There were three way to get remembered. High medieval windows
allowed limited light to illuminate large oak boards bearing the remembered
names. In pride of place, prominently visible behind the Head’s rostrum, was
the list of Oxford scholars. Down one side of the hall that served both for
assembly and as a dining room was a melancholy inducing sequence of boards
listing the old boys who had “fallen”, mostly in the Great War, but also in the
other end of empire conflicts. A third space near the door held two more
boards. There was a longish listing of each year’s Victor Ludorum and a very
new looking bright board with the short record of those named Victrix Ludorum. The school was established sometime in the 1200s. Girls were
admitted in 1967.
The school was originally established as an act of charity by
the tradesmen who made and built the useful stuff that a town needs, in order to
provide an education for the boys of the town. Both in the wallboards and the
school there is the retrace of an ancient Hindu teaching from the Bhagavad Gita:
There are three paths to enlightenment; the path of reason, the path of action,
and the path of devotion. The first two meanings are obvious; devotion is the
observance of ritual and the unconditional acceptance of the ritual. The
Guildsmen worked and created their wealth which in an act of religious selflessness
they used to endow a school to teach reason. Sportsmen and women are action embodied.
The Oxbridge wranglers were masters of reason, and those who voluntarily gave
their lives for the greater good offered the ultimate act of devotion or duty.
For a short while I am lucky enough to inhabit the academic
space that is the University of Cambridge. It was said that at interview for
certain colleges a rugby ball was thrown at the interviewee. If he caught it
then he was half way to his place. My father in law went to a school that had a
long standing relationship with Clare College. He was called for interview,
asked to do some exams and then went in for the interview. “I was thinking that
I might like to study French” said the father in law. Surveying the exam paper
the tutor looked up and asked “Hmm. Have you considered theology”. Thus three
years of privileged scholarship was repaid with a lifetime of service to inner
city congregations. I am sure that the enduring success of the colleges is down
to the way that intense academic selection and high intellectual standards were
leavened by the sportsmen and the clergymen. Action, reason and devotion when
mixed do seem to endure.
My mistaken understanding of the Hindu text was that I should choose the path that suited me, as an individual, best. I now don’t think that is the case. It seems
more likely that at each step all three pathways were always there, out in front, but I could only take one.
When I was in the gloomy high halls of my ancient grammar school,
none of them seemed available. I was disorganised and distant from the social
and ritualistic fabric of the place. I routinely came in the bottom five of the
class, and being nearly the youngest in the year, was never in the running for
the high status sports teams. As a coping mechanism I learned to look for the
easiest path rather than the one that we were set on by the school. I stopped
trying to get to where we were supposed to go and instead took the biggest step
that required the littlest effort. What
I did not notice at the time was that many of the things that I did because I
found them easy, others avoided because they found them difficult.
The upshot is that I went to Sandhurst and later passed selection
for the SAS. After leaving the Army I went a good university and am now, eventually, a
Masters student at Cambridge. It is hard to think of two experiences which are
better exemplars of the paths of action and of reason, yet I chose neither. Not
many people will have done both. I just took one step at a time. Sometime it
felt that it was the same step over and over, but every so often I would look
around and realise that I was a long way from where I had started.
