much about the Quaker school except that I was so afraid of a red-faced mathematics teacher that I often played truant, lying to mother. I was also a member of a little gang headed by a tough, athletic girl called Fiona.
The most important piece of luck for me was another key decision made by my mother. Irish law made it compulsory for small children to start learning either Irish (nationalism) or Latin (Catholicism). My mother saw no point in my learning a nearly extinct language spoken fluently only in the far west of the country, so Latin it was. She found a private tutor for me, Mrs Webster, a wonderful middle-aged woman who was the best teacher I have ever had. It may be hard to believe, but she made me fall in love with Latin, and realize that I had, from the start, a gift for languages.
Later I asked my mother: ‘Why Latin? It is even more extinct than Irish.’ Though she did not know Latin herself, she knew the right answer: ‘Latin is the mother of most Western European languages – French, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian – so if you know Latin, you will find all these languages easy. Besides, Latin has a great literature which every well-educated person should know.’
It turned out, however, that my mother had another reason for her decision. She believed that Irish schools of those days were not very good, and she wanted her two boys to go to a fine boarding-school in England which might help them get into a good ‘public school’ and later a university. In these educational institutions, Latin (and Greek) were essential elements in the curriculum.
So off we went, myself first and my younger brother a year later. It was quite an experience to go to England. We had to take a steamship for seven hours across the notoriously rough Irish Sea, with people vomiting all over the place. We would land at the little Welsh seaport, Fishguard, at about 2 a.m., trying to keep warm with cups of hot cocoa or Marmite, and then leave by the 4 a.m. train for London, getting there around ten o’clock. After a day or two at grandfather’s house, we would be sent by train to Scaitcliffe, our little school southeast of London.
I was only at this new school for two years, but they were intense because it specialized in ‘cramming’ little boys to get into the top ‘public schools’. The pressure also came from my mother, who told us that since she was a widow living mainly on a pension, we would not be able to go to one of these elite schools unless we could win scholarships. I duly took the nationally competitive exam for thirteen vacant scholarships at Eton (where my maternal grandfather had also won a scholarship towards the end of the nineteenth century), and to general astonishment came in at no. 12. My younger brother, more energetic and competitive, took the examination later and did much better than I.
Eton was a strange place for me. The vast majority of the pupils came from the English aristocracy and very rich business or banking families, with a scattering of brown-skinned ‘princes’ from the ex-colonies and the living protectorates. The scholarship boys mostly came from middle-class families; they lived together in a separate building, ate together, and had a special ‘medieval’ outfit they were obliged to wear. The majority, who lived in handsome ‘Houses’, we met only in class. These boys, whose backgrounds guaranteed them a comfortable or powerful future, saw no need to work hard, and openly despised the scholarship boys as ‘bookworms’ who were socially well below them. The scholarship boys, mostly intelligent, responded by mocking the ‘stupidity’ and snobbishness of their enemies. They had their own (intellectual) snobbishness, too, and bonded closely. I had never been in classes with so many intelligent boys.
It was a strange place in other ways too. Even in winter, we had to get up very early, take ice-cold showers, and then go to our first class before finally being allowed to eat terrible English breakfasts. Class followed class every morning and afternoon, interrupted only by regimented sports and evenings full of homework. One reason for this intensity, we came to realize, was the teachers’ firm belief in the old saying ‘The Devil finds work for idle hands’. They knew that in an all-boy environment, hormone-tossed teenagers would fall into different kinds of love and sexual relations unless they were constantly monitored and kept physically exhausted.
The curriculum was especially tough for the scholarship boys, who were aware they would probably have to win scholarships again in order to get into Oxford or Cambridge. But it was still quite old-fashioned. The core element was always language, Latin, Greek, French, German, and later a little Cold War Russian. But languages were backed by classes in ancient history, art history, bits of archaeology, and a lot of comparative modern history, with Britain at its heart. No anthropology, no sociology, no political science. Aside from the above, there was a lot of mathematics and, rather feebly, smatterings of chemistry, biology and physics. But no sex education, of course.
I remember only two teachers. One was Raef Payne, a young man who taught English literature and had the temerity to introduce us to T. S. Eliot (by then an old man, and a Nobel Prize winner). This was our only taste of post-Edwardian literature at all. The usual English literature syllabus mainly covered up to the late nineteenth century, and the teaching of poetry in class stuck to certain set patterns like rhyme with limited length. It was highly unusual then to be taught the poetry of Eliot, which did not follow the standard conventions. The young English teacher also managed the annual school play, usually Shakespeare, and handled well the whistles and screams that always came when a boy was assigned to play any of the female roles. ‘Don’t be idiots,’ he would say. ‘In Shakespeare’s time all actors of female parts were boys like you.’
The other memorable teacher was our intimidating Head Master, Sir Robert Birley, who, surprisingly, taught an excellent class on poetry that greatly increased my appreciation of verse. Rather than simply comparing several poems and analyzing their different lengths or rhyming styles, he would pick a poem by Kipling, for example, analyse its composition and explain its historical background. It was also he who taught me that beauty and virtue need not be the same and that poets who wrote splendid poems were not necessarily wonderful people.
In this environment, my brother and I moved in different directions. He concentrated on modern history, mainly but not entirely European, while I focused on language and literature. The eye-opener for me was a systematic, if conservative, study of French literature, from late medieval times up to the end of the nineteenth century. It is a notorious fact that French and English are the two European languages hardest to translate into each other. I felt the difficulty right away, and was enthralled by being allowed to enter a completely un-English world.
Rather massive reading in the literature of antiquity had a different effect. It felt like bathing in two grand non-Christian civilizations. Because we scholarship boys were regarded as the school’s intellectual elite, we were allowed to read almost anything, even erotic passages, though the teachers often skipped them out of embarrassment. The ancient cultures we were trained to admire and the contemporary culture into which we were being educated were miles apart. While we were taught to be ashamed of, and hide, our bodies, the statues of ancient Greece were almost entirely and unashamedly nude, and very beautiful. Homosexual behaviour in 1950s England was still a criminal offence, and could put people in prison for years, but ancient mythology was full of stories about gods falling in love with human boys or young men. Ancient history offered plenty of examples of young lovers going bravely to war together and dying in each other’s arms. Then there was a gorgeous goddess of love, and a naughty little boy-god with a bow and arrow to back her up. Christianity seemed dull and narrow-minded in contrast.
One other notable aspect was that we were seriously taught how to write. We had to practise writing poetry of our own in Latin, and translate English poems into Latin. We also studied carefully the great masters of English prose from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth. Finally, we had to memorize and publicly recite many poems in different languages. To this day, I still have in my head poems in Latin, Greek, French, German, Russian and even Javanese.
I did not know it at the time, but I was lucky to be among almost the last cohort to have these experiences. By the late 1950s, the practice of memorizing poems had almost died out. Classical studies in the old broad sense, considered as the basis for a humane education, was also being pushed aside by subjects thought more useful for careers, the professions and modern life in general. Moreover, coarse Anglo-American was becoming the only ‘world language’, at a great loss to the planet.
I did