The Mower
Well, I hope you had a wonderful half-term. I have heard great things about the school trips that have happened whilst we have been away: our wonderful and longstanding Japanese Exchange, hosted by the parents, pupils and staff of the Aoyama Gakuin School in Tokyo; a successful Year 11 Silver Duke of Edinburgh Expedition, and an outstanding Classics trip to Greece, on which I heard the pupils were exceptionally good ambassadors for the School. My thanks to all those colleagues who led these trips.
I want to start by handing out some certificates related to the Rotary Peace Debates. Many congratulations to our team of Sofia P, Tife Y and Sophia J for their victory in the Rotary Peace Debates. The team were the proposition for the motion ‘This House Believes That migration will bring about long-lasting peace and economic success in the country of destination’ and the judges commended our team on their clarity, research, pace and volume.
Today, of course, is the day of the US Presidential Election – we will have to wait and see what transpires. I say it’s election day, but in fact around 75 million people have already voted early, in advance of today’s official polling day – that’s about half the total number who voted in the last presidential election in 2020. It’ll be interesting to see how things unfold – I don’t think I have experienced a more important Presidential election than this one, with so much seemingly at stake. The campaign has been just brutal, characterized by the three Ps of this current political culture: polarisation, populism and post-truth. And along with that, there has been widespread belittling on both sides of the aisle. We shall see what happens – my prediction is that it will be some time before we know the outcome, and I suspect that it will end up in the courts, so it may be weeks or months until the matter is concluded.
Whatever transpires, some of the language and behaviour we have seen in the run-up has been shocking: the assassination attempts, the questioning of Kamala Harris’s identity, the threats to use the military to go after one’s political opponents, the description of Puerto Rico (and subsequently of a Trump supporter, or all Trump supporters, depending on whom you choose to believe) as “garbage” – the rhetoric and hatred on both sides has been extreme and unseemly. You could say it has been a manifestation of the universal underlying human capacity for unkindness.
I had been wondering over half-term how I should reflect on this at the start of this new half of term. And then over the break I went to see a show by the veteran standup comedian and writer, Arthur Smith, and amidst the jokes he also recited some of his favourite poems, including one by the British poet and long-time Yorkshire resident, Philip Larkin.
In the poem, Larkin reflects on his accidental killing of a hedgehog as he mows his lawn – a relatively personal and private event – but he draws an altogether more universal conclusion. The poem is called “The Mower”, and it’s always meant a lot to me.
The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found
A hedgehog jammed up against the blades,
Killed. It had been in the long grass.
I had seen it before, and even fed it, once.
Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world
Unmendably. Burial was no help:
Next morning I got up and it did not.
The first day after a death, the new absence
Is always the same; we should be careful
Of each other, we should be kind
While there is still time.
In my view nothing defines a society, any society, more conclusively than the way it treats its most vulnerable members. In wider society, it’s about how a society treats children, or old people, or those who, through no fault of their own, are vulnerable.
In the same way nothing, to my mind, is more important in a school than the way in which we treat one another: how staff treat each other, how the staff treat the pupils, how pupils treat the staff and, surely most importantly of all, how the pupils treat each other.
We all have it in us to be unkind. In any school there will always be the temptation to make oneself look big by making others look smaller. Pulling rank, calling names, belittling someone in your year group, those who could be our friends, those who perhaps are feeling vulnerable for whatever reason, those who could really do with our help – it is a common temptation, but it is a choice.
Like hedgehogs, people are vulnerable and so is life itself. We need to be acutely aware of the human capacity to be caring – just as of the human capacity for inhumanity and unkindness.
You have it within your capacity, within your ability to decide, to be careful and kind and caring in your dealings with your classmates today. Think and act on that capacity, not just today, and not just this week, but throughout your School careers, and for the rest of your lives.
“We should be careful of each other – we should be kind while there is still time.”