The History Boys Read Free Page B

could decide when precisely after I’d finished the play.
    My own memories of sitting the Cambridge scholarship examination were so vivid that they coloured the writing of the play, with Oxford and Cambridge still held up to my sixth formers as citadels to be taken just as they were to me and my schoolfellows fifty years ago. I knew things had changed, of course, but I assumed that candidates for the scholarship examination spent two or three days at whichever university, staying in the college of their first choice, sitting a few examination papers and being interviewed: after which they would go back to Leeds or Blackburn or wherever to await the results ten days or so later. That was what had happened to me in December 1951, and it was a time I had never forgotten.
    I was well on with the play when I mentioned it to a friend who had actually sat next to me in one of the scholarship examinations. He told me that I was hopelessly out of date, and that scholarship examinations such as we’d both experienced were a thing of the past, and even that scholarships themselves were not what they were. What had replaced the system he wasn’t sure, but he thought that candidates no longer took scholarship examinations while they were at school, but at the end of their first year in college when awards were made on course work.
    I was shocked and didn’t want to know, not because this invalidated the play (it is a play, after all, and not a white paper), but because what had been such a memorableepisode in my life was now wholly confined to history. What had happened so unforgettably to me couldn’t happen any more; it was as outmoded as maypole dancing or the tram. And as for the now stay-at-home examinees, I just felt sorry for them. No romantic weekend for them, threading the frosted Backs or sliding over the cobbles of Trinity; no Evensong in King’s: life as in so many other respects duller than once it was. I don’t imagine the candidates themselves felt much deprived, and from the colleges’ point of view it simply meant that they had another weekend available for conferences.
    However, I now had to decide if I should adapt the play to present-day circumstances, but decided I shouldn’t, as much for practical reasons as any concern for the facts. The current system of assessment, whatever its merits, is no help to the playwright. Graduated assessment is no use at all. The test, the examination, the ordeal, unfair though they may be, are at least dramatic.
    Accordingly I set the play in the 1980s, when people seemed to think the system had changed. It’s significant that without looking it up nobody I spoke to could quite remember the sequence, which testified to the truth of Irwin’s remark about the remoteness of the recent past but is also an instance of how formless the history of institutions becomes once its public procedures are meddled with. Fairer, more decent and catering to the individual the new system may be, but memorable and even ceremonial, no, and that is a loss, though these days not an uncommon one.
    Luckily the eighties were a period with no special sartorial stamp, no wince-making flares, for instance, or tie ’n’ die. Mrs Thatcher was more of an obtruding presence then than she is in the play, but that particular omission will, I hope, be forgiven me.
    The school is not a fee-paying grammar school such as Leeds or Manchester, which are both represented at the Headmasters’ Conference and count as public schools. This,though, is what Mr Armstrong, the headmaster in the play, would aspire to, just as my own headteacher did all those years ago. I’m old fashioned enough to believe they private education should long since have been abolished and that Britain has paid too high a price in social inequality for its public schools. At the same time, I can’t see that public schools could be abolished (even if there was the will) without an enormous