John Christopher Timothy Jennings

John Christopher Timothy Jennings is a name I fondly associate with my childhood. He was mentioned to me again recently and I was reminded of the fact that, unlike Richmal Crompton’s William Brown and Frank Richards’s Billy Bunter, his name is unknown to many people, despite the usually Midas-like Stephen Fry having recorded audio versions of some of the Jennings books which are still broadcast relatively regularly on Radio 7.

Although I have not read Crompton or Richards for some years, I do still revisit Anthony Buckeridge’s books and, as a result of the comment, thought I would try to consider their appeal. In short, I believe that Buckeridge provides a realistic perspective on the thoughts, behaviour and actions of a group of 11-13 year old boys. As a former preparatory school teacher, he was ideally placed to observe the lives of his charges and does so in a way which combines an adult’s insightfulness with a youngster’s unbounded enthusiasm.

When I first encountered the Jennings books, I (like the eponymous hero) was a boarder at a preparatory school. I feel that it is the realism of the situations coupled with the tendency of incidents to develop one step further than one would imagine that makes the stories entertaining while retaining an important authenticity. Critics have acknowledged Buckeridge’s good understanding of how boys talk, but what seems more convincing to me is Buckeridge’s understanding of how small boys think. One early example is the explanation as to why Temple, whose initials are CAT, is known as ‘Bod’.

As Temple’s initials are CAT the other boys obviously call him Dog; however, that was felt to be to long-winded so they call him Dogsbody for short. When Jennings points out that Dogsbody is, in fact, longer than Dog, Venables’s simple response is that it therefore needs shortening to Bod, succinctly summarising it as ‘Bod short for Body and Dogsbody short for Dog.’

Apart from the glorious schoolboy illogicality, this moment also demonstrates Buckeridge’s insight. The explanation is given to Jennings over the first meal the pupils share at the start of his time at Linbury Court and his naivety in the matter is greeted scornfully by the other boys, including Atkinson. Buckeridge’s understanding of the behaviour of the boys is shown when he tells the reader:

Atkinson, as a new boy, had asked exactly the same question less than a year before, but his manner implied that he had been born with preparatory school jargon on his lips.

From experience I know that such details are true to life and that such concerns are real and it is entertaining (and potentially reassuring) to see them written down. Reading them today they also serve to bring a wry smile to one’s lips as previous preoccupations are remembered affectionately, doubtlessly through rose-tinted spectacles, and with a light heart.

If I do have a criticism of Buckeridge it is for writing two more Jennings books in the 1990s, some fourteen years after the previous book had been published. One of them, Jennings Again!, is concerned with the fashionable green issues of the late twentieth century and, as a result, makes it feel, ironically, more dated than texts first published in the 1950s. However, if these can be overlooked as aberrations, I would heartily encourage anyone to make John Christopher Timothy Jennings’s acquaintance.

Placing initialisms

Every three months the Oxford English Dictionary adds revisions of current definitions, new entries and new subordinate entries to the OED online (which, many people are not aware, can be freely accessed at home using your membership number for your local library).

This quarter’s new entries include, inter alia, the initialisms OMG, LOL, IMHO and BFF that are associated with the new medium of electronic communication and, therefore by extension, children and young adults. Apart from the surprisingly early first use of OMG in a collection of published letters from 1917, the earliest citations are found in the 1990s and most often in Internet Usenet newsgroup discussions.

I am regularly teased for having more prescriptivist tendencies when it comes to the English language but I do very much acknowledge that language does (and must) develop and move forward; however, I feel that the foundations on which the developments are made and occur should not be forgotten and am – admittedly – more defensive in my personal desire to see a living archive of language rather than the more liberal thinkers’ approach of consigning punctuation, spelling and grammar rules to history.

In a world in which boundaries are routinely blurred as a result of people’s use of and reliance on technology, it is not uncommon to see these initialisms appearing in my pupils’ work. Apart from ensuring that I have to keep up to date with examples I was not using on the Internet before many of them were born (a fact that surprises many of my students), the students are, as children and young adults have done for many generations, merely trying to establish their own identity through their sociolect, which is doubtless the reason they bridle if I write ‘LOL!’ in the margin of their books next to something genuinely funny.

I am not against people using these initialisms, but what I do find infuriating is the way in which they have become accepted as a societal norm in any medium. When instant messaging, the written word replaces the spoken: its immediacy can readily mean that capital ‘I’s may be forgotten, paragraph breaks are not used and shortened forms abound. It is a private conversation for personal consumption. The immediacy and length restrictions on a text message mean that shortened forms may be necessary, but they are, again, private exchanges.

E-mails (and the question of whether I should have used a lower case ‘e’ and a hyphen is still to be answered) start blurring the boundaries. They have the immediacy of a text message but today an e-mail often replaces a letter. Is this, therefore, a formal piece of text, or not? The answer, obviously, depends on who the recipient is: the audience.

My frustrations come back to the mantra that we endeavour to instil in English lessons where writing is concerned: whatever the piece of writing, the three things which must always be considered are purpose, audience and form. Writers, be they children or adults, need to be able to distinguish between the situations and media and make their language choices appropriately. However, while people demonstrate an increasing incapability to do so, it is reassuring to know that the OED is still recording usage and helping those still bewildered by BFF.

Relationships with Facebook

In different circles I have heard the question of what we all did with our time ‘before Facebook’ raised a couple of times this week. I know that back in August 2007 Facebook quickly become part of my computer routine and, having had a smartphone for the past eight months, I now regularly take opportunities to see what my friends (and I do pride myself on the fact that I have, with only a couple of exceptions, met all the people with whom I am friends in person) are doing or have been doing.

There have been stories in the press of couples splitting up over Facebook, and by this the reports mean one half of the couple discovering they are no longer an item thanks to a status update, rather than Facebook itself being the cause of the split. To a bystander who does not know the people or details, these headlines indicate something of an abhorrent manner in which to behave, but it is surely only the logical extension of perpetually broadcasting the details of one’s life on a public forum, rather than managing the public and private spheres and informing one’s soon-to-be-ex of their impending situation privately over the telephone or (shock, horror) face to face.

Traditionally, social announcements were made in the London papers – indeed, for a small fortune they can still be made in the London papers – but now details of relationships can be precisely addressed to their target audience at no cost. Earlier this week I was saddened to see the relationship statuses of two friends change from being ‘In a relationship’ to being ‘Single’; while I have seen these changes being made by individual friends before, this is the first time when I have known both people and seen their profiles change in such a synchronised way. The touching thing that followed this was the number of messages, albeit public, of reassurance and support that each party received.

The use of Facebook also came up this week in individual tutorials (or ‘Learning Reviews’ as they are officially termed for us) with pupils at school. As the exam season is looming large, it was reassuring to be told, unprompted, by two A-Level students that they had deactivated their Facebook accounts and had no intention of using them again until the summer. I half seriously asked both students whether they were suffering withdrawal symptoms and both said that while they knew they had to deactivate their accounts for the good of their revision, they had suffered no anxiety about not logging on since deactivating them.

While I was pleased to hear about their decision and that it was not causing them additional anguish, it did make me wonder how we really view and use Facebook. Deactivating an account leaves it dormant on the system and the simple process of logging on to Facebook again will reactivate it. If it is possible to disconnect and reconnect so easily from one’s personal social network, what does that say for the nature of today’s human relationships which underpin the whole concept of social networking?

Ancient and Modern

In what is an era of rapid change in so many areas of our lives, I am a great believer in respecting tradition and upholding customs (even if they are, at times, outmoded) as I feel it is important that identities and histories are not lost in the name of progress. Nevertheless, when people do make changes, as long as they are justified, explained and attempt to retain the spirit of the original concept, I endeavour to accept them without complaint and view them as the next stage of development in what are often long established practices. I like to think I am not so arrogant as to insist that people, societies and nations remain static.

However, in the course of this week I was faced with a tradition being up-held which frustrated me. The Lichfield Conduit Lands Trust is inviting applications for two new trustees as a result of two retirements. According to the publicity, the Trust makes charitable grants to individuals aged under 25 to further their education and to local organisations for more general purposes and, having been resident in Lichfield for more than five years and thereby fulfilling the stated requirements of the post, feeling that this might be a good opportunity to get more involved in the local community I decided to apply.

I already knew that the Trust had been founded in January 1545 to provide water for Lichfield and it was an organisation I had encountered while researching the history of the Cathedral’s Choral Foundation as records of Chapter’s nineteenth century meetings discussing the management of all aspects of Cathedral life include the provision of water for individual houses in The Close.

The fact that it is such a historical organisation had an inherent appeal, and the four meetings a year seemed manageable; the only question to which I did not know the answer was when the meetings were held.

I contacted a representative of the Trust to answer this question and was given the dates. Apparently, the meetings in March, June and September are always held on Wednesdays and December’s meeting is held on a Tuesday in keeping with an ancient tradition. Quaint, but not unmanageable. However, the meetings are always held at 3.30pm and, having been that way throughout living memory, I was brightly and confidently told ‘that’s not likely to change any time soon’.

Suddenly, a tradition was being upheld but for what purpose? By implication, the applicants and trustees must, most likely, either be retired or unemployed. The trustees of a charity making donations to help young people are to be distanced from their beneficiaries: I had felt that, as a teacher, one of the strengths of my application would be my work with young people.

I bit my tongue merely saying that, being a teacher, there was clearly no point in applying – which was duly agreed with – and I hung up. I struggled mentally for a few minutes with the question of tradition and rationality and decided that if people are going to be so protective of traditions which, when considered in the larger scheme of things, appear risible there would be no point in questioning it.

As I sighed to myself, I was left with my penchant for tradition tarnished and a sense of disappointment that, even in our era of rapid change, there are still some people who seem too stubborn to acknowledge it.

A cry of despair and a warning to humanity

Two years ago my wife and I visited Krakow for the first time. As part of the trip we visited Auschwitz and Birkenau, the two most famous German concentration camps in Nazi-occupied Poland. The experience of visiting the concentration camps is undeniably harrowing, but one that people should certainly take if given the opportunity.

Over half term we returned to Krakow but did not make a return visit to the Oświęcim (Auschwitz’s pre-Nazi-occupation name). However, this time we visited a relatively new museum established in what had been Oskar Schindler’s factory. While there is much that could be said about Schindler and Hollywood’s presentation of his eponymous list, there was one exhibit from the museum – a video reconstruction of an event which occurred in November 1939 – which lodged itself in my mind.

When visiting the concentration camps, the headline figures are always – understandably – about the number of Jews who were killed by the Nazis. Indeed, much of the Schindler museum shows the way the Jews were forced to live in Krakow and the way in which they were treated while still, in name at least, free. However there were many other groups of people who were also sent to the camps and one group, imprisoned in the Nazi operation codenamed Sonderaktion Krakau, was the Polish university professors.

On 6 November 1939, the rector of the Jagiellonian University – the fourteenth century University of Krakow – was obliged by the SS to instruct all Polish professors to attend a lecture on German plans for Polish education. There was (and it is easy to say now) of course, no lecture. The 144 professors who turned up and another 39 people in the building were arrested and sent to Sachsenhausen and Dachau concentration camps on the pretext that the university was educating people without German consent.

Although an international outcry led to the release of 101 professors aged over 40 in February 1940 several of the older individuals had not survived the relatively short stay in the camps’ terrible conditions and notable Polish academics died.

This operation was one of many which made up the Nazi’s plan, the Intelligenzaktion, to rid Poland of the Polish intellectual elite as the educated were deemed to pose a threat to the ‘Germanisation’ of Poland. Under the plan around 60,000 intellectuals and members of the upper classes were killed and Polish secondary and higher education was stopped until the end of the second world war.

Denying people education is a simple means by which to control a population and perpetrate the ruling class’s ideology and status. In twenty-first century Britain we are in a position where ‘Every Child Matters’ and every child is duly entitled to an education up to the age of 18, but beyond 18 the country is currently in a state of flux. As university educations are being priced at £27,000 students are understandably worrying about the options open to them in the future. It is not clear where this will leave tertiary education in this country in five, ten or twenty years’ time, but in a world which is changing so rapidly, education and academics are essential and – although I know it is idealistic to say so –  their existence cannot, or at least should not, be based on money alone.

Patience is a virtue

Last week I had to explain Douglas Dunn’s metaphor about the beauty of life being ‘the film that always comes out blank’ to the majority of a group of GCSE students. Coincidentally, the next day the process of ideas emerging during writing was described to me using the simile of an image slowly appearing in a developing tray.

Although there are people who continue to use film cameras – I also learnt a couple of weeks ago that the manual developing process is still taught on photography degree courses – this is another area of people’s lives that technology has radically altered over the past decade.

In today’s world of digital photography, when we take a picture the first thing we do is to squint at the small LCD display on the back of the camera to see if it has come out successfully. If not, we can remedy the situation immediately but if it has, the picture is easily transferred to another medium (often Facebook or Flickr) for general consumption or possibly printed when we return home or next pop to the supermarket.

These instant results are far removed from the physical process of loading a film into a camera, taking 24 or 36 pictures that all count (and squeezing a couple of extra frames in if you were lucky), removing the film from the camera while ensuring it is not exposed to light, sending it away to be developed, and waiting a few days before the arrival of a package of prints in the post. If a new film was loaded towards the end of a holiday, it could be months before the film was finished and developed and then when the pictures arrived on the doorstep they had the power to transport the photographer back to another place and another time.

The delay in seeing the ultimate prints was often tantalising: even at photo labs which offered an hour’s premium service there was still the nail-biting sixty minutes wondering whether any of the shots would be any good. Now we know immediately.

The immediacy in seeing results is both a benefit and downside of technology. Many people are now wholly ‘connected’ so that they can receive and deal with e-mails on the go (accepting we are well past the stage when it was unusual to be able to speak to people away from a landline telephone). As a result of this, senders expect a faster response to e-mails but it is noticeable that people rarely demand the faster responses: it has simply become an expectation.

People now expect things to happen instantaneously; the idea of waiting for something is becoming outmoded. However, there are still reminders of the virtue of patience: buds are beginning to appear on daffodil shoots, and Lent is shortly to make us wait for Easter, but they are things we have to look for and often only find in the natural world. Unless opportunities to wait are searched out and embraced, it is easy to lose the space in our lives for reflection, for ourselves, and for each other in our hurry to show our holiday snaps to the world.

‘I am wiser than the aged’

I have spent what feels like much of the weekend as part of Lichfield Cathedral’s fund-raising ‘Psalmathon’ which involved the five choirs associated with the Cathedral singing all 150 psalms between Friday and Saturday evenings.

Apart from confirming that any event with the suffix ‘-athon’ is nothing but exhausting, it has introduced me to something new in a familiar setting. Even as a cathedral musician for the past 26 years, I only know about half of the book of psalms: the psalms assigned to each day’s evening worship are old friends, but the morning psalms are the newcomer that everyone regards warily. Discovering the unfamiliar in a familiar context has, for the second time in the past year, caused me to reflect on the impact of psalms on my life.

As a boy chorister, the daily round of psalm singing was part of the job and the strange language and ideas were simply accepted. While the gamut of emotions and events portrayed in the psalms is difficult for a pre-teen to grasp, details did stick out: who were Oreb, Zeb, Zeba and Salmana that princes should aspire to be like? What did God do to the Madianites, Sisera and Jabin at the brook of Kison? Why did the Philistines join Gebal, Ammon, Amalek and Assur at Tyre to help the children of Lot? And all these are just from psalm 83. Many of the names of the people and places are fantastical and would not sound out of place in the worlds of JRR Tolkien or JK Rowling; indeed, the same psalm also includes the Edomites, Ismaelites, Moabites and Hagarenes.

 

As well as providing a rich seam of people and places there is also the inevitable poetry of the psalms. As an adult this is more apparent, but there are images I remember from childhood readings and psalm 55 is one of my clearest memories:

The words of his mouth were softer than butter, having war in his heart:
His words were smoother than oil, and yet be they very swords. 

Even as a youngster, the dichotomy between what one says and does was familiar to me and the simple metaphors make a clear image. Although I can now identify and comment on the poetic devices in the texts, I was certainly aware of some of the meanings and imagery when I was younger.

Having sung psalms on a daily basis, I have never shirked away from attempting to read English texts. My students shy away from Shakespeare because the language is ‘difficult’ – some even object to the ‘thee’s, ‘thou’s and words ending in ‘-eth’ – but, having been brought up with the words of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, these have always sat comfortably with me.

There is an absolute maximum of seven hundred child choristers in England in any academic year. Through their singing of the psalms they are – unwittingly, like me – having worlds opened up to them to which many children just do not have access. The regular repetition of poetry, some dating back three thousand years, must influence the linguistic development (and possibly even subconscious ability to appreciate poetry) positively and the psalms could, perhaps, in their own small way be admired as a rare, but precious, gem in the crown of children’s literature.