Although during these difficult years the exigencies of war intruded upon almost every aspect of our lives, much of what we did during the Blitz and the pinched, dreary years thereafter had in itself nothing at all to do with enemy hostilities or the epic global struggle of the Allies to turn the tide of battle in their favor. It was, in fact, my schooling that occupied most of my attention during those years, with my latter time at our parish elementary school unfolding against the backdrop of the devastating losses of merchant shipping and personnel in the Atlantic convoys of 1941 and 1942 (which meant for people in a port city like Liverpool the loss of many a relative, neighbor, or friend) and the backdrop of the seesaw campaigns in the deserts of North Africa which rendered familiar names like Tripoli, Benghazi, and Tobruk that were destined to return once more, seventy years later, to the front pages of our newspapers. They unfolded also against the successive catastrophes in Eastern Europe and the Far East—the stunning German advance to the very gates of Leningrad and Moscow, the attack on Pearl Harbor and subsequent loss of the Philippines and much of South-East Asia to Japanese occupation, as well as (and at the forefront of British minds) the sinking of the battleships HMS Prince of Wales and HMS Repulse and the appalling rout of Commonwealth forces in Malaya and Singapore. I followed all of these happenings on wireless news, in the local newspapers, and via the Pathé newsreels shown before films (my father loved the movies and often took us with him to our local cinema on Saturday evenings). And the more immediate presence of war was brought home on a daily basis by the passage along the Woolton Road of trucks filled with troops and of more sluggish convoys carrying the fuselages of fighter planes to the Rootes aircraft factory in nearby Speke, where they would be fitted with their engines. We were particularly taken, as time went on, with the appearance of twin fuselaged Lockheed Lightnings, as well as by the passage of trucks bearing Italian prisoners of war to the farms outside the city limits. Apparently relieved to be out of the fray, they usually made their way singing and didn’t fail to whistle at any English girls they passed. The latter were prone to waving back excitedly, though not as excitedly as when trucks carrying American soldiers began to put in an appearance. This last understandably gave rise to ill feelings among their poorly paid and less well-attired British counterparts. I can recall that one truck carrying some of the latter had chalked on its side the sourly resentful message: “Don’t wave girls, we’re only British!”
But all of these goings-on notwithstanding, my own attention had to be focused, above all, on what was going on at school. Sometime in the 1942–43 school year I took the examination for a Junior City Scholarship and, in view of my mother’s earlier worries, we were all mightily relieved when I was awarded one. In the autumn of 1943, then, I moved to my new school, St. Francis Xavier’s College (SFX), a Jesuit school that, in the nomenclature of the day, was a direct-grant grammar school. I began my studies there not long after the great Soviet victory at Stalingrad and the turning of the tide in the Battle of the Atlantic, and just before the Eighth Army’s decisive defeat of the German-Italian forces at El Alamein in North Africa. My grammar school years, (1943–50), were to straddle the period dominated by the ultimately successful Allied effort to crush the Axis powers and the unutterably dreary postwar years that were marked, in Britain at least, by national economic privation, continuing shortages of practically everything, the painfully slow restoration of public services (like street lighting), and the equally sluggish reconstruction of the basic infrastructure destroyed or run down during the years of war.
My early years at elementary school had provided good conditions for learning. The teachers were kindly and attentive, the setting and atmosphere relatively benign—though marred somewhat in my case by the amount of anti-Irish feeling that was prevalent among the boys and that led to my involvement in an unfortunate series of fights or scuffles. Liverpool, like Boston, numbers among its population a comparatively large proportion of people who are ultimately of Irish descent—most coming from families whose arrival dates back to the great migration that occurred in the 1850s in the context of the potato famine and during the decade or two immediately following. In contrast with the Boston Irish, however, who continue proudly to think of themselves as somehow Irish, by the time of the Second World War their Liverpool equivalents had long since ceased to think of themselves as anything other than English. It was a great irony, then, that so many of the boys who jeered at me, sneering that the Irish were dirty people who lived with their pigs, or were Nazi sympathizers guilty of refueling the very German submarines that were torpedoing Allied shipping, and so on, bore, unlike me, unambiguously Irish surnames like Murphy, Kelly, O’Flaherty, O’Brien, O’Donnell, and O’Connell. Whatever the case, it wasn’t much fun. But the miseries involved were no more than intermittent, and they were dwarfed by the startling change of atmosphere that later occurred when my school, attached to the parish of St. Francis of Assisi, had to take in the boys and girls from the school attached to Holy Trinity parish, which could cater to their needs only into their eighth year. These were the children whom we came to dread and to whom we referred as the kids from “under the bridge”—the local equivalent of the American term “across the tracks.” The bridge in question carried the railway line that ran parallel to the Garston dockside area and the children in question came from the old, grim, and slummy row housing crammed in between the railway and the river. They were a rough and tough lot, often ill-fed, ill-clad, and dirty (upon their arrival, head lice became a problem for all of us), as well as ill-behaved, adept at cruel bullying, and, as I would now in retrospect judge, frequently immature for their age. Though there were some striking exceptions, learning tended to bulk large neither in their own priorities nor in those of their parents, and our classes, two of them side by side in one open classroom, with a third separated from the other two by nothing more substantial than a flimsy glass partition, swiftly took on some of the characteristics associated with the word “bedlam.” The male teachers at the school had been called up for military service, and they had been replaced by women who had left the teaching profession after getting married, sometimes long years earlier. Some of these women found it difficult or even impossible to cope with the obstreperous behavior of the new arrivals. The noise level, accordingly, could sometimes reach appalling dimensions, and I can remember wishing longingly for the headmaster, the only man still on the staff, to show up with his cane, punish the promoters of chaos, and restore order, if only for a while. He himself was an excellent teacher when he had the chance to take over a class (he was kind enough to give me some tutoring in arithmetic after school hours), but it was his unforgiving wartime fate to have to spend much of his time making punitive rounds from class to class simply in order to keep the lid on.
My departure for SFX, where Noel was still at school, was thus something of a welcome relief. The Junior City Scholarship not only took care of school fees but also included an allowance to help with the purchase of the requisite (maroon) school blazer, cap, and tie, and defrayed the costs involved in travelling to and from school via public transport—tramcar and, later, bus. The school had been founded not long after the Jesuits established themselves in a parish at Liverpool in the wake of Catholic Emancipation (1829) and the abrogation of the centuries-old Penal Laws that had burdened Catholics and excluded them from public life. It was situated close to the city center in what had been a prosperous mercantile district in the nineteenth century, but which, by 1943, had degenerated into a half-bombed-out slum. While the school building itself had incurred only minor damage during the Blitz, Salisbury Street, on which it stood, had taken a bit of a beating with the surviving houses sticking up unevenly like rotting teeth embedded in a singularly unattractive, rubble-strewn gum.
Upon that school we descended six days a week (half days on Wednesdays and Saturdays), boys from all over Merseyside and contiguous parts of the county of Lancashire. Some of those from the county bore surnames like Blundell and Scarisbrick that had a long and proud association with the stubborn regional tradition of Catholic recusancy, or refusal to conform to the Reformation religious settlement. We came by tramcar, train, bike, and bus, and, identified unmistakably by our school uniforms, had frequently to run something of a gauntlet between the tram or bus stop and the school gate, pursued by jeers of “college puddin” from the local toughs. The trip from where we lived in Garston took about an hour and involved changing trams at the transfer point known as “Penny Lane”—like “Strawberry Fields” and the “Cast-Iron Shore,” a local name later to be destined for immortality by virtue of its association with a Beatles song. And I have vivid memories from the years that ensued of desperately trying to memorize geometry theorems or Latin conjugations and declensions while seated, school-bound and petrified, at the back of a freezing and swaying tram. The school building on which we converged, a three-story piece of Victoriana now renovated and part of the Liverpool Hope University campus, was then a rather grim, gloomy, and grimy place, threadbare after years of economic depression and war, with large but dirty windows and a toilet and washroom facility which, while less appallingly noisome than the one at my equally old and rundown elementary school, had long since seen all its putative soap dispensers smashed and was almost permanently bereft of even the merest trickle of hot water.
It was not, physically-speaking, a particularly prepossessing or inviting facility. But some very good things took place, nonetheless, within its grimy walls. That they did so reflects, I believe, the quality and dedication of its teachers, the heart-of-the-matter intensity of its academic focus, and the unquestionable Jesuit commitment to the importance and nobility of the intellectual quest. There were only two Catholic grammar schools in Liverpool and, given that fact, the boys brought together at SFX were drawn from a broad array of social backgrounds, ranging from the marginally impoverished to the solid and comfortable middle class. Some came, accordingly, from families with little interest in the impracticalities of the type of academic education being offered, and it would have been all too easy for the school to “sell” its program, the demands being made, and the heavy burden of homework imposed, on the grounds that those things would enable the graduates to get “good jobs.” But I cannot remember ever having heard anything to that effect. The emphasis, instead, seemed to be on the intellectual quest, not so much as an end in itself but as part of the ongoing effort of faith seeking understanding and as something directed to “the greater glory of God” (Ad majorem dei gloriam, or AMDG, the Jesuit motto). And in recognition of that fact, we were taught to inscribe “AMDG” at the top of all our essays and themes, with “LDS” (Laus deo semper, or “Glory be to God forever”) inscribed at the end as a sort of spiritual QED.
In the Lower School (forms 1 to 5), boys were prepared for what was then called the School Certificate, which was awarded after an external public examination administered by a consortium of universities. The boys were unashamedly “streamed” by tested ability level into four separate classes to which were attached the totally transparent labels of A, B, C, and D. Some of the earlier cultural amenities (e.g., a school chorus and orchestra—how I would have loved to play in one!) had gone their way during the upheavals and stringencies of the war years. What remained was a rather stripped-down curriculum, its central focus being a narrowish group of strictly academic subjects in which the boys would have to present themselves for external examination: Latin, French, English, history, mathematics, and general science, with the addition at the age of thirteen of either chemistry and physics or Greek. This was a rather stark choice to have to make at that age. Mathematics was my best subject and I had enjoyed the general science taught in the first two forms, so I chose (unlike my brother Noel) to forego Greek and take chemistry and physics. The first of those sciences was taught very well, the second, alas, abysmally. I came to regret that choice later on when, having decided that I needed at least a smattering of Greek, I committed myself as a Williams faculty member to taking our introductory course in the subject. It met at 8:00 a.m. five days a week and was largely populated by young women students of daunting diligence and formidable competence. It was taught very skillfully and moved along rapidly. Remembering the glacial grind of the Latin classes of my high school days, I came away impressed with the speed at which language instruction can progress with bright, committed college students.
In addition to the core group of subjects at SFX, we were also taught religion, geography, and art, but as subsidiary subjects not examined for the School Certificate. The teaching of religion, oddly enough, did not bulk at all large. It was indifferently done and I can remember little or nothing about the form it took apart from the reading one year of Luke-Acts and the memorization of the Westminster Catechism—the English Catholic equivalent of the American Baltimore Catechism. Geography and art, on the other hand, I very much liked; both were well taught, the former in very traditional but interesting fashion with much drawing and memorization of maps, the latter in very creative and imaginative fashion. We painted, learned perspective drawing, and were let loose on elementary architectural design and the design of posters, furniture, decorative motifs for wallpaper, and so on. Perhaps inspired by Gustav Klimt and the Viennese Secessionists at the turn of the century, our teacher abhorred the distinction between arts and crafts and had us spend a lot of time drawing or designing knives, forks, spoons, cups, teapots, and saucers. He himself was very much “form follows function” in his aesthetic sensibilities and, under his influence, we were led to despise the over-elaborate Victorian furnishings with which we were surrounded and the gloomy, Gothic-revival buildings that seemed in Liverpool depressingly omnipresent. “Slaughterhouse Gothic!,” we uppish boys would sniff dismissively, and it was to be some years before I could overcome such early prejudices and concede the sheer beauty of a truly great neo-Gothic building like the National Cathedral in Washington, DC, or, for that matter, of the Anglican cathedral in Liverpool, built out of the local sandstone, designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, and situated on a commanding site overlooking the Mersey.
By my time, though the earlier school orchestra and chorus had both fallen by the wayside, we were still taught the traditional English and Scottish songs in periodic singing classes and, until my voice broke, I also contributed an undistinguished contralto to a small church choir that led the hymn singing at the end-of-the-week Benedictine service the whole school attended in the handsome SFX parish church. On those occasions, looking down from the choir loft while the reverend the headmaster delivered pedantic sermons on recondite topics like the Immaculate Conception, I can remember observing the occasional boy pursuing an alternative vision of immortality by surreptitiously carving his initials into the back of the pew in front of him. This was an offense, if one were caught, that carried the penalty of immediate expulsion. But as the condition of the pews itself testified, it was a traditional schoolboy practice that went back into the mid-nineteenth century. And there still runs through my mind the exultant sound of five hundred boys, fired up by the prospect of the impending deliverance from school at the end of the week, belting out to the melody of Ralph Vaughan Williams’s splendid hymn “For All the Saints” the Latin words of a Marian hymn pleading (appropriately enough) for release of suffering souls from purgatory:
Languentibus in Purgatorio
Qui purgantur, adore nimio;
Subveniat tua compassio,
O Maria! O Maria!
For our physical, as opposed to spiritual, well-being we were exposed to regular, well-planned, and quite rigorous sessions of physical education (gym), learning among other things how to do balance walking on the Swedish beam and how to climb fifteen-foot ropes—both skills that were to prove valuable later on when I became a soldier. But there was no instruction in swimming (swimming pools were closed for much of the war) and no coaching in the two sports in which the school competed: football (soccer) and cricket. Those who did well enough in those sports to make it onto the school teams tended to have learned the appropriate skills from their fathers. As my Irish father had played neither of those English sports and could give no such help, or perhaps because I possessed no natural aptitude for them, I got nowhere with either of those sports. So far as cricket went, that was a source of some sorrow for I adored the game, serving in the sixth form as scorer for our first eleven and following closely the performance of the leading professional teams. My father and mother were also nonswimmers and, having had no formal instruction in that either, I never became more than an indifferent swimmer, capable of little more than passing the not-very-stringent test required at officer cadet school—that of swimming, fully clothed, one length of an Olympic-sized pool.
While most of our teachers were Jesuits, either priests or younger “scholastics” still making their way through the lengthy period of training and discernment before being ordained and, after that, admitted to final vows, a few were laymen. Nearly all of the latter were Great War veterans afflicted with various disabilities: one had been gassed and was overtaken periodically by horrible bouts of racking coughing; one had lost a leg, was equipped with a very creaky artificial limb, and, with a certain inevitability, was known among the boys accordingly as “Peg-leg”; another had lost the better part of a hand and we fixated, with morbid curiosity, on the rigid, artificial fingers that made that hand at least partly usable. Most, if not all, I realize at least in retrospect, were capable teachers and decent human beings, devoid, it seems, of any English snobbery and comfortable and sympathetic in their dealings with the boys. But upper-level Latin and mathematics, while taught very well by Jesuit and laymen alike, tended to be taught by fear. And thereby hangs a tale.
While at SFX no corporal punishment was inflicted in class, no dramatic outbursts of pedagogical ire followed by punitive retribution, appropriate behavior on the part of the boys, a calm atmosphere conducive to learning, and the conscientious completion of one’s work both in the classroom and at home was ensured by a baroque and, in the Jesuit fashion, highly rationalized, system of discipline that my own children refuse to believe could have existed, even sixty years ago. But it did, and its nature deserves a mention.
That system worked as follows. If a boy had not done his homework assignment properly or was guilty of misconduct, the teacher would characteristically tell the miscreant to see him after class. The boy would then be presented with what we called a “white bill,” a small piece of paper signed by the teacher, with AMDG at the top and LDS at the bottom, indicating the boy’s name, the nature of his misdemeanor, and the number of ferula strokes it warranted by way of penalty—“six ferulae,” for example, or “twice-nine.” The ferula was a small, bat-shaped implement made, we thought, of whalebone covered with rubber, though, in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce portrays the boys at Clongowes Wood College, also a Jesuit school and one that a Dublin cousin of mine was later to attend, as believing it to be made of “whalebone and leather with lead inside.” At the next break, the miscreant was required to take the bill to the prefect of discipline for registration, at which point he had the right to protest the punishment as unwarranted or unjust. This last was little more than a formality and, if the protest was viewed as frivolous, could lead to an increase in the severity of the punishment. The one time I myself tried on such an occasion to plead my innocence, the prefect of discipline, a splenetic Scotsman, coldly informed me that he usually found the masters to be right. I got the message and did not press my pathetic point. That formality completed, we had to take the bill at a set time to an office where one of the young scholastics would have the job of delivering the punishment itself, entering that fact into the record and returning the white bill to the teacher who had written it. The punishment was always delivered on the hands and could be severe enough to raise blood blisters. But, this being a boy’s school and the maintenance of a stiff upper lip being essential, the main challenge was that of avoiding any whimpering, sign of tears, or loss of face. The reward was the extension of comradely respect and the strengthening of the species of tribal solidarity that, religion to the contrary, formed the bedrock of our communal ethic. The whole atmosphere was one very much informed by a sense of “us against them,” and in such an atmosphere whining was almost as unacceptable as snitching. I was an interested student who wanted to learn and I don’t believe I was, in general, a badly behaved boy. But during my four years in the Lower School (such punishments more or less ceased once one was in the sixth form), I received a total of around eighty-nine strokes (we all tried to keep tabs on our total), almost entirely for the petty misconduct of talking out of turn in class. None of this did I mention to my parents, knowing that, if I did so, they would simply reproach me for having misbehaved.
To that whole bizarre system, however, cruel though I suppose it was, a comic footnote attached. This being a traditional Catholic school of the pre–Vatican II era, there almost inevitably had to be some sort of indulgence option attached. And, indeed, there was. This took the form of the “red bill” subsystem. Red bills were quite handsome documents, formally printed in Latin on red paper, with AMDG at the top and LDS at the bottom, and they were awarded to students who had done well in the regular end-of-term examinations. All the teacher involved had to do was to fill in the number of ferula strokes to be remitted and to sign the bill. Not all teachers would accept such red bills when they were proffered by boys seeking remittance of punishment, but most would. Some of the more softhearted, in fact, would accept a red bill even if it had not been awarded to the boy presenting it but to a friend. Boys being ingenious gamers of almost any system, that inevitably opened up the way to a rather lively black market on which these instruments of indulgence were bought and sold for cash. I don’t believe I ever sold such a bill, but for years I kept one folded up in my wallet as a souvenir and I much regret losing that bill along with the wallet itself. Had I still possessed it when my own children were themselves growing up and at high school, they might not have greeted my moving description of the disciplinary system at SFX with such knowing looks of total disbelief.
While most of us were proud to be at SFX, which enjoyed an enviable reputation among Liverpool grammar schools both as an academic powerhouse and for the prowess of its football team, I can’t say that during our years in the Lower School we actually liked the place. The atmosphere was a bit too pressured for that and the shadow cast by the ever-present threat of punishment was such that the dark loom of Monday could cast a bit of a premonitory pall even over whatever time off we had at weekends. But life outside school, with all of its sustaining distractions, still went on. The established church notwithstanding, England, compared with the United States, is a markedly secular country. And that was so even when I was a child. But, against the odds, I had grown up in what amounted to a Catholic subculture. What I was the beneficiary of at home as a child, then, was what I once heard the distinguished sociologist of religion, Bob Wuthnow, refer to as a “heavy duty religious upbringing.” Regular confession on Saturdays was followed by mass on Sunday mornings, the last of which was a missa cantata (full-scale sung High Mass). The parish choir was a good, well-directed one in which my father anchored the bass section, and I was accustomed from early childhood to hearing well-sung Gregorian chant and Palestrina motets. Sunday afternoon might bring with it a benediction service, while the evening certainly brought with it a choral service, sung in English and akin to the Anglican Evensong. And in Lent we made the Stations of the Cross. Both Lent and Advent were taken seriously as penitential seasons preparatory to the celebratory joys of Easter and Christmas. In our lives, the liturgical calendar was mapped onto and in many ways dominated the secular one. On Good Fridays, as the church bell tolled solemnly at 3:00 p.m., it was as if space and time had been transcended, and in our imaginations Christ died once more on the cross.
This being so, it is not surprising that, while still at elementary school, I had busied myself not only as a member of a Boy Scout troop in the Woolton area, but also as an altar boy at our parish church. In the latter capacity, when it was my turn, I had to make my way in the early morning darkness, and not infrequently in fog, on foot or (later) by bike to our parish church in order to serve at the first mass of the day. The church was a neo-Gothic structure in the thirteenth-century English style with partly stained glass pencil windows. It was not easy to black out, but the regulations were met by reducing light in the nave to a minimal glimmer cast downwards from carefully dimmed lamps and by illuminating the altar with little more than candlelight. Somewhat later on, when we were required at school to memorize large chunks of Milton’s minor poems, I was to resonate nostalgically with his reference to
. . . storied windows richly dight,
Casting a dim religious light.
I thought I knew exactly what he had in mind. If I associated any darkness with religion, it was a benign and physical one, evocative of the beauty of holiness. As an altar boy I served also as acolyte at many a Requiem Mass and subsequent service of interment. Some of the beautiful words used in the latter ritual continue still to ring through my mind and retain their power to move, among them the antiphon said (or sung) just prior to burial:
In paradisum deducant te Angeli:
in tuo adventu suscipiant te Martyres,
et perducant te in civitatem sanctam Jerusalem.
Chorus Angelorum te suscipiat,
et cum Lazaro quondam paupere
aeternam habeas requiem.
———
May the Angels lead thee into Paradise:
may the Martyrs receive thee at thy coming,
and lead thee into the holy city of Jerusalem.
May the chorus of Angels receive thee,
and mayest thou have eternal rest with
Lazarus who once was poor.
Sad enough it may be, but for us altar boys the duty of serving on such occasions was not a cause for gloom. After all, it got us out of school for a while and brought with it the unaccustomed pleasure of a car ride, even if it was only to the Allerton cemetery and back.
Given the miserable surfacing of recent years, and not only in the United States, of appalling evidence of priestly pedophilia, perhaps I should report that, altar boy though I was, I myself encountered at the time nothing to suggest that anything of the sort was happening. In retrospect, moreover, and rightly or wrongly, it seems utterly foreign to what I sensed in the character of our priests and in their relationships with the laity in those far-off wartime years. Figures of authority those priests may well have been, and hemmed in also by a suffocating degree of adulation that could border almost on priest worship. But my own memory of the clergy in that small, largely working-class parish is that of two devoted, hard-working, and compassionate men who were good and attentive pastors to the flock they made a point of knowing so well.
In those same years I had also become a member of a Boy Scout Troop headquartered in Woolton, where we met above a fine but empty set of stables constructed out of the local sandstone and attached to a mansion left derelict during the Great Depression. While I was not passionately devoted to Scouting, I did enjoy many of the activities and, in pursuit of coveted badges, did my best to learn such skills as building and starting an outside fire with a minimum of equipment, cooking the basics over it with a minimum of utensils, and so on. I also enjoyed the Baden-Powellesque “wide games” that we played in the scrubby woods and deteriorating meadows of the surrounding estate. Not surprisingly, given their provenance, these games had a military feel to them, bearing a close resemblance in organization and objective to the maneuvers in which I was later to participate as a soldier during my infantry training days. The high point of our scouting year was a two-week camp under canvas up in rural Lancashire. The tents were cumbersome and of old-fashioned design, we slept rolled uncomfortably in blankets on the ground, the food was pretty awful even by wartime standards and, because of an ill-chosen location, we were dogged by an oversupply of aggressively stinging bumble bees. Not for us, in those days, the well-designed backpacks and tents or the comfortable sleeping bags and niftily miniaturized, propane-fueled, collapsible stoves that I associate with camping out later on along the Appalachian Trail in western Massachusetts, or when taking my children one by one for overnight togetherness campouts up on Stone Hill here in Williamstown. But, for a city-raised child, the experience was still a good and positive one. After two weeks of reasonably convivial discomfort, I was ready to return to what I now recognized as the real comforts of home. And perhaps that was an intended part of the whole exercise.
At about the same time as I had become a Boy Scout, and in this following in the footsteps of my brother Vincent, I had also taken up the violin, starting lessons with an elderly Dutchman, Kwast by name, who had played for years with the Hallé Orchestra in Manchester. I took to the instrument very well, passing with distinction several of the examinations set by the Associated Boards of the Royal College and Royal Academy of Music for which Mr. Kwast insisted on entering me and developing over time a powerful vibrato that sat well with my rather Romantic musical tastes. Blissfully unaware, however—or perhaps uninterested in—the academic demands and burden of homework with which we had to cope at school, and thinking perhaps that, like my Uncle Paddy, I might want to go the professional route into music, Kwast began to entertain ambitions for me. As a result, he began to insist on an amount of practice time that proved to be incompatible with the equally increasing amount of homework being required by SFX. As a result, then, with a mixture of relief and regret, I discontinued violin lessons at the age of sixteen. A year later I switched to piano lessons, and those I enjoyed much more. I found the piano more fun to play by myself, and those lessons left me, if only for a while, capable of turning in a reasonable rendition of Chopin’s easier preludes. At the same time, I continued to play the violin. My sister Molly was an accomplished pianist and a capable accompanist, and we would both perform, along with my father who sang, at musical evenings that my parents put on for friends and neighbors. After my brother Vincent was finally demobilized from the army and living once more at home, we would also perform en famille pieces that Uncle Frank had arranged for our somewhat awkward combination of cello, piano, and two violins. I very much enjoyed those occasions and it didn’t really hit me at the time that they were far from being the norm among my friends and acquaintances.
Several other things enriched my life during those years when I was in the Lower School at SFX. For one of my birthdays, my parents presented me with what was for those days a rather sporty Raleigh bicycle equipped with three speeds and dropped handlebars. With that, the world began to open up for me. Either with friends or with my brother Noel, I began to get out of the Merseyside urban agglomeration and to explore southern Lancashire and Cheshire. As it was the nearest stretch of real woodland and the largest in Cheshire, we liked particularly to ride our bikes to Delamere Forest, which is situated in the middle of the Wirral. This last is the peninsula of land framed by the Irish Sea and the twin estuaries of the River Mersey and the River Dee, an area referred to in the great fourteenth-century romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight as “the wild land of Wirral” where “there lived but few that were loved by either God or man” but to which Sir Gawain was led nonetheless to explore in the course of his lonely quest for the Green Knight and the Green Chapel. Sir Gawain’s quest, of course, had brought him up from the south and through North Wales. We came from the opposite direction. Near the city center, the Mersey narrows somewhat, but it is still almost a mile across to Birkenhead and the Wirral and we had either to make use of the sturdy, radar-equipped ferry boats that crisscrossed the river even in the worst of weather and the thickest of fogs, and which lent a glimmer of romance to a grimy port city, or to get there by riding through the Mersey Tunnel. For in those days cyclists were still (perhaps unwisely) permitted to use the Tunnel, and one would make one’s perilous way, squeezed frighteningly close to the tunnel wall as huge lorries roared by, separated from one’s right elbow by little more than eighteen inches.
Around the same time as I acquired my bike and newfound mobility, some friends and I took up tennis. I quickly became so attached to the game that, during the summer vacation, I used to play it for long stretches of time, as often as five days a week, sometimes with a girl to whom I was much attracted but in whose presence I was normally awkwardly shy. I suppose that lessons in the game were available at tennis clubs, but such amenities were beyond our reach and, in any case, it didn’t seem to occur to us that lessons might be helpful. All our playing was done on inexpensive public courts, usually the grass courts at nearby Otterspool. We simply picked up the game, making up in gusto what we lacked in skill. Not the best way to learn because we also picked up some terrible habits. With time, I somehow acquired a pretty accurate fast serve and came to rely on it altogether too much in the effort to win games. I could not sustain a decently protracted rally and my choppy returns were all too often dependent on luck and an abundance of energy. Only years later, when I was almost fifty and had decided finally to take a few lessons, did I discover that I needed to do two simple things if I hoped to rally successfully: first, get my racket much further back in anticipation of a return; second, keep my eye on the ball. All those years, it turned out, I had instead been watching my opponent! And something similar had probably been true in my cricket playing too.
Oddly enough, while we didn’t associate lessons or coaching with the ability to play sports well, we took it for granted that we would need them if we were to learn ballroom dancing. And that, by the time we were fourteen or fifteen, we were all determined to do. Being at an all-boys school, it loomed large in our pubescent longings as just about the only way to get to even remotely close quarters with girls. And that was surely a consummation devoutly to be wished. My mother and father were both good dancers and encouraged us to take lessons. When I did so, I discovered that I was not as clumsy as I had suspected and I readily mastered the waltz, foxtrot, and quickstep, as well as the samba and a somewhat shaky and evanescent ability at least to fake it with the rhumba and tango. As I did not stick with lessons long enough, that was about as far as I got and I altogether missed out on jitterbug. Like my future wife, who was a lovely and elegant dancer both in the ballroom and on ice skates, I came very much to enjoy dancing and it was to play a happy role in our social lives for decades.
One final thing worthy of note from those Lower School years was the return to Liverpool and arrival at SFX of the brothers O’Keeffe—Bernard, the elder, and Laurence, the younger, the latter known to his close friends as “Lol.” In the early months of the war, before the torpedoing in the North Atlantic of the liner City of Benares, which went down taking to the bottom seventy-seven of the ninety evacuees it was taking to Canada and putting an end to that form of evacuation, the O’Keeffe brothers along with their sister Kathleen had been among the thousands of English children evacuated for safety to Canada. With their return, they brought with them a whiff of the exotic, intimations of more spacious realms that lay beyond the cruel sea, and a touch of worldliness lacking in the rest of us whose lives, after all, had revolved within the comparatively confined orbit of a provincial port city. I can well remember the newly arrived Lol, striding to and fro at lunch break across the school playground in full peripatetic mode, holding forth on Canada and his experiences in the New World, and trailed by a gaggle of fascinated boys hanging onto his every word. The brothers were alike, I think, only in their raw brightness and the multiplicity of their talents. Bernard, a fairly slim and neatly handsome fellow, was somewhat dreamy in demeanor and by temperament coolly reserved. Although I was to spend much time in the always-welcoming O’Keeffe household, I never came to feel that I really knew him. He was very talented musically, and was a fine pianist whom we all assumed (incorrectly, it turned out) was destined for some sort of a career in professional music. Lol, on the other hand, rumpled, untidy, and stockier in build, was very gregarious by nature, flatteringly interested in practically everyone he encountered, warmhearted by instinct and deeply loyal in his friendships. He was a gifted student of literature and a good pianist. After Oxford, he sailed through the challenging examinations required for direct entry into the administrative (senior) level of the civil service (in our day, a prestigious choice of career) and ended up in the Foreign Office. Over the years, in the interstices of his diplomatic activities, he somehow found the time to write and publish two novels and a monograph devoted to the role played by the domestic politics of ethnicity in the diplomatic relations among nations. In his later years, he served as British ambassador to Senegal and affiliated nations, as participant in one of the Vienna rounds concerning arms reduction, as British ambassador to Czechoslovakia (during the Velvet Revolution), and as director general of British Information Services (BIS) in New York City. This last appointment he adored, both because of the degree of independence that was attached to it and because of its natural fit with his gregarious temperament and the social skills that he and his (French) wife Suzanne possessed in such superabundance. During that period we more than once did house swaps with the O’Keeffe’s, who were ensconced, courtesy of the British taxpayer, in a capacious apartment in Sutton Place on the fashionable upper East Side of Manhattan and were engaged in a constant round of entertaining. When Peter Jay (son-in-law of the then prime minister, James Callaghan, and not himself a career diplomat) became British ambassador to Washington, a controversial appointment, tensions rapidly developed between the two men, with Jay trying to cut by half the size of the BIS staff in New York and to bring the whole operation under a greater measure of ambassadorial control than heretofore. In response, and with, perhaps, unwise vigor, Lol struggled to defend the integrity and independence of his own piece of diplomatic turf. When Jay decided to make an official, if largely ceremonial, visit to New York, it was a potentially fraught occasion and the O’Keeffes scrambled to marshal their influential friends in the media to grace with their presence the truly splendid party they gave to honor and welcome the ambassador and his wife. Claire-Ann and I were invited as houseguests for that occasion and had a wonderful time talking with the Jays, who were in reasonably gracious social mode, as well as with such luminaries of TV and print journalism as Walter Cronkite, Tom Brokaw, Midge Decter, and, I believe, her husband Norman Podhoretz, neoconservative editor-in-chief of the journal Commentary. The party showed every sign of having been a great success, ending, as it wound down and people departed, with the British ambassador to the United Nations, by that time very well lubricated, accompanying himself on the piano while he sang a somewhat lugubrious series of Welsh hymns. That notwithstanding, Jay was to persist in his attempt to cut British Information Services in New York down to size and his efforts seem in the end to have succeeded. Certainly, Lol’s term as director general was cut short and, with the publication of an article about the contretemps in the pages of the Economist, the whole affair spilled out, unfortunately, into the open. The Tories, accordingly, seizing upon the matter as an opportunity to embarrass the Callaghan government, raised questions about it in the House of Commons and went on, even, to introduce a motion deploring “The removal from office of the director of BIS in New York by the prime minister’s son-in-law because he [O’Keeffe] refuses to convert his daily digest of the British press to a pro-government propaganda medium.” Lol may well have received his fifteen minutes of fame out of all of this, but, while it does not seem to have shadowed his subsequent career, it was the sort of publicity that no career diplomat would ever want to get.
He and I had become good chums shortly after he arrived at SFX and our friendship deepened during our time together in the sixth form and at Oxford. It matured, indeed, into one of those wonderful, lifelong friendships capable of surviving unscathed the separation of continents and the hostility of time. Although we were able to get together only infrequently, whether in England or the United States, and while those moments were more than once separated by the lapse of a good few years, our friendship was of the sort that made it easy to pick up the thread of conversation where we had left off, years earlier. On one two-day-long visit, when Lol was in New York on business and came to stay with me at Princeton (where I was spending a year’s leave at the Institute for Advanced Study and commuting home on weekends), I can recall our talking animatedly and nonstop for the better part of twelve hours, the effort advanced, admittedly, by the consumption of an inordinate amount of Scotch. He was a very well-informed fellow with a broad and catholic array of interests, though in conversation, especially if a third party were present, he could become quite didactic, with his didacticism verging sometimes on the pompous. That could be an irritant for those whose liking for him was well under control. But it was the occasion, rather, of affectionate amusement for those of us who were genuinely fond of him. In him, any such pomposity had about it an endearingly Toad-of-Toad-Hall quality, lovable rather than deplorable, the more so in that it reflected none of the underlying narcissism with which A. A. Milne endowed his fictional Mr. Toad so superabundantly. Lol’s didacticism, moreover, tended to be essentially object oriented, usually surfacing when he was holding forth enthusiastically, sharing in somewhat proprietary fashion his characteristically extensive knowledge of some historical site—Salisbury Cathedral, perhaps, to which he was deeply attached, or Stonehenge, which was very close to the cottage in Wiltshire that he and Suzanne had acquired. On one occasion, indeed, when we were walking around Stonehenge, he held forth so authoritatively and at such unconscionable length that we came eventually to be trailed by a growing body of enthralled onlookers who clearly assumed that he had to be some sort of official guide.
In the England of our school days, probably no more than 3 percent of the eighteen to nineteen-year-old cohort nationally went on to university. That group stemmed from the minority that, having taken the School Certificate, stayed on into the sixth form to prepare for the Higher School Certificate which was the sine qua non for university entrance. At SFX, the great majority of the boys left at the age of sixteen, having taken the School Certificate, with only a small cohort soldiering on to specialize for two sixth-form years in the classics, in mathematics and the natural sciences, or in history and literature. Lol and I belonged to the group of illuminati who pursued the last option. In comparison with our age group in French lycées or German Gymnasia, ours was a highly concentrated and specialized course of study—simply French and French literature, English literature, and history. Its downside was its obvious narrowness, its upside that it permitted the universities to start in the freshman year at a more advanced and specialized level. Its unscripted upside, too, was that it left room for the assembly at regular intervals of the entire sixth form, called together to participate in parliamentary-type debates on the great issues of the day. The pertinent motions, often political in nature, were picked by the headmaster himself, who also presided over these (sometimes tumultuous) affairs in the role of Speaker. He was clearly a Tory in his sympathies and that stimulated the more hardy among the boys (nearly all of them Socialist in disposition) to take advantage of the conventions of debate in order to rattle his ideological chain. I much enjoyed these occasions, developing a taste for the cut and thrust of debate and enough confidence to get to my feet, make my case, and stand my ground.
The further upside of the rather narrow course of studies we were pursuing was that it left us, as individuals, with a lot of free time which, if not wasted, could be put to good, general educational use. I don’t think that any of us did waste that precious time, and, though it was a period of great tension at home, so far as school was concerned, I have very happy memories of my sixth-form years and of the wonderful intellectual horizons that were opening up before us. At home, the tensions were in some measure predictable, precipitated by the presence of too many large people crammed cheek by jowl in a pretty small space and all coming and going on different schedules. At the time, it was the expected cultural norm, at least for people of our class, for grown-up children working in the area to live at home and contribute their share to the family’s expenses. And even if that had not been the case, the postwar housing shortage would probably have mandated that sort of living arrangement.
With the war years behind us, Vincent demobilized from the army and Noel from the Royal Air Force, our entire family of six was now living at home. That in itself was cause enough for moments of tension and ill temper, the more so because my mother’s anxious need to control everything seemed, with the passage of time, to be growing. Exacerbating the general malaise, however, was the fact that Vincent, after getting back from the Middle East and enjoying his demobilization leave, simply didn’t seem to know what to do with himself. He had taken his Higher School Certificate examinations at the seminary, had done quite well, and could have chosen to go on to university on the British equivalent of the GI Bill. But he was somehow not interested in doing that. In fact, he didn’t seem to be interested in doing anything, betraying instead a worrying degree of passivity. It was as if, after almost a decade of sequential subjection to either priestly or military authority, he still needed to be told what to do. This caused my parents considerable distress. As the weeks lengthened into months with no sign of movement and no decisions arrived at, the tensions at home mounted accordingly. They eased somewhat when my father finally bit the bullet and found Vincent a job working for him. But by then, having, from the uneasy sidelines, watched the whole drama unfold, I had arrived at some conclusions. While I was not, I believe, an inconsiderate or particularly selfish boy and felt, indeed, somewhat guilty about entertaining such thoughts, it had become clear to me that my own desire for greater independence would mean that I would need to leave home once my schooling was over. Whether or not it was because of this onset of domestic turmoil, I found myself subject in those late-adolescent years to evanescent, if sometimes weeklong, bouts of depression (Churchill’s “black dog”). These frightened me a bit, but I learned to cope with them by attempting doggedly to pursue whatever task was at hand, and by the time I left for college in 1950 they seemed to have stopped recurring. In subsequent years, I have been as little prone to depression as I have been to the species of dreary boredom that had overtaken me for a while in 1939–40 when I had suddenly to cope with the loneliness of being the only child left at home.
In the meantime, during those late-adolescent years, I was content to withdraw into my studies and into the world of music and imagination. All of us sixth-formers seemed to be reading voraciously and eclectically at large, and everyone, however untutored, seemed to be trying his hand at writing poetry. One of us was an opera buff, another, a Trollope fanatic, and I myself, thinking that it would be a wonderful thing to be a writer, took out a subscription to the Times Literary Supplement in an earnest if somewhat uncomprehending attempt to keep abreast of what was going on in the London literary world. P. G. Wodehouse’s books were very much in vogue, and we all, it seems, were working our way through Jane Austen, reading, I suppose, not critically (her works were not required by the official English syllabus), but rather for interest and for fun, the way, I assume, they were written to be read. Our history teacher, who had an extensive personal library, took a genial interest in our reading habits, would suggest books for us to look at, and would lend them to us. Thus, most of us came to work our way through the “Catholic” authors—G. K. Chesterton, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, and, by adoption, C. S. Lewis—and made a bit of a dent, too, on François Mauriac’s oeuvre, though I must confess to having found his novels a bit depressing. I had become very interested in poetry and worked my way from Palgrave’s Golden Treasury of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language, via the new Penguin series entitled The Centuries’ Poetry that was edited by Denys Kilham Roberts and produced in cheap, wartime-standard paperbacks (the first books I ever purchased), and on into the collected works of such poets as Gerard Manley Hopkins, T. S. Eliot, and William Butler Yeats, the last of which I read again and again, memorizing the poems I most liked.
All of this extracurricular reading raised for us topics that we would earnestly discuss over coffee (not usually consumed in our sort of households, but, to us, a more “intellectual” drink than tea) in one of the Kardomah Cafés then springing up, or in the café of the Walker Art Gallery whose galleries we patrolled in the combined hope of meeting girls and acquainting ourselves with the visual arts. And that encouraged us, in turn, to imagine ourselves as budding intellectuals—French-style intellectuals, of course, for we were all snobbish Francophiles. France and not dreary old England, or so we thought, was the land where real intellectual life flourished. We dreamt, accordingly, of sitting, sipping strong, black coffee at the Café Les Deux Magots in Paris, puffing away at Gauloises, dressed (of course) in regulation black, and thinking cutting-edge existentialist thoughts, as dark as they were deep.
Not all our extracurricular activities, of course, were quite so high-minded. With few exceptions, we all went out dancing on most Saturday nights, the high point of our somewhat constricted social lives. And, during the unsupervised times at school allegedly devoted to “spiritual reading,” an ongoing game of Pontoon went on, boys placing small bets in the hope of winning enough to finance a weekend date. Spending much time (as we had to do for our weekly essays) at the Picton Reference Library, the city’s principal library collection situated in the city center, we also took the opportunity to “hang out” in town (though that accurately descriptive expression had yet to be coined). One of our favorite diversions was to go down to a “Scouse” equivalent of Hyde Park Corner which had sprung up on one of the cleared, but not yet rebuilt, bombed-out sites of which, at the time, there were still quite a few in the city. The fluctuating group of determined speakers who peopled that site ranged from obsessive millenarians prophesying the doom to come, to aggressive vegetarians excoriating the crimes of the carnivore, to representatives of the Conservative and Labour Parties jousting over the political issues of the day. But the ones I best remember were the representatives of the Communist Party, at that time quite strongly embedded in the ranks of some of the Liverpool labor unions, who heaped impartially a generous measure of vituperative scorn on Tories and Labour Party loyalists alike. Their staunch opponents, the earnest members of the Catholic Evidence Guild, who offered a sort of stripped-down version of Apologetics 101—nothing other, in fact, than a bit of boiled-over and boiled-down Bellarmine—also spoke there, as did those unfortunate young American Mormon missionaries who had had the bad luck of being assigned to duty in Liverpool, and who surely had to view their lot as nothing less than two years at hard labor. In that context they stood out not simply because they were Americans but also because they were young, good-looking, clean-cut, neatly dressed, healthy, and obviously well fed. And week after week, with whatever patience and good humor they could muster, they fought a losing battle against a wholly predictable barrage of ribald questions and interruptions focused almost exclusively on the joys and sorrows of polygamy.
Meanwhile, back in school, there were subjects to be mastered and examinations to be prepared for. And we took that challenge seriously. French literature was competently taught, if not inspiringly so. So, too, French language, so far as grammar and syntax were concerned. But it was taught very much as a dead, literary language like Latin, and our only real exercise in speaking it took place at the evening gatherings organized by the Foyer français in town. There we tried to put it to good use while (rather shyly) chatting up the girls who were our sixth-form equivalents at grammar schools like Bellerieve—a convent school that flourished the motto Suaviter in modo, fortiter in re, in which we sex-starved boys (inevitably) detected wholly improbable sexual overtones. English literature and history, on the other hand, were taught, not simply competently, but extremely well. The standard textbooks approved by the city’s education authority were more or less ignored as being too thin. Instead, we were taught in more or less tutorial fashion with weekly essays (carefully graded) which called for a lot of independent reading and “research” in the Picton Reference Library. The same was true in history, where we were prepared in continental history for the medieval option and in English history for the Tudor-Stuart option. In both, we were privileged to have as our teacher W. F. F. Grace (nicknamed “Putty” Grace among the boys). He was a layman, a rather pious lifelong bachelor, almost certainly gay, an old boy of the school who, after military service in the Great War, had gone on to complete a PhD in nineteenth-century European diplomatic history at Cambridge under the supervision of Herbert Butterfield. When visiting his old school after obtaining his PhD, he had been asked, because of a sudden staff departure, to help out for a term. A quarter of a century later, he was still “helping out” in superb fashion and, having switched interests, had come to focus on the medieval period. I am not sure what the secret of his unquestionable pedagogic success was. He would simply come into class, sit on a desk, and start talking in an informal but altogether captivating manner. Beyond stipulating a topic for a weekly essay, he was not particularly directive in his advice about what we should read on the given topic. Again, as with our studies in English, we were thrown back on our own devices and imaginative resources and became acquainted, accordingly, with the study practices and library skills needed for independent work. But of Putty Grace I should properly acknowledge that, by an alchemy one can only admire without being able to emulate, he aroused in me, as in many other SFX sixth-formers, an abiding love for things historical in general and a consuming interest in the Middle Ages in particular. That love of the historical and fascination with its intriguing complexity may also have been stimulated, or so I am now inclined to think, by the fact that I had complexly intertwined in my mind, each competing for supremacy and each exerting its own emotional tug, three implicit master narratives of British history. One was Irish in provenance, the second of English Catholic inspiration, and the third, English and patriotic (jingoistic?) in feel, was the one embedded in our prescribed textbooks. The first, picked up at home, tilted in a “perfidious Albion” direction and resonated to the plaintive theme of centuries of English colonial oppression of Ireland. Its modern heroes, though they had ended up at odds, were Éamon de Valera and Michael Collins, “the big fellow.” Its villains, unquestionably, were David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill, who, it was argued, had threatened and cajoled the members of the Irish nationalist delegation to Westminster and tricked them into abandoning their hope for a republican united Ireland and into settling instead for an unheroic Free State in the twenty-six counties alone. That view of things was very much at odds with the British history we learned at school, mostly because the latter was really English history, with the Irish, Scots, and Welsh simply being trundled on the stage every two centuries or so to be defeated. Also at odds with the standard account conveyed by the prescribed textbooks, which tended to glorify Queen Elizabeth and her vindication of Protestant England in the face of the alien and Catholic Spanish threat, was the Chestertonian nostalgia inculcated at school for the old faith as it had prevailed in England prior to the stripping of the altars. Similarly, the glorification of the Elizabethan Catholic martyrs, especially Jesuits like Edmund Campion, who had risked and lost their lives in the attempt to keep the old faith alive among the Catholic recusants who had stubbornly refused, in the teeth of government oppression, to align themselves with the Elizabethan religious settlement. Though, significantly enough, I don’t remember having heard anything at all about those Catholic laity and secular clergy who prided themselves on being loyal Englishmen and proved willing to take the 1606 Oath of Allegiance and to put up with the Elizabethan settlement in return for a restricted measure of toleration. Given the uneasy presence in the mind of views so mutually antagonistic, it was hard for me, or indeed for any of us, to be “God for Harry, England, and St. George” types. But if such views were in tension one with another, I am inclined now to think that the tension involved was a creative one that helped nourish in us a helpful measure of skepticism and an incipient degree of comfort with interpretative complexity. Certainly, by our sixth-form years, we had become sensitized to the competing religious biases embedded in the historical writings of such as Cardinal Gasquet, G. G. Coulton, and Hilaire Belloc.
At the end of two years, we all took the examinations for the Higher School Certificate, and while we all secured entry to one or another of the “redbrick” universities or Senior City Scholarships that ensured admission and financial support at Liverpool University, not all of us took up those options. The school selected five of us to stay on for a third year in order to compete for the Open Scholarships offered by the Oxbridge colleges, and our long-suffering and uncomprehending parents were somehow cajoled into permitting us to do so. These scholarships, funded by the college involved, were often quite ancient and, accordingly, did not carry with them much in the way of financial support. What they did carry with them, however, was a great deal of prestige both for the recipient and for the school from which he or she hailed, and in any case a state scholarship would make up on a family means-tested basis the size of the financial aid award needed. I have often wondered what would have happened had my parents insisted that I stay at home, take up the Senior City Scholarship, and continue my studies at Liverpool University. It was, after all, a first-rate place with an excellent history department numbering in the ranks of its faculty at that time two outstanding professorial appointees in medieval history, Geoffrey Barraclough and Hans Liebeschütz. As a student keen to focus on medieval history, I would certainly have been in very good hands. But the image of Oxford loomed large in the intellectual atmosphere of our school. In the absence of any Catholic university in Britain, the English Province of the Jesuits had long since established in Campion Hall its own constituent college at Oxford, and most of our Jesuit teachers were Oxford products and Oxford boosters. Even apart from that, we boys were all, it seems, in the grip of some sort of metropolitan mania. We were prone to thinking that everything worthwhile that happened in Britain took place in the environs of London or, at least, south of the grim Northern and Midlands industrial belt that constituted in our minds a sort of cultural and intellectual equivalent of the Mason-Dixon Line. There in the beguiling southland, Rupert Brooke’s beloved England, lay the truly cultivated part of the country, so different from the roughness of our northern clime, a land of which we had little or no direct experience. Instead, it was one mediated to us largely by literature, news reports, and film. It was the land, or so we imagined, where everyone spoke with the authoritative, plate-glass, “Received Pronunciation” which the BBC had succeeded in establishing as socially de rigueur. This was the era, after all, in which the BBC’s experiment in using Wilfred Pickles, a Yorkshireman with a mildly regional accent, as a news announcer had been met with irritated protests, some of them, I suspect, from people who spoke very much the same way as he did. Somehow, it seems, the news could not be taken seriously if announced in northern-accented English. Moved, then, by the unattractive stirrings of adolescent snobbishness and class-based insecurity, we were becoming awkwardly conscious, in those unutterably dreary postwar years, of what we interpreted as the stultifying provincialism of our lives in Liverpool.
There is a wonderful moment in Alan Bennett’s play The History Boys when one of the boys, Posner, gripped, the author suggests, by “a premature disillusion,” is moved in a confessional moment to confide in his teacher that
I’m a Jew.
I’m small.
I’m homosexual.
And I live in Sheffield.
I’m fucked!
Had that play been written when we were still in school, whatever we might have made of the other things with which Posner felt himself burdened, I am confident that we would have resonated sympathetically with his dismay at growing up amid the northerly industrial grimness of Sheffield. After all, we ourselves were growing up in grimy old Liverpool, beginning to chafe against the cultural bit we felt it imposed on us, anxious to get away from the restrictions of home life, ready to spread our wings in glorious independence, and eager to find ourselves in the more exotic university world we had read about in novels like Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. Even when we finally got there, our preset image of the enchantment of Oxford life was so powerful as to trump the somewhat pinched and threadbare realities of conditions there in those immediate postwar years. It is true that no exotic figure like Sebastian Flyte thrust his elegant head through the open window of my room in order, impeccable manners notwithstanding, to vomit diffidently onto the floor. But, then, the rooms I occupied during the two years I lived in college were both on the first rather than the ground floor. And, though it may be a poor substitute, it is the case that my old school friend, Tony Galea, who was reading classics at Christ’s College, Cambridge, contrived, having consumed too much cheap South African sherry at a party I threw to celebrate a visit of his to Oxford, to vomit out of my window onto the path leading down to Christchurch Meadows that runs between Corpus and Merton.
Our third year in the sixth form turned out to be even better than the other two. Lol O’Keeffe and I were the beneficiaries of a wonderful English tutorial given by a young Jesuit recently graduated from Oxford and on loan to SFX from Stonyhurst College, the order’s premier public school in Britain. In that tutorial, tackling groups of Shakespeare’s plays among other things in our weekly essays, we managed to work our way through most of the Shakespearian corpus—with the exception, I think, of Timon of Athens, Titus Andronicus, and Pericles, Prince of Tyre. In history, we soldiered on with the inimitable Putty Grace, burrowing further into the more recent scholarship and doing our best to absorb the unfamiliar perspective that informs Francis Dvornik’s Making of Central and Eastern Europe and the new theoretical subtleties embedded in Walter Ullmann’s Medieval Papalism. We also tackled parts, at least, of Augustin Fliche’s monumental La Réforme Grégorienne and even struggled a bit with the canonistic technicalities of Barraclough’s Papal Provisions.
Heady stuff for schoolboys it may well have been, but it all clearly added a measure of depth to what we wrote when we competed for our Oxford Open Scholarships. Lol and I, having entered for Open Scholarships in Modern Subjects, he at University College, I at Corpus Christi, did the written examinations at school and then went up to Oxford during the Easter vacation of 1950 for the vivas, or subsequent oral examinations, at our first-choice colleges. By early morning the next day, Lol had heard that he was in at University College but Corpus had not yet posted its results. So I spent the morning at Oriel College writing the first examination for an Open Scholarship in history. When I emerged at lunchtime, Lol was waiting for me with the glad tidings that the announcement of my election as a Scholar at Corpus had been posted at the porter’s lodge there. So I withdrew from the competition for a scholarship at Oriel. Having somehow laid our hands on a couple of bikes, we then spent the afternoon riding all over Oxford in a mood of barely controlled exploratory euphoria.
The next day we embarked on a triumphal train ride back to Liverpool where we found that the other three who had been entered for Open Scholarships had also been successful: Tony Murray, in mathematics, also at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and Eric Bushell and Tony Galea, both in classics, at Peterhouse and Christ’s College, Cambridge, respectively. We were neither the first nor the last at SFX to succeed in that competitive quest, but I think ours was, for a pretty small school, something of a banner year. The previous year, Chris McDonnell, who had started out like me at St. Francis of Assisi elementary school in Garston, had been elected to an Open Scholarship in history at Corpus, while John Sullivan had been elected to an Open Scholarship in classics at St. John’s College, Cambridge. Viewed in retrospect, this success rate strikes me as extraordinary. There was nothing obvious in our social or educational backgrounds to suggest the likelihood of such an outcome. What we were attending, after all, was a small, provincial day school. McDonnell’s and Sullivan’s fathers were both dockers (i.e., stevedores) on the Liverpool docks, Bushell’s and Galea’s were elementary school teachers, Tony Murray’s was a clerk in a local government office, Lol O’Keeffe’s a constable in the Liverpool police force, and mine a foreman in a factory. Smart, I suppose, we undoubtedly were, at least in the sense that we were skilled examinees, for we had had to prove ourselves capable of scaling a rather steep and strictly meritocratic ladder. But things could easily have turned out otherwise, as they did for so many of our contemporaries. It is poignant to think about it now, but we would have got nowhere without the generosity, sacrifice, sympathy, and loving (if somewhat uncomprehending) support of our parents, or without the quality, thoughtfulness, interest, and dedication of our teachers. I would dearly like to think that we didn’t let any of them down or squander the opportunities so generously bestowed upon us. Tony Galea, alas, died tragically in an autobahn accident while serving with the British Army of the Rhine, but given his ability, temperament, and drive, I find it hard to believe that, had he lived, he would not have made something significant of himself. Chris McDonnell, who took a First in history, and Lol O’Keeffe both went on to years of distinguished service in the senior ranks of the civil service (the War Office and Foreign Office respectively), in our day a much-admired calling. Eric Bushell went on to become a business executive. Tony Murray, John Sullivan, and I became academics—Tony became the principal of a teacher’s training college and John Sullivan (who took a Starred Double First in classics at Cambridge) became a don of great distinction, first at Cambridge and then at Lincoln College, Oxford, before being lured away to a series of prestigious professorial appointments in the United States. As for what happened to me, we’ll get to that later.
With our university future decided and no more examinations to be faced, the remainder of our third year in the sixth form was a relaxed and enjoyable one. As SFX did not itself offer instruction in German, though it viewed it as the language of scholarship, Lol and I were dispatched to a local technical college to make a start on getting some sort of a grip on that language. And a young Jesuit was assigned the task of mounting a mini course in philosophy for all of us. It took the form of a sort of assault course in various logical and epistemological conundrums. The purpose, I suspect, was to armor us against the wiles of the logical positivists and the lucidly persuasive arguments of A. J. Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic, which, at that time, had acquired among undergraduates the status almost of biblical revelation. It was all very stimulating and very much to my intellectual taste. But if there is any truth to the derisive description of philosophy as “the trade of professors and the sport of impertinent boys,” I should ruefully confess that in that half term we never really got beyond the impertinent boys stage.
L.D.S.