In Loco Parentis

 

Discovering a person in adulthood whom you previously knew in childhood is one of life's quietly dislocating experiences. It's like realising a picture you thought you knew well was in fact just a child's sketch. Few children know the adults around them with an evolved intellectual awareness of the type of person that they are, but all children know how the adults around them make them feel.

These thoughts were much on my mind as I attended last week the Memorial Service of my House Master James Cook, whose obituary you can read here: https://www.thetimes.com/uk/obituaries/article/james-cook-obituary-eton-master-who-married-his-matron-vfrsv2tcr

I did not know James, or JNBC, as teachers at Eton are known by their initials, in childhood but in adolescence; that long liminal state in which we can be embarrassingly sure of our opinions and judgements. I can tell you how he made me feel: cared for and regarded. It was with good cause that something his eulogy emphasised again and again was his kindness. 

We like to assume that all children grow up surrounded by kindness but one of life's roughest lessons is discovering how often that is not so. When you are entrusted as a child to the residential care of an adult who is not your parent if that trust proves unfounded lifelong damage can be the result. I was blithely oblivious to that fact as a teenager but two decades in the criminal justice system has proved to be a hard education.

I wrote after the birth of my first child how there is nothing like becoming a parent to engender a sense of gratitude towards one's own parents, however deficient they may have been. But my real awe and wonder is reserved for those who are prepared to take on that mighty responsibility for children who are not their own. It is little secret that teenagers can sometimes come up short in the delight department; imagine what it is to be literally responsible for the health, care, and wellbeing of 50 of them. Exposed daily to their pranks, defiance, and churlishness it seems incredible that corporal punishment was relinquished so readily.

James Cook was a profoundly civilised man who cared that his boys should be civilised also. I shudder to recall how often we were anything but. However, it was only in listening to his nephew's beautifully delineated account of his life that a man was revealed entirely unknown to me and my complacent assumption that I knew him at all.

We live in a time when more and more are choosing not to have children or who have not, by force of circumstance, made that choice of their own volition. Men like James Cook are a reminder that the cultivation and development of young people is not the exclusive preserve or responsibility of parents.