On False Pretences - by Alan Bennett (Extracted from the house programme of The History Boys)
The History Boys is set in a school, I was educated at Leeds Modern, a state grammar school which in the 1940s and early 50s regularly sent boys on to Leeds University but seldom to Oxford or Cambridge. I don't remember the sixth form in my year being thought to be outstandingly clever but in 1951 for the first time the headmaster, who had been at Cambridge himself, made a effort to push some of his university entrants towards the older universities .... mine at Sidyney Sussex College, Cambridge.
.... More relevant to the play, it seems to me, is that in two of the most important examinations of my life I cheated.
I was not dishonest; I kept to the rules and didn't crip but nevertheless I cheated. On the first occasion, it was to win a scholarship at Exeter College, Oxford, in January 1954; and then I did it again, three and a half years later in 1957, when I sat my final examination in history. Nobody else would have called it cheating, then or now, but it's always seemed so to me; false prentences, anyway.
Having been offered a place at Cambridge I was obviously bright but not outstandingly so and there was nothing, I'm sure, in any of the papers I wrote that would have singled me out and made me worthy of a prestigious colleage scholarship.... I was an odd boy, I can see that, but I was no scholar.
This impression was confirmed when I went into the army to do my national service and for the first time began to mix with boys who were much cleverer than I was and who had been better taught, all of us having ended up learning Russian at the Joint Services School.... and after the national service I would be better (more rounded I fear I thought of it) going to Oxford.... I go for the scholarship examination at Exeter College, Oxford.
.... I reduced everything I knew to a set of notes with answers to possible questions and odd, eye-catching quotations all written out on a series of 40 or 50 correspondence cards, a handful of which I carried in my pocket wherever I went. I learned them in class, while ostensibly doing Russian, on the bus coming into Cambridge in the morning and in any odd moment that presented itself.
Come the examination everything tumbled out, facts, quotations, all the stuff I'd labriously committed to memory over the previous three months, my only problem a lack of time. At the interview I still said, as I had said at Cambridge, that I would probably end up taking holy orders, though in view of the existentialism I'd spewed out this seemed increasingly unlikely.
.....When the letter came saying that I'd won an open scholarship (at Oxford) I thought life was never going to be the same again, though it quite soon was, of course, and after my initial joy and surprise I began to feel the whole exercise had been a confidence trick on my part. I was a promising something, maybe, but it certainly wasn't a scholar.
Cut to three years later when I am two terms away from my final examinations at Oxford..... as I began to cram for Finals I adopted the same technique, reducing everything I knew to fit on cards which I carried everywhere, just as I'd done bfore. There were more cards this time but the contents were much the same : handy arguments, out of the way quotations, an exmination kit in fact.
I also twigged what somebody ought to have taught me but never had, namely that there was a journalistic side to answering an exmination question and that going for the wrong end of the stick was more attention grabbing than a more conventional approach, however balanced. Nobody had ever tutored me in examination techniques or conceded that such techniques existed, this omission I suspect can be put down to sheer snobbery or the notion that any such considerations were practically indecent.
What we were supposed to be doing at the highest level was writing scholarly answers to academic questions (a "Times" leader was often offered as a model). In my case there wasn't much hope of that, with the alternative a lolier form of journalism, the question of argued in brisk generalities, flavoured with what facts I could muster and written in terms that might engage the examiners' attention.
Once I'd got into the way of turning a question on its head I began to get pleasure skeleton answers to all sorts of questions, using the same facts, for instance, to argue opposite points of view and the whole seasoned with a variety of quotations. I knew it wasn't scholarship and that in the Final Honours Schools it would only take me so far but it was my only hope.
I duly did the examinations, two three-hour papers a day and the most grueling five days in my life. At the finish I'd no notion how I'd done and was so exhausted I didn't care and went to the cinema every afternoon for a week....I went back home to Leeds in low spirits.
A friend who was in Oxford when the list went up sent me a postcard. It came on a Monday morning when I was working at Tetley's Brewery, rolling barrels in the cellars. My father was ill and out of work and he and my mother brought this card to the lodge at the brewery gates, where I was sent for from the vaults. They weren't sure what "a first" was. "Does this mean you've come top?" asked my mother, not particularly surprised as from their point of veiw that's what I'd always done ever since elementary school.
....With a first, research grant was a formality and so I stayed on at Oxford for a time even convinced myself I was a scholar, coming up to London twice a week to read manuscripts at the Public Records Office in Chancery Lane. But I wasn't a scholar, more of a copyist, since this was all I did, transcribing mediaeval records without ever doing much with them and the longer I did it - for five years afer taking my degree - the more dissatisfied with myself I became and the bigger fraud I felt.
So The History Boys is on the one level an outcome of those two crucial examinations and the play both a confesson and an expiation. I have no nostalgia for my Oxford days at all and am happy never to have to sit an examination again. One of the blessings of a career in the theatre is that there are no examinations unless, that is, you count the viva voce the audience put you through every night of the week.
2006 香港藝術節《高校男生》 英國國家劇團 18.2.2006 香港演藝學院歌劇院
