The Reading School reunion went about as well as I’d hoped, which is why I haven’t rushed to blog about it. I do so now because there’s a bunch of unrelated ideas backed up that need me to engage with them. The economy in this industry has gone a bit crap for a while (reasons: tariffs temporarily removing a big territory; Spotify and its ilk eviscerating recording industry revenue and diverting what little is left; the private-equity takeover in pro audio that’s transformed investment budgets into debt service; the cost-of-living crisis reducing people’s discretionary spend). These are quite the storm, so I might be erring on the side of introspection while either it blows over or it doesn’t.
Anyway, the monsters are dead. This is true literally. The only truly rotten adult in my school career (not mentioned in the previous post) died a couple of years ago. He was, it was quietly confirmed, the subject of a police investigation at the time of his death, but you can’t punish a dead man. Sad rule of thumb: anybody whose job involves wearing a clerical collar, a PE kit, or a military uniform around children might have a vocation that involves an extraordinary level of character and self-sacrifice. Or they might have a motive that involves gaining power and trust over vulnerable people. Much easier to get away with it if you can impose a solo detention: persuade the child that he deserves what you’re doing, so the cheque gets drawn on his shame and not yours.
It couldn’t happen in quite the same way today because we’re a lot more careful about that kind of thing. There are rules; chaperones; safeguarding teams. And I promise that’s the end of the miserable part. The monsters are also figuratively dead, which is nicer, and what I’d hoped to find.
A fellow attendee put it more simply than I do: sixteen-year-old boys are dickheads. It’s a cliche that happy people don’t bully. (Again, too brief: I’ve encountered a bit of Cluster B, and want to adjust this to ‘Healthy and happy’ because sociopaths, on the whole, seem rather pleased with themselves.) We’ve all turned out a little more confident and a lot more self-aware, mostly as a result of inhabiting ourselves for a bit longer. People do change, profoundly, as they conform to their environment.
Taking turns to talk about how awful the place was to us, in the company of our former tormentors, was cathartic and entertaining. It didn’t (as I feared it might) seem like selling out. The alternative — to hold on to a past that has receded entirely into the realms of recollection — would be less honest. As for adults, I talked to the teacher who sent me the cease-and-desist about the website. He wouldn’t let me apologise. If pushed, I’m unsure how complete and sincere such an apology might have been, but contrition doesn’t require a contract lawyer to draw up small print.
While digging in my archives before the reunion, I found some [mercifully] unpublished writing from my early years at university where I agonised about a teacher under whom I did quite well but who never seemed to soften his hostility towards me. I’d completely forgotten about that aspect of him. I caught him last week, just as he enters retirement, and immediately realised that he’s just neurodivergent. The standoffish-bordering-dismissive manner was what happens when a pupil looking for reassurance meets a thick wall of social awkwardness. I’m still terrible at reading people, but must have been worse, and in need of some nourishment that he couldn’t provide.
With a writer’s hat on, it’s rare to be able to experience real life in this way: as one character witnessing an event, but fully inhabiting two narrators of different ages, needs, and powers, both equally correct. It’s a good device in fiction, and I’d be the millionth person to use it this week.
But, as I must write honestly, there are two structural problems with the school reunion. The first is that dialogue needs action. People sitting around working and talking until they outgrow their demons is quite a lot of life, but it makes a dull book. Chekhov would throw in jokes, a Russian doctor, people thinking they’re seagulls, and an orchard being cut down. There’d still be too much dialogue, but everybody would agree he’s a genius.
Children you could point to at the age of fourteen and go ‘Hedge Fund Manager’ did, indeed, become hedge fund managers, but were just as miserable in the company of other teenagers as I was. Without wanting ever to be like them, I admired the self-assurance, the perfectly-worn school uniform, the calibrated sense of aloofness and found it (still find it) a little intimidating. But what comes across as self-assurance was probably just an inability to be anything else: a need to possess, without shame, a persona they were stuck with. So the same amount of misery was dealt to them as to everybody else. And then university happened: people reset, stayed on the rails with varying degrees of success (those who crashed and burned weren’t well-represented last weekend, and we missed them), and turned their skills and training to their advantage. The dynamics of the adult world, fortunately, are more forgiving: failure usually comes with a greater degree of dignity and a kinder, less fixated audience. School life, on the whole, was fuelled by envy and a delicate intellectual/tribal hierarchy, which was awful but is a great machine for drama.
The second problem is that real life seldom meets the need for a structured closure. The best I can do to wrap this up is to temper my title idly in the flame of experience. Age compensates for some of what it’s about to take away. Time doesn’t heal so much as broaden your perspective. Most monsters are shrunk to death.
Anyway, you should go to these things. Even if you don’t make any friends. Even if you’re the one with the lowest salary, the smallest family, and the weirdest job. Meet the kid who’s now running a legal practice, and realise that he, like you, is just styling out his compromises as though they’re gifts he chose.
What defines success from a launchpad like Reading School is just making the best of character and happenstance and not knowing how else to survive.
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