Without doubt, there are thousands of good-to-brilliant photographers out there, most of whose names and work you or I will never have come across, and probably never will. Nonetheless, I feel I have a good grasp of the Who's Who of photography, admittedly with certain blind spots in areas that don't interest me, like fashion or sport. Despite having only really seriously engaged with the subject around 1984, at the age of thirty, it's very rare that I come across a major figure I have not heard of before. By contrast, I have been reading poetry since around 1970, when an anthology of modern verse featured on our O-level English syllabus, continuing into A-levels and a spell of intense study [1] at two universities that very nearly led to an academic literary career (phew! narrow escape...), followed by a casual but ongoing interest that continues to the present day: I'm one of that tiny minority who actually buy books of poetry. And yet: it seems that nearly every week I learn of some notable who clearly features prominently in the poets' Who's Who but is either unknown to me, or exists in that long but largely unexplored list of "I think I've heard of" names that includes the likes of Premier League footballers, rappers, tennis players, classical musicians, second-rank politicians, and most actors.
The latest of these pop-up poets is Peter Scupham, whose obituary appeared in the Guardian and elsewhere recently. I suppose I must have come across his name before – or am I confusing him with the drummer with one of those '70s Prog bands? – but had certainly never knowingly read any of his work, and had no conception of his place within the highly diverse, not to say intensely factional world of poetry-writing. But, beyond the thought, "Well, look, here's yet another one", there were three things that got my interest in that obituary.
First, it appears he taught at St. Christopher's School in Letchworth for thirty years. Letchworth is the first English "Garden City", built along Ebenezer Howard's utopian lines in North Hertfordshire in the early 20th century, and a forerunner of the post-WW2 New Towns like neighbouring Stevenage, where I was born and brought up. Letchworth became the location of publisher J.M. Dent's Temple Press, where my grandfather moved from London to find work as a bookbinder before the First World War, and where he met and married my grandmother – a local girl who also worked at the Press – and where my father was born in 1918. Yes, dear reader, I'm a third generation North Herts utopian.
St. Christopher's School is an example of what I only know as a British phenomenon, but may well be more universal: fee-paying private schools run along "progressive" lines, generally based on Montessori or Quaker principles. To an end-to-end state-educated person like me, the child of intelligent parents who were obliged to leave school for work at age 14 in the 1930s, such schools are an embodiment of the contradictions of Britain's class-bound society: if you want your children to be brought up in a free-thinking, happy, unpressured, child-centred environment, safe from bullying and the worst kinds of peer influence, then you'd better be in a position to pay for it. I note that St. Christopher's non-boarding senior school fees are £6,827 per term, in advance, plus "extras" [2].
Naturally, you might run into a few people who had been to such schools at university (although, unlike conventional private schools, university is not their natural destination) but, as it happened, those of us who played in our school sports teams would sometimes get a tantalising glimpse of these fee-paying educational utopias at weekends. For entirely snobbish reasons, in the 1950s my state grammar school for boys had abandoned football – the lingua franca of world sport – in favour of rugby and hockey. This idiotic decision meant that few other local state schools were in a position to offer us matches – for hockey in particular – so "away" games meant Saturday morning coach journeys to the more far-flung, rural corners of Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire, and Essex, where the private schools were located. Unlikely as it seems, I was the First XI hockey goalkeeper all the way through secondary school, so I got to visit these exciting Edenic enclaves where boys and girls mixed freely, uniforms were not worn, hair-length went unmonitored, and teachers were addressed by first name. One of these was St. Christopher's, and another was the Friends School at Saffron Walden, a Quaker establishment where, as I discovered a few years ago in an exchange of emails, photographer Pradip Malde was a pupil at the time.
The second thing that got my attention was this quotation from the Guardian obituary:
He was a brilliant teacher, moving effortlessly from scholarly close reading with the sixth form to verbal game-playing with younger pupils – for whom his guiding principle was “keep English sweet” – while treating all administrative chores with amused contempt. Once, during an especially tedious staff meeting, he decreed that we should each write a poem before it finished: mine ended up in the bin, his ("The Sledge Teams") in the Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry.
That's hilarious, I think. I can't say that any of my own marginal scribbles to library staff meeting minutes have ever achieved any kind of success, but I do know exactly how he felt. The tedium of meetings is an excellent spur to creativity; you need to find some distraction to prevent yourself from punching some waffling windbag in the face, or from falling asleep. Mind you, one of my more elderly ex-colleagues did use to fall ostentatiously asleep in meetings; his snoring would usually kick in somewhere around "matters arising". Boredom is not necessarily a bad thing, of course, and is something children need to encounter in their lives and learn to use or at least endure, and yet they so rarely do, these days. Sundays, which used to be so excruciatingly boring when everything was closed and nothing at all was happening other than dutifully dull visits to grandparents or church, are now just a day like any other. The motivation for kids to actually do or make something stemming from an inner creative impulse seems to shrink further every year, only to be replaced by the listless and complacent passive consumption of virtual entertainment. Or so says this grumpy old man, for what it's worth.
Anyway, the third thing was a quotation from Peter Scupham himself, also in the obituary:
The Hinterland (1977) is centred on a sequence of 15 interlinked sonnets that move between the outbreak of the first world war and the mid-1970s summer of Dutch elm disease. In a note written at the time, Scupham said: “I feel acutely ill-at-ease in places where now is the only dimension visible; life is a texture where past and present become each other.”
I was initially intrigued by that idea: that we experience life as a texture, a sort of fabric where past and present are interwoven, and that the balance of the two elements can be wrong, leading to psychic discomfort. After all, where is more alienating than the nowhere-but-now spaces of airports and shopping malls? But then I realised that I am uncomfortable – "rubbed the wrong way", perhaps, to use a textural metaphor – with what I suspect is its underlying conservativism, not least as expressed by a man whose later life was apparently dedicated to restoring his very own Tudor mansion. Too much "past" in the weave is surely just as much of a problem.
Of course, if, like me, you spent your first eighteen years in an environment where nearly everything was new and made to a "good enough" specification, you are likely to develop a fascination with the persistence of the old into the present, whether it be architectural details like sash windows in the older buildings at school, or ancient churches surrounded by new estates, inhabited by incomers with no family connection to the parish or the occupants of the graveyard. But, if life can be said to have a texture made up of past and present, then, as with the "texture" of schooling, it clearly varies tremendously: from the plush, to the utilitarian, to the shoddy; from real wood and leather, to formica and plastic, to mouldy plaster and rotten floorboards. I think anyone, given the choice, would take the texture of "all now" over "all rotten" any day, however soulless it might appear to those living within a more privileged texture. And more and more of us are surely becoming wary, to use the words of that repellently textured old Etonian Jacob Rees-Mogg, of being ruled by those who are exclusively "used to being educated in beautiful old buildings" [3].
1. Well, "intense" is a relative term... I concentrated on poetry in my studies rather than drama or prose because (a) I like poetry, and am a very good "close reader", (b) poems tend to be short, and good ones are few in a poet's oeuvre, and were therefore (c) more compatible with my indolent lifestyle at the time.
2. Hardly cheap, but not outrageous, by private school standards (confusingly, these are called "public schools" in Britain). For comparison, a top school like London's Westminster charges £9.987 per term for "day" pupils, and academic hothouse Winchester College charges £11,330.
3. Quoted in the book "Chums: How a Tiny Caste of Oxford Tories Took Over the UK", by Simon Kuper.
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