Lessons in humility

It’s impossible to go back to your school and not feel like a 10- or 12-year-old again. I returned last week, having proved my final theorem in geometry and parsed my last sentence in English grammar more than three decades ago.

First of all, there was the preparation. I cut my fingernails, washed behind my ears and ensured my hair didn’t flop over them, and polished my shoes until I could see my reflection in them. I could see others had done the same. A classmate I hadn’t seen since we left school had even managed to polish his head so you could see your reflection there. This was the guy who had long hair in school and somehow managed to get away with it.

A strong caste system remains in place, too. You might be the president of a small country or the CEO of a big organisation, but if you were junior by even a year to the man who is “between jobs” (and has been so for the past decade), you still have to keep your place. Social hierarchies outside the school walls don’t count for much. But 1980 must always bow and scrape before 1979.

Everybody remembers the cricket match they lost or the soccer final where the referee ‘cheated’ or the teacher’s pet who became a prefect. “I should have been school captain,” said an old-timer at lunch, nodding towards the honours board. It still rankled after half a century that someone else got the job. Nothing – not even one of the country’s highest civilian awards that he’d received – was compensation enough.

It is amazing the number of things you remember when you return to the hallowed portals. Never go back to school for an event unless you want your colleagues telling your children stuff that you have locked away in the dark recesses of your mind.

“I have been reading you for many years,” a senior teacher (who was probably younger than me) said. I suddenly felt nervous. Was my tie straight? Hair combed? Dirt under the nails removed? It’s impossible to return to school – often the area of long-forgotten embarrassments – and feel like an adult.

No one calls anyone by his real name. It’s always ‘Inky’ or ‘Stinky’ or ‘Shorty’ or other colourful nicknames. Someone came up to me and presented his credentials: “I am Peanut; I hope you remember me.” Of course I did; he is a diplomat now, ambassador to a European country. But destined to remain ‘Peanut’ to anyone who went to school with him.

You can take a boy out of school but not the school out of a boy.