I remember discussing violence when very young indeed with my oldest, deepest childhood friend, Mark Eldridge. When we were about eleven, we agreed that we didn’t like fighting or violence as we “were frightened as to what we might do to someone.” Between the two of us we wouldn’t have been able to muster enough muscle or aggression to knock the skin off a rice-pudding, but it’s clear that it was something we were having to consider, to form a view of, and it’s also clear that it was something to which we had been partially socialised to ascribe value to.
We went to the same secondary school where they put us in separate classes and things were never the same between us again until recently. There were two top sets in an eight-form entry: I was in one, Mark was in the other. That gave you a certain magic, and my quite ornate ability with a football at my feet gave me a further spell that kept most of the physical bullying away though there was some pretty vicious name calling. If you have freckled skin, it can be very upsetting being continually called ‘spotty’.
Lower down the great sifting of students based on their results in the 11+ (or whatever the easy pattern recognition tests they gave us at the end of primary actually were) things could be less comfortable. In the Lord of the Flies atmosphere of an all-boys school, you did not want to appear to be weak. If you appeared weak, your life was made into a deeply traumatising bath of a misery that was almost total.
Even in the top set, there could be bullying. Keith the Teeth, for some strange reason, had orange deposits on his teeth, a permanent collection of his breakfast that must have taken significant neglect to maintain on such a regular basis. He was quite spindly, plausibly undernourished, possibly neglected and for this reason, Inch, a very good goalkeeper with a scathing sense of satire seemed to think it reasonable to treat Keith as his personal valet. “Keith, polish my shoes. Keith, go to the shops for me.” He would go so far as to instruct Keith to steal items for him from the local W. H. Smith which all worked very nicely indeed for a while until Keith was arrested.
Tim was a very bright, bespectacled mathematician and scientist who no doubt went onto have a successful career[1] and lovely family and who, in his teenage years, lived next door to my uncle and aunt in this strange, semi wooded area, Coneyhall. The residents there were a mix of middle-class and aspirant working-class who’d moved out of the metropolis. Neal also lived in Coneyhall. Neal could be something of a bully, proudly so. Like myself, he was half-Irish, and he was a very good, quite aggressive football player. My being half-Irish caused him to be fond of me despite the fact I was not the specimen he was physically.
At some point, Tim must have offended Neal’s sensibilities, and I recall a break time in which this resulted in a physical ‘fight’. It was not a fair match-up. Tim could barely see without his glasses and was a complete innocent in realms of the punch up in which Neal, having two tough older brothers, was expert. Neal brutalised him. It was gut wrenching to witness, physically nauseating, repulsive. The memory of Tim flailing, glasses knocked off, shirt torn as Neal span him around again, punched him forcefully yet again, tore another final strip of human dignity from him still makes me wince forty-five years on. We watched on, relieved it was not us enduring the humiliation of a brutal, public mauling.
Teachers will all know a version of the braying crowd gathering around a fight between two people in a playground or corridor. There are calls along the lines of “fight, fight, fight”, and a pulsing circle of people gathers around the combatants to enjoy the adrenalin thrill of watching two frightened humans taking lumps out of each other. The crowd also forms a barrier to any teacher attempting to intervene and means the public show of violence can continue for as long as is possible. I’ve had cause to (try to) stop several of these in my career, and they are frightening for everyone concerned. The teacher is walking into an arena in which they are possibly in significant physical peril as well as being in danger of damaging their reputation in the school. A smack in the mouth for sir or miss is unlikely to bolster their prestige with students. It’s an unpleasant human instinct to fight each other, but it exists. It’s not limited to one culture though some cultures, anecdotally, seem to prize it more highly than others. Elements of the white working-class might be said to value it very highly indeed.
When I presented at Charles Darwin School on this subject, I bumped into someone I had attended school with who was four or five years older than me: John. John had had a long career as head of PE at the school and was, by this time, perceived to be a very senior teacher, a mainstay of the school, a ‘legend’. I located a dim memory of him being continually being paraded in front of the students at the school we both attended as he was very much a hero to the younger boys - myself included. He was held as a paragon and as a great role model. He was clearly a very nice guy, well brought up, not in any way a bully, but the reason he was always at the front of assembly after assembly being clapped by the school was that he could run incredibly fast and was a superb goalkeeper. By the time I had reached the age of sixteen or so, I was arguably joint best in the school at English and the best at drama. These things had almost no status at all. What did have status was the realm of the physical. Our school senior football team, a team that I was just short of being good enough for, was amongst the very best in the country, and our heroes were contained in that team, the people we looked up to were amateur athletes. No one came anywhere near making it as a pro.
Two students in my year group ended up going to Oxbridge. They had almost no status within the school community, none at all, and Nick, the school swot, was, unfortunately for him and shamefully for the school, subjected to cruel and unusual treatment and held to be something of a pariah even by the top sets.
What working-class males value, culturally, is the physical realm. We sort of value fighting, and we value sport. Everything else can go jump. Sport is manly as it prepares our bodies for the physical labour we’ll probably do as adults. Fighting is manly as there is threat around every corner, and it generally only comes knocking on the noses of those who appear as if they might struggle in that arena. Violence and its threat are a currency,[2] and our sense of ourselves is engrained from an early age and is partially linked to a capacity for (unevidenced threats of) brutality. It may also be the potential presence of violence at every corner that causes the thing that Lynsey Hanley describes as “learned incuriosity”[3] amongst males: you poke your head round this corner and there might be a kicking attached.
There is an idea in the working class that a certain version of masculinity is to be lionised and that, underneath this, there is some misogyny, a belief in the innate superiority of the male. This can sometimes be viewed in the idea, propagated quietly once, that all women are “mad”.
Boys develop their sense of masculinity against the backdrop of a culture which espouses boxing as being one of the permitted ways out of the ghetto and continues to eulogise violent murderers as being the salt of the earth. The “Oh, the Krays never hurt their own, mind you mad Frankie Fraser[4] he was a bit tasty” nonsense.
As small children, if our dads are around, we play at wrestling. Usually, they let us win, but sometimes we are given a message of their total physical superiority over us. We are given the not altogether subtle reminder of our own weakness and their total domination of the arena of the home. We repeat this with our own children. Generally, it is the innocent training in the physical realm and an excuse for the cuddle that males are often denied.
But there are darker strains of the physical world. I’ve been speaking recently to a friend who has allowed me to write this on condition of being anonymised, and he talks with the sadness of a well full of souls about the brutal treatment of children within the home environment. This goes way beyond the line of playful wrestling a long way into the landscape of extreme physical abuse: he tells of being stripped naked, brought into a room and whipped, he utters phrases that I recall from a less violent childhood than his, “I’ll knock you into next Wednesday,” he makes remarks about the existence of violence towards women which I had always thought was completely against our code but clearly happens/happened more than I thought.
Kerry Hudson talks of the hypervigilance that happens to children when they grow up with the constant threat of violence, how she would find herself, “Looking for pockets of comfort or relief or gain or for things that might suddenly, violently explode,”[5] along with constant wariness, “When you learn to assess who’s a threat and who isn’t”.[6]
Think of such children. They still exist. Think of how difficult it would be to concentrate on the ephemera of ox-bow lakes when you are regularly witnessing your father beating your mum up. Think of how vulnerable they are. Think of how tough they will eventually become.
My friend tells the story of his own conviction for violent disorder and that his first adventures in pugilism were in the family home. The moment he was able to get any purchase in fighting back, he did so. He didn’t win, but he was being trained in the art of violence, and he became more than competent. His criminal conviction came at an early age, and he talks of it having straightened him out of a little. Someone had behaved in an admittedly utterly abysmal manner to someone he had loved and, one evening, my friend saw his enemy out and about and chased him in his car. My friend’s victim back himself into a corner at the entrance of a municipal building. It was an unwise move which resulted in him spending two weeks in hospital after being seriously bashed up.[7]
So, there is a very dark side to our physical culture. It will still exist to an extent. While I wouldn’t be able to estimate a guess as to how many modern families use corporal punishment or whether it was a generational thing, I would imagine it still goes on. (It’s perhaps worth asking your class how many of them are in homes with corporal punishment. You might be surprised, and it would give you an interesting insight into the home lives of your students. I did this once at a multi-ethnic school in Croydon. Only one child in the class was raised in a home without corporal punishment. Entirely coincidentally, she was the gentlest, most balanced, nicest girl in the class). Some of the middle-class ideas or taboos about this don’t exist, and many working-class people hit their kids, regardless of whether it’s legal or not. It’s regarded as perfectly normal, I’ve heard the phrase “there’s nothing wrong with a bit of a clip around the ear,” in a Penge pub, and there can be lapses of control. If you use corporal punishment there is always a danger, if this is not an understatement, of going too far (though to my mind using it at all is going too far).
Acting out in anger with children is always a bad idea and, to my recollection, this happens sometimes. I’ve previously referenced the notion of the ‘good hiding’. I was subject to this a few times as a child. It is traumatising.
I’ve spoken to people of my mother and father’s generation about this and they’ve all expressed the sincerest of regrets about it, saying something along the lines of, “We wish we hadn’t hit the kids, but It’s just what everyone did.” I have no idea if it remains what “just everyone does”, but the result of this in terms of factors that might affect education is that it makes violence an acceptable thing, a currency one might deal in and use, one in which you are already more experienced than middle-class children who have not been hit as children. Violence becomes an acceptable response to difficult situations. This, of course, will have repercussions in terms of the effect on education. It will result in exclusions. It will result in perhaps not feeling the need to develop the skills of articulation that one requires in order to properly negotiate. It will result in worse exam results as a consequence.
Working-class males are subject to a ‘toughening up’ as children. Crying gets you nothing if you’re a boy. It’ll destroy any previous reputation for toughness, and it might even get you another hiding. “Stop crying, or I’ll give you something to cry about.”
And when we play, we play physically, often outside. We run races against each other all day, we play football, we go up the local park to play hide and seek, to climb trees, to be shouted at by the ‘parkie’. Our lives playing out are to an extent rather carefree, but our entirely physical culture limits us at school. School wants us to sit still. School wants us to be quiet. School wants us to read. But we may not have learnt to read at all before school, and we arrive far behind the middle-class kids whose mums and dads have been reading to and with them from a very early age. We’re behind from day one. We stay there. The gap widens as middle-class children have more ‘cultural’ experiences than us, more days out, more foreign holidays, more trips to the theatre all of which have an impact on their oral as well as vocabulary.
And if we pick up the book, and if we attempt to do well and if we, against all the odds, do very well at school, this may be taken as a threat to the hegemonic version of masculinity our culture specialises in, a masculinity that values physical attributes over anything related to the the intellectual realm. If we are not really that physically inclined, if we are a bit clumsy, if we are a ‘bookworm’, we are somehow unmanly, unmasculine and are emasculated and feminised by our own families. Booker Prize winning novelist, Douglas Stuart, when being interviewed by Alan Yentob, records something along the lines of the reaction a ‘sensitive’ working-class boy might have from the culture in which he has been grown: “When I was a kid, I was just this creative, feminine, free spirit. And very early, about six years old, I was told that was a wrong thing to be.”[8] He references the very clear “gender coding” that working class families have and how difficult it can be, or is made, for those who do not necessarily fit neatly into the prescribed block. He speaks of being “bad” at masculinity and his attempts at being ‘masculine’ being performative, that some of us in the community are forced to modify our every action “just to be invisible.”
Anecdotally, I am still, at the age of 59, as the father of three kids, regarded within elements of my extended family as being, to a humorous extent, a little effeminate, vulnerable even. (George Orwell said, that working class Britain is the only culture that regards speaking a foreign language as being a sign of effeminacy): “nearly every Englishman of working-class origin considers it effeminate to pronounce a foreign word correctly.”[9] This devotion to ignorance is totalitarian in its reach. Anything that is not in our knowledge is satirised as being feminine.
I’ve written about this mockery of achievement in Rules for Mavericks. It is, of course the height of rudeness and arrogant self-indulgence to quote your own previous work, but it applies here: “One of the duties (or functions) of any tribe is to stay together so that the members of that tribe might find strength in their number and, thus, survive. In wanting to explore realms outside of the immediate landscape or experience of the tribe, you are not only breaking fundamental customs and taboos, but are theoretically putting your safety and that of the tribe at risk. If your parents’ primary concern has always been for your safety (as it always has), then you cannot experiment with what you might achieve outside of their immediate perspectives and expect them to judge your actions through any other prism.
It is also in the nature of human conformity to see any one person’s desire to escape the position their social and economic background has bequeathed them as having ‘ideas above their station’ and as being unrealistic. The notion of station goes by another name: it is called the class (or more accurately in recent times, the feudal) system. Those at the top of it profit from those at the bottom mocking anyone who shares their place (their ‘station’) attempting to rise above it. The coward scoffs at bravery just as the slave scoffs at the free man. It is (stupid but) easy to scoff at bravery. Your desire to stand apart from the massed ranks of the rank masses will be taken to be a criticism of them (which indeed it is). But the implied criticism of their life ‘choices’ that your desire to be something apart from them represents will not be taken kindly. Their response to your ambition will be derisive laughter and ridicule.”[10]
This tribal dragging down function, which Pierre Bourdieu describes as the obsequium, in which the community polices the ambitions of the young, results in a perverse valuation of certain forms of knowledge and the disavowal of what is referred to as “book learning”. Book learning is distrusted in certain parts of the community. The feeling that George Gregory expressed as existing in the last century that “books were not intended for people like us and were not actually necessary”[11] is still in existence. Knowledge itself is held ambiguously. To own too much of it is to stick out, and this can make you a pariah in a community that seeks to keep its head down since drawing attention to yourself can be a means of alerting feared forces as to our continued desire for existence.
Being a reader is to advertise yourself as potentially rejecting the folkways of the tribe and is therefore a means of attracting resentment. Flora Thompson described this feeling in Lark Rise to Candleford. It rings true now. “Their ideal for themselves and their children was to keep to the level of normal. To them outstanding ability was no better than outstanding stupidity.”[12] If, as Joseph Starmer remarked, “you only have a small amount of exact knowledge, and if you are a truthful sort of person, your knowledge limits your arguments. But when you know nothing at all you can argue north, south, east, and west, just as your fancy takes you.”[13] I am not the only person from this heritage to remark on this. Lynsey Hanley writes “Growing up I could never understand how people – peers, parents – could be so keen on ignorance, to appear to prefer it to knowledge.”[14]
This is not a recent development. Historically, any working-class person who has sought to raise themselves through devotion to learning has been treated with immense distrust by the community that sired them. Ellen Johnston, who was known in Glasgow as the ‘Factory Girl Poet’ wrote that, while the more intelligent of her fellow factory workers sought her company and conversation, in other quarters she was less esteemed: “The girls around me did not understand, consequently, they wondered, became jealous and told falsehoods of me … I was a living martyr and suffered their insults.”[15] And Scottish cotton spinner, Charles Campbell who joined a club of twelve men to discuss the classical literature they were reading in the early 1800s noted the hostility to this practice amongst his folk. “No poor devil was ever more tortured, or persecuted for his attachment to books than I was. Every cross accident – every misfortune that chequered my early life, was ascribed to my love of books.”[16] Factory worker, V. W. Garratt, writing just before the outbreak of the Second World War, observed how this dragging down effect operated: “To be oneself courageously and unashamed in matters of dress, talk, and action, meant running the gauntlet of ridicule and tribal opposition. Much easier to fall into the rut and become moulded to mediocrity.”[17] These oppressive structures and forces operate in much the same way today: the structures of the factory seep deep into family life so that only a specific form of masculinity and perhaps of femininity are allowed to flourish, if that is the correct word. Garratt noted that working-class children and young adults were “growing up in an atmosphere of constraint in which individual thought and action stubbornly follow the groove of class prejudice, there eventually emerges the ‘sound, solid British working-man’.”[18]
So, education for working-class children is the generational project that separates generations.
It strikes me as odd that my mum, who left school as soon as she was able to without a qualification to her name was quite so insistent on it for me, and I am at a loss to explain why it took hold or why it seemed to have less power for my brother who is quite a bit more intelligent than me and is an electrician. What those not from the social order do not recognise is how the ‘educated’ or ‘bright’[19] child becomes separated from his or her own culture – the distance it causes between father and son, mother and daughter, can be difficult to bridge. I admire my father above all men, and he has never been anything less than loving and kind, but there have been times when we have been unable to find the shared language to communicate with each other. He is not able to speak in mine and so, in order that we might communicate at all effectively, we have to speak in his. I like this version of communication. We have a shared set of idioms that we both enjoy, but it limits our conversations which nowadays are chiefly about politics about as much as his choice of daily newspaper limits his perspectives and understandings of the same.
Education makes you not belong anymore. It makes you not part of the thing you were meant to be. My Dad is proud, I think, of my sons’ achievements as they are the fruit of a generational project that my mum initiated but is perhaps a little more ambivalent about my own. He encourages me to write and is aware, because his retired teacher friends have told him so, that I am good at it[20] and, I think, cherishes it when I bring him a book I’ve written. But I am not sure he has ever read any of them, and the conversations about politics between a left leaning former broadsheet education columnist and the reader of a right wing, mid-market tabloid can be unbalanced. I tend to do most of the listening and most of the being reasonable.
[1] I’ve just found him on facebook. He was a significantly capable linguist. It’s interesting how our culture stereotypes those we think are swots as being somehow ‘sciency’.
[2] My own brother speaks rather approvingly of his capacity for viciousness, and he alleges that my dad has the same ‘ability’. He’s a big man, my dad, with forearms trained by decades of manual labour that are roughly the same in circumference as my thighs. You wouldn’t want a punch from him even in his eighties.
[3] Lynsey Hanley, Estates: An Intimate History (London: Granta, 2007) p.7
[4] I once shared a dressing room with a very old Frankie Fraser. We had a decent enough chat.
[5] Hudson, Kerry (2020) Lowborn: Growing up, Getting Away and Returning to Britain’s Poorest Towns (London: Vintage) p.??
[6] Hudson, Kerry (2020) Lowborn: Growing up, Getting Away and Returning to Britain’s Poorest Towns (London: Vintage) p.??
[7] My friend also tells the story of a punch up in Italy where, in the space of four seconds and four punches, he broke someone’s nose, their cheekbone and detached both retina from his victim’s eyes.
[8] Douglas Stuart, interviewed by Alan Yentob in Imagine, Douglas Stuart: Love, Hope and Grit, BBC, 14th November 2022, https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001f89c/imagine-2022-douglas-stuart-love-hope-and-grit
[9] George Orwell, The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius (London: Penguin Modern Classics, 2018) p.16
[10] Phil Beadle, Rule for Mavericks: A Manifesto for Dissident Creatives (Carmarthen: Crown House, 2017) pp. 44-45
[11] George Gregory, untitled TS, BUL, p.2
[12] Flora Thompson, Lark Rise to Candleford (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987) pp.109-111
[13] Joseph Stamper, So Long Ago (Hutchinson First Edition, 1960) pp. 185-186
[14] Lynsey Hanley, Estates: An Intimate History (London: Granta, 2012) Preface to the Paperback Edition p.x11
[15] Ellen Johnston, Autobiography, Poems and Songs (Glasgow: William Love, 1867) p.9
[16] Charles Campbell, Memoirs of Charles Campbell (Glasgow: James Duncan, 1828) pp.3-6
[17] V. W. Garratt, A Man in the Street (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1939) pp.80
[18] V. W. Garratt, A Man in the Street (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1939) pp.81
[19] Cash Carraway points out that this word is a “derogatory” term for clever working-class kids. Carraway, Cash (2019), Skint Estate: A Memoir of Poverty, Motherhood and Survival (London: Ebury Press) p.37
[20] Though Mum got extremely upset at one point when, interviewed briefly in The Times, I described her as working-class. She was absolutely incandescent about it
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The memoir, one post at a time? Great read.