The days of boyhood seem distant. Photo / 123RF
What was I humming? Obviously I knew the tune, but where was it from? Were there words to it? Suddenly, yes, the words came flooding into my throat.
When years have rolled behind us
And back in time’s deep shade
And I realised I had been humming, and was now singing, ye gods, my old school song.
I attended a state school that had been founded in the late 19th century and in keeping with the times, had acquired a song. More surprisingly, the song was popular among us kids in the 1960s and 70s. Not for its words but for the anarchy of its singing.
The headmaster would announce at the final assembly of term that the school song would be sung, whereupon the music master bashed out an introductory chord or two on the piano and off we went.
The juniors at the front of the hall would keep in time with the piano. But at the back the seniors would deliberately dawdle. Gradually, the two tempi would separate. The juniors would reach the treble climax of a verse and embark on the chorus, only for the seniors to reach a basso profundo version of the same climax several seconds later.
The headmaster, an ineffectual scrawnster whose name I can’t recall but who was universally and fittingly known as Weasel, stood marooned on stage faced by a form of insurrection over which he could exert no control.
On one occasion, he ordered the music master to stop playing, but on went the song, with the back of the hall finishing fully 15 seconds after the front. Weasel banned all singing of the song for a year after that. And now here I was humming it on the other side of the world. But unlike 50 years ago, I was paying attention to the words.
A school is like a nation state and a school song like a national anthem. National anthems tend to jingoism.
They aim to instil patriotic fervour and to conflate it with state religion. God Save the King is the perfect example and few such anthems survive any sort of intellectual scrutiny. Was our school song any better? How would it stack up after half a century? Not that well is the answer.
When years have rolled behind us, and back in time’s deep shade
The distant days of boyhood grow fainter till they fade,
One memory we’ll cherish, one name hold ever dear,
And through the darkening shadows our school shall yet stand clear.
I think we can agree that’s guff.
Fifty years have duly rolled behind me, and the days of boyhood do indeed seem distant, but the memory I retain and cherish is not of the school. It is of the kids I attended the school with.
I could name dozens of them still. What a range of character was there. Just within my own year-group of 90 boys, there seems to have been every human characteristic that ever was.
It was like the complete works of Shakespeare. We had thugs and bullies, the sensitive and the skilful, the idle and the diligent, the nonchalant, the shy, the outgoing, the stuttering wreck, the weak, the cruel, the greedy, the thoughtful, the moody, the ambitious, the malicious, the capricious, the sexually obsessive, the conniving, the leader, the lieutenant, the lickspittle. Even today, I could put names to every one of those epithets.
(That, while I’m at it, is why, in my view, home schooling is so misguided.
A year group of his or her peers provides every kid with an overview of human nature, a lived encyclopaedia of behaviour and character. It is foundational knowledge of the world.)
The song’s chorus was more philosophical. It riffed on the school motto, absque labore nihil: without work, nothing.
Absque labore nihil, in work, in play, in life,
In rivalry of nations, or boyhood’s friendly strife,
The race goes to the eager, the laggard falls behind,
And ever to the bravest do fortune’s smiles prove kind.
Corny, obviously. Trite, even. But is it true? Has half a century of experience borne out the idea that work is fundamental to success?
By and large, I think it has. Some people have more gifts than others, but most people I know who’ve done well have worked hard to do so.
But as for fortune smiling on the bravest, I’m not so sure. Most of us can summon a little courage in certain circumstances. But I can think immediately of only three people I know whom I’d describe as consistently and noticeably brave. One of them married disastrously. One went to prison. The third deserved to.
By which rigorous statistical analysis, it appears that fortune favours the brave 33% of the time. So much for school songs.