Notices

Until 1966, the Times posted births, marriages and deaths on the front page, the rationale being that this was the information of most interest to its readership. Relegation of the register, as it is known, to the inside pages and its replacement by news was greeted with much harrumphing from loyal readers. These days, life events of celebrities and public figures, as well as one’s own relations and friends, are shared through social media. Formal notices in national newspapers are reserved for the denizens of the echo chamber who view communicating in this way as a mark of social standing and prestige.

Despite having repeatedly attempted to cancel it, I am still the recipient of my school magazine. Each one is larger and glossier than the last, its primary audience being prospective parents who they wish to dazzle with the extravagant stage productions, comprehensive sports facilities and outstanding academic achievements. Alumni are included in the circulation and periodically exhorted to donate additional funds to augment facilities which already outstrip by some margin anything offered by publicly funded schools. Flipping past the self-aggrandising content written in that curiously stilted prose favoured by such publications, I turn to the inside back cover where old boys who have died since the previous edition are listed, along with their age and school dates. 

Two of my form died not long after leaving school. The first, an aspiring racing driver, in a helicopter accident. The second of a heart attack on the rugby field. Since then, I have gleaned little of my contemporaries from the magazine. The class of ‘69 endured traditional education management where corporate punishment was endemic. A more humane environment, which recognised that living in constant fear is unlikely to be conducive to learning, was still over the horizon. But at a time when the vanguards of many aspects of social change were gaining traction, we were a peculiarly rebellious cohort with the consequence that little communication appears to be had with the school magazine unless the group is so remarkably fit and healthy that the absence of death notices simply reflects unusual longevity.

I cannot account for my morbid fascination with these notices of passing. For none of my classmates do I wish for a speedy demise, nor am I deluded enough to think that their predeceasing me is in any way a consolation for the inevitability of my own mortality. Idle curiosity is the only explanation.

The same must apply to my dilettante interest in the later lives of those with whom I spent my secondary schooling. I know of a few. A clergyman living in the United States issues an annual ‘round robin’ whose smugness shares its literary style with the school magazine. Glowing accounts of his children’s successes are outnumbered only by breathless celebration of their increasing progeny, none of whom the recipients of the missive know or are ever likely to meet. 

There were some notable trajectories. Becoming an eminent Cambridge professor could have been predicted by one boy’s academic performance at school, exceptional even by the high standards of the institution. Another, equally predictably given his predilection for driving cars without a license or insurance, ended up in prison. But when I hear of most - so and so became a teacher, so and so became an accountant - the information, so valued in anticipation, is received with merely a nod and a shrug. Those bald fragments tell me nothing. Does it betoken a lifetime of fulfilment and satisfaction or, in the words of Thoreau, quiet desperation? I will never know, and frankly, for the most part I don’t really care. 

So I shall stick to glancing down the list of death notices and wondering whether they will bother to publish mine, and if so when.