They were working class, almost all of them, the Essex postgraduates, W. says. That's what needs to be understood.
Working class, but grammar schooled, for the most part, and with only instinct driving them to Essex. Instinct – and luck. Because luck played a great role in getting them there.
All they had was a vague sense that life had gone wrong, somehow. That it had taken a wrong turn. That what had happened in this country – here – was, in its entirety, a wrong turn.
Some, it is true, had a kind of folk-memory of working class radicalism, of the Socialist Worker's Party, of the Revolutionary Communists, but beyond them, of the Spanish Civil war, of Peterloo and the Chartists, but most did not. Most had nothing except an instinct, only half awake, only half alive, that there was something wrong, and not merely wrong with them. That it was no merely a personal problem, that of not fitting in, that of chronic depression or chronic fatigue. That it was not merely a personal failure, a personal foible, a matter of idiosyncrasy or maladjustment.
There was nothing wrong with them at all: wasn't that what they discovered at Essex? Nothing wrong with them, and everything wrong with the world, especially Britain: wasn't that their first lesson at the University of Essex? Wasn't that put up on an overhead in the first lesson of Essex Postgraduate 101: There's nothing with you, and everything wrong with the world, especially Britain.
Deprogramming: that's what the University of Essex provided. Deconditioning. It was like emerging from a cult, arriving at Essex. They needed exit counselling, the new postgraduates! They needed to be deindoctrinated!
This country, this terrible country, says W., shaking his head. What it does to people. What it might have done to him, were it not for his years in Canada! How it might have laid claim to him, if he'd spent his own childhood in the Midlands.
He thinks of those who didn't make it to Essex. Those who never got there, who had no idea of what waited for them there. Those that didn't even apply, and had no thought of applying.
Ah, no doubt there are lost British Weils, lost British Kierkegaards – even a lost British Rosenzweig, sitting paralysed in Doncaster. There are lost British Socrateses, who, like the original, will never write a line; lost Aristotles, great synthesisers of thought.
Lost Spinozas, lost Leibnizes. A lost Immanuel Kant, working in a Customer Services department in Staines; a lost Hegel, a regional manager for a mobile phone company in Yately …
What might they have been had they passed through Essex! What might have happened if they'd washed up on Essex's shore!
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