Take a warm summer’s day – especially if it’s a Saturday, and school is just over – and let us contemplate Yard. A couple of hundred pupils, a third of them plugged into their mobiles, are milling around. Girls throw their arms round each other and hug. Boys look blokeish and strut round in trainers with undone shirts. Clearly, there are plans. Within an hour it’s usually deserted except for a few miscreants on SAP.
It looks fun out there. Some staff and parents, looking at this backdrop of youthful effervescence, ruefully compare the wild fun the young clearly have planned for the weekend with the more sedentary pleasures in store for them. Half of them seem to fly to St Kitts for a Bank Holiday, and wear an offensively perfect sun tan. It’s all very embittering. I was part of a school skiing party to Vermont this Easter. On our one free afternoon in Vermont this Easter, everyone (all male trip, I might add) chose to go shopping – walking in and out of cruddy shops during two hours of teeming rain in order to pick up Gap, Armani, Timberlands, Ray-Bans, Calvin Klein. Then they all met up in the bus taking us back to the resort, unpacked their purchases and showed them off to each other. It was like a catwalk, without the tantrums.
It’s fun, this sort of parody – but in the end, a parody is all that it is. The poseurs in Yard are, or certainly affect convincingly, to be young, carefree – above all contemporary. That must be a terrific sensation. But it’s not everyone – not even most people – who can share in it unselfconsciously even among our cosseted clientele. There are plenty of boys and girls who never, or hardly ever go to a club for the very good reason that they don’t want to, and would prefer to take a weekend expeditioning, or read a really good book, or (not all the time, I beg) slob out and watch TV. They usually strut their thing a little more discreetly in Yard, but they are at least as important in understanding the essence of what this school tries to be.
One of the most pernicious myths is that the ‘best’ fun is had by those with a keenest eye for the contemporary – that the coolest clubs play the coolest music and are filled out by the coolest people. All that kind of arrant, self-serving, tosh. I think there is real pride to be drawn in Westminster’s reputation as a tolerant home for quirky pupils (and teachers). The Elizabethan , in its attempt to give a flavour of the school, tries to offer some insights into not just its opportunities and attainments, but of its temper. I am proud of the fact that the Model United Nations commanded a rather larger audience than the Old Westminster vs Common Room football match.
The cult of the individual sits oddly alongside the relentless media and marketing onslaught defining every ingredient of ‘lifestyle’. After the intense pressures to achieve social conformity of the immediate post-war era, here is another tyranny. I wonder, today, whether our pupils have an easier time being themselves.
In the end, teenagers being teenagers, won’t be told. Those robust, sceptical traits which so often characterise our pupils may lead them into a range of tricky and unsatisfactory situations, but also lead them out again. I sometimes see in the dog-tired eyes of a pupil someone who has just completed an intensive round of partying, the weary relief that a rite of passage has been completed, and that that needn’t be done again in a hurry. There is an uncomfortable subtext to these years which can involve spending portions of time hanging out with people who bore you, and on pastimes you know are futile.
I’m not being lofty, having spent many of those years in a Walter Mittyish grand tour of different identities myself – the worst was going to a rock concert, a deafening and incomprehensible nightmare, right at the height of my enthusiasm for The Mikado. I can’t say I found the youth icons of my day very reassuring. They were usually being arrested for rioting outside the American Embassy or up on a drugs rap, for one thing, and – shades of my tough boarding school – it was liberty I was after, not further incarceration.
In the end, it is the quirkiness of this school - our untidy, querulous, stroppy, but endlessly engaging generations of boys and girls – that makes it fun to chronicle. Their powers of affectation are prodigious, but in the end they are invariably undermined by their own ruthless intelligence and the democratic wisdom of their peers who value most kinds of brilliance. That great poseurs’ promenade we call Yard is filled with people who, by fits and starts, reject any house style and are just truly themselves.
Old Westminsters are a curious species. I’ve always known that. At University, those that I knew were less stuffy than Etonians (less tweedy too) but just as cliquey. These were heady days of union power and dire warnings from the IMF: with their donkey jackets, their long and greasy hair, they looked as if somebody had plucked from the picket line outside the Grunwick plant.
It was an illusion, however, and one quickly shattered the moment they opened their mouths: relentlessly articulate and opinionated, even when their ideas was backed up by precisely nothing, hopelessly devoid of intensity, oozing their own version of street cred. Bond Street cred.
Other public school alumni at my rather stuffy college wore Old Boy ties, rowed, went to watch the Varsity game at Twickenham, joined the Air Cadets - that sort of thing.Between them and the OWW, there wasn’t often a meeting of minds.
When, some years later, I joined the Staff, Old Westminsters came to mean something different. I identified them initially as the septegenarian and octogenerian old gentlemen in black tie who turned up to Elizabethan Club garden parties. In common with all their genre at public schools the length and breadth of the nation, they were amiable, deaf, and healthily uninterested in talking to anyone other than their contemporaries. Talking to them was like meeting a distant member of the family at a Christmas party - there was seldom any great pleasure to be drawn from the encounter, but we all knew the rules by which this was to be played.
A new teacher has no obvious point of contact with a recent OW to whom any unknown member of the Common Room has the status of an imposter. Going to a Gaudy before you have clocked up five years (at least) in the job is a dead loss. OWW look at you rudely, and then check they still have their wallets. Your longer-serving colleagues have no intention of easing your pathetic, solitary condition. Quite the reverse, they are all deep in conversation with their old pupils, reliving the glory days, loving the attention. It occurs to you at this point that the wine on offer is poison, and you retire, with colleagues of your own vintage, to the pub. Westminster, you all agree, isn’t half what it’s cracked out to be.
Well, that was then, and this is now. After fourteen years here, I’ve accumulated a lot of ex-pupils, the great majority of whom have known me as someone who was in situ even when they arrived. It doesn’t make them necessarily like me or respect me any better, but it does lend a certain gravitas.
Though Common Room, characteristically, tends to play it down, we look forward to those occasions at school when our old pupils show up. They are generally delighted to see each other again, and - overwhelmingly - pleased too to see their old teachers. It is the people, the place, and the memories which bring them back - the profile of the school as ‘the institution’ remains extraordinarily low. Westminsters are loyal and affectionate, but I don’t think many of them dream at night about sending their sons and daughters here. If they do, it will be with the same cool pragmatism that propels so many of them to success in many walks of life.
Not merely because they don’t often cut me dead, these days I really do know how much I like the huge majority of the Old Westminsters. They are ideal people to meet in large social gatherings, not least because the house style isn’t one of long, meaningful silences. Everybody talks very loudly and fast - they are even more articulate when they’re older. They attitudinise, if anything, even more freely than they did at eighteen. Many are highly successful, and seem to make rather a lot of money, but they tend not to be too intense about their work. Rather as when they were children at this school, there is something about overt competition which they tend to find distasteful - I’ve never known how much of that is down to fastidious good manners, affluent homes, or cheerful indolence.
Just as when they were in the Upper Shell, the professed value system of some of them is shameful. But most are more ruminative and less egotistical, as befits the passage of time. Though it’s a very worldly constituency in which most live, few are judged on the basis of their personal lifestyles, or on traditional criteria of status and wealth. What matters to Westminsters at 15, or 18, or 30, is that they sense that you are the person you seem to be. If there is doubt on that, they can be alarmingly dismissive - formal good manners are not a large part of the repertoire. That said, they are the most generous, responsive and consistently entertaining people I’ve ever known. To those of us who have stuck around a long time, that means a great deal, not just in terms of fun, but reassurance.
