I wonder what the Iron Duke would have said to the news that Wellington College is to have happiness lessons. I wish we’d had them where I was at school. They would have been well-named: another free period, like Art and Divinity. That happiness could have been taught to boys of fifteen in any other way than giving them a break from more Latin seems ridiculous, unless the classes were sources of happiness in themselves – i.e., ending ten minutes early. Happiness is an instinctive requirement. Looking for it is part of it. Interference with the search sounds more like unhappiness.
Headmaster Anthony Seldon has recruited a team of “positive psychologists” to take forty-minute classes for fourteen- to sixteen-year-olds, offering “skills” in the management of negative emotions and how to achieve one’s ambition. Call it “neuro-linguistic programming”, “cognitive behavioural therapy” or just plain “life-coaching”, it amounts to the purchase of a regular nag to keep you on a prearranged straight-and-narrow. These lessons for tormented O and A level students sound like pep talks, intended to boost what they are supposed to be ameliorating: the league tables. Is there really such a thing as a “positive psychologist”? I’d rather have a negative one. There’s nothing more discouraging than a remorselessly cheerful response to one’s moans. In my experience, a sense of hopelessness ensues.
And yet there is something in it. Just as “Show, don’t tell” decodes the mystique of creative-writing courses, there is one thing in the positive-psychology programme that strikes a chord with me retrospectively: “Make yourself an expert in something”. I would have thought this was a natural human tendency, but perhaps the funnelling of culture into celebrity makes it harder to find a corner to call your own. The world may be getting more specialized but the backwaters have less and less attraction for children deafened by consensus.
My own first attempt at expertise was a collection of scent bottles, started before I could speak and ending when I learnt to read. From scent bottles at home, I went away to the Stamp Club at school. Having sensed at about this time that the world was too big, I was interested only in British stamps. I didn’t like my big children’s album with all its blank countries and the odd crooked stamp. I kept everything in a swap-book, arranged by colour: my own version of the world. Other attempts at empire-building included feathers, medals, pressed flowers and Victorian “bun” pennies. I tried collecting autographs for a while, but tired of their abstraction. I wonder what happened to my collections? Our peripatetic life made it necessary for my mother to streamline our passage from time to time and my development into a chronic collector was ensured by her use of term times as a clearing house for my rusting or mouldering acquisitions. Every holidays I would start on a new collection, a new assault on chaos.
Stamps were followed by more manageable cigarette packets – an offshoot of my related efforts at tobacco addiction. As well as Gold Flake, Capstan, Churchman’s, Kensitas, Passing Clouds, there were strange whiffs from abroad such as Lucky Strike (USA), Scissors (India), Park Drive (Ireland), Camels (Turkey), Balkan Sobranies (Russia) and Gitanes (France), which laid down early impressions, especially of France. It always seemed right that the British should smoke blond tobacco, the French brown.
Collecting things is the invention of power. It’s a territorial pursuit, therefore sexual. The little boy is seen rounding up his harem. When he progresses to conjuring, aged about twelve, he is thought to be getting warmer. My own magic tricks were life and death to me at one point. In spite of shyness, I felt compelled to make people watch them. I even produced a Grand Fete in our garden as a setting for my humiliation. I wore a top hat over my ears and employed my brother as my assistant, naked to the waist. Here silks were pulled through rings, water changed into red water and a tiny cricket bat twisted between my fingers to make a peg change places. I was ashamed of my tricks without even knowing what it all meant. I can still remember the exact moment when the penny dropped. I was watching my sister’s school concert when I suddenly found my mind reaching out and encircling a girl dressed as a bumble bee. A Health & Efficiency phase was followed by a period of hoarding Brigitte Bardot pictures.
Collecting things is vaguely sinister in grown-ups, but I see now that my family had no interest in their collections of clowns (my mother), toby jugs (an aunt) or pigs (my grandmother); they were there to help us out at Christmas. The end of my own childhood collections left a void in my life. I was worried about the chasm of the future opening under my feet but I had developed a system of ignoring it, except when I was actually being questioned about it. Then I would scan the South Downs for something convenient and come up with a baffled “I want to be an actor”: in other words, do nothing. It was about then I discovered the advantages of writing, my own and other people’s, as a way of going on collecting things. Poems were lists of things you wanted to keep. They were little blocks of print which had to be glued together so they could act as a defence against the coming storm. If I couldn’t be an expert at something useful I would become an expert in myself. Collecting the past began for me when I came back from a spell in Paris and bought my first scrapbook to preserve it in. My first published poem was called “Nostalgia”. I wonder would this dangerous life-choice be welcomed in the Wellington happiness seminars.
I have revised my opinion of happiness lessons, but if they are going to advise pupils to become an expert in a subject, they might worry – the internet being either criminal or sexual or both – that there weren’t enough safe ones to go round. If a course in happiness could lead the way back to collections of obscure and useless objects, it might be useful. I suppose lessons in happiness have got to be better than lessons in unhappiness, which are already on most syllabuses. In a sense, the programme is remedial: a better idea might have been not to send the child to boarding school in the first place.
