A Somerset Lad

It is Mental Health Awareness Week, in tutor time in school today there was a short animated video encouraging students to talk about the issues they face. (Two protracted periods of school closure will have far more devastating impact on their lives than the virus which brought so much disruption). Perhaps it was the case that for those who understood no explanation was necessary, and for those who did not understand, no explanation was possible. There was little I could add to the video they had watched.

My experiences of depression have been ones where the darkness is not like a sudden acute moment that can be isolated and identified, but is more like clouds across the sun: light and shadow. There are moments of brilliant light that are suddenly obscured and dark times that are suddenly illuminated by a piercing light.

In the dark moments, I have to persuade myself that this is not the world as it is. But, if the dark moments are unreal, is there also an air of unreality about the light? Is the cost of dismissing sorrow the loss of the counterbalance of joy? Is the price for saying that the pain does not exist, the dismissal of delight as no more than imaginary? One can seek clinical help, but what the medical world seems often to offer is a uniform greyness; no dark moments, but no light moments either.

The Great War poet Edward Thomas, he of Adlestrop,  was a writer who possessed the power to evoke the painful extraordinary experiences of the war. He believed his capacity to create profound contrasts in his writing arose from from his own personality, where in the space of a few moments his mood could shift from darkness to light, or, more ominously, it could move in the other direction, from light to darkness.

Suffering depression so deep that he was at the point of suicide on one occasion, Edward Thomas, nevertheless, feared that the loss of the darkness might bring a loss of the light; the absence of the depression that so afflicted him might bring an absence of creativity. In a letter to his friend Gordon Bottomley, he wrote,

“I wonder whether for a person like myself whose most intense moments were those of depression a cure that destroys the depression may not destroy the intensity – a desperate remedy?”

Perhaps Edward Thomas was right and that a removal of the dark moods would mean also the loss of his power to assemble words in a way that moved the hearts of his readers. But what of ordinary human beings without the skills of a great poet, is the world of greyness and equilibrium the only real world?

Yesterday was difficult. Some children have become feral in lockdown. Perhaps it only exacerbated an indiscipline that was already there. Managing behaviour of the disengaged who are indifferent to sanctions is difficult. Lessons become occasions of containment, getting through material in the hope that some have gained something from the hour. Already low aspirations among some students have been superseded by a mood of complete indifference. “Why did you disrupt the lesson?” The reply is blunt, “because I couldn’t be arsed with it, sir.”

Driving the M5 motorway on a damp grey evening, there was time to ponder the previous day. There seemed little that could be done other than to continue to try to teach and to hope that things would improve.

Turning on the radio, the sound of Classic FM provided diversion from the pedagogical drowning. The music put into perspective the petty annoyances of school teaching.

An hour of music began with Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture. The commemoration of the Russian campaign against Napoleon’s Grand Army is a piece that lingers in the memory of even people like me who knows nothing about classical music, someone who would be hard-pressed to differentiate between a crotchet and a quaver. Of course, the Napoleonic campaigns were covered in history lectures, but it was only a reading Tolstoy’s War and Peace that captured a sense of the horror of the war. Hundreds of thousands of lives were lost in the futile attempt to defeat Russia.

The overture was followed by John Williams’ theme from Schindler’s List. As part of a unit on anti-Semitism, at a Year 9 lesson yesterday, which had gone very well, we had watched the closing sequences of the film. In the whole of human history, there are few periods as bleak as 1933-1945.

The third piece that filled the hour was Elgar’s Enigma Variations. Was this a third piece associated with the horror of war? Struggling to remember the word, it was not until the first notes of Nimrod were played that I remembered the name of the piece. It is the music that fills Whitehall on Remembrance Sunday, the music that evokes ranks of veterans standing in silence, music that evokes countless stories of conflict.

There was a moment of contentment as the programme drew to an end. The music created a sense of proper perspective. The challenges of daily school life were trivial and entirely inconsequential when compared with the real stuff.