by Mark Colvin
The reference to reading history is deliberate. Before my father’s return from Hanoi, I had passed my O-Level exams, and was now studying for the A-Levels. The system meant that you had to specialise: if you wanted to go to university, you had to choose just three subjects.
History had been a genuine choice. A couple of the science masters had been trying to persuade me to go into their stream, because I’d had a strong interest in biology and chemistry for several years, and at one point expressed a wish to be a biochemist. But maths, my perennial Achilles heel, struck again: even differential calculus was a stretch, and without it, my marks weren’t good enough for A-Level physics, which you needed if you were going to do any science subject at university. There was no way the system would, for instance, let you do chemistry, biology and English. It was CP Snow’s Two Cultures theory, ossified in the education system. So I opted for English, French and history, but I already knew what I was aiming for: to read English literature, if possible at Oxford or Cambridge, but if not, then maybe at York or Bristol.
* * *
If the soundtrack to my life when Dad left for Hanoi had been The Beach Boys’ ‘Good Vibrations’ and The Kinks’ ‘Sunny Afternoon’, by the time he got back it was Hendrix’ ‘All along the Watchtower’ and The Rolling Stones’ ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’. That year, 1967, had been billed as the ‘Summer of Love’, but now the mood was darkening. Not long after Dad’s return, it became clear that the post-divorce stability my sister and I had enjoyed before he went to Hanoi was never really going to come back. He came round one evening to tell us that he and Moranna Cazenove were getting married at Chelsea Registry Office the next morning. We remembered her, didn’t we? A young woman we’d met with him on a train coming back from Hampshire?
My sister and I did indeed remember an occasion when we’d walked up and down the platform at Winchester station for no apparent reason, choosing which of several apparently identical near-empty carriages to get into. Then, once inside, the staged moment of ‘Oh hello, what are you doing on this train? Oh, these are my children, Mark and Zoë.’ It was like a rather incompetently mounted espionage operation.
We were certainly surprised by the wedding news, and asked if we could come to the ceremony. ‘No, I’m afraid not,’ my father explained. He was forty-six, Moranna was only in her early twenties, and they feared that her father, an extremely unpredictable alcoholic stockbroker named David Cazenove, would go mad and try to stop the wedding. No, he told us, there would just be a couple of witnesses, and he and Moranna would go straight from the registry to the airport for the honeymoon. By the time they got back in a fortnight’s time, the fuss should have died down.
We later found out that for the previous few days he’d been staying with his mother, our Granny Sybil. He’d told her nothing about the impending marriage until that morning, when, having packed the car, he was sitting in the driver’s seat preparing to leave. ‘Oh, mother,’ he said. ‘I’m marrying Moranna Cazenove tomorrow,’ then wound up the window and sped off in a shower of gravel.
This was even more complicated than it sounds, because Moranna’s father had previously been married to my father’s first cousin, Barbara. Dad, his sister Prudence and Barbara had all grown up together in my grandparents’ household, after the death of Barbara’s mother. During her marriage to David, in other words, Barbara had been for a while the very unpopular stepmother of my father’s new bride. So there were bound to be massive reverberations on both sides of the family. What the wedding meant for Zoë and me, other than the melodrama of its beginning, was that the days of dropping into Dad’s little Chelsea flat were never really going to come back, because he and Moranna were going to buy and renovate an old house near Basingstoke.
The following year, my life changed even more radically. At the beginning of 1968, a Royal Australian Navy officer named Tony Synnot, who my mother had known in Melbourne in the 1940s, arrived in London to do a year-long course at what was then called the Imperial Defence College. He was a captain, and the IDC course was the transitional training ground for the step up to rear-admiral. He and my mother resumed their old friendship, hit it off, and in March they took me out to lunch to tell us they were going to get married.
I liked and respected Tony, and I was happy for my mother, but I can’t say in detail what my reaction to the news was that day: all memories were effectively blotted out by what happened directly afterwards. As we left the restaurant, I doubled over in pain, recovered, walked a few more steps, doubled over again, then had to clutch some railings. The agony was excruciating, like a dagger to the stomach. I was rushed to hospital, where a doctor diagnosed acute appendicitis, warned that it could turn to peritonitis at any moment, and put me straight to sleep. I woke up vomiting (it had been too urgent for them to wait the usual six-plus hours for digestion) and with a long row of stitches in my gut. The thing that worried me most was not that I was going to spend my sixteenth birthday in hospital, but that I would miss the school trip to Greece.
I was no longer studying Latin or Greek, but I retained an interest in classical history, and the Greek trip was also known as a kind of rite of passage, with usually minimal supervision when not actually visiting classical sites. Fortunately, teenagers heal fast, and I was out of hospital just in time. Although I wasn’t supposed to carry my own suitcase, masters and friends helped, and soon we were rattling across Europe in couchette class, with six hard beds in each compartment—talking, playing cards, reading, drinking wine and eating mortadella bought at station stalls, through France and down to the toe of Italy. The first Italian phrase I ever learned was the one printed under every train window: E pericoloso sporgersi—It is dangerous to lean out. Italian is such a musical language that we kept thinking of new tunes to sing it to, cod-opera style, as the countryside sped by.
Waking early on the Brindisi–Piraeus ferry after an uncomfortable half-sleep in a reclining chair, I went on deck to watch, for the first time, the sun come up over the western coast of Greece. I had given up ancient Greek as a subject, but I had read The Iliad and The Odyssey in the Penguin translation, and there in front of me were the familiar Homeric epithets, turned literal: ‘rosy-fingered Dawn’ rising over ‘the wine-dark sea’. I should not have been entirely surprised to see ‘fleet-footed Achilles’ running along the hills, as I breakfasted on coffee and a roll, passing through the Gulf of Corinth. Later that day we made landfall in Piraeus, before a bus ride to our hotel in Athens.
It’s worth remembering that mass tourism was still in its infancy then. It may have been the year Hollywood was filming If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium, but that in itself was an indication of how novel the phenomenon was. We were used to that: tour parties could be seen wandering around Westminster Abbey, a few making it into the cloisters, and a very few managing to reach the school itself. And of course, with the Houses of Parliament and Whitehall just across the road, our whole area was a tourist destination. But there were as yet no budget airlines, and even the cheap-ticket ‘bucket shops’ hadn’t sprung up: there were few alternatives to paying full price to fly—or to stay in hotels. Westminster was largely ours, for most of the time. I knew from experience that you could wander through the Tate Gallery, for instance, with perhaps only two or three other people in each room, even for the Turners.
As in Britain, so in Greece. Our school party may have been occasionally unruly and often raucous, but we had the ancient Agora in Athens, if not to ourselves, then certainly with plenty of room to move. We wandered largely unsupervised around the Parthenon and through the echoing rooms of its museum, taking in the wonders of ancient Greek sculpture and pottery. I remember sitting in the amphitheatre at Delphi, listening to a master explain the mechanics of Greek theatre, and we were the only group there. I pointed my camera up at a solitary eagle soaring in the thermals around the cliff-edge above, and thought about the Oracle and the clever ambiguities which had misled both Oedipus and his father Laius.
Or perhaps I
was thinking about how bad the food was: for most of the fortnight the tour operators scrimped by feeding us on little but rice and cooked tomatoes, and most of us supplemented our diet by discovering the dessert called halva and the resinous Greek wine called retsina. I had an unreasoning and misguided prejudice against Greek food for years afterwards.
Not being a fan of anything that tastes like licorice, I avoided ouzo, but I did succumb to peer pressure and smoke my first cigarette. A packet of Papastratos cost almost nothing: even a schoolboy could afford them. The second day I bought a packet for myself, and by the time I got back to London I was smoking several a day, switching to Rothmans. It was a habit I would escalate for a decade before giving up for the first time. It would be several more years before I kicked that habit once and for all.
Back in London, we moved house. Tony Synnot was a widower with two young daughters, Jane and Amanda, and our Chelsea flat wasn’t big enough for an expanded family, so when he and my mother married, we moved in with him, in a big house not far from Harrods. But it was always clear this was temporary: at the end of Tony’s course, he and my mother would be going to Canberra. I was halfway through the A-Level course: should I go back to Australia with them, moving into a completely different educational system, or stay in London?
There were negotiations between my parents about what would happen when Mum and Tony left England. Zoë, who was then happy and doing well at the highly academic St Paul’s Girls’ School, was nevertheless not at the academic hinge-point I faced, and could transfer from one system to the other. She would go with Mum, a blow in itself, because although three and a half years separated us in age, we had always been very close in affection. I was to stay with Dad: to finish my A-Levels, and on the clear understanding that if I then got a place at Oxford he would not take any postings that would leave me stranded for three years without a home to go to in the holidays. He made this solemn undertaking to my mother, and the thing was decided.
Even so, the whole business was a wrench. I had been a weekly boarder at Westminster, spending every weekend with one parent or another (depending on whether Dad was in the country). More significantly for me, Mum lived a fifteen-minute bus ride away from school, and I often popped over in the afternoon to say hello and spend some time with her and Zoë. In some ways I felt almost more like a day-boy than a boarder. Now it was clear that from 1969, I was to board pretty much full-time, with only occasional weekend trips down to Dad and Moranna’s place.
At the end of 1968, I said goodbye to what was now my Australian family with sadness, but also with the knowledge that I would see them again in less than a year. My relationship with Dad became more volatile and difficult during this time, as I worked towards A-Levels and, in the winter term, the Oxford Entrance Exam. Moranna gave birth to a daughter, Joanna, which meant there was understandably less time for anyone else. Dad was commuting up to London every morning on the train from Basingstoke, so when I did see him it was usually when he took me for lunch at his club, the (now-defunct) St James’.
My father’s intelligence expertise, when it came to me, was sometimes artfully deployed: never more so than the day Westminster got itself into the Daily Express over a student demonstration. This was late-ish 1968, the year of the Paris riots and the Czech uprising, and the spirit of rebellion was everywhere. I printed out a series of what I thought were fairly mild requests for more consultation with students—an early plea for student democracy—and went round Liddell’s collecting signatures. My housemaster, Charles Keeley, in an uncharacteristic rage, got wind of this from somebody, descended on me, refused to listen to my arguments, seized all the signed copies, tore them up in front of me, and told me I was grounded.
I wasn’t the only one: similar petitions were going around other houses. One of the others involved was an American boy called Robbie Fields, and the next day he was called in to see the headmaster, John Carleton. It was then that Westminster experienced its first sit-in: a crowd of boys sitting on the ground in Dean’s Yard, shouting ‘Free him, free him.’ With photographs, and in the aftermath of Lindsay Anderson’s If…, this story of a Top Public School In Revolt was a tabloid dream. I probably would have been in those photos myself, but my father had already spoken to Keeley, got him to suspend my grounding temporarily, and descended in the late morning, just before the ruckus began, to take me to a very urbane lunch at his club, where we had a reasonably civilised argument about generational change and what he regarded as the need to be patient. I wasn’t entirely convinced, and said so, but arrived back at school to find I’d missed all the action, including, allegedly, the hanging of an anarchist black flag from a window of historic Ashburnham House, by the heir presumptive to a barony, no less.
My career as a student revolutionary, craftily nipped in the bud.
Chapter 15
Night Tripping
IN 1969, I knuckled down just enough to get through A-Levels with no great distinction: I believe that my last exam was on the day that Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. Then I flew out to Australia for the (northern) summer holidays, and to wait for the results. After so long in grey England, this return to Australia was welcome in its way, though I missed the theatres and rock concerts in London. My mother and Tony had bought a house in the Canberra suburb of Deakin, less than a kilometre from the prime minister’s Lodge.
The air was so different, so clean and eucalyptus-smelling. My mother fed a family of magpies who would come to the back door and sing to her. We had a lemon tree in the back garden, covered with sacking in winter to keep off the Canberra frost. One day a baby possum fell down the ventilator of the kitchen extractor fan, and its fiercely protective mother made clear I wasn’t welcome when I climbed up a ladder to help—we eventually managed to push the baby up to safety with a broom handle. And in contrast to the underpowered small and mid-sized cars that were common on English roads, we had a long, spacious, white Holden station wagon, in which we drove on the long switchback road down Brown Mountain for NSW South Coast beach holidays.
My music was The Doors, early Led Zeppelin, The Band, Joni Mitchell, The Stones’ Let It Bleed, and—what we didn’t know was going to be The Beatles’ swan song—Abbey Road. The biggest Australian hit that year was Russell Morris’ brilliant and epically produced ‘The Real Thing’. I also remember seeing Midnight Cowboy at the cinema in Manuka, not only an extraordinary film, but the first time I’d heard the voice of the great Harry Nilsson.
Even in Canberra’s winter and spring, Australia seemed more expansive and easy, and I was tempted to stay, but I went back to Westminster for one final winter term, to prepare for the Oxford Entrance Exam. Those last three months were more like university learning than school days: we had seminars rather than lessons, including a number from the headmaster’s wife, the historian Janet Adam-Smith. We were treated like adults, and expected to behave as such, an atmosphere in which I found it considerably easier to work.
At the beginning of the term, Charles Keeley had sat me down and told me apologetically that he’d decided not to make me a monitor (prefect), to which I replied politely that I should have refused if he had, because I had no taste whatsoever for wielding authority—a line in my Twitter bio, ‘Lifetime Lance-Corporal in the Awkward Squad’, reflects a long history. Keeley accepted this with equanimity—his deputy house-master, Jim Cogan, had always been in the habit of calling me ‘Colvin, you truculent youth’—and I got on with my life.
Although I was aiming to read English, everyone wanting to enter Oxford had to take a ‘general paper’, in which you were expected to write essays on philosophical questions or current affairs: ‘Is it possible to learn lessons from history? Discuss’; or ‘Empires rise and fall: Britain is to the US as Greece was to Rome. Discuss.’ This was meat and drink to me, and I performed well enough in the exams to get invited to an interview at Christ Church, Oxford, where I must have been plausible enough to impress someone, because they offered me a place. Then it was farewell to my l
ife at Westminster and back to Canberra for my first Australian Christmas since my maternal grandfather had died a decade before, and to work out how to fill the time before ‘going up’ to Oxford in September 1970.
Because I’d learned how to develop and print photographs in the Westminster School Photographic Society, I answered an ad in The Canberra Times for a junior darkroom worker at the Research School of Biological Science at the Australian National University. They hired me, and I spent most of 1970 there, learning eventually how to produce pin-sharp prints of shots taken by the school’s electron microscope. I had little idea what the images I was printing—mostly viruses—represented, and instead of concentrating on the negative print image on the paper, I had to learn how to focus with a sort of small adjustable periscope onto the grain of the glass negative itself. It was quiet and repetitive work, but I had the most congenial of companions in the form of an Englishwoman called Maureen, the senior darkroom technician, who was patient enough to help me learn, and being extremely well read herself, a delightful conversationalist about books and other subjects. We had ABC Radio on most of the time, Anne Deveson’s talk show and Ellis Blain’s Guest, and so I began to get a picture of Australian public life which I hadn’t absorbed naturally, growing up elsewhere.