Nearly three years ago, in a small seminar room in Oxford, the scary ladies and I came up with a masterplan for the neglected Worcester Road end of the campus and for Prep School boarding. The scheme lacked humility. Many governing bodies would have thrown it out. Typically, our governing body did not. They asked for details.
Almost done. Sure there’s some touching up required, but every new building of the Worcester Road development is now operational. I’ve just hung out and had a cup of well posh coffee in Café 1553: you’ll love it. And yesterday I went to the new gym and entertained guests by screaming “Make it stop, oh please make it stop!” a lot. I’ve seen people dancing in the shiny studios; Mary Windsor has been thriving since Christmas: Oakley is a joy; the Hospitality suite last week witnessed its first major event for around 150 people; the arena has already been booked by national sports teams and will host the England Schools hockey finals next year. Page House (possibly the UK’s largest Prep School boarding house) will be finished for September, as will the new extension to the Health Centre.
On it goes. Energy and purposeful change remain our mantra.
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During the Easter holidays I found myself gettin’ down wid da crew in the newly built but as yet uninhabited Oakley House. By this I mean I was helping the Bursar and Director of Estates attach labels to the girls' pigeon holes. Me at my demotic best you might think. Not so. I immediately bagsied the bourgeois job of putting the labels on the pigeon holes, while Bursar and Head of Estates acted as the lumpenproletariat by peeling the labels from their backing and handing them to me in alphabetical order. However I was soon demoted because in the Bursar’s prosaic eyes I wasn’t putting the labels on straight enough. Get her. Anyway, the Bursar now took over and, despite my protestations, I was unceremoniously relegated to peeling labels and handing them to her in sequence. Relations were now frosty. Worse was to come. But let’s pause for a moment.
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Next week the statue arrives. The final aesthetic flourish to the Worcester Road project. Inexplicably, none of the governors seemed interested in a fifty foot statue of me, designed along Stalinist lines, with a square-jawed, flag-carrying Headmaster striding boldly forward, grateful children clutching his bronze boots. As a result we’ve had to go for something else. Herbert Read said that “Art is pattern informed by sensibility”: the only definition of art I have come across that resonates with me. It is evident in the sculpture that is set to appear next Tuesday. Please like it.
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Back to labelgate. As the Bursar neared the end of the job (and there are lots of girls in Oakley), I discovered I had sometime earlier dropped a label and therefore overlooked a name. A name that began with a letter significantly nearer “A” than “Z”. I suddenly remembered what it felt like to kick a football through your mum’s kitchen window. Reverting to the passive tense, as one always does in these situations, I informed the Bursar in a mousy voice that there had been a tinsy-winsy error and that she’d need to peel off the labels and start again. In the following moments I had time and cause to muse on Christopher Morley’s observation that a man who has never made a woman angry is a failure in life. I felt like a king.
