197OS: A.S.Neill and Kilquhanity: Notes by Aitkenhead
Undated, hand-written notes
Transcript:
No disciples’ says Neill and fair enough, we take his point. Folk should breed their own bees in bonnets. Yet he never fails to tell how his own inspiration came from Homer Lane . . . and so we must shoulder his share of the blame for what happened back in Scotland when his fellow Scots took him seriously, and like me, took to visiting Summerhill before the Hitler war. ‘All very well to have your followers in Scandinavia, and your books translated into Japanese; but when somebody is soft-headed enough to propose That Dreadful School in Scotland it’s another story’, we can inquire him saying. And yet he has never been anything but warm and helpful to us.
Once in the very early years Neill brought in the New Year with us and later sent us moving testimonial: ‘All the Kilquhanity staff can hold their liquor, to a man, they smoke far too much.’
Of all the people who in 1939 thought another ‘free school’ would be a good idea, Neill alone advised going ahead in spite of the danger of war. ‘Get started’ he wrote, ‘before freedom goes west altogether.’ This was when the kids at Leiston were digging their air-raid shelters in the grey Suffolk clay – before the whole shebang moved to Wales, for the sad duration.
The Summerhill idea in . . . . Ffestiniog must have taken a beating, the school could, I reckoned then, as a visitor, have foundered, folded up. Neill spoke of the return to Leiston when the army would have moved out, a dream, I reckoned an impossible dream. Bit I reckoned without the true measure of the man. Neill not only brought his gang back to their old home, he went on, again, to great thigs there, as we all know.
The happiest day of each year, he used to say, was when he took out his old car and turned her nose for Scotland. Now our car must head south for us to meet – or we write and he indulges his liking for the East Coast vernacular of his childhood, where kids are bairns, boys are loons and girls are quaynies.
His letters were always – and now some thousands of letters later, wiser. I know why – telegraphic. A very early one, I remember quite typical. About 1937, I’d written asking if I could visit again in the summer holidays: ‘OK. A room at the Coast, but mind you, there’s no job’ Neill. I hadn’t asked for a job but incredible as it may sound now, teachers, graduate trained were two-a-penny.
Neill, of course, couldn’t have known, that he was in fact, during that and other visits, lining me up not only for a job, but for the job, the life sentence, which if it sometimes weighs heavy, can always be enjoyed because of the good company of the convicted and especially the loving humour and warm wisdom of the chief conspirator.
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