by Bryan Magee
In physique, David was portly, and reminded everyone of a well-known comedy actor of the day called Robert Morley, still to be seen in some old films. Without being himself at all actory he had a certain sparkle and dash, and always a twinkle in the eye. His speech and mannerisms were much imitated, especially his way of putting a finger to one side of his nose, or his reiterated injunction to history specialists, ‘You’ve got to get a general picture’, waggling a hand at arm’s length with the fingers splayed as he spoke. The fact that his relationship to his pupils combined clear-eyed detachment with personal concern brought a high level of irony into it, and much humour, which he was anxious should not be hurtfully misunderstood. Given that he was, in his way, a sort of genius, it is not surprising that he had not himself had much academic success before finding his vocation as a schoolmaster. I have been told (I have not checked this) that he got a third-class degree at Cambridge and became a prep-school teacher. He told me himself that he had been a plodder at university who never gave serious thought to what he was doing. It is obvious that what he needed was a teacher like himself, and did not have the good fortune to find one.
The only other teacher who impinged on me significantly at that age was an American, Al Blackmer. As soon as the war ended, Christ’s Hospital resumed a regular relationship with the oldest private school in the USA, Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. Each year a boy would go from one to the other, and also a master accompanied by his family – the two families swapped homes. The Christ’s Hospital master who changed places with Al was the only one I felt a regret at not being taught by. He was Edward Malins, a young cavalry officer recently returned from the Far East. Casual yet elegant, refreshingly tolerant in outlook and attitudes, a lover of the arts, especially music, good-looking, and married to an equally attractive wife, he seemed too sophisticated to be a schoolmaster. (Colin Davis seems to have had a special relationship with him rather like the one I had with David Roberts.) Even so, I think I came off just as well with Al Blackmer.
Al introduced us to American literature, which we knew nothing about. I still carry in my head the inflections of his voice as he read two classic short stories aloud to us: ‘I’m a Fool’ by Sherwood Anderson, and ‘The Killers’ by Ernest Hemingway. It was my first lesson in the relationship between American writing and American speech. When I heard him read Shakespeare – it was the final scene of Othello – I had culture shock. I found it ridiculous, not acceptable, to hear Shakespeare in an American accent: I felt embarrassed, and wanted to laugh. But the truth is that American pronunciation is probably closer than modern English to the way the language was spoken in Elizabethan England. In any case Al read the scene so well that I forgot about my embarrassment and became absorbed in the content. This, again, was an important first lesson, this time in the silliness of provincial cultural attitudes to America. Later, in my mid-twenties, when I spent a year at Yale, he wrote inviting me to visit him and his family, and we became friends. I think of him with much admiration and affection.
Altogether, I believe, I got as good an education at Christ’s Hospital as was to be had at any school in Britain at that time. Most of the classroom work was not of much interest to me, but that would have been the same anywhere else; and here it was well taught, on the whole, though I did have my share of bad teachers. It is obvious now that I should have specialised in physics and maths, the two subjects I was best at, but that was not obvious then: the school, like all the best schools at that time, took it for granted that bright boys specialised in humanities, and I shared that foolish view. I did not feel at one with most of what I was doing for teachers until I became a history specialist – and then the individual care and attention I received were extraordinary by any standards, and my real education began. Against my own emotional resistance I started to think, to analyse, to look critically at my own ideas and my own concepts. The essays I wrote for David Roberts were my first attempts at intellectually serious writing, and each one received from him an instructively critical response. With one I was carried away and produced sixty pages – it was on Louis XI – yet David read every word of it and gave me vigorous and detailed criticisms. He made us not only study history but reflect on its nature; and when A.L. Rowse’s book The Use of History came out he ordered us all to read it. To my surprise I found myself revelling in academic work.
But, as must be the case with any school education worthy of the name, the most valuable aspects of it were going on outside classroom periods. I was developing across a broad front as a human being, learning to stand on my own feet in a stressful society, and to get along with every kind of person. Within myself I was trying to develop as a writer – a poet first and foremost, but also trying my hand at general essays, and a diary, all now mercifully defunct. And I was increasingly enthusiastic as a debater.
One experience I had in connection with a school debate had an important effect on my life. Bob Pitman, an Old Blue currently prominent at Oxford as a debater, was invited back to the school to speak, and I was detailed to debate on the same side as him. I remembered him vividly for his star performances in Gilbert and Sullivan. He knew nothing about me, but he wrote and suggested that we meet on the afternoon of his arrival to make sure that our prepared speeches were not going either to repeat or contradict one another. We went for a long, meandering walk across Big Side. During most of this he was bubbling with enthusiasm about the Oxford Union. I had heard of it without actually knowing what it was, and he gave me a wonderfully sharp, though also beglamoured, description of that club-cum-debating-society – its atmosphere, its debates, the coruscating wit, the outsize personalities. Incomparably the highest achievement open to any undergraduate while at Oxford, he said, was to become president of the Union. From that day onwards I thought that if I went to Oxford the Union would be one of the centres of my life there, and I would become its president. What actually happened was that on my first day as an undergraduate I took the cheque for my student grant to a bank in the centre of Oxford, opened my first bank account, then walked the two hundred yards to the Oxford Union and wrote my first cheque, for life membership. In a crowded, many-sided life at Oxford the Union meant more to me than any other institution, and I did indeed become its president.
There were visiting speakers at Christ’s Hospital of other kinds who made a lasting impression on me. The then provost of King’s College, Cambridge, a fellow called Sheppard, told us that what more than anything else distinguished human beings from animals was language, and that the first people to understand this had been the ancient Greeks. He quoted, from a play by Sophocles, a passage that makes the point, a chorus beginning:
Wonderful are the world’s wonders, but none
More wonderful than man …
I was mesmerised by it. It was the first time I had heard any such significance attributed to language. For me it was counterintuitive, and the more I thought about it the more I disagreed with it – today I would say that if one thing more than another distinguishes man from the animals it is morality – but it is a fascinating idea nevertheless, and it opened up all sorts of possibilities in front of my eyes. Also, I thought that the Sophocles, my first tiny glimpse of Greek drama, was marvellous – it gave me goose pimples. Even Sheppard’s manner swept me away. Instead of standing behind the speaker’s table as usual, he sat on the front of it dangling his legs. I had never seen a speaker do this, and was hugely impressed – it seemed a triumph of informality and direct contact with us. It became my own practice in subsequent years, in the role of teacher and political speaker. But it was many years before I saw anyone else do it.
There was a Captain Harry Rée who talked to us about his adventures with the French Resistance during the war. Years later he became a friend. Colin Davis returned to give more of his profoundly musical performances on the clarinet, and I later got to know him too. Altogether it was as if our surroundings were opening up after the hunkered-down, closed-in years of the war. No doubt part of
this feeling was due to the age I was at, and the fact that I was growing up, so perhaps I would have had some of it at that stage of my life anyway; but the school really was turning outwards. The sandbags and blackout shutters had gone; younger masters with fresh, alert faces were reappearing after years in other countries. Quite other things were coming back too, like ice cream and bananas, which had not been seen for years. We acquired an American boy at the school, then half a dozen French boys. Foreign visitors became common. As it had done every year before the war, the school started visiting London every St Matthew’s Day and marching behind its band through the City to the Mansion House, to be greeted by the Lord Mayor for tea and a celebration, each of us being handed a coin by him (I forget how much). A month after that we marched into Horsham, again behind the band, for a special showing of the film of Shakespeare’s Henry V. It was the only occasion during my time when the people of Horsham saw the whole school – which was, so to speak, reasserting its existence in the eyes of the outside world after the deliberate obscurity of the war years.
The school was more famous then than now. For hundreds of years it had been one of the biggest sites (and sights) in the City of London, and the only school in the country that offered a five-star boarding education to the children of hard-up parents. Added to that was its remarkable uniform, familiar to everyone in the capital. Inevitably, people became less aware of it after it moved to the countryside. But the biggest change in its position came after the Second World War, when the academic opportunities it offered were opened to the population as a whole. Christ’s Hospital ceased to serve a unique purpose, though it continued to meet special needs. Its distinctiveness now was as a charity. The post-war revolution in secondary education was launched by the Education Act of 1944, in the middle of my time at the school, so I knew Christ’s Hospital in the last years of its special greatness.
Well known though it was, those of us who were there had an exaggerated idea of its outside reputation. We were more aware than others of our old boys who were making a name for themselves in the world, and we supposed them to be more famous than they were. I think this is true of all schools. And we thought of our old boys as being somehow continuous with ourselves – they represented the future towards which we were heading. There were quite a few on the current scene. The actor establishing himself as the leading young man in British films, Michael Wilding, was a recent Old Blue (and, enviably, was to marry both Margaret Leighton and Elizabeth Taylor). Keith Douglas, who had been killed in the war, was being talked about as the outstanding poet to have come out of it. Keith Vaughan had had his first one-man exhibition, and was launched on his fame as a painter. Constant Lambert had more reputation than any of them, at least as a personality – social figure, wit, author, composer, regular conductor at the Proms, director of Sadler’s Wells Ballet (and, had we but known it, secret lover of Margot Fonteyn). Almost undisguised, he was to turn up later as one of the leading characters in Anthony Powell’s twelve-novel epic of mid-twentieth-century Britain, A Dance to the Music of Time. There were older established celebrities such as Barnes Wallis, the prototype of ‘Q’ in the James Bond films, inventor of the bouncing bomb and other devilishly ingenious wartime inspirations; the poet Edmund Blunden, an already classic writer from the First World War, though still not old; and John Middleton Murry, man of letters and husband of Katherine Mansfield. Those of us who cared about sport – which was a majority – were proud of the fact that the Old Blues rugger team was generally regarded as the best of the public-school old boys’ teams during the 1940s. Those more academically inclined were aware that the school sent something like thirty boys a year to Oxford and Cambridge, where quite a number became professors and heads of colleges. Whatever our separate inclinations, we saw ourselves as going into a world in which Old Blues flourished. (The City, we knew, was teeming with them.) During the time I was there I do not think it occurred to me to doubt that Christ’s Hospital was the best school in the country. It was an ignorant opinion, of course. But there can have been no other that offered so good a boarding-school education, leading to such excellent life chances, with no consideration whatsoever of money or social class.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
AT THE END of one school year five of the six house monitors in Barnes A left, so I and my contemporaries became the government. By now Hudson, Courtier and Mercer had left too, but all the rest of my year became monitors simultaneously. Griffiths was house captain, with Erskine-Tulloch and me in charge of the seniors, and Cavendish and Batts in charge of the juniors. For the first time I had to organise other people, and punish lawbreakers. Learning to do these things fairly and responsibly had always been an essential part of a public-school education, and so it still was in the Britain of those days, and would have been a turning point in the personal development of anyone. We came into the perks of office, chief of which, as far as I was concerned, was the freedom to stay up late, since we had to supervise the other boys going to bed and then to sleep. And we acquired fags, smaller boys to make our beds, clean our shoes, post our letters, and run our errands.
All this was, as it had been developed to be, a training in growing up, because it was learning to accept responsibility and exercise authority. My friends and I had our own views about this, and we ran the house in what was really rather a grown-up way, allowing the boys more individual freedom than in other houses (and in return being regarded by them as ‘slack’). We became a house known for personal rather than shared attainments: we were the individualist’s house. It was during this period that Richard Cavendish and I became particular friends. Almost inevitably, given his interests, he became a history specialist like me and entered David Roberts’s kingdom in the school library. Because David did not teach his specialists in the classroom that had been allotted to him for that purpose, he turned it into something approximating a junior common room for his older pupils, and now Richard and I were the only two members of it from Barnes A. Back at the house we came to be thought of as the two ‘intellectuals’, though people were still well disposed towards us. Unlike me, Richard was quite good at sport, and this helped, I think.
The newness of our regime was underscored by the fact that our old housemaster, Snugs Burleigh, had retired at the same time and been replaced by an air force officer newly back from the war, Eric Littlefield. His nickname, which he brought with him, was ‘Pongo’, the genus name for orang-utans, and an armed services word for an ordinary chap, a bloke. I fell foul of him in the first few days, in a way from which I never recovered in his estimation. On his first tour of the dormitories he had been sitting on the end of a boy’s bed chatting, and idly fingering the number card at the foot of the bed, when he noticed some handwriting on the back of the card. He looked closer, and found himself reading an obscene limerick about the boy he was talking to, about him being the object of another (named) boy’s lustful desires. Without showing it to the boy, Pongo asked him if he knew what this writing was, and the boy said no, he had not realised it was there. Pongo – who believed him, on the grounds that if he had known it was there he would have erased it – said nothing more, but slipped the card into his pocket. During the next couple of days he hunted around to find whose handwriting it matched. It matched mine.
I was summoned to his study. The conversation went something like this.
‘Have you been writing anything, er, shall we say indiscreet recently?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Search your mind. Can you think of anything, er – well, I’ll be blunt, indecent, that you’ve been unwise enough to commit to paper?’
I was baffled. ‘No, sir.’
Pongo produced the card and handed it across to me. ‘Is this your handwriting?’
I was discombobulated. I went lobster red. I had written that limerick a full two years before, in a different life. At that age, and in a school, two years is an aeon, and I had long ago forgot
ten all about it. Obviously I had written the limerick on the boy’s bed card for him to stumble across at some future time, but he never had, and then I had forgotten about it myself.
Almost lockjawed with embarrassment, I explained this to Pongo, who told me in return how he had found the card. At the end of it all he said: ‘I believe you. I accept that you wrote this a very long time ago. In fact I think I can see the difference in your handwriting. But the question is, is it true?’
‘What do you mean, sir?’
‘Is what you’ve written on the card true? Did these things actually happen?’
This was a shock. I was trapped. And I was tongue-tied. What I had written contained much truth, if exaggerated, but our schoolboy code made it impossible for any boy to say such things about another boy to any master.
Pongo tried to help me out.
‘The boy has no idea what you’ve written here, still less who has written it. If you tell me, I give you my word I’ll never say anything to him about it. But I want to know if it’s true.’
‘No, sir, it isn’t.’
‘Not any of it?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Not a word of truth in any of it?’
‘No, sir.’
I could see he was angered and frustrated by the fact that he had no way of knowing whether what I was saying now was true or not. He decided to put the boot in.
‘What you’re telling me is that all this is nothing but the product of your dirty mind?’