by Mark Tully
But for all my socialist arguments, it never occurred to me to rebel against going to public school during the time that I was there, nor later to refuse my commission on the grounds that there shouldn’t be any officers. I took my privileges as my destiny. I had been born the son of a man who had become comparatively rich through hard work. I therefore took it for granted that a private education and army commissions were what happened to boys like me. At Marlborough we were not taught to be grateful for our privileges; instead, most boys simply accepted without question that they had a right to their education and the social status that went with it. We were not taught to be grateful for our talents, either. We were not reminded that we had been given those talents, nor that, although we may have nurtured them, we hadn’t created them. The competition and the emphasis on success bolstered our belief that our achievements were all our own doing. However, the tragic reverse of this was that many boys felt that their lack of success was all their own fault and gave up trying, as I had in classics.
I now think of life as a hand of cards that we are dealt. We can’t change our hand but we can play it either well or badly. Knowing how misunderstood the concept of fate is, I asked Richard whether he thought this idea was nonsense. ‘Not nonsense at all,’ he said. ‘It’s profoundly true. The old Calvinist doctrine of pre-destination has a lot of truth in it. What we get from our birth and our parents we have no right to be proud about or indeed feel any guilt about.’ He quoted a Methodist scholar who had come to speak to one of his classes and told them that ninety-five per cent of life was predestined and only five per cent influenced by free will, but that five per cent was ‘jolly important’.
Richard’s personal views on destiny had been reinforced by his experiences as a visitor to a young offenders’ prison, ‘I see boys there,’ he explained, ‘banged up for committing crimes that are sometimes really deplorable – violence, sex, a lot of drugs. They come from homes where, almost invariably, there has never been a father. Many of them have never had a home at all. Many of them are not very bright. Part of my job is to write letters for them because they are illiterate. I find it very helpful, and I hope I get this right when I reflect on what an appalling deal they have had. I don’t condone their actions, but compared to my good fortune, they’ve had a miserable deal. When you reflect on why they are that way it makes you realise the extent to which we are all victims of our fate.’
Although Marlborough was a religious foundation, it was also a school of the Enlightenment. All the emphasis in the teaching was on reason. When it came to religion, the arguments for the existence of God were emphasised. It was a given that anything that could not be supported by reason had to be taken on trust. We were told that faith bridged the gap. But that faith was primarily a faith in the authority of the Church, accepting what it taught – a faith imposed from outside, not the faith that grows within. There was little or no mention of experiencing God personally, which later in life I was to appreciate as being so important. However, while at school I was inspired by the palpable goodness of the Chaplain, John Miller, and comforted by the kindness he showed me. He allowed me to see him whenever I liked and helped me to wrestle with my confusion and self-doubt. But I don’t remember talking to him about experiencing God.
We were told to accept the authority of the Church in chapel, and in the classroom we were told to accept the teacher as the absolute authority. Marlborough was, as I have said, a school of the Enlightenment, but we were not encouraged to reason or to work things out for ourselves. We were instructed rather than taught. Almost all my teachers gave me the impression that there was only one answer to every question, and that was the answer they gave. All I had to do was to learn that answer and reproduce it correctly when tested.
In that same block of classrooms in which Richard had been taught scripture, the suave Frank Shaw had dictated notes on ancient history to our class, notes which we had to learn by heart. He kept a gym shoe in the drawer of his desk for beating anyone whose Latin or Greek prose contained a careless mistake. In the room above his classroom sat one of Marlborough’s great eccentrics, Geoff Chilton, who seemed to revel in being a caricature of a school master. He taught Homer, but the teaching was all about the great poet’s grammar. The beauty of Homer’s poetry barely got a mention. When Chilton gave us a grammar test there was always what he called ‘a face-slap question’, which would be a trap. If a boy got the answer wrong, the bulky Geoff Chilton would squeeze onto the bench beside him and administer a sharp face slap or pinch his bottom. Year after year Chilton set the same test each week, until our lack-lustre class stupidly put up such a remarkable performance that he realised we must have asked the previous year what the test for the week was going to be. ‘Oh, you are a lot of sods!’ he sobbed.
Richard’s own teaching experience has shown him that it is the teachers whose lessons children enjoy that get the good results. There were, indeed, masters at Marlborough whose classes I did enjoy, but unfortunately I was only taught by them briefly. For the most part I had teachers such as Frank Shaw and Geoff Chilton, who did not encourage straying beyond the text book or reading for ourselves. Therefore I didn’t learn to take my own notes. I always crammed for exams, which fortunately I had a knack of passing. That was how I got into Cambridge, which was much easier in those days. But when I went up to my college I found myself wholly unprepared for the essays that my supervisors asked me to write. For the first time, I had to read for myself, take my own notes and balance arguments rather than repeat facts.
Although Richard had won a scholarship to Marlborough, he too felt that he had not been particularly well prepared at school for using his powers of reasoning, which was what was required at Cambridge. But now, looking back on his career, he doesn’t think Marlborough was worse than many other schools. ‘The fine line between instructing rather than teaching is a perpetual problem for teachers,’ he said. ‘After all, good teachers know what they are talking about and children are there to learn, so in a sense it’s a bit like Christ preaching to the disciples in the Sermon on the Mount. But on the whole instructing is inefficient teaching and, what’s worse, it discourages any form of disagreement.’
Since in our school there was only one answer to every question, it is probably not surprising that I never considered there might be other ways to God than Christianity. Yet I couldn’t understand how, if Jesus was right in saying, ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life. No man cometh unto the Father but by me’, that way was not always clear and that truth not certain. I had been educated to believe in facts, in certainties, in a sharp divide between truth and untruth. However, in the 1950s scientists, historians and theologians themselves were casting more and more doubt upon the story of Jesus as told in the Gospels and its interpretation in the Epistles. Science particularly worried me. I thought of it as entirely factual, based on certainties, and I dreaded the possibility, as I saw it, that scientists would prove Christianity was untrue and there was no God.
It was only when I went to Cambridge and was taught by the Dean of Trinity College, Harry Williams, one of the most influential spiritual writers of the twentieth century, that I began to understand that it was experience, rather than learning, and the heart, rather than the head, that deepened trust in God. In her introduction to the recent edition of Harry Williams’ collection of sermons called The True Wilderness, the novelist Susan Howatch writes: ‘He could only preach what he had personally experienced.’ In his own introduction, Harry Williams wrote: ‘Christian truth, in other words, must be in the blood as well as the brain. If it is only in the brain, it is without life, and powerless to save.’ Marlborough was all about brain, and so it’s not surprising that my early Christianity lacked blood.
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My blood added to my confusion about Christianity at Marlborough. We were told that all sexual activity outside marriage was a sin. One evening the headmaster went round every house to announce that he had expelled a boy for homosexuality, as though homose
xuality were the cardinal of the cardinal sins. The only education we were given in sexuality that Richard can remember was when the headmaster told leavers, ‘It’s not clever to go to brothels.’ I was acutely aware that Jesus had warned, ‘Whosoever looks on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery already with her in his heart.’ But nevertheless I committed adultery in my heart many times a day when I looked at girls. I suppose that, although an Anglican, I suffered from what is often called ‘Catholic neurosis’. I was told that Jesus had died to save sinners but I was obsessed with my sin.
It would be unfair to Marlborough today to suggest that it is the same school now as it was fifty years ago. These days, Marlborough accepts girls, which must make a great difference. It is less sexually repressive. Richard said any teacher who suggested, as we were taught, that people should remain virgins until they marry would be treated with contempt by the class. And, although in the old days beatings could bring glory, it can’t be argued that their disappearance is regrettable. But Richard said Marlborough was just as competitive and less tolerant of eccentricity than it had been. There was more pressure to conform.
I first went to boarding school at the age of five, and remained incarcerated until I was eighteen. From school I went into the army, which was not so very different. So it was not until I reached Cambridge that, for the first time, I began to live a life that was not institutionalised. Just as I had to begin to read and reason for myself at Cambridge, so I had to learn to make my own decisions. A boarding-school education is said to make children independent. In my case it didn’t because so many decisions were taken for me. Perhaps it is not surprising then, that I was swept off my feet by that first experience of freedom as an undergraduate. Looking back on it, maybe my behaviour was no more outrageous than that of many other young men who feel that they have been let loose at last when they reach university.
At college I was torn between wanting to appear outrageous and wanting to prepare myself for a career in the Church. In spite of my upset at being grouped among the goats for my classics lessons, Marlborough’s competitive spirit had imbued in me an urge to shine and to be a success. I still measured success at university in academic terms, but my failure to be in the top class at school had already destroyed my self-confidence and I didn’t believe I had any chance of getting a first class degree. At Cambridge, my supervisor’s reaction to my first essay persuaded me yet again that I had no idea how to achieve academic success. So I reverted to the role that had at least got me noticed at Marlborough, the role of a rebel.
This time, my rebellion took the form of establishing a reputation for myself as a drinker. This reputation was enhanced when I came back late one night after a heavy session at our regular haunt, Morley’s Wine Bar, also renowned for its beer. Finding myself locked out of the college, I got stuck on a spike while trying to climb over the college walls and tore the flesh off my calf. The accident got me admitted to hospital and featured in the university newspaper.
But I still believed I had a calling to be an Anglican Priest and attended the college chapel regularly. I also experimented with the many other traditions of Anglicanism available in Cambridge. I rejected the call to be saved at an evangelical service and came down on the High Church side of the fence. So there I was – a notorious drinker yet a regular churchgoer, a recipe for inner conflict.
The conflict was deepened by my religious doubts. Marlborough’s rationalism had left me with the need to be convinced that God existed but tormented by the thought that no proof was available. The 1950s was a time when it was widely believed that science disproved not only the existence of God. Metaphysics was also still reeling under the attack of the ‘logical positivists’, who insisted on empirical evidence before verifying a statement. Moreover, Don Cupitt, an Anglican priest and Cambridge theologian, had founded a school of theology known as ‘The Sea of Faith’, which seemed to write off God too. I remember my tutor, Robert Runcie, who went on to be Archbishop of Canterbury, saying that some priests thought being the Dean of a college was a cushy number, but they didn’t realise how lonely a Cambridge Common Room could be for a Christian at that time.
To add to my confusion, Cambridge was the first opportunity I had to acquire a girl friend, but I was afraid of women. Marlborough had left me with the feeling that my sexual urge was evil and that women would be disgusted by my desires. So I was tormented by the frustration of that urge, compounded by a sense of guilt which was deepened by the drinking. Yet the ambition to become a priest and my love of the Church would not go away. I became like the Indian philosopher-poet Bhatrihari, popularly believed to have been a king, who is said to have renounced the world seven times in order to enter a monastery, only to return to his wife and his pleasures six times. He wrote one hundred poems in praise of erotic love, one hundred poems in praise of a prudent worldly life and one hundred poems on renunciation.
Like Bhatrihari, I too finally entered a monastic institution. Although the battle between the Bible and bottle had not yet been decided in my life, Bob Runcie supported me through Cambridge in spite of all my rebelliousness, and agreed that I should go to Lincoln Theological College after I graduated.
There were a few married students in Lincoln Theological College but the majority of us lived what was essentially a monastic life. The days passed in work and regular worship, and we had little freedom. I did, however, lead the party that found time to visit the Adam and Eve pub most evenings, but that didn’t particularly strain my conscience. What did was my sense of sexual conflict, which was heightened by the conviction that real priests did not marry.
Although at Lincoln it was sex rather than drink that caused me to doubt my ability to lead the life of a priest, those doubts were finally resolved by a spectacular drinking accident. I had met one of my closest Cambridge drinking friends, Victor Forrington, in a Lincoln pub at lunchtime. Vic merrily assured me that there was no danger of my getting legless because the pubs had to close at two o’clock. But I think he had deliberately chosen the Market Pub as our venue, because it was market day, which meant that the pub was allowed to stay open all afternoon. The result was that I arrived back in time for evensong, if not legless, then distinctly the worse for wear. After this episode, the Bishop of Lincoln told me he thought I would be more at home in a public house than a pulpit. So I ended my academic career with a sense of failure and, like that other old Marlburian John Betjeman, turned to the last resort of young men with indifferent degrees and no career plans: Gabbitas, Thring and Company’s scholastic agency. Like Betjeman, I too became a temporary schoolmaster.
Nearly fifty years after leaving university and theological college I naturally regret that I didn’t experience the excitement of learning there. After all, I would be much more learned now if I had. But, strangely, I am now grateful for the confusion in my mind as a young man and my sense of failure. Without them I might have been content with myself and perhaps not so open to new influences. I might have spent my time in India as a foreigner, as an expatriate, instead of developing an interest in the country that has become a lifelong passion, keeping me there long after my retirement from the BBC.
Richard’s difficulties at Marlborough and Cambridge were less acute than mine, but, I wonder, if he had been a prefect at Marlborough as he had wanted to be, or got the first he was certainly worthy of at Cambridge, would he have had such sympathy with the children he taught later, particularly the less obviously gifted ones? The writer-priest Harry Williams was able to preach only from experience – rather than repeat what he had been taught – after he had passed through his personal wilderness, which took the form of a nervous breakdown that was so devastating he couldn’t preach in his college chapel at all for two years. Only then did he realise that he had been using religion ‘as an attempted escape from the ambiguities and anxieties which belong inevitably to being human’.
The immediate result of my education was a sense of failure and a closed mind. I still prized academic ach
ievement above all else and I had not achieved it. I still believed in the utter supremacy of reason but feared that it would disprove the existence of God and so destroy the Church, and its liturgy, which I loved.
It was India that truly opened my mind, that led me to value experience as well as reason, and that taught me the experience of God is so widespread I need not fear the death of religion. But above all it was India that taught me to see my failures and achievements in context, to value humility, to suspect certainties and to seek for the middle path. So how might the lessons India has taught me be relevant to the way we all live? That is what I am going to discuss next.
DELHI: AN INDIAN UNDERSTANDING
WE WHO LIVE in the Indian capital are always being scornfully told that Delhi isn’t India. It certainly isn’t, but then nowhere is India. India is far too large and diverse a nation for any city or region to claim that privilege. The vast Indian metropolitan cities all vary enormously. Mumbai is all about money; Kolkata, which was once all about making money too, is not really a commercial city anymore but a strange amalgam of Marxist influences and the last vestiges of the British Raj. Chennai, or Madras as it used to be known, has a sober south Indian culture which is less concerned with moneymaking than with the old-fashioned virtues of manufacturing. Bangalore is the IT capital of India.
But what to say about Delhi? When a sordid political coup ended the veteran Gandhian Morarji Desai’s s brief Premiership and he finally gave up politics, he said, ‘I will never come back to Delhi again. It’s a city of thieves and thugs.’ There is some truth in those words – Delhi is indeed a city of politicians, bureaucrats and dalals, or agents, who broker deals with the former, and their dealings are often unsavoury. But Delhi is much more than that. It has a history stretching back, we are told, almost 3,500 years to the days of the great Hindu epic, the Mahabharata. Compared with that past, the other metropolitan cities are all upstarts. But, as far as I am concerned, the most important thing about Delhi is that it’s been my home for nearly forty years now, the home in which I discovered the India that has changed me. I know that Mahatma Gandhi said village India is the real India – and that is one reason why I have travelled far and wide – but I have always returned to Delhi, so I suppose Delhi is my India.
