So, Anyway...

by John Cleese

IF WORK is best defined as “What you have to do, but would rather not,” there were two other Clifton activities that qualified: going to chapel and Officer Training Corps (i.e., soldiering for teenagers). Chapel took up a lot of time. Just as at St. Peter’s, there was a Church of England service every workday morning, a fifteen-minute affair which took place in Clifton’s remarkably beautiful chapel. Then, on Sunday, there was a full one-hour marathon, with a proper sermon, and hymn-singing, and crab racing, and fire-eating, and a trampoline act. To look back on these religious practices from the peak of spiritual perfection that I have now achieved is to wonder, “What the fuck did we think we were doing?” We had all been taught how to behave: to walk more slowly than usual, looking downwards; to sit, fresh-faced and attentive and slightly awed, as we repeated well-known catchphrases of uncertain meaning (“Lord of hosts,” “Son of God,” “paschal lamb,” “life everlasting”), none of which had ever been explained but which, if spoken with sufficient sincerity, would apparently keep the bogeyman away; then to stand and sing obscure lyrics about the hosts of Gilead creeping around after dark, or rousing military marches like “Onward Christian Soldiers” that were contrary to the idea “Blessed are the peacemakers”; and then to ask God to do us favours, even though the Lord’s Prayer taught by Jesus specifically says, “Thy will be done on earth,” which clearly indicates it isn’t.

Much more significant than my disdain for Williams was the fact that I started to become sceptical of authority as a whole. I’d always been naughty in class (when I thought I could get away with it), but now I began to find my way around school rules, and to take the major authority figures less seriously. The school marshal was one victim of my new-found disrespect. Responsible for a wide range of disciplinary matters, he had always struck me as rather forbidding when he entered the classroom every morning to check on attendance. However, when he asked me, a few weeks after the beginning of my micro-revolt, why I had missed chapel that day, I told him that I had been walking along Lower Redland Road, and that as I’d passed the big block of police flats opposite the police station, someone had opened a window on the top floor and thrown a pan of hot fat all over me; and that, because of this, I had had to go back to shower and change my clothes. There was a stunned silence. The marshal stared at me, as did the class. I held my nerve and looked straight back at him. After about half an hour, he said, “Do you really expect me to believe that?” “Marshal, I swear that is exactly what happened,” I replied. He gave me an odd look. I knew that he knew this was an outrageous fib. “All right,” he said, and he ticked his clipboard and left. The class looked at me admiringly. But I think that he had enjoyed it too.

My main criticism of my time at Clifton is that, at this point, when any master could easily have steered me in the direction of a new interest, I was left entirely to my own resources. And the truth is, I was not very resourceful. But then, in fairness to me, no teacher ever tried to stimulate my intellectual curiosity either. Nor, in five years, did any of them spot that I had any creative abilities whatsoever. I remember writing an essay on “Time,” which I thought rather ingenious: I spent the entire essay explaining how I had failed to get down to writing the essay because I had prevaricated and procrastinated and wasted time, and the last line of the 1,500-word essay was an apology for not having written it. If I’d been a teacher reading this, I would have spotted talent. Unfortunately you have to have some creative ability before you can recognise it in others.