Edgeborough Revisited: 66 years on

Dear Dan (Headmaster) and Gill (Head's PA).

Thank you both for facilitating and organizing my visit to the school and for so graciously welcoming my wife and myself.

In particular, Dan, I really appreciated your generously allocated time, the very real warmth that you gave to my return and the way you so charitably indulged an old man.

The visit was everything I could have possibly wanted. It was for me a deeply emotional life summarizing moment.

I am so grateful for the thoughtful way you assembled documents/photographs to enliven the immanent fusion of past and present that I experienced.

It was not just a perfect combination history and present day journey for me, but quite serendipitously part of a larger ongoing narrative which the poem below tries to encapsulate; i.e., the capture of institutions by Woke activists who need to justify and obfuscate their pedagogical and ideological incompetence, by damaging and discrediting their only competition in the service of a completely unfalsifiable/unjustifiable ‘Progressive’ dogma…..which is why its shibboleths and behaviors seem so reminiscent of the heresy sniffing and intolerant clericalism of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation.

The ‘inclusion’ of private schools in the VAT (Value Added Tax) system is not only the beginning of an attack on the private school system (which in the UK gets no state funding), but part of the roll out of a much larger totalitarian agenda that doesn’t accept opposition/competition at all. It has taken over the universities and then run the agenda out with its graduates throughout both the public and private institutions of social administration.

The move on private schools is justified as 'social justice' in the same way the Church once talked about 'Divine Love and Providence', when it was really about power, its accumulation and the elimination of dissent and alternative narratives.

Right now The Woke are winning. They need to be fought tooth and nail.

In the meantime, thank you Dan and Gill for a wonderful and truly memorable afternoon outing and a very English afternoon tea. It was for me a significant life moment.

Fond regards, Christopher

How seemly it is
for the child to find the man
Revisiting old haunts
Amongst the drifting sands
Of memories 66 years past
But at last
Found
In the greenéd rolling hills
of England’s land
A school whose present
is but a living froth
Atop so many layers of ghosts
Whose voices echo without sound
To a history’s beat
That ripples down
The corridors of time and tide
To successive victories and defeats
Jostling in crowded halls
And spilling into silent streets
Of lives and possibilities sown
upon a wind of fervent promise
Delivered in its measure
And sometimes not
As memorable as time
That time forgot
Yet lived and owned
Tortured and stroked
Intended
accidental
Or lost
Like rolls of banknotes
Rashly smoked
Wending up to surfaces
Where past and present greet
Their passing fate
A moment of humble hesitation
Five minutes early
For the pilgrim at the gate
Then proceeding up the drive
Upon the agreed time and date
Once again to meet
Edgeborough’s evolving business
The fizz of children’s matters
Shouts and pitter-patters
Of many feet
As mine once did
Compressing now this laminated past
Then dives
Into the evanescent present
Through the building portal
Warm welcome to a long lost son
A revisit well begun
A feast of re-acquaintance
Rememorization
reocupation
Re-entered spirits and spaces
A passing parade of ancient faces
Names and stories
Sadnesses, sideshows and sometime glories
Staged up stairs and down
Around from ground to attic
About the student town
The fields and trees
The paths once trod
The static left by long forgotten games
Races lost and won
Miseries and sometime fun
Passions ploughed into this benighted land
upon which it is we presently stand
Held up by parents for their daughters
And their sons
Ever replaced by sacrifice and toil
Worth fighting for
Against any who would soil
Or douse its vision
For this is it
In front a looming gate
It beckons
Time for tough decision
Seize the day
Pass through its portals
Or share the fate of those
Who hesitate
For history only loves the winners
Be they saints or evil sinners
Losers are the lunch and dinner
And history simply serves them up
Smooths the way
Facilitates
Then eats their memory for supp.

Sober is the mind that thinks these things
Knowing that the peace is stretching thin
Like skin upon a rotting corpse
That in due time will fissure and irrupt
All that stinks and is corrupt.
That sweet rancid aroma slowly creeps
Under doorways through the carpet seeps.
Every house upon the street
It will disrupt
And rage will have its day
To sound of drums and marching feet.