1982: Nick Broome: Article and Letter to Aitkenhead
An Evening at a Progressive School
. . . . While it would be sensible to continue wearing my cycling clothes, and humane of the authorities to provide a changing room at the school, I also felt it might be rash to expect them to take this point of view. The alternative was to change beside the road, I was halfway through this undignified procedure when a boy stripped to the waist with a sheath knife at his belt, and a girl with striking red-gold hair rode past me, side by side, down the road. Something told me they were two of the pupils. In one way it was a reassuring encounter – just ordinary children. In another, their style of dress, their relationship with each other hinted that in the middle of this ordinary countryside I was about to meet an unconventional culture.
I turned the corner of the house onto a stretch of gravel. Beyond the gravel was a lawn, and then the land fell away to a green valley. As I was walking my wat towards the front door, I met a girl wearing a tee-shirt – a teacher or a pupil, I was not sure which. She told me the headteacher was on the top landing, which I felt was a self-explanatory explanation.
He was in his study – not the office of the modern school but the more comfortable, cultured, old-fashioned equivalent. Though this atmosphere, with the help of tea and cakes, could accommodate visitors of all sorts, exactly why the headmaster, neatly dressed in jacket and kilt, and I, still flushed from my ride and wearing a rather over-loud shirt, were facing each other from armchairs was not clear, so conversation was difficult.
It was not long before I was outside in the bright sunshine again, and soon surrounded by boys asking me questions about my bike. Here conversation was not difficult at all. The boys were not at all inhibited with a stranger and drew me naturally into their group.
I noticed that the questions they asked were mindful both of he who asked them and him of whom they were asked, so, in answering, I tried not to use any of the teachers’ tricks I had learned over the years to snub and humiliate. (What an admission! Ed.) I was excited at meeting these products of a different system of education, very much aware of the sound of my voice, my bike behind me, and the sun in my face. Before I had answered everything that could be asked I felt that rapport had been established.
Complete personal relaxation followed closely on it. Nothing could be more certain to make one forget one’s troubles than a swim in a stream, especially when the body is tired form a day’s cycling. The bathing was going on without any fuss, following established custom. A boy teased another his ability to swim, the teacher I had first met encouraged a child, the boy and girl I had seen on the road had their arms round each other. Shy at first, I waded in late on, and with the water all my self-consciousness and troubles were washed away. I came out in a mood of relaxation and happiness which lasted all evening.
Soon after this we ate the evening meal. Most of the children took theirs out onto the steps, because it was one of the first fine evenings of the year. Then I sat on the steps in the evening sunlight and the children came and chatted to me, and I had only to be sure not to pursue them, not to force the conversation, for company to be offered to me. Loud music was played from the house.
Boys rode scrambler bikes on the gravel. The children strayed in and out of the house, lounged in window-frames or leaned out of second-floor windows to talk to their friends on the gravel below and passed time, as they would have done in the streets, had they lived in a town. The teachers had disappeared to the pub. A boy called Nicholas curled up at my feet and asked penetrating but sympathetic questions about why I had come. When his teachers returned, and it was his bedtime he asked me to his supper.
Rosie was slicing malt loaf when I first went down to the basement staffroom. I was turned away from two chairs which I told were taken before I found one next to where Rosie was to sit, which was lucky because later on it meant that I could get a good idea of the kind of attention that was directed to her.
The boys who had been so quiet and ‘laid-back’ outside now became noisy and demanding. Suddenly it was more like school. ‘Rosie’, they called again and again from the armchairs backed against the walls, ‘Rosie,’ as they sought her attention. The girls were quieter, but even among the boys reciprocity was observed. Nobody spoke when another was speaking. They were prepared to put themselves down, not each other.
When they had eventually all gone to bed I felt that some essential business had been transacted. One of the boys, a newcomer to the school, poked his round the door.
‘When does a person make it known that he doesn’t want to share a dormitory with somebody next term?’ he asked. ‘You could tell me,’ said Rosie. ‘It’s Dick,’ he said, ‘I definitely don’t want to share with him’. ‘That could be OK’, said Rosie. ‘I don’t promise anything but it should be OK.’
Some time later the headmaster showed me where I was to sleep the night. He took me through the overgrown grounds to a pavilion which had been, like so much else, designed and built by the staff and pupils. Suddenly the bright sunshine, the relaxation from the swimming, the headmaster’s pervasive charm broke through my inhibitions, and I tried to explain to him what it had been like to be, at one moment lonely, isolated, on my bike, the next moment to be absorbed into a ‘school’, whatever of companionship, activity, youth, is connected by that term. Whether he understood what I was trying to say I do not know.
In August 1982(?), John recieved the following letter.
I don't know who Nick Broome was, whether he managed to publish his article or become a teacher at Kilquhanity.
