Inevitably the present overwhelms the past, and the latest erasure from the world, the demolition of the school in the summer of 2005, left me feeling robbed, bereft, and curiously cheated, as if something prized, though overlooked up till then, had slipped through my fingers. I suppose it all proves the truism that it is loss that makes things valued, and it took demolition of the school to bring it closer to me after decades of taking its existence for granted. I can almost see people smiling at what may seem like an overstated reaction to the school’s obliteration, but somehow it was hard not to take it personally. That was my school, and now it no longer exists, not a wall or even a brick remaining as a marker to its existence, and my past seems buried just a little deeper now. I have always reflected on my school days from time to time, and it was somehow important to me that the old school should always be there, that familiar Tower a lighthouse, if you like, to help my wandering memories navigate back. But now, it’s nothing, and good for nothing but ignominious hardcore for its alien replacement. I read that the decision was made to “replace rather than refurbish” the school, and not to incorporate it physically into Unity College. The usual practical and logical reason was given, of course: money. They could replace the existing building with a modern design for the same cost. Hard cash and sentiment are oil and water; they don’t mix, and one of them always comes to the top. All too often it’s the wrong one for me. And some said that it was important to be “state-of-the-art,” and to “move with the times,” as if our current era is so celebrated for its superior products. Well, it’s happened and there’s no helping it now. It was someone else’s money and it’s hardly my school now after all these years and changes, for “my” school really ended when I left it. By now I know well that change comes, of course, and now and then an old building will be pulled down, especially in Northampton, which suffered perhaps more than its fair share of official vandalism during its expansion and the great urban so-called “improvement” plan in the 1970s when so much that was architecturally and historically interesting was razed. I’ve always deplored the loss of those important spaces and places, and it is so much worse when there’s a personal connection like this. Some such “memory hosts” are more secure, and I don’t know why I ever thought that schools were safe and forever. I suppose they always seemed so solid in their community value, their continuous use, their apparent permanence, for they had a life that was prolonged and sustained by the remembered pleasure and pain of the thousands of pupils that came and went as the generations changed. A community has to protect its schools for the community’s roots grow there. Well unmistakably these places are transitory too, for of the three Northampton schools that I attended only one remains, as far as I know: Cedar Road Primary, where I first wore my red cap in 1950. On a visit to Northampton in 1984 I went to take a look at St. Matthew's School, between Byron and Shelley Streets, where I attended 1953-56, but it had gone with no sign that it had ever existed. All I found was a block of new houses spanning the streets. I had relied on the sight of it to pry open a few old memories, but it was not to be and I have to make do with what survived on its own. This was disheartening, another theft of my past, but I understood that its fate was perhaps not so remarkable, for that school was a cramped and outdated late-Victorian horror even when I was there. But THS? Surely not! It almost saw its 50th birthday, but as I left it when it was only seven years old, to me it was always as new as it was when we first went there. I still remember the fresh smell it had then of clean walls and new paint, and there was the sparkle of spotless windows and the polished gleam of wooden banisters snaking up the Tower stairwell. And there was that odd rubber flooring everywhere (“In order to reduce the noise in the school, rubber flooring has been used in the circulation spaces and studded rubber in the classrooms,” B.S. Howard, Headmaster, February 1958). It’s not that I consciously expected the school buildings to remain, for the alternative was never an issue. I never gave a thought to the school’s future, of course, because the unspoken assumption was that it was sure to last forever, conveniently on hand to nourish the nostalgia that I was subconsciously planning. I casually accepted its existence as something permanent, where, in due time, future memories would lodge and be available to feed my meditative moments to come. I think we all have special places like that; it may be a school or a church, a cinema, a pub, or a house, a place ready and waiting to be revisited whenever the reflective urge sweeps upon us, whenever we choose (or cannot help but choose) the self-indulgent re-exploration of who we were in another far-off life. Clearly my stubborn desires and unrealistic assumptions diverged strikingly from reality, and just from the vanishing of two of my schools I see that it's disturbingly easy to be denied the simplest visual (or other sensory) participation in one's own past. It’s not a lot to ask, but it’s impossible to grant. Views and landscapes usually remain, awaiting our return, unless the busy and uncaring hand of man has intervened, but the mere buildings where our memories reside are plainly extremely vulnerable and impermanent. Now I know that I should have made the pilgrimage to see the old school on my last visit to Northampton, but little did I think at the time that it would be the final opportunity. Now it’s more than 20 years since I saw it, though that was just the view between the Trinity Avenue railings and I haven’t been any closer since I left. I envy those who participated in the 2003 reunion, for they got to go inside the school again and were able thus to welcome back their fossilized reminiscences. They were, we now see, the last of us to walk those corridors, and that’s quite a privilege. I knew that after I left the school in 1963 more buildings were erected within the grounds – what I think were 6th form quarters at the end of the workshops, and later some huge mysterious intrusion into the playground. Much of the school’s landscape thus quickly became unfamiliar, though most of the original school remained, the Tower (a “landmark” to some and an “eyesore” to others) ever an obvious symbol of our high aspirations in education. Even before its demolition, the photographs of the school on the website were depressing. The old place was abandoned and looked “neglected, vandalized, and forlorn” as the website’s description so accurately puts it, with broken windows and the grounds thick with long grass and weeds. Perhaps that was deliberate; we object less to the demolition of what has become ruined and unsightly. It was surely a cruel public embarrassment to leave the empty school to rot away to a premature wreck after so long and faithful a service. Now the school exists only in photographs and in our minds, and recollection has to be a strictly internal and unaided process, for in August 2005 the destruction began. The sight of it, merely in pictures, was appalling, like a kick in the guts to see what they had done to my school. The devastation conflicts so much with what I remember, and I try to ensure that the mental images I keep are those from the 1950s and 1960s, those lost rooms crammed with returning incidents and sleepy lessons, the corridors and playground alive with throngs in green blazers, and the noise on the tower staircase between classes, and not those agonizing images of collapsing walls and mountainous wreckage. But the mechanical jaws nibbled away at the house of my memories, and I was faced with the grim sight of those fallen bricks and twisted steel, the rubble piles, the roofless rooms, the plaster smoke, and awful empty air where walls and glass should be. Well, it’s all over and done with now. What’s changed is here to stay, and we’ll get used to it in time. To deny and fight what has taken place is irrational, but that doesn’t mean that we have to like it. Our only means of combating the displeasing situation is to develop or give in to nostalgia, for that’s all that remains to us, even though this is dangerous ground, being a first cousin to mooning melancholy and pointless daydreaming. On the other hand, too, recollection inevitably adds a glow to barely remembered facts that become alluring (even the bad ones) simply because they are of the past. Inaccessibility isn’t the best reason for desire, but it’s harmless and inevitable, and I confess to being a sitting duck for high-quality nostalgia, even though I understand perfectly what a fallible lens it is to look through. Will Rogers put it well: “Things ain’t what they used to be, and probably never were.” Whatever each of us may think about their time at school (and there were bleak times, of course) and about the pitfalls of nostalgia (it’s like a grammar lesson – you find the present tense but the past perfect), I like to think that we all deplore and regret the shockingly effortless loss of the physical place where we spent so many of our formative years. For better or worse, those years and that school are part of us for ever. It’s surely difficult for us all to grasp that our school days are now half a century ago, and while some may be happy to have the buffer of so much time between now and their dreadful school days and have no more interest, I for one always wanted to revisit the actual scene some day, something sadly unattainable now until someone invents a time machine to rewind the years and make things as they were before, to scatter the bricks of Unity College, and re-erect our Tower. Even back in the early 1960s I had my first flicker of the nostalgia to come, and I have checked this quotation on the Internet to be sure. During an otherwise forgotten Latin lesson with Richard Bennett, while we were ploughing through some textbook extract from “The Aeneid,” we came across a passage that prompted one of the playful chuckles that often erupted from Mr. Bennett. He read it aloud: “Forsan et haec olim meminisse juvabit.” If he was looking for a translation our blank uncomprehending faces would have told him that we were totally stumped, so he told us what it meant: “Perhaps one day this too will be pleasant to remember.” “But probably not,” he added with a grin. I hate to contradict him, but he was wrong about that, and Virgil was right on the money. |
