Section William Dykes and Samuel Holliday

Foreword

Four times this last academic year, a group of selected Shells from Radley College have met a group of Year 9s from Desborough College to write together. Two sessions ‘in real life’, two online. This has meant that boys have had to keep the skills going of meeting new people online and striking up relationships in a virtual format.

In the first session of the year, Lauren asked them to write a Sestina – a poetic form with strict rules about half a dozen words being the ends of successive lines in various patterns. In the first online session, I asked them to write 100 words about something that brought them joy. Next time, Lauren asked them to write a social media speech about what young people need to hear now. Finally, I asked them to write different sections of a modern version of The Canterbury Tales. I have done that session every year but I am delighted to be able to include the whole thing for the first time at the end of this anthology.

Thanks are due to many. At Radley, to John Sparks who runs Partnerships with vigour and generosity and to Alex Nash, Head of English, who has supported this venture as part of a renaissance of creative writing in the department. At Desborough, Lauren Humphreys, my opposite number, who has helped this collaboration go from strength to strength and to Trevor Crook who has ferried boys up from Desborough with seemingly unfailing enthusiasm. Final thanks are to the boys, who engaged with this all with terrific good humour.

For various reasons, this is the last iteration of this project, so this anthology takes on meaning as a kind of memorial the four years of its success. You will see that our Canterbury Tales is unfinished, like Chaucer’s original. That is rather fitting: collaboration and creativity are not a journey towards some endpoint. Instead, the journey is the destination: eternal and infinite.

James Sheldrake, June 2022