Caution: Explosive Device
IT didn't look like a letter-bomb. In fact, the familiar manila envelope with its juvenile handwriting (the Second Form is always assigned the task of addressing them, and no computer is ever likely to come cheaper than those conscripts) seemed identical with all the others I've received over the years. The thought crossed my mind that some far-sighted Old Boy had bought a couple of million familiar manila envelopes when the association was founded in 1906, as a hedge against inflation. At any rate, as soon as I saw that envelope peeping out from under the pile of entreaties from all and sundry, I knew that I could look forward to an hour or two of untroubled rambling through the corridors of boyhood memory. The school magazine, The Poultonian, had arrived and with it, as always, the reassurance that some things are permanent. Just as there will always be an England, so there will always be a Baines School. Or so I thought.
Perhaps I should take a moment to explain a couple of things. The Poultonian is the closest thing to a DARTMOUTH ALUMNIMAGAZINE that I receive from any of the places I studied at when growing up in England. Neither of the universities I attended has a magazine (or an alumni fund). I receive absolutely no communications from one of them, and from the other I get, once a year, a scruffy 12-page, newsprint tabloid containing a hodgepodge of news items and no reference to anyone I ever knew. On the other hand, the Poultonian (it used to come out every term, but printing costs turned it into an annual some years ago), which emanates from the grammar school I attended from age 11 to age 17, keeps me in touch with a part of my past in a pretty effective way and gives me a sense of how the present looks as well just what a good alumni magazine should do. In British terms it is a fairly standard product: Edited by one of the masters, it consists of three sets of articles reports on school activities, creative writing by current pupils, and a section devoted to the Old Boys Association. At least, that's what it used to consist of. But my letter-bomb told me that the Old Boys Association is now called simply the Baines School Association, and, as the old song has it, the effect upon me was terrific. Baines School, founded in 1717, is now also educating girls!
In the month in which the tenth anniversary of the trustees' decision to admit women to Dartmouth is being celebrated, I find myself able for the first time to understand what that decision meant for at least some of those to whom it brought feelings that were, to say it as neutrally as possible, mixed. Don't get me wrong. I do not for a second regret whatever votes I may have cast in faculty meetings in favor of coeducation. I have not at any time doubted the rightness of the decision, nor do I do so now; and I have not, I believe, failed to see the benefits it has brought to the College. Similarly, I do not doubt the reasonableness and wisdom and propriety of making Baines School a place where girls and boys are taught side by side (it will mean, among many other things, that in future fewer young people will be thrown off their stride by encountering university studies and the opposite sex at the same moment.) So far as my head is concerned, I am 100 per cent for it. What I discovered, to my surprise, from reading about the Girls' Cricket XI and seeing references to the Senior Mistress and taking in the disappearance of the words "Old Boys," was that my heart wasn't quite so ready to cast all its votes in favor. And so, for the first time, I discovered sympathy for those Dartmouth people for whom the trustees' decision was in some measure a source of regret.
The sympathy does not extend to those who were saddened or angered because of
their basic antipathy, whether acknowledged or unconscious, toward the female gender. There are, after all, some absolutes in this world, and one of them is surely that there are no grounds whatever for distinguishing between men and women in terms of access to all that a society can provide for its members. But I do realize, now that my ox has been gored, that it is impossible to ignore the pang which comes from seeing that an institution one loves has changed in an absolutely fundamental way from what it was when one loved it first. The fact that the change is for the better is, at that moment of realization, beside the point. Something which we allowed ourselves to believe would always be there more or less as we thought we had always known it has disappeared, and some part of one's humanity finds it hard to take and mourns the loss.
But only for a while. Living with a heart-pang is as perverse as living with a toothache. I'll write my check for the building
fund, I'll jot down the date of the annual meeting of what used to be the Old Boys Association knowing that this time, God willing, I'll be able to get to it, and I'll send a brief note to Whittle, J.T., as he heads for Trinity College, Oxford. I cant say that I've kept careful track, but I have a fairly strong feeling that he is the first person to win both the Lucy Tomlinson Magazine Prize and the Bolton-Newton Prize for Public Speaking in the same year since a certain Smith, P.D., managed it more than (heaven forbid!) 30 years ago.
