Volume 2, Number 7 · May 14, 1964
The Playing Fields
By Neal Ascherson
Gentlemanly Power: British Leadership and the Public School System
by Robert Wilkinson
Oxford, 260 pp., $6.00
When I left an English public school, I wanted to like every person I met and find the good in every place which harbored me. Exclusiveness seemed to have been the trouble. My first private boarding-school, where I went at the age of eight, was actually separated from the village school by a towering wall with a chicken-wire battlement; over it came only blind-launched missiles of the country limestone and impotent cries of hate in an accent we could not understand. On the eve of the 1945 general election, one of our masters told a group of us that a Socialist victory would immediately bring workmen round to knock the wall down, and submerge us beneath the strange children with stone weapons who would come screaming through the breach. At first I believed this. Later, at a public school proper, that wall of exclusion came to seem the decisive enemy; in reading, I escaped to the primitive equalities of barbarian Europe, and dreaded the long lessons on the Glorious Revolution, or the eighteenth century, in which every decade seemed to lay another course of stones between classes of men.
Review, 1589 words
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