“Do your boys go to Public School?” By this she meant an independent fee-paying school like Eton or Harrow, perhaps, a school for the very affluent which my family would never have been able to afford. I needed to clarify the term she had used.
“No,” I replied, “we live in Canada, where they go to what we call a public school, by which Canadians mean a state school run by the province, neither fee-paying nor private.”
“Oh,” she said, plainly embarrassed by her faux pas, “I thought they did because their manners are impeccable.” I thanked her, and said I would pass her comment on to the boys. They would be pleased. Their late mother and I had done our best to bring them up properly. The poor woman became more flustered at this disclosure, apologizing for bringing up the subject.
She blushed crimson for “prying.” I reassured her no offence could be taken at mere curiosity.
We left Frant shortly after this for a tour of Yorkshire, a six-hour motorway drive north to York, Rievaulx Abbey, the moors and Whitby by the sea, from which Captain James Cook began his explorations of the Pacific, and also the place where the vampire Dracula came ashore to slake his thirst for human blood in Bram Stoker’s novel. We stayed in a farmhouse cottage for a week before driving to East Anglia and a family reunion, but that is a subject for another time.
Ever since the unexpected question from the lady at the B&B, I have pondered its significance. Until the age of thirteen, I had been educated privately. From then on, I was a product of the Ontario educational system, as was my wife, and our two sons. In fact, both boys went to the same Ottawa high school my two brothers and I had attended a generation earlier. All things considered, we have all had a sound public education. I come from a family of teachers, and I was fated to become one too. What I eventually came to understand is that the assumption the lady was making, for all her discreetly polite inquiry, was quite incorrect. To believe that a school is the arbiter of politeness is absurd. There are impolite schoolchildren, even bullies, snobs, social deviants and delinquents, in both private and public schools the world over, in all likelihood far more snobs in the former. Someone’s wealth or social position is no guarantee of their respect for good manners or social convention. Poor people can and do have impeccable manners and the appropriate social graces. It is the values of the home that largely determine what the child will become in later life. As the twig is bent, so is the tree inclined, proclaims the proverb. ‘Manners makyth man’ declares the motto of New College, Oxford, but schools do not make manners: the family the child is brought up in is the crucial determinant here. It is incompetent parenting that all too often fails to provide children with the moral code they will need as they grow. It is the height of arrogance for an educator to presume to take the wise parent’s place. I wondered why it took me so long to explain to myself why the answer I gave that lady then felt so inadequate…
The B&B is now long gone, and the property is today a private residence, yet the memory of that time and place, complemented by diary entries and photographs, has remained vivid for me ever since. Now I know why.
