Christmas now and then

Sue loves Christmas. Decorations, tree, cards, presents, the lot. She is not keen on tinsel, it’s true. But apart from that she loves the whole thing. Of course, no Christmas is complete without watching It’s a Wonderful Life, and in a normal year she likes to pack as many members of the family in as the floors will support. In fact, on one occasion I spent time in the cellar supporting the living room floor with timber props in case it gave way under the combined weight of visitors.

Me ? I don’t like Christmas. A house full of visitors is my idea of a nightmare. Being a vegetarian non-drinker completes the picture. You can see that the house is divided and Christmas is the dividing line.

‘Why are you such a misery ?’ I hear you ask.

When I was a kid, Christmas was magical.

Christmas at home was the one day in the year when we ate together at dinner-time – that’s 12 noon for families like mine. All the other days the shop was open and people were popping in and out to serve the customers who unknowingly disrupted life behind the shop.

There was always a bit of a struggle on Christmas Day. My mum would encourage my Dad not to open the shop, and he would agree. But on Christmas morning he would be in the closed shop peering disconsolately through the blinds looking for ‘passing trade’. After frequent visits, and becoming subtly agitated at the thought of losing business, he would come into the sitting room and announce that he thought he should open the shop to catch passing trade – rogue customers who had run out of things they had forgotten to buy in time.

Everyone accepted this, and the shop would open for Sunday hours only.

Christmas was also a time when there was a complete embargo on visitors. Nobody was invited, and nobody called. Even relatives were unwelcome. Especially relatives. I can’t remember anyone ever coming round on Christmas Day. It was somehow exclusively private time, punctuated by the shop bell and stray customers in search of fire-lighters, bread, tennis balls and other essential Christmas items.

We had a discouragingly moth-eaten tree which we later folded up and stored on its high shelf in the shop storeroom. There were lights, huge pear-shaped bulbs painted in matt colours and strung on cloth-insulated cables. There was an annual attempt to make them work well, followed by the ritual acceptance that they were a lost cause. There was an attractive cottonwool snow scene under the tree, where various and random small figures – Santas, shepherds, angels – cavorted in imagination under the glass balls looming in their sky.

Of course, we made sure our kids enjoyed Christmas magic, but somewhere along the way, Christmas lost its mojo for me.

But we found a solution. We now do an on-Christmas and an off-Christmas in alternating years. This is year is an on-Christmas for Sue, so the house will be packed with decorations, starts, puddings, cards, holly, tree. You name it. It will be like Santa’s grotto in here. There will be angels, stars, a nativity scene. It will be a scene straight from Charles Dickens.

Next year is my turn, and Christmas will look like any other day. There won’t be any sign of the virus next year (I hope) and there won’t be any sign of Christmas either. Ah, bliss.

However you celebrate, make sure you have a wonderful, happy, peaceful and laughter-filled time.

Tom

I was very lucky, as a young teacher, to work in some interesting schools. But the best school was both interesting and a very happy place to work. The staff were an eclectic mix of talents and personalities, and we were all united behind the head in trying to make it a good school.

 

One year Tom, another teacher and myself were in adjacent mobile classrooms (glorified huts) sharing the top juniors. Tom had always taught the top juniors.

 

Tom had been in the tank regiment in the war. His brother had been killed in the Far East, and Tom had neither forgotten nor got over it.

 

After the army, he had gone onto teaching, like so many others. He was coming towards the end of his career when I knew him. He had taught in only the one school, and during his thirty or so years there he had taught in the same classroom.

Tom was old school. He had no fancy views about education. His classroom was just that: an empty box to teach a class in. Though he had been working in the same room for decades, it carried no personal touches, nothing to indicate indwelling, or even habitation. There was not much work on the walls, and 'display' was limited to a few curling papers artlessly drawing-pinned to fawn notice boards. It was not a room busy with the hum of excited learning.

Children feared Tom, who had taught their parents. Many of the parents STILL feared Tom. He had on his desk the sole of a plimsoll. He had cut the upper away. This dusty relic wasn't used as in former days, but the sight of it kept the class in order.

Tom taught hard stuff. His class were 10 and 11 years old, and very mixed ability. He taught from the blackboard (actually green). Conic sections, volume of a cone, box analysis of sentences. All stuff he had remembered from his own secondary school and kneaded into some sort of inexplicable curriculum for his annual performance. If the children were not interested, they did not dare mention it. If they did not understand it because they could not actually read much, well, that was their problem.

Tom was both gruff and strict, and had a fuse so short you never saw trouble coming. And trouble was terrifyingly volcanic.

With staff he was much the same, but on a franker level. You knew where you stood with Tom. It might be uncomfortable knowledge, but you knew alright. He was not a man to mince words, to dress up the obvious truth.

He had a couple of friends on the staff. He was still, in his sixties, a handsome man, and could be charming. He had clearly been a devastatingly attractive catch when he was young, and had retained the charm long after the looks had begun to wrinkle.

You didn't argue with Tom. The best you could hope for was a dismissive grunt as he turned away, stalking off in a famous mood.

Tom could laugh, and his yellow teeth and a noise like gravel in a faulty mixer betrayed a lifelong love of smoking. A lesson was the longest he was ever away from a cigarette. When he laughed, it was almost as if he was testing to see if he still could.

 

Children, staff, parents all feared Tom. Even the head was wary of upsetting him. Tom took this for respect. 

 

Tom was not sure what to make of me. If he could have fired me, I am sure he would have. I was a teacher so different from himself as to be unrecognisable even as a teacher. He thought I was soft on the kids, and probably soft in the head. I did for the dress code what the Luftwaffe had done for Coventry. I seemed to have a talent for annoying him, not least when I wanted to keep pet rabbits under his classroom where I had identified the perfect spot for a row of hutches. He could have made more effort to hide his view that I was a complete idiot, but he did not feel the need.

 

He did not care for innovation of any kind. Things were fine as they were, and the more familiar the better. Nothing new should be allowed to ripple the surface of his safe predictability of coming to work.

At the end of the summer, I wanted to have a disco for the kids in our year. They were about to leave the school and it seemed like an obvious thing to do. Nobody had done this before and though the idea did not affect Tom, he was more than clear in his views. It was a mad idea. It would give the children ideas. Modern music was dreadful, and the volume would damage the kids' ears, leading to an outbreak of premature deafness in the area. The parents would think it was crazy. It would demean the school. It was extra work for the staff (though he wasn't involved in any way). It wasn't what the school was about. It wasn't what ANY school was about. It would have a negative impact on behaviour and he would be left to pick up the pieces.

He made his views clear at a staff meeting, and pulled no punches. It was simply a mad project and would jeopardise us all.

The week before the disco, Tom popped into my classroom, politely ignoring the apparent chaos of lunchtime activities. Would I like some lights for the disco ? He happened to have some that he had used at home. And how about the sound system ? The one in the hall was pathetic and would not be loud enough for a disco. He could bring in a much better system if that would help.

You bet it would help.

Tom and I spent hours after school rigging the place up, climbing unsafe ladders, testing the equipment. He was the only member of staff to help me cross the t's, dot the i's. He was infinitely patient. We even joked together when things went wrong. When it was all set, Tom disappeared. He wanted no part of the disco. He did not want to be tainted by it. But the success of the disco was in large part due to Tom's hidden collaboration.

 

Much later, we discovered a shared love of music, and I was invited covertly round to his house with my guitar. He was an enthusiastic and skilful organist, though at school this was never revealed. Like Wemmick, he shrugged off his home life somewhere on the journey to school in his battered and ancient Volvo.

I still do not know why he helped me with a project that was such anathema to him. But he taught me two things that have stayed with me all my life. You have to help people do what THEY want to do, not what YOU want to do. And respect. He had earned that. In spades.

Tom. I owe him way more than disco lights and loud music.

 

It doesn't HAVE to end in tiers

The tier system to control the virus has not worked, and the next version of it won’t work either.

The impact so far is a clear upward drift. If you were in tier 1, you moved up into tier 2, while those in tier 2 moved up into tier 3. Once in tier three there was no way out.

If the tiering approach was working, you would expect to find areas moving downwards into a lower tier. It would be a bit like watching a hot-air balloon land: there could be bounces, but eventually areas would find themselves landing in tier 1. That has not happened.

Why ?

It seems that in every tier, people have taken a pick ’n’ mix approach, deciding which restrictions to stick with, and which to modify to match their needs. Some are willing to take more risks than others, and some simply see any restrictions as an infringement on their freedoms. This latter group, by the same logic, must have an urge to drive on the right and never wear a seat belt. But then logic is not their strongest suit.

In effect, this means that the tiers are probably all exactly the same, each with a population comprising the extremely cautious, the tier-accepting, and those largely ignoring all restrictions. No wonder they are not working.

Maybe there is a solution there.

Think for a moment how easy it would be to stay healthy if we could actually see the virus, if it was obvious to the naked eye. Avoiding it would suddenly be easy. As it has no visual impact, we don’t have that as an option.

The next best thing is to avoid people most likely to have the virus, and those taking risks while ignoring the scientific advice. And we could make this very visible, very cheap, and very effective. Visible risk would be easier to assess and avoid.

If we issued every person with three badges – traffic light badges, one green, one amber, one red – we could reasonably ask everyone to wear one during every public moment out of their house. The three colours would represent the degree of risk the individual was taking that day. The colours could be defined like tiers:

Green: super-cautious and taking the virus very seriously; obeying tier 3 restrictions at all times; verging on a personal lock-down; remaining socially isolated whenever possible; have not hugged anyone in the last 3 years; wear a mask at all times; remove visor only to clean teeth; would do virtue-signalling but don’t want to waft the virus about

Amber: flexibly cautious; seeing family under the radar; bending restrictions to suit personal circumstances; taking small risks; wear masks whimsically; only hug people who familiar and never in shops; dangerously and haphazardly well-meaning

Red: ignoring all known restrictions and finding ways to subvert them whenever possible; proud to be libertarian; convinced of personal invincibility; risk-taking no problem; negative altruism; sociopathic loose cannon; hug promiscuously uninvited whenever possible; have a daily target for invading others’ personal space; masks are for wimps; have heard about science and want no truc with it;

In a household, all members would have to wear the badge of the highest risk person in the house. Two greens shacked up with a red would all wear red outdoors.

If you saw someone without a badge, it would be easy to assume that they were in the red category and avoid them. There could even by peer pressure resulting in reds re-thinking their behaviour.

The badges would make it easy to join or avoid queues, and to assess risk more easily. Cleary joining a group of greens would be a safer bet than a group of reds. It would be easy to identify the former and avoid the latter. People would be nationally in voluntary tiers on a permanent basis until the R number shrank away like a hibernating snail.

This would allow the lunatic libertarians to do their thing while allowing the rest of us to avoid them until they self-culled.

Supermarkets could arrange red, amber and green checkouts. Petrol pumps could be colour-coded. Risk would suddenly be visible. The R number would plummet.

There would not be the hassle of trying to enforce tiers against strong public resistance, and everyone could feel that they were taking appropriate action to do their bit to reduce the virus.

And at the cost of three badges per capita, the cost would be low.

It won’t work because you cannot trust people to behave with integrity ? Well, the same can be said for self-quarantine. The same can be said about people slipping over the tier borders for a drink or two. The same can be said for mask-wearing. The same can be said for anything non-mandatory, and there are some who even flout mandatory measures. The badge approach has some advantages, and it is cheap.

Come on, let’s give it a go. It can’t be less effective than all of the government’s current strategies. Oops. Did I say ‘strategies’ ? Slip of the tongue.

Kilvert and a trifle

Friday 19 March 1875

I was very much annoyed this evening by a note from Marion Vaughan saying that my last letter to Netta had been forwarded by Matilda to her at C.D.S. at Bristol, that Miss Winter had opened the letter, read it, refused to give it to Netta, and then laid it before the Committee, and that the Honorary Secretary had written to Mr. Vaughan saying that if Netta continued to receive letters from me he must withdraw her from the school.

This is the whole of the diary entry for 19th March, and Kilvert gives no explanation. It would be a help if we could see what the original unedited entry had to offer.

Kilvert was friendly with the extensive Vaughan family, four of whom appear in the entry above. 

The intended recipient of his letter was Janetta Vaughan who was 15 and studying at the Clergy Daughters' School in Bristol. The school was on Great George Street on St Brandon's Hill, and later became St Brandon's School.

Marion and Matilda were two of Netta's older sisters, Marion being 22 and Matilda 17.

And Mr Vaughan was their father, Rev David Vaughan of Newchurch. Kilvert called the Vaughans his 'kind friends' and felt close to the family. There are many diary entries which refer to them, and he wrote about them with great tenderness. Kilvert loved children, and felt keenly the death at the age of 13 of Emmeline Vaughan. She was perhaps his favourite in the family.

Whatever Kilvert wrote was clearly unacceptable to the school authorities, and Kilvert does not record what his friend David Vaughan thought about it. Perhaps the school had a blanket policy of not allowing girls to receive letters from men not in the family, even if they were clergymen.

Kilvert might himself have given us a vital clue to Miss Winter's reaction.

On 4 June 1874 he had visited Bristol with his mother, and while she had gone off to see a friend, he had visited Janet Vaughan at the CDS. He took her a 'nosegay of roses'. It was his first visit to the school and he was unsure how to find it. He asked if she was home, and while waiting he

heard a sweet voice singing along the passages and Janet Vaughan came in much grown and with her hair cut short over her forehead, but unchanged in other ways and as sweet and simple and affectionate as ever.

They gained permission to stroll in the gardens and

walked up and down talking of Clyro and Gilfa and Newchurch and old times

They came to the 'Poet's Retreat' which was a wooded area

fringed with young trees upon which some of the girls had carved their initials.

He seems to have recognised that his next move was not his smartest idea ever:

Upon the stem of a young beech whose bark was grimy black with Bristol smuts I carved Janet's initials J.V. and reluctantly at her earnest request my own R.F.K. above.

It is not hard to imagine that the staff of a Victorian school for daughters of the clergy would have had an eagle eye for who was carving what on the trees in the Poet's Retreat. JV would have narrowed the field of girls, even if it was not a unique set of initials. And RFK ? Who could that be ? Staff would have felt a duty of care to their charges, and might have nursed a strong curiosity about the identity of RFK and his/ her possible intentions. Perhaps the concern was so great that they kept a close watch on JV's movements and mail, and, fearing scandal, took action as soon as they knew RFK's identity.

If he was annoyed at Marion Vaughan's note, Kilvert would have been incandescent with the CDS committee report of 1 February 1875:

The secretary laid before the Committee a note from the Rev. Kilvert addressed to Jannetta (sic) Vaughan, one of the pupils. It appeared that Mr. Kilvert was a friend of the family, but had called at the school last half year, and had conducted himself in a trifling way in the presence of the school, which conduct he followed this half year by the letter produced in which he alluded to the circumstances in language calculated to lower the tone of the school. The Committee requested the Secretary to write to the Rev. J. Vaughan (sic) and inform that if any communication of the like nature either by letter or otherwise were repeated, it would be their duty to request him to remove his daughter from the school. 

What was Kilvert’s offence ?

He was 34 and unmarried at the time of his first visit to the school in June 1874, and Netta was 15. He seems to have been generally unconscious of any difficulty arising from his warm interest in girls much younger than himself,

He had visited Netta at the school, unwisely carved his initials with hers on a tree in Poet’s Corner, and followed up the visit with at least one letter, and probably a series (‘my last letter to Netta’ may mean his final letter, but more probably, his most recent letter). The school took its time in determining what to do. From their point of view the visit on 4th June 1874 must have been unnoticed at the time, and must have aroused no suspicion.

But something had made Miss Winter frosty, and she began to intercept mail. She must have become aware of the initials which had been seen, and caused puzzled consternation. The initials must have been the ‘trifling’ conduct which had caused such quiet outrage.

Kilvert’s later letter was sent to Netta at home, and was forwarded to her at the school by her sister some time before 1^st February 1875 when the committee met. The letter to Rev Vaughan would have followed quickly after that meeting, but it took about six weeks for Kilvert to hear of the trouble he had caused.

It is noteworthy that he did not hear from Rev Vaughan himself. His diary entry makes clear that Marion’s account was the first he heard of the scandal. Mr Vaughan, on receiving the letter from the committee, had talked to his daughter about it, and apparently been content for her to deal with it.

Indeed, whatever Kilvert's offence, it seems to have caused no rift with the family. Of course we do not know whether it was ever discussed with him at Newchurch, but Mr Vaughan’s response suggests that he saw the dodgy conduct as indeed trifling, but in a different sense.

What did KIlvert himself think ? On hearing from Marion, he was ‘annoyed’. Kilvert tended to flail around for the appropriate adjective, often chaining lots together in a scatter-gun approach. ‘Annoyed’ does not quite seem to fit the bill. ‘Embarrassed’ eluded him, though we might expect that emotion to be prominent. He knew he had been unwise, but now he was annoyed. Here, as elsewhere, Kilvert seems to have been oblivious to how his behaviour might look to a third party.

27th April 1876 finds Kilvert with the family at Newchurch once again, having tea with the 'good Vicar', his wife, and Marion and Arthur who were at home. 

Perhaps to Miss Winter’s great relief, there is no record of his ever visiting the school again. Perhaps after all, Kilvert’s annoyance had turned into the realisation of a faux pas.