The following essay was written for a book that is being prepared to celebrate the seventy-fifth anniversary of Bryanston School (www.bryanston.co.uk).
This River Runs Through Me
by John Elkington
By the time I left Bryanston early one summer morning in 1966 - after a friendly goodbye from a dressing-gowned Mark Elder in the courtyard of the old Forrester House which he then headed - the Sixties were getting into their stride. Me too, to a degree. After a year's freewheeling, I would spend five years at two very different universities, increasingly immersed in the emerging counter-culture. Yet, in retrospect, if any one institution was my alma mater it was Bryanston. Not so much for what it did to me as what it allowed me to be and do for myself.
So what do I remember most, apart from the shorts - and the shirts whose shoulders we would surreptitiously rip so that the poor matrons would gradually build up impressive chevrons of stitching? Top of my laundry list would be the freedom of choice. After a prep school where the cane-fetishist headmaster eventually ended up being committed to an asylum, and a childhood spent in hotbeds of religious and inter-communal intolerance like Northern Ireland and Cyprus, perhaps anything would have felt like progress. But Bryanston allowed me to test out values I was still struggling to understand and express.
In a school committed to the Church of England, no-one protested when I said no to Confirmation. Next, with a father who had been a Battle of Britain pilot, I was amazed to be allowed to be a conscientious objector when it came to the Sea Cadets. Later still, when (greatly to my surprise and his) I had a stand-up disagreement with my tutor in a hushed library, I was allowed to change to another tutor who - by accident or design - kept me on a much looser lead.
Much of my personal study time I spent delving into the history of religious and civil wars, whether on the curriculum or not. And in the end that around-the-margins study in Bryanston's libraries was what propelled me, pretty much despite myself, into university. Like many people, I had discovered that I learn best when allowed to follow my own lines of inquiry.
Of course, the freedom to choose is also the freedom to make your own mistakes. I had no thought of going to university, for example, which meant that I was allowed to drop subjects like Latin early on, ruling out Oxbridge. I also skittered away from most of the sciences, even though years later I would do a good deal of science writing for the likes of New Scientist and The Guardian.
The upshot: I ended up (language deliberate) at Essex University. Thank God. When it erupted in student protests in 1968, annus mirabilis, I learned more about social and political dynamics than at any other time in my life. Indeed, when I later spent two years doing a postgraduate degree at UCL, I woke up to just how lucky I had been to have found myself, time and again, on the edge: growing up in the unravelling fringes of Empire, then at Bryanston (outside the traditional academic mainstream), moving from Dorchester House to Forrester (which, as part of a large batch of new inmates, I remember being told we were meant to help civilise), then Essex and my immersion in the gathering tides of environmentalism. New things emerge - and best evolve - on a system's fringes.
We learned in many different ways. Years later, for example, standing on the Grassy Knoll in Dallas, I recalled first hearing the news of JFK's assassination in the Forrester common room. The rumour was that the President's car had been hit by a bazooka in Mexico, which taught me something about the inverse relation between the speed at which news travels and its reliability.
But if any one thing unites my memories of the Bryanston years, it is the slow moving, valley-hugging River Stour. These were days when so-called 'detergent swans' would still foam below the weir, forming great masses of bubbles. But I remember watching barbel, chub, dace, perch, pike and roach in clear eddies and rills under shaded banks. By moonlight I watched a graceful silver fish arc up over the weir. I don't know whether it was a salmon or sea-trout, but its flanks flash far brighter in memory than anything experienced in Biology lessons.
Meanwhile, the real pleasures - and the source of my most intense memories - lay several miles upstream. One more thing we were allowed to do was to cycle off into the landscape. Though I still loathe most sports, cycling (alongside skateboarding around the Science Labs) was soon an addiction. Despite having to be carried back to the school unconscious after one cycling mishap on Durweston bridge, this became a lifelong (and on occasion almost life-ending) passion. I have now cycled in London for over thirty years. Things may be better now, but for years this was my war. I was twice left unconscious, once - on a day when I flew to Egypt to work on the Nile ecosystem - with three broken ribs.
Anyway, cycling down through Durweston, we would cross the bridge, heading for the confluence of the Stour and Iwerne. (The 'we' here sometimes included my brother Gray, who arrived at Bryanston a couple of years after me.) From the confluence, we would strike out either to Hod Hill (Dorset's largest hill fort, they say) or Hambledon Hill, haunt of glow-worms, from whose magisterial summit and ramparts we would look down on the backs of circling hawks, quaffing from a half-gallon flagon of illicit cider.
I recall one sun-hazed afternoon when we unexpectedly met up with a pair of Bryanston sculls on the river winding around Hod Hill - and the glorious, slow-rending crack when a tree-vine on which one of us was swinging out over the river broke and the would-be Tarzan described an astonished arc into the current. That, looking back, was what leaving Bryanston was like for me, initially at least, mainly because I had little idea what I wanted to do next.
All of this came back to me recently, courtesy of a psychotic peacock. I was trying to fall asleep with Elaine, who I first met in 1968 at Essex - and years later married with the aid of an ex-Bryanston best-man, Ian Keay (very ex-Bryanston: he was expelled). Anyway, we were visiting our eldest daughter, Gaia, recently moved from Edinburgh to the Stourhead area. The peacock, which had taken to attacking its own reflection in parked cars, shrieked through the night from the roof of The Spread Eagle inn, hard by the Stourhead estate.
Sleepless in a room directly below the squawking, my mind reflected on those halcyon days along the Stour. Whose main source turns out to be the Stourhead springs. And that fact I learned in 1998 when one of my favourite conservation groups, Common Ground (www.commonground.org), launched its 'Confluence' project. Over three years, Common Ground organised music workshops, courses and concerts for people living in the Stour catchment, from Somerset and Wiltshire where the river rises, through Dorset, alongside Bryanston, and thence to the sea at Christchurch, where schools of bass and grey mullet glide.
Today, only one river rivals the Stour in my affections: the Thames, particularly its London reaches. We have lived alongside it for thirty years, raising our daughters Gaia and Hania in Barnes. And I am often struck by the way our lives make more sense when viewed from a considerable distance, just as rivers do when you can look down on their entire catchments.
It's now nearly four decades since our old Landrover growled
through Forrester's gates for the last time. What I value most about the Bryanston
experience is that it made it much harder for me to go with the flow. Instead,
like the Stour or Thames in turbulent weather, I have felt a growing urge
to break through banks and explore new tributaries, new eddies, new courses.
And in today's free form, do-it-yourself economy that drive has proved more
valuable than anything we ever sat an exam on.