One of Them — Julian Girdham

I read Musa Okwonga’s One of Them: an Eton College memoir straight through, with great pleasure, for three reasons: he writes beautifully, with generosity, humour and thoughtfulness; it is good to spend time with such a genial and perceptive personality; and he has a truly interesting story to tell.

The sub-title is not inaccurate (his time at Eton forms the central chapter of three, ‘The School of my Dreams’, and its aftermath is examined in the third, ‘Reunion’), and it is certainly a book that school, and about privilege and race. But the lens is wider. It is also a book about friendship: if you ran a word search through the text, ‘friend’ would feature prominently. It is a book about the complexities of contemporary Britain. It is a book about a personal journey, as the author navigates his way towards some kind of settled identity.

Eton, with its weird argot and dress-code, has had a unique influence on our neighbours’ public life, recently via a disastrous couple of Prime Ministers (the current one is mentioned, nameless, with his ‘amoral swagger’). For more background, John Self has interviewed Okwonga for BBC Culture, and his excellent piece The School that Rules Britain looks at how the school appears in literature from authors such as P.G. Wodehouse, Paul Watkins and Ian Fleming.

Prompted by an invitation to a reunion, Okwonga starts to reflect on his teenage years at Eton. He was an unlikely arrival at the school, not just because of his colour, but because he came from a nearby unlovely London suburb. The edgy ordinariness of that place is vividly evoked through episodes involving his Ugandan grandparents, playing basketball with friends, and several racist encounters. Despite living closer to Eton than any other pupil, he only goes home during term-time twice in five years, as the school becomes a home (especially his own House, presided over by an admirable Housemaster). He is conscious that he must make the most of his time, especially given his mother’s efforts to pay the fees (£20 a day, he calculates, but with fee rises now an impossible reach for someone from his background). The book is certainly no hatchet job, though criticisms of the school as an institution do come late on: instead, we follow him as he throws himself with relish into all the opportunities of school life, comically carrying a briefcase for years-

No one ever seems to mock me for carrying one of these things around - they are probably too busy coping with the fact that they are dressed like wedding guests.

Which way around is the ‘Them’ of the title? Who is using that word - Etonians or the rest of us? This ambivalence permeates the book: Okwonga has great affection for my school but also condemns its influence on British life and wants it to face up to its past, particularly on slavery. There is great kindness there, but he also suffers from some bullying. Overall, his experience is positive, but years later he needs to settle in himself just what he feels about it.

He armours himself with a military level of self-restraint, making sure he does not conform to any stereotypes in matters like drug-taking, to the extent of not even risking getting a haircut that I might enjoy. He knows he will not get a second chance if things go wrong, unlike the white children from privileged social networks:

I merely have to remind myself not to get too comfortable in this world. It is not my own and its rules do not apply to me.

And he becomes like them in this sense: he has to be hyper-watchful, to develop a mask which eventually becomes a part of him. After he has left school, a friend comments:

When people look at you, he says, they’ll think he was a nice guy, but I never really got to know him. And, he adds, I think that’s kind of how you like it.

The very wealthy

are not inherently different from the rest of the world, they are generally raised with a very different mentality. There is a watchfulness about many of them, a constant vigilance. Some of them keep their wealth as private as some might keep their faith.

But he also needs to armour himself at home, as a boy with few enough local friends (given how little he returns during term-time) and as a black teenager, constantly vigilant for racist flare-ups on the street (some also happen in his prep-school and then in Eton too, most horrifically in the short section ‘A Slave Driver’).

There are beautiful tributes to friends in sections like ‘So Much Beauty in Him’, ‘Perhaps the Fascism Adds a Bit of Space?’ and, close to the end, ‘Into the Tender Sunlight’, which is followed closely by a surprising personal revelation. The final image of the book is of the author taking off from a UK airport on his way back to Germany, himself heading into the sunlight as the journey of the book comes to an end:

My plane speeds up, flees the tarmac and then breaks free of the clouds.