Recollections of School Days

It’s a hard thing to say, but I don’t think any school ever touched me – things that happened at school touched me all right (thefts, fights, escapes, punishments, humiliations), but these could have reached me anywhere, in jail or on a ranch. The education process never touched me, that’s what I mean – as soon as it came near me, I instinctively slipped my mind into neutral, became passive, inert, allowed myself to be pushed around mentally or physically, but in a sense came as near as I could get to a state of suspended animation. I still do that when I’m in company I have to tolerate but don’t really like. It seems that the school days were mainly a blank period, a time of waiting – waiting for what? For action, I suppose; for a different kind of experience; for the dinosaur’s egg I carried inside me to hatch and break open. It did in the long run; but schools had nothing to do with that.

I remember, at the age of eighteen or thereabouts, lying in a bed on a fine morning in a small rented room in Dunedin, and reading A Dominie’s Log, by A.S. Neill. A moderate hangover did not stifle a peculiar sense of joy that came to me from the book, a sense that a key to certain episodes in my own page 5 past had been given to me by Neill. It was a sort of conversion, I suppose – Neill was concerned to de-educate the children in his charge, or let them de-educate themselves. He wanted to put the Calvinist engine in reverse and hand back the kids their own personalities. Since that time I’ve heard Neill damned with faint praise often enough by those of his own profession who bother to read him; and perhaps I’d be willing to admit that a Summerhill kid is bound to be a freak in the Age of the Nuclear Deluge. But I still owe old Neill some words of love for what he did for me at eighteen. He told me that the running fight I’d put up against education from the age of five onwards came from subconscious wisdom, not from some source of malign perversity. And as I read his book an old, sad cloud began to lift from my mind. Neill’s name is inscribed with reverence on the wall of my spiritual bomb shelter –

Here lies the bones of Neill
Who worked it out by feel . . .

It boils down to this. I have always seen a school primarily as a jail. Jails have their purposes; but the views of the prison management and those who serve time are likely to differ profoundly. Once in South Canterbury towards sundown, I went into a deserted one-room country school, and the smell of chalk dust and plasticine and ancient body odours carried with it a piercing message of gloom – as if the demon who inhabited the place were saying, ‘There’s no door out, boy; you’ll be here till Doomsday!’ The message was a rock-bottom one, quite unmistakeable; and I record this impression because it very probably echoed an older one – my own feeling at five or six, as a young calf being trodden underfoot in the infant school stockyard.

I did not begin school auspiciously. On that first grim day I sidled into the room and went straight up to the fat black stove and put my hand on it. It was hot; not red hot, but black hot. So I hid behind the teacher’s dress. She probably comforted me. I remember her as a vague, kind middle-aged woman. Some time later, when I stole her strap and took it home and hid it in a rusty can under a macrocarpa tree, she did not punish me for this infantile protest against corporal punishment. But the teacher who came after her was a very different woman – a young tough lass with a black moustache, who decided to give one cut for each spelling mistake over two in the morning tests. I did all right there, because my home was full of books, and my reading was well ahead of anything I learned at school. But the farm boys, who had no books in their houses, and had to milk the cows before they left home in the morning, came off badly. I remember one big mother’s boy with a running nose going up for his dose of leather morning after morning. The question was – Would he howl or wouldn’t he? Sometimes he did; sometimes he didn’t. This early initiation into the rites of sadism gave me an insight into myself and others. The audience were always fully awake – on their toes, you page 6 might say. I think that boy avoided being educated more successfully than I did. His prison term is long over now, and he is an able farmer in the district.

Neither then nor later did I want to learn anything. The usual verdict was – He’s bright but lazy – or else – He’s a daydreamer. I think the situation was simpler than that. I was already erecting my defences around that core of primitive experience, that ineducable self which I like to call a dinosaur’s egg. The abstract analytical processes which the schools were prepared to offer me, and ram down my throat, if necessary – geography, history, grammar, arithmetical calculations – have the side-effect of neutralising this kind of experience and making it inaccessible to the conscious mind. The two types of learning were opposed; the first being the discovery of a sacred pattern in natural events; the second being the acquisition of the lens of abstract thought which sees nothing sacred on the face of the earth. I learned to write poems at the age of seven by going into a burrow in the side of a hill and listening there to the sound of the sea.

There was something to learn, though, in the playground fighting. I was a slow lad and physically timid, but I had the advantage of weight. If I could once get a headlock on my opponent, and drag him down and sit on him, the battle was mine. But the time would come when I had to let him up again – and on his feet he would be quicker than me, and angrier, and I would usually end up with a bloody nose. Once, inspired by boredom, when the class had been set to cut up sheets of coloured paper, I clipped a stronger boy’s nose with the scissors – unwisely, for he jumped on me from a high bank as I dawdled home, and punched my face while the back of my head rested on the ground. It taught me to find other ways of countering boredom.

Later on, the family shifted up north, and I attended a Quaker school on St John’s Hill in Wanganui for a year. There they used to sing Blake’s Jerusalem in the morning assembly, and for some reason this gave me a sense of strong religious joy. There was a gully below our house where bushes made a thick mat of leaves above a small stream. There I was able to learn what I needed to learn, and also at Virginia Lake and Kai Iwi beach:

And by the bay itself were cliffs with carved names
And a hut on the shore beside the maori ovens.
We raced boats from the banks of the pumice creek
Or swam in those autumnal shallows,
Growing cold in amber water, riding the logs
Upstream and waiting for the taniwha . . . (‘Virginia Lake’, CP 74)

At this school they had an interesting system of discipline. Each child carried a penny notebook on his person, in which a teacher would set down a black mark, the nature of the child’s offence, and his (the teacher’s) initials. Thus each pupil had his or her own criminal file to look at. At the end of the page 7 week one took the notebook to the headmaster’s study, and there was a close examination of the motives and causes, and penalties assigned if one had more than three black marks. Some stainless individuals had no black marks at all. The system induced in me a curious reaction. After I had acquired two or three black marks, a kind of impenitent despair would take charge of me, and I would acquire in rapid succession fifteen or twenty of them. As a result I found myself more or less permanently deprived of privileges and confined to the dungeons. The sessions with the headmaster were both emotional and dramatic.

When I was nine the family shifted to England for a year or two, and I attended a Quaker boarding school in the Cotswolds. This was a period of undesired sexual enlightenment for me. No doubt some turmoil at puberty is inevitable. But I think the transition from childhood to manhood might have been much less gruelling under different conditions – in a Maori pa, let us say. Yet I remember the barbarities of the dormitory as the beginning of adult life – one could see clearly the irrelevance of any external authority in that world of violence and wry self-knowledge. I remember one night when the strong men of the dormitory were engaged in beating up a homesick German lad. One at a time they moved over to his bed in the dark and punched him. I had a choice to make – for I too was a foreigner, and the gang initiative could easily swing in my direction. So I put on my slippers and moved over and got in a few hard punches. I knew somebody had been betrayed – and I knew, too, that this was the underlying process of the world in which I had to live from then on – either to betray, or to be at the receiving end of group violence. These were things well worth learning.

There was an English teacher in that school who was kind to me. He read my poems and liked them and encouraged me to write more. There was some trouble between him and the art mistress. I think they were found in the art room behaving in an unseemly manner. But he was young then. No doubt he acquired the terrible discretion of his profession as he grew older.

When my family moved back to New Zealand I boarded for a year at the St John’s Hill school. Though I must have done the minimum work to avoid penalties, I can’t remember any of the actual instruction I received there, except for a clumsy frieze around the wall of the classroom which had mammoths at the beginning of it. But a difficult guerrilla warfare developed between me and the headmaster. I recall one night when the headmaster’s son wagered that I and another boy would not go down the road to a place where a bulldozer had been working among the sandhills. We put on our dressing gowns, and went down the road, and leapt and slid among sandhills in the moonlight. There was a sense of the jailbreak about it – the wild globe of the moon overhead and the noises of trains from the town in the distance – trains were always symbols of discovery to me. On our way back up the road we met a procession of staff members coming to meet us with torches. There page 8 were hushed and lengthy investigations. There was talk of expulsion; for the headmaster could conceive of only one reason for two boys being out together at night. My concern was chiefly to conceal from him the fact that his own son had suggested the expedition. I was successful. On that occasion I took the rap and betrayed no one.

Later on I attended a day school in Dunedin. I think I would have liked it better if it had been co-educational. My unwillingness to learn never deserted me. But by now the dinosaur’s egg was hatching. Some of the verse I wrote privately nearly every day of the week had control and shape and meaning.

This autobiographical sketch implies perhaps some criticism of modern educational processes. Well – I can’t say what they might do for other people; but in me they induced a sense of strain and alienation which was dispersed only when I began to mix with my own kind of people in factories and on farms – people who, whatever their faults, are not dominated by neurotic decorum. What kind of education would I have preferred? That’s a hard one.

Perhaps – until ten years old, on a farm in the South Island mountains or the Urewera country, learning to use a horse and a dog and a gun; then, for a year or two, during puberty, in a Maori pa; then on the coastal boats. I might have owned a good fishing launch by now. And what about books? Well, I’d pick them up here and there. There are libraries in this country. No schooling at all. But our firms and departments require literate peons for their dreary empires of economic liberalism. So we have universal, secular, and compulsory education.

1966 (376)