I once went to a school where there were lots of rules. There were so many that they were given to us in a small pocket-sized, powder-blue booklet. This also listed the names of all the inmates, provided the unmemorable words of the school song (deployed three times a year at the ends of terms). And it specified the punishments for breaking the rules. Not since medieval churches still displayed their gruesome but fascinating depictions of the Last Judgement has any society made matters so clear. If you do certain things, certain other bad things will definitely follow.
In the case of my school, there were no pincers and hideous demons, just boredom used as a weapon. For any ordinary broken rule, you had to appear at 7:00 A.M. in a large classroom, there to write out, twenty times and very neatly, the school line. Though naturally old-fashioned, I was astonished to find this Edwardian penal survival at a twentieth-century school. It was as if our family doctor had suggested bloodletting or poultices. The line ran, “Few things are more distressing to a well-regulated mind than to see a boy, who ought to know better, disporting himself at improper moments.” I do not in fact have a well-regulated mind, but even so I suspect this claim is not true. I can think of a lot of more distressing things.
For more severe offenses, you would be “gated,” that is, confined to the school’s well-regulated grounds for long periods, forbidden even to venture into the seductive town of Cambridge, which lay on our doorstep. For some reason the most serious offense, which would most swiftly lead to being gated, was being late for breakfast. I couldn’t and can’t see much of a thrill in breaking such a rule, and never did. The well-done sausages would have run out if you were late. I suppose the idea behind it was a belief that a chap who could be late for breakfast was capable of almost anything.
One of the problems with strictly codified rules is that you may feel free to do things which the rule makers never thought of. It never crossed their minds that any boy should be so wicked as to pay others to play cricket in his stead on long summer afternoons. I continued to do this shocking thing undiscovered for two years. The worst offense which I actually committed, climbing the fence into a secret British government fallout shelter (we didn’t get far), was also not listed in the blue book and so could only be dealt with by a stern talking-to. But, in the way of things, it was not long after that before I was no longer there at all, and so had to make my way in the great world without any obvious book of rules to guide me. What was one to do?
There is a scene in the film Groundhog Day where Bill Murray goes through the maxims of his youth: “Clean up your room,” “Be nice to your sister,” “Don’t mix beer and wine,” and “Don’t drive on the railroad track.” (The passengers in his car take the view that this last rule is actually quite a good one.) And I suppose, in my mid- to late teens, that my moral equipment was round about that level. How odd it was to think that so much effort had been made, in my upbringing, to draw my attention to morals, and that it had had so little effect. I suppose that I had, as Don McLean once sang, “heard about people like me, but never made the connection.”
Looking back, most of it took the form of the hymns I had sung daily at an earlier school, about stepping fearless through the night of doubt and sorrow, choosing the steep and rugged pathway instead of idling about in green pastures, finding the service of the Lord in a purer life, fighting the good fight. One of my favorites wasn’t really a hymn at all, but some verses by Thomas Carlyle which our headmaster liked us to sing to a haunting tune on summer mornings: “Here hath been dawning another blue day. Think, wilt thou let it slip useless away?” Even when I was ignoring these sentiments, I still knew that I was ignoring them, and shouldn’t be—and they still inform my thoughts, actions, and decisions to this day. The hosts of God, I was assured from the start, encamp around the dwellings of the just. The unjust, by contrast, have different and less agreeable neighbors.
But by then another music was drifting insidiously through the woods and groves which surrounded our sequestered little academy of past things. Even the stodgy B.B.C. was playing it, and Lennon and McCartney, Jagger and Richards, and the rest of them entered my mind by a side door, there to do battle with John and Charles Wesley and Isaac Watts. I’m still amazed that so few people are interested in this important front in the culture wars. Who can deny the lasting power of the Mamas and the Papas, singing rather beautifully, with all the strength of this new sort of music, “Go where you wanna go, do what you wanna do, with whoever you wanna do it with”?
At the start of the revolution there was also a fascinating tinge of what would now be called “misogyny,” which has had to be forgotten, explained away or dropped from repertoires now that the destruction of patriarchy has become such a vital part of the movement, when it absolutely wasn’t at the start. It turns out that there are in fact limits to self-worship and personal autonomy after all, and they are set by the latest wave of the women’s movement. Two Rolling Stones songs especially spring to mind. One, “Under My Thumb,” was once an immensely important part of their image, enhanced by its strange Marimba backing. Now, elaborate excuses are made for its apparent message, in lines such as “the difference in the clothes she wears,” “the way she talks when she’s spoken to,” “the way she does just what she’s told,” and, most of all, “Her eyes are just kept to herself . . . well, I can still look at someone else.” These words could all be sung by the Taliban, if they ever go into the music business, with a backing group of veiled women all in black.
Even odder is “Sittin’ on a Fence,” a bitter little protest song against marriage, sung to a beguiling twangly and seemingly gentle tune. Someone must have thought, at some point, that this was worth singing, in public, on a stage. Why? A song is much more potent than a speech, and lasts much longer in the public mind. I can only urge you to read its odd, faintly creepy lyrics and see for yourself.
Once a phrase has entered your mind as a song, you will probably never get rid of it, and it may very well change you. The late Ian MacDonald, in his book Revolution in the Head: The Beatles’ Records and the Sixties tried quite hard to explain the importance of Beatles songs. I am always surprised by how few people have heard of it. The entire work is justified, in my view, by an essay on the 1969 song “Come Together,” a track which must be in the heads of more millions of now-living English speakers than any number of hymns or proper poems. His description concludes with a smashing blow: “Enthusiastically received in campus and underground circles, ‘Come Together’ is the key song of the turn of the decade, isolating a pivotal moment when the free world’s coming generation rejected established wisdom, knowledge, ethics and behaviour for a drug-inspired relativism which has since undermined the intellectual foundations of Western culture.”
It was not the only song of that era with great power to do harm, but even so it is a coincidence that 1969, the year I decided to try to grow up, was also the date on which I stopped listening to this stuff anymore and began a long, slow rediscovery of the rules I had too vaguely absorbed as a child and now wish to learn properly before it is too late.
