Paul Danon (pupil, 1966-73) iconoclastically
argues for a brutal smashing of the conventional Hispano-Scottish archetype of the
successful old Gaytonian renaissance-man, or pollymath.
Mere membership of the privy council, Euro-knighthoods and the opportunity to work with
Dawn French's Bottom are all well and good, but immortality is too important an issue to
be left to historians.
It was difficult enough to penetrate any single one of the manifold cliques which
flourished at Harrow County during the 60s and 70s, so it was at incalculable personal
risk that I sought to be part of not just one but two such tight coteries. Only now can
the story be told of how I managed to infiltrate not only the school's throbbing artistic
powerhouse but also its quivering cyber-ballistic launch-pad for which Harrow County will
be remembered long after participants in the last tri-monthly school-reunion have finally
adjourned to their celestial Traveller's Rest.
Elsewhere I have described my bloodcurdling
initiation to the subterranean stronghold of A2, the English department's bookroom and the
aesthetic nerve centre of the school's politico-cultural scene. However, just along the
corridor, further below ground, yet all the more influential (as I shall prove), lay the
twilit, potholed world of Brian Doggett and his loyal, if occasionally cringing,
lab-coated minions.
Brian (if I may be so bold) embodied, nay, incarnated the very white heat of technology so
inspiringly described by Mr Harold Wilson, our then beloved socialist prime minister. Just
as Wilson set out to create a bold new post-Tory world forged amidst the brilliant sparks
of science and engineering, so did Doggett (and his own little bright sparks!) carve out
an entire civilisation founded on the miracles of sheer human endeavour and
tightly-focussed inventive genius, though on an immeasurably grander and more enduring
scale.
Doggett's achievements speak for themselves. After all, which other suburban day-school
had its own space-exploration programme? The SlimeSlug missions blazed a bold
interplanetary trail across the skies of unsuspecting parts of Middlesex and
Hertfordshire, as well as providing noisy and fume-ridden test-burns in a disused
coal-cellar not a million miles below the school-clock.
The Gayton Gardening Club brought about its own green (and white and orange and bright
blue) revolution on south Harrow's allotments, while Brian will probably blush as I
rightly attribute to him nothing less than the single-handed invention of the internet.
Harrow County's primitive local area network consisted of some bare copper wire running
along the outside of the school's southwestern elevation from the stationery store to the
main entrance. The negative return was an unwitting Mr Jim Cook's central heating system
and this early school-wide web, decades before its time, carried occasional radio
programmes and essential intelligence-information for desperate fugitive schoolboys on the
run from the authorities.
A subsidiary part of the Doggett publishing empire produced a phlegmatically-entitled
magazine whose viscous literary heritage survives to this day.
To see Doggett at work, surrounded by his adoring acolytes to whom he was simply
"Uncle Brian", was an inspiration. There was no need for sneering, A2-style,
book-ridden, effete, casuistical sophistry, barbed wit or rhetorical point-scoring with
him. Doggett's power was not exerted through the ironical wordplay, the subtle
debating-parry, nor the sardonic curl of the ample Iberian lip. Brian governed, nay,
reigned through the sheer brute-force of furnace-bright technology and in the dazzling
afterburn of Groombridgean science driven to awe-inspiring, though occasionally grotesque,
extremes.
Paul
Danon
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