On Sunday, in Chapel with the boarders, I listened with interest as the Chaplain spoke about certain human features which he described as the ‘marks of God’ – features of our human capacity which are signs of God’s mark on us. One of these is the capacity to be caring. I couldn’t agree more, but it is hard, sometimes, reading the news or listening to the radio, to maintain one’s confidence in this human capacity to be caring. The Chaplain and I have, more than once in the past, discussed and ruminated on the converse human capacity for cruelty - a capacity for evidence of which we do not need to look as far as Burma to discover.

I was struck a few months ago by a particularly horrifying account about three youths in Sunderland who, seemingly for the sport or enjoyment of it, repeatedly assaulted and tortured a disabled man – eventually to death. The young victim, Brent Martin, was just 23 years old. He had severe learning disabilities and had spent nine years of his life in psychiatric hospitals. This poor man, mentally in fact more of a child, was systematically attacked, demeaned and beaten by people against whom he had never lifted a finger and indeed whom he misguidedly believed to be his friends. Finally he was left dying in a pool of blood – at which point his three assailants posed for pictures. They were eventually found guilty of murder and received between 12 and 20 year prison sentences.

In describing their behaviour, the prosecution stated that “they behaved like a pack of animals”. This reflects a very natural instinct to dissociate what they did from humanity – and yet, inhuman though their behaviour was, it appears that human beings are all too capable of such inhumanity, as reflected in Robert Burns’ famous phrase about ‘man’s inhumanity to man’.

In my view nothing defines a society, any society, more conclusively its treatment of its most vulnerable. In wider society, this means the way in which society treats children, or old people, or those like Brent Martin who, through no fault of their own, are vulnerable.

In the same way nothing, to my mind, is more important in a school than the way in which we treat one another: the way in which staff treat each other, the way in which the staff treat the pupils, the way in which pupils treat the staff and, perhaps most importantly of all, the way in which the pupils treat each other.

Whilst the fate of Brent Martin was a horrifying and thankfully rare example, it is surely only an extreme manifestation of the more universal underlying human capacity for unkindness. Rather than ignore it, I prefer this morning to bring this out into the open, so that we can address it. Parents who look round the school often ask me about bullying. My answer is that any school which says that there is no bullying at that school is a school which has a bullying problem. I add that I firmly believe that the culture of this school is wholly hostile to bullying. Perhaps this talk can help in a small way just to reaffirm that hostility.

We all have it in us to be unkind, not inhumanly unkind perhaps, but unkind. In any school there will always be the temptation to make oneself look big by making others look smaller. Pulling rank, calling names, belittling someone in your yeargroup, those who could be our friends, those who perhaps are feeling vulnerable for whatever reason, those who could really do with our help – it is a common temptation, but it is a choice.

It has been some time since I read to you the poem, ‘The Mower’, by Philip Larkin, that lugubrious, probably misogynous, introverted and troubled human being who is nevertheless in my view one of the finest poets of the twentieth century.

In the poem, Larkin reflects on his accidental killing of a hedgehog – a relatively mundane event - but draws an altogether more universal conclusion. The poem is called “The Mower”.

The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found
A hedgehog jammed up against the blades,
Killed. It had been in the long grass.

I had seen it before, and even fed it, once.
Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world
Unmendably. Burial was no help:

Next morning I got up and it did not.
The first day after a death, the new absence
Is always the same; we should be careful

Of each other, we should be kind
While there is still time.

People are vulnerable, and so, as the example of Brent Martin and indeed the hedgehog in the poem testify, is life itself. We need to be acutely aware of the human capacity to be caring – just as of the human capacity for inhumanity.

Think of that in your dealings with your classmates today. Think of it not just today, and not just throughout your Warminster School careers, but for the rest of your lives.

“We should be careful of each other - we should be kind while there is still time.”