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While researching Jonathan’s early years, I came across this article he wrote as a teenager for Saga, the magazine at Bryanston School in England. Years later, Jonathan would say this was his “entrée to becoming a journalist.”
Reading it today, I was struck by something unexpected. Although he was still a teenager, I could already hear the voice that millions of readers would later come to know. He wasn’t simply writing about a school pipe organ. He was asking whether money was being spent on what mattered most, a question that would become a hallmark of his writing for decades to come.
On Saturday, HumbleDollar will publish “The Making of Jonathan Clements,” the story of the people and experiences that shaped his remarkable career. Until then, I thought I’d share where it all began.
Organ Transplant Fails
An almost uncensored personal viewpoint Jonathan Clements
Bryanston is desperately ill, her death throes reverberating throughout the whole school. It is a spiritual problem that has taken a materialistic form and though the doctors have been unable to diagnose the problem, for it is in fact a malignant disease of their own minds. They have acted decisively, though the unity among them has certainly been shaken by this decision. Bryanston has had a new organ introduced which is pumping a different coloured blood through the system (one would almost say it was blue) which has resulted in the school rejecting both the organ and the system.
The school is rejecting the new organ for a number of reasons. Its position in one of the many souls of Bryanston, the previously beautiful Victorian Church of St. Martin, is such that one’s prayers are no longer directed at the cross, but at this admittedly fine instrument (though I believe it rejects nineteenth century music in much the same way as the school is now rejecting the twentieth century) which rather than assisting worship seems to have usurped God in a coup d’état not incomparable with that of the Trojan Horse.
The NHS’s dislike of private patients will not be helped by this new private organ whose spouting may have now brought the Stour Gap (the problem of the bad relations between the school and the local community, about which there has been a blast of oratory and a vacuum of activity this year) into full flood.
The most objectionable part about the new organ is that it has added a sixth finger to the school (an organist’s dream?) whilst neglecting certain vital parts. The church is used once a fortnight for a service attended by about two hundred people on average, while the actual organ is played by a mere handful.
Certain other causes are more worthy, I believe. Glass Study Block’s green colour (providing aesthetic comparison with the surrounding buildings) necessitates slightly more than the prescribed Disprin gargle. The shed, home of Dorchester House and shoelace-gnawing rodents, deserves steamrolling as a temporary building almost thirty years old. The importance of the Ordinary Level examinations, and the tensions experienced in houserooms after three years of close captivity, demand studies for people in B Block.
I know and expect that all these causes will one day be attended to, and meanwhile they will be crawling up the list of priorities, but what will happen if one day (if not already) a vital transplant is necessary? One wonders what is on this list for which parents will be stung next:
Thirty-five new fives courts?
An indoor eighteen-hole golf course?
Or even an air-conditioned tiddlywinks complex for left-handed players?
In succumbing to the traditional public school organ in the traditional public school church, disposing of the less prestigious brass quartet on the way, one wonders whether we are seeing Bryanston slipping into the typical public school groove through stagnation after the school’s original innovative beginnings.
I believe the money spent on the organ, half of which was raised by the school, epitomises the misplaced priorities and financial waste in the school’s policy.
It is, of course, too late to send the organ back, and it would make a very uncomfortable study block, I suspect, but one has to learn the lessons of this folly and hope that the powers that will be will not want another organ on which to play the final bars of the Te Deum for the funeral of a public school that dared to be different… at least, by the standards of 1928.
Jonathan Clements
This is awesome. He already has a nice “voice,” with good use of sarcasm and irony, and his talent for clever titles started young. I’ve never been good at titles myself, and when I wrote articles for HD, his title suggestions for my pieces were always better than mine.
Somewhere in a box I have some short stories I wrote for my creative writing classes in college, but I hope no one ever lets them see the light of day! My first “creative achievement” was winning a schoolwide contest when I was in the fourth grade. I remember that the first sentence was “I lay in agony on the creek bank,” (there’s a grabber, huh?), but not much else about the story. I do remember the giant Hershey bar I won as a prize, though!
Thanks for sharing that, Andrew, and I look forward to the Saturday piece!
Thank you Dana! I had to smile at your fourth-grade opening line, and especially the giant Hershey bar! One thing I’ve discovered during this journey is that every writer really does have a beginning. I’m also glad Jonathan’s title suggestions helped you. He certainly had a gift for them.
Thank you for sharing this with all of us. He would have been a fine novelist. Did he write any fiction?
Yes, Jonathan did write one novel, 48 and Counting: A Story of Money, Love and Bicycling. One of his retirement plans was to do more creative writing. But sadly, we all know that was not meant to be.
Thank you Elaine for the reminder. I had forgotten about 48 and Counting. And yes knowing Jonathan he had many more stories waiting to be written. Sadly, he wasn’t given the time.
Thank you Jack. Not that I’m aware of. He wrote some poetry in his younger years, but his passion was always journalism and nonfiction. He had a wonderful ability to tell true stories in a way that made readers feel they were part of them.