In one of those futile bits of research on which academics waste time and money in the pathetic hope of getting mentioned in the press, Hiroshima University in Japan claims to have discovered that people work harder if they have a picture of a pet on their desk. This finding was considered so interesting by the Daily Telegraph that it reported it on its front page with the advice that ‘looking at pictures of puppies and kittens could improve your concentration by a tenth’.
I wouldn’t have thought many people had photographs of pets on their desks, and I certainly don’t. But I do have the real thing sitting on a chair beside me, and she isn’t improving my concentration one bit. I refer to my Jack Russell, Polly, who is actually preventing me from concentrating by urging me (by whining, twitching her tail, and pricking up her ears) to take her out for a walk. That’s something I will not do, for this column has to be written before I go off for a few days to France. But looking at Polly, I am thinking how much she has in common with the great British public, for she shares with it an extraordinary lack of judgment about people.
Polly, faced with a lovable, well-meaning old lady wanting to pat her or stroke her, bares her teeth and growls menacingly. But when a half-naked thug of criminal appearance and covered with tattoos crosses her path, she jumps up and licks him affectionately. Similarly, it is characteristic of the British public that the people it takes to its heart and anoints as national treasures are almost always weird, and sometimes patently sinister.
I include Jimmy Savile in the second category. If anybody was an obvious creep, it was he. I can’t believe that this wasn’t universally recognised; yet he was admired, respected, even loved by millions of people, who took his ‘fixing it’ for children as a sign of caring, and his charity work as evidence of compassion. But now we know that these activities were not only ways of achieving fame and wealth but also of finding young girls to molest. Why he was not exposed when he was still alive, and before a funeral worthy of a national hero, has been a matter of much anguished debate.
Some 40 women have now come forward to tell how he sexually abused them as young girls. Why not before? The answer they usually give is that they thought they wouldn’t be believed, that Savile’s fame and reputation, not to mention his value to charities like Stoke Mandeville and to the BBC, would ensure that his word would prevail over theirs. But there is another reason that is evident from the numerous cases of child abuse in schools and religious institutions that have come to light in recent years. The victims have not understood what was happening to them. They may have felt uncomfortable about it, but they have assumed that the pedagogues they had come to respect knew better than they did and were not ill intentioned.
I was at a highly respectable prep school called Pinewood near Shrivenham in Oxfordshire. It was thought to be a very good school, and lots of boys from privileged families were sent there before going on to Eton or wherever. The headmaster, Mr Wakeham (always known as ‘Magga’), was greatly admired as a kindly, inspirational man. Parents loved him, and his boys were always eager to please him. Yet he was in reality just a rotten old paedophile; or at least that is what I subsequently came to believe.
I have no evidence of actual sexual abuse. But every evening, when we were tucked up in bed, he would tour the dormitories and sit on our beds and kiss each of us good night. We did not think this odd. In fact, the only thing I ever thought about it was why did he linger on some boys’ beds so much longer than on mine. There were one or two boys that he particularly fancied, and he would snog them for what seemed like hours, while we less attractive ones were dismissed with a quick peck on the cheek. It felt humiliating.
That was all a long time ago, in the late Forties and early Fifties. Pinewood is now a co-educational school of a completely different and irreproachable character. But in its previous incarnation it was creepy in its quiet way, and nobody would face up to the fact any more than they would later face up to the creepiness of Jimmy Savile.
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