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| The cannon is because they knew we were coming. |
There
is no straightforward way to handle this one. Most English people know of Eton
College, if more through its mythos than the thing itself. And one does not
simply know Eton College. Generally speaking, to know Eton College is to either
adore it or to resent it to every monied brick in its crenellations.
Why,
indeed, does a school need crenellations?
Perhaps
to call it a school is misleading. It is a school, of course – the most infamously
exclusive in England (and needless to say, one of the most expensive) – but
only in the first instance. In the ways that matter it is so much more.
What
we have here is an England. Eton College is an embodiment of this
country, or rather of a specific vision of it which, though only a tiny
minority of its population ever passes through its doors, wreaks so reekingly
powerful an impact on the majority that it needs no introduction. A vision so
storied, so intractable, that to its detractors, and there are many, Eton is no
less than the principal sausage-factory of England’s white, male, upper-caste
forces of destruction and the ultimate locus of fault for the ruin of their
land.
Thus
while physical Eton nests safe and snug in the Thames Valley, imaginary Eton is
a castle under permanent siege. And behind its walls, as much as anywhere else
in the world, there is no
hard border between reality and imagination. That, perhaps, explains the
crenellations.
Is
it fair to lay guilt for so supreme a crime at the gates of one mere school? The
real significance of the condemnation of Eton in these terms is perhaps less
literal, more mythic: a permanent counter-mythology which, in crashing upon the
school’s mythology, becomes half the dialectic nest of narrative power which
sustains the legend of Eton. But in factual terms the case is not without
grounds. To say nothing of its graduates’ perpetual dominance in media,
commerce, religion and the military, the twenty prime ministers it has
manufactured include both the individual who instigated the Brexit crisis for
no reason, David Cameron, and the one who now consummates its descent into the abyss of
authoritarian nationalism, Boris Johnson. This entire saga can and has been
read as the continuation of a tussle between these two bully-boys which started
in Eton’s playgrounds: rollicking, soaked in seven varieties of bodily fluids, now
spilt out to nation-wrecking scale. And then, goes this telling, once the
country’s breaking is complete, the lives of everyone in it laid waste, and
their chisel lodged securely in their mortal wound to the
post-World War II European peace settlement, these Etonian man-boys will bear
none of the consequences but march away across a burning horizon, underpants
overflowing with multiple multimillion-pound incomes for doing nothing while they
slap each other’s backs, chortling at what a fun game it all was – and really
believing it.
The
game. Here and in the wider English public-school universe, this seems to
be the operating principle, the nexus to which everything returns. The world
is your game, and this is how you play it. If that means the Boris and Dave
Show is Eton’s doing, how often has the same been the case for the political
currents that shaped England and Britain in the past? Conspiracy theories are
dangerous and should not be mistaken for serious consideration. But the
distance between reasonable suspicions on the one hand, and the mythic image of
this place as the puppeteers’ tower behind so many of England’s imperial
misdeeds and perennial structures of oppression on the other, is not great
enough to satisfy scrutiny.
What
shall we do with it? There is no getting around it, because cross the bridge
from Windsor
and there it is, lording upon the northern bank where it secretes a power
uniquely its own. A power not jewel-studded or glintingly solid like the
stone towers of royalty it faces across the river, yet nonetheless every bit its
equal and in practical terms quite possibly its superior. Its crown is made of
different material: subtler, less tangible, wafting and oozing and sausaging rather
than towering, all the more challenging to pin down for how it is in that very
swirl of myths and symbols, ever elusive to those they are designed to ward
away, that is concealed the source of Eton’s power.
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| Upon Windsor Bridge, facing upriver (west) with Windsor at left and Eton right. The college’s old boathouse facilities at right have been re-done into apartments; instead of the river they now train at a colossal artificial lake further upstream. |
Less
a school, then, and more a phenomenon: one built right into the heart of both
the stories and power relations of the phenomenon called England. Its class
system, its problems of race and gender, its land, its empire, and now its
post-imperial nervous breakdown – everything refracts through the Etonian prism
in ways that are impossible to grasp, because as soon as you get close, it
moves, teasingly, just enough, like the well-timed evasive twist of a cricket
bat, then chuckles down at you that you’ll never really get it because after
all, it’s just a game, and you’re not special enough to play it.
Maybe
so. But it so happens we’re playing a larger game here and Eton is in the way. Let’s devour some sausages.
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| Your barricades will be of no use, Eton College. |
Start:
Windsor Bridge (nearest stations: Windsor and Eton Riverside; Windsor and
Eton Central)
End:
Maidenhead Bridge (nearest station: Maidenhead)
Length:
10.5km/6.5 miles
Location:
Berkshire – Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead; Buckinghamshire – South
Bucks
Topics:
Eton College, Eton’s backyard, Boveney and St. Mary Magdalene’s
Church (which is special), vampires (Oakley Court) and cannibals (Monkey
Island, Headpile Eyot), Bray, Maidenhead
