Unlike similar schools Marlborough’s theatre, the Memorial Hall, was hardly state of the art, but I briefly trod its boards from time to time with the character actors Paul Brooke and Michael Elwyn (real name Michael Emrys-Jones and, like so many actors, the keenest of cricketers) and the versatile Shakespearean Michael Pennington, whose brilliant performance as Prospero in the school production of The Tempest was undoubtedly enhanced by my memorable appearance as a sprite. What I remember most about Pennington was his voice. It had an Olivierian timbre and clarity at the age of eighteen and still does, on stage, screen and radio.
I never wanted, nor had the talent, to become an actor but I did take the lead role, that of a character called Dobelle, in an Irish play called The Moon in the Yellow River, written by Denis Johnston in 1931; and also in a house production of John Osborne’s Luther. Both received a reasonable local press but what I most remember about Luther is the hours of repetitive memorising of the lines that took up most of my time in the previous holiday. I can see myself now on the floor of the study at the Dutch House with my hand over the page repeating speech after speech until each was drummed into the consciousness like a cork being squeezed back into a bottle-neck. It was enough to dissuade anyone from the stage.
Much more fun were the end of term concerts in which, towards the end of my schooldays, I used to take a leading part as a mimic, often in cahoots with Humphrey Carpenter. Son of the Bishop of Oxford, Humphrey was another brilliant musician who was equally adept on the tuba, the piano, the bass saxophone and the double bass. He was a natural broadcaster and a prodigious author whose biographies included works on W.H. Auden, Benjamin Britten, Ezra Pound and J.R.R. Tolkein. Both as boy and man, Humphrey, occasionally spotted again at Broadcasting House, always looked dishevelled and, with his long nose and sticking-out ears, a bit like a baby elephant. He was genial, dishevelled and unassuming, although he could bash out fierce critiques on a typewriter.
There was, I suppose, the odd rather dull schoolmaster in my five years at the College, but generally they were a sparkling bunch of characters, not least the ones handpicked by Garnett. They included the two in-College junior housemasters, Dennis Silk and Ian Beer, later headmasters respectively of Radley and Harrow. Garnett had gone to Cambridge to appoint them when they were still undergraduates, one the captain of cricket, the other of rugby.
A house had been designed by a prison architect with stone steps and iron railings around a central well and my father reported that nothing had changed it since his spell at the school in the 1920s. The two dynamic young housemasters counterbalanced the spartan building in which they lived. Both believed that to encourage uncertain adolescents was far more productive than scolding them. Ian was a good-looking fellow with what seemed a permanent half-smile on his face, although his predominant feature was a pair of cauliflower ears, in those days a badge of honour for self-respecting rugby forwards.
Dennis looked and behaved like a great, amiable bear. He had a huge, open, welcoming face with a chin like Desperate Dan’s and lively dark eyes. His voice, always beautifully modulated, was distinctively soft: every sentence he uttered seemed to have been carefully considered first, such was the deliberate manner of its deliverance. His first words to me were instantly captivating: ‘Well done, M-J: you played a blinder.’ He was referring to my effort on the left wing for the A2 hockey team, who had defeated his own A1 earlier in the afternoon. Later it was my good fortune to find myself in his fifth form after my O levels. He encouraged me to read far more widely than ever I had before, including works that I would otherwise have avoided, like Boswell’s Life of Johnson and the poems of A.E. Housman, or others that I might never have considered, such as Robert Graves’s Goodbye To All That, Sassoon’s Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, and Elspeth Huxley’s The Flame Trees of Thika. One way or another Silk remained the biggest influence on my schoolboy progress, bringing the same mighty enthusiasm, sensitivity and bonhomie to his running of the Colts cricket team and, although I did not experience it personally, the always competitive first XV.
In the previous academic year I had begun, at last, to broaden my academic horizons a little under the lead of another outstanding teacher, Arnold Ronald Donald Wright, soon to become headmaster of Shrewsbury. An imposing figure, very tall with a slight stoop, he had a loud voice and was never either dull or predictable. On one occasion he threw a book at a boy called Horsey who had offended him in some way. On another, if the memory does not deceive, he threw a whole desk at someone as well. It was, I think, the tragic Michael Maxwell, one of seven children of the mighty but notorious Robert. A clever, very reserved boy, Michael was involved in a car accident from which he emerged with irreparable brain damage. He remained in a coma for years before dying in 1968.
Wright’s philosophy was that his charges should not wait to be taught something. We had to go out and get it. Once our O levels had been taken he allowed us all to do a project of some kind. My friend Timothy Osborn-Jones and I decided that we would write a joint report on the youth of Swindon, which involved cycling to the nearest big town and more or less doing as we pleased. It included going to see Frankenstein’s Monster at the cinema, with a careful eye on other attendant youths, naturally. The document that I subsequently produced, undoubtedly a fascinating contribution to Sociology in Mid 20th Century Britain, was never read by A.R.D. Wright, because it was lost in a major fire at his house, Littlefield.
That I got sufficient A level grades in History and English to be offered a university place owed much also to the learned Peter Carter, an expert on monasticism, whose handwriting was so minuscule that he could have written the whole of Bede’s ‘Ecclesiastical History of the English People’ on a few pages of foolscap. I caught some of his enthusiasm for monks but not, perhaps, to the same extent as more intelligent and academically minded form-mates, such as Lloyd.
The more down-to-earth Bill Spray, another future headmaster, guided me academically through my last year. He, too, set a fine example as a human being.
My housemaster, Percy Chapman, was an austere clergyman whom few if any of us got to know, but his successor Jake Seamer was a Marlborough ‘character’ of real character. He remained in the town into his nineties, serving it as Mayor after his retirement from the staff of his old school. He had returned there after colonial service in Sudan, where, in the broiling heat, he claimed a very unusual variation on the rare feat of scoring a hundred before lunch. Jake scored one before breakfast.
With his straight back, craggy jaw, prominent proboscis and spectacles he had a formidable presence and personality and with a bat in his hands you could somehow sense that this was a man of backbone who would neither countenance anything underhand, nor give his wicket away lightly. There was, however, a notable exception, the occasion on which he played for Somerset against Hampshire the morning after a Commem Ball at Oxford. He had not gone to bed, so he was dropped down the order to allow him to get some lost sleep on the physiotherapist’s couch.
Alas, Somerset collapsed, an experience not wholly without precedent in those days. Jake was summoned from deep slumber, hastily got his pads and gloves on to go out at the almost instantaneous fall of the next wicket and arrived at the crease in a daze, with a headache, to face Alex Kennedy. Remembering his education at Marlborough – if in doubt, push out – he took a large forward stride to the first ball and heard an ear splitting appeal as the ball thudded into his pad. To his disappointment it was given not out but the second ball struck his front leg again. This time there was no reprieve. Out he walked, aching head down, his emotions a mixture of relief, dejection and embarrassment. When he saw the white of a picket fence ahead of him he was aware of laughter from the crowd. ‘Sorry, mate’, said Lofty Herman of Hampshire, pointing in the opposite direction. ‘The pavilion’s that way.’
That story told against himself masked a sporting career of solid achievement. At school he had been a star cricket, rugby and hockey player and at Oxford in the mid 1930s he got
both cricket and hockey Blues. His courage and powerful frame must have made him a formidable rugger player too, not least as a hefty, accurate place kicker who would summon a fag from the touchline to hand him his glasses when there was a penalty or a conversion to be taken. Having booted the ball between the posts he would hand the boy his glasses again.
In 1948, a season when Somerset had five different captains, he was one of the three official ones, with his distinguished Oxford and Sudan contemporary ‘Mandy’ Mitchell-Innes and his fellow Marlburian George Woodhouse. Jake was by now thirty-five, playing on leave from Sudan and although Somerset did not have a great season his personal record of 223 runs in ten games, not out five times batting at number eight, was creditable.
Jake was an obvious candidate to be master in charge of cricket but he preferred to take the second XI while keeping a benign eye on events elsewhere. Mike Griffith recalls his advice that if you were going to play a long innings it wasn’t necessary to take a quick single off every ball.
John Thompson, known to all as ‘JRT’, was no less wise an observer of schoolboy cricketers. One of the greatest of all rackets players, he had been a batsman of high class for Cambridge and Warwickshire and he ran the first XI with skill and quiet authority until handing over to David Green, another former county cricketer, in 1964.
JRT too, lived to a great age, ninety-two. He was a wise counsellor, never inclined to exaggerate the importance of cricket in the general scheme of life. Speaking softly, with the words coming slightly from one side of his mouth, he commanded respect and I would hang on every word all the more because there were so few of them. He organised all the practices with quiet efficiency but left much of the coaching to his professional, the jockey-sized all-rounder David Essenhigh, who spoke with a lovely Wiltshire burr and was utterly devoted to the players in his care. JRT seldom intervened. He preached accuracy to his bowlers and, working on the old saw that the best professional bowlers could ‘pitch it on a sixpence’, he placed a sheet of paper on a length on the off-stump one day and ran a competition to see who hit it most often. To my delight I was comfortably the most consistent of the first XI bowlers and a few days later received a specially produced certificate from JRT pronouncing me officially ‘the World’s Most Accurate Bowler’. It rammed home the message and made me feel better than I was.
The motto was ‘style ahead of strength’ when it came to batting, which, sadly, may not fit the bill for the age of the Twenty20 cricketer, even at school. ‘The best kind of four is the one that makes the fielder chase the ball all the way to the boundary before it crosses the line ahead of him’ he would say. ‘You don’t need to smite the ball, just to stroke it.’ His own batting, still gracing the Wiltshire side in the sixties, demonstrated his message perfectly. His rackets partner was another Marlborough ‘beak’, David Milford, a shy man with a genius for games and revered as one of England’s greatest hockey players.
Hockey was Marlborough’s great sport. The main pitch, Level Broadleaze, was always one of the best in the land until artificial surfaces took over. There were at least three future internationals in the school in my time – Griffith, David MacAdam and Rupert McGuigan – and there were always at least a couple of internationals on the staff. Graeme Walker, later headmaster of Harberdashers’ Aske’s School in New Cross, was the one I remember best, both for his nimbleness and his sense of humour.
School life got better and better for me. Captaining the cricket XI at Lord’s and in the weeks leading up to that match against Rugby in 1963 was, despite the distraction of A levels, the focal point. The big disappointment in that last year was that the hockey term was wiped out by the coldest winter since 1947, eliminating any chance I might have had of making the XI. But I left in a mood that mixed elation, nostalgia and optimism, after one last end-of-term concert and a final, hearty rendition of the two school songs that always sent everyone to bed happy on the last night of term. One, to a rollicking tune by Sir George Dyson, had been sung by leavers since the Christmas Concert of 1912, with rousing lines by J. Bain that included ‘we all must go in time my lads’; and the heartfelt chorus: ‘We’re all going home in the morning’!
‘The Old Bath Road’, the other hardy perennial, also had a memorable tune by Dr. J.W. Ivimey and lyrics by C.L.F. Boughey that started: Strong and true on its western stages/Girt by downland and tree-clad hill/Strong and true as in bygone ages/the Old Bath Road fares onward still/And strong and true the young with the older/Stands the school, our youth’s abode/Side by side and shoulder to shoulder/Guarding the flanks of the Old Bath Road.
There had been 800 boys at Marlborough at any time in my five years so it is not surprising that a week seldom goes by without my bumping into one of my contemporaries. Sadly, that is not true of any of my closest friends at the school. Richard Allen, whose sense of humour was absolutely the same as mine, went to Canada and died of cancer in his thirties. Two others, A.J. (Adrian) Coote, a brilliant games player, and Robert Tiarchs (son of the Archdeacon of the Isle of Wight, rather a fine title I always thought), who was a good companion in Bill Spray’s History Upper Vth class, went to University in Canada and remained there; and Nick Parkinson, whose pink podginess belied his great natural ability as a games player, especially as a left-arm swing bowler who had defeated Winchester almost by himself in 1963, followed the melancholy example of his father, a doctor from the Fens, by taking his own life.
I did not really begin to understand the dreadful spectre of depression until years later when an even more gifted and far more extrovert friend, Robin Skinner, a respected solicitor loved by everyone and the successful head of a thriving family, left his office in Sussex one afternoon and walked in front of a train. In Robin’s case the tragedy might to an extent have been caused by a prescription for the wrong pills and I have since witnessed how a change of medicine brought about the sudden revival of a famous cricketer, Hubert Doggart, following years of depression.
There were no such shadows over my own outlook at the age of eighteen. Immediately ahead lay Lord’s, a family holiday in Portugal and a gap year that gradually took shape after John Dancy, a classical scholar of high intellect, had suggested in his final report that this workaday academic might develop further at a University. Once the future had been planned I used the rest of that precious year enjoyably, if less altruistically than so many of those leaving sixth forms at both state and independent schools these days. I worked a passage on a ship to and from South Africa; taught a summer term at a prep school in the Surrey hills (where the irascible and cricket-ignorant headmaster wanted to beat an unfortunate boy called Morton-Clarke for practising the shot he had just played after being dismissed); and wrote a naïve novel about a cricket commentator in love with a Scots lassie who had accidentally killed an intruder at her cottage in the Highlands.
Neither this nor a subsequent attempt at acquiring literary fame through a thriller, written in a summer vacation, about an England cricketer kidnapped by a terrorist during a tour of the West Indies, deserved to see the light of day. I had kept quiet about these absorbing but misguided hours of toil, until admitting them to, of all people, Jeffrey Archer. I felt unable to fib when, sitting beside him one day at a lunch or dinner, he asked me directly if I had ever tried writing a novel. Persuasive as he was, at least before his unfortunate fall from grace, I found myself digging the second manuscript out of a drawer and sending it to him. I had to press hard for its return many months later. That he felt unable to recommend a publisher and that not a hint of plagiarism has been evident in any of his best sellers since is, I think, a fair enough indication that I was never cut out to be a serious writer.
Many journalists are to be admired, certainly, but not so much as good novelists. The cross that each of the successful ones must bear, of course, is that, like professional sportsmen, they are seldom able to reach the heights time and again.
6
CAMBRIDGE
October 1964. A huge sky, coloured pale blue li
ke sunlit Arctic ice from horizon to horizon. I am riding a battered old bicycle at pace, biting wind smarting the ears and making the nose run despite a striped and voluminous woollen scarf wrapped round my neck and jammed below the collar of my duffel coat as I speed down the hill into the majestic centre of the second oldest University city in England. The journey continues beside the river for a time, then out towards one of those tree-lined, flat, quiet streets towards the comfortable but characterless suburban house where the lofty, red-nosed Mr Hide is waiting to start my first supervision in Economic History. At University you go looking for knowledge.
At school I had been a boy. At Cambridge I was suddenly, officially at least, a man. A gentleman indeed. Letters from Fitzwilliam College in advance of my arrival addressed me as ‘Mr.’ and any written regulations always referred to gentlemen, a quaint throwback to the days of the fictional Sebastian Flyte and earlier, when you had to have money, if not necessarily manners, to go to Oxbridge. Fitzwilliam, sometime ‘House, sometime ‘Hall’, had actually been founded by 19th century philanthropists wanting to offer a Cambridge education to those who could not afford to pay for it. My poor father, having sacrificed a lot in order to educate three sons at Marlborough, willingly forked out a bit more to keep me fed, watered and brain-trained for three more years, and glorious years they were.
There were virtually no rules and everyone was entirely responsible for himself. Nobody told you what to do. You found everything out from notice-boards and the grape vine. This was a first taste of real freedom and arguably the last because once marriage, mortgages and children come along, most of us are tied to our responsibilities like string to a balloon.
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