Depending on when you start to count, it’s Reading School‘s 900th anniversary this year. On Saturday, there’s a grand reunion of all the willing alumni and staff they can find. While nobody will recall the first staff meeting on a fresh autumn morning of 1125, there’s one venerable teacher in attendance whose life stretches back more than a tenth of that time.
It’s no secret that I had a miserable school career. Not every minute of it, but enough to have cast a pall of gloom. I made a few friends; a handful of teachers saw something worth cultivating in me and they worked a minor miracle. I can write; I became something of a musician; I knocked some really rough edges off myself before they became a big problem. Should I meet these people on Saturday, I’ll tell them as much. But such spots of light are lifebuoys bobbing on a vast, dead ocean.
There is a lesson to be given about shutting up and knuckling down; I was absent when it was taught. A boy in 1989 was not calmly given feedback about the way that he comes across, given a theatrical workshop in which to rehearse something more suitable, and invited to try again with fresh material and a clean slate.
I was quickly marked out as an unlikely boy. Every institution collects a set of moulds that you are encouraged to choose between and crawl into. Some people never fit, or are never invited to try. Apart from the intellectual snobbery, there was a minor material one about the neighbourhood you came from, the primary school you went to, and what your parents did for a living. (Nurse and art teacher. What’re you going to do about it?)
One misunderstanding sets the scene: I was once expelled from the School Chapel mid-lesson. I was delivering from my pew a sotto voce but rather disrespectful anticipation of Reverend Otto’s reading that day, all of five yards from him (I was an idiot). He clicked his fingers at me twice and intoned the words ‘Supper! Go and wait in the vestry.’
The lesson that day was 1 Peter 5, as I cannot now forget. (At 8:35am! Hardly my fault he was in a bad mood.) After the chapel had emptied, in strode the Rev with the Deputy Head, the latter already poised to administer the appropriate bollocking. His gown flapped with demonic resolve. Your adversary the devil prowls as a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour. His eyes and forehead, of which I made a careful study, bulged with a furious incredulity that must have required a decent warm-up.
Leaning towards me, he began his address slowly, relishing the effect of every word.
I have never (he began, letting the words fall as splashes of water onto thirsty soil)
— In twenty years (he continued, with the pompous ritardando of a man who can casually invoke a period of his career that dwarfs a schoolboy’s pitiful little life)
— Seen such disgraceful (O, delicious! Four hisses of disapproval, framing that middle syllable of ‘disgraceful’, to arch his upper lip into a sneer of cold command. You’re witnessing poetry, boy, and you’re in big trouble)
— Behaviour.
For a reason I cannot fathom to this day, he then added the line: ‘You are the only boy ever to have been ejected from the Chapel, and the only Supper to have attended this school. You are the first Supper, as well as the last!’
At the age of twelve, I had already endured every pun that my unfortunate surname can elicit. To my ears, he was retreading a classic. In the oaken surroundings of the Alfred Waterhouse-designed chapel vestry, after a New Testament lesson, he was riffing smartly upon The Last Supper. Thinking as any child might, I chose the surest way I knew to flatter him out of his anger. I looked squarely into his eyes and laughed.
Watching the breath pop out of him made it startlingly apparent that this wasn’t the effect he was going for. It was one of many events that marked my card until the card was just one big mark. What’s a boy to do? He and I witnessed worse behaviour at that school in every hour of every day, and we both knew it. I still regard this performance as an anthropologist would a human sacrifice: the highest level of danger plainly evident, but worthless without the context of the logic behind it or the purpose it supposedly served.
Reverend Otto and the deputy headmaster are no longer alive. As the sole surviving cast member, I might have invented anything about the vestry. The truth is weird enough — as though it’d take a Deputy Head dreaming of his Bafta to sour me on religion — but I can’t remember anything else ever coming of it. Reverend Otto had previously given me a detention about an unrelated matter (chuck it on the pile, dickhead), and we weren’t ever going to get along.
I stuck the school out for seven years, and won a music prize in the Upper Sixth. It was a fairly valuable one, and the field of contenders small enough that I can say it was my turn. I wrote to thank Lady Beecham for endowing it in my direction: that was a test of character I could understand.
I eked out the prize money over my undergraduate career. Most of it went on sheet music which I then learned and performed. My playing at Reading School tended to disintegrate on stage, so the modest talent I possessed as an accompanist had to wait until university to take me by surprise. My playing there won approbation and a couple more prizes. But receiving one at school was my ticket to Speech Day. An Old Redingensian, some captain of industry, was wheeled out to address us. I remember nothing that he said: he might have beamed in from Mars for all his success at connecting.
… But in one way, he did. It has been a singular and peculiar fantasy of mine — more a recurring anxiety dream — to find myself in his place, at some podium with the expectation that a sift of my life experience might leave some tiny grain of value that I can hammer out and pass on. Other unhappy introverts must be troubled by similar thoughts. The comfort is that it’s never going to happen.
A grammar school does not confer status on misfits (the clue’s in the name), but saves it for the sportsmen, the debaters, and the nerds who exhibit brilliance in ways that run parallel to its curriculum. I would have had a very different time had I stood a chance in those domains, but a dyspraxic, asthmatic teenager with a lisp, monoscopic vision that turned ball games entirely into guesswork, academic but never precocious, and as green as they come? I was doomed.
My strategy towards sport was to wager that I would lose status whether I made a special effort or not. One of those options was clearly a path of least resistance, and it left me in full control of the ridicule I received. Skulking on the back line of a pitch for five years, fleeing from any ball that dared come my way, did not endear me to the institution. Instead, it afforded me extra time to dream about the subjects I wanted to do, while setting the tone for a lifetime of avoidant behaviour. If this sounds like a sin, you have no idea how badly suited for this cruelly compulsory subject some people can be, or what an ordeal it is to find yourself regularly exposed, naked of ability and experience, with only the jeers of your fellows to accompany you.
A mathematics teacher who also happened to direct hockey practice remained unable to reconcile the ready and keen boy in a school uniform with the incorrigible one he observed from a distance in a PE kit. Yet it was a proudly hard school: those of us who weren’t all-rounders were going to have to prune. To this day, I marvel that my response surprised anybody.
The other thing that wouldn’t win me friends was my attempt in 1996, on the nascent Internet, to devote a page of my first-year university website to settling the score. The precise contents are lost even to the Wayback Machine, but I remember receiving a cease-and-desist at my home address. It was signed by the teacher in charge of the Sixth Form, who knew me little and liked me less. Naturally, I sent a response at the earliest opportunity with the delighted defiance of a young man who has just seen his first punch land perfectly on the nose of a bigger opponent. (I still have that letter somewhere, and a follow-up from the Headmaster including the words ‘I found your response unhelpful.’ Where does one exhume such people?)
Hard copies of a few pages of my site were then printed by an unfortunate factotum in the school office. Photocopies were made of the reply I’d sent. Three covering letters were then signed by the headmaster, to be circulated variously to my father, to the IT facility at the University of Surrey, and the head of my department there.
My father mentioned his laconically on the phone: ‘Well, son, you made your bed and I think you can lie in it.’ As a schoolteacher himself, his refusal to stand beside his peers, preferring to let his adult son fight his own battle, still stands as a great bit of parenting and a testament to his contempt for them. He had, of course, lived the seven years that I had been through vicariously: a son coming home in varying shades of permanent distress, and years of letters and meetings and parents’ evenings making it clear that stopping it was presumed to be my job.
Surrey’s IT facility, of course, summarily shut down my website without a word being exchanged. They weren’t going to test legal boundaries for the sake of a moody fresher, and I didn’t expect them to.
I’m aware of the letter to my head of department only because, partway through my PhD some six years later, we were having a social evening after a research seminar. The Head of Research, one of my supervisors, asked me: ‘Are you still publishing subversive websites about your old school?’ Half a minute or so into the conversation, the Head of Department chipped in: ‘A letter came from your school that demanded some action. I hope you haven’t forgotten the action I took.’
The grown-ups in my life rolled each letter into a ball, chose a nice parabola, and launched it into the bin. In the right place, you find the right people.
Every ten years or so, the words I deliver from my anxiety podium change. They can never be fond but, by way of resignation, they have become kinder and more conciliatory. The teenage Ben Supper is now guided by a collage of people and ideas he’s assembled around him, realises how much of himself he owes to others, and continually wonders how much more work he can bear to do.
I am not, and have never been, anything remarkable in a history of resounding achievers from the school. It would take a big minibus crash to make me the right man for Speech Day. But here we go anyway: In my twenties, I’d have given a fusillade of fury to the institution, and spared words of comfort for those cast adrift by it. This is why you don’t give young people important speeches. While cognizant of those who helped me, I expected better (why?) and might not have been able to see through this to find gratitude.
In my thirties, I would have been more palliative. The message would have been: it takes time to get over this place, but every step you take is immensely valuable. Murder the senseless and monotone critic that clueless adults set up in your head. Seek the real-life critics who recognise something in you, and are curious to see what you’ll do with it.
To be stern is fair play, but a decent adult will treat a child poorly as a test of character only when the child is in a work of fiction and the adult is Willy Wonka (or Mr. Miyagi: the most abjectly drawn character in a terrible film). But don’t confuse bad people with those who don’t help because they can’t see how. Frustration should not harden into anger: it’s a waste of energy, and it clouds your vision. And, for those of you whose profession is already mapped out, my pockets are unfortunately empty. Godspeed, you lucky bastards.
Having plunged into self-employment at 40, I conclude that being adrift becomes a blessing. You never lose touch with who you are if it’s a daily concern, and there’s nobody around to demand that you be anybody else. The downside is that sometimes it’s healthy to try.
I’m lucky still to meet young and talented misfits: a confluence of untempered ability, drive, and desires that the world cannot suppress, but cannot put to immediate use either. It’s always beautiful and terrifying. Forging a path of your own is playing in hard mode: by definition, no one person can guide you. And yet, there are still great teachers and plenty of lucky people who’ve make it work.
The rejection and alienation I remember as feelings more than specific memories: a tightness in the diaphragm and a sickness in the stomach. The bullying was largely psychological, but real enough. If I learned anything there, it’s not to tell a child that they’re making it up, or they’re bringing it upon themselves. Or, as somebody associated with the school told me years later, that it doesn’t happen there, it wouldn’t ever have happened there, and if it did happen it’s because you deserved it.
(I was old enough by then, of course, to hear the admission of guilt and the personality disorder pouncing like two tigers from a pomegranate, so I simply agreed and completely forgot who she was. Experience saves a lot of time.)
But do whatever you can to straighten a charge’s path in the hope that they’ll find their way out, because it’s a hard enough walk as it is. If you’re the one getting out, don’t beat yourself up when you misstep or waste effort. Careful experimentation isn’t truly wasted, even if the project doesn’t turn out. Elvis was dead at 42, and spent most of his last decade making shit films. Efficiency is for activities that you already know how to do, and is not an explorer’s concern. There’s time enough to prove yourself in more than one discipline.
Treat defeat, whether commercial or social, with the grace of the divine lesson that it is. Learn everything you can about yourself from it, but no more. Remember how it feels to be striking out, and treat your future subordinates as you need to be treated today.
These days, my schoolteachers are peers: some have made videos for the day that betray an abundance of kindness and generosity of spirit. In the main, these were good people doing what they could, working as I did and do in spite of a disrupted home life, a foreground of personal limitations, and an institution that will always have a life and character of its own. It just didn’t have room for some of us.
I’m going back on Saturday for two reasons. Because Reading School isn’t what it used to be. And neither am I.
