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Jump to navigationJump to searchBlades of Grass by Mark Aylwin Thomas (view source)
Revision as of 11:28, 16 August 2020
, 11:28, 16 August 2020no edit summary
The author confesses his connection up-front: George Aylwin was his uncle. That middle name that they share derives, they think, from the Celtic ''Aaelfwine'' – usually translated as 'noble friend' or 'wise friend'. Hogg was both of those things to the Chinese people he came to know and love and work with.
Hogg was of that class of people that most of us only come across in period dramas. He lived in a sizeable house, had a nurse and a governess, and a Montessori-style early education. He had a year in Switzerland in his youth, then St George's and then, of course, he went to Oxford. It was – let's be honest – a very privileged upbringing. On the other hand that schooling in Switzerland also taught him that ''class'' wasn't everything, nor was rank, nor indeed the very privilege that got him there. That may have coloured his attitude to everything that followed. It certainly coloured his approach to educating peasant children in China some years later.
Added to this – he had an adventurous spirit. Student holidays were spent hitching around Europe just as events in Germany were gearing up to threaten the whole world.
What follows is a close personal study of what it was like to travel across America, via Japan and into China in the political upheaval of the late 1930s; and then to follow the growth of the co-operative movement in China, and the small attempts to build sensible schools answering to local conditions – not just ''in China'' with all that that entails culturally and logistically, but in a China at war with Japan, in a world with other wider wars impacting on the outside influence and capability and capacity to help, in a China working towards being at war with itself. The Empire has fallen, the Republic is trying to find its future path, but in some of what goes on between the lines of these pages, the birth pangs of the People's Republic are also squealing.
For the most part, Thomas has (rightly, I think) chosen to act more as an editor than author. Wherever possible he has allowed the letters and other writings of the protagonists to speak for themselves. This makes it a very personal piece. It made me care very much about the people involved, and want to know more (though I never will) of the stories of the Chinese people who make brief appearances.
The other important thing that this approach does is to avoid colouring the experience with what we know about what happened next. Hogg was SO full of enthusiasm and belief in what they were trying to do. By ''they'' I mean and his small band of brothers, but mostly the Chinese people involved in the Co-operative movement that was his introduction to the work, and the Baillie schools that grew out of it. Reading this in 2017, with the knowledge of everything that has intervened, does make me think again – about where China goes next, and how.
I learned a lot reading this book. It has made me start to consider my views on some things. It didn't grip me in a fast-turning-the-pages kind of way, but it did draw me in and make me want to know more, and more, and left me feeling the same way. Which is a very good thing.
For more Western perspectives on early 20th Century China we can recommend [[Burying the Bones: Pearl Buck in China by Hilary Spurling]], bring it right up to date with [[Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A Sweet-sour Memoir of Eating in China by Fuchsia Dunlop]] or check out the intervening period in a fictionalised account [[Dreams of Joy by Lisa See]], You might also enjoy [[Bomb, Book and Compass by Simon Winchester]].
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