Surrogate Opinions

Now and again an idea for an assembly at the infant school bubbles to the surface which could go horribly awry. This Sunday at church we kept the feast of St John at the Latin Gate which is of significance to us, and, rather as a few years ago when I told the pupils the story of St Nicholas eating three children in a pie, I found myself being inexorably drawn towards telling them about St John being boiled in oil (of course the point of the story is that he’s all right, just as St Nicholas brings the children back to life). It was all very over-the-top – the Lives of the Saints as re-told by Roald Dahl – and was rewarded by gasps of horror and ripples of laughter at the right points.

But the point of this post is not that at all. As usual I went to the staff room for tea after assembly. Normally the conversation among the teachers, when not concerning the activities or achievements of this or that child, is about diets or what they’ve done over the weekend: yet on Monday it was the presidential election in France. The defeat of Marine le Pen was discussed with something like hysteria-tinged relief, which I thought was a surprisingly engaged reaction for a group of teachers at an infant school in Surrey none of whom had a particularly close connection with France, who I’ve never heard discussing politics as such before. Everyone I know was relieved on Monday, because I don’t know very many right-wing nationalists: the eclipse of Ms le Pen felt like a little chink of light and reason in a world which has seemed gripped by a sort of collective madness since last June. So the staff room at Swanvale Halt Infant School was no different in that respect. But it only struck me later that a fulsome endorsement of an election result in France is a way of expressing what people feel without wading into the painful and possibly divisive marshland of British politics. We can all safely have a go at Marine le Pen: our own situation is a different matter.