'Stretcher-bearers': (39) Camp thoughts by Jack Blockley

Camp Thoughts

by J.B. Blockley

We settled down on the bags of grain, and perched our cigarette-tin paraffin lamps on piles of kit. We could hear the rain on the tiles, the mules and the men outside slipping and sloshing their way down the hill; and the pleasure of a dry night indoors glowed in every face. "Night is a dull, monotonous period under a roof," wrote Stevenson. But wartime experience provides exceptions to all such statements. Our classical scholar rustled the pages of Caesar, our historian pushed Macaulay's Life closer to the wavering naked flame of his lamp, and, adjusting my jerkin pillow against the wall, I settled down to grapple with "I Verbi Italiani." Learning is delightful in such surroundings. It is luxury to stretch out in dry blankets, while the soaked trousers which have for hours chilled one's legs swing on a line overhead. With duty done, and earned repose, mathematics, science, the pleasures of poetry, the broader artistry of prose, become a thousandfold more vital and vivid than ever they were in the days of formal education.
Shortly before, as we supped our "char", we had discussed Education as we had experienced it before the war. It seemed to us that precious years of our youth had been drained away in weary note-taking, the dreary copying down of answers to questions "spotted" by masters bent on keeping up their certificate averages. Of certificates we spoke in unprintable language, in our heated, barrack-room way. We wondered why, with few honourable exceptions, schoolmasters had sacrificed to them the freshness and freedom of learning. We concluded that certificate "results" were not so much a guide to intelligence, industry and attainment as to the intensity and efficiency of the cramming to which we were subjected. It is, of course, easy to talk in this strain when material needs are a minimum, and merely to be away from noise and suspense is contentment. Yet in "bivvies" in the desert, in all kinds of "abris" and barrack-rooms, on one occasion under a Sicilian almond tree by bright moonlight, when studying with delight for its own sake, I have thought how strange it is that more of such feeling is not experienced in our schooldays.
Those ends which were made out to be so important, and to which we devoted so much effort, seem worthless when we look back on them over the years from an Italian mountain-top. The vellum sheet which once cast a gloom over our days we would willingly burn here to help "brew up." No doubt when we are back in "Civvy-street" our views will be modified. At present we feel that Education, however admirable the new proposals, will not be the best if examination successes and "good jobs" are major items. There are few here who know h e reward of sacrificing cigarette-space to books in their packs, or how the extra weight, which presses so hard on the shoulders, can transmute boredom to pleasure, and enrich the moist unlikely situations. We shall not be able to talk of success in Education till the children who leave our schools have found some corner of the fields of leaning which they will continue to cultivate on their own, instead of feeling relieved that the drudgery of schooling is over; till we have more of the spirit of Chaucer's Poor Scholar,
" for hym was lever have at his beddes heed
Twenty bookes clad in blak or reed
Of Aristotle and his philosophye,
Than robes riche, or fithele, or gay sautrye."

Article by J.B.Blockley originally published in the Spectator. 9.3.45.

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