“If it’s in the blood
There’s no accounting for the urge!
When the rest of the face is shaved
The moustache will emerge….”
From Ai Shuddup Yaar by Bachchoo
My childhood friend Alfie Gordon calls urgently on Sunday morning to tell me that the school we both went to in Pune would be featured that afternoon on a BBC programme called Extreme Schools.
Extreme? The Bishop’s School, Pune? Has some BBC unearthed a jihadi training camp or a staging post for the Colombian drug mafia? Or has the caning and flogging regime we suffered (“We’ll make a man of you yet, Dhondy!”) in the Fifties got worse with water boarding and scientifically organised psychological torture?
The programme began in Bristol school with children I identified as the present “I-phone” and games-console generation. The documentary, for such it was, picked out two 13-year-old boys and introduced us in cinematic language to their ways. Charlie and Adrian were naughty boys who attended school and classes when they wished but concentrated on defying and cheeking their teachers, rejecting all instruction and discipline and consequently spending most of their time at school in detentive rather than regular classes.
They were captured on camera sitting by themselves in an otherwise empty classroom with Adrian throwing a book at Charlie’s head. Charlie told the camera that he knew better than his teachers and being smarter than they, didn’t have to follow their instructions or co-operate with what he considered the boring routines of school.
We didn’t see their parents, but the lady presenter setting up the documentary entered their classroom, isolated the smirking pair and told them that they were, for their own improvement and instruction being subject for a week to the extreme disciplines of — the Bishop’s School, Pune, India!
Obviously, behind the scenes, the parents, the Bristol school and the powers that be at Bishop’s had been party to the set-up. The lads seemed like the sort who would have gone on holiday abroad on school trips or with their families so they would have had passports and not being of Pakistani origin, the Beeb would have obtained their visas easily.
I was by now holding my breath. What would the old school look like? To what sort of regime would the two naughty firangs be subject? There they were looking startled and perhaps culture-shocked being driven through the thronged and trafficked streets of my city.
The precincts of the school were after all these years easily recognisable. It didn’t seem as though much had changed though it must have. The headmaster’s bungalow, the hub of the compound, looked just as it was and so did the grey-stone “new hall” building.
Charlie and Adrian were welcomed and given a brief and polite introduction to the motto of the school which was and remains the single word “thorough”. It didn’t seem to make much of an impression on them. They were to be introduced to the school assembly the next day and would have to wear the school uniform which remains identical to the whites, maroon and yellow ties and sweaters and maroon blazers we used to wear — though I didn’t spot many blazers.
The morning of the assembly brought the first conflict. Charlie refused to wear the uniform and was left sitting on the floor in a stubborn sulk, his back against the wall of the changing room. He was finally talked round by Adrian, who appealed to his sense of esprit de corps. Charlie wore the uniform.
The lads were subject to the disciplines of learning in the classrooms. The present intake of Bishop’s seemed much more dedicated to their studies than my contemporaries were — or at least that’s the impression the documentary conveyed.
One of the pupils of the class, which Charlie and Adrian joined contrasted the ethic and attitude of the Bristol boys to his own. He said his generation was imbued with the idea that education, by which he meant the attainment of academic grades, was survival and salvation.
“One had to aspire to being a doctor or engineer,” he said. The Brits struck him as uncaring about learning or competing for top marks.
It seemed that the era of defying teachers, a practice or pastime prevalent when I was there, had disappeared from Bishop’s. Not that all of us offered all the teachers disrespect, but there were certainly four or five of the masters who were held in contempt by most of the boys even though there were only a handful of devil-may-care contemporaries who were openly defiant and in their offensiveness made Charlie and Adrian look like doves of peace.
The Bishop’s of the documentary, which pronounced it one of the elite schools of India — a label to which, unlike Doon or Delhi Public or La Matiniere, it never even aspired in my time — didn’t seem like the sort of school which would tolerate a pupils’ strike. I can remember my class going on strike and refusing to work or listen to the teacher on two occasions, one in a science class and one demanding cricket from which our class for some misdemeanour had been banned by a particularly abrasive and much disliked teacher.
The headmaster, whose authority a certain few but very few, notably my friend Alfie, would care to defy, worked out an appropriate and diplomatic punishment which was for the teachers a face-saving compromise and very short of the beating one would have got for individual defiance.
Charlie and Adrian were asked, as a final test, to teach a reputedly unruly class about the kings and queens of Britain. We witnessed them dressed in cloaks and wearing paper crowns doing a good job in what seemed to be the least extreme of schools. They said in their final interviews that they were returning to Britain with a chastened appreciation of the difficulties teachers faced. I don’t suppose there’ll be a sequel which portrays them as reformed characters or star pupils. But that’s TV!
