December 8th An Old School Song

Every day is a significant anniversary of something. Florence Nightingale and Beethoven must have been very disappointed that Covid prevented their anniversaries being properly commemorated this year. That 40 years ago today John Lennon was shot will cause many of us to pause and remember. A childhood or teenage life ended, a moment of disbelief, an evocation of places, moods, people who all crossed our path once four decades ago today. I find on all these occasions we mourn and remember far more than the immediate victims, we mourn time passing, a past lost, the prevalence of chance and inevitably our own mortality.

But it also provides a small inner theatre in which to replay the past, because free association comes into play. Chains of events and relationships start falling into place like synapses in the brain. When John Lennon was shot we were living in Upstate New York, about 350 miles north of New York City. Most of the teachers in the school where I was working were of our generation and when the news broke the whole community seemed to go numb, breathing appeared to stop. I remember Harry McManus, the local mayor, coming to see me, his voice broken, stunned. Because I was British there was an assumption I knew the Beatles though I actually knew someone who had one of George Harrison’s guitar strings. It made me apostolic. The fact that I had actually seen them perform back in 1964 conferred on me a guru status which I was able to relish until another colleague quietly muttered that he had once seen Elvis in concert. It took a while to claw back my credibility after that!

John Lennon’s death was a moment of international empathy – he should have been pleased.

Imagine all the people

Living life in peace...

'Imagine' with its anti-religion, anti-nationalist sentiments couldn't be more different from the old school songs of our more prestigious public schools. I'm not given to quoting them because they usually have nothing to say to me, being neither a cricketer nor a member of the cavalry, but here is a song immortalised by Alan Bennett in his play of that name. I had to excise two verses which I found indigestible.

Forty years on, when afar and asunder

Parted are those who are singing today,

When you look back, and forgetfully wonder

What you were like in your work and your play,

Then, it may be, there will often come o’er you,

Glimpses of notes like the catch of a song –

Visions of boyhood shall float them before you,

Echoes of dreamland shall bear them along,

Follow up! Follow up! Follow up

Follow up! Follow up

Till the field ring again and again,

With the tramp of the twenty-two men.

Follow up! Follow up!

Forty years on, growing older and older,

Shorter in wind, as in memory long,

Feeble of foot, and rheumatic of shoulder,

What will it help you that once you were strong?

God give us bases to guard or beleaguer,

Games to play out, whether earnest or fun;

Fights for the fearless, and goals for the eager,

Twenty, and thirty, and forty years on!