On the basis that you should always shoot the crocodile nearest your boat, the immediate problem I needed to deal with was hunger.
I was heading west through the valleys of Wales, thick with cold, pissed off and with at least an hour to go to get to my B and B (‘we can’t guarantee to let you in if you’re late, see’), when I suddenly needed food more than I had ever needed it before. Having pulled off the motorway, I found myself in a series of long, dark and entirely food-free mining villages, all of which could have come straight out of a Richard Llewellyn novel, or a Max Boyce song. After about five miles, and with the prospect of eating my own socks and shoes when I finally got to the B and B, I found a dimly-lit pub-cum-working-man’s club on the crest of a hill, parked up and walked in.
It’s true what they say about heads turning and conversation stopping when the stranger walks in and, for a second or two, I was tempted to call for silence and give them my myxomatosis joke routine in desperation. After a while, most of them turned back to watch the telly where someone was playing someone else in a Champion’s league match, so I thought better of it and asked the bloke behind the bar if he was still doing food. He was, and I ordered, and it was great. Just what I wanted, and fully deserving of the 5 Tripadvisor rating I gave it this afternoon. Basically, it saved my life.
Just as I was licking the last of the tartare sauce off my lips, the landlady came and sat at my table, and asked ‘what wind had blown’ me here. She was the loveliest woman on earth, apart from the one that I am married to, and I almost booked next summer’s family holiday there on the spot. We agreed to keep in touch, and I’m sure we will.
You can be as egalitarian as you like to all of us there present and pretend that the differences were meaningless, but you would also be missing the point, which was that I theoretically fitted in about as well as a cat might in a dog rescue centre. You can take the boy out of Eton, and all that. But what we had in common, and what we always have in common if we choose to, was our humanity. That and the utter futility of labels.
I was thinking all this through as I headed westwards into the night down the A48.
My old school, for reasons I completely understand, is getting a very bad press at the moment. By a process of tragic genetic coincidences, it has been partly responsible for producing some of the key people who are, as my children put it, ‘f****g over’ our country. People hate Eton with more or less the intensity with which I hated it for the first three years of my time there, if for rather different reasons. The Labour Party, in another masterstroke of shooting the wrong fox, is sponsoring an education debate at their conference this weekend with the slightly chilling title of ‘Abolish Eton’. (But then, with a leadership who preferred to go to IRA funerals than the ones of the soldiers who were killed by them, one can dimly see how all this makes sense). We live in a media world of heroes and scapegoats and very little in between, which probably never makes for the most illuminating debate.
I’m lucky. No, not because I went to Eton, even though that was a privilege that it took me another thirty years to appreciate, and which I kind of hid in the years between. No, I’m lucky because I genuinely have grown up not to give a toss about who in my life comes from where. For the record, Eton at its best provides a vibrant and humanist education that creates, alternately, a relatively small number of arrogant idiots who have an imperious sense of entitlement, and a large number of people who genuinely want to make the world a better place, and have been given the equipment to try to do so. Just like everywhere else, in fact, only with marginally more of the former category.
I don’t blame anyone for wanting to make state schools so good that their private equivalents become anachronisms. We all should. I certainly don’t blame anyone who thinks that people like me got an unfair slice of the cake. We did, and most of us probably know that we did, and worry about it more than you think. But I suppose I do question people who simply demonise the entire output of one prominent school just because it’s a bit of a soft target, and safe to do it.
The school that gave us our Prime Minister and Jacob Rees-Mogg also gave us Hugh Laurie, Adam Nicolson, Justin Welby, Matthew Pinsent, Rory Stewart, Tom Hiddlestone, Eddie Redmayne, Jonathan Porritt and, yes, Princes William and Harry, to name but a few.
And it gave me Michael Kidson, who taught me to love words. And for that alone, even though I hated about 60 percent of my time there, I will always be profoundly grateful.
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