VI. Progressive Education.
When I told people I might be going to Dartington Hall School they would sometimes go ‘Ooooh!’ and look at me coyly, as if there was something slightly risqué about the idea, because Dartington Hall was what was called a ‘progressive’ school. They had heard tell, they said, that there was no uniform and people sometimes went about with nothing on! From some I heard that there were no rules and no proper classes, that the pupils were in charge of the staff and there was fun and freedom all the time. From others I heard that it was licentious, and surely a sink of sin. Everything that was said about the school was charged with strong feeling. It may seem a bit odd today but in 1939 the very idea of educating people in an unconventional way was slightly outrageous.
Now it was the first day of term and as I rode down the hill towards the school I realised that I had absolutely no idea what I was going to find when I arrived. It might of course be a quite ordinary place like Woodhouse School, with uniforms, prefects and an Assembly. I think I was rather hoping it would be.
I couldn’t see anywhere to put my bike so I leaned it against the wall, opened the front door and looked in.
I heard a lot of noise and saw a lot of people milling about. They weren’t all children, some of them seemed to be grown-ups but none of these were wearing academic gowns. In fact they were dressed in all sorts of different clothes and were just chattering away together and looking at notices.
I stepped in and stood just inside the door. People smiled at me as they brushed past but didn’t say anything. After a few minutes of standing about I realised that nobody was coming to find me, so I had better find somebody myself. I moved along a corridor to the right and saw a door marked ‘Office’. I knocked but nobody answered. So in the end I pushed the door open and walked in. A lady was sitting at a typewriter.
‘Hallo,’ she said, ‘I’m Sarah.’
‘Postgate,’ I said, ‘Oliver Postgate. I am here.’
‘Yes, I can see. What can I do for you?’
I’m sorry. I don’t know what to do.’
Sarah sighed with resignation, arose and led me back into the foyer. There she pointed to a gigantic timetable. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘you’re in C Group. In half an hour you have Art.’
‘Yes, but what do I do?’
‘Why, whatever you like! You are free, absolutely free! Aren’t you lucky!’ She lifted her arms in joyful freedom and swirled away, back to her office.
I stood there, stunned. I looked at the board. I turned and looked at the doors. I looked at the people milling busily about, oblivious of my existence. I have never felt quite so lonely and baffled in my life.
How long I stood there I don’t know. I remember finding a man looking out of a window and asking him if he knew where Art was. He must have told me because I came at last to the Art Room. It was deserted. I sat at a table.
After about twenty minutes a large girl in trousers walked in. She dumped her things on a table and said: ‘ ’Lo, who’re you?’
‘Postgate,’ I said.
‘What?’
‘Postgate.’
‘Poached egg? You a poached egg?’
‘No …’
Four or five more people came in, all dressed differently; then a thin young man wearing a brown jersey.
‘Hallo,’ he said in quite a friendly tone, ‘I’m Mark. Who are you?’
‘He’s a poached egg!’ shouted the girl.
‘No, I’m not,’ I whispered.
The Art class didn’t seem to begin at any particular moment. Some people had rummaged around and found paper and powderpaints but the rest just chatted. The teacher chatted with them. Nobody spoke to me so I found a piece of paper and a crayon and drew a fish. The class must have ended at some point because everybody left.
For the rest of the day I kept my head down and did my best to follow on behind the others. I clung on to the hope that somebody official would come along to acknowledge my existence, but it didn’t happen.
Late in the afternoon I noticed that people were going into the dining room to eat. I wondered whether I was supposed to join them. I didn’t know who to ask so I went to the Office to ask the typing lady if it would be all right to go home. The Office was locked, so, feeling cold with misery, I got on my bike and rode back to Kay Starr’s house.
John had had a different but equally daunting time. Notice had been taken of him and he had been told to wait for some sort of ‘tutor’, who simply didn’t turn up. So where I was feeling baffled and lost, he was healthily angry. He noted in his diary that it was a silly school and he asked to be taken away from it as soon as possible. Very soon he was staying with our uncle Richmond in Exeter and going to a school there.
*
My first day at Dartington Hall School had not only been very different from my first day at Woodhouse School, it had been quite different from anything I had been able to imagine. In all my conjectures about what Dartington might be like I had always wondered what sort of school it would be, how we, the pupils, would be controlled and directed. It had never occurred to me that there mightn’t be a school there at all, that I would have no desk, no place to go, and that nobody would tell me what to do next. But that’s how it was.
From the moment I had arrived at Woodhouse School, I had been fully involved in the organized life of the school and had felt quite secure in the place I held in that benevolent authoritarian hierarchy. At Dartington there seemed to be no benevolent authority, nobody to notice what I did or didn’t do. I might as well not have existed.
Although I didn’t realise it at the time, I was completely desperate, frantically trying to find a place for myself in a social order that didn’t in fact exist. In this I was of course unsuccessful but my behaviour must have been observed, because it was mentioned in my first report:
Oliver … started off by showing off in ways that did not endear himself to either children or staff … both in class and in his written work his chief motive seems to be to gain admiring attention.
Ray passed that report to me with a contemptuous gesture and I remember it hitting me like a body-blow, not so much because it was so casually damning as because it was the only comment that had been made. During the term I had been given no clue as to whether or not my behaviour was acceptable. I had spent my time in a sort of ongoing panic because I hadn’t been able to get anybody to acknowledge my existence, let alone admire it.
Looking back, I can get some really embarrassing pictures of the obnoxious way I carried on in that first term. During the first weeks I think I went in for a bit of the formal thuggery and armtwisting that had been customary at Woodhouse. That simply didn’t work. I remember trying to be funny in class. That was a waste of time. Answering back at the teachers provided no thrills and was just ignored. I can see myself clowning and nobody taking any notice. I pretended to be clever and know everything but all that brought was mockery – all these were the standard
