Description
Read Arthur Calder-Marshall’s novel Dead Centre (1933), with its portrait of a boys’ boarding school, inspired by the author’s experience of teaching English at Denstone College. Calder-Marshall had complex views on class conflict; his father lost a large fortune as a result of the 1917 Russian revolution. But Calder-Marshall was attracted by socialist activism, even editing Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man and Other Writings in 1970.
In Dead Centre, Greek and Latin Classics are a touchstone against which class status, intelligence, originality, physical and psychological wholesomeness and humour are all measured. One pupil, Podmore, despises the Head Boy because ‘he’s classics-mad. I hate classics. They’re dead right through. Dead languages and the men who teach them are dead’.
The school games trainer compares his own son Bill, who has left school at 14, with the boys at the school: ‘He can make things with his hands, there’s not a carpenter’s tool he can’t use as well as I can myself. He’s hung round the garage since he was a kid and can tinker with a car and know what’s wrong… He’s strong, can run with the best, a good boxer, can rear and cure rabbits, set snares, ride a horse and handle a ferret. Add to it, he knows more about crops and gardening than I ever did and has as much book-knowledge as he’ll ever need. These young gentlemen up at the schools they’re strong all right… Even if they’ve got good bodies, they think it’s bad class to use them for anything that’s not useless. And what they learn from books is never going to do them much good, as far as I can see. They’ll never be able to use that knowledge of Greek or whatever it is.’
But the last word goes to a pupil named Stagge, whose devout Christianity is fundamentally challenged by Greek comedy: ‘Last night, when I was translating Aristophanes, I came to the word πορνη (pornē, ‘prostitute’) and I looked it up in the lexicon and when I saw what it meant, I suddenly began to smile…‘What is so terrible is that I laughed, that the mentions of a degraded woman filled me with insane joy and laughter.’
