The complex webs of snobbery and socially-conscious agonising that characterised the more "progressive" inhabitants of early 20th-century Britain are well, if one-sidedly explored in the work of writers like Virginia Woolf and E.M. Forster. Woolf's The Years and Forster's Howards End are both novels about the shifting boundaries of class at that time, but of the two – although Woolf's is the better book in my judgement – it is Forster's book, with its famous epigraph "Only connect!" that is better known, and also happens to have a particular resonance for me, personally.
A British New Town was a curious sort of place to grow up, especially when it was still actually new in the 1950s and 60s, not least because of the conspicuous absence of the wealthy and the privileged, or even the property-owning middle classes. Our town was almost entirely constructed out of self-contained estates of social housing rented from the Development Corporation, each a named "neighbourhood" with its own set of local amenities: shops, schools, medical and community centres, and so on. With the result that as children we never saw the sort of high-hedged, secluded, privately-owned dwellings that denote the presence of the upper-middle classes in more organically-developed settlements. Such as the original "old" Stevenage, whose residents had vehemently opposed the imposition of a town of 65,000 homes for London's blitzed slum-dwellers onto their small town, thirty miles up the Great North Road from the capital.
Years passed, and the population grew. At the close of the 1970s the Thatcher government had given tenants the "right" to buy their own council homes at a knock-down price, destroying the egalitarian principles behind a place like Stevenage at a stroke. So – predictably, perhaps – when the time came to expand the New Town, some of the inhabitants – forgetful of their town's origins and having become property owners with an eye on the value of their asset – opposed any such new meteor strikes. This time, however, rather than invoke parallels with Stalinist Russia, they played the heritage card. They conjured up a vision of an unsullied landscape in need of protection, which they dubbed, yes, "Forster Country".
That school, Alleynes, was then in its 30-year heyday as a state-funded boys' grammar school – situated in the Old Town but modernised and expanded to meet the educational needs of the New Town population. It was a decent-enough school, academically, and attracted a number of boys from middle-class families who either couldn't or wouldn't pay for private schooling, and who daily rode the bus routes into town from the surrounding villages. The war still cast a long shadow over Britain in the 1950s and 60s, and these village boys were self-evidently "officer class", and inclined to identify with the school and its aims and methods. We townies, however, had inherited the uncooperative, awkward-squad attitudes of our other-ranks fathers, most of whom had either served in the wartime forces or been conscripted into post-war National Service. Ironically, as an embattled minority, often mocked and even bullied, these village boys actually represented the true continuity and traditions of the school, which had been educating the local gentry on the same site since 1558. Had Shakespeare been a North Herts lad, this could well have been his school. Sadly, from an Only Connect! point of view, it was never Forster's.
With hindsight, it is clear that this volatile mix of compliance and defiance within the school – given a vigorous shake by the advent of counter-cultural attitudes in the later 1960s and the school's conversion to "comprehensive" intake in 1969 – was problematic for teachers accustomed to a traditional grammar school ethos. As a result, a certain institutional split personality developed over the years: you might get the secret handshake reserved for the compliant minority, or more likely the professional reserve (and occasional resort to corporal punishment) offered to everyone else.
School for most of us was, in effect, a job: you turned up, did what you were asked to do, and – apart from several hours of homework most nights – left it behind you at 4 o'clock. To be a pupil at the "snob school" was not any sort of advantage on the street; if you had any sense, you removed or covered up your uniform on the way home. Reciprocally, there was zero curiosity on the part of teaching staff about what we got up to in our own time, unless there were concerns it might be illegal and thus endanger the school's reputation.
But for recipients of the secret handshake, doors were opened. In the years below us there was a boy we'll call Peter Weston. He had been injured playing rugby (in a ridiculous and truly snobbish move, the school had abandoned football in favour of hockey and rugby in the 1950s), so that, if my memory is correct, he was obliged to wear a crash helmet all day, rather like B.D. in Doonesbury. He was another would-be musician, but of an acceptably conventional sort, and in his very special case was granted unprecedented permission to use the school's precious and untouchable grand piano; even, it seems, at weekends [2]. Many years later I read in an obituary I came across – he had died in 2004 – that he had also been receiving tuition during those school years from Elizabeth Poston, an established composer who happened to be living locally. Despite the complete absence of formal music teaching in the school, he was able to go on to the Royal Academy of Music, and became a composer in his own right.
So how does any of that connect to Forster or the development of the New Town?