No England They Eat Cat Food

New Month Old Post (originally posted 12th September, 2014)

“What do you eat in England?” Hugo’s dad asked me in English.

“Food,” I said, trying to be funny.

He translated for Hugo’s mother and sister. Horrified, I realised I might have implied that what we were eating now was not what I thought of as proper food. 

It was my first meal with Hugo and his family in Belgium. I was there on a foreign language exchange trip. Hugo’s dad seemed concerned that, not only was I having difficulty in understanding their French, but that I might also be unfamiliar with their food. They had asked whether I would like beer, wine or water to drink, and not being sure how to reply I had said wine. That was a new experience for me at fifteen. Had I tried to stand up I would have fallen over. Was I red because of the wine or embarrassment?

The food certainly was different. I can’t remember the details now, but there were a lot of meaty stews with lots of bread and weak fizzy beer or bottled water with every cooked meal. There were no familiar bowls of breakfast cereal, but thick chunks of bread and jam dipped into huge bowls of black coffee which rapidly acquired a disagreeable film of jam, butter and breadcrumbs on the surface. They enjoyed an unpleasant vegetable called “le chicon”, a kind of blanched endive with a bitter taste. In the days before ubiquitous international cuisine and mass foreign travel, food did differ across countries and regions. I was just going to have to cope with it. I was there for two and a half weeks.

Hugo and his parents lived in a square, average-sized detached house on a hill a few miles west of Charleroi. It was one of three or four on a busy road with an open valley at the back. The region was brown-field rather than green, the main economic activity being coal mining. Across the valley at the back was an open-cast mine from which a constantly moving, overhead bucket conveyor, carried coal past Hugo’s house to a railway somewhere across the road. Nearby, industrial buildings and black metal structures mingled with terraced housing in grimy cobbled streets.

View Behind Hugo's House
the spoil heap remains today, wooded over

It did not dishearten me. It resembled parts of Yorkshire around Knottingley and Pontefract not far from where I lived. My own town constantly echoed to the clatter of railway wagons and the roar of ships loading coal. Nor was I bothered that the toilet was in an outhouse. I had used outside toilets too. What did surprise me was that the house had no mains water. In the kitchen, instead of a tap, was a hand pump to draw water out of the ground. The toilet looked normal, but there was no water in the bottom, just a dark hole through to a cesspit. A swarm of black flies buzzed gleefully in and out of the hole, not somewhere you would want to sit any longer than necessary, but it made things interesting when standing for a pee; you could try to beat your personal best for the number of flies swilled down.

There was no bathroom; you washed in a bowl of warmed water at a washstand in the bedroom. Once a week we walked the half-mile to Hugo’s grandfather’s for a bath. He had a normal bathroom, except there was no hot running water, so the bath was filled with water heated on a stove. To save fuel you took turns. Being the guest, I was allowed to go first, so at least the water was clean, but it could be scaldingly hot.

Bearing in mind their water came untreated from the ground, it was unsurprising that Hugo’s family habitually drank weak beer with meals, but I was surprised that teenagers of my age could buy and drink alcohol without restriction in the equivalent of English coffee bars. In England, as I was later to find, it took a certain courage to go into a pub for the first time, even on reaching the age of eighteen, but we spent hours in Belgian cafés drinking the local Maes Pils, Extra Pils and Stella Artois (years before it was available in England) and playing ‘kicker’ (pronounced ‘keekay’, the table football game with wooden footballers fixed to spinning metal rods), which the Belgians played with incredible skill. I could never replicate their unstoppable bullet-like shots, executed with a near-imperceptible flick of the wrist. The only way I could get any kind of power was by vigorously spinning the rods right round, but that was not allowed.

As the days passed, I realised I was having a great time. In fact, I returned the following year, and then for a third year after that. I even improved my French a little.

I supplemented the Belgian cuisine by carefully rationing out precious biscuits brought from home. It gave Hugo’s sister the perfect come-back to my earlier faux pas insulting their food. They had Kit-E-Kat cat food in Belgium, but not Kit Kat chocolate wafers. Watching me undo a red and silver wrapper, she choked in triumphant delight as she struggled to get out her words.

“En Angleterre ils mangent des aliments pour chats”, she said.

Selective Education

My true tale about being attacked by Modern School boys touched upon some of the issues related to the post-war selective education system we had in England, Wales and Northern Ireland (but not Scotland). Mostly, from age eleven, the academically most able 25% (assessed by intelligence tests) went to grammar schools while the rest went to secondary modern schools. I want to say more about my own experience of this, and what I’ve learned since. Apologies if it makes for something of an essay.   

The Grammar School

It was rarely said out loud, but the grammar schools enjoyed three times the resources of the secondary moderns. They had their pick of the most highly qualified teachers to guide their pupils, both intellectually and culturally, towards membership of an expanding middle class. It was social engineering on a grand scale.

We might not have been fully aware of this, but it must have rubbed off in attitudes. At my grammar school, we received for free the kind of education some parents now pay tens of thousands of pounds for. Modern school pupils and their parents had every reason to resent the grammar schools.

Let me list some of what this gave us at my school:

• Studies for G.C.E. ‘O’ and ‘A’ level qualifications offered across the full range of sciences, humanities, arts and classics.
• A purpose-built science block containing well stocked laboratories with work benches for individual experiments.
• Foreign language exchange trips to Belgium and Germany; geography and biology field trips and excursions.
• Drama productions which took advantage of the magnificent, fully equipped stage with a proscenium arch and modern lighting rig.
  
• After-school science, arts, crafts, hobby and debating societies.
• Rugby, cricket and hockey teams, summer athletics sports days, and outdoor pursuits such as climbing, rambling and pot holing from the school hut in the Yorkshire Dales.
• A gymnasium with retractable beams, ropes and wall bars, vaulting horses, spring boards and basketballs in the overflowing equipment cupboards.
• In the hall, an electric organ with multiple keyboards, stops and bass pedals, the preserve of the ancient but gifted head of music who accompanied our uplifting Christian hymns at morning assembly.
• Wood- and metalwork shops for boys, and needlework and domestic science for girls.

Everything was respected and looked after, with little theft or vandalism.

I am not suggesting that modern schools had none of this, just less. The only things they seemed to have that we didn’t were vegetable plots, greenhouses and chicken pens for lessons in horticulture and animal husbandry. Oh yes, and the boys played football instead of rugby.

Even the buildings shouted different levels of privilege. The grammar school’s attractive Georgian architecture in yellow-orange Flemish-bond brick, its Queen Anne cupola topped by a Viking ship weather vane, the town coat of arms carved over the door, and the foundation date in prominent Roman numerals, scorned the functional redbrick of the modern school directly across the road (above and below).

The Secondary Modern School

Typically, the two schools led to different jobs, pay levels and ways of life. Many modern school children were thought to have no future in education and encouraged to leave at fifteen. Modern school boys, such as Jibson and his mate in my story, often found themselves in blue-collar or unskilled work, typically in the engineering industries, the building and motor trades, the railways, road transport, shipping, the armed forces, mining and agriculture. Girls might at first go to work in shops or factories, but most saw this as a temporary measure before marriage, children and home making. In comparison, most grammar school pupils were still in education at seventeen and most went on to university, teacher training, the civil service or the professions. Some, like my friend Burling, did exceptionally well.

If the different levels of opportunity were an injustice, it became even more conspicuous when you realise that selection was not based entirely on merit. Children from middle-class homes full of books, culture, intelligent conversation, and the time and space to enjoy them, were far more likely to get into grammar school than those from poorer backgrounds. If there was doubt, ambitious parents would pay for private tuition to ensure they did.

Then there were children who actually did make the grade, but had their grammar school places turned down by parents because of the cost of keeping them out of paid employment. In some places, single parents were considered unable to afford the uniform, so their children didn’t get in. I also remember two boys from council houses, both well on track to pass until discovered reading ‘dirty magazines’. In an act of unbelievably small-minded, puritanical snobbery, they were peremptorily denied any opportunity of a grammar school place. They were eleven for goodness’ sake! Their places must have gone to two others, oblivious of the circumstances behind their arbitrary good fortune.

Still worse, the very principle of selection by intelligence was based upon an outrageous scientific fraud committed by the educational psychologist and government advisor, Sir Cyril Burt. He faked his studies of separately-raised identical twins to declare that intelligence was primarily determined by genetics rather than upbringing, and therefore fixed at conception. Had he been right, then selection for different kinds of education might have been sensible, but evidence points the other way. In Nottingham, two thirds of children from one middle class suburb went to grammar school, against one in fifty from an adjacent poorer area. In some depressed northern towns, less than ten per cent of all children got in. This could never have been down to intelligence alone.

I don’t want to imply that everything about grammar schools was perfect and everything about modern schools poor. Far from it. Grammar schools could be indifferent to under-achievers and modern schools launched many successful careers, but it was a dreadful waste of talent. I know ‘rejects’ who went on to demonstrate this in the most superlative way. One, after a year at the modern school, was thrown the lifeline of a transfer into the first form at the grammar school and went on to Cambridge University to qualify as a veterinary surgeon. Two others who transferred at the same time became a solicitor and an accountant. Yet more, allowed to transfer to the grammar school at sixteen after overcoming the not inconsiderable hurdle of passing ‘O’ levels at the modern school, went into teaching. But how many ‘false negatives’ and ‘late developers’ did the system miss? How many found it impossible to recover from the stigma of failure?

Selective secondary education was (mostly) abolished in the nineteen-seventies, and university provision expanded so that, today, nearly half of young people go to university. This means that around half of recent graduates would once have been ‘failed’ at eleven. Things have undoubtedly changed for the better, but there may be something in the view that we have gone too far the other way. Working in universities, I came across students (a few, but the most arrogant academics would say a lot) who simply lacked the basic levels of literacy, numeracy, ability or diligence to gain much at all from degree level study. They didn’t seem to grasp what they were supposed to be doing, or why they were there. “Pass them anyway,” said the management, off the record, “because that’s what the government wants us to do.” I suppose at least now, few can genuinely claim they have not been given some kind of opportunity.