Growing Up In a War (40 page)

The teacher whose classes I enjoyed most taught us English: a very young woman called Helen Tyrrell. She was preparing us for School Certificate, the rough equivalent of the more recent GCSE. There was always a Shakespeare play, in our case
Richard II
, and a set book, which was usually in prose but in our case was Book Four of Palgrave’s anthology
The Golden Treasury
, the section devoted to the Romantic poets.

I had an odd relationship to the Shakespeare play. I already loved his work with a passion, but had never been a reader of it, indeed never thought of it as something intended to be read. I had always taken it for granted that theatre was a performing art, and that plays existed only in performance: their texts were recipes for performances, no more intended to be read for their own sakes than food recipes. Shakespeare himself never published any of his plays, though he published, and was very keen to publish, his poems. The plays existed to be acted, to be seen, not read. On the stage they came alive: on the page they were not there. So this whole business of treating them as if they were reading matter seemed to me to go against their nature. During school holidays I was seeing Shakespeare played by the greatest actors of the day, and finding the experience thrilling beyond words; but here at school I was being confronted with slabs of cold print and told that this was Shakespeare. If only I could have seen
Richard II
, which unfortunately I never had, I could have re-enacted bits of it in my head each time I read some of the text. As things were,
I
felt like a gourmet who sits down with relish to eat his dinner and finds himself handed the recipes to read instead. I got to know
Richard II
as a text without knowing it as a play, and felt my relationship to it unnatural and alienating. This spoiled the play for me for decades. For half my life it remained the odd one out among Shakespeare’s plays, the only one I could not spontaneously relate to. It was only after I had seen it many times that I was able to respond to it in the same way as I did to the others.

The pleasure for me of Miss Tyrrell’s classes lay in the Romantic poets. I was, or had been, a bit of a Romantic poet myself, and they came as meat and drink to me. I swilled their stuff down, licking my chops between gulps. Some of the poems, or chunks of them, have been part of me ever since – a quotation from one was the title of my last book. Miss Tyrrell’s approach helped this process by being fresh and engaging, unlike many of the fuddy-duddies we were used to being taught by. She had come to Christ’s Hospital straight out of Oxford, at the age of twenty-two, in the full flush of enthusiasm for her subject, and this was her first teaching experience. She was only a few years older than I was, but I did not think of her in that way. For all her youth and sympathetic manner she was an authority figure merely by virtue of being one of the teachers. But one day, when I was talking to her after a class, it came out that I was a reader of modern poetry, and at once she started referring to Eliot and Auden. It was the first time I had heard these names on anyone else’s lips, and it gave them an independent reality they had not had before. I became excited and voluble. She asked me to come and talk to her in her study: to have anything like a serious conversation we needed to be somewhere other than a classroom. And there she gave me, in brief outline, an overview of contemporary poetry. What she said caused me to realise that, by what seemed to me sheer chance, I was already reading the most interesting of the writers she talked about – but of course they had been pre-selected
by
the school library. She even knew about Dylan Thomas, who was younger than the others – little more than thirty at that time – and when I left her she lent me one of his books. So now I knew someone who not only knew about these poets but actually bought their books. Scarcely had this happened when Dylan Thomas published a new volume called
Deaths and Entrances
, and I bought it myself, and thought it contained his best poems of all.

I took the School Certificate in eight subjects, half of them languages. The subjects were Latin, French, German, English language, English literature, history, elementary mathematics and advanced mathematics. When I went to the headmaster’s classroom at the beginning of the following term to find out what my results were, there was nothing but a row of misprints beside my name. I sought out a master and told him that the copying-out of my results had been garbled. He peered at the results book, disappeared to the school’s office, came back, and said no, this was not an error, these were my results. The possibility of these being my actual results had not occurred to me, even when I saw them on paper. I had got a distinction in every subject except the two mathematics papers, in which I had credits. I looked at the other boys’ results to see if any were like mine. None were, except for those of a boy called Pickens: he had seven distinctions to my six. I was dumbfounded. For days I was unable to talk about it even to my friends, being in a state of shock. Something basic to my conception of myself had been shaken to the foundations. I failed to take the new realisation properly on board, and made what was in essence the same mistake at Oxford six or seven years later. Then, when I found myself being given a long viva for my degree in philosophy, politics and economics, I took it utterly for granted that this meant I was a borderline case between a second and a third, and it was only later that I learnt to my incredulity
that
I had been vivaed for a first. At no time in my life have I thought of myself as an academic person. At school especially I found most academic work boring. The small part of it that interested me I would work at joyfully, but for the rest I did as little as would keep me out of trouble with my teachers – and did not always manage to do that. I had no desire to shine in class, or come top, or win prizes: that whole mode of being seemed to me a dim one. When prizes started coming my way, towards the end of my school career, they seemed to me unrelated to my interests, in fact unrelated to
me
.

After School Certificate there were two or three subjects in which my teachers thought I was bound to get a place at Oxbridge, and each wanted me to specialise in his, but by that time I knew which one I was going to pursue. This was history, though I chose it not because of the subject but because of its teacher, David Roberts. He had the reputation of being, and certainly was, the best teacher in the school. He did not teach his specialists in a classroom but gave them individual tuition, as if they were already at Oxbridge and he was their tutor. Each met with him alone at frequent intervals and would be given individual tasks, individual essay subjects, individual reading lists. The boy would then spend history periods working by himself in the school library, and would write his essay. During these periods Roberts would always be around in the library, seeing how each one was getting on, available to all. When an essay was finished the boy would have another session with Roberts, and they would go through the work together, the boy being also questioned about his reading. In all these respects the life of a history specialist was quite unlike that of other boys in the school. For that reason Roberts would take on only those who he thought could handle the independence, these being by no means always the cleverest. Some of the other masters resented him for being so presumptuous and highfalutin as to carry on so differently from themselves, but the fact that he
got
nearly all his boys into Oxbridge, including some unpromising and even recalcitrant material, when none of the others had anything like so good a track record, made it difficult for them to do more than snipe.

Roberts’s methods attracted me immensely, and for the rest of my time at Christ’s Hospital I was a history specialist. Two-thirds of my school periods were devoted to history, the rest to languages, and only the latter pursued in a classroom. The history I was launched on was unusual. Roberts required all his boys to study chiefly, though not exclusively, medieval European history, and I found this a revelation. Being taught by him was a milestone experience in my life. His particular aim was to unlock the capacity for self-development of each individual; and he could find a boy’s hidden potential like a water-diviner. Other teachers would nearly always encourage a boy to do what he was best at, or, failing that, what he was most interested in, and thus to develop along the lines that came easiest to him. David explored until he found what a boy was capable of being interested in but had never turned his mind to, and then put him on to it, thus enlarging him, his mind and his outlook, yet always on a basis that was rooted in the boy himself, and was not factitious. In the course of questioning me about my passions for music, theatre and poetry, he realised that I had never woken up to the visual arts. So he came one day and sat beside me in a corner of the library with an art book full of high-quality reproductions of Old Masters, and spread it open before the two of us. Our conversation went something like this.

‘What would you say about that painting?’

Me silent, gawping at the picture. Nothing to say.

‘You’re looking straight at it, so you must be able to say
something
. Say anything that comes into your head, it doesn’t matter how obvious. Don’t be afraid of being silly.’

Me: ‘Well, this half of the painting is light and that half’s dark.’

‘Good. Now why do you think the artist has done that?’

Me speechless again. Mind blank.

‘Well, what effect does it have?’

Me: ‘Well, contrast, I suppose.’

‘Good. Now why might the artist have wanted to get an effect of contrast? What, for instance, could he be contrasting here?’

And from such laboured beginnings, with painful, bumpy slowness, we were off. He drew me in. For the first time I started looking at a picture and thinking.

He judged that, for me, it was best to start by getting me to
read
a picture.

‘These hands over here are beautifully painted, in very fine detail. But those over there are hardly more than sketched in. And, after all, it’s the same picture. Why do you suppose that is?’

And then, in response to yet another blank-minded silence: ‘Well, how does it affect your eye now that you notice it?’

He soon had me fascinated, then excited; and by an ingenious selection of pictures he managed to give the whole process a relationship to the history I was supposed to be studying. Next time I was in London during the school holidays I was off to the National Gallery and the Tate, and other galleries, to look at originals. I had never been in the habit of going to art galleries, preferring museums: nor was it something my family ever did. So it was almost a new world: at any rate, the eyes with which I was seeing it were new. From that day to this I make for the main art gallery in any town I visit. Paintings do not have for me the compulsion that music and theatre do, but they have enriched my life nonetheless: the interest I take in them is real, and so is the pleasure I get from them.

Another quite different thing that David Roberts did for me was to challenge some of the basics of my thinking, not so much my assumptions as my concepts. When I spouted my schoolboy socialism at him he would say something like: ‘What do you mean when you say equality? Equality in what respect? Equality
of
opportunity? Equality of possessions? Equality of income? Equality of status? Any two of the above? All?’ And needless to say I did not really know what I meant by equality, except in the most vague and emotional way. He did the same to me with the concept of freedom, which had always been my idée fixe, and I found this an impossible nut to crack. At first the sort of thing I would say was: ‘Everybody knows what freedom is. It’s silly to
ask
me what it is. Freedom is just freedom, that’s all.’ He had no difficulty in showing me that not only were there various sorts of freedom but that some were incompatible with others, so that when different people talked about freedom they were sometimes in conflict with one another. Which sort, he wanted to know, did I stand for?

In the early stages of this my reaction was one of frustration. I had never been challenged to analyse my own thinking in such a way, and had no real idea how to do it. I did not see how one
could
do it, or be expected to do it. Your basic concepts, it seemed to me, were what you started from, so they were, as I might now say, irreducible. From that starting point it was your emotions, nourished by your moral sense, that drove your ideas forward. Of course you had to respect logic on the way; but so long as you did that, it was feeling that was all-important; and this seemed to me how things should be. My commitment to the ideals of freedom and equality was so passionate that the mere questioning of them presented itself to me as an act of hostility, to which I reacted with resentment, a resentment that easily became anger. David was quite unruffled by this, in fact he understood perfectly what I was going through, and he was putting me through it deliberately. For me it was a process of real emotional difficulty, painful, slow. It was years before I got through it, and there is an important sense in which such a process can never be completed; but in me it was started by David. It was the beginning of my higher education. This is a process that most people do not embark on
until
they go to a university – and not always then. The awakening left me with a lifelong feeling of indebtedness to him, as the person who made me start thinking, very much against my will. Being a schoolmaster, he always linked his teaching to reading of some kind, but he never allowed anyone just to start from books: he always made sure first of all that they were infected with a serious problem that arose from the breakdown of their own immune system, and only then pointed them towards a book or books in which they, eager by now to get some help with the problem, might find it. In my case it was John Stuart Mill’s
On Liberty
, which I guzzled greedily.