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School
Time
by Dylan Morgan
I
have written this as a meditation of sorts on what it was all about. But
I hope that it may be a trunk on which branches and leaves may grow. Perhaps
it will stimulate other ex-pupils to send in little anecdotes or thoughts.
Note that although I mention the round figure of 500 boys,
Colin tells me that the true figure was more like 430-440.
Above
the school we see four-faced Time standing, commanding the tides of boys
to rise and fall, to come and go. Time, the greatest mystery and most
inexorable force of all, that unites and separates youth and age, past
and future, and pulls them as the moon pulls the seas. Up and down the
valley it pulls from their beds five hundred faces: sleepy or sullen or
smiling. It pulls on grey trousers. Short trousers for the younger boys
whose torn knees heal cheaply while cloth is still dear. Long trousers
for mature youths to suggest the adults they are being groomed by time
to be. It pulls on shoes football-scuffed or Mam-polished. It draws bread
and jam or cereal or bacon and eggs from larders and cupboards in cold
or coal-fired kitchens.
Time
pulls open five hundred doors of mostly terraced houses and with clockwork
precision orchestrates the convergence of boys and buses. Time watches
indulgently as boys jostle and push for those seats deemed best, as
it simultaneously sees them doing later as men. For time sees the boy
in the man and the man in the boy.
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