Cloud-capped towers

Orpheus, his heart beating a little faster, turns and looks back; Eve, her hand trembling ever so slightly, stretches out a hand, for a moment forgetting that she’d been warned, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die. We all know how these stories end, the loss, the exile, the nothingness. And, in the third decade of the 21st century, look too long at something on Facebook and the algorithm will ensnare you in its virtual tentacles, drawing you in helplessly to worlds of whose existence you had until then remained, like Eve, happily unaware. And so it was with me; one day I must have spent an idle few seconds gazing, possibly wistfully, at an old picture of the market hall in my childhood town, and before I knew it, I was scrolling miserably through screeds of lamenting jeremiads all roughly along the lines of how much better things were before the council/immigrants/wokeness screwed it all up.

And then, last week, on the same site, this picture appeared, apparently torn from a disembowelled architects’ magazine of 1899, and apparently for sale on eBay. And since it’s my old school, I thought I’d buy it. It wasn’t only my old school, but also my father’s- he was headmaster there from 1959 to 1979, and of course my name appearing in the FB chat inevitably provoked some comment. One guy muttered ominously that if I was related to his old head teacher, he’d refrain from commenting on his character, before proceeding to do just that, but most of the comments were rather joyous, commenting on how my father had fostered a love of music and drama. Some inspiring ladies, now I suppose in their seventies, reminisced movingly about the performances they’d been involved with, and their abiding memories of them.

The picture itself is simply wonderful. It’s dated December 1899, and the school’s brand new, its three red brick gables, tastefully adorned with neo-classical detailing, proudly embodying three decades of Gladstone and Disraeli’s growing conviction that educating the nation’s children at least up to the age of 11, is a Good Thing. It’s a new Board School, one of the so called Elementary Schools, the name suggesting its ambitions have been tailored to the limited requirement of the pupils for whom it is designed. In front of it, children play with hoops- don’t worry, they’ll soon be inside doing arithmetic- and elegant ladies promenade fetchingly with parasols.

As we stand before it, we’re on Saltergate, the ancient salt trail with its Old Norse etymology. To the East, it drops to the town, whose spread is limited by the Midland railway, the canal, and the confluence of the rivers Rother and Hipper. To the west, it winds away through fields, where our house will many years later be built, climbing up onto the moors before dropping down to the Cheshire salt mines. On the street corner opposite to our left, if it is a Saturday, men will be trudging to the brick stands of Chesterfield Football Club, who began playing there in 1871. Opposite the stadium, a small grocer's shop. Behind the school’s confident, new century façade, the plot slopes alarmingly and precipitately, plunging down giddily towards the Brampton Brickworks, and creating excitingly sloped playgrounds, separate of course for boys and girls. From the school’s high back windows, we can look out towards the moors. To the right are the Goldwell Rooms, a First World War drill hall, enthusiastically appropriated by my father for the school’s orchestral society, and for his school plays.

Ah yes, the school plays. My earliest memories are of a front row seat at these remarkable events; my father would write them, his wonderful Head of Drama would produce them, his equally wonderful Head of Music would provide incidental accompaniments, and the results were spectacular, earning national schools’ drama awards and rave reviews in the press.  I remember now mainly the highly evocative titles, I’m going to Build a Shed for the Children, and Finist the Bright Falcon, based on a Russian folk tale. And, above all, The Isle is Full of Noises, whose programmes I remember, cut in the shape of an island, complete with wavily coastline edges- I still have one in a trunk in the attic. When I was six years old, I didn’t recognise the title as a quotation from the poetically visionary, anti-colonialist noble savage, Caliban, but realise now how it would have appealed to my father’s imagination. Raised in an age of saluting the flag, in classrooms decorated by the map of empire, he had seen British India during the war, understood its injustices, and read lots of William Blake, so was an early post-colonial, as well as a celebrator of the Imagination.

The Tempest is Shakespeare’s final play, a drama about crime and punishment, forgiveness and redemption, but also the powers of the imagination, and the politics of power. Prospero, the usurped Duke of Milan, exiled in a leaky boat with his daughter Miranda, arrives on a remote island; here he lives and rules over Caliban, the island’s indigenous occupant. Caliban is remorselessly othered by everyone, including Prospero, who describes him as “earth” and “this thing of darkness”. Despite this, he produces one of the play’s great speeches, describing his most intimate awareness of the beauties of the isle (it’s full of noises), and how painful it is to dream of beauty, before awakening to dull reality, making the heartbreaking admission “I cry to sleep again”.

The school intake in the 50s and 60s was shaped by the eleven plus, which routinely deposited a tranche of the more modestly performing academic students to be taught mainly practical subjects. There’s an astonishing clip on YouTube from 1962, of an unbelievably patronising head teacher explaining to young Janet why she had not failed, but passed, the eleven plus exam, which had thoughtfully decided exactly what kind of education she needed; Janet and her mother appear unconvinced by his slippery sophistry. Here is the clip, if you can bear it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KND4r5vjUTg. And so, to offer music, art, and drama to young people who hadn’t been exposed to them, was, perhaps, to awaken a neglected, patronised and disparaged Caliban, to discover a poetic soul within a socially disdained demographic. Furthermore, one lady on the FB chat remembered how she’d played the character of Knee-Knock, a satirical portrait of a populist demagogue, clearly inspired by the noxious racism of Enoch Powell, and I wonder how that went down amongst the wider community of our socially conservative town. As the new right wing, led by the monstrous Farage, spills its poison into the national bloodstream, I’m proud and happy that so long ago my father used a school play to express his disdain for such toxic populism.

I don't remember how my father ended his play, but The Tempest ends with Prospero’s great valedictory, elegiac speech about the transience of all things: “The cloud capped towers, the gorgeous palaces…the great globe itself, Yea all which it inherit, shall dissolve, And like this insubstantial pageant faded, leave not a rack behind…” And so, the school itself, resplendent here in its Victorian newness, is no more. On a visit home a few years ago, I saw the demolition team at work, ploughing through its classrooms and corridors. I rescued a coping stone from the front wall, and it sits in my garden, a useful impromptu holder for a potted geranium. I expect it is the only remaining part of the building. And it’s good to know that a few, a happy few, recall those wonderful school plays. The Goldwell Rooms are also gone, as is the football ground, the team banished to an out-of-town roundabout by a supermarket, which itself, no doubt, helped to destroy the grocer’s on the corner.

And this, in short is why I had to buy the print; it is above all a fragment to shore against ruin.