the joy of learning and, by extension, the joy of teaching.

‘Something was missing, something I rediscovered at King’s – the joy of learning and, by extension, the joy of teaching.’

It is a huge privilege to work in a place where my skills are valued. I continue to perform often, and it never ceases to amaze me that my pupils can tackle much of what I undertake professionally. Many of the directors of my professional ensembles are now installed in Oxford and Cambridge colleges, and would like to maintain a steady flow of King’s students into their college choirs. One of my principle ensembles, The Cardinall’s Musick, is directed by Andrew Carwood, Director of Music at St Paul’s Cathedral, an important feeder school. So I am lucky to be able to put the professional dimension of my musicmaking to good use. Thanks to King’s, I have rediscovered the passions of my youth – armchair Science, History, Economics And Politics. Happy days.

‘Building confidence is the greatest challenge any young person has to face, and as a mentor at King’s it is my mission to help our students find their authority.’

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Nick was a chorister at Salisbury

Cathedral and Uppingham before winning a choral scholarship to King’s College, Cambridge in 1991. As a freelance tenor he sang with Polyphony, The King’s Consort, The Sixteen, The Cardinall’s Musick, The Huelgas Ensemble and The Tallis Scholars, performing and recording all over the world. Now a tutor, teacher and conductor at King’s, he continues to work with a select group of vocal ensembles such as Alamire and Tenebrae.

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Development

International

College Geoff Cocksworth, Director

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he King’s International College in They will, of course, be supported at all Canterbury will open in September times by the highest quality of pastoral 2018 in a state-of-the-art building care directed by the Joint Principals, Bill designed by top London architects, and Jo Prior, who will also be the resident Walters & Cohen. It will be located on the Housemaster and Housemistress, and by same site as the magnificent Malthouse Suzanne Kuster, the resident Assistant. The development for King’s students will live within Drama, very close to the the new building in double King’s Recreation Centre.

‘The students will be very bedrooms, all en suite, with separate private much part of the King’s The College will educate study areas designed to tradition and history but international boys and facilitate both individual receive an education that is and collaborative learning. girls, aged 11-16, from an innovative blend of the anywhere and everywhere, traditional and modern.’ preparing them for entry As for any King’s education, to a suitable senior school the College will provide a for their further studies. wide range of co-curricular The students will be very much part of the opportunities, with students combining with King’s tradition and history but receive an King’s pupils for all of the wider programme, education that is an innovative blend of including music, sport and King’s Week. the traditional and modern, specifically designed for international children to equip them for a global future.

The classes will be small and the teaching and learning will be based on research and discussion around a bespoke curriculum.

Year 11 will take an appropriate range of IGCSEs and all students will receive a College Graduation Certificate that recognises their academic progress, their personal development and their all-round contribution to College life beyond the academic curriculum.

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Book Binder

The art of the

A stone’s throw from Mint Yard Gate a rare craftsman plies his traditional trade. Isabella Snow (6a Walpole) went to meet third-generation book-binder, Christopher Paveley.

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magine you could watch the city of Canterbury evolve right outside your window for three generations. Well, that is what the Paveley family of Canterbury Bookbinders has been able to do. They have, come to think of it, monitored first-hand the vicissitudes of the book as a cultural artefact in a city founded in the first place to produce books. And that makes them the artisans’ artisan when a revolt against the e-book is underway.

and property prices. Christopher says high rent has driven most bookbinders and vintage bookshops out of the city: ‘There used to be six or seven antiquarian bookshops in Canterbury, but now there’s one.’

It is tough keeping such a unique and dwindling trade as bookbinding alive while competing with high-end business, but Christopher has survived by being practical and honest with clients about the service he provides. He deals in what’s known as a ‘goslow’ trade because clients have to understand that bookbinding is a time-consuming craft that depends on sourcing the right materials and the nature of the damage done to the piece that needs repair.

Christopher mainly serves regular customers, and he works hard.

Christopher Paveley, the latest incumbent of the family firm, recently gave me a fascinating introduction to the world of bookbinding as well as his thoughts on Canterbury, technology, and the power of books. Christopher’s grandfather started the bookbinding service more than thirty ‘Canterbury Bookbinders years ago, in Ludlow, Shropshire. plays a key role in In 1988, the business moved to the centre of Canterbury, where preserving cultural history it has thrived on Northgate Street in the community of ever since.

Because of the high number of students in Canterbury, most of the time he binds university theses, but such bread-and-butter work has declined since more and more Canterbury.’ students have been allowed to The business welcomes people submit their work electronically. from around the world into a Nowadays most of the students who warm, homely environment enriched with history. enter Christopher’s shop to bind their work are being University students bring their PhD theses to be sentimental. bound; families hope to repair their family Bible and thereby reconnect with their heritage; and passers- Of course e-books and tablets have caused a decline by look in, curious about the ancient tools and strange in the purchase of physical books from independent devices roosting behind the window. But what gives book shops and chains alike, but in the last few old-fashioned trades like this so much character? Is it years the purchase of physical books has been on the expert service the business provides? Or are we the increase. After it fell for the hype of e-books, it just nostalgic for an ideal version of our own families, seems Britain now prefers the old-fashioned way of or a traditional version of Canterbury that no longer reading. exists? Do books, deep down, express our longing for a stable world of certainty?

Souvenir stores. Hair salons. Coffee shops. Walking in the centre of Canterbury one sees little else.

Pavements throng with tourists, and languages from all over the globe are heard in every Starbucks and Costa. Most of the restaurants, retail stores and bookshops are brand names, owing to spiralling rent

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Whenever they are asked why they are paying once again for good old-fashioned paper, readers celebrate the comfort, satisfaction and nostalgia offered by the physical copy of a book.

But Christopher claims such a resurgence in the demand for physical books won’t boost the slender business of old-fashioned bookbinding because of the recent rise of modern methods, such as spiral binding, which have lost his craft a lot of custom. But the ups and downs in the sales of physical books cannot affect the business of restoration. The opportunities offered by spiral binding do not appeal to those who want

‘Many customers want to restore a children’s book that once belonged to a mother, or mother’s mother.’ their family Bible restored. Canterbury Bookbinders thus plays a key role in preserving cultural history in the community of Canterbury. ‘When family Bibles are resewn, we try to keep the original binding most of the time. And we instal plain pages on the inside so they can carry on the family history.’

Many customers want to restore a children’s book that once belonged to a mother, or mother’s mother, their interest in older books infused with nostalgia.

Thus they engage in a gentle form of escapism by preserving books of stories, kept by loved ones on the living room shelf, that have watched people come and go in the family home for generations. Caring for these ageing works helps unite families, preserve relationships and hold people together in a shared

‘High rent has driven most bookbinders and vintage bookshops out of the city: there used to be six or seven antiquarian bookshops in Canterbury, but now there’s one.

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narrative. Repairing and rebinding such books, so they can be passed down the generations, Christopher relishes old and creates new memories. Such a craft keeps our family culture alive.

Canterbury Bookbinders 60 Northgate Canterbury CT1 1BB 01227 452371 www.canterburybookbinders.co.uk

‘Families hope to repair their family Bible and reconnect with their heritage; passersby look in, curious about the ancient tools and strange devices roosting behind the window.’

I asked Christopher whether division, violence and war would languish if people read more books. ‘Well, it’s not going to solve all of the world’s problems if we all sit down with a book, but it would help a lot of angry men if you could fill their minds with a bit more education and understanding.’

Beyond the souvenir shops and generic retail outlets, Canterbury boasts unique characters, diverse flavours, refreshing and educational experiences. We can lose ourselves in its history, discover proper places to go: a café with ancient tunnels leading to the cathedral; a shop that colourfully sells any organic fruit or vegetable you can name; stores selling vintage records, homemade jewellery and real French chocolate; and the workshop of a bookbinder, visible from the street, that’s managed to stay in the same place for 29 years despite a wave of powerful bland brands gobbling up local property. Be sure, on your way through the door, to pet the lazy dog.

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I

practised law for about fifteen years and technically I’m still a solicitor. The fact that I changed careers should not put anyone off practising law as a career. It can be an intellectually stimulating, personally fulfilling and financially rewarding way to spend each day. In fairness, it also involves long hours, countless deadlines and some anxious moments, but even those aspects of the job have their own attractions. When a deal has been signed or a case won, the sense of achievement is magnified by the work put in.

Other Lives

George Harrison, Housemaster of Marlowe, looks back on his life as a lawyer.

The firm I worked for was in the City, meaning I acted for corporations and banks rather than for individuals.

Most of what I did involved contracts for the buying, selling and mortgaging of assets, so I have very little experience of going to court. Although the sums involved might have run into the hundreds of millions, the size of a deal was often of less importance (to me) than the urgency of getting it done. Everything had to be done quickly, it seemed. It was partly for that reason that my firm operated twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. There were about six hundred lawyers in the London office and on any day of the week a good number of them would be working through the night, either to complete a transaction or because the deal involved different time-zones. ‘Pulling an allnighter’ was, at the start of my career, rather fun and even though such nights became less welcome as the years went by, there was still a bit of a buzz when they occurred, even towards the end.

‘ I once mislaid £36 million on a Friday afternoon.’

I had a number of heart-stopping moments. I once mislaid £36 million pounds on a Friday afternoon. I was phoned up by the Deputy Chairman of the German bank involved, who politely but firmly asked me, ‘Vere iz my money, Mr Harrison?’

At the time, I had absolutely no idea where his money was and, for a while, I knew my job was on the line. I went to see a colleague in my firm’s accounts department and he rang a mate called Lee. Lee worked in the Coventry office of the bank responsible for settling international payments. In my experience, anyone called ‘Lee’ or ‘Dean’ is generally not someone to mess with. Lee was able to trace the money and arrange for it to be transferred to Germany. Years of university and law school are all very well, but nothing, it turns out, beats a phone call from a hard man in Coventry who threatens to ‘give you a clump’.

I have happy memories of my time in Law. I worked with motivated, intelligent people and learned a lot about business and human nature. I also learned (and you may be surprised here) that there is only one standard when it comes to quality. 

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Law

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King’s Week Vintage Bikes 124

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H

ermione Sharp studied English, French, Spanish, Religious Studies and Ethics at A Level but after King’s her life took a whole new direction. While attending an aesthetics class in her first year at university she discovered a passion for Art and switched from Philosophy to a Double Major in History of Art and Spanish.

the

After graduating, Hermione found it hard being thrown in at the deep end of the real world right in the centre of New York. At first she applied for a number of auction house jobs, but luck was not on her side until she got an internship with a prestigious private art collector. After a year and a half, she gave the auction houses another go, and was accepted onto the Floater Program at Sotheby’s, a temporary position that floats you around various departments while you apply for any positions that become available. Although this did not guarantee a job at the end, within two months Hermione was accepted into the ‘Post Sale Services’ department. This meant handling clients’ accounts once they had acquired a piece, and involved shipping purchased property, invoicing and debt collection. This was the perfect way, she says, to grasp how the industry works.

by rare and fine works and ensures they retain their pristine condition. Visiting museums and galleries all the time has expanded her knowledge so much that she now wishes to be a true specialist within the Photography Department. As if this saturation is not enough, she is also studying at a local university for a Masters Degree in History of Art. I asked her three questions:

big Smoke

Jessica Madavo (6a Luxmoore) asks Hermione Sharp OKS about working at Sotheby’s and her life in New York.

A year and a half later, Hermione specialized in 19th Century European paintings as a Sale Administrator. She and her new department suited each other. A native French speaker, she was able to connect directly with French artists, sources and clients. The job was gruelling but rewarding. Running the department with its complex logistics, legal contracts, compliance and corporate governance was daunting enough, but Hermione also wrote notes for printed catalogues and researched paintings to be sold at auction.

When she became Associate Cataloguer of the Photography Department in 2015, Hermione had finally found her true métier, and she is still there. She researches art, spends all day surrounded

What’s it like living and working in New York?

New York is the heart of the Art world. Although finding a job was difficult, it made me stronger and quicker on my feet. I had no choice but to learn fast.

What about the famous auction house?

Everyone hears about the sale of million-dollar paintings but there is MUCH more to the business. The press, for one thing.

What is it like working in the Photography Department?

Photography as a collecting category is quite new. It really took off in the 1970s.

So it’s taken a lot longer than other forms to be accepted as ‘Art’. The best part of my job is visiting exhibitions, working with clients and selling works. Phone bidding is a real thrill. It’s a privilege buying wonderful art for people and seeing how happy they are after their purchase.

‘Phone bidding is a real thrill. It’s a privilege buying wonderful art.’

Hermione Sharp

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Hugh Walpole hoped his collection would be ‘seen by many people’ and at least ‘enjoyed by some.’

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Walpole’s

Hidden s m e G

Novelist Hugh Walpole OKS was an avid collector of literary letters, manuscripts and early editions, all of which he presented to the school on 12 February 1938. His bequest is known as ‘The Walpole Collection’.

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Let loose in The Walpole Collection, Sophia Putterill (6a Bailey) discovered an eccentric female novelist who was a friend of Oscar Wilde and spent four years living in the Langham Hotel.

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he Walpole Collection, tucked away in Old Grange near Mint Yard Gate, is a collection of manuscripts and early editions left to the school by novelist Hugh Walpole OKS, whose fondness for King’s and Canterbury permeates works of his, such as The Crystal Box and Reading: An Essay.

Walpole’s generous bequest is expertly and lovingly cared for by archivist Peter Henderson, who is able to give visitors chapter and verse about every item in the extensive collection.

This is coherently catalogued and easy to access for those wishing to study a particular writer, honouring Walpole’s wishes that ‘…this little collection of mine will always be kept alive’. Walpole, who spent twenty years building it up, carefully curated the content to fit his individual curiosity.

The archive thus gives us a unique way into the writings of the modern period, providing ample resources for the study of more established figures such as Maugham and Thackeray, as well as lesser-known writers, such as Walter Pater, Anstey, and Ouida.

The manuscripts, bound in leather and marbled boarding rarely seen today, show stages of literary composition and reveal the thought process of a writer such as Maugham who, when writing Catalina, corrected himself in red ink and left a blank space next to every page for major edits.

Walpole’s article ‘Modern Wartime Home of King’s School’ is on the reverse of proofs of his novel The Bright Pavilions and Thomas Mark the editor has corrected ‘potatoes’ to ‘cabbages’ because the piece is set during the late Sixteenth Century. Next to more substantial volumes, such as Wilkie Collins’ No Name, smaller and more obscure scripts

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vie for attention. To a mere Sixth Form student like me, unfamiliar with many titles, the volume of writing can feel overwhelming, but with the advice of Mr Henderson one can choose an appealing title to learn more

Virginia Woolf inscribes a copy of Orlando to Walpole

about. And this is perhaps the best way to get to know The Walpole Collection – by absorbing one piece at a time.

When I made my own visit, a short piece called ‘The Marriage Plate’ by Ouida, for example, which had recently been studied by a Professor of English, caught my eye. The manuscript is bound in dark blue morocco leather, with florid writing in purple ink on lilac-coloured paper, colourfully contrasting with the more sober attire of other texts.

Ouida turns out to be the pseudonym of Maria Louise Ramé, a Victorian author who enjoyed great prosperity in her lifetime by writing essays, short stories, adult novels and children’s books. Ouida found success in her teenage years and led an unconventional life, so that critic Tom Steele duly describes her earlier novels as a contrast to the ‘moralistic prose of early Victorian literature’.

Her purple manuscript in The Walpole Collection corresponds with the Langham Hotel’s account of her ‘surrounded by purple flowers and writing manuscripts on large sheets of violet-coloured notepaper.’ In the Langham, where she lived from 1867 to 1871, before she moved to Italy, she would often hold lavish parties for the likes of Oscar Wilde, Robert Browning, Wilkie Collins and John Millais, breaking the social mould expected of a middle-class Victorian female, especially from Bury St Edmunds. She would dress in white satin and silk outfits imported from Paris, her arms bare, hair undone to her waist and ankles exposed. Publishers from America and England bought her work, earning her £50 for her first novel, Held in Bondage, and £75 for the next. (£100 in 1875 would be worth £11,000 today.) On top of this, American publishers paid her £300 annually. But Ouida spent all this income on fine china, objets d’art and clothing, as W H Mallock observes, to live up to the standards of the heroines who sashayed across the pages of her novels. Walpole had a similar interest in collecting objets d’art, owning paintings by Renoir, Cézanne, Manet and Picasso as well as hundreds of lithographs and woodcuts.

Ouida’s most popular works expressed her eye for the aesthetic so much that Oscar Wilde dubbed her ‘the last romantic’. Her play Afternoon concerns a collector of fine arts and objects, and in a short story ‘The Streets of London’, printed in Strand Magazine, she condemns the grim effects on the city of industrialisation. ‘The Marriage Plate’ follows a young impoverished Italian peasant with few possessions, apart from one family heirloom – ‘a mother of pearl and gold’ marriage plate. Instead of looking for love and wealth in the form of his boss’s young daughter, Dea, protagonist Faello spends his time and energy trying to save his dog from execution at the hands of the law. Ouida’s compassion for animals is here evident and Pastore, Faello’s beloved sheep dog, is described as ‘the very beau ideal of their race — brave, gentle, generous, and full of grace.’ Ouida further writes that the dog was Faello’s first love and ‘playmate and comrade in preference to any other.’ The story makes no mention of any sexual desire for or intent to marry Dea: indeed, ‘He loved to think of her — as he thought of the saints.’

And so the focus falls on the bond between man and dog. When Faello falls asleep after a strenuous journey delivering pottery, the authorities confiscate Pastore because the law prohibits dogs from being unattended in the streets and the pet can only be released if Faello pays fifty francs, an impossible sum when he has less than ‘fifty centimes’

“‘The Marriage Plate’ by Ouida caught my eye.

Florid writing in purple ink on lilaccoloured paper.”

to his name. The narrator duly observes, ‘Petty laws breed great crimes.’ The poverty of Faello and Pastore is so great that ‘they never ate till midday, and then not half that either needed.’ The story’s pitiful poverty is a thinly veiled attack on the taxation Italian peasants at the time had to suffer.

for oppression is reflected in ‘The Marriage Plate’ when a shoeblack, who witnesses the lassooing of Pastore, bitterly criticises the current state of affairs, which overlooks ‘the freedom … we old fellows fought for’.

Despite her opulence, Ouida was progressive in her views on equality, homosexuality and domestic violence, and her writings express an independent outlook through the scenes of luxury. The accessibility of her In the midst of the frugality portrayed in ‘The work meant both pre-Raphaelites and shop Marriage Plate’ is an appreciation of art and girls could enjoy her writings in the circling the Italian landscape. The inherited plate, libraries for only two shillings. During her crafted by the fine Italian potter, Orazio later years Ouida focused on social criticism, Fontana, provides the money, when sold, to free Pastore. Faello and her essay ‘The Legislation makes one thousand of Fear’ laments how the Ouida’s most popular works five hundred francs public has to compensate expressed her eye for the from a mysterious for the ‘excesses of the few’ aesthetic so much that Oscar collector, which allows in answer to severe Italian Wilde dubbed her ‘the last the recovery of both laws by which ‘men in the romantic’. him and his beloved freshness of their youth’ dog, and demonstrates are wronged at tribunal courts and locked away in prisons because wryly the healing powers of Art. Indeed Art the authorities fear they will receive public suffuses the tale, with people sometimes sympathy and support. Ouida’s contempt compared to a ‘Pieta’ or ‘Madonna’. Oscar Wilde could have been inspired by Ouida’s stories when he wrote The Picture of Dorian Gray since both evoke the decorative and decadent aspects of an artistic lifestyle.

In Cecil Castelmaine’s Gage, for example, Ouida complains that her hometown of Bury St Edmunds was the ‘lowest and dreariest of boroughs, where the streets are as full of grass as an acre of pasture land.’  Ouida (Maria Louise Ramé)

Virginia Woolf, Siegfried Sassoon and Emily Brontë

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Her contempt for the surroundings of her birth is not surprising since, after living in a posh London hotel she moved, when she was only 32, to a Florentine villa once owned by the Medici family.

Ouida influenced many contemporaries, such as Max Beerbohm, Oscar Wilde, Lord Tennyson, John Ruskin and Norman Douglas. And some of their manuscripts also reside in The Walpole Collection, such as Beerbohm’s Revisited London, Douglas’s Paneros and some of Wilde’s rarer books. This unique archive is a goldmine for manuscripts whose interest ebbs and flows over time but allows us to understand the literary, social and artistic ideas to which Hugh Walpole and his ilk were exposed.

I hope others interested in literature will follow my lead, and the wishes of Hugh Walpole himself when he hoped his collection would be ‘seen by many people’ and at least ‘enjoyed by some.’

Rudyard Kipling’s Stalky & Co.

Joseph Conrad writes to King’s School master Harold Goodburn

Emily Brontë’s violent sketch in her translation of Horace 130

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Jewels from the Archive Peter Henderson taught History (and a bit of Politics) at King’s from 1969 to 2006. He has been the Walpole Librarian since 1993 and is now the School Archivist and President of Canterbury Cricket Club.

In 1562 the Headmaster (John Twyne) was accused of being a conjuror – i.e. of being a wizard.

ord Chief t, future L ighteenth ot b b A es al E Charl s to one of sever Justice, is th Century King’s boy es n ch ee en b the and Ninet his name on have carvedCathedral cloisters. in the

s for The eed, famou director R l ro Ca OKS st , won a be Third Man ! er iv Oscar for Ol

In 1873 there was a reb ellion at the school.

Some of the ringlead ers were flogged, but the Headmaster, Joh n Mitchinson, then declared an amnesty and announced he was leaving to become Bis hop of Barbados.

The tree in Mint Yard the w blown down as the hurric in ane of 1987.

omotive ury’ loc built b r e t n a was g’s C The ‘Kin Class, no. 933) om service r s f l o n o w h a s (Sc hdr me plate and wit in 1935 1. One of the na annexe. room in 196 e dining is in th

n ain o Chapl and is s a w Boys years s with chard or many es i R S f d ch OK lena ve playe e H a St to h said eon.

Napol

d s was use classroom racking V2 y r o i r P e t One of th al Artillery for orld War. W y o d R n o e c h e t S e y b ing th r u d s t e k roc

Charles Dic the Headma kens denied that Dr St st was based on er in David Copperfi rong, eld, King’s Sch John Birt.

Well, he wou ool Headmaster ld, wouldn’t he?

The Channel Tunnel Treaty was signed (1986)

by Margaret Th and François Mitterrand on atcher a King’s School dining room table.

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Sibeliu s notation , the music was inv software, e OKS twi nted by n called F brothers inn.

i’s Giuseppe Garibald s wa o, un Br grandson, at the Captain of Boats is He . ol King’s Scho rst Fi e th on ed at or commem . al ri mo me World War

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25 The Hall (No. e) Hodgson’s the unimaginativ h o t t n s e t e c t n n ve Preci in the Se was builty – the date 1659 n the Centur en betwee can be se oor windows. first-fl

s vilege nd Pri d in a s m o t e s h ‘The Cu : publis Book – – was first ‘Second Year e u l B : ’ r e l e d z o The o a u h l l c c b S n of the s. Customs i ns of coat or e buys n o 30 o t 9 y t 1 r u e e b v h o t Day: e wears ave tw must h p’ and ‘Speechreakfast and it is b u n er whe done ose aft eches, ial.’ a red r il after Spe l War Memor o t o n h u Sc it on the placed

The Palace Block (once Archbishop Parker’s gate house) was Featherstone’s Department Store before becoming school classrooms.

When Queen Elizabeth visited Canterbury in 1573 to celebrate her 40th birthday, a King’s Scholar delivered an oration to her – in Latin, of course.

The present Queen’s ancestor s include OKS Richard Boyle, Earl of Cork, whose portrait is in The Grange.

The Scho King’s fou ol was nded n in 5 ot 97.

The Scho ol di dTh ireecMe nCh t morial inap g el 119 ha,lldedicated in st36J,uwahsit duer rily rm recsh ne 1fo eive.

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er a woman The first house named aft s Douglas was Jervis: the name honour ah.

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The

Development

Malthouse Rebekkah Beattie, Director of Drama

T

he King’s School Drama Department has over the years developed the (very happy) problem of bursting at the seams. We have expanded our production opportunities, extended our Excellence groups and Scholarship programmes, and enabled the growing number of curricular performances required by exam boards. Exciting Dance and Musical Theatre opportunities are also developing. So we look forward with delight to filling our fantastic new theatre complex at The Malthouse.

The facilities include stateof-the-art Drama and ‘The theatre space is Dance studios, and a 350thrillingly versatile: a seat theatre that will allow capacity for different larger, more ambitious productions. The theatre stage configurations and space is thrillingly versatile: auditorium sizes is a key a capacity for different feature of the design.’ stage configurations and auditorium sizes is a key feature of the design. Exam pieces, for example, require a far more intimate feel than a school musical. Crucially, therefore, The Malthouse Theatre has been tailored to cater for the specific needs of King’s School Drama students, both to enrich their co-curricular options and enhance their academic success in the subject. We greatly look forward to embarking on this dramatic new journey.

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Commemoration Day 138

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N

o one starts in TV expecting mega-bucks fast.

In fact, it’s an open secret you have to do your time in some unglamorous job for peanuts, if you’re lucky enough to get paid at all, before you are considered for a ‘proper’ job. Most hopefuls start out as a runner. For me, this meant being an intern at TWI, Sky Sports and Sunset + Vine. (Back then I wanted to work in sports.) Sunset + Vine had the rights to test match cricket so it looked like a dream job for a fan like me: hanging out in the Comm Box with Ian Botham and Ravi Shastri, walking through the Long Room (I’m not going to lie; this was a life highlight), and escorting Richie Benaud to his car while fans shouted his name and genuflected. What I remember most, however, is working 12-hour shifts for £20 and being sent out to buy deodorant because one of the commentators had been on the razzle the night before.

Other Lives

television

Alanna Fraser, teacher of Theology and Philosophy, tells us about her time in TV.

‘It’s true that in TV you have to be in the right place at the right time.’

My dues paid, I could look towards the dizzy heights of research roles. And I got lucky: it’s true that in TV you have to be in the right place at the right time. My break came at Optomen TV, an independent production company. Their Head of Production had just left to become Commissioning Editor for Science and Religion at Channel 4 and they were looking for ways to exploit the new link. I pitched up, a green but willing Theology graduate, and was offered the job.

As Development Researcher I was part of a team that comes up with ideas for the small screen. It’s an odd job because 95% is dealing with rejection – yes, around 5 out of every 100 ideas are accepted. But it was also creative, which allowed me to write and research all day long. I also learnt how to use a professional camera and shoot my own screen tests and taster tapes.

I worked for a visionary producer, Pat Llewellyn, who was Development Director at Optomen when she discovered Jamie Oliver. Pat decided Gordon Ramsay needed to be on TV more, so I was part of the team that came up with the BAFTA-winning Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares. As a big foodie, I was star-struck when I first met Gordon on the stairs. I was holding a cup of tea and was mid-biscuit when he said hello and asked how my day was going. He was sprayed with crumbs for his troubles. Actually, he’s delightful in real life and bears little resemblance to the expletive-fuelled chef you see on telly.

‘I was star-struck when I first met Gordon on the stairs. I was holding a cup of tea and was mid-biscuit when he said hello and asked how my day was going.’

I soon learned that programme ideas are formed one of two ways: either you come up with a format and then find a title, or you come up with a title and then mould a format. My favourite ideas were Wrinkle Pickers, a late-night C4 documentary on gerontophilia, and Pope Idol, a talent contest among papal candidates after John Paul II’s death. Both were binned.

After Optomen, I became Development Assistant Producer at Keo Films, the production company of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall.

When asked to research the oldest porn star in Britain, I realised my life was not shaping up the way I wished. I found the old girl all right but couldn’t negotiate access because her family didn’t know about her work. It was time for a change, and teaching came to call.

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Granta Philanthropist and former King’s parent, Sigrid Rausing, bought magazine Granta in 2005 and became Editor. Rupert Davis (6a School House) charts its journey from student rag to literary royalty.

O

n its cover the literary quarterly, Granta, dubs itself ‘the magazine of new writing’. It is in fact more of a book than a magazine, and a weighty one at that, since each issue is around 250 pages. But it needs to be weighty, given the wide variety of short stories, memoirs, poetry and reporting, all written in English by authors from all over the world, that it seeks to share. And the writing is indeed new. One of the cardinal rules of Granta is that no piece can have appeared in any other publication. And the authors are as varied, talented and unique as the pieces they write. So anyone who knows Granta knows Granta is not only global and niche but cool.

fair Granta acknowledges the inevitable shortcomings in producing its lists of new talent, so that in the first Best Young American Novelists issue it asked, ‘Who are the best young novelists in the United States of America?’, before mocking itself by calling this ‘a bad question’.

Granta is aware that even its capacious issues cannot wholly cover the global genius for great storytelling. But it is still valid as a showcase for major new talent.

In addition to the best new novelists list that Granta releases every decade, each issue has some central theme that loosely connects the pieces. These themes usually focus on one aspect of how we live, be it love, work, travel, or a glimpse at different parts of the world and their respective cultures. Some of these themes are influenced by current events. For example, Granta’s 77th issue (‘What we think of America’) concentrated on how 24 different writers saw America after the 9/11 attack.

This was not always the case. Granta was once the student magazine of Cambridge University. Founded in 1889, it was a periodical written by students, featuring student politics as well as some great fiction and poetry by writers such as A A Milne and Sylvia Plath. The tone of this original Granta was light and jocular, its cover depicting a jester sitting with his head in his hands – an apt image, perhaps, for a Granta is not alone in a market where competition is fierce. There are many literary magazines worldwide and, with a limited student magazine that did not seek appeal beyond the readership of around 50,000 subscribers, Granta is university’s young, optimistic and wide-eyed student “The authors are as small compared to the likes of The New Yorker and body, even if it did publish the juvenilia of later greats. varied, talented and The Paris Review. Yet Granta does differentiate itself The name Granta, of course, was taken from one of unique as the pieces from other literary magazines with its unique content. the tributaries of the river Cam that runs through the they write.”

Unlike most other magazines, Granta features in-depth city of Cambridge, associating the publication with the reporting and photo essays, cleverly making sure it is Romantic notion of free-flowing creative imagination and revolutionary consciousness. Despite its freshness and these always both topical and timeless, when the present becomes the worthy aspirations, however, over time the magazine faded in past. The Observer rightly wrote, ‘Granta has its face pressed firmly against the window, determined to witness the world.’ popularity and its finances dwindled to the edge of extinction.

But thanks to an American who was studying at Cambridge on a prestigious Marshall scholarship, a gift set up by the British government after World War Two to honour the eponymous architect of the Marshall Plan, Granta was relaunched in 1979 and survived. That American Marshall scholar and new Editor of Granta, Bill Buford, who spent his Cambridge time at King’s College, thought that British fiction in 1979 was ‘neither remarkable nor remarkably interesting’ and guilty of ‘uninspired sameness’. American Literature, however, he deemed ‘challenging, diversified, and adventurous’.

And so the first edition of the newly launched Granta was dedicated entirely to works by American authors. And it took off. When the seventh issue came out, in 1983, the careers of a new generation of British authors was well underway and Granta was turning its bright light on the likes of Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie. So by the time Thatcher was in her second term, new British fiction was finding a loud voice in Granta’s edgy pages.

Since then Granta has spread its golden net to include, in its famous list of new writing to watch, Spanish, Brazilian and Japanese authors, as well as British and American, and has launched the careers of several talented unknown world novelists. But the new Granta has its critics in more ways than one. The ‘best’ novelists are decided by a panel of judges, all highly regarded authors, in combination with the production team at Granta, but this august combined body has failed to include some key authors who went on to great success without its help, such as Nicholson Baker and William T Vollman. But to be 140

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Such is its continued illustrious reputation that, since its rescue and resuscitation by Buford in 1979, Granta has been acquired twice – once in 1994 by Rea Hederman, owner of The New York Review of Books, and in 2005 by Sigrid Rausing, writer, editor and philanthropist.

Both acquisitions caused, inevitably, philosophical and editorial disagreements and changes of staff, but compared with the war on mediocrity that Granta continues to win, these internal skirmishes were superficial, and the publication has maintained its literary integrity.

The controversies that characterised some of Granta’s earlier issues still raise eyebrows today. Take the 46th Issue, ‘Crime’, in which there are two accounts of murders written by the murderers themselves. And the 24th, ‘Inside Intelligence’, which angered the British government by publishing the memoirs of former British spy, Anthony Cavendish.

Although Granta sticks to the spirit that has inspired 140 issues so far, the variety of pieces has widened, and poetry and photo essays have recently become more prominent. But that is to be expected. Granta knows that, in the publishing world more perhaps than anywhere else, if you stand still you get knocked down.

So since its birth as a posh student rag full of jests and japes, Granta has long since grown up. Amongst literary magazines, Granta is for the reader who looks around and looks ahead, values tradition little and treasures, above all else in the literary landscape, a great story well told.

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The

Red

Shop

We sent Charles Griffin (Remove School House) across the road from Mint Yard Gate to meet the staff of the school’s favourite shop.

A

t King’s it is rare to meet anyone When I asked him about competition he who doesn’t visit The Red Shop refused to comment but further investigation often. Newer pupils may know it revealed he is rather against The Blue Shop. as The Corner Shop, even though it is not He says their prices are extortionate and they on a corner. But whatever we call it, few of do not treat their customers with respect. us know what goes on behind the scenes. The Blue Shop declined the interview I I went to The Shop and offered them so I have interviewed one of the no option but to believe shopkeepers to discover the claims Ali has made.

‘Apparently 40% of more.

The Red Shop also told business comes from King’s me that there was some and pupils buy an insane The man I interviewed was friendly competition with Ali, who runs the shop amount of camel balls but Smokey’s but all three staff with the help of his friend not enough Turkish milk.’ felt respect for the people and brother. I asked him who work there. many questions, especially about the popularity of In exchange for the certain items in the shop. He told me camel interview The Red Shop man asked me to balls and Maryland cookies sell best, with talk about his brilliant new offers. He was very few people opting for the Turkish milk. especially keen that I mentioned Lucozade He told me he and his brother come from a being sold for under a pound. place in Turkey called Batman and that their friend comes from Istanbul. They moved to When I asked him if he was going away Canterbury thirteen years ago and live in for the holiday he told me he was going to an apartment a few minutes away from the Bristol with his girlfriend. Which I found shop. most intriguing. He then asked me to wish all at King’s a happy holiday.

They told me they like King’s pupils a lot and think they are polite and helpful. He In conclusion what I ascertained from the joked that the shop would not exist today if interview is that the men who work behind it wasn’t for King’s. He says that the pupils the till at the beloved Corner Shop, or Red always put a smile on his face. Apparently Shop, or Turkish Shop, have charming banter 40% of business comes from King’s and and love working opposite our school. I have pupils buy an insane number of camel learned things about their backgrounds and balls but not enough Turkish milk. He also about their relationships with the other local said pupils were not buying Turkish Bibles shops. I think The Shop is an integral part of much and that he might ask the school to King’s life. I wish them well. incorporate Turkish psalms into its services and assemblies.

‘They told me they like King’s pupils a lot and think they are polite and helpful. He says that the pupils always put a smile on his face.’

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New

Development

Science

Building Louise Comber, Head of Science

T

he new King’s Science Building Project will co-locate the Sciences, which are currently housed in separate parts of the school. As well as a new building on the edge of Mint Yard, where Mitchinsons now stands, we will renovate Parry Hall to create a new suite of improved laboratories. Two new Chemistry laboratories have already replaced the ‘An auditorium will Mint Yard IT classrooms, provide a space for and the wonderful use of space and the high a science lecture quality of the fittings have programme, outreach intensified our excitement projects with local schools about the future. The new and larger groups.’

Science building will retain the individual departments of Biology, Chemistry, Physics and Earth and Planetary Sciences, but link them so that research projects can stretch across more than one discipline. An auditorium will provide a space for a Science lecture programme, outreach projects with local schools and larger groups. And a new Science library and Science studios with up-to-date technology will encourage pupils to go beyond the curriculum and share research ideas with their peers. The project will merge the old with the new, keeping the historical features of Parry Hall and the Harvey Labs, but bring these up to date to nurture the modern and creative Science that takes place at King’s.

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A Sealed Box for Xanthi In many years from now, you’ll read These lines I write, when I am dead.

Why were you born, my darling, or What is a person living for?

Let us assume these questions are One question, all-the-more bizarre: How should we approach this life, Which murders us, the more we love?

In lines of love I have before Written more, Which I perceive small use to you, as you Do what you do.

How may the music of my mind inspire In you, who played with me for hours, The living fire, When all that’s left of me is flowers?

Your life ago, the light of dawn Shone in your eyes, five minutes born.

You had a look of fiery pride In which my egotism died.

When you were one, or two, or three, You had the measure of my heart; And long before I could devise A way for me To instruct you in the art Of being alive, you were heavenly-wise, Drinking Through a straw, Conscious of compassion as a primary choice, a decision, Which you enacted with precision, And set me thinking.

And then I saw Love precedes what we are living for.

Do you remember how we made a rocking-horse Out of rubbish?

How you swung in a swish, swish, swish, An original emblem of the force By which such love is known?

I rock you in the bone.

To have had such moments with you is bliss Conscious of the kiss With which we leave This earth, on which we quarrel, love and grieve.

Sebastian Barker OKS (1945-2014)

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Shells trip to Ypres 148

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Wyndham Le Strange Buys the School

Alex Preston

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WYNDHAM LE STRANGE BUYS THE SCHOOL Alex Preston

than he has for a while. He was happiest of any of us at “Do you chaps remember Wyndham Le Strange?” school, a fine student, a better cricketer, in love with the Ginger looks up at us from his paper. I stir my tea, quiet rhythms of the place. Where Bingo and I couldn’t frowning, until an image comes to me – this is how my wait to get out – university, London, the world! – I fancy memory works now – of a pale, ribby boy with the clear that Ginger might have cheerfully stayed there forever. eyes of a husky, standing at silly-mid off.

Even now, with his hair in flying retreat, the moustache, “You know, I think I do,” I say. Bingo just sits there, the scar that strings a yellow arc between ear and mouth, hands flat on the table, staring at the misted windows of there’s something bouncingly schoolboyish about him. the café.

On Sundays, I visit my mother in Dorking. This “He’s taken an advertisement in the Mail,” Ginger particular Sunday happens to be my twenty-fourth continues. “Here, let me read it.” He is silent for a birthday, and there is a bottle of sherry on the table, a moment. “Well, I say. It’s about us.” bunch of dying roses. My mother pours and sips, pours “Us?” and sips, and we sit in the wash of soft noises that passes “He’s asking us to contact him. Old Somptonians. for familial silence: the well-remembered ticking of the Anyone who was there between o-six and fourteen.”

“I suppose that is us. What is it that he wants? A reunion?”

We sit listening to the omnibuses rumbling on the Tottenham Court Road, visible only as passing smudges of red on the fogged glass.

It has been raining forever, or so it seems, thin icy rain that insinuates, drenches, chills to the grey bone.

Wars shouldn’t end in November, I think, stirring my tea again as I let the trailing edges of my mind brush against that half-remembered figure: Wyndham Le Strange.

“Wasn’t there something about the father?” I ask. “Some tragedy?”

Ginger strokes the wispy moustache that alleges itself on his upper lip. “Yes,” he says, “now you mention it, there was.”

Bingo floats his fist above the table, opens it and drops three sugar cubes, which crumble on impact.

“That’s right,” Ginger says. “He was killed in ‘sixteen. A Zeppelin raid, poor blighter. Farringdon Road, it was.”

“When is this reunion?” I ask.

“Next Thursday. I do think we I let the trailing edges of my mind brush against that half-remembered figure: Wyndham Le Strange. ought to go.” Ginger looks peppier

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WYNDHAM LE STRANGE BUYS THE SCHOOL clock, knives on the faded crazing of Limoges china, the cat meowing itself between our feet. Every so often my mother speaks, her voice hesitant and fluting. “Do you remember the year we went to Abersoch?” or “I found your father’s deerstalker hat,” or “What ever happened to that girl, Lavinia?” and we sit and watch as the memory spreads itself out on the table before us, glowing.

We came back as ghosts from the war, haunting the places we once called home, but they had changed utterly, or rather it was that trench foot, trench mouth, the dawn burst of star shells, had changed us. The things we’d seen meant that we could no longer step along the same blithe pavements, could no longer hold the dry, decisive hands of older girls on summer evenings, could no longer look with the same eyes on the wainscoting and gabling, the ivy, the chimney-topped roofs of our homes. Now we live between London’s boarding houses and cafés, her pubs and her parks, striding with collars up through the endless, pitiless rain.

He trips back into the carriage shock-headed, his face washed Bingo has his head out of the train window, clean of age, of emotion, by the wind and rain. a grin on his face, and I’m reminded of my Uncle Frobisher, who drove a Benz to the office each day, his King Charles, Tatters, on of always being on the point of stumbling, as if still the seat beside him, wind-buffeted. Bingo’s dark hair learning the grown-up version of himself, as if his body streams behind like smoke from the ashes of his face. He had expected some quite different inhabitant. He trips is too thin, gangly and awkward as he leans further into back into the carriage shock-headed, his face washed the rushing world. He’s a man who gives the impression clean of age, of emotion, by the wind and rain.

Ginger, too, is staring out of the window, and I know that he is trying to pick out the villages and farms, the coppice-clad hills and valleys that were signposts to school. I’d never taken the time to wonder why school had meant so much to him, but remember the hecticcheeked mother who’d come to see him off at Victoria, her own red hair grey-streaked and hopeless. A curdled atmosphere that hung around Ginger’s mentions of home, and he never had us back to visit. Now, though, he is as I remember him on journeys to school all those years ago, We make our way onto the driveway, and it is as if we are stepping into the shoes on the other side of the abyss, of our younger selves.

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WYNDHAM LE STRANGE BUYS THE SCHOOL following us inside. I notice that he walks with a limp. when he’d quiver upright in his seat, his eyes alert to the “When father died, you see…” Le Strange has a low, here and there. confidential voice, an ingratiating manner, which means “I say,” he says, “Is that?... Look, over there, is that he leans towards us as he speaks, and we toward him. the church? It is, you know.” The train begins to slow “He left me a frightful amount of money. Now not being and finally comes to a noisy halt, its steam swallowed by the business type...” His speech is full of these little putthe river mist. We step down. Expecting others, we stand downs – “far be it from me” and “not that I’d know” – as for a while in our hats and overcoats in the rain, but if he is standing there, lobbing grenades at himself as he no one comes and no one leaves on the bare platform. talks. We sit in the library, where hand-cut gold letters The train pulls off and we make our way up the hill read WELCOME BACK above the fireplace, and I am towards the school. Ginger has an umbrella and Bingo sorry that only the three of us have come, that all this and I huddle against him, staring into the wind-blown performance should be directed at such a diminished mist as we climb. Finally, two iron gates, stone gateposts audience. topped with pineapple finials. We make our way onto “I’d heard,” Le Strange continues, “that the school the driveway, and it is as if we are stepping into the shoes had closed down in ‘fifteen and, goose that I am, I of our younger selves. thought – why not?” There is a fire in the library, too, Soon, the great grey school is looming above us, its every light illuminated. I realise I haven’t felt well like spires and peaks pronging the swept cloud, its windows this, warm like this, for years. “At first, after I was lit and welcoming. I think what a good idea it was to shipped back, I lived here on my own, but it’s a big place, come, not just for Ginger, but for all of us. There is a and I don’t mind telling you it gets lonely. I’m a nervy temptation, when you’ve been through hell, to live there type, you see.” He gives a deprecating smile and limps afterwards. Going back like this, to the other side, seems over to throw another log on the fire. one way of moving forward, of pulling our feet from the “Which show were you at?” I ask. mud and gore.

“There’s Le Strange,” Ginger says, and he’s right.

Wyndham Le Strange stands in a green smoking jacket in the school’s main entrance arch, a wide smile on his pale face. He is older, of course, his arctic eyes bulging from dark shadows, his blond hair side parted, combtracks visible. Campaign ribbons pinned to his chest. He brandishes a cigarette lighter in one hand and with the other ushers us expansively into the hall. “I’m so glad you fellows could come,” he says. “I was hoping you would.” We step uncertainly inside, where a fire burns in the great hearth, and the chandelier rains down golden light upon us, and everything seems gentle and welcoming. Bingo draws in a deep breath of the memory-thick air. Ginger is already standing beneath the notice boards that record successes scholarly and sporting. I see him looking up at his own name, and all the others, sun-kissed just by being there, in the time before. “The old Matron’s old bedroom is full of moths who paper the walls with their place,” Le Strange says, pulling veined wings. the heavy oak doors closed and 152

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WYNDHAM LE STRANGE BUYS THE SCHOOL “Wipers,” he replies, although he pronounces it like the French, Ypres. “Gough’s Command.”

“Gosh, you fellows took it rather bad.”

“We did.” He pats his leg. “Anyway, I thought it’d be ripping to have you chaps here, if you’ve time on your hands, and the inclination. I’d keep out of your way, not make a nuisance of myself.”

“We’d love to,” Ginger says, and I cast a sideways glance at Bingo, who sighs.

“Why not?” I say.

The school, emptied of children, teachers and books, but crowded with memories, requires re-exploring. We rush through a labyrinth of endless corridors, up narrow, winding staircases that give onto observatories, rooftop greenhouses, aviaries where the floor crunches with the bones of long-dead budgerigars. One room, at the top of the tallest tower, has been taken over by soft grey bats; another, matron’s old bedroom, is full of moths who paper the walls with their veined wings, rising in a susurrating cloud when the door is opened. We don’t go into the cellars – they are dark and smell of soil and damp. One day, I find Bingo nailing boards across the door that leads down. We stick to the upper reaches, to the warren of panelled rooms and spiral stairways and meandering corridors whose paths are so haphazard and unlikely that it is as if we are inventing them as we go. Sometimes, Ginger and I run along with our arms held out, pretending to be Sopwith Camels. Le Strange hobbles gamely after us, ratatatating. Bingo is a glider, serene and otherworldly.

We find letters. Canadians were stationed here during the war and must have left suddenly, for there is a room of their unsent mail, and we read it to one another, feeling a trifle ashamed, but also as if we are performing a necessary ritual, freeing the words into the forgiving air. Dear Maude, we read, I’m missing you dreadfully, and wish I were back in Spiritwood. Or Darling, Why haven’t you written me? I thought we were in love. Or Dear Ma and Pa, I’m scared. We wonder which of them lived to say these words in person, and which of them are lying in close-packed graves marked with white crosses, or lost under the drifting Flanders mud.

I sleep better, up here at the school. It is partly the sense of coming home, for the place is more familiar to me than my mother’s circumscribed life in Dorking.

When my father died – something I realise I share with Le Strange, although my father’s death was neither so dramatic nor so random – my mother retreated into herself, into a pinched, pointed widowhood. Up in the dormitory, with Bingo in the bed to my left, Ginger and Le Strange opposite, I feel life seeping back into my bones.

We talk with lights out – about our schooldays, about girls, about our dreams for the future. Le Strange tells us about Veronica, before the war. “She had hair that

bounced when she laughed,” he says, his voice heavy with memory. “What she saw in me, I’ll never know.

I used to take her in my arms and stroke that laughing hair.” I remember for them a cricket match in o-nine.

I’d scored a century for the first eleven. “It was the last time I saw my father. My mother had him there in his bath chair. When I got my hundred, I raised my bat to him, and I could tell that it took all the life he had left in him just to raise his arm. But he did, and he smiled, a wide, proud smile that gave a new light to my whole childhood. They didn’t wait for me to come in from the crease. Mother pushed him squeaking away, and the next day he was dead.” Ginger tells us about his wedding, in Frome, and the blossom that fell from the trees into his young wife’s hair, the sense that he was six feet taller than any other man there, when she took his hand and called him her husband. “What was her name?” Le Strange asks. “Rebecca. Becky.” Ginger’s voice cracks when he says it. Bingo just sighs. Then we sleep, and only rarely do I wake, taloning the air, from dreams tinged gas-mask green.

During the days we walk, either in the school grounds or up on the Downs, for spring has finally broken, the rain stopped, and life is slowly, hesitantly, crawling out from under the rock of the war. Yellowhammers bounce through the air above us, cow parsley throngs in deep clumps beside the footpaths, rabbits twitch our approach.

We play long games of cricket on the overgrown pitches, or kick a rugger ball while Le Strange watches, stretching his bad leg out in front of him.

It is a spring of sublime sunsets, so that the long eastern walls of the empty classrooms are painted peach and gold in the evenings, and the four of us sit watching the light fade, listening to the swell of all the birds of Sussex, singing in the hills. As time passes, I feel myself growing stronger, younger even. It is as if we have entered some sacred grove whose nepenthean air has overthrown all the ills of the young century, and we are back where we began.

One afternoon in May, I’m out walking with Le Strange on the hills. We can see the glimmering sea away to the south, the coil of the river through the valley.

We speak of the golden summer of ‘fourteen, when Le Strange was up at Oxford and I’d just taken a position in foreign accounts at Lloyds. We cusp a hill and it seems as if we could reach out and run our fingers through the wisps of mares’-tail clouds that sit above the water. We loll back on a bank of tussocky grass and it is hot and good with the heavens above and the soft earth below.

I half-listen to Le Strange, half float off into sleep, and always the chirping of birds, the whisper of the warm air.

“My time here,” Le Strange says, “got me through the war. I used to curl up in my kip or in the funk-hole, a choir of shells singing out over me, the Hun’s breath CANTUARIAN | 2017

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WYNDHAM LE STRANGE BUYS THE SCHOOL used to be, through the ruins of a house that looks very down my bloody neck, and I’d close my eyes and I’d be much like the house I grew up in. Ahead of me, in the here. I’d be playing cricket or chatting to the chaps over wide emptiness of the town square, I see a child, maybe tiffin or waking early and going for a jog in the grounds.” five years old, and I realise that it is me, as a child, and Something in his voice changes and I look over at him, that this is why I’m here.” I look down towards the sea, but he’s still canted back, his hands behind his head. where a flotilla of sailboats has appeared, sails bobbing “Do you dream now?” he asks. “Here, I mean.” gaily. “I run towards the child and suddenly the sky is “Sometimes. Less than when I was in London.” filled with shells, and they fall like heavy hail around us.

“They can be bastards, dreams.”

They’re phosgene – that dreadful smell of new-mown “I had the same dream,” I say, “every night for a hay, the sulphurous eddies of cloud – and I pull on my month. Used to wake with the ticker going like billy-o, sweat-drenched and screaming. It was like a coffin lid pressing down on me, that dream.”

“I know,” he says.

“In the dream, I’m running bent double through a labyrinth of trenches. You remember the way some duckboards would give, so you didn’t know if you’d sink? Every one is like that, every step unsteady. Now the trenches get lower and lower, until they’re no bigger than dug-outs, and I can feel the eyes on my back, can hear the Prussian machine gunners popping at me. But on I run.

“Soon, the trenches end, and I’m sprinting across a field, stumbling through shell-holes, pounding my feet on the soft, giving earth until I realise that it’s not earth Finally, I come up into a French town, bomb-blasted and crumbling, and I step over the but bodies, that I’m rubble where a church used to be. stamping down on the corpses of my gas mask and carry on towards the child, but he’s down pals, and there’s Ginger and Bingo down there, still ” – I’m crying now, tears flowing fast and unfelt – “and squirming, their eyes gone, their legs stumps, their when I reach him, there’s blood and spume in his mouth, mouths screaming silently. I keep on running, because and he’s not moving.” I’m sobbing, and I can’t speak that is the logic of the dream. any more, can’t tell him about the weight of the body in “Finally, I come up into a French town, bomb-blasted my arms, how light it felt, as if life were substantial. Le and crumbling, and I step over the rubble where a church 154

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WYNDHAM LE STRANGE BUYS THE SCHOOL Strange reaches over and puts his arm around me, then both arms.

“You’re safe now,” he whispers. “We’re home.” He places a kiss on my cheek. Wind through wheat has left dust on his lips, and he presses them to mine for a brief, hot moment. He leans his head back to look at me, like a man inspecting the menu in a restaurant. “We’re going to get better, you know.”

Spring kindles into summer, and we spend our days reading in the cool high rooms of the school’s many towers, windows left open to the breeze, or down by the river. There is a willow tree on the banks from whose branches we swing, sending ourselves up in great whooping arcs and then down into the cool freshness of the water. Our bodies, stretched naked on the grass and sand after swimming, are repaired and restored by the sunshine; skin firms and scars fade and we look more like we did, ten years before, when we’d come down here and float, star-shaped, until the bell called us up for tiffin.

I find a copy of Chekhov’s stories in one of the masters’ old studies, and we sit in the sunshine by the fast clear river and I read ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’ and ‘About Love’ and ‘Angel.’ Ginger stirs the water with a stick as I read, Le Strange sits with his eyes turned up towards me, Bingo cries silent tears, his fist pressed to his mouth. The stories unknit something in us, and in the depths of them we find parts of ourselves that we feared lost forever.

A blanket of downy dust has fallen over the furniture in the school. It sits in shifting drifts on the floor, renders solid the sunshine that spears in through high windows, gives the air a hazy, dreamlike quality. We have been outside so much, you see, and anyway are flimsy things, our skinny bodies unlikely to disturb the dust as we pass. When you have lived as we lived for three, four years, mud-spattered, bent-over, never dry, you barely notice things like dust, or the weeds that begin to grow in through the windows, to curl through the boarded-up door to the cellar.

It is in late summer – and there, I’m already speaking as if it’s dead – that things begin to unravel. Perhaps we were foolish to think that we could go on like that, living apart from the world. For each of us, even Le Strange, had lives outside the school, had dreams and obligations, promises to keep. We still pictured ourselves in the future, holding a soft-skinned baby, perhaps. But if the world had not irrupted into our sanctuary, who knows how long we might have lasted on our island?

One Saturday morning, Rebecca, Ginger’s wife, arrives at the school. We hear the creak of the oak doors in the entrance hall, which we rarely use, and we scuttle up the stairs, into shadows, looking through the bars of the bannisters. She’s pretty, early twenties, dark hair falling down onto her shoulders like a stain. She takes

off her gloves and runs a long finger over the dust on the table. She stands looking up at the noticeboards, and we see the tear that drops, surprising her, when she catches sight of Ginger’s name. Then she stands in the airy emptiness of the hall, wringing her gloves, looking upwards.

I can feel Ginger straining all of this time, fighting against himself not to rush down, to take her in his arms, to walk with her into the sunlit world. I’m reminded of how he was on the train, on the way to the school, alert and expectant. Finally, Rebecca turns to go, and Ginger lets out a brief bark, a sob or a shout, and she turns, her face eager and alive. I’m holding Ginger by the shoulders, Le Strange has him by the hand, and we pull him back further into the shadows. He’s panting, his cheeks bright with tears. The glimmer on Rebecca’s face fades. With a last look up the stairway, she leaves, pulling the doors creakingly shut behind her Ginger doesn’t speak to us for the rest of the day. He sits in one of the tower rooms reading Chekhov and we give him space, hoping that the stories might provide what we could not – solace, a recognition of the truth of his situation. Just before bed, Ginger puts his long slim arms around my neck, pulls me towards him, and I understand what this means, and I squeeze him very tightly. He was my best friend, you know.

I hear him get up and dress in the darkest hours, feel a soft hand on my forehead and then there is the click of the dormitory door shutting. I imagine him making his way down the driveway, and the courage it must have taken to leave, and the brave, determined look on his scarred face.

“Thank you, Rebecca,” I whisper into the night.

Bingo is the next to go. We are in the tower room which, since Ginger’s departure, has taken on a kind of sacred meaning for us, a place to be together, to remember him. I am reading ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’ out loud. Le Strange is lying on the floor, his eyes closed, a distant smile on his listening face. Bingo is perched on the window seat, looking out towards the evening sunlight, which arrows through scattered pink clouds. His face is rendered almost invisible by the brightness of the light, and he sighs every so often, and it is as if he is made of the air, the light. I come to the end of the story, that final hopeful-hopeless passage: “And it seemed as though in a little while the solution would be found, and then a new and splendid life would begin; and it was clear to both of them that they had still a long, long road before them, and that the most complicated and difficult part of it was only just beginning.”

All the while I’ve been reading this, Bingo has been leaning further and further towards the sun, out of the window, extending his gangling frame into the insubstantial air. With the final beginning, he issues a last sigh and slips out altogether. I drop the book, rush to CANTUARIAN | 2017

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WYNDHAM LE STRANGE BUYS THE SCHOOL

Through the broken windows of the library, snow has blown, and now banks up against the armchairs, the mildewed ottoman.

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WYNDHAM LE STRANGE BUYS THE SCHOOL at Ginger’s name on the notice board each time I pass, the window and look down, but there is no broken body saluting the window from which Bingo disappeared. It on the lawn below, no sign of him at all. Thin air. Le bothers me that I never thanked Le Strange, because I Strange joins me, puts his arms around me, and we stand realise that I needed this more than anyone: a retreat, there as the light leaches from the sky. On the night wind a haunt away from a world that carries on as if the war that comes with darkness, I hear, I think, one of Bingo’s never happened. sighs, far up amid the noctilucent clouds.

I have a new dream now, up there in the wind-blasted I thought, with Ginger and Bingo gone, that I’d be dormitory, under the gaze of the owl. Every night, next to leave, but when I come down in the morning, Ginger and Bingo and I run through the no-man’s land after a night of desperate dreams, the trenches and the of Cambrai. It is as if we have wings, though, so light town square, the child with the froth-flecked lips, Le are our footsteps. We spring like antelope over shellStrange is standing in his smoking jacket in the hallway, holes, dance out of the way of twanging Mills bombs, a pigskin travelling case by his feet. we exhale and the force of our breath dissipates the gas“It’s time for me to say cheerio, old chap,” he says. clouds. With a whisper, the bullets from the machine I give him a narrow look. “I should have realised, you guns pass right through us, falling like rain into the soft know, that this was never going to hold together. Typical mud. The shells that explode slap-bang on top of us of me, I’m afraid.” A little regretful shrug. cause only the slightest perturbation of the air, throwing “But…” I say, and nothing more. up bouquets of earth that are already behind us as we “It’s been awfully good to know you, old fellow,” he run. We come to a ruined town where we spring over says. “I shall often think of you.” walls, skip through rubble, stride through unpeopled “Where are you going?” streets. There is a boy in the wide emptiness of the town Again he gives a sad little shrug and I take him in my square, and I lift him laughing onto my shoulders and arms, and it seems as if the whole world is concentrated we go on running, running, running. in our embrace, as if we have woken from some terrible dream to feel the firmness of the living world, of each other. Le Strange breaks away, stumbles back, tears in his wintry eyes.

“Goodbye,” he says, desperately.

“Goodbye.” He walks out into the morning, and I am left alone It is December now. Frost patterns the windows, shimmers on the roofs, making icicles of the towers. The weeds that smashed through the cellar door, that vined their way in through windows and shutters have died, leaving their yellow-brown corpses underfoot. The bats control the towers; further down the moths rustle and birds shriek and creak and cackle. Foxes scarper through the corridors, their swift brushes sweeping trails in the dust. There is an owl in the dormitory who sits watch over me as I sleep. Through the broken windows of the library, snow has blown, and now banks up against the armchairs, the mildewed ottoman.

House agents come by every so often, showing shiny-suited businessmen the potential of the place. “A country home of distinction,” I hear. I keep well out of their way. I feel nothing but pity for these people from the outside, living their lives, storing up more and more memories, each one I have a new dream now, up there in the wind-blasted dormitory, less and less memorable. I walk the halls under the gaze of the owl. with measured, memorial paces, nodding CANTUARIAN | 2017

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WYNDHAM LE STRANGE BUYS THE SCHOOL was reprinted here by kind permission of the author and illustrated by Jason House

Alex Preston, Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at The University of Kent, is a writer, reviewer and interviewer now working on his fourth novel. A former financier, Alex has spoken frankly at King’s about his inspired move from the world of money to a whirl of words. His most recent book is a beautiful non-fiction celebration of all kinds of writing about birds, As Kingfishers Catch Fire. www.alexhmpreston.com

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@ahmpreston

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Against Seriousness

A young scholar sat in an orchard Composing poetry on a serious theme.

All was well, until a friend said, ‘Why do you annihilate existence?

This is the way to do it.’ And he danced under the apple trees To a hidden music.

Sebastian Barker OKS (1945-2014)

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www.kings-school.co.uk info@kings-school.co.uk +44 (0) 1227 595501 164

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