Human Flower Project

Tuesday, January 10, 2012

Domestication, Under This Tree

The old trees of Cambridge and Oxford are riddled with association. How do you elude history and fall into the nature of nature?

Jesus Green

Essay and photos by John Levett

I spent my career in primary education. I don’t miss what it became. I left teaching in 2003 and haven’t set foot into a school since.

If I were asked what I think of the changes that have taken place over the last decade I couldn’t give a coherent answer, no longer following beyond the headlines.

My dissociation with primary education came to me a few months back when I was passing by Park Street School in Cambridge. It’s a long-established church-aided school close by Jesus Green. In good weather the children use the Green as their playground. What took my ear as I walked past was the singing from the school hall.

Under the spreading chestnut tree,
Where I knelt upon my knee,
We were as happy as could be,
Under the spreading chestnut tree.

For those of my generation and before, the song will be familiar, not for its words but for the actions that go with it—the replacement of the word by the action (spread, chest, nut, tree). There’s a film of King George VI (he of the voice) doing the business at a scout camp. I recall it always dissolving into a confusion of arms, hands and elbows.

What made me pause that day was the surprise that ‘singing’ as nothing beyond its appreciation and fun still had a place within a primary school. I’d assumed that anything that didn’t make an instrumental contribution to capitalist accumulation had been stricken from the curriculum.

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