Hampshire College in Massachusetts was founded in 1965 and describes itself as “unconventional, quirky and one of the original disruptors of higher education”. Students create their own curricula and are encouraged to be “unbounded’ in their pursuit of urgent issues.

In the face of falling enrolments, the college will close this autumn.

The documentary film maker Ken Burns graduated from Hampshire in 1971. During a recent interview Burns highlighted the importance of an arts education. “Sometimes 1+1 should equal 3 because sometimes we are looking for the whole to be greater than the sum of the parts.” *

At the School of English Studies, Folkestone, Peter O’Connell was in search of a similarly creative equation. His mission statement was “to place the learner at the centre and to make everyone and everything else subordinate. If we can help the student to be more confident, we shall make our own work much more effective. What is important is teaching language as competence in communication rather than as structural and phonological code.”

Students learning the English language at SES were offered classes in subjects ranging from Astrology, Art Appreciation and Current Affairs to Geography, Photography and Cooking.

During the 1960s and 70s Peter travelled extensively in pursuit of new ideas. He took courses in Programmed Learning, Community Language Learning, Sleep Learning, the Silent Way, Suggestopedia and Transcendental Meditation.

“Ideas came off Peter like sparks from a Catherine Wheel” observed one of his teachers.

As I grew older, my father recruited me as a guinea pig for anything he considered might provide a helpful tool for his students.

Having perceived a link between foreign language learners and participants in an Outward Bound school, I was sent to Wales on a four-week course. In a letter to a friend, Peter made the observation that “these young people suffer quite a lot of anxiety but, because they are part of a group, they rise to the occasion and perform way above their normal capabilities.”

In 1977 he spent two months teaching in Beijing where he visited a commune. I was in Switzerland taking a domestic science course at the time. Writing to a Chinese colleague, my father describes my twelve-week training as “not such a thorough experience as going to a commune for two years, but it is better than nothing.”

In a letter to my mother, however, he admitted concern at seeing “girls, little older than Suseli, lifting great blocks of cement in a yoke device.”

Before I left for university I went to Warwick to study Lateral Thinking. The following spring I was in Lichtenstein, where I spent 5 days in a reclining chair, listening to Mozart and learning Spanish according to ‘Suggestopedic’ principles.

I was onboard for most of it. I enjoyed the travelling, my expenses were paid and all that was required was that I write a report when I got home.

In 1971, when I was 12, my father flirted briefly with the idea of sending me to Summerhill, the mother ship of alternative education. I had no wish to go to boarding school and fortunately Peter himself wasn’t entirely convinced either. In the 1940s he had been a history master at a boys boarding school and had taught what he referred to as a ‘Summerhill refugee’. In his diary, he wrote “Woolwich spent one term at the school and loathed and despised it, partly for its poverty but also for more important things which he couldn’t express but which were obviously real to him. Neill, as a man, he disliked.”

Founded in 1921 by A.S. Neill, Summerhill School advocates a child-centred education which opposes discipline, morality or guidance of pupils in any way. Children, both then and now, have absolute freedom in terms of how they choose to spend their time and lessons are not compulsory. Neill insisted that children are completely good, wise and sensible and, if left to themselves, will develop naturally.

A decade ago, I drove past the school and my imagination conjured up a bunch of feral ‘do-as-yer-like’ kids running riot in the grounds. I breathed a sigh of relief that my father had, in the end, sent me to a conventional girls’ school.

In 2019 I decided to sign up for a Summerhill Open Day. I wanted to test my prejudices, fully prepared to dismiss the school’s kooky educational ideas but also open to having an opinion of my own.

A.S. Neill’s daughter, Zoe Readhead has been the head teacher since 1985. Her son, Henry is the assistant head and all Neill’s grandchildren have been through the school. Lessons remain optional and children are free to ride bikes and climb trees, although screens and social media appear to have replaced outdoor pursuits.

The fifteen members of staff, all of whom live on site, struck me as dedicated and passionate. The Science teacher, who had previously taught in a university, expressed his appreciation at ‘being able to get on with the business of teaching’. There is very little paperwork and state exams are available, although only if the children ask for them.

Readhead, when asked what she considered to be the aim of education replied “a happy childhood and emotional intelligence.” Henry added, “You can study when you’re 30 but you can’t be a child when you’re 30.”

Our group included visitors from France, Spain, the Czech Republic, India, the United States, China and Japan. In the 1970s, a large proportion of pupils came from America. Today 50%  are from Asia.

There are a few day students, although this is discouraged as leaving the school allows pupils to opt out of taking full responsibility for their actions.

Following a tour of the buildings and a Q+A, it was time for the General Meeting. This aspect of Summerhill, perhaps more than any other, showcases the school as a true democracy. Issues are raised and resolved by a show of hands. Everyone, from the teachers to the youngest student, has a vote. Individual infringements receive a warning, a monetary fine or a work fine. There is no shaming or heavy-handed punishment and no guilt. The act is always separate from the child and the consequences are very practical.

Neill was keen to emphasise the balance at Summerhill between freedom (as opposed to license) and responsibility.

First though the students had to decide whether we, the visitors, would be permitted to attend the meeting that day. We waited outside until a vote had been taken. The community agreed and we all filed in and stood at the back of the room.

There was a great deal I heard and saw at Summerhill that made sense, especially when compared to a results-oriented education that demands compliance and conformity at the expense of curiosity, creativity and confidence.

Self-directed education, however, has its own price to pay. Students generally leave the school as self-assured, tolerant individuals, but, in a non-Summerhillian world, they often have difficulty integrating into corporate and educational hierarchies. This may be one of the reasons that many become artists and entrepreneurs.

With no tradition of obedience to adults, they can seem opinionated, arrogant, even rude. It’s good to be independent but it’s also useful to be able to integrate and adapt to those around you.

“I’m not particularly bothered about whether I’m pleasing people” wrote Clare Harvie (1973 – 78) “It’s more about whether I’m satisfied with the job I’ve done and whether I feel it’s good enough.”

I’ll never know what Summerhill might have done for me had my mother not adamantly refused to send her only child to boarding school. Neill’s observation that “the homesick child is the one who is unhappy at home” would certainly have described my situation in 1971.

I was not a child who thrived in a room without walls. I think I would have felt abandoned by my parents, emotionally neglected by the adults around me and socially-isolated in my peer group.

The School of English Studies was sold more than twenty years ago and, in 2017, the owner moved the school to Oxford. A potential new tenant for the buildings in Folkestone was the freshly-minted East Kent Sudbury School. The founder, a former Summerhillian, described the Sudbury model as “doing away with structured lessons and compulsory exams.” Sudbury, she claimed, was “the future of UK education.”

The school eventually opened in Ramsgate, moved to Dover and now describes itself as a “part-time learning community.”

Summerhill is the original ‘free school’, known the world over for its unmodified, radical approach to education. Operating continuously since 1921 and led by the same family, the school has maintained its independence, even in the face of threats from the government to close it down.

But Summerhill too is struggling with enrolments. Registered to take 90 pupils, this year it has just 51.

Freer Speckley, who spent eight very happy years as a pupil at Summerhill in the 1950s has described it as “a therapeutic community more than a school.”

Maybe Summerhill should run summer camps, based around Zoe Readhead’s “happy childhood and emotional intelligence”. More people would have the opportunity to become short-term Summerhillians and it would certainly knock spots off Outward Bound for fun and freedom.

*Podcast Shane Smith Has Questions. Interview with Ken Burns, June 2026.

After Summerhill,  Hussein Lucas, pub. 2011

Another Brick in the Wall, Pink Floyd, 1979

In the 1990s, the lakeside village of Iseltwald in Switzerland was largely unknown. Access was along a narrow road or via the water. Visitors were Swiss day-trippers and some Europeans tourists.

In 2018, a South Korean TV crew arrived in Iseltwald to film a scene for the Netflix series Crash Landing on You. Fans of the drama now flock to the village, undeterred by long queues and the recent introduction of a Sfr 5 charge to stand on the wooden dock where a man once played a piano.

This unexpected popularity has proved challenging for local people, many of whom have lived in Iseltwald for generations. Visitors gather flower bouquets from private gardens for their TikTok posts; others take intrusive photographs. One woman discovered a young man in his underwear standing in front of her basement washing machine. He explained that a social media post had recommended this spot as a good place to wash your laundry for free.

My hometown of Folkestone, on the south-east coast of England, has experienced a similar rise in popularity. There are major differences, of course. 53,000 people live in Folkestone and just 400 live in Iseltwald. Fans of the Netflix drama visit for an hour or two. Nobody moves there.

I am curious as to how we navigate the psychology of ‘what’s mine’ and ‘what’s yours.’ Do I, as someone who lives in a place, have more right to it than the visitor who is travelling in a free world, making choices that are his and hers to make.

How can we navigate the spaces we occupy with sensitivity and generosity. How do we avoid entitlement and hold respectful boundaries.

I grew up in Folkestone in the 1970s. When people asked me where I was from, I used to say ‘Kent’, in the hope of focussing imaginations on rolling countryside and 15^th century pubs. I was embarrassed by Folkestone. I thought it was shabby and dull.

In 2015 I began to visit more often, at a time when the town was experiencing a huge surge in popularity. During casual conversations with strangers, I would tell them that I lived in Hertfordshire. This frequently led to rapturous descriptions of Folkestone –  the Harbour, the Creative Quarter, the Leas, the wonderful high-ceilinged apartments which they’d bought for a song. They had moved down from London, they told me. On a whim. They’d come for the day and loved it. No regrets. Best decision ever.

These stories began to irritate me. ‘So, is this your first visit to Folkestone?’ they’d ask.

‘No, I grew up here’, I would reply, a little frostily, sub vocally adding, ‘back when it was gritty and edgy… long before you arrived’.

My hometown was being mentioned in The Guardian, The Times, even The New York Times.  Journalists were describing Folkestone as ‘a bit like Detroit, without the Motown’, ‘like Hackney before it got gentrified’ and ‘a Barbican by the Sea’.

Folkestone has a diverse history. At the beginning of the last century it was considered to be the most aristocratic seaside resort in England. The Leas was described as one of ‘the finest marine promenades in the world’.

During WWI soldiers from across the Empire and Commonwealth gathered in Folkestone as they waited to cross the Channel to fight on Flanders fields. In 1914 one hundred thousand Belgian refugees arrived, fifteen thousand of whom subsequently settled in the town. The King of Belgium declared Folkestone to be ‘the prettiest place in existence.’

Today, the refugee crisis of one hundred years ago is being replicated as small boats cross the English Channel from France.

World War II was less kind to Folkestone. Fighter planes were shot down, either into the sea or onto the town itself. The military mined and wired the beaches and placed gun batteries along The Leas. Thirty-five thousand residents moved away.

There followed more than two decades of demolition and re-planning and from the rubble of bombed Victorian villas grew the brutalist blocks of the 1960s.

In the 70s Folkestone lost its edge as a seaside resort when affordable package holidays in Europe re-routed the masses to Malta and the Costa del Sol.

The 1990s saw the construction of the Channel Tunnel.

In 2022, I interviewed Diane Dever who had been in charge of curating and developing the old Folkestone ferry and railway terminal. Dever has a degree in Art in the Public Space. Her first degree, however, was Geography.

“Physical Geography is about the world and what it’s made of. Human Geography is about people and the patterns they create,” she explained. “I am interested primarily in how people work and fit into the natural environment.”

When the Harbour Arm project came up, she was curious to see whether art-led regeneration could be done well; whether the maxim A rising tide lifts all boats could successfully be implemented in Folkestone or whether there would inevitably be winners and losers. The town has gone through many changes so Dever knew that change was possible. “The question I had was how would it change and how would people change with it?”

“We are experiencing our fourth or fifth wave of ‘in-migration”, reflected Dever. “How do we welcome those who arrive here? How do we protect those who live here from feeling threatened?”

I thought about my own parents who moved to Folkestone from London. My Irish grandfather had lung damage from fighting in WWI and my Swiss mother had spent a year as a tuberculosis patient at a sanatorium in Davos. There must have been plenty of ‘people like us’ who wanted to escape the polluted air of London in search of a better life for themselves and their families.

We promptly invited hundreds of foreign students into the town. Many people welcomed them and for sixty years students from the School of English Studies lived with Folkestone host families. Life-long friendships were made.

Some people, however, weren’t so enthusiastic about all these foreigners living in their community. It made them feel uncomfortable. It made them feel as though they didn’t belong.

“People are moving to Folkestone from London and elsewhere because it’s a great place to live. It’s not their fault and we shouldn’t blame them. After all, we did the same” continued Dever.

How can we study these migration patterns and learn from them? How do we resist the desire to criticize and exclude?

“We don’t know how this will roll out. All we can do is be open to it because it’s happening. Each wave of new migration looks with uncertainty and a critical eye at the wave that follows.”

How can we address this fear? How do we engage with the very real concerns that people have such as: ‘This is too big’. ‘It’s happening too fast’. ‘Who are you?’. ‘Where do I belong?’.

In the early 1900s the Leas was a restricted area, privately policed in order to keep the working class out of the west end. Urban legend has it that some, who lived in the east end of Folkestone, would pawn what few valuables they had in order to dress up in fine clothes and parade freely along the Leas on a Sunday. One hundred years later and the development of the Harbour Arm established the east end, the old fishing community, at the centre of this new space. Today there is no separation or exclusion.

“Everyone is welcome”, said Dever. “No one has to pay to go there. The music is free. You can enjoy a beer. The children can run around. Those who live along the Leas come down too. We created a social space there.

“The Arm is not in the town, it’s an out-at-sea place, a place that people go to at the same time, in the same way, for the same thing. And those who live here can look back at their town and see how beautiful it is.”

Folkestone is on the map and young people are returning to live and work, as artists and owners of small shops and cafes. People are moving to Folkestone because the town is an exciting place to be. “We should be proud of that”, said Dever.

In Iseltwald, a visiting Korean was asked whether she objected to paying Sfr 5 in order to take pictures on the dock. She laughed and said “I’ve spent thousands of dollars getting here. If the ticket were Sfr 100, I’d pay it.”

One of the founding aims of The School of English Studies, Folkestone was to create “a mini United Nations that really is united”.

On July 30th, 1966 the students and staff at SES were invited to watch the final of the World Cup. It was shown on a relatively modest-sized television in the Students’ Common Room.

I was seven years old. I had no understanding of football but I was spellbound by all the cheering and stamping, the waving and hugging.

When England won, our German friends were disappointed of course, but the French, the Spanish and the Italians, the Iranians, the Turks and the Israelis were thrilled. They loved England, they loved Folkestone and The School of English Studies. They had a strong bond of friendship with their teachers and their host families.

It was as if their own country had won the World Cup.

On that Saturday afternoon in 1966, we truly were ‘a mini United Nations’.

In the early hours of Monday morning my English son-in-law joined the 11.6 million who rose from their beds to watch England beat Mexico in the Azteca Stadium.

Two days later, the Swiss beat the Colombians in Vancouver. Not since 1954 has Switzerland made it to the quarterfinal of the World Cup. For the Anglo-Swiss members of our family (who know nothing much about football), this is pretty exciting.

Our 5 year-old granddaughter, who holds Swiss and British citizenship and believes in winning streaks, says she would like to get up at 2am next Sunday to watch Switzerland beat Argentina.

In 1969, I too was awoken in the early hours of a July morning to watch Neil Armstrong walk on the moon. I recall the thrill of being awake, in the middle of the night, watching something my parents were watching too. It was this quality of a shared experience that remains with me fifty-seven years later.

Mike made it to work on Monday but more than 300,000 children failed to show up for school. England’s manager reportedly advised parents to “write an excuse and let them watch.”

I’m not generally in favour of truanting, but in this case, I’m with Thomas Tuchel.

“We have two ears and one mouth, an equation that is easy to forget.”  Peter O’Connell

The complete quote, by the Greek philosopher, Epictetus is “We have two ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as we speak.”

My father was a good listener, a skill he learned from his own father. Peter felt uncomfortable around people who sought to distinguish themselves at the expense of others and he abhorred what he referred to as ‘buffoons and poseurs’.

My paternal grandfather, who lived with us until he died, was a shy man who had been profoundly shell-shocked during WWI. His experiences at the Somme were too painful for him to share with others. Instead, Harry asked questions. And he listened to the answers. He listened with genuine interest and with his full attention. This, perhaps more than any other quality, contributed to his popularity across the generations.

“There was an owl who lived in an oak. The more he heard, the less he spoke. The less he spoke, the more he heard. Oh if men were all like that wise old bird.”

My father liked this poem and often quoted it. It always sounded a bit preachy to me, a veiled implication that perhaps I should be doing a better job of listening to others.

In 1959, my parents founded The School of English Studies, Folkestone and, for the next 40 years, Peter pursued ideas that he hoped would help his students not only learn English but also improve their social skills. Not all his teachers were on board with these novel ideas and there were intermittent rumblings in the staff room about ‘brainwashing’ and how ‘teaching English shouldn’t concern itself with altering personality’.

In 1969, the wonderfully named, Norman Castles, arrived at SES. One of Norman’s projects was to arrange a series of interviews to be conducted by advanced students with local people in their own homes. As a retired congregational minister he had an impressive bank of prospective interviewees ranging from a Q-Boat commander, who had served in WWI, to a retired bank manager with a passion for folklore.

Norman arranged the initial interview and then equipped the student with a cassette recorder, a table microphone, a folder and sheets of paper. He would offer advice on etiquette and students were encouraged to ask thoughtful and thought-provoking questions, such as: What qualities do you think are needed to be a good bank manager?. What class do you consider your parents belonged to?.

Norman taught his students how to sustain an interview over a two hour period, how to listen for cues and details and how to politely draw the speaker back if he wandered off topic. It was a lesson both in understanding and in making oneself understood.

After the interview Norman would help, if required, with writing a letter of thanks. The complete interview would then be transcribed from the tape and the finished folder donated to the SES student library.

For my father the real value of the exercise lay in teaching people to be good listeners whilst improving their English in an authentic situation.

Peter ran classes on the Technique of Conversation and would model the importance of posture, gesture, facial expression, emphatic communion and non-verbal communication. He also wrote a paper titled More Learning – Less Teaching in which he discussed the difference between teaching and learning and hearing and listening.

At mealtimes, he would coach the au pairs in what he referred to as social ping pong. ‘Did you have a good morning, Elisabeth?’ to which the correct response was ‘Yes, thank you Mr. O’Connell, did you?’

I later developed some of Peter’s ideas in my own classroom teaching. I worked with primary school children and would run workshops for Year 6s preparing to move to secondary school. One of the things we talked about was how to be a good listener.

I would ask the children to draw up a list of ‘Dos and Donts’ and I was always impressed by their imagination and sensitivity: ‘Keep good eye contact/listen carefully/don’t be distracted/don’t interrupt/don’t get too physically close/ask questions/don’t talk about things that the person might not be interested in/make comments to show that you are listening/be encouraging.’

We practiced moving around the room and greeting each other silently. We imagined whole conversations without words, which is a good way of exploring body language.

We played the Silence Game – one child listened to another for 15 seconds, without interrupting, and then reported back what they had heard the person say. We also discussed different ways of starting and ending a conversation and how to join a conversation as a late arrival to the group.

We learned that when you listen to another person it’s important to silence yourself and pay settled attention, with no agenda or intention.

The skill of listening is largely neglected in our classrooms, perhaps because it is rather difficult to observe or control. We live in an era that is absorbed by individual psychology and yet the future of the world depends on skilled listeners. Good listening is closely allied to concentration, a valuable asset at any age.

Educational psychologist, Herman Hall, once made the observation that “Human attention is one of the most powerful forces on earth. Being listened to is sometimes indistinguishable from being loved.”

American Photographs is an exhibition currently showing at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. It borrows its title from Walker Evans’ book of photographs, published in 1938.

“Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long.”                                                                  Walker Evans

In 1980 I was a student in Paris. It was a year of protests, strikes and demonstrations at universities, including the Sorbonne. After a couple of months I decided to use this as an excuse to stop attending lectures and study on my own. I read a lot. I spent hours walking around the city. I went to museums, exhibitions and plays.

I remember buying a postcard from a bookseller by the Seine – a sepia photograph of a cobblestone courtyard surrounded by flaking buildings and peeling wooden shutters. The photographer was Eugene Atget and everything about the picture coincided in my imagination with the 19^th century French novels I was reading.

Later, I discovered the photographs of Henri Cartier Bresson, Walker Evans and Robert Frank. According to my diary, on February 16^th 1981, I went to two exhibitions dedicated to Walker Evans. Both were in small galleries – one featured the most famous of his photographs, the Alabama sharecroppers during the Great Depression and the other, titled New York between the Wars, was a collection of street scenes and anonymous subway riders.

The work of Robert Frank and Walker Evans spoke to my fascination with America and I was drawn to their images of ordinary people captured in unguarded moments. The black and white photographs were unfiltered and emotionally raw, reflecting a complexity of life in the United States that I was anxious to discover for myself.

In the spring of 1984, with savings of $900, I left London on a one-way ticket to New York. I flew People Express, the airline that operated like a bus service. You paid the fare in cash from your seat. In Newark I was granted a six month visa and with that, I was ready for the Promised Land.

I travelled on Greyhound buses, staying in cheap motels and visiting Civil War battlefields and the homes of former presidents. People were friendly, although puzzled by the fact that I was travelling without a car.

Old family friends, both artists, had invited me to spend Memorial Day weekend in Maine. Getting to Cranberry Island involved two flights, a drive, a boat-ride and a flat-bed pick-up truck. Final access to the house, which stood on a point, required stumbling across a pebbly beach at midnight.

Cranberry Island is a beautiful, magical place. Just two miles long and one mile wide, the island is rich in birds, hills, woods and water. In the 1980s, there were just 40 year-round residents, most of them artists and fishermen. We visited Mark, a painter who had studied in Paris in the 1940s when Picasso and Leger were living there.

At a dinner of neighbours one evening I met Isabelle Storey, a vivacious and attractive woman. Born and raised in Switzerland, she and her husband, a photographer, left Zurich in 1958. Soon after they arrived in New York, Isabelle was introduced to Walker Evans. Within a matter of weeks she had left her husband and told Walker that she wanted to marry him, which she did in 1960. She was twenty-seven. He was thirty years her senior.

In 1970 she left him too and shortly afterwards married Jim Storey, a successful lawyer with an active and well-connected social life. The couple lived in Boston and summered on Cranberry Island.

Isabelle’s stories of her early relationship with Walker sounded challenging and I wondered what had motivated her to go through with the marriage. He was brilliant and compelling, she replied.

She told me about another unhappy love affair that had recently occurred on Cranberry Island between a local boy and a girl from a wealthy Boston family. When the young woman ended the relationship, the abandoned lover was so distraught that he bulldozed her family home into the sea.

Walker Evans died in 1975. Isabelle Storey Evans returned to her homeland in 2022, where she died two years later at the age of 91.

*“The eye should learn to listen before it looks.”   Robert Frank

Eugene Atget   born, Paris  1857 – 1927

Walker Evans   born, St. Louis  1903 – 1975

Henri Cartier-Bresson  born, Chanteloup-en-Brie   1908 – 2004

Robert Frank    born, Zurich  1924 – 2019

American Photographs is at the Victoria and Albert Museum until May, 2027

Our granddaughter has recently learnt to say ‘Hi’ and ‘Bye’, sounds that are accompanied by an outstretched arm and a small wave. As any parent remembers and any grandparent knows, it is a captivating and charming development in the life of an infant.

Lia is generous and inclusive with her salutations. She greets the lady sweeping leaves, the grandfather feeding ducks, the delivery man running with his parcels. Sometimes the person smiles and waves back. A brief respite. A moment of connection.

In Salinger’s novel, A Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield feels responsible for all the little children playing in a field of rye. “Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around – nobody big, I mean – except me.”

He imagines having to catch the children before they all go over a cliff. His sister, Phoebe explains that he’s misremembered the words from the Robert Burns poem. She tells him that it’s “meet” not “catch”.

Lia has taught me something important. She has taught me how to greet those I meet in a field of rye. She has taught me to smile at strangers, not all strangers, but the kind I am prone to overly-analyse – the man with the growling wolf tattoo on his upper arm, the woman with the too-short skirt or the too much lip-filler. Before my brain clicks into its well-worn groove, I try and catch myself. I smile. And when I do, I think of Lia.

Holden’s right. Those who are ‘big’ have a responsibility to guard and protect those who are ‘little’. But those of us who are big have also been provided with opportunities to witness the innocence, the single-pointed attention and the wonder of those who are still little.

Lia has taught me the value of smiling at strangers.

Reference:
“Gin a body meet a body, comin thro’ the rye, Gin a body kiss a body, need a body cry.”
from ‘Comin thro’ the Rye’ by Robert Burns, 1782

2021/2026

“Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask and he’ll tell you the truth.”                                               Oscar Wilde

In 1981, my final year at university, I took a course in Greek Tragedy. In November of that year, Aeschylus’ trilogy The Oresteia opened at the National Theatre in London. The five-hour production was performed on a bare stage, by an all-male cast in full masks. The play was scheduled for a limited run but became the unexpected hit of the season and twenty performances became sixty-one.

The following year the company was invited to Epidaurus, where The Oresteia became the first non-Greek language production of a Greek play ever to be performed in the ancient amphitheatre.

Director, Peter Hall, first began work on The Oresteia in 1974 and auditions were open to anyone willing to give it a try. “Odd things happen when an actor puts on a mask,” Hall explained. “You become it and must go with it.”

Future cast member, Peter Dawson, for example, chose a female mask. When a fellow actor handed him an ashtray and said “These are the ashes of your dead children”, Dawson found himself weeping uncontrollably inside the mask.

Greek tragedy focuses on elemental human struggles – vengeance, betrayal, love for one’s children, loyalty, obligation and justice. Masks give voice and shape to feelings too powerful for the human face. If an actor emotes inside the mask, he begins to shake. It is the mask and the formality of the verse that contains and disciplines. An actor’s job is to tell the story and generate emotions in the audience.

The actors were not only denied the use of their own faces, they had to speak directly to the audience. No character in the play ever looked at or touched another.

The Oresteia, together with a six-hour staging of Philip Pullmans’ His Dark Materials, also performed at the National Theatre, are unquestionably the highlights of my theatre experience. My daughters were 12 and 14 when I took them to see His Dark Materials. When the final curtain came down, the younger one said: “I could see that all over again.”

My own reaction to the end of The Oresteia took me by surprise. I was completely absorbed by the action on stage – the masks, which were both expressive and oddly ambiguous, the bare stage, the strange verse and the rhythmically complex music – a combination of percussion, woodwind and harp. It was compelling and I was hypnotised, almost from the beginning.

Then, suddenly, it was all over. The house lights came on and the actors lined up on stage. Too quickly, the spell was broken. In one synchronised move, the characters pulled off their masks to reveal sixteen sweaty, bearded, twentieth century faces.

I felt so strongly about it that I wrote a letter to Peter Hall. He wrote back. “I’m sorry we spoilt the end for you by the removal of the masks. This is an interesting point and I shall certainly raise it with the cast when I next see them.”

Twenty years later I was working in a primary school where I ran lunch clubs for children who were struggling, academically and socially. I explained to a group of ten-year olds that in ancient Greek theatre the actors wore masks so the audience couldn’t see their sadness, anger, worry and fear.

We talked about how faces can deceive. Someone may smile at you but the kindly expression doesn’t feel true. Instead of feeling happy and safe around the smiling person, you might feel threatened and anxious.

I brought in some white, full-face masks and gave one to each child. I encouraged them to paint the masks to make them their own. If someone grew frustrated or was finding it hard to say something difficult or painful, I suggested they hold up the mask and speak from behind it.

Similar to the cast of The Oresteia, the children were given the opportunity to tell, not feel. They knew, from their daily lives, what it felt like to be angry, resentful and unhappy.  Speaking through the mask provided them with an opportunity to generate those emotions in the listener.

“Masks are like magnifying glasses”, said Peter Hall “they concentrate the mind.”

Reference:

The Oresteia by Aeschylus, in a version by Tony Harrison, directed by Peter Hall. National Theatre, opening night 28 November, 1981

The Oresteia at Epidaurus

In Search of Greek Theatre: The Oresteia (1981)

I grew up on a diet of 1950s America. Following my father’s return from five years teaching in the US, he remained forever homesick for his adopted country. He would gladly have lived out his days in America where life, he said, was both more gracious and more fun than it was in England.

Occasionally, after a Saturday afternoon soccer game, Mr. O’Connell would take his students for a frappe, a float or an apple pie a la mode at Howard Johnson. This particular story fascinated and frustrated me in equal measure. We had a Wimpy in Folkestone that served Knickerbocker Glories in tall, fluted glasses. Dad never thought to take me there.

Eventually, when I was 12, we went on a family holiday to America. We stayed at a Howard Johnson motel in Pennsylvania where I tasted my first onion rings followed by ice cream which came in 28 different flavours.

One of my father’s students in 1952 was thirteen year-old Douglas Van Dyck Brown, who later returned to the school as a teacher and archivist. Doug retired in 2021, the longest serving member of staff in Groton School’s one hundred and thirty-seven-year history. In 2024, he and I collaborated on writing his memoir.

Doug has eaten breakfast at Tiny’s diner in Ayer, Massachusetts since 1979. He goes there six days a week. On Mondays, when Tiny’s is closed, he drives to the Airport Diner in Shirley for his bacon, egg and pancakes.

Tiny’s opened in 1958 as a donut shop. It has always been a family business, run initially by Anna and Alfred Mauro. Anna was very short, hence the name of the diner. Bill, the Mauros’ son, started working at Tiny’s after he graduated from college in 1972 and took over when his father died in 1982. Today, Bill’s children and grandchildren work in the restaurant.

The first time Doug and I went to Tiny’s together he explained that he never sits in a four-person booth. “I’m generally on my own and so I sit at the counter. I like to be opposite the kitchen where I can catch the waitress’s attention if I need more coffee or the check. There used to be a clock on the wall, so I could watch the time. Before I retired, going to Tiny’s for 45 minutes every day gave me the space and time I needed before school started.”

Doug introduced me to Norman, who, much to my astonishment, has been a Tiny’s customer for even longer than Doug. Norman remembered when the place was the Clam Shack and, before that, the Donut Treat.

During my visits to Groton that year, I quite often went to Tiny’s for supper as well as breakfast. The food is all home-cooked – from the tender and lightly-battered scallops served with coleslaw to the crispy onion rings. The portions are enormous and I would bag up the leftovers and take them back to my apartment for the following day. This also left room for an ice cream sundae at Johnson’s Dairy Bar on the way home.

You can’t find a proper American-style diner in England. Franchises like Five Guys replicate the space but they fail to capture the essence of the American diner experience.

When our nieces and nephews visit from Boston and Chicago, they ask to go to ‘a real English pub’, one with a fireplace, low beams and locally-brewed ale. In return, they will go out of their way to find me a Dairy Queen in America because, as everyone knows, DQ has been making the best root beer floats since 1940.

The Man in the Blue-Striped Shirt by Una Suseli O’Connell

published 2024   reprinted 2025

The playwright Peter Shaffer once made the observation that tragedy is not a conflict between right and wrong, but a conflict between two different kinds of right.

The world is a noisy place and opinions about what’s right and who’s wrong are growing louder.

In these early days of 2026, listening thoughtfully and integrating intentionally has suddenly become a lot more difficult. The people I normally turn to for clarification or relief – op ed journalists like Jonathan Freedland or American comedians like Jimmy Kimmel – are themselves struggling to understand what’s going on. How can they explain the world to us in a way that makes any sense?

I was born in 1959, too young to comprehend the cause and effects of WWII or to have a clear understanding of the Civil Rights Movement. I did know, however, that there were certain people my parents respected and admired, men (and they were mainly men) who spoke unflinchingly and with integrity about God, man and meaning.  They were the public philosophers and theologians of the 20^th century: men like C.S. Lewis, Martin Luther King Jr. and Reinhold Niebuhr.

In the 1930s, Niebuhr, then a pastor in a New England village, wrote a prayer.

“Father, give us courage to change what must be altered, serenity to accept what cannot be helped, and the insight to know the one from the other.”

The Serenity Prayer was included in the prayer book given to American soldiers on the front lines during WWII and later adopted by Alcoholics Anonymous.

Reinhold Niebuhr was born in Missouri in 1892, the son of a German pastor. He received his degree from Yale Divinity School and was subsequently sent to Bethel Church in Detroit, where he became an outspoken critic of Henry Ford in the days before labour was protected by unions. His congregation (which swelled from 18 families to 600 during the 13 years he was there), consisted of those in management positions at the Ford plant as well as assembly line workers. “An industrial overlord” said Niebuhr, “will not share power with his workers until he is forced to do so by tremendous pressure”. As individuals, he knew his affluent congregation to be good, concerned and altruistic people and yet as a group they appeared selfish and self-interested.

Niebuhr saw religion as a real world issue, not confined to those who attended church or worked in academia. He sought institutional change over the salvation of the individual. He spoke out against President Nixon for his misuse of religion to bless his politics and he expressed regret at President Kennedy’s promiscuity and the thinness of his moral fibre. “By their fruits shall ye know them” he said “and the relevant fruits are charity, proportion and justice.”

Niebuhr often expressed weariness at what he described as the stale debate of atheism versus faith.

“It’s as difficult to get charity out of piety as to get reasonableness out of rationalism. Nothing worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime, therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in our immediate context of history, therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone, therefore we are saved by love.”

In 1952, my father was teaching at a boys’ boarding school in Massachusetts where Christopher, Reinhold’s son, was his advisee. At the end of the year, Reinhold Niebuhr gave Peter a copy of his book The Irony of American History. In writing to thank him, he took the opportunity to ask Niebuhr for advice on how to manage his own religious conflict. This is the reply he received:

“Dear Mr. O’Connell,

I deeply appreciate your letter if for no other reason than it gives me an opportunity to thank you for your great kindness and help to Christopher. I meant my copy of the book to be a token of my gratitude but it is a poor token indeed.

I find as a matter of fact that parents are so deeply indebted to teachers who take an interest in their children that there is no adequate way of expressing gratitude. What you and the School have done for Christopher is of inestimable value to him, and we can never be too grateful.

Perhaps I will have time in June to talk with you about the issues which you raise in your letter, because they have concerned me all of my life, but I have reached rather different conclusions than you have reached.

I believe, for instance, that in a world where, as Pascal said, justice must be enforced by power, the voluntary abnegation of power by a few Christians is not as valuable as the wielding of power “with fear and trembling” in the way that every business man and every Government official must wield it.

Whether on the question of powerlessness or poverty it seems to me that the Christian has to choose between the Monastic-perfectionist principle of goodness and an essentially Protestant one. According to the one he seeks to free himself from the evils of the world but he does not seriously affect the struggle in the world for a tolerable justice and brotherhood.

According to the other, he never escapes guilt because he is involved in all the various forms of guilt in the social life of man, but he regards this as a concomitant of “an ethic of responsibility” in contrast to “an ethic of perfection”.

I know this is a very sketchy way of stating a very ultimate problem with which I have been wrestling, as it were, all my life.

Sincerely yours,

R Niebuhr”

Reinhold Niebuhr was a nuanced, thoughtful and passionate thinker, willing to risk popularity for the sake of integrity. People paid attention to him because he didn’t speak  out of self-interest but from a larger, human perspective. This made him trustworthy. Despite being on an FBI watch list, the US State Department invited Niebuhr to help shape government policy during the Cold War.

In this time, in our time, we are in profound need of Niebuhrs, Tillichs, Lewises and Kings.

Reinhold Niebuhr   June 21^st, 1892 –  June 1^st, 1971

Reference:

Mike Wallace interview with Reinhold Niebuhr, April 27^th, 1958

The Irony of American History by Reinhold Niebuhr, pub. 1952

An American Conscience: The Reinhold Niebuhr Story by Martin Doblmeier, 2017