Boston. My father had been cold at Charterhouse; I was cold. Nevertheless, I was quite happy in my first year. I was a fag in Verites, which was my house; ‘fag’ was then an innocent word, which meant that I had to perform minor domestic tasks and run errands for the monitors. My own house monitor soon discovered that he would do better to polish his own shoes than have me polish them.
I was in the scholars’ form, and found myself sitting next to Simon Raven, on the alphabetical principle. He was as good a classical scholar as I was a bad one, and was soon moved up a year into the fifth form. The quiet and elderly form master of the Remove, Mr Lake, had taught my father when he was a young man, and shared my enthusiasm for the novels of Anthony Trollope.
My great-grandfather had been to Charterhouse, in the time of Thackeray; my grandfather had been to Charterhouse, less than ten years before the school moved out of London and down to Godalming in Surrey; my father had been to Charterhouse in the years before the First World War. None of them had been happy; all had received a sound classical education and retained a loyalty to their old school. For much of the time I was not happy, or in good physical health, but I too retain an affectionate loyalty for Charterhouse.
Institutions are like people; one has a temperamental affinity with them, or a temperamental unease. I doubt if I have an ‘anima naturaliter Catholica’, a naturally Catholic soul. Left to its own devices, my soul is rather inclined to Protestant liberalism. I do, however, have a naturally Catholic temperament; I enjoy the personality of the Church of Rome, as well as being thankful for its graces. I love the ancient institutions of Somerset. I love the institutions of the United States. In another life I would have liked to have been born in Boston, preferably in the 1860s, studied at Harvard and – if my career flourished – become a Senator for Massachusetts during the Presidency of Theodore Roosevelt. I related reasonably well to Clifton College, saw the appeal of an Eton I did not go to, am loyal to Charterhouse, rather disliked Balliol – which returned the compliment – but enjoyed Oxford, and particularly the Oxford Union, had a liberal education at the Financial Times, worked well with the Sunday Times, have had by far my greatest professional loyalty to The Times, seriously disliked the institutional BBC, was happy and useful at the Arts Council and enjoy a peaceful old age in the House of Lords. Balliol and the BBC, out of all those institutions, I did not take to. They were not my cup of tea, and most decidedly I was never theirs.
One story illustrates how Charterhouse sees the world. My daughter Charlotte, who was a sweet rebel as a teenager, had left Cheltenham Ladies College in disfavour; it was, in my view, the College’s fault rather than hers. I remember writing to the Chairman of the Board of Governors a letter which contained the sentence: ‘You make the girls unhappy and then punish them for being so’. We decided that Charlotte should, if possible, take her A levels at Charterhouse. They received a letter from Cheltenham, which, apparently, warned them against Charlotte in strident terms. Their reaction was to decide at once that they ought to take her. I was an Old Carthusian, which constituted a bond; Charlotte’s education was in difficulty; they obviously ought to help. That is how sympathetic grown-ups think. It is not how all schools would have reacted. So Charlotte became the fifth generation of Rees-Moggs to go to the school of Addison, Steele, Blackstone, Wesley, Thackeray, Max Beerbohm and Robert Graves.
At the start of the autumn term of 1941, the war was shuddering towards its tipping point. Germany had invaded Russia, and at first had been having every success. The Russian winter was holding the German army before Moscow. Towards the end of my first term at Charterhouse, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, and the United States entered the war. After that, there was never any doubt who was going to win. Of course, Pearl Harbor came as a great relief to the British; the Japanese had given us an invincible ally. Despite the loss of Malaya and then of Singapore, the turn happened in the last months of 1941, and every schoolboy knew it.
At Christmas the scholars were promoted to the Special Remove, which was then taught by a charismatic man, Bob Arrowsmith. He would have regarded the word ‘charismatic’ as new-fangled, possibly blasphemous and certainly vulgar. He had three great enthusiasms: Charterhouse, cricket and eighteenth-century literature. He found that I shared all three; having discovered in the nets that I was a hopeless duffer at cricket, he particularly encouraged my interest in the eighteenth century. He received antiquarian booksellers’ catalogues, and left them for me on his desk; he got me to read Gibbon’s Decline and Fall; he let me explore the minor eighteenth-century poets, such as William Shenstone; he introduced me to the great classical scholar Richard Bentley, and to the eighteenth-century letter writers. In those days, when his arthritis only showed in a slight limp, he was a great walker and we went on country walks together and discussed what Gray had written to Mason, or John Wilkes’s reply to Lord Sandwich. ‘You will either die of the pox or by hanging.’ ‘That depends, my Lord, on whether I embrace your Lordship’s mistress or your principles.’
For some boys, probably the majority, Bob Arrowsmith was a great teacher. We used to imitate his drawling vowel sounds. ‘My dear Sir’, he would say, and it was easy to imitate that. With those he did not like, he could be more alarming. Max Hastings, who has edited both the Daily Telegraph and the Evening Standard, was later to have him as a housemaster. I believe that Bob tried to be kind to him at an unhappy period of his life, but I do not think Max has ever forgiven him for his inability to reach a common ground of sympathy.
In February 1942, I asked Bob whether, in addition to my ordinary school work, in which I was rather idle, I could write a weekly essay for him. It never occurred to me, nor, I think, to him, that I was putting him to any trouble. For the next couple of terms, I wrote these essays. I remember one of his comments. I had been reading Bacon’s Essays and was writing in similarly short, staccato sentences. Bob said that my essays reminded him of the Book of Proverbs. None of those essays survives, and I imagine they expressed antiquated prejudices in antiquated language; indeed, Bob would have liked that. But those weekly essays, with their echoes of Bacon, or Addison – I was reading Addison’s Spectator – Johnson or Gibbon, helped to teach me how to write. I tried to imitate Addison’s conversational style, but could not resist a rhetorical antithesis. One should get a big style as a teenager, so that one can tone it down later on.
My first year at Charterhouse was a good one, particularly the summer, when I spent my spare time divided between the cricket field, at least as a keen scorer, and the excellent school library, with its huge patent Victorian stove in the middle.
It was after I had returned to Somerset for my first summer holiday that I fell ill, and for the next couple of years that illness changed my school life, even leading to a suggestion by J. C. Holmes, my housemaster, that I should go on indefinite leave to try to recover my health. I remember the first illness being diagnosed by Dr Brew, the jovial and very old-fashioned Somerset doctor from Chew Magna. He was a farmers’ doctor, and was full of farming stories, such as that of the old farmer who had not been to the end of the garden for six weeks, and commented, ‘you’d better send a ferret up’n’. He listened to my symptoms, felt the area of my liver, and diagnosed the infectious jaundice which had become epidemic in the unsanitary mass feeding of wartime. It would now be diagnosed as Hepatitis A.
I have never felt so horrible; I had less than no energy; my urine was the colour of mahogany; I was struck by the depression which is a symptom of the disease. The illness and convalescence lasted from late July into October, when I did manage to go back to Charterhouse, but I do not think my energy or my spirits fully recovered so long as I was still at school.
I do remember one happy moment when I was at home, but had started to recover from the acute stage. My mother wanted to cheer me up. I had set my heart on a set of the Pickering ‘wreath’ edition of Christopher Marlowe, which I had seen earlier in the summer in George’s Bookshop, at the top of Park Street in Bristol. It was priced at £2 5s. That would now be the equivalent of about £75; if I saw the same set in a bookseller’s catalogue, I would now expect it to be priced at about £350.
I have the books in front of me as I write. They are bound in a Victorian half-green morocco, an excellent, clean copy. I put a regrettable rubber stamp of ‘W. R-M.’ in the end fly leaves, and stuck my great-grandfather’s armorial book plate, which is far more appropriate, in each volume. I also put a red ribbon