Memoirs

I realized, of course, that The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Dr Faustus was Marlowe’s masterpiece. The closing scene, in which Faustus faces his death and damnation, is of Shakespearian quality.

O lente, lente currite noctis equi!2

The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike,

The devil will come, and Faustus must be damn’d.

Oh I’ll leap up to heav’n!

– who pulls me down? See where Christ’s blood streams in the firmament:

One drop of blood will save me; oh, my Christ!

My imagination was so gorged with Marlowe that, when I went back to Charterhouse, I wrote two full-length tragedies in my version of Elizabethan blank verse. The plots were full of murders, and were placed in sixteenth-century Italy, about which I knew next to nothing. I remember that one of the more sinister characters was called Bagnio. These plays are lost, which I cannot regret.

Unfortunately, jaundice is a disease which produces clinical depression, and I suffered for the next two years from an adolescent depression which, though intermittent, was at times acute. I remember a degree of exhaustion which made it hard to rise from a chair, even when I was sitting in a draught. In such a depression, as many will know only too well, all pleasure, interest and zest disappear from life. At the time I had never seen television, but the effect of depression is to grey the world, as though one was turning the colour control from vivid to black and white.

The school authorities were naturally disturbed, but fortunately they were flexible. I sometimes went to class, and sometimes not. I often stayed in bed until lunchtime, and occasionally did not get up at all. Admittedly I read a lot in bed, so the time was not wholly wasted. Somehow I stumbled through School Certificate with respectable but not scholarly marks. The two matrons at Verites, Mrs Lewis and Mrs Peel-Yates, fluctuated between wondering whether I was malingering or was so seriously ill that they should no longer take responsibility for me. They were, however, very kind.

The school doctor, a healthy-minded man, was convinced that I was a malingerer who ought to be restored to ordinary school discipline. My physical symptoms, which were not extreme, centred on my sinuses. He sent me to a Harley Street ear, nose and throat specialist, Mr Gill Carey, who had the background of an international rugby player, from New Zealand, or perhaps from Australia. He was, in my life, the good physician who may have saved my sanity. He examined the X-rays and shone a torch into the back of my mouth. He saw that my sinuses were in no great disorder. I left the room; he then told my mother that I was reasonably healthy in my sinuses but tired and run down; that I was not a malingerer, but should not have any pressure put on me; that I should be permanently excused from games and the Officers’ Training Corps, but might, if I wished, play an occasional game of cricket in the summer, as I seemed to enjoy that. He wrote a letter to the school doctor to that effect.

That solved the school and the games problem, and thereafter the depression gradually abated, though it was only at Oxford, six or seven years later, that I had the last attack of it which I can remember. During the more acute phase of the depression I had suicidal ideas. I talked about suicide to my friends, including Gerald Priestland, who later became the much-admired religious correspondent of the BBC. Suicide ends the career of Somerset Lloyd Jones in Simon Raven’s Arms for Oblivion novels, a character which is loosely based on the less agreeable aspects of my schoolboy personality.

I argued with Bob Arrowsmith that both Socrates and Jesus Christ had committed suicide, because they could both have avoided their deaths; it was not his sort of argument, and it embarrassed him, though he tried to frame a reply. I never actually made any attempt at suicide, but I can remember looking at my father’s wartime pistol, and wondering how it worked. I can also remember a moment in Charterhouse chapel when I simply wished that I could be removed from an earth which I found so pointless and returned to what seemed to me a lost state of happiness. I could not understand what I was doing in this strange and ugly century, when the eighteenth century had been so much better.

Literature continued to be a great consolation. I read Edgar Allan Poe, a sinister though romantic author I cannot now stand. I also read Shakespeare, and when, in 1943, I saw Gielgud’s Hamlet, the Shakespearian melancholy – ‘Oh that this too solid flesh would melt’ – summed up my mood precisely. So did Gray’s Elegy, which I read in a state of acute depression. Gray’s elegiac depression offers a benign and calming alternative; one is still depressed, but in a nostalgic style.

Undoubtedly depression affected, and even dominated, my period at school. Nowadays it would probably have been diagnosed and I would have been put on some mood-altering pill, which might or might not have improved it. I am, however, glad to have experienced it, and even gladder that it has not so far recurred, as I rather expected it to, in later life. It gave me an understanding of the shadowy side of my own nature, and a better sympathy with the tragic condition of human life. I think it gave me somewhat more insight than I might have had into the gusty emotional weather of adolescence in others. Depression – if it is survived – is an exploration as well as a disaster.

In my worst year, from the autumn of 1942 to the summer of 1943, I was taught by a most sympathetic master, V. S. H. Russell, nicknamed ‘Sniffy’. He was not a very good teacher in his class, but he was a brilliant teacher outside the classroom. He was a man of wide learning, and sympathetic to anyone who was going through a bad time. He was the housemaster of Hodgsonites, and I used to drop round to his house after school to talk over school gossip, in which he delighted, and about literature and the progress of the war, where, of course, many of his recent pupils were fighting.

Arrowsmith and Russell were both classicists. They believed that the study of the languages of Latin and Greek provided the only sound basis of education; this belief had dominated public school and grammar school education in England since the time of Erasmus and Linacre. Up to my fifteenth birthday, I received, without the floggings which used to accompany it, the same classical education as John Locke would have had at Westminster under the great Busby, Horace Walpole would have had at Eton, or as my father had under Thomas Ethelbert Page at Charterhouse. It was more limited in scope than modern systems of education, more vigorous in its mental discipline and more intense. I am glad that I belonged to the last generation educated in the culture of ancient Greece and Rome.

The grammar and public school classical teaching retained its imperial purpose when I was at school. Clifton and Charterhouse were a practical training for, among other things, governing nations and fighting wars. This faded away within a few years of the independence of India, which brought the British Empire to an end. Britain no longer needed to train boys to become colonial officials; deference to authority slipped away from the national culture and education.

By the end of my second term in the Classical Under Sixth it became clear to me that I was never going to make a classical scholar, even of the humblest kind. Nevertheless, there had to be a battle if I was to change my specialization. The classical side of Brooke Hall, which is the masters’ common room at Charterhouse, would not easily give up. Arrowsmith advised strongly against a change; Russell, as was his nature, was less dogmatic; Irvine opposed it though with decreasing confidence. My housemaster, Jasper Holmes, was a scientist, but was well aware of the strength of the classical side in Brooke Hall, from which he had sometimes suffered his own reverses in Charterhouse politics.

I wanted to switch to the History Under Sixth, which would lead naturally to Robert Birley’s History Sixth. That in its turn would lead to reading history at Oxford. I was increasingly strongly convinced that that was what I ought to do. However bad I was at the classics, I was good at writing essays, and had always read history.

During the period of this minor, but, to me, crucial, struggle, an incident occurred which nearly led to my changing my house as well as my form. There was a Jewish boy in Verites whose family background was unhappy, and whose conduct was erratic. He was so unhappy that at one time he tried to set fire to the school pillar box. He was nonetheless intelligent, and he was a friend of mine. I remember once going to a meal with his mother. Perhaps she had pressed him to bring a friend home. I knew therefore that his home was not happy, and that he resented about equally the authority of Charterhouse and that of his non-Jewish stepfather who, even to me, lacked charm.

In Verites he was unpopular. No doubt there was anti-Semitism in it. He was accused of being dirty, of not having taken a bath for a long time. This was not all that unusual; hot water was rationed and we only got one bath a week, so we must all have been pretty grubby. A group of sixteen-year-olds dragged him to the bathroom, stripped him and put him in the bath.

I was present, protesting and horrified at what was happening. I was not able to prevent it, though my protests may have helped to shorten the ordeal. I went to Holmes, as the house-master, who took less action against the bullies than I thought appropriate. I wrote to my mother, saying that I could not tolerate staying in a house where this sort of thing could happen. In this there was no doubt some desire to take advantage of the situation for my own ends, as well as a genuine horror and shock at the Jewish boy’s humiliation. I suggested that I should be transferred to Birley’s house, Saunderites.

Strangely, it did not occur to any of us that there was a parallel between the ritual humiliation of my friend, who had come to hate Charterhouse, and Nazi anti-Semitism. The event happened, after all, in 1943. I did raise the issue of bullying and the issue of anti-Semitism. I did not myself raise the parallel of Nazi anti-Semitism. Neither Holmes, Birley, nor, indeed, the bullies saw it in that way. The bullies themselves were not particularly thuggish boys, as I remember. They seemed to be acting out some very primitive role, like chimpanzees setting on a weakened companion in the rainforest.

I am not sure how closely my bid to move house, which failed, and my bid to move from Classics to History, which succeeded, were linked. I do not regret having stayed in Verites; it was not my spiritual home, and Holmes was not a particularly sympathetic housemaster, but we had a mutual respect, and I was certainly more trouble to him than he was to me. Later, when Birley made me Head of the School, Holmes refused to make me Head of Verites, a disjunction of office which had last happened when William Beveridge, later the author of the Beveridge Report, was Head of the School. That, too, suited me perfectly well. I liked the prestige of being Head of the School, but was happy to forgo the chore of running Verites.

The move to studying history was a joy and a turning point, one of the crucial decisions of my life, all the better for having been achieved after a struggle. Robert Birley, later to become the head of education in the British Zone of Germany and Headmaster of Eton, was an inspired teacher of history for a sixth-form student. Even then, I took a Tory view of the world, more so than I do now, and was always willing to argue the Tory case. Disraeli was right; Gladstone was wrong, even about Ireland. Birley found that amusing; he was himself a man of liberal views, later to distinguish himself in the struggle against apartheid in South African education. Some of his liberalism was bound to rub off on me, as it did on James Prior, who was in the same History Sixth, and as it had on Edward Boyle, an earlier Eton pupil of Birley’s, who, as a rising Conservative Minister, resigned over Suez.

The summer of 1944, when I had my sixteenth birthday, was a happier one. The depression was still lurking, but was seldom too unpleasant when the sun was shining and there was good cricket to be watched on the Green. My closest friend at Charterhouse, one of the closest friends I have ever had, was Clive Wigram. Clive was the son of a distinguished Jewish doctor, who had cared for Asquith in his last illness. Because he was Jewish, Clive had been sent to the United States early in the war, but his father fell ill and he came back in 1942, earlier than most of the refugee children. He was more mature than the rest of us, and was a year older than I was; he found it difficult to take schoolboy life seriously, and even Robert Birley misread his character as a result. Birley mistook Clive’s maturity for cynicism.

Clive and I would go for gentle walks in the Charterhouse grounds. On one such walk we were discussing the fact that we had not been invited to join the Literary and Political Society, an ancient Charterhouse society. The reason for our exclusion was that the Lit and Pol was run by Harry Iredale, a senior French master with snowy white hair, who disliked us; he had never been made a housemaster because of his progressive views, which were largely derived from George Bernard Shaw. He saw Clive and myself as sinister and reactionary; we saw him as pretentious and superficial. The poor man had suffered a tragedy, some time in the later 1920s, when he had taken a boy out punting on the River Way. The boy had fallen overboard and been drowned.

As we walked beside Under Green, the idea came to us of setting up our own literary society. I am not sure who had the idea first; it came into our heads together. We thought it should cover much the same subjects as the Lit and Pol, but from a more conservative point of view. We decided that it should be set up so as to capture the high ground of Carthusian prestige. We would match Iredale by two patrons from Brooke Hall; one was to be Russell, always a willing co-conspirator in school politics, the other Mr Thomson, the senior science master. He introduced me to Sung Dynasty Chinese pottery, of which he had a fine collection.

Clive and I discussed an appropriate name, and decided to call it the Thackeray Society. William Makepeace Thackeray, the Victorian novelist, was one of the most eminent of the Carthusian authors; there is a long-standing Thackeray Prize for an English essay, which I was later to win, narrowly beating Simon Raven into second place. We thought that the school would soon accept the Thackeray Society as an established institution.

I remember some of the early meetings the society had, usually in Russell’s drawing room at Hodgsonites. Clive and I had selected the best of the next year’s group of boys, most of them scholars. One of them was Dick Taverne, the brightest of the scholars of the year below mine. We took entrants a year younger than the Lit and Pol, during their summer in the fifth form, so that we could catch the best candidates before the Lit and Pol could get hold of them.

My own contributions were marked by my interest in a classical and even stoical human culture. I persuaded the society to have a play-reading session in which we read Addison’s Cato, on the grounds that Addison had been an Old Carthusian. Cato is a play which justifies suicide in a noble cause, and that may have influenced my choice; I think it was more the stoicism which attracted me.

’Tis not in mortals to command success,

But we’ll do more, Sempronius; we’ll deserve it.

I still feel an attachment to the play, which has many connections for me. It is a link to the Thackeray Society, to Russell and Clive Wigram. It is a link to my youth, and what it was like to be sixteen. It is a link to George Berkeley, my favourite Christian philosopher, and to Alexander Pope. Both Berkeley and Pope were present on the first night the play was performed in April 1713.

On that first night, the part of Marcia, Cato’s daughter, was played by Anne Oldfield, the leading actress of the period from 1710 to 1730. I think Pope fell in love with her and was rebuffed, since he attacked her more than once in barbed verse. She had an illegitimate son, Charles Churchill, who married Maria Walpole, Robert Walpole’s daughter by Mary Skerritt, also born out of wedlock. My son-in-law, David Craigie, is a descendant of that romantic match between an illegitimate Churchill and an illegitimate Walpole. For me, Addison’s Cato is ringed about with the happy coincidences of life. Four of our grandchildren are descendants of Anne Oldfield.

In the early autumn of 1944, I discussed with Robert Birley the prospect of going to university. I knew that I wanted to go to Oxford. I was drawn by its romantic and political character and slightly repelled by the intellectual puritanism of Cambridge. I had no strong family connection with any particular Oxford college; my father had gone to University College, but his uncles had gone to various other colleges, and my ancestor John Rees had gone to Jesus. Birley recommended that I should try for a scholarship at Balliol, his own old college; he had himself won the Brackenbury Scholarship, which had been held by various other well-known figures, such as Cyril Connolly and Hilaire Belloc. In terms of prestige, the Brackenbury was then the best known history scholarship at Oxford.

I was only just over sixteen and had been a history specialist for no more than a term and a half. Birley warned me that I was too young and did not really know enough history to get a scholarship, but suggested I should enter for Balliol, to see what the examination was like. I was delighted with the challenge.

The examination was taken over a couple of days, and the candidates stayed in college. I remember how cold it was, with an early December snow covering the paving stones outside the Sheldonian. I took with me a copy of Richard Hooker’s Ecclesiastical Politie, a first edition which I had bought from George McLeish of Little Russell Street. I imagine that I found an opportunity to work in some quotation from Hooker, intended to show the breadth of my reading. The set essay was a quotation from Shakespeare’s King Henry VIII, in which Cardinal Wolsey says to Cromwell: ‘Fling away ambition, by that sin fell the angels’. At the age of sixteen, I was not at all willing to fling away ambition, which was my ruling passion at the time. I wrote an essay defending ambition; how I got over the problem of the fall of Lucifer I do not now remember.

There was an oral interview, in which my confident assertions were gently probed. Two young Balliol dons, still serving in the army, took part in it: Richard Southern, a serious-minded medieval historian, who later became the President of St John’s, and Christopher Hill, the Marxist historian of the seventeenth century, who later became Master of Balliol. Southern was too ascetic, too serious, too medieval for me, and I was too frivolous, too partisan, too eighteenth-century for him. I was never to find it easy to learn from him, which was my fault; he never found much pleasure in trying to teach me, which was also my fault, since he was both a good historian and a good man.

Christopher Hill was much more my type of historian. As a good Marxist he looked for broad explanations of historic events. He saw, and taught, history as a series of challenges and responses, which could be explained by identifying underlying social and economic forces. He had an ebullient Celtic temperament. Although we were on different sides of the ideological fence, and disapproved of each other quite strongly, we were also quite fond of each other in an adversarial way. I have always been grateful for his Marxist teaching; Marxism is only one of the ways of looking at history, and is only partly true, but it is a form of analysis all historians need to have experienced at some point.

The history dons sat round the fire in the Dean’s room, and made me feel welcome; I knew I had done quite well. I was back in Somerset on my Christmas holiday with my parents when the telegram arrived, telling me that I had won the Brackenbury. I had won it, as I now think, because I had the basic qualities not of a good historian, but of a good journalist. I had trenchant opinions; I wrote with vigour at short notice on any subject; I was manifestly clever, without being particularly consistent, accurate or profound. I showed promise. Indeed, my whole educational career was based on showing promise.

When I received the telegram I was filled with delight; I felt like Marlowe’s Tamburlaine. ‘Is it not passing brave to be a King, And ride in triumph through Persepolis?’ Was it not passing brave to have won the Brackenbury Scholarship at the age of sixteen? I have never felt such an uprush of pleasure at any subsequent success, at becoming President of the Oxford Union or Editor of The Times, agreeable though success always is. It is the moment of success which gives the greatest satisfaction; the life of a Prime Minister must be anxious and exhausting, but the hour of appointment, or of winning a General Election, must feel very good. The hour I got that telegram from Balliol was good in that way. Of course, if one is going to have a success, sixteen is an enjoyable time to have it.

I paid for it, in a way I have not had to pay for any subsequent success. I went back to Charterhouse in the January, having achieved a Balliol scholarship and having at least a couple of terms of relaxation ahead of me. The old depression came back, more severely than it was ever to come again. I sat in my study at Verites, unable to concentrate, unable to take pleasure in anything, wholly lacking in energy, let alone zest. I had not expected to react so badly to something which had given me so much delight. The black mood passed as spring came, but for a couple of months I felt lower than I had felt high on receiving the telegram.

That year I edited The Carthusian, which was a senior position in the school. I spent a good deal of my leisure time with Clive Wigram, on whose judgement I greatly relied. I remember a walk with him when we discussed the relative evils of the Hitler and Stalin regimes. I said that Stalin’s was the more totalitarian of the two, and that a private individual had a better chance of preserving some normality in Germany rather than Russia. Clive agreed, but pointed out that such an option would not be open to him, because he was a Jew, and Hitler would kill him. At that time, early in 1945, we still had no real knowledge of the Holocaust, but Jews knew that Hitler was a Jew killer. It was only when British troops liberated Belsen in May of 1945, and the first photographs of the starving or the dead appeared, that we began in Britain to realize that the evil that had happened was even worse than the war itself.

In the summer, the war in Europe came to an end. Rather to my surprise, Birley asked me to stay on for an extra term and be Head of School. I had not been considered a likely candidate for the job, and, in any case, everyone assumed I was leaving. I was conspicuously unathletic. I was a thorn in the side of my house-master, who was opposed to the whole idea. I was seen in the school as a weedy intellectual, and there were doubts as to whether I could maintain discipline. Few headmasters other than Birley would have considered it. I think that part of his motivation was the desire to show that an intellectual could be Head of School.

I do not think that I made a particularly good one. I compensated for my apparent lack of authority by being too decisive in some cases. The benefit of my being Head of School was not to Charterhouse but to me. I would previously have thought of myself as the sort of person who edits the school magazine but does not become the Head of School. My self-image came to include the idea of exercising authority. I have never subsequently found it worrying to handle the political relationships in such positions of authority as I have held. As Editor of The Times or as Chairman of the Arts Council, I have found the simple leadership skills which I first learned at Charterhouse were useful, and if I made some of the mistakes of the learning process while I was still at school, that is as it should be.