Not one of the boys (II)

Chapter Two: Schools. Hardly the happiest years
by Christopher Levenson

[Editor’s Note: The previous chapter of Not One of the Boys can be found here.]

*

I was not destined to stay at my first primary school for very long. The war saw to that. In September 1939, aged five, I started at Stanburn Elementary School, a building in would-be modernist 1930s style with extensive use of glass brick that was about a mile from my home. When we returned to London in the autumn of l943, I was able to attend the same school, where I remained until 1945, after I had passed the Eleven-Plus exam that qualified me to attend Harrow County Grammar School for Boys.

I don’t know when the air raid shelters were built on the sports fields behind Stanburn school but most of my memories of that first year of school centre on our rushing out from our classrooms on hearing the air raid sirens and sitting on wooden-slatted benches in the dank cement-smelling darkness with our gas masks in cardboard boxes on our laps waiting for the All Clear. At one stage, maybe later on in 1940, school was suspended altogether and groups of children gathered between air raids for some sort of ad hoc lessons in the homes of nearby parents.

The first school I remember clearly was the one I attended for two years in Lancaster. It was housed in some kind of Parish Hall on the main A6 road. Perhaps because it was a parish school, all the pupils occasionally trooped en masse across the road to a large church, where I was first exposed to the dubious glories of the Anglican liturgy and music. But it was definitely not a private school:  most of the pupils seemed to be evacuees from Salford, at that time a predominantly slum district of Manchester. A large beech grew in one corner of the raised playground nearest the road. The iron railings that protected it had by this time, like everywhere else, been removed so that their metal could be melted down for the war effort.  I recall my class going out to collect the ripe, burst-open shells of the beech nuts and colouring them with poster paints to make imitation flower ornaments.  Over the road was a shop that sold pork pies and also newspaper cones full of soft, floury black or brownish salted peas, while next door to it was a shop that sold parkin, a rich, dark treacly gingerbread much loved in Lancashire and Yorkshire, to which I also became addicted, doubtless as a welcome variation from our monotonous war-time rations.

I have no recollection of what I learnt at the Parish School, though I do recall two plump, tweedy elderly teachers, Miss Rampling and Miss Worrell, who apparently forecast great things for me as a writer and who would occasionally come round to our house for tea. Probably I would have stayed there for the full three years of my evacuation had it not been for the head lice. I remember my mother treating my head with some strong-smelling disinfectant liquid and later having the dead fleas combed out onto newspapers spread on the kitchen table. Some of my school mates had iron leg supports because of rickets and others occasionally appeared with purple daubs against impetigo, but head lice… this was too much for my parents. If this was what happened from my mixing with Manchester slum kids, I would have to go elsewhere.

The obvious choice was the Friends School, Lancaster (later renamed the George Fox School), run by the Society of Friends as a day and boarding school for boys. It was just up the road from the Storey Institute, the massive Edwardian structure that temporarily housed my father’s school, the Regent Street Polytechnic.

More to the point for me was the fact that the school literally overlooked the main railway station. This proximity caused my parents one very traumatic incident when I failed to return home after collecting engine numbers on one of the station platforms. This was not a new addiction: where previously I had sat on the abutment of a bridge near our house that spanned the two railway tracks, part of the main west coast LMS line from London to Scotland, I could now, for a penny, the price of a platform ticket, see the locomotives close up and even, as on that occasion, sometimes be invited into the driver’s cab. Although I have long since overcome my nostalgia for the ‘romance of steam’ (a very dusty, gritty romance as I rediscovered when I travelled around India in 1986), there was something very attractive — heroic and powerful and smelling of distances — about these engines, especially the 4-6-2 Pacific Class engines complete with nameplates of famous  places or important people I had never heard of such as the Duchess of Buccleuch. The sulphurous smoke that rose from their funnels and the steam from around their pistons lingers in my memory. But even the 0-6-0 freight locomotives, used mostly for shunting, and the stubby 2-6-0 tank engines had their fascination for me. The only model railway I remember from my early years was a clockwork German one, a Märklin, given me by our ‘Uncle’ Helmut and I envied the smaller gauge electric sets of some of my friends., My interest in the real thing, then and later in the 1940s, was abetted by the series of trainspotters’ handbooks brought out by Ian Allan.

Something of this atmosphere persists in Philip Larkin’s poem ‘The Whitsun Weddings’ with its references to leaving with ‘all windows down, all cushions hot, all sense of being in a hurry gone,’ the ‘reek of buttoned carriage cloth,’ and the whole ongoing panorama of an untidy countryside. With the advent first of diesel locomotives then widespread electrification and finally high-tech really fast expresses like the Intercity 125s, plus of course the natural obsolescence of old stock that had been delayed by the war years, a standardization has come about that I am sure has paid off in terms of finances and efficiency but that leaves little of interest for the trainspotter.  Do such people even still exist? 

The same applies of course in the case of buses. The London Transport buses with curved outside staircases that still drove on Route 38 in the late ’40s and early ’50s are all gone, as are the few remaining double-decker trams, replaced by masses of sleek, standardized vehicles that carry many more passengers in much greater comfort but give far less purchase to the imagination. I cannot imagine my younger self nowadays travelling right across London, as I did then, to explore echoing, oily bus garages in, say, Sidcup or Chingford for the sake of a glimpse of an old bus that was soon to be declared obsolete.

I stayed at the Friends School, Lancaster for only two terms. As far as I can recall they were fairly happy times. In English at least I did well, my report states, and I made a number of friends among the day boys. Paddy Howarth and Billy Gorrell are two of the names that linger and that I can put vague childhood faces to. On the sports field, just the other side of the railway station, I was predictably less successful mainly because I was constantly distracted from soccer, in my rough uniform of red and black shirts and shorts, by the tantalizingly distant view of passing trains. I recall, too, my mother’s anger that the school apparently did so little to recover a towel lost or stolen from the changing rooms. My own dislike of male locker rooms probably also dates from this time.

I remember nothing of our actual journey back to London, in the autumn of 1943, only its aftermath.  Because the family to whom my parents had rented the house in Canons Park refused at first to move out but generously offered to take us in as paying guests in our own home, the four of us were for a while separated; my father in one house, my mother and Geoffrey in another and I at first in a house only one street away with Mr. and Mrs.  Sellin and then for three weeks in what I remember as a hot dry late summer in Leatherhead, in Surrey, the home of Dr. Topping, a colleague of my father’s.  I don’t know why I did not stay with the Sellins for the whole time but I could not blame them if they tired of me because of my constant habit of asking, when offered anything, “Oh, are you sure you can spare it?” Although the trait is, I suspect, common to many brought up in times of deprivation and rationing, such as the Depression and Second World War, in my case it was probably from this time that I acquired the concern I still have with saving, reusing, and recycling. Long before local governments started collecting recyclable materials with the garbage, I would religiously use the reverse side of leaflets, and other scraps of paper for notes and I would mould together scraps of soap, and still do so, to avoid having to throw them away. One of my mother’s favourite sayings was “I can’t abide waste.” No doubt I inherited it from her. Painful though it must be to my more insouciant colleagues and partners, this derives from a genuine need: I am intensely uncomfortable seeing things wasted, especially food, even when I know very well that the food I cannot finish at this meal will not in fact go to help starving peasants half a world away and that it is not charity organizations but governmental action that is needed to redistribute food and other necessities to the world’s poor. The only benefit I ever got from this kind of activity was when I participated in a school-run drive to collect magazines and books to send to our troops abroad. If you collected twenty-five magazines you became a lieutenant, fifty made you a major, a hundred a general, and two hundred or more, which is what I collected, made you a field marshall, a somewhat embarrassing success for a ‘birthright’ Friend and future Conchie.

My host, Mr. Sellin, was a robust thickset man with short silver hair, a round face and a hearing aid. He worked in a customs shed in the South West India Docks and on at least one occasion he took me around with him as he inspected sacks of what looked like anthracite but was in fact shiny solid brown sugar. A marvellous aromatic scent pervaded the sheds that more than made up for the sense of war-time neglect and dereliction in the surrounding dockland.

Moving to Leatherhead changed the whole atmosphere. Now I had countryside near at hand and children to play with. The house I was staying in, far larger than our own semi-detached, was on a quiet street two or three miles out of town and the Toppings had a boy of my own age, Geoffrey. Moreover, there was almost next door a girl also of about eight or nine, Judith Browning, descended from the poet Robert Browning, with whom I quickly formed a rather earthy companionship that entailed amongst other things mutual exploration in the haystacks. I remember trying to get her to pronounce “bum” the Lancashire way—the “u” like the double-o of book—as I must have done myself at that time. But biology aside, Geoffrey, Judith, and I all cooperated on what was probably my first literary venture, a four page, hand-written “magazine” that no doubt contained our own poems and stories and local news items.

My other main memory of those weeks was of the Canadian troops stationed nearby. They were tall and friendly and gave us gum to chew, though what lingers most is the smell of hot oil and hot metal from the jeeps that once or twice I was allowed to steer for a few yards down one of the quiet side roads. I also picked up new words like ‘cookie,’ though I might have encountered this already from having lived with the Brands for two years.

When exactly we all returned to our own home I no longer know but presumably near the beginning of the new school term for I was soon back at Stanburn School. Not that Britain was out of the woods yet. On the roundabouts in our trim suburb, there were still ARP (Air Raid Precautions) huts, where my father who was a volunteer air raid warden, would sit with his fellow wardens drinking tea. Every so often a street would be disfigured by a huge EWS (Emergency Water Supply) tank full of stagnant water for use in the event of a nearby fire. But it was not like 1940 when I could see the silver spitfires and hurricanes battling the black Heinkel and Messerschmitt fighters a few thousand feet above us.  London and the South East were no longer subject to regular bombing raids — indeed at night we became familiar with the sound of huge fleets of allied bombers as they set out to wreak even greater havoc on German cities — but the Luftwaffe still had a powerful psychological weapon in the doodlebugs, which I sometimes saw and heard flying low over the rooftops, flames flaring from the tail. The greatest fear came when the engine cut out, just prior to its crashing to earth and exploding. On our way home from school or at the cost of a slight detour, we could see houses totally wrecked by V-1s, the doodlebugs, or by the deadlier but less terrifying V-2s, the rockets, and we scrambled among the rubble, looking for bits of shrapnel. The appearance of such bomb sites grew familiar to us as children whenever we travelled into the centre of London by Underground.

PRIMARY

In the corridors tiny red raincoats hang and drip

from their hooks beside stacked crates of empty milk

that wait to be carted off.   At Assembly we sing

“All things bright and beautiful, All creatures great and small”

Inside the nest of the classroom, late ’44,

our play goes on.  V1s, V2s – we know

they exist, on the way home

we pick through bomb sites for shrapnel, but for now

it is All Clear. From our carefully hoarded food

Miss Vaudrey and Miss Weedon teach us to make

marzipan animals or fashion Alabastine

relief maps of the British Isles, Australia.

The rest of the world can wait.

With coloured chalks, red, yellow, blue

and poster paints we soon mix purple, green,

a whole rainbow of brightness.  Only at home

can I find names in the paper for my bad dreams — 

Auschwitz, Treblinka, Belsen, matchstick men. Rag dolls

bulldozed into the mind’s mass grave and covered up.

They stay behind after school these images,

wait by the gate like bullies.  Though now I deal 

in nuances, I know the world is not pastel or powder blue.

The rage of the thwarted child overturns like an inkwell,

spills onto red stars, yellow stars, blackness is running down

between the desks in Stockton and Montreal.

At school, however, we were literally worlds away as we concentrated on such tasks as making relief maps of Australia or the United kingdom out of Alabastine, and then, as they dried, colouring them various  shades of  green, yellow, or brown according to altitude. The other event that stands out in my mind was the time we all brought in contributions from our ration cards for sugar, vanilla, etc. and were shown how to make animals out of marzipan. 

Academically I remember little of this school. What sticks in my mind are atmospheres, especially those triggered by smells: the damp smell of bright, mostly red, or yellow oilskin rain capes and mackintoshes hung up in the corridors combined with the crates of empty third-of-a-pint milk bottles that at that time were distributed free to all schoolchildren. The sounds that stay with me were the school assemblies where we sang “All things bright and beautiful, all creatures great and small” or the hymn that ended “ you in your small corner and I in mine.” It was a friendly enough place, presided over by Miss Weedon, its small plump headmistress with her dark hair done up in a bun. As for my friends, these included Martin Smith, who was to accompany me to Harrow County—literally, very often, for we frequently rode our bikes there together and John Mills and tall, pig-tailed Audrey, with whom at the age of ten, I fancied myself in love, and Johnnie Parker, who used to bully me until the day when, in spite of my  pacifist Quaker upbringing  I turned round, hit him in the face, and broke his glasses.                                                            

As my eleventh birthday approached, my attention and that of my parents focused increasingly on the Eleven-plus exam that had been introduced in the 1944 Education Act to separate the academic sheep from the more trade-and-crafts-oriented goats, with very little provision made for those who did not learn at the same pace. Those whose purely academic abilities had not emerged by the age of eleven risked being shunted permanently into a Secondary Modern school which, like South Africa’s black schools, may in theory have been ‘separate but equal,’ but in practice served as little more than holding pens until the statutory school leaving age of sixteen except for those few able at the age of 13 or 14 to move up to a technical school.

Had I failed the Eleven-Plus, my parents would not have contemplated sending me to a private school, even if they had the means, which they didn’t, and anyway I would not have wanted that. The only kind of private school that I would have liked to have attended would have been a co-ed Friends boarding school, such as Sidcot or Saffron Walden, since I had got a probably idealized impression of these from my contemporaries at Friends Meeting such as Janet Croker or Richard Errington. In practice, I had the choice of four local grammar schools. Because it was co-educational, I would have chosen Harrow Weald County but unfortunately, I did sufficiently well on the exam to get ‘my’ first choice, Harrow County Grammar School for Boys. This was located near the centre of Harrow, nowadays very much a dormitory suburb and about twenty-five minutes by bike from my house or ten to fifteen minutes longer by the more devious bus. The next seven years that I was to spend there were both very important and for the most part depressing, certainly not the happiest years of my life.

Not only had I got into Harrow County, I had even been accepted into the A class, which took Latin (The B classes took German instead, while the C and D classes took extra science subjects). Maybe if the headmaster that presided over my first year, D. Crowle Ellis, had stayed on, my school days would have been happier. He was at once stylish, even aristocratic, in manner yet informal and seemed to generate a sense of optimism. Unfortunately, he left after my first year while his successor, Dr. A.R. Simpson (he loved being referred to as Dr. Simpson) remained for all my time and longer and re-made the school in his own harsh image.  He was a nationalist, a bully, a hypocrite, and a snob.  As Harrow County was almost literally in the shadow of the Harrow School, sometimes during lunch break my friends and I would go up to the village of Harrow on the Hill to watch the young Harrovians walking around in their uniform of straw boaters and short dark jackets or ‘bum freezers.’ The new Head lost no time in exhorting us to “look up to the boys on the Hill.” He was very concerned with the ‘tone’ of our school and had it been possible he would have liked Harrow County to have become part of the Headmasters Conference, the sign that an educational establishment in the U.K. is in that paradoxical English sense of the word, a ‘public’ school.

In some respects, the school already had a number of carefully nurtured traditions tending in that direction. We played rugger rather than the more plebeian soccer. We competed with several minor public schools at cricket and rugger and, although twelve miles from the River Thames, entered one or two rowing eights in the Head of the River races. 

In addition to this Dr. Simpson lost no time in making the Corps, the Combined Cadet Force, all but compulsory for those not already enrolled in the only permitted alternative, the Boy Scouts. In keeping with his militarism, he also laid great emphasis on the wearing of school uniforms, even getting prefects to report and punish those pupils who did not, as he enjoined us to do, wear their caps “proudly from door to door” by which he meant every minute of the time between leaving home and arriving at school. (One of only two occasions when I was caned by him was for failing to observe this rule) Given this militaristic emphasis it was not surprising that several of his new appointments, such as ‘Major’ Bigham, seemed to owe their jobs more to their fondness for organizing field days and war games than to their teaching skills. 

In addition to this Dr. Simpson lost no time in making the Corps, the Combined Cadet Force, all but compulsory for those not already enrolled in the only permitted alternative, the Boy Scouts. In keeping with his militarism, he also laid great emphasis on the wearing of school uniforms, even getting prefects to report and punish those pupils who did not, as he enjoined us to do, wear their caps “proudly from door to door” by which he meant every minute of the time between leaving home and arriving at school. (One of only two occasions when I was caned by him was for failing to observe this rule) Given this militaristic emphasis it was not surprising that several of his new appointments, such as ‘Major’ Bigham, seemed to owe their jobs more to their fondness for organizing field days and war games than to their teaching skills. 

But it was his militarism that was the most intrusive. At times he would even interrupt teachers in their classes to harangue those of us not yet entrapped into the CCF and to extol the virtues of being ‘an all-round person’ (the cadet corps being an essential part of such rotundity) rather than hiding away in what this Doctor of Classics termed ‘the respectable hole and corner of high scholarship.’

I was lucky in that for my first three years at the school I was a member, albeit an unenthusiastic one, of one of the school’s three scout troops (the only badge I ever earned was for map-reading). After that, when I wanted to concentrate on my ‘O’ levels and later my ‘A’ level exams, I had the full support of my parents and, when necessary, the Quaker Peace Testimony to fall back on. My friend Martin Smith, brought up in the Church of England, was less fortunate and was frequently verbally and sometimes physically abused by the Head or, especially, Major Bigham. True, there were times when we regretted not being able to go on ‘field days’ with the Cadets, but the atmosphere of conformity that came with the uniform was depressing (I still find it hard to imagine anyone with  any independence of mind and  spirit  making a career of the army, the police or the correctional services), and I like to think that these pressures brought out whatever individuality and backbone we possessed sooner and perhaps more firmly than might otherwise have been the case in a more tolerant and less militaristic  environment.  Certainly, at school, I never felt that I was ‘one of the boys.’

The school ought in fact to have been pleased that we reacted as we did for to do so accorded well with its peculiar brand of middle class vitalism that found its most blatant expression in the school song. The words were by the first Headmaster, Randall Williams, and the melody by George Thorne, the man who was still music master and choir master during my time. The school’s motto was Virtus non stemma which was rendered ‘Worth not birth.’ This was a rallying cry for the upwardly mobile middle classes, who had been educationally enfranchised by the 1902 Education Act, that created the public grammar schools, although it was not until 1944 that they became free to all. The school song’s first verse and chorus went as follows:

   Our pride is not in far flung ancestry,

            Emblazoned scroll or pomp of heraldry.

            No carvéd portals breathing time’s appeal

            Great deeds of storied past to us reveal.

            But though our walls in modern mold are cast

            Our flag flies free atop Ambition’s mast.

            None but the brave will stand the test of time:

            The ladder’s here. Let him who can now climb

Chorus:

           ‘Tis worth, not birth, be this our battle cry.

            Stand up for the truth, be honest, spurn a lie.

            The strife is hard and needs the strength of men

            Hold fast, fight on; if beaten, try again.

George Thorne, always a melodramatic pianist, wrung every ounce of drama and pathos out of the three pauses in that final line. 

Leaving aside all the clichés and echoes of dreary old jingoistic poets such as Sir Henry Newbolt, the statements of the first stanza were not even literally true. The original school building, dating from 1911, was in an eclectic style I would call ‘Edwardian Imperial Baroque,’ and the front facade did in fact boast ‘carved portals,’ while the War Memorial incorporated both emblazoned scrolls and pomp of heraldry.  A later stanza speaks of ‘A land that few can e’er explore/ Where there are found those tests of will and wit/ Which baffle boys unless they use their grit,’ and the whole song, in fact, was redolent of John Buchan and The Boys Own Paper and blatantly at odds with attempts at equal opportunities espoused by the Labour government under Clement Attlee. Such ideals were ignored in the school I underwent for seven years.

Take sports, for example. In the first year — the Second Form since Harrow County had an ‘accelerated’ curriculum that aimed to get boys through the GCE ‘O’ levels in four years rather than five — everyone had to play rugger. Although as an adult I can at least appreciate the speed, skill, and even at times, elegance of rugger, as an eleven or twelve year old, I hated the cold, the mud and what seemed to me the mindless brutality of the game. Above all I hated the communal hot showers afterwards, the whole hearty sweaty camaraderie of the locker rooms, the grungy wooden slats on the floor, the concrete walls, and the inadequate time allowed to get dry. So, I was delighted when in my second year I had the option of doing cross-country running instead. Probably I could have done quite well at this if I had wanted to. In fact, once, in three successive weeks from a field of over 200 boys, I came in around fortieth, then thirteenth, and finally, third. This caught the attention of the school’s Cross Country Running Captain, and there was talk of putting me on the school team if my form continued. Next week I took care to see that my form did not continue, as otherwise I would have had to sacrifice my Saturday mornings for inter-school meets. After that I regularly placed around fiftieth. I did run the mile and the half mile for my House once or twice on school Sports Days but without conspicuous success, partly because I could never summon up in myself the necessary single-mindedness, let alone the ‘House Spirit.’ Obviously I was not ‘a team player.’ 

The only game that I would have enjoyed playing at least at a House level was cricket and for this I have retained an abiding interest and affection, but I was never good enough to make the House team and had to be content with scratch games with a few friends in our local park.  I still remember watching two of my heroes, W.J. (Bill) Edrich and Dennis Compton, playing for Middlesex in a friendly match against Stanmore, our nearest (albeit suburban) village. This, one of my most English traits, is much mocked by my wife Oonagh, who likes to think of all cricketers as chinless wonders, aristocratic twits. In fact, some of the most enjoyable games to watch are precisely those played by village teams where nothing except local pride is riding upon the result and where batsmen and bowler double during the week as greengrocer or stationmaster. One of the things that struck me on my first visit to India in 1986 was the way the Maidans, like an English Common, in Jaipur or Bombay would be packed not only with the official teams in whites but also with masses of urchins of all ages playing games with from three or four kids per side on every available parched patch of grass. Cricket in India, Australia, New Zealand,  and the West Indies is every bit as democratic a game as baseball in the United States and, since it is a game that I enjoyed playing, however badly, rather than simply watching, it is one of my minor regrets that in Canada the game has virtually no following except in those few English-style private schools whose characteristic products would fit Oonagh’s stereotypes, and in areas with large South Asian or West Indian populations.

As for swimming, my performance was abysmal, though I can’t help thinking that some of this was the doing of our P.T. instructor, Mr. Amos, nicknamed Swanny because of his long neck. As the less aquatic of us hesitated at the brink of the school’s swimming pool, he would come behind us and flick at our bare legs with a switch until we jumped in. I was quite afraid of being out of my depth and of having my ears and nose full of water, so that although I did manage to swim a width and can do a passable crawl or breast stroke, for a few yards, the only part of swimming lessons that I enjoyed was the mug of steaming Bovril we could buy afterwards at the Tuck Shop as we stood with damp clothes clinging to only half-dried limbs before returning to regular lessons.

Swanny Amos used the same barbaric and, in my case at least, counter-productive methods in the gym, where he could flick at our legs as we hung like apprentice Christs on the parallel bars, with the result that whatever I achieved came from fear rather than enjoyment and it was many years before I could contemplate even jogging, let alone tennis. So, while I am not against team sports, I do seem to have acquired from my school experiences a total scepticism about such shibboleths as ‘team spirit,’ to which the school paid so much attention. I have carried over the same attitude where concepts such as ‘the gentleman’ and ‘honour’ are concerned and I am glad that I never came nearer than this to the ‘public’ school system in all its revolting old boyishness.

As for the more strictly academic aspects of the school, subsequent experience in high school teaching made me suspect that many of the teachers who left, and doubtless some who did not, felt ill at ease under Dr. Simpson’s new dispensation and let us glimpse something of their discomfort. While people like the Music Master George Thorne, who was certainly a hypocrite and possibly a pedophile, much given to cuddling his favourites in class, seemed to go along with everything that Dr. Simpson ordained, other masters dropped in passing the occasional remark or raised a sceptical eyebrow. My first English teacher, Dr. Bradley, an Irishman with a passion for rowing and an irreverent shock of greying hair, was among these, as was ‘Eggy’ Webb, the bearded Biology master, whose methods were obviously too progressive. One day the Head came into our classroom with some announcement to find Mr. Webb standing on his hands on the desk at the front of the classroom. He had been demonstrating to us pressure points on the body.  Mr. Dyer, who taught Religious Knowledge, would invite favoured boys out with him for Sunday afternoon spins on his tandem; ‘Jumbo’ Jones, later replaced by another, younger Welshman, also a rugby player, taught us Latin but those fortunate enough to come first or second in the class at Latin had the dubious pleasure of the Head’s special tutorials in Greek. I took good care never to excel in Latin, so much so in fact that I had to retake my Latin at ‘O’ Level and even the second time got only 40%, the absolute minimum required then for entrance in arts subjects to the ancient universities. However, I do still enjoy being able to work out the etymological meanings of many Latinate English words and phrases, and have subsequently wished that we had been asked to translate Ovid or Catullus rather than Livy and Caesar.

Most of the other teachers I had in the lower forms were unmemorable except for ‘Spadger’ Hayes, who taught Physics and walked with a stick, and Mr. Bristow, who taught Math, always one of my weakest subjects, and who was a genius in making bad puns on pupils’ names. In my own case he once said, “Come along now, Levenson, you’ll have to do better than that or you’ll be leavin’ soon.”

As for French teaching, I suppose in one sense I got a good grounding, first of all with ‘Sorbo’ Hartland, then W.H. (Whiffy) King and finally with S.R. (Sammy) Watson, but by now most of it is a blur. As with English literature, the emphasis, still perhaps inevitable at that time, was upon the nineteenth century – the Romantic Movement and after – and I found the lachrymose raptures of De Musset, for instance, considerably less congenial even than the early Tennyson, though there was little to choose between them and the ‘slippery blisses’ of Keats’ Endymion or the more voluptuous passages of The Eve of St. Agnes. But I did admire some of De Vigny and Victor Hugo, especially the drama and rhetoric of ‘Le Chasseur Noir’ or lines like “Waterloo, Waterloo, Waterloo, morne plaine!” On the other hand, I was bored to tears by Anatole France’s Le crime du Sylvestre Bonnard and De Vigny’s Servitudes et grandeurs militaires and in general was turned off by the amount of rhetoric in nineteenth century French literature.

Even so, I obviously went too far when, in discussing Lamartine’s poetry, I described its verse movement as ‘competent.’ I had said this simply because I wanted to move on to discuss other aspects of his work but I still remember ‘Sammy’ Watson’s sarcastic demolition of 

what he considered my impertinent condescension. It’s the kind of error I have found myself making on many subsequent occasions, appearing at least to be arrogantly offhand. As was the case with Latin, I took away from school very little curiosity about the subject even though my father taught French for thirty-three years at Regent Street Polytechnic and was ready and willing to help me at any time. When I did return to French literature it was more through the influence of Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Mallarme on T.S. Eliot and other anglophone modernists than for its own sake.

This is a pity since, despite a good accent, and the chance, had both my parents wanted it for me to have become fluently bilingual, French has remained a poor third among my foreign languages, after German and Dutch. Unfortunately, in Ottawa, where 30% of the population is francophone, I might have been able to develop a certain fluency, but I frequently found that although the stall holders in the ByWard Market could understand my correct ‘metropolitan’ French, I could not understand the ’joual’ dialect of their replies. 

My second and third form history master, Johnny Armstrong, was also memorable but in a way that is shaming for me to recall. Handicapped from the start by having black hair and a ginger moustache, he was in any case a terrible teacher. Strictly, he was hardly a teacher at all since his classes consisted entirely of filling the blackboard with notes which we then had to copy down. While his back was turned, which it mostly was in order to write on the board, we flicked pellets at each other, passed notes, pulled faces and generally misbehaved. However, when he turned round quickly enough to catch someone red-handed, he only stood glowering at the front of the class, mumbling curses into his moustache. Sometimes he would start down the classroom, pulling apart the desks that, in self-protection we had shoved together but it was rare indeed that he would actually hit the culprit. More often he stood above the boy for a few seconds, red-faced and quivering, then stalk back to his desk to resume the dreary writing of notes on the board. Eventually he was forced to resign because of ill-health — TB we were told — but we all assumed that we were responsible for a nervous breakdown.

Not surprisingly, I can remember nothing of what Johnny Armstrong tried to teach us. At that time, I was not much interested in history anyway. Apart from English, Geography was my best subject though that soon changed once we reached topics such as isobars and isotherms, anything that required even a rudimentary knowledge of physics, so that I switched to history before my ‘O’ Levels. The history master was a tall, stooped older man, Henry S. Parkinson. With the callousness of children, we assumed that the S stood for ‘Shellshock.’ Certainly, it was easy enough for us to distract him from topics like the Grab for Africa or the Unification of Germany under Bismarck into talking about his own experiences during the First World War. What with these reminiscences and his personal assortment of historical clichés (the Balkans were always ‘the powder magazine of Europe,’ Balfour was always ‘a dark horse,’ Japan always ‘arising from its medieval sleep’) and the way he would string together all the fill-in phrases ‘a kind of a sort of a … as it were,’ it’s a wonder we learnt anything at all from him either, but somehow we did, enough at least in my own case to get my ‘A’ levels in the subject comfortably two years later, and to enrich my first experience of travelling in the Balkans, when I came upon Novi Pazar, even though I still don’t recall what a “sanjak’ was or maybe still is.

History Lesson

Remembrance Day: those of us not in the Corps

file past the War Memorial, stand in Assembly

singing “For all the saints’ (I feel guilty still to be moved),

hear the Roll of Honour read and suffer through

the Head’s eternal pieties, idolized stained glass names 

of ex-School Captains, Prefects, Rugger blues,

yearly immortalized. Brought up a Quaker, excused,

I did not join the Old Boys Club,

have neither regimental memories nor ties.

But my Sixth Form History master,

Henry S. Parkinson (the S we assumed

was for ‘Shellshock’) as he stood before us,

hand and voice quivering, could be lured to digress 

about the Great War, Ypres and the Somme, the human angle.

His clichés churned through our muddy minds like tanks:

the Balkans always ‘the powder magazine of Europe,

Turkey the ‘sick man,’ Japan interminably 

‘awakening from its Medieval  sleep.’ We jotted down dates, 

of the Treaty of Brest-Litoivsk, the Sanjak of Novi Pazar 

and added them to our childish memories – Stalingrad, 

Coventry, Dresden, Dunkirk, El Alamein –

to form the roll call of history. (Ten years later by chance

I passed through Novi Pazar, a dusty nothingness

in Bosnia, lost between mountains, a footnote.)

Some things we were not taught:

how empires do not simply disintegrate  

but like human bodies die with a sickening stench,

collapse to a seething mass of tubes and veins

fought over by dogs, how the statesman’s noble phrase

has to be tested, as the Germans say, ‘am eignen Leib’,

on our own bodies, words made flesh

in the face of a small boy in a Warsaw ghetto,

a Vietnamese girl running naked from the napalm.

Mr. Parkinson’s experiences in the First World War were something he shared with Sidney Fooks, ‘Beaky’ to his pupils, who taught me English for my last three years at Harrow County. Beaky, however, never spoke to us about this and it was not until years later, when the master-pupil relationship had been replaced by an abiding friendship, that I discovered how deeply he felt he had been scarred inwardly by these experiences of seeing so many young men killed. His manner was as gruff and bristly as his moustache.  He loved prodding us to reactions by exclaiming for instance “Pure punk!” I discovered later, especially when he showed me his own books of poems which he wrote in his retirement and sold in great numbers to aid local charities, his taste was solidly romantic. But without I think his ever having read Denys Thompson’s Reading and Discrimination or Q.D. Leavis’ Fiction and the Reading Public, he had a good sense of where English Studies at that time fitted into a modern education and in modern society as a whole. Above all he conveyed enthusiasm and could encourage us to share that enthusiasm and that, I still believe, is a major virtue in any teacher.

Our syllabus covered selectively the whole range of English literature from Chaucer to the twentieth century, but at least in my own case I never felt that I was being asked to subscribe to a canon, even though in fact it was. Inevitably, one’s response to particular works of literature depends on one’s own maturity and life experience. It is surely far better to come to Shakespeare or Wordsworth for the first time at thirty or forty than to have been put off at the age of fifteen by a merely superficial acquaintance. Even in my twenties my first two attempts to read Vanity Fair ended in frustration and failure after a couple of chapters, yet in the 1970s, for my own curiosity and satisfaction, I decided to read one later Dickens novel every summer. However, it was not until I wanted to communicate my newly won pleasure in Dickens and my remembered pleasure in George Eliot that I agreed to teach a Victorian fiction course at Carleton University. This obliged me to read Vanity Fair in its entirety. While in school, we had to read such suitable boys adventure novels as Quentin Durward and Kidnapped, but in my own time with the help of local libraries I started on a diet of Arthur Ransome, progressed via Hugh Walpole, where I could sympathise first hand with his admittedly romanticized  historical novels set in the Lake District, and from there proceeded through H.G. Wells, Charles Morgan, John Galsworthy and Arnold Bennett until I felt able to tackle Joseph Conrad or D.H. Lawrence.

But Beaky had a light touch. It is important, I feel, not to force-feed good literature. Even though in retrospect I was glad to have had to learn by heart such speeches from Shakespeare as MacBeth’s “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” or Brutus’ “There is a tide in the affairs of men…’  along with the inevitable ‘modern’ poems such as Masefield’s ‘Cargoes’ or Rupert Brooke’s The Soldier’ and even though I still feel that  genuine memorability is one valid criterion for good poetry, I am nevertheless glad that no one forced me to read Dickens or Conrad, Jane Austen or George Eliot before I was ready for them.  

Moreover, he was wise enough to know what he did not know or had too little sympathy for to teach. Thus, when I had taken my ‘A’ Levels and was preparing for university entrance exams in the so-called ‘Scholarship Sixth,’ he handed me over to a Mr. Connolly who had recently gone down from Cambridge, so that the younger man could prepare me for the critical party line that I would need to get into my first choice, Downing College. In fact, my last three months of school, I occupied a tiny room in one of the twin turrets at the front of the school — thus literally the ‘respectable hole and corner of high scholarship’ that the Head had referred to. It had previously been used for the storage of textbooks but was cleared specially for me to use as a study. These last few months when I had no further scheduled classes, just occasional consultations with ‘Beaky’ or with Mr. Connolly, were the happiest of my whole school life.

At this time, I did not know what I wanted to do with my life after university, if indeed I managed to be accepted. I have always been fascinated by maps and as a child often invented my own maps of countries that existed only in my mind or town plans of imagined cities but I had long since given up the idea of becoming an architect or an urban planner as it would clearly require greater skill than I possessed in maths and physics and I was drawn to the idea of becoming a journalist if I failed the A levels. What I was sure I did not want to be was a secondary school teacher. I had seen enough of the way its grinding routines had worn down my father.

In any case, as often happens with educational institutions, much of the real learning comes about informally through new friends. This was certainly the case with the people I met through the Harrow Young Poets Group that I founded, but it was also true in the case of Michael Patrick Butler, a boy one year my senior, who introduced me to T.S. Eliot, Yeats and the Metaphysical poets when I was about fourteen, and argued passionately with me about poetry. He had wavy, dark hair, intense, coal-black eyes, and wore black leather. Many years later, I was saddened to hear that he had been killed in a motorbike accident. My second, but alas purely Platonic, girlfriend, Moira Shannon – later the feminist teacher and scholar Moira Roth – was also a potent educational force for me a year or so later, lending or giving me books, some of them Irish, such as James Stephens’ The Crock of Gold. I was very much under the influence of her Irishness, far more I suspect than she was herself at that time. Indeed, in some of the ultra-romantic short stories and plays I wrote at that time I gave myself the pseudonym Michael Douglas to suggest what I would have liked a mixed Scottish and Irish parentage.

In a different area, another schoolmate, Tony Hodge, contributed unwittingly perhaps to my education. He was a convinced Tory — an appalling condition for anyone so young — and knew the local Conservative electoral agent. Sometimes during lunch hours, I would accompany him to the Conservative Constituency Office near Harrow on the Hill Underground station, where we would argue about the Labour government’s policies and the proposed Tory alternatives. I found Tony’s attitudes rather pompous while my own views were based doubtless on massive ignorance. Neither of us budged from our prepared positions, but it was good practice and may have contributed to whatever minor talent I later displayed for debating.

In any case, my political views were almost as well taken care of by my family background as were my religious views. My parents were both Labour supporters and at times during municipal elections our living room would be used as Labour’s committee room for that polling district so that I was used to the ritual of canvassers coming in with electoral lists, rushing off to ‘pull out the vote’ (a phrase that always had unpleasantly dental overtones for me) and crossing off those who had ‘done their duty.’ Whether the election was for parliament or the local council, I enjoyed the excitement of campaigns — the rosettes, the cars slowly manoeuvring along our shrub-lined suburban streets blaring out candidates’ names or picking up the old and frail to whisk them to the local church basement or community hall that was doubling that day as the polling station. It did not take much to give me personal as well as theoretical and ideological reasons for disliking some of the well-dressed smoothies who worked for the Tories who, at the local council level, disguised themselves as the Ratepayers Association. My fervour only increased when I piped up at a Tory candidate’s electoral meeting in Watford once to ask a question of a fur-swaddled middle-aged lady speaker. Her response concluded: “And that’s the answer to your very ignorant and stupid question.”

In fact, though, I tried my best to be informed: my father had two shelves or more of the lurid orange Left Book Club volumes by people such as Stephen Spender (Forward from Liberalism) or Arthur Koestler published in soft cloth by Gollancz. It was my mother, however, who was the more passionate politically and it was from her, I think, rather than from my father that I acquired, for a time at least, an interest in Herbert Morrison, Ellen Wilkinson, and Aneurin (Nye) Bevan, whom I had heard speak once in person in a crowded Co-Op Hall in the neighbouring suburb of Burnt Oak. I am sure that my mother, earnest Quaker as she was, would have repudiated all ideas of class warfare or class hatred, but strong feelings based on her childhood experiences in the solidly working class district of Kings Cross were clearly there and I came  to respond, as she did, to the personal justifications behind Bevan’s notorious speech in which he termed some Tories ‘lower than vermin’ just as I took over from her an almost automatic support and sympathy for the coal miners whenever they went out on strike.

My father’s political allegiances, though doubtless as firm, were more intellectual in origin and, in some respects even, sentimental. He would love to sing or whistle ‘The Red Flag’ or ‘l’Internationale’ and he had several anthologies with titles like Poems of Protest filled with, for example Thomas Hood’s ‘Song of the Shirt’ or the three obtrusive pearl-diving stanzas from Keats’ ‘Isabella,’ and we would sometimes go to the Unity Theatre, near Camden Town, to see socialist plays. On the other hand, I have to admit that my mother’s political sympathies were narrower. Despite her strong sense of injustice and unfairness as it affected the poor, women, and children, repugnance overwhelmed her where for instance gay rights were involved  Even where foreigners were concerned, she could be quite ‘British’ in her suspicions, extending her feelings about the culinary unreliability of Indian curries (“I like to know what I’m eating”) to other aspects of non-British behaviour.  While the Dutch, the Germans, and, doubtless, the Scandinavians were exempt from such disfavour, Americans enjoyed the full force of her traditional British prejudices as being noisy, pushy, vulgar, and materialist.

Nor was my father totally immune: maybe because even then, through my friendship with Moira, I felt particularly sensitive on that score, it rankled when in the middle of a political disagreement he spoke dismissively of the ‘feckless Irish.’ We rarely argued anything to a conclusion because at some stage he usually gave up with a shrug. I suppose we are all entitled to a few prejudices, simply as an emotional safety valve, though it’s surely healthier to choose from the powerful groups such as Scots or Americans or the French rather than the traditionally powerless races and out-groups such as the Irish and the Roma. In my own case I will confess to having once had a prejudice against Belgians, who were also vicious imperialists but probably nowadays come somewhere about halfway down on the power list — but this was on almost purely aesthetic grounds, because of the way late nineteenth and early twentieth century Belgium has desecrated the newer parts of its medieval cities such as Bruges and Ghent with some of the most hideous and vulgar domestic architecture I know, while I felt that too many of the inhabitants, seeming to pick up the worst aspects of the Dutch in the North and the French to the south, were overweight and garishly overdressed. (It has to be admitted, of course, that stereotypes do not materialize out of thin air; obviously penny-pinching Scots and pushy, vulgar Jews do exist, and all one can do is to take a person on his or her individual merits before in a few cases replacing them in their prearranged pigeonholes.)

My infatuation with all things Irish has been one of my enduring traits. In my mid-teens, under the influence of Moira Shannon and of Michael Patrick Butler, I wrote off to some Irish nationalist organizations for more information on the political situation in Ulster on reading of the denial of basic civil rights, the gerrymandering of electoral districts and the like. I became an instant convert. This in turn was followed by a glut of reading — mostly the biographies of Red Hugh O’Neill at the end of the Elizabethan period, of Daniel O’Connell, ‘The Liberator,’ of Parnell and of many other Irish and Anglo-Irish patriots from Elizabethan times to our own, so that even before I became an enthusiast,  or had read Yeats’ heroic invocations of them, I knew something of the late eighteenth and nineteenth century background to the drive for Irish independence and revered such names as Emmet, Wolfe Tone, Grattan, Michael Davitt, Arthur Griffiths, Michael Collins, Connolly, and Pearse.

All such figures and their history were of course miles away from the school’s official syllabus. Outside English literature, there were few areas where my own interests and those of the school overlapped. Where they did was in the school’s ‘social studies,’ especially the last half hour on a Friday afternoon when those in the Cadets went about playing soldiers and the rest of us assembled in various groups for such activities as the Writers’ Club, the Music Club, or the Debating Society. Mostly these far exceeded their allotted half hour and were all in their different ways useful additions to the school’s normal fare. I shudder when I think of my own efforts at poems and stories that I read out to the Writers’ Club, especially the pompously long-winded would-be humorous stories, but I suppose even the benign, punch-pulling attention of my peers and of Beaky Fooks on these occasions had some remedial effect and one can never underestimate the value of a live audience. Of the music club and the jazz club and of some of the other friends I had at that time, I will say more later.

Having become since the age of eleven an only child and having been deprived of a chance of going to a co-ed school, I did not at this time know many girls. The few that I did, I knew mostly through the Friends Meeting. Although Harrow County School for Boys had a sister school, Harrow County School for Girls, about a half mile away, there was very little official contact between the two schools. One of the few permitted contacts was provided, at least for upper forms, by the joint dance classes, which for a while I attended. I never mastered the tango and am still nervous about the waltz, but did at least manage the Quickstep well enough that my partner and I were asked to demonstrate it on one occasion at the Thé Dansant that concluded the classes for that year. By the time I reached Cambridge, dance forms had disintegrated into cheerful anarchy but as Pope says “those move easiest that have learned to dance” and until quite recently I could still occasionally surprise myself and others by a bit of fast footwork in crowds. But even the dance classes did nothing for my general lack of social savoir faire.

That may have been better taken care of by one aspect of school life that I remember with real gratitude. My parents had for years been putting money aside for possible school trips abroad and this chance materialized during my last two years at Harrow County. I do not know who was responsible for the daunting task of co-ordinating such a trip that involved not just our own pupils but a dozen or so more from other local grammar schools, but we were in the very capable hands of ‘Cob’ Webb, the teacher I had for mechanical drawing and woodwork (in North American parlance ‘shop’), not one of my favourite or more successful courses. Mr. Webb, a bulky, slow-moving hippopotamus of a man, who owed his nickname to a large bump on one side of his forehead like a swan’s cob, must have seemed reassuringly normal and British to most parents. At the very least he provided a safe way for an adolescent to reach out into otherness, and the stupidities that my schoolmates and I managed while under his care were conventional enough and easy to remedy. Thus, it was that at sixteen in 1950, I took part in a school trip to Switzerland, and the next year, to Austria.

I tried to evoke something of that first trip in the opening section of my poem “French Leave’ –the gusty Channel crossing, the crowded train to St Lazare and Paris itself. With several hours to go before the overnight train to Switzerland from the Gare du Lyon, we were all bundled into a hired bus and treated to a rushed guided tour of the sites. Our guide’s English was only marginally better than our school French and I was amused to hear him intoning “à la gauche vous voyez…” and then, of the same building, “on the right ‘and side, you will see…”. What we saw I no longer remember… l’Arche de triomphe, the Pantheon, Notre Dame, all became a blur.  Soon enough, though, we were deposited at a restaurant near the Gare du Lyon to test our palate and our French. As the time to board the overnight train approached I remember our frantic efforts to get the attention of our ‘garçon’ for ‘l’addition,’ the bill, which he kept rebuffing with “un moment, monsieur,” as he understandably neglected us in favour of wealthier and more sophisticated diners. For the mostly sleepless overnight journey to Geneva I had equipped myself from a local café with a bottle of ‘vin rouge ordinaire.’ Très ordinaire in fact, which I swigged periodically throughout the mountainous night when I was not busy cuddling up to Olive, a girl I had just met who attended the co-educational Harrow Weald County School, the school that I had wanted to attend but that was only my parents’ second choice. I felt very much the man of the world.  

Around noon next day we finally reached our destination, a Lycée in Clarens, near the resort town of Montreux on Lake Geneva, and not far from the Château du Chillon, an almost Disney-perfect castle on the shores of the lake. I have twice since been back to Switzerland but my memories of the fountains in village squares draped with baskets of flowers, of elaborately shuttered chalets crowded with the most colourful window boxes, and of the gentle, coffee-coloured cattle with necks behung with sonorous cowbells as they grazed alpine pastures, reinforce all the clichés of The Sound of Music.Of this whole trip, my first foray abroad and probably my first holiday away from my parents, only a few isolated places and incidents stand out: an evening, maybe our first, in Montreux, when two or three of us returned late and if not totally blotto certainly tipsy, having drunk most of a bottle of Fendant, a local white wine; a boat trip across the lake to the Rochers du Naye; a funicular ride up the Dents du Midi, our nearest peaks, and, either there or at the summit of some other mountain, lunch at a restaurant where I embarrassed a young waitress by asking for sherry: “Un sherry, s’il vous plait.”  On seeing that she mistakenly thought I was addressing her as Chérie, to forestall an international incident, Mr. Webb, intervened and persuaded me to settle instead for a beer, my first ever, which did not go down well with me. Indeed, most of my early contretemps involved drinking. Since my parents never consumed more than the occasional half pint of cider in summer and the odd glass of Stone’s Ginger Wine at Christmas, I was both woefully inexperienced and determined to make up for lost time now that I was beyond the reach of British licensing laws and parental disapproval. Thus, on an outing to Lausanne, I remember ordering, and knocking back far too quickly, a Green Chartreuse (or was it Crème de Menthe? Some green liqueur anyway) at a station restaurant with only five minutes to spare before our train was due to arrive. The same thing happened the following year on the school trip to Schruns-Tschagguns in Vorarlberg, Austria, where with a friend or two I explored the local Gaststätten, sampling one or two different liqueurs each evening. These were drinks that I have never since encountered with names such as Gluhwurmchen (little glow worm) or the yellowish Kaiserbirn, made from bananas.

But Lausanne is etched on my mind for a different reason. Olive and I and another couple were lying down on the grass in a public park and in our incompetent adolescent way had begun kissing and fondling each other when we were approached by a policeman who obviously disapproved and asked us something along the lines of : “Est çe que vous couchez ensemble en Angleterre?”  Thinking that he meant, did we lie down in parks together in England, we answered “Mais oui.”  Although he did not fine us or give us an official warning, he was obviously shocked by our depravity and feared for its effect on Swiss morality. Mr. Webb would have approved of his stance. So too when we went as a school group to the picturesque and romantic Château du Chillon, Olive and I took the opportunity offered by one of the darker and more remote turrets to kiss and embrace ardently, only to be discovered by our tour leader. Obviously unaware of Byron’s lines invoking Clarens as “cradle of all truly passionate love,” Mr. Webb reminded me that when abroad I had to think of myself as an ambassador for my country and conduct myself like an English gentleman, which indeed was exactly what I thought I had been doing. Fortunately, no abiding harm came of these early experiments either in drinking or in the would-be sins of the flesh, and after the holiday Olive and I never met again. 

The trip to Austria the following year was less eventful, unless you count the only excursion that sticks in my mind, to Bregenz on Lake Constance, to see a night-time open-air performance of an operetta, again a first for me, Johann Strauss’ Der Zigeunerbaron (The gypsy Baron), which I did not care for. Although I have subsequently enjoyed some musicals, such as Mamma Mia, for their relentlessly optimistic energy, and loved almost anything by Stephen Sondheim, I have an almost pathological, and in many people’s eyes totally snobbish, dislike of operetta as a form, induced perhaps by my equally intense disdain for the whole Grand Hotel world of schmaltzy make-believe with its princes and princesses and fake aristocratic prettiness.

Neither of these school trips abroad was much help in preparing for the real world of borders and foreignness that I was to encounter a few years later in Holland and Germany, but at least it did familiarize me with customs procedures, passports and the like. For any but the most privileged and blinkered tourist, foreign travel, like learning a foreign language, will at least raise one’s awareness that there are different ways of being and of doing things. For that early lesson I am grateful.

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Born in London, England, in 1934, Christopher Levenson came to Canada in 1968 and taught at Carleton University till 1999. He has also lived and worked in the Netherlands, Germany, Russia, and India. The most recent of his many books of poetry is Moorings. He co-founded Arc magazine in 1978 and was its editor for a decade; he was Series Editor of the Harbinger imprint of Carleton University Press, which published exclusively first books of poetry. [Editor’s note: Christopher previously contributed the essay on evolution of language On Permanent Loan, and has reviewed books by Kelly Shepherd, Cynthia Woodman Kerkham, Catherine Owen, Jess Housty, Susan Musgrave, and Katherine Lawrence for The British Columbia Review.]

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

“Only connect.” – E.M. Forster