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Tales of the Country: Cultural exchange... to Wolverhampton

Brian Viner
Thursday 27 March 2003 01:00 GMT
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My nine-year-old daughter, Eleanor, came home from school the other day with the exciting news that she has been chosen to go, along with 11 other pupils, on a "cultural exchange". To France? The Netherlands? Germany? No, to Wolverhampton.

It was a deafening reminder that, by taking our children from a state primary school in Hornsey, north London, and installing them at a state primary school in north Herefordshire, we have, at a stroke, removed multiculturalism from their daily lives. At Eleanor's London school, one of her best friends was a girl from Sierra Leone whose family had fled the civil war. Here, there is not a black or Asian face in any of their classrooms. The nearest that their classmates have come to civil war is a boundary dispute that is unfolding between two farmers up the lane.

But the odd, and comforting, thing is that my kids don't appear to have noticed the stark change in their environment. Not once have they asked, "Why no black faces?", just as they never asked, in the playground in Hornsey, "Why so many black faces?" Indeed, when, in London, Eleanor once tried to describe to me another African friend of hers, she detailed all her defining characteristics – pigtails, pink coat, lovely smile, really good at skipping, woolly hat – before throwing in, as an afterthought, that she had very dark skin.

And now she is going to Wolverhampton on a cultural exchange, along with lots of children from other Herefordshire schools. This morning, her headmaster told me what they have in store: gospel singers, Afro-Caribbean poets, Asian drummers, Indian silk-painting. "I am hoping that Miss Wood will come back enthused by bhangra dancing," he added, memorably.

The headmaster is an excellent man. He told me about a counterpart at a school in Wolverhampton where 100 asylum-seekers speaking 26 different languages have enrolled in the past 12 months. "I sit in complete awe of him when he tells me what he has to manage," he said.

Not that he is uninitiated in the realities of inner-city education. He spent seven years teaching at a school in Southall, west London, before taking up a job in Leominster, Herefordshire. And, just two weeks into the Leominster job, he found himself back in London, taking his new charges on a trip to Wembley Stadium. He remembers their looking out of the coach window and laughing at passing Rastafarians. "I was appalled," he said, "but it wasn't their fault. It wouldn't be as bad now, because there are more black people in sport and music. But we still have to work at it. I sometimes think that, with the Government's drive toward literacy and numeracy, we are so preoccupied with attainment in schools that we overlook things at least as important." Clearly, my children are in good hands.

Who needs literary references when there's children's TV?

My wife, Jane, let out a shriek in bed last night. Nothing to do with being buzzed by flies, as it usually is, but because she is reading Donna Tartt's novel The Secret History and in it came across a golden retriever called Milo. We have a golden retriever called Milo. We bought him from a breeder near Hereford the day after we moved here last summer, as a bribe to our children, who were worried that they would miss their friends. We thought his name original, although we have since come across several other doggy Milos, including, now, a literary one.

Our more intellectual friends have always assumed that our Milo has literary origins, that we named him after a character in Joseph Heller's novel Catch-22. We are happy to go along with that, but the truth is that Milo is named after a TV character greatly revered by my younger son. Milo owes his name not to Catch-22 but to The Tweenies.

These anecdotes are hit and myth

My slightly grudging thanks to all those readers who wrote and e-mailed in response to the story I related last week about my clergyman friend.

By an extraordinary coincidence, it turned out that an uncannily similar story had appeared in this newspaper's property section only the day before, related by an estate agent (although, as I dispatched my column the day before that, I am able to plead not guilty to the charge that I don't read my own paper). Most readers pointed out the repetition good-naturedly; a few revelled in my perceived embarrassment. Just this morning, I received an anonymous letter cattily addressed to "Lord" Brian Viner, containing my column and the relevant Confessions of an Estate Agent. There was an arrow pointing at my head, and the old Herefordshire word "twazzock". Twazzock yourself.

Another reader e-mailed me with the withering observation: "I could enjoy a most convivial evening at the pub, given a pint for every inspector in the life-and-pensions office I worked for who told the tale of the fierce dog and his balls in posh ladies' gardens."

But even urban or semi-rural myths have to start somewhere. As we in the country know, there's rarely smoke without fire. And the partner of my clergyman friend assures me that he has been describing his encounter for 43 years, so quite clearly it did happen to him, and all those estate agents and pensions inspectors have been appropriating the story as though it had happened to them.

Besides, you have to admit that, as an anecdote, true or false, it really is the dog's bollocks. And had I not told it, it would not have prompted another reader to recall a "young curate" story told to him by the vicar in the village in which he grew up. The young curate, said the vicar (for it had been he, 20 years earlier), was a muscular Christian with a love for the great outdoors, but also a shy man. He agreed to instruct his flock in the art of canoeing in a nearby swimming-pool and was teaching one busty female parishioner how to execute the eskimo roll when he saw, to his horror, that although she had successfully righted the canoe, her bikini top had somehow failed to complete the same journey.

Far too embarrassed to point it out, he took the snap decision to do nothing and, in the words of my correspondent, "was therefore subjected to the sight of a topless woman bobbing in and out of the water" for quite some time, presumably until she became aware of her predicament.

That was the vicar's story. If you've heard the same one from an estate agent or pensions inspector, or, worse, if you read it yesterday elsewhere in these pages, I think I'd rather not know.

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