The Fatal Englishman: Three Short Lives

by Sebastian Faulks

  The surprise was caused by the fact that nothing in Taylor’s narrative to 1939 had supposed England capable of acting in such a way and nothing he had seen since had led him to believe it capable of continuing.

  Taylor was a fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, and it was behind its fancy white crenellations that the peculiar story of Jeremy Wolfenden was fomented and begun. It started in provincial pride and glory and ended with suspicious death, far from home, and an ill-tempered visit to the college by the gentlemen of the Secret Intelligence Service.

  In the 1930s Magdalen had set its course to the Left and determined to lose its reputation as a finishing school for aristocrats and to compete with the most intellectually accomplished colleges. Its star fellows were Taylor and Bruce McFarlane in history, Peter Medawar in science, the philosopher J.L. Austin and, in English, C.S. Lewis. A significant recruit to the cause was a young man called Jack Wolfenden.

  Born in 1906, he was the son of an education official at the County Hall in Wakefield, Yorkshire. He was a brilliant product of Chapel and grammar school, a walking vindication of the uses of literacy. He had Yorkshire roots, a trace of Southern swank after a childhood stay in Swindon, and a hard, competitive character. Greek and Latin were the only subjects that counted for scholarship boys, and in due course Jack Wolfenden was entered for the awards offered by Queen’s College, Oxford. On a wet and windy night Alfred John Spilsbury, the headmaster of Wakefield Grammar School, tramped to the Wolfendens’ modest house to tell them their Jack had won a scholarship.

  ‘My parents,’ he recalled, ‘did not say much, that night or ever. We were, after all, taciturn Yorkshire folk, not given to facile expression of our feelings. In fact, the deeper the feelings, the less they were spoken. There might be a momentary trembling of a lip, or a sudden start of tears to the eye, or a quick pressure of the hand; but there were very few words, either in joy or in sorrow.’

  Jack Wolfenden read classics, or ‘Greats’, as they were called at Oxford. In his third year he started to have tutorials in philosophy from T.D. Weldon in Magdalen. Weldon, known as ‘Harry’ after a music-hall comedian, was a defensive, hard-shelled, lonely man, afraid of betraying anything that might be construed as ‘weakness’, or even feeling. He was also terrified of women. Under Weldon’s tutelage at Oxford, Jack Wolfenden listened to Wagner, read widely and worked hard. He believed that, since he had taken a catastrophic second in Mods, the first part of his degree, he was destined for a life of schoolmastering. Then Weldon made him a surprising offer. In 1928 Oxford was starting a new course called Modern Greats, or PPE (Politics, Philosophy and Economics). Such was the demand for it that Weldon believed Magdalen would need another philosophy don in addition to himself. He offered the job to Jack Wolfenden on condition that he got a First in Greats. The First, after immense toil, was achieved, and, following a year in Princeton, Jack Wolfenden became a don at Magdalen in 1929. In 1932 he married Eileen, second daughter of A.J. Spilsbury of Wakefield GS, who had made the rainy trip with news of his Oxford scholarship. When their boy Jeremy was born in 1934, Harry Weldon became his godfather.

  Jeremy Wolfenden was born seven weeks early, on his father’s birthday, 26 June. Haruspicators after the event could delight in both these facts: the precociousness and the father’s shadow. Jack had left Magdalen to become headmaster of Uppingham at the amazing age of twenty-eight. Jeremy was the first baby born in School House for fifty years. Masters and boys who had thought it indelicate even to notice Eileen Wolfenden’s pregnancy could now happily pay court to the little boy. He was everything the earnestly over-achieving Jack Wolfenden might have wanted: a boy, a charming boy, an instantly and prodigiously clever boy.

  At two years old he could pick out the letters of the alphabet; at three he could do the same in Greek; at four he could read fluently. In the summer of 1939, aged five, he would get up early to make a start on the Child’s Encyclopaedia. Strange words appeared in his conversation, which turned out to be the phonetically-pronounced trophies of his reading. He didn’t like it when his parents laughed affectionately; he considered that to be annoying. His cousin Sally Hinchliff was evacuated from Dover, where her father was a doctor, and came to stay at Uppingham. Her mother Clytie was Eileen Wolfenden’s sister, and Sally was a child almost as prodigious as her cousin Jeremy. Each developed a fantasy world with a secret language; but then, unusually, they fused them into one. During the War they would lie in bed giving imaginary wireless reports, from Jupiter, in Jeremy’s case, from the Middle of Nothing Land in Sally’s. They could talk to one another in such a way that no one else could understand. They might have been twins.

  Jeremy was a difficult child to bring up and was more advanced in some ways than others. The constant presence of a nanny protected him from some of the practical demands of life; he would never, for instance, answer the telephone. Every day after tea he came down from the nursery to play with his parents. They were old-fashioned provincial Yorkshire people. Jack Wolfenden remained an ascetic, unsophisticated man: he had a good mechanical brain, but little imaginative flair; the outstanding periods of his distinguished public life were as a quasi-civil servant when he became head of the University Grants Committee and of the British Museum. As a teacher he tended to the Gradgrindian: ‘Look it up,’ was his favourite advice to children and pupils. He was morbidly frightened of emotion, a failing that his friends put down to shyness. He was too busy to be personally involved with his children’s upbringing; his wife believed he was more like an uncle than a father, making friendly but irregular excursions from the smoky atmosphere of his study. Photographs show him looking lean and active: on a hiking holiday he is wearing British Empire shorts and long socks, peering eagerly at the map, mouth clenched round a bough of briar. Even as he sits reading in a deckchair, his spectacles give off an air of twinkling urgency.

  Eileen Wolfenden was equally old-fashioned, though in the manner thought more appropriate to a mother. She was content for the nanny to look after her children by day, but was keen to direct Jeremy’s reading. She introduced him to books of the Greek legends and amused him by drawing the heroes from the stories. She was a warm and imaginative mother when she had charge of her children; she was good at finding ways to keep Jeremy occupied.

  When the boy was four, the trustees of Uppingham came to visit the headmaster. Jeremy was brought down from the nursery and amazed them by naming the countries of the world from a Times Atlas. Although he would perform for his father, he did not enjoy being the focus of attention. He was not sociable; throughout his childhood he preferred to be left to his own reading and his own games. The birth of his younger sister Priscilla caused a welcome diversion of interest. In the family photograph albums Jeremy is a fugitive presence: Priscilla dresses up and dances; a later pair of siblings, Daniel and Deborah, cavort upon the sands, have parties, and shoot the garden hose on sunny days. But Jeremy makes only the odd appearance: an unconvincing Robin Hood, a reluctant horse on all fours to be mounted by the baby Deborah, or clasping a book and a newspaper, a picture of concentration and knobbly knees. He didn’t like the games that other children liked; when a party was threatened he would lock himself in his room, from where, on one occasion, he had to be extracted by a gardener on a ladder. Much though his mother adored him, even she had to admit that he could be an extremely difficult child.

  In School House Jeremy had a governess, and at the age of six he went to a little local school where all the other pupils, except Sally Hinchliff, were the children of Uppingham staff. Sally was the only child who could stand the pace he set; the rest were always at least two textbooks behind. He picked things up so quickly that he barely had to work, and school therefore held no drudgery. His father was ambitious for him, but Jeremy was self-motivated; no one needed to push him. His parents did not consider him ready for boarding school until he was nine, when he was sent to Maidwell Hall in Northamptonshire. Within a year he was in the top form and two years after that he was bored. He was in
a hurry to leave. The headmaster, Oliver Wyatt, worried that he was simply too clever; they could not find enough to teach him or enough ways of keeping him occupied. Jeremy complained that he found it difficult to reconcile his life at school with his life at home. He liked games and was reasonably good at them, but a problem with his eyesight which began at about the time he left Maidwell limited his success on the playing field.

  It was decided that he should sit the scholarship for Eton. He was awkward and shy, but well prepared. When it comes to the English essay, his father advised him, don’t do ‘What I did on my holidays’ or something like that; pick the one-word title, like ‘Rivers’, then you can write about anything you like. And don’t forget, his mother added, how bored they will be after reading all these essays; why not try writing something funny?

  The Eton scholarship concentrated on Latin and Greek. The rewards for the 100 or so entrants were great, and the invigilating masters took it as seriously as the boys involved. One of the Latin questions in Jeremy Wolfenden’s year, 1947, invited the boys to parse English words as though they were Latin – potato, for instance.

  The boys were trained little winners who had been learning Latin since the age of seven. They usually came from one of the preparatory schools that specialised in the Eton scholarship, and it was thought to be to Wolfenden’s credit that Maidwell was not one of these classics ‘factories’. Wolfenden’s entrance papers were unusual in being the source of gossip for some time afterwards among the staff. What had impressed the examiners particularly was his English essay on the subject of ‘Dreams’. He had taken his parents’ advice with spectacular results. ‘I have been in this sort of examining for more than forty years,’ wrote G.B. Smith, late headmaster of Sedbergh at the bottom of the essay, ‘but I can say without hesitation that it is the most attractive piece of writing I have ever read from anyone of his age under exam conditions.’ He won the top scholarship.

  The scholars arrived at Eton feeling pleased with themselves. They had come through a fiery competitive test and had paid for their own education for the next five years. They lived in College, a separate entity, apart from the rest of the boys (Oppidans), who lived in houses round the town. The scholars, also known as Collegers or Tugs (from the gowns they had to wear – Latin, toga), were accommodated in little stalls in Chamber, a dismal, oak-lined passage on the first floor of a medieval College building. The walls that divided the cubicles reached only halfway to the high ceiling; curtains, not doors, provided meagre privacy from the corridor itself. After three weeks, before they had even grown used to bow ties, collar studs, tails and gowns, the scholars were placed on a mantlepiece and asked a number of impossibly detailed questions about Eton lore. As they answered, they were pelted with bits of bread by the previous year’s intake or ‘election’, one of whom was nominated Captain of Chamber. All the Tugs failed the test, which meant they could be ‘siphoned’ – beaten with a rubber tube – by the Captain of Chamber, Stephen Egerton, who subsequently became the British ambassador to Iraq.

  Although they were taught with some of the brighter Oppidans, the scholars’ life in College was self-contained, and the rest of the school looked on them with a kind of awed pity. They ate in their own dining-hall and played in their own junior common room. College Library was distinct from the School Library across the road; it sat on top of a distinguished cloister behind School Yard that gave the whole place the air of a slightly impoverished Oxford college.

  Midway through the first term all the scholars were thrashed for being too full of themselves. It made no difference if they were servile or timid; the beating was a ritual. A fag’s pattering footsteps were heard in Chamber Passage, his unbroken voice chanting: ‘Wolfenden you’re wanted in the Sixth Form Room, Layard you’re wanted, Howard go down to the Sixth Form Room …’ The big day had come, and down they went to find various prefects lounging in armchairs looking unconcerned. Four strokes of the cane, delivered over Wolfenden’s eloquent protests, were considered sufficient to reduce the Tugs to a tolerable level of humility. Wolfenden was the personal ‘fag’ to a grave boy called Douglas Hurd, who became Captain of School. Recollections among Wolfenden’s contemporaries differ as to whether Hurd ever physically punished Wolfenden; if so, it left no animosity between them, and Hurd was able to include a visit to Wolfenden in his itinerary when he went to the United States as a diplomat in 1964. By then Wolfenden was nearing the end of his short career as a journalist; Hurd had not yet begun his political ascent to the position of Foreign Secretary.

  After he had settled down, Wolfenden worked reasonably hard, but he was not the best classicist of his election. He was outstandingly good at mathematics and by some way the best of his year at abstract thought, but these didn’t count as heavily as Latin and Greek in the grading of scholars. He was happy to settle for third place and bore no resentment to those who had nominally overtaken him. It was agreed by everyone that he was the cleverest of them all, and thus, by a natural sequence of Etonian logic, the cleverest boy in England.

  But he was always in trouble. He had a way of dragging himself up the High Street; his walk exuded disrespect. He didn’t approve of the social side of Eton life, the snobbery and the exclusive little clubs within the school. One day he banged his fist on the desk of the headmaster, Robert Birley, and demanded to know – á propos some small injustice – ‘Is this or is this not an institution that respects free will?’ Eton didn’t want to lose him, however; the school thought he would bring glory in due course and so allowed him more latitude than it would have given to one less gifted.

  He was blackballed from the most self-serving of the élite clubs – ‘Pop’, a group of prefects who elected themselves and wore fancy waistcoats – but was a member of Sixth Form Select, a second prefectorial body appointed by the masters. As a member of this group he had to dress up in breeches and buckled shoes to give a speech. The school records report: ‘Wolfenden looked down his nose at his audience with his usual lofty contempt. Whether or not he felt thus for his speech as well as his audience … he delivered it in his usual impressive tones. He is a competent and forceful speaker who successfully holds his hearers. He carefully concealed from them his own views (if any) … perhaps this was a good thing.’

  At Eton Wolfenden also became precociously and openly homosexual. A tea-time conversation with him might include news of his latest discovery in literature (he was keen on Goodbye to Berlin by Christopher Isherwood); it was likely to touch on work, games and school gossip; but it was sure to dwell on the eternally interesting question of which of the juniors was the most beautiful. Because so many of his contemporaries spoke lasciviously of the small boys, Wolfenden’s predilection, which was to be a lifelong passion, was able to develop freely. He cultivated the dangerous aspect of his taste; though homosexuality flourished at Eton it was against the school rules. It was also against the law.

  Occasionally boys would be ‘sacked’ with a menacing fanfare that was meant to deter others; sometimes a boy would simply not reappear at the start of a new term. In his penultimate year, 1951, Wolfenden found himself in serious trouble over a scholar in the junior election. It had gone further than romantic posing and lewd comment, and Wolfenden narrowly escaped being expelled.

  The masters at Eton were much occupied by the moral character of the boys, though their suggested remedies for laxity seldom went beyond a bicycling tour of Breton churches. Wolfenden was a cause for particular concern because he was so openly disrespectful. He was always in danger. While the other boys struggled with Hesiod, he read novels. The problem with his eyesight limited his usefulness at games, though he did his best. Eton’s particular sport is the Wall Game, in which two teams try to move a small football along a wall through the crush of bodies and the suck of the mud beneath them. The small boys, known as ‘seconds’, go in on hands and knees to fight for the ball, while the larger ones mill around on top. If a boy is being suffocated he is allowed to shout ‘Air’, though this is co
nsidered an admission of ‘weakness’. Wolfenden was a useful second, though quite crushable. He once cried ‘Air’ when he was buried and incapable of breathing: he lifted his head above the surface of the mud where it was mistaken for the football and fallen on by several eager bodies.

  Jack Wolfenden had taken a sabbatical in 1941 at the request of the Air Ministry to be in charge of an urgent programme to train young men to be pilots. From Uppingham he was appointed headmaster of Shrewsbury, where among the visitors he and his wife received were Michael and Edwyna Hillary, parents of a distinguished old boy. After Shrewsbury he became vice-chancellor of the new Reading University, and the teenage Jeremy became more than ever restless at home. Although he despised much of what Eton stood for, he was more excited by what was going on there than by life in Reading, which he called ‘a caricature of a university, consisting entirely of Agricultural Economy and Tennis.’ He wrote dismissively about his mother – unfairly so, perhaps, in view of how well she had looked after him, but her homely qualities were not ones that appealed to him. He was able to talk to his father on level terms, but he resented being his father’s son and distrusted Jack Wolfenden’s ambitions for both of them. He described his father as being ‘surrounded by the aura of sanctity that is bound to grow on any Public School headmaster’. He told his mother that his father just wanted him to be another version of the Wolfenden success story.

  In the school holidays he wrote letters to his friends that showed a precociously developed style, a self-consciously decadent attitude, a clear knowledge of himself and an obsession with the beauty of boys. Philip Howard was considered good-looking, as was Robin Hope, while Wolfenden was no more than average. He was of medium height, strong, but with sloping shoulders; his spectacles gave him a froggy look, for which the verve of his conversation worked hard to compensate. He did not really grow into his looks until his late twenties, when, with a heavier jaw, dark glasses and cigarette at an angle, he traded his gawkiness for a kind of louche glamour.