The Grammar of Privilege, and Our Retreat from Honesty

You'll have to wait till Sunday for my thoughts on Slippery Dave's Downing Street Diner, Pastygate and the rest. For the moment, a few other thoughts.  I was at a Canterbury Grammar School (Simon Langton Boys) yesterday to debate the worthlessness of the Tory Party. The event itself was a follow-up to a similar debate I'd taken part in at the King's School, an ancient independent foundation, in the same rather moving city. Moving? Why so?   In Canterbury there are many lingering traces of the lovelier England that has now been pushed to one side by bulldozers, money, worldliness and egalitarianism. The cathedral itself (surprisingly small for the mother church of Anglicanism) on a sunny late afternoon in Spring probably looks as beautiful as it has at any time in all its centuries of history. And Evensong on Wednesday evening, with the lamentations of Jeremiah in a Purcell setting, and the Psalms chanted as they have been from the beginning, came close to what it ought to be, the most profound and intense expression of English Christianity in literature, music, architecture and ceremony.

Of course, modernism has crept in.  the lessons from the Bible were in plastic, poetry-free English. Then the usual problem arose with the  137th Psalm, which begins with the sublime lament, one of the saddest expressions of exile and loss ever written in the history of the world, elevated into great English poetry by Miles Coverdale : 'By the waters of Babylon, we sat down and wept: when we remembered thee, O Sion. As for our harps, we hanged them up:  upon the trees that are therein. For they that led us away captive required of us then a song, and melody in our heaviness: sing us one of the songs of Sion. 
'How shall we sing the Lord's song : in a strange land? If I forget thee, O Jerusalem: let my right hand forget her cunning. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth: yea, if I prefer not Jerusalem in my mirth'.

So far so good. In this we hear the authentic voice of the enslaved Children of Israel toiling under their cruel masters in Babylon, jeeringly compelled to sing for their oppressors' entertainment, and muttering under their breath their abiding loyalty to their own land and faith. But – and there's quite a bit of this in the Psalms (check out the 109th,  a lengthy and terrible revenge curse which features twice in the astonishing ghost stories of M.R.James) - the authenticity doesn't stop there.

Except that in the English church, it does. It must have been years since any choir has gone on to sing the final atrocious words of the 137th Psalm: 'Remember the children of Edom, O Lord , in the day of Jerusalem: how they said . 'Down with it, down with it, even to the ground!' O daughter of Babylon, wasted with misery, yea happy shall he be that rewardeth thee, as thou hast served us. Blessed shall he be that taketh thy children: and throweth them against the stones'.

This is a disgusting sentiment, and runs clean contrary to the New Testament injunction to forgive and love thine enemy. It's also a bit of a problem for those of my faith who treat the Bible as a Christian Koran and intone the silly words 'This is the word of the Lord' after all and any reading from the scriptures. No it's not. In this case it's the word, albeit his true feelings, of an embittered, half-starved slave, quite possibly with a hook through his nose by which his captors drag him about,  silent under the lashes and taunts of his jailers, and seething with impotent feelings of vengeance and resentment,  cruelty and loss, having almost certainly seen his own family snatched from him and either killed or raped, or perhaps both.

And, I might add, what God could reasonably stand against such feelings, except one who had himself been the victim of mob rule, falsely condemned at a show trial, ritually humiliated, tortured and eventually driven to his own death in an extremity of torment, and still managing to forgive those responsible?

(for an unEnglish but extraordinarily powerful exposition of this and other thoughts about the uniqueness of Jesus of Nazareth, for believers and unbelievers alike, may I recommend the famous and astonishing sermon 'The Seven-Way King' delivered 40 years ago by the American Pastor S.M. Lockeridge,   and still to be found in various versions on the Internet).

I came out of the cathedral into the level evening light which picks out the loveliness of the carved stone, and reminds the visitor that England's cathedral cities contain riches to match those of the wonders of the world, yet hardly any people in these islands bother to visit them any more. On the advice of an old friend who lives in Canterbury, I slipped down an undistinguished side-street and found a tranquil, wholly English garden, modest, peaceful, informal, verdant, not overlooked, lovely , with an ancient chapel over a stream.

Then I stayed the night in that friend's glorious mediaeval house, hidden behind a modest frontage, full of the spirit of England, independent, guarded with privacy, unassuming , settled, thoughtful and enduring.

It was a good end to the day.  The debate, with the Tory MP Julian Brazier, would have been familiar to any reader here.  Mr Brazier would be better off out of a party that does not really believe what he believes in, and I told him so.  But he hasn't recognised this ...yet. The setting , in a school run to high and exacting academic standards, but without fees, was a good deal less familiar – and yes, as the index will attest, I do understand that the surviving grammar schools of England are besieged by so many parents that they are not really grammar schools, as such things existed before 1965, but super-super-selective academies falling far short of the demand for good selective secondary schools

So it is interesting that Kent County Council yesterday sought to expand two of its existing grammar schools, planning to create an extra 120 grammar places. This was in response to a petition bearing 2,600 people, which just shows how inadequate it is. even as a local response. It is even more inadequate as a national response. But it has to be, since in most of the country, where they do not now exist,  grammar schools are now actually illegal, a fact so astonishing in itself that I shall repeat it. In most of the United Kingdom it is against the law to open a new selective state secondary school.

Why on earth should that be so? Continuing supporters of our unhinged, suicidal obsession with using schools as engines of egalitarian social engineering (and to hell with the education)  are invited to explain why such a law might be desirable or necessary. I know the answer. But will they admit it?

I note that some readers don't share my astonishment that members of a carefully-selected team for University Challenge were clueless about John Keat's 'Ode to Autumn'. One or two even seem a bit cross that their own lack of knowledge of this poem is viewed, by me or anyone else, as a disadvantage.

Well, I am pleased if they are discontented. It might encourage them to put this right, and become better people by doing so. As a public service, even though it is the wrong time of year, here is the Ode. If you didn't know it, don't you wish you did, and aren't you glad you've now encountered it?

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;
To bend with apples the mossed cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o'erbrimmed their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reaped furrow sound asleep,
Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers;
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cider-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too, -
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing, and now with treble soft
The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

Next week, we might have a go at John of Gaunt's dying speech , which I don't suppose anyone under 30 knows either.