Growing Up In a War (49 page)

Back at school for what was to be my last term, I found life mostly taken up by two things: my relationship with Jill and my preparations for the scholarship to Balliol in March. Ralph Davis, backed up by David Roberts, carried on trying to persuade me to put off the exam, and I persisted in refusing. When the time for it drew near, and I asked Ralph some idle question about what being at Balliol was like, he replied nastily that it would make little difference to me since I would not be going there. The conversation continued something like this:

Me: ‘I know you don’t think I’m going to get in, but just supposing I do.’

Ralph: ‘If you get in, it won’t be to Balliol, because you won’t be putting down for Balliol.’

Me: ‘What do you mean?’

Ralph: ‘Look here, the fact is you’re going to do badly in this exam. You’re not ready for it. If your papers are read by the people at Balliol they’ll get a low opinion of you. And if you try there again next year they’ll already have decided they don’t want you. You’ll never get in. If we can’t stop you taking the exam now, you’ve got to put down for another college if ever you’re to get in to Balliol.’

I was dumbfounded. For well over a year I had been told I was destined for Balliol, and I had taken this for granted. It was now part of my conception of myself. I protested strenuously. Ralph Davis protested back. It emerged that the credit at Balliol that he was most concerned about was not mine but his. He had come to us straight from there, and his tutors, who were now personal friends, would be my examiners. If the very first candidate he sent
them
was below standard, what would they think of him? Furthermore, these were the people he would be asking to be his referees in any job application he might make. (He was, unknown to me, already applying for university posts.) He became angrier and angrier, and finally shouted at me in tones that closed the conversation: ‘I
FORBID
you to put in for Balliol!!’

Actually, he had no power to do that, but I did not understand this at the time. In places like my school no one frontally disobeyed so direct an order from a person in recognised authority, and it did not enter my head to do so.

What college should I put in for, then? The Oxford colleges organised their entrance examinations in groups: candidates wrote down an order of preference on their application forms, and their papers were read first by the college of their first choice. When it decided not to take someone it passed his papers on to the college of his second choice; and so on. The group I had been targeted at consisted of Balliol, Magdalen, St John’s, Wadham and Keble. I had heard of only two of the others apart from Balliol – Magdalen and St John’s – and knew nothing even about them.

In his anger during our argument Ralph had so bitingly, and at such length, rubbished my chances of passing the exam that it damaged my self-confidence. I had always known that by taking it earlier than I ought to I was increasing my chances of failure, but I still thought it was my only chance of ensuring a university education. Now that I found myself staring into the cold eyes of the probability (the certainty, according to Ralph) of failure, I knew that the most important thing was simply to get a place, any place, at Oxford. Which college it was at was a trivial matter by comparison. I asked Ralph which of them was the easiest to get into. He said the one with the lowest standards in the university was Keble – so, he said decisively, I should put in for that.

I went to Oxford to take the examination. The candidates stayed in the college of their first choice, so I stayed in Keble. We all sat
the
same papers together, but that was in Keble too, in the dining hall. I did not have any preconceived idea of the college as a place, but I found it actively depressing. Built on the largest of scales, it was Victorian gothic throughout, and clamantly ugly. The endless corridors were loweringly institutional, with rooms opening off them that you found yourself reluctant to go into, as in a hospital or a prison. The windows, much too small, were designed as if to keep out the light, which they did; and the artificial lighting everywhere was a dull, dirty orange. The whole place was murky, like a Victorian prison. My soul descended into my shoes as I wandered round it.

I had never felt such dismay as this in a new place. It was compounded when the candidates started discussing the colleges they were staying in. Some were positively excited about them. And when they started comparing them with Keble, or talked about the differing reputations of the colleges, it began to sound as if Keble were some sort of joke college, notorious not only for its ugliness but also for low standards of every other kind. People said it consisted largely of students who could not get in anywhere else. Everyone I spoke to had either put it down last or left it out altogether, because they would rather risk another try for a better college than accept a place at Keble. Their talk piled horror upon horror. Keble was, they said, churchy: something like a quarter of the undergraduates there were going to become vicars. The whole reputation of the place had something of Aldwych farce about it. If I went there, they said, I would find that all I had to do was say I was at Keble for people to laugh. (Every one of these things turned out to be true.)

By the end of my visit my hostility to Keble was implacable. I had made a ghastly mistake. Going there was unacceptable. I found myself grabbing in a new, wholly unexpected way at what Ralph Davis had been saying all along, that there was no chance of my passing the exam. Thank God, I thought. I told myself that,
with
his knowledge of my work, and his knowledge of Oxford, he was bound to be right. But what a close shave! I began to form plans of finding ways to keep myself if I had to leave school, and then trying to arrange through the school, through David Roberts, to take the exam to Balliol. Now that I knew how the system worked I felt I had a chance of doing something along those lines. Having met the other candidates, I felt that my hopes of getting into a good college were not less well grounded than most of theirs. I might not get a scholarship, but I was likely to be offered a place, which was all I needed.

Although by the time I left Oxford to return to Christ’s Hospital I wanted desperately to fail the exam, I had come only slowly and reluctantly to that conclusion. While writing my papers I had done so as if my life depended on it. And, prickly adolescent though I was, my predicament vis-à-vis my mother had aroused in me enough good sense not to try to show off, but to write as well as I could. I surpassed myself. The examiners later told David Roberts that I had written the best papers they had seen in more than ten years, since well before the war.

Two days after I got back to school I went in to breakfast and there on my place at the table was a telegram from Keble. They had given me their top scholarship. I was distraught. With a rush of blood to the head I plunged straight out of the dining hall to look for David and tell him that I was going to refuse the scholarship, and explain to him what I planned to do instead. By an extraordinary coincidence he was directly outside the door, crossing the lawn on his way to the masters’ common room, and I nearly knocked him over as I came rushing out of the door. I stood there pouring it all out, and he stood there listening to it. Then, for a long time, we walked very slowly up and down on the grass outside the dining hall, to and fro, to and fro, against the muffled backcloth noise of a thousand people having breakfast, while he talked me out of what I had decided to do.

I knew enough now, he said, to understand that there was always an element of chance in examinations. However probable a candidate’s success, it could never be guaranteed. One or two of the ablest pupils he had ever taught had been undone by exams. He was, indeed, virtually certain that I could get a place at Balliol, if not a scholarship; but he emphasised the word ‘virtually’. He could not be sure. Nor could I. That being so, just suppose I turned down the Keble scholarship, then sat for Balliol the following year, and was not offered a place? What would I do then? The truth, he said, was that
then
I would give my eye teeth for a scholarship to Keble. But then it would be too late. In any case, what mattered about a college was not what people said about it, and not even the quality of its architecture, but the quality of its teaching. I had written my papers in medieval history, and this meant that if I went to Keble I would have as my tutor one of the most distinguished medieval historians in Britain – certainly one of the two or three best in Oxford – the great J.E.A. Jolliffe. To be taught by him would be a privilege – and a privilege I could get only at Keble. Meanwhile, in the university at large, I would be just as free to do whatever else I wanted as I would be at any other college. Only plodders lived within their colleges. What I was being offered was something truly valuable, and it would be wrong to gamble it against the possibility of getting nothing at all. I would be allowing myself to be governed by false values. On this point he was withering. Imagine, he said, someone risking the very possibility of an Oxford education because he disliked the architecture of a college, or because other people made unpleasant jokes about it. What would I myself think of any other person who did that?

This conversation was a turning point in my young life. At one moment David said: ‘Don’t you go looking any horses …’ then stumbled and stopped, having taken the wrong turning with the words, so I said, ‘… gift horses in the mouth.’ Ever since then I recall this whole conversation whenever I hear that phrase.

My respect for David was beyond words, as was my affection for him, and I knew that his only concern was for what was in my best interests. Eventually my arguments against him dried up, and I felt myself, though somehow still against my will, being talked round. My Achilles heel was my lack of self-confidence. I caved in, and accepted the scholarship. In due course, after service in the army, I went up to Keble. What this whole story and its antecedents signify is that if Ralph Davis had simply left me alone, to follow my own choices along the path I was already on, I would have gone to Balliol and plunged straight into the study of philosophy, politics and economics – which, in retrospect, is obviously what would have been best for me – whereas, because of his double intervention, I went to Keble and spent my first three years at Oxford taking a degree in history (having been blocked at the last minute in my attempts to switch to music). I did then take a degree in philosophy, politics and economics, but it was only after these years-long diversions that I found the path that my own inclinations had pointed me to in the first place – and which was, for me, the right path. These were seriously wrong decisions; and in each case I fought against them hard at first, but in the end went along with them, so I carry a full share of responsibility. What started the whole mess was my mistaken assumption that staying on at school was dependent on my mother’s being willing to carry on paying for me after she had told me directly that she would not. It was a catalogue of errors on all sides; and their combined consequences were to cause me prolonged setbacks during my early years. I think I eventually got over their ill effects, but they did me a lot of harm in the short run.

Having written so harshly of the Keble of that time, I must in fairness add that the college has long ceased to be as it was then. Its rise to excellence was one of the supreme success stories of Oxford in the second half of the twentieth century.

Acceptance of the scholarship there changed everything else
for
me at once. In those post-war years the universities were straining to take in, direct from the armed services, people of widely differing ages who in normal times would have gone up in different years, but whose higher education had been interrupted or postponed by the war. Colleges were stretched to their limits, and to help themselves cope they were refusing to take most school-leavers straight from school. These were still subject to military service at eighteen, unless they received exemption on health or other grounds, so the universities required most of them to do their service before coming up as undergraduates. The standard life-path for my generation of students was to be at school till eighteen, then go into the army for two years, then go to university at the age of twenty.

This was the path that now opened before me. However, I had not yet got to my eighteenth birthday, and this prompted the hope that with luck I might be able to take advantage of a quirk in the system. If a conscript’s two years of service took him so far into a new academic year as to leave him unable to start university until the following year, but still with an awkward gap to fill (without occupation or source of income), he could apply for an early release, to catch the beginning of the earlier year. This was known as a Class B Release. I hoped that if I could persuade the authorities to call me up on the earliest legal date, which was my eighteenth birthday, that would maximise my chances of getting a Class B Release, and enable me to start at Oxford in October 1949 (it being now March 1948). It would be cutting it fine, because I would be missing half a year’s military service, and I was by no means sure that the authorities would allow so much. But it was worth having a go. I wrote and asked to be called up on my eighteenth birthday.

We were now under two weeks from the end of term, and my birthday was about to fall in the vacation, so now I knew I would be leaving school for good in less than a fortnight. All this was
disconcertingly
sudden. My relationship with Jill made it agonising too, even though we had always known that such a day must come. We had been very happy together, and our relationship was the one wholeheartedly good thing in my life at that time. But there seemed to be nothing else for it. I went around saying my goodbyes.

On the last night of every term there was a leaving service in chapel for those boys who would not be coming back. It was attended by the entire school and staff. I had always found it chokingly moving. I was liable to be got at emotionally by any leave-taking so, to me, even being only a bystander at the end of so long and deep an attachment had been distressing. Most boys left at the end of a summer term, this being the end of the school year, so the group of leavers then was always a big one; but now, at the end of the winter term, there were only two or three of us. The service consisted, as always, of the same valedictory prayers, readings and hymns; and while the last hymn of farewell was being sung, those of us who were leaving put down our hymn books and threaded our way past our fellows, out of our pews, and down the centre aisle to the altar, under the eyes of the whole school as they sang goodbye to us. There to receive us, with his back to the altar, stood the headmaster. Although we were so few, he used a voice that could be heard by everyone in the chapel to summon each of us by name to step forward and receive from his hands a large bible with the school’s crest on it in gold, and our name inside – obviously meant to be our bible for life. As a Grecian, I was given also a matching copy of the Book of Common Prayer. Then came what for me had always been the most devastating moment of all, the Charge. The school remained standing while the headmaster said to us, looking into the eyes of each in turn as he spoke: ‘I charge you never to forget the great benefits that you have received in this place, and in time to come according to your means to do all that you can to enable others to enjoy
the
same advantages; and remember that you carry with you, wherever you go, the good name of Christ’s Hospital. May God Almighty bless you in your ways and keep you in the knowledge of his love.’ My eyes were now full of tears, but luckily for me none of them spilled on to my cheeks. That scene remains with me as one of the most piercing of my life.