INTERMISSION

A WRITER TAKES PAUSE TO CONSIDER…

MATT GLASBY @MATTGLASBY

HOW LINDSAY ANDERSON’S IF.... PUT MY SCHOOL DAYS ON SCREEN

When I was growing up, the John Hughes-style American high-school movie didn’t speak to me at all. In real life, I never saw the losers winning, or the shy guys getting the girl. Not least because, as I attended a single-sex private school, there weren’t any girls.

But Lindsay Anderson’s stirring 1968 satirical drama If...., about a rebellion in a fusty boys’ boarding school, really struck a chord. Released at a time of political turmoil, it pitted the Crusaders, a group of idealistic pupils led by the dashing Mick Travis (Malcolm McDowell), against the establishment and its prehistoric traditions, and ended, thrillingly, in all-out war.

As an adult, I realise I’m extremely privileged to have had such an education, especially as the government helped pay for it and I’d have been eaten alive anywhere else. I had some good teachers and made some lifelong friends, but the school was hopelessly stuck in the past, its values mired in patriarchal entitlement and its pupils only recognised for what they achieved, not what they thought, or – god forbid – felt.

Anderson shot his masterpiece at his old school, Cheltenham College, using a fake script to convince them he meant no disrespect. Later, he would talk affectionately of his time there, but when it comes to skewering the system, If.... is absolutely savage. School life is a mixture of ridiculous bureaucracy (‘Ringworm? Eye disease? VD? Confirmation class?’ the pupils are asked during a medical exam), pointless rules (‘You don’t speak to us, you’re a “scum”, aren’t you?’) and arcane practices such as fagging (an abusive system whereby the younger boys act as servants/ slaves to the older prefects, or whips).

Some 30 years later we were forced to learn Latin (last spoken around 750AD) and parade around in uniform as part of the Combined Cadet Force (CCF), in training, presumably, for building another empire or fighting another world war.

But it wasn’t just ridiculous, it was harmful. Living in such a rarefied environment left us stunted – like the foetus in a jar that Mick and his pals find – and completely unprepared for real life. Keeping the opposite sex at arm’s length (literally, we had to remain a foot away from any visiting girls) meant we grew up misinformed and misogynistic. And there was such a terror of homosexuality (which is illicit but rife in the film), that out of 700 pupils only one had the courage to come out. How terribly, terribly sad.

Unlike If...., caning had been abolished years before, but the stench of sublimated violence still tainted everything. There was even a shooting range, FFS. Like the boys in the film, we were always jostling for supremacy – in the classroom, in the playground, on the pitch – but rather than training us to fight to the top of a dog-eat-dog world, weren’t they meant to be civilising us?

‘Like us, they ’re soon brought back to earth by the stupidity and brutality of the system’

I don’t remember when I first saw If.... – it feels like it’s always been with me – but I do recall a video passed between my friends, along with A Clockwork Orange (another early McDowell classic) and other contraband. Of course, despite their pretentious proclamations, we sided with Mick, Knightly (David Wood), Wallace (Richard Warwick) and the Crusaders. Like them, we tried to lose ourselves in music (the hauntingly spiritual Sanctus from the Missa Luba features prominently in the film; we preferred Radiohead), fantasy (they play at swordfights; we acted out scenes from Taxi Driver) and romance. Who could forget the beautiful moment a lovelorn Bobby Philips (Rupert Webster) watches, spellbound, as Wallace performs on the parallel bars?

Like us, they’re soon brought back to earth by the stupidity and brutality of the system. I remember being made to choose between music, art and drama – all of which I loved – because they weren’t ‘proper’ subjects. A friend getting suspended for having slightly too long hair. A teacher laughing when I broke my leg playing football. I interviewed McDowell once, and, to my eternal joy, he repeated one of the film’s most famous lines down the phone: ‘When do we live? That’s what I want to know.’ When indeed?

For financial reasons, parts of If.... were shot in black and white, mostly fantasy sequences and intimate moments exploring the characters’ inner lives. But for me it was the other way around: the endless monochrome of school punctuated by bright sunbursts of colour when, all too briefly, we managed to escape. If we ever really did.