In December of the second of my two years at Christchurch, there occurred an event which would decisively alter my life and the lives of my friends here at school and indeed people everywhere. On that day—it was a mild and golden and cloudless Sunday—I had taken illegal leave of the campus and had gone on a gently beer-soaked automobile ride through this incomparable Virginia countryside, which was beautifully forlorn and wild-looking in those days. It was a wintry, leafless afternoon—very bright, as I say—with no hint in it of menace. My companions on the ride that afternoon were a classmate named Bill Bowman and two girls from Urbanna, who even at this late date shall remain nameless. Bowman, besides being a year older than I was, was a native of New York City, and thus I trusted him in sophisticated matters, such as beer. The beer we were drinking out of brown bottles, purchased stealthily the day before at Cooks’ Corners, was a vile concoction called Atlantic, so crudely brewed that gobbets of yeast floated in it like snowflakes. I earnestly hope it is no longer being manufactured. At any rate, our car and its occupants finally ended up down the road in West Point, where, inhaling the sweet fumes of the paper mill's hydrogen sulfide (intense and ripe even on the Sabbath), we dismounted at a seedy little café for hamburgers. It was while we were in this dive, eating hamburgers and surreptitiously swilling the foul Atlantic, that the waitress came to the table and announced the perplexing and rather horrible radio news. I’ll never forget her homely face, which was like a slab of pale pine with two small holes bored in it, nor her voice, which had all the sad languor of the upper Pamunkey River. “The Japanese,” she said, “they done bombed Pearl Harbor.” Her expression contained a certain real fear. “God help us,” she went on, “it's so close. Imagine them gettin’ all the way to South Carolina.”
That woman's knowledge of geography was only a little less informed than our own, and the next day—as we sat in study hall listening to the radio and President Roosevelt's call for a declaration of war against the Axis powers—few of us sitting there could realize how irrevocably things would be changed—for us and the world—and how all of our lives thenceforth would be in one way or another determined by the existence of war.
I would not be so fatuous as to say that when I was here all was perfect bliss, that in this garden of earthly delights high above the Rappahannock a scuffed toe would not have uncovered a toad or two. But of all the schools I attended, including the three institutions of higher learning I went to subsequently in the South and North, only Christchurch ever commanded something more than mere respect—which is to say, my true and abiding affection. I think that much of the warmth and sweetness I felt and still feel for Christchurch has to do with the fact that when I was a student the place was very small and resembled a family—a sometimes tumultuous and quarrelsome, always nearly destitute but at the same time close-knit and loyal family. There were, I believe, only fifty-odd boys. We were poor. The school was poor. Many schools at the end of the Depression were poor, but the threadbare nature of Christchurch was almost Dickensian in its pathos. The library, for instance. At sixteen, I had a natural inclination for geography and I loved to pore over maps, but in the library there was only one geography book. It was not a bad atlas, had it been left undamaged, but it had been divested of Africa and all of Eastern Europe—something which to this day has produced significant gaps in my knowledge of the earth. The works of American literature stopped with Jack London—no Hemingway, no Fitzgerald, no Thomas Wolfe, no Theodore Dreiser; in compensation, we had that laudable work Tom Sawyer, but even this boy's classic palled upon perhaps the fifth reading. The Encyclopaedia Britannica was of such antique vintage that its information in the technological sphere alone ceased, I remember, with the invention of the telegraph and the diving bell. The pride of the entire library was a complete twenty-volume Shakespeare, but at least three volumes had been left out in the rain and the pages were stuck together, while someone else had stolen both King Lear and Richard III. Despite all this deprivation, I managed to get educated enough to pass on to college and acquit myself with at least passable honor. Our masters, good-natured and hideously underpaid drudges who possessed nonetheless high ideals and admirable patience, dispensed as much learning as was within their power. I still salute them in memory. When out of sheer exhaustion the teachers flagged and stumbled, the brotherly family-like nature of the school allowed us to teach each other. My classmate Tommy Peyton taught me all the trigonometry I ever knew. Langley Wood tutored me in chemistry, also about the girls in Richmond. It was in Jimmy Davenport's late-evening seminar that I learned how to beat the dealer at blackjack.
In later years, after leaving Christchurch and college, I became the good friend of several of those who had attended the great preparatory schools of New England. In all truth, it must be said that the potential for a good early education must have been somewhat larger at these richly endowed schools, with their splendid libraries and other resources, than it was at Christchurch; but I emphasize that word “potential” in the realization that at Christchurch, for those of us who had the determination—and most of us did—it was possible to overcome the handicaps and obtain an excellent preparation for college while in the process having a good time. Most of my friends who went to those venerable Northern institutions with names like Andover and St. Paul's did not seem to have a good time; so often their descriptions of school life are bleak, cold, impersonal, resembling a bearable but monotonous servitude rewarded later by glorious times at Princeton or Yale. At Christchurch I remember we worked as hard as anyone else to get our learning, but we also enjoyed ourselves. And I say that with memory uncontaminated by false nostalgia. Nothing warms my heart more than the recollection of those little sloops we sailed down on this matchless river. Certainly there are few schools in America that have proximity and access to a waterway of such magnificence. It mattered little to us that some of the boats were ancient and badly caulked and waterlogged and had been known with some frequency to sink sedately beneath the waves, even in the middle of a race; they were our boats and we loved them. Sailing, like the other sports, gave us ravenous appetites, and this leads to another obvious delight: the always tenderly prepared meals of Mr. Joseph Cameron, who of course is now an almost global legend. Could anything be more incongruous, more preposterous than the idea of any institution of learning where the food was consistently palatable and often superb? While my Ivy League friends still complain thinly and bitterly of soggy Swiss steaks and glutinous mashed potatoes, I recall cheese biscuits and pastries and delicately grilled fish, fresh from the river or the bay, which would have caused a French chef to salivate with envy. Christchurch may not have been in those days a well-heeled place, but it had a warm and golden ambience, and life was sweet, and we ate like kings.
[From Styron's commencement address at Christchurch School, May 24, 1974.]