We were all talking about peasants. Sometimes an ordinary word can flip and start to seem extraordinary, or funny, and find a place in schoolboy slang. It might have been Geography that started us off on peasants; it might have been that History mentioned the Peasants Revolt, or we might have picked up on the peasant question from reading Russian novels. One History master still thought – after all those years of teaching - that it was funny to tell every class that the peasants in 1381 were revolting. We discovered that there was something called ‘peasants’ in other countries, and that there had once been peasants here, and that maybe they were revolting. Otherwise our education on this point was as defective as our sex education, where we were given the mysterious advice that a gentleman should never try to persuade a lady to go swimming if she didn’t want to, and not put pens in his top pocket.
This is a brilliant insightful piece of writing and should be part of the National curriculum
I admire your talent and always look forward to your posts. Would you be interested in giving a talk to a poetry group?