Report Card from Breath

In the autumn of 1962, when I was 11 years old, I had been in Britain for two years. After attending various schools in the United States, the Marshall Islands, Japan, Spain, Germany and an English “primary school,” I was now in the tenth school of my life, if nursery school is included. Hampton Grammar School was a boys only school that prided itself on being the most academic school of its kind in the county of Middlesex, stretching across the southwest suburbs of London.

Entry into Hampton was highly competitive, and my last year in primary school was punctuated by a series of tests that would determine the secondary school I would get into. I worried all year that I might not be “good enough” for this school, so when the news came that I had in fact been accepted, I was both relieved and excited — so much so that I delighted in repeatedly trying on the new school uniform and proudly looking at myself in the mirror. I belonged!

But the tension and worry associated with the selection process resurfaced from day one. Hampton’s was an excessively competitive and unconsciously macho culture. The first stage of processing that the school put us through involved sorting us out on the basis of whether or not we appeared to be “bright” enough to have a chance of getting into either Oxford or Cambridge universities. Both of these institutions required that applicants have studied Latin, at least to “O Level," the Ordinary Level exam of the General Certificate of Education or "GCE," usually taken at age 16.

So the “best” students were selected at the end of the first year for a class called “Latin A,” and those who were considered to have not quite as good a chance of getting into these elite universities went into the “Latin B” class. The Latin A students were on an accelerated track, taking the nationwide O Levels at age 15 instead of 16, and Advanced Level exams (“A Levels”) in three subjects at age 17 rather than 18 so as to give them time to take the Oxford or Cambridge entrance exams after A levels. These two classes, with 30 boys in each, accounted for half of the boys in my year. Eventually, 26 out of the roughly 120 boys in this cohort were to go on to Oxford or Cambridge. A member of the Latin B group, I somehow got into Oxford, where the tolerant environment of Worcester College allowed me to go through the motions of studying French Language and Literature with neither distinction nor disgrace.

The boys who didn’t make it into Latin A or Latin B went into two equally-ranked classes classes called Alpha and Beta. I don’t remember this being said, but I guess most of these boys were not expected to go on to university, although some certainly did so. The 1960s was a time when, if I remember correctly, about 3% of 18-year olds went on to universities, and 4% went on to study in what were then called Polytechnic Colleges. The “Polys” were generally more focused on vocational training, and as such were thought of as being somewhat lower academically than universities. Nowadays, all the Polys have been given full university status, and a much higher percentage of school leavers enter university than was the case in my day.

Although I eventually got into Oxford, this was far from a straightforward “success story,” as you will see from the following account of what happened in my first term at Hampton, and from what I will say elsewhere about Hampton and Oxford. In fact, it is a story of how a paragon of mainstream education was able to help disconnect one little boy from his innate self-confidence and sense of self-worth, the birthright of all children. At Hampton we learned that our innate value was not taken as a given. Rather, we had to prove our worth, and it was assumed from the outset that we were going to demonstrate, through our performance at the school, the extent to which our lives could in the future be deemed valuable and worthy of respect.

Such a competitive ethos would have been a toxic enough drug on its own, but it was rendered even more potent by the religious rectitude and apparent total lack of self-doubt of the headmaster. George Whitfield’s daily addresses in school assembly dosed us with just enough fear to make sure that the excellence of the education we were enjoying could never be questioned by child, teacher or parent. His rock-hard belief that the school was ordered and guided in ways that had the seal of divine approval appeared strong enough to make all of us, if we didn’t entirely share his conviction, at least feel guilty for not doing so.

I was very aware, in my first few weeks at Hampton, that we were all being judged. It felt like the grade on every homework assignment and on every one of the frequent tests would be used to determine the class to which we would be assigned in the second year. At the time I thought I could hardly live with myself if I didn’t at least get into the Latin B class or “stream,” as it was called.

A few weeks into the first term I got a bad sore throat. My father had a couple of years earlier retired from the US Navy, and we were entitled to free medical treatment at the US Air Force hospital in the west suburbs of London. My parents felt more comfortable taking advantage of the services here than of those of the equally free British National Health Service. I guess they felt like foreigners in Britain, and they may also have felt that the American treatment would be superior.

At this American hospital I was given a penicillin injection, in my backside, to treat the throat infection I had. But at home the next day I felt even more sick, and had a very high temperature, so my mother had to take me back. I had developed an abscess in my buttock, presumed by the doctor to have been caused by a needle that had not been properly sterilized — disposable needles were not yet the standard in those days. I had to stay in hospital for an entire weekend, lying much of the time on my stomach with an electric heat pad on my bottom.

I loved being there. Nobody expected me to do any homework that weekend, and I was allowed to watch as much TV as I liked. This was a real luxury, because we didn’t have a television set at home, my parents — or I should say my mother — having determined that it would be a distraction for me and my brother to have one in the house. And it was a treat to eat white bread, ice cream, jello and other foods that were banned from the meals served by my zealously health-conscious mother.

When I went back to school a couple of days later the teachers were very sympathetic and didn’t make me feel bad for not having any homework to hand in.

The following Saturday I had to go back for a checkup. Actually my bottom had pretty much healed, and it was obvious to me that, despite a little remaining redness, the doctor would be satisfied that there was no longer any cause for concern. I couldn’t therefore hope for another relaxing weekend in hospital.

Unless, that is, I were to take matters into my own hands… And this is what I did, literally.

Before seeing the doctor I went into the toilet, and hit my bottom repeatedly, as hard as I could, to make it redder. The result was a blotched effect which was quite different from how it had looked when the infection was at its peak, but it nevertheless looked quite impressive in its own way.

This unusual condition baffled the doctor, who decided it would be safest to have me admitted for another weekend, for observation. So I got another weekend of ease in hospital, and the teachers were again kind about my not being able to hand in homework. But their kindness in saying they would help me to catch up was translated into my childish mind as further anxiety: they wouldn’t be so kind, I reasoned, if they knew I had lied.

I was too young to see that my not feeling secure enough to communicate my truest feelings was evidence of there being something wrong in my family and school environment, and that I was not the problem. The wisest choice of simply saying I didn’t like the school did not appear to be an option, and so I chose instead to lie. And now that I was on this path into a forest of self-entanglement and doubt, it seemed easier to keep going than to turn back.

After returning to school I did my best to rise to the challenges, but my tools for dealing with the situation had not changed. Being good enough at sport to represent the school first-years in soccer or rugby might have helped to preserve or nurture my sense of self-worth, but that clearly wasn’t going to happen. The only sports I found myself in my adolescent years to have some natural aptitude for were table tennis, badminton and tennis, none of which were offered at Hampton, except for tennis in the summer, and this only for third-years and older.

Academic success appeared to offer my best chance at proving my worth, but keeping up with the homework assignments had become harder. Those friends and classmates who looked as though they were headed for Latin A or Latin B all seemed to have notebooks that were much more organized than mine. Even their handwriting was tidier.

The dislike of my own handwriting, when I think about it now, is a telling sign. I had been taught quite different handwriting styles in the different schools I had attended and was unconsciously struggling to synthesize different cultures. I was probably much later than my peers in finding my own consistent style, and it was therefore a mildly self-affirming surprise to hear a university friend, now a professional calligrapher of note, tell me ten years later that he found my handwriting aesthetically pleasing and “balanced.”

It must have been seven weeks or so into the first term, around the end of October perhaps, that I decided that the best course of action would be to find a pretext for getting back into hospital. My older brother had occasionally suffered from stomach-aches, and this seemed to be a promising way to go. My creative streak, however, allowed me to add the dramatic effect of a swollen abdomen to my chosen ailment.

The strategy worked astonishingly well.

I was quickly admitted to the hospital, this time for a period that was to last three weeks. And whereas my previous stints in hospital had only yielded relief from homework and the freedom to enjoy the food and desserts that were normal in other families, I was now also receiving presents each day from parents and well-wishing friends. It was a season of Christmas and birthdays combined, stretched out over days.

There were “tests” of a different kind from those at school. They were sometimes unpleasant, but unlike those at school they did not threaten to determine my value as a human being. When the juices in my stomach needed to be examined, plastic tubes were pushed through my nose and down my throat in a process that I remember as extremely uncomfortable. But when it was finished there was no carry-over into my daily life. I could resume whatever I had been doing without a feeling of failure or inadequacy.

At one point there were seven doctors standing around my bed, all of them perplexed by my case. I always managed to stick my stomach out in a convincing way, and my voice in responding to where their probing fingers were causing pain must have sounded authentic.

My case may also have been intriguing. When the main pediatrician, Dr. Schwab, suggested to my mother that my liver might be swollen because she had been giving me too many vitamin D or E supplements, I think she was hurt. But her defensive response, voiced only within our family, was to accuse him of being too eager to find something to write about in a medical journal. Perhaps I learned from her not only a skepticism with regard to authority, but also caution and even fear with regard to challenging it directly.

The combination of my impressive performance and the total lack of any diagnostic indications from the tests — including extensive radiological tests — led the hospital to conclude that I should be referred to the military's better-equipped and much larger hospital in Wiesbaden, Germany. The Air Force ran a regular medical evacuation flight around its bases in Europe, picking up patients who needed to be treated at Wiesbaden. So one morning, two weeks after I had been admitted, my mother and I boarded a twin-engined “medevac” plane bound for Wiesbaden.

There were half a dozen or so patients on the plane. I was the only minor, and I was also the only one to avail myself of one of several stretchers lining one side of the plane in bunk bed fashion. It was a fairly long flight, since we had to make a couple of stops to pick up other patients, and the chance to lie down for a while must have been an opportunity to relieve the boredom. It was also an opportunity for me to render more realistic my performance. “My stomach hurts, so I want to lie down for a while.” I remember my mother’s worried face… One curious aspect of all this was that in some sense I was, if not actually believing my own story, feeling that I really was sick. Psychologically, of course, I was.

Further tests in Wiesbaden yielded no results. The test where I watched with doped eyes as a needle was inserted into my stomach was disturbing even to me, the feeling compounded with my mother arriving in the ward just as I was being wheeled down the corridor in a wheelchair. She panicked at the sight of me with my head listing druggily to one side.

I'm not sure if it was that night exactly, but at some point during that week I myself had a kind of panic attack. As I lay awake in the dark ward, my mind turned for some reason to breath. “How is it possible to breathe? How do I breathe? What is keeping me breathing? I don’t understand… I don't know how to... I can’t breathe!” When called by my friend from a nearby bed, the nurse seemed to know exactly what to do, and pushed me repeatedly up and down from lying prone to sitting upright, and back again. I returned to normal, but with a fearful sense that I had just gone to the limits of the human mind. And this was not the first time that I was to venture to these limits. I was later to write on the walls of my college room, in response to a another mental storm for which the only remedy was simply to let go, “The answer is there is no question.”

The doctors finally resolved to open up my abdomen surgically: they would perform what they called an exploratory operation. When I woke up from the operation, the surgeon was sitting at my bedside. “What was wrong with me, doctor?” I asked, awareness of the need to maintain the deception undiminished by the anesthetic. “Nothing at all. As soon as we gave you the anesthetic, your stomach went down. But we thought we'd better have a look anyway.” I learned too that he had removed my appendix as a precaution.

A week later my relieved mother was able to take me back to England. I had a long vertical scar on my belly as a permanent reminder of what had happened, but I was fit enough soon after that to go sledding on Box Hill in Surrey with my friend Steve. Having been absent for a total of six weeks from school, I was free to have fun without having to think about meeting anyone’s expectations.

The doctors did tell my mother that they thought my problems must be psychological, but neither she nor my father ever talked to me about it. They were just happy that I was not suffering from any of the life-threatening ailments that might have been producing my symptoms. This lack of open communication was, of course, a serious problem in itself, and I don’t want to blame my competitive and elitist school for all the pain that I experienced in the course of my “first-class” education. However, this school and the social values it embodied were a very big part of the problem.

My sustained experiment with deception, and many other experiences that I will write about elsewhere, have guided me in my career as an educator to seek ways to humanize mainstream education. I have learned that whatever the technicalities of a particular subject, and regardless of the stage of education, the foundation has to be an understanding that happiness is not something to be achieved in the future at the cost of the present. The highest human attainment is the knowledge of how to appreciate, at this moment, the fact that we are alive. People are not innately lazy any more than they are innately pretentious or deceptive. Our fundamental nature is love and joy, and when human beings are educated to respect themselves primarily for their ability to embrace and enjoy life now, they will naturally seek ways in which to “work hard,” to strive to perfect their own unique gifts. They will understand that the pursuit of true excellence does not entail feeling or appearing superior to someone else.

My mother’s words, “Kevin, we don’t mind what grades you get, as long as you do your best,” used to confuse me. “How can I be doing my best if I feel like playing outside?” “Does it mean that I should hand in neater homework?” “Should I be more like so and so, who is always getting good grades for his homework?” While her words sounded wise, they gave me no idea what “doing my best” means. Now I understand that “doing my best” is deeply personal. It is to pay attention, with the heart rather than the mind, to a quiet inner voice that is constantly speaking through every unique breath. It speaks with an authority much greater than that of my old headmaster, who used to regularly write on my report card the bland words, “He has much to his credit.”

The report card from breath also repeats itself, but miraculously sounds fresh each time: “All is well. Now.” And it is also a challenge. Do I have the courage, perseverance, simplicity and clarity to accept this joyful reality?