Mad About Shakespeare

2. Erecting a Grammar School

In one of my earliest memories, my brother and I are in our beds and our mother is reading a chapter of The World of Pooh, the two Winnie-the-Pooh books gathered in a single volume, published in 1958, the year of my birth. This was the first edition to have full-colour illustrations by E. H. Shepard. The jacket showed Pooh, Piglet, Rabbit and Roo leaning out over the white bars of the Poohsticks bridge as Eeyore floats on his back along the meandering blue stream. After the story was finished and before my star-patterned bedside light was switched off for the night, Mum let me examine the map of the Hundred Acre Wood on the endpapers.

It showed a variety of inviting homes. There was Pooh, sitting comfortably on a long log in front of where he lived Under the name of Sanders. Piglet very small in front of the very grand beech-tree house that had, according to the broken board beside it, once belonged to Trespassers W, short for Trespassers Will, short for Trespassers William. Owl’s tree, the one that, I would discover, had two signs, reading respectively Plez ring if an rnser is reqird and Plez cnoke if an rnsr is not reqid. These were written by Christopher Robin, who was the only one in the forest who could spell. Then there was Rabbit’s burrow-hole; Kanga’s house, adjacent to the sandy pit that was Roo’s playground; Eeyore’s gloomy place; and Christopher Robin’s own home. It was a world that felt safe, as mine did. My mother was a Kanga. I didn’t know then that she also had Eeyore in her genes. My father, always the schoolmaster, was one-part Owl and one-part Rabbit – he was entirely without the bossiness, but liked to be very organized, which he had needed to be when playing a captain’s part in the siege of Caen in 1944. My brother wasn’t really a character in the book: he was always busy in another world with his trains and his model-making. I bounced around like Tigger and as a slightly spoilt younger child shared Pooh’s taste for both honey and condensed milk with my snack at elevenses – though, so as not to seem greedy, I could happily have done without the bread.

The words at the top were what I liked most about the map. On the left was a copse marked NICE FOR PICNICKS. We lived near A. A. Milne’s inspiration for the 100 AKER WOOD, the Ashdown Forest. We went there ourselves for gorsey picnics and Poohsticks thrown from a bridge alleged to be the original. And on the right, in the very top corner of the map, was the widening stream beyond the bee tree, where my eye went past BIG STONES AND ROX to the words TO NORTH POLE. Much as I loved my cosy childhood world, I wanted to get out. To go on expotitions to other worlds, new worlds.

We could not, however, afford to travel. In those days, only the very well-to-do went on holiday abroad. At the beginning of each school year, I was quietly humiliated by the tales of more prosperous schoolmates who had flown to such exotic locations as Spain and even the fabled Riviera. I had never been on a plane. The best that my family could manage was a bucket-and-spade week beside the sea in Broadstairs, where my grandmother lived at the magical address of 55 West Cliff Road. She was cared for by my maiden aunt and each summer we formed a relief party, looking after Granny while Auntie Joan went hiking in the Alps. The closest I got to abroad was the slideshows of her travels, with which we were regaled at some length when we paid a brief return visit to West Cliff Road each freezing January.

I must have realized that the only way I was going to discover other worlds would be by reading. The first book that I can remember reading on my own was a little oblong hardback called Around the World with Ant and Bee. It took me to Paris, New York, Moscow, even Sydney and Tokyo. Later, I miniaturized myself with the Borrowers, messed about on the river with Ratty and Mole, followed Mijbil the otter to the west coast of Scotland in Ring of Bright Water.

When I was nine, my older cousin Diana moved to a school much nearer to our home than hers. She suffered from severe motion sickness, so in order to shorten her journey on the school bus she came to stay in our tiny guest room during the week in term time. One evening we talked about books and she asked me if I had read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. I had not. The next week, she came back with her family’s well-thumbed hardback copy. And then Prince Caspian and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, all the way through to The Last Battle. I could not get enough of this other world. I rejoiced in the exploits of Reepicheep the mouse. Lucy felt like the little sister I longed for, and I developed an especial fondness for the old professor. O, to have a rambling house like his, with a library and proper opportunities for hide and seek. I wrote my own stories in imitation, giving my world of talking animals the astonishingly original name of Animalia. Although we went to church each week, my parents taking their religious duties very seriously, I didn’t twig that Narnia housed a Christian allegory and I felt rather cheated when I discovered that it did.

I started reading Sherlock Holmes stories instead. I still have the volume of Collected Short Stories that my parents gave me for Christmas when I was eleven – my brother and I were allowed to choose our main present, maximum price £2. The Conan Doyle was just a little more, but an exception was made because it was a book. Once again, I revelled in worlds so different from my own staid suburbia: the hansom cabs clattering past 221B on foggy Baker Street, all those granges and lodges in the country, holding their secrets and dark deeds. What I liked about Holmes himself was the mixture of forensic rationality and romantic energy – the violin sonatas, the restless, angular passion for new adventures, to stave off the boredom, the endless boredom, the melancholy that came with it.

Then I turned thirteen and stopped reading books.

Our town of Sevenoaks claimed an – albeit tenuous – connection with Shakespeare. Each day as I strode, not crept, willingly to school, satchel in hand, I passed Cade Lane at the bottom of our road and then skirted the cricket ground called Solefields that would become my summer domain of triumph and disaster. At the junction with the road that led to Tonbridge, our cricketing rivals, there was a plaque on the stone wall explaining that this was the site of the Battle of Solefields, fought in the year 1450 between men of Kent led by Jack Cade and the king’s troops under the command of Sir Humphrey Stafford.

Rebel leader Jack Cade had compiled a ‘Complaint of the Poor Commons of Kent’ and assembled a ragtag army on Blackheath. Forced to retreat, they ambushed the pursuing royal forces near Sevenoaks. During the skirmish, Stafford and his brother were killed. Commoner Cade presumptuously donned Sir Humphrey’s armoured velvet jacket and his spurs. Emboldened, he and his followers marched to London, where they became more interested in looting than revolution. The rebels were defeated in a battle on London Bridge. Cade fled, only to be captured by a Kentishman called Alexander Iden. He was injured in the fray and died of his wounds as he was being taken back to London, where he was given a posthumous mock trial before his body was dragged through the streets and quartered, the pieces being sent as a salutary warning to various locations in Kent where rebellion had been fomented.

Shakespeare dramatized this story in one of the ‘Wars of the Roses’ plays that I studied in the summer term before my father’s death. It was published in 1594 under the catchy title The First Part of the Contention betwixt the two famous Houses of Yorke and Lancaster, with the death of the good Duke Humphrey: And the banishment and death of the Duke of Suffolke, and the Tragicall end of the proud Cardinall of Winchester, with the notable Rebellion of Jacke Cade: And the Duke of Yorkes first claime unto the Crowne. In the First Folio, it would be rebranded as Henry VI Part 2. (Part 1, it seems, was what we would now call a ‘prequel’.) The Battle of Solefields takes place on stage, though the location is not specified beyond the fact that it is in Kent.

Neither side comes off well. Stafford would not have endeared himself to Shakespeare’s groundlings by calling the commoners filth and scum, while Cade, despite proclaiming that all things shall be in common, is a vain upstart and rabble-rouser rather than a proto-socialist revolutionary who genuinely believes in liberty. He puts on Stafford’s armour as a sign of his victory – in an age when dress was a mark of status and gender, Shakespeare always loved a subversive swap of clothing – but then announces with savage relish that the bodies of the dead brothers will be dragged to London, where he intends to release all the prisoners from the jails and cause general havoc. He also proclaims that when he is king, no young woman will be allowed to marry until he has taken her virginity for himself.

Being illiterate, Shakespeare’s Cade has a particular hatred of learning. When the rebels capture the Lord Saye, Cade turns that word filth on to him:

I am the besom that must sweep the court clean of such filth as thou art: thou hast most traitorously corrupted the youth of the realm in erecting a grammar school: and whereas before, our forefathers had no other books but the score and the tally, thou hast caused printing to be used, and contrary to the king, his crown, and dignity, thou hast built a paper-mill.

As punishment for these crimes, the rebels behead the Lord Saye and his son-in-law, Sir James Cromer. Their heads are brought on to the stage on poles and made to kiss.

Shakespeare owed his education to a recently erected grammar school in Stratford-upon-Avon; he found the sources for his plays in books; the printing of his poem Venus and Adonis made his name; and he could not have written Henry VI Part 2 without paper. So on the matter of grammar schools, books, printing and paper, he could hardly have been in sympathy with Cade. The mob on the rampage has no care for literature. In this respect, the scene anticipates the chilling moment in Julius Caesar when Cinna the Poet is torn to pieces by the crowd because they have mistaken him for Cinna the Conspirator.

James Fiennes, 1st Baron Saye and Sele, was indeed executed as a gesture to placate the rebels, because his abuse of his great power in Kent was one of their chief complaints. (Ralph Fiennes, whom I first saw as a dazzling Dauphin in King John and then as Troilus in the Swan Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon, and his brother Joseph, who so wittily played Shakespeare in Love, are descendants through a cadet branch of the family.) The latter part of the Saye and Sele title was acknowledgement of the Baron’s ownership of the manor of Seal, a village on the edge of Sevenoaks. Given this association and the location of the Battle of Solefields, it is plausible that the grammar school Shakespeare had in mind when he wrote this speech for Cade was indeed Sevenoaks, founded in the early fifteenth century to give a secular classical education to the boys of the town.

The school was unusual. Because it was a lay foundation, it was unaffected by the upheaval of the Reformation. Because it was in a backwater, it escaped the Victorian reforms whereby many grammar schools became ‘public’ (i.e. private) schools, which had the effect of excluding local boys. It also bypassed the Education Act of 1944 in which grammar schools lost some of their autonomy and resources through the exclusion of fee-paying pupils. When a reforming headmaster called Kim Taylor arrived in the late 1950s, he described the school as ‘medieval-modern’: it was, he said, ‘as though a clock had got so far behind the time that it seemed ahead of it’. About a third of the boys had their fees paid by the Kent County Council, the others by their parents. There were fee-paying boarders, but in a minority, in contrast to the historic public schools that were dominated by the ethos of boarding.

The distinctive nature of the school gave Taylor the opportunity to experiment. Old customs were mingled with innovations. Uniform was capped with an Edwardian-style straw boater known as a biff, even as one of the boarding houses became an ‘International Centre’ self-governed by pupils from all around the world. Mathematics was taught in a new way, sparking the imagination of my contemporary Simon Donaldson, who went on to win a Fields Medal for his breakthrough in four-dimensional geometry. There was an after-school Technical Activities Centre, where my brother spent all his time building computers and miniature steam locomotives. Music lessons began with jazz improvisation. An exchange scheme gave the option of spending a term at a school in France. The Art Room was open all day, inviting boys to come in – lured by a gramophone backing-track of Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan or the Velvet Underground – and do their own thing with coffee pots, guitars, plaster casts, disembowelled lawnmowers, barbed wire and, as visionary art master Bob White put it, ‘piles of machinery decomposing like Cézanne’s apples’. It attracted the creative rebels – out of the Art Room crowd of my generation came punk-rock bands The Gang of Four and the Mekons, the award-winning films of Paul Greengrass, and the highly distinctive documentary collages of Adam Curtis.

Taylor had moved on by the time I was at the school in the 1970s, but his spirit remained. Public-school traditions were called into question. There was no place for muscular Christianity: in morning assembly, in place of hymns and prayers, there were talks by staff or pupils on ethics, politics, the arts, even existentialism. Militaristic CCF (Combined Cadet Force) was optional, not compulsory, with community service or environmental projects offered instead. The latter was known as Digweed, not because it involved digging weeds (though it did), but because it had been proposed by a boy of that name who was a conscientious objector. I opted for VSU (the Voluntary Service Unit) and still have vivid memories of performing conjuring tricks in care homes for the elderly, leading drama workshops with severely autistic children, and going to afternoon discos at Leybourne Grange, a self-contained ‘colony’ in a crumbling mansion that had been established in the 1930s as a home for more than a thousand so-called ‘Mentally Defective Persons’ (most of whom had Down’s Syndrome and were among the warmest people I had ever met).

Political debate was encouraged. Jim Guyatt, our history teacher, took an unashamedly Marxian approach to the discipline, choosing the Russian Revolution as our special topic. And we were encouraged to engage with contemporary politics. Mock elections took place and senior figures from every party, along with trade union leaders and captains of industry, were invited to address the entire sixth form during ‘Wednesday Period Eight’. Even the leader of the ultra-right-wing National Front was given a platform. He said that immigrants should be repatriated because the races were genetically different from each other, so should not mix. His prime piece of evidence was that ‘Black people can’t swim’. When it came to questions at the end, a Black student in the back row put his hand up and said, ‘I’m the captain of the school swimming team.’ Cheers, laughter and applause raised the roof and sank the speaker.

The hybridity of the school, with its combination of freedom from regulation, resources made possible by the fee-payers, and social diversity created by the free places, was only possible in the 1960s and 1970s, before the free places were abolished with the introduction of ‘comprehensive’ state education. The problem with the system was that there were not enough free places for everybody, so selection was made on the basis of the dreaded 11-plus exam.

‘What will happen if I don’t pass, Dad?’

‘Well, we couldn’t possibly afford to send you to Tonbridge, so you’d have to go to the Wildernesse.’

This was not a metaphor: it really was the name of the secondary modern school at the other end of town, which offered none of the opportunities that those who passed the test were privileged to receive. Taylor himself recognized both the social injustice of the public-school system and the inhumanity and waste of the 11-plus. It would have been Utopian to suppose that his educational experiments might one day be made available for all. Sevenoaks could only be a crucible for innovation because it was financially independent, academically selective, and answerable only to its governors, not the government. If Shakespeare was most fortunate in his time and place of birth, as the Tudor educational revolution was creating new grammar schools in small towns such as Stratford-upon-Avon, opening up unprecedented opportunities for middle-class boys, then so was I, born into a generation where Kent County Council paid not only for my place at school but also for three fully subsidized years at university. There was no such thing as student debt.

I wasn’t aware of the privilege at the time. I have only the vaguest memory of my parents’ relief that the 11-plus had been a success for me, as it had for my brother two years before. And I didn’t really take advantage of the opportunities in my first few years at the school. I lived for football and cricket. Is it because some combination of testosterone and peer pressure turns so many boys off reading between the ages of thirteen and fifteen that – to judge from the gender balance of English courses, library usage and fiction-buying – a love of literature is more common among women than men?

The Sevenoaks way of addressing this problem was to abandon grammar and précis, the traditional stuff of school English classes, in favour of creative writing and analysis of the work that language does in many different contexts. As headmaster Taylor explained,

Classes will be spent on, say, advertising, or TV or film and other forms of pop culture and mass communication; or on the quality of life in cities, and town planning; or, perilously, on the work and influence of Freud, Adler and Jung. What were once red herrings become a main dish.

By linking personal passions to creative projects, the English department gave boys far more interest in writing than they would have had if lessons had involved grammatical drilling and morally improving texts. My first project, channelling the love of birdwatching that I had learned from my mother, was a polemic against a government proposal to build a third London airport on the mudflats of the Maplin Sands off the Essex coast, a haven for migratory birds including rare avocets. This sowed the seed of a lifelong interest in the uses of literature as a means of addressing ecological questions.

As for reading, Taylor continued, books that had once been studied because they were acknowledged masterpieces in the history of English literature were abandoned in favour of works that deal with situations of concern to boys, by writers who are themselves concerned, or ‘committed’:

Gone, at school level, are Addison and Steele, so much favoured a generation ago: in have come not only George Eliot and D. H. Lawrence but books like Hartley’s The Go-Between, Golding’s Lord of the Flies and Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. It is not just a question of drawing parallels, of cerebral instruction and comment. It is important that a boy should be emotionally involved in what he reads; dragged, from the character and situation in the book, through the hedge backward to self-awareness; moved, in discussion and when he writes, to new insights about himself and those around him.

To begin with, it didn’t work for me. We were prescribed Lord of the Flies in the third form. I gave up halfway through. It was a distraction from Match of the Day and Top of the Pops. We were prescribed The Catcher in the Rye in the fourth form. It sparked a small romance with the idea of America, but again I gave up, finding Holden Caulfield a bit of a phony. I also failed to finish Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country, which was especially shameful because one of the school’s most charismatic teachers was the poet and novelist C. J. ‘Jonty’ Driver, exiled from his native South Africa after ninety days jailed in solitary confinement for his anti-apartheid activism.

In the fifth form, there was no choice but to read all the way through to the end of The Go-Between: it was O-Level year and this was one of the set texts.

The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.

That, I liked. The past which was opened up seemed both familiar and strange. Many elements of the book transcended time: a boy who is bullied, but who outwits his rivals through clever use of language; shyness and embarrassment; long, slow summer days; the outsider peering into a world of beauty and elegance that may not be as happy or desirable a place as he imagines; the trauma at the climax (a suicide, a child’s nervous breakdown, a mother dispatched to a mental institution); the onset of teenage years bringing a reckoning with the body, with sex and sexuality. The confusion of young Leo Colston as he falls in love with both the lovers he goes between, ethereal, blonde, upper-class Marian – the Virgo who proves not to be – and farmer Ted, ripped and tanned, was presumably a projection of L. P. Hartley’s experience of being stifled in the closet. Other elements, meanwhile – the manners, dialogue, dress and customs of the characters – transported me to a lost time, the Edwardian summer of my grandparents.

And at the pivot of the plot, there was a cricket match (evoked in such detail that for the American edition Hartley had to rewrite it with an explanation of the basic principles of the game). When Leo made his miraculous catch, I could remember mine. I was twelve again, at my middle school. We would walk up to the playing field borrowed from West Heath, a boarding school for wealthy but not very academic young women (Lady Diana Spencer among them). One of my challenges as team captain was to resolve eager competition for the fielding position of deep square leg, adjacent to the hedge that divided the cricket pitch from the girls’ swimming pool. That day, we were playing our local rivals, Sevenoaks Prep, who invariably won with ease. When they came out to bat, I decided to wrong-foot them by opening the attack with my own slow, looping leg spin instead of the conventional fast bowler. Their captain, Paul Downton, clearly destined to play for England, drove the first ball back at head height four feet to my right. I leaped with outstretched hand and held the catch. After that, it didn’t matter that they still defeated us. The mighty Downton had, as Leo would have said, been vanquished.

The Go-Between was an ideal novel for classroom discussion because it was so rich in themes and symbols: class antagonism as well as sexual awakening; the eternal idea of childhood as a lost paradise, as well as the historical specificity of the coming Great War as the end of an era; the weather as emotional thermometer; the signs of the Zodiac as image of Leo’s belief that he is among gods; the sense, as Leo describes it, of a magical Midsummer Night’s Dream turned from comedy to tragedy. There was just enough erotic frisson to generate a sense of excitement for boys without causing offence to parents. The novel is a watered-down version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover: whereas Lawrence’s Sir Clifford has been literally emasculated by a war wound, Hartley’s Viscount Trimingham merely has a Boer-inflicted scar on his face; where Lawrence wrote graphic sex scenes with four-letter words, Hartley was content with the shadow of the thrusting farmer’s buttocks on the outhouse wall and the phallic image of a bicycle saddle which, pulled out to its fullest extent for Marian to ride, disclosed a shining tube of steel six inches long.

I loved the book so much that until recently I dared not return to it, for fear of disappointment. Now that I have done so, I recognize that the symbolism is sometimes heavy-handed and I can understand why its place on the examination syllabus has been taken by Ian McEwan’s Atonement (I would wager that The Go-Between was one of his set texts in school). But my admiration for the perfect pacing of the plot and the evocation of place, time and feeling remains undiminished. And I am thankful that by being forced to study it at the age of fifteen I was relaunched into a life of reading. Re-reading it after all these years, I reached the final page, when the south-west prospect of the Hall, long hidden from my memory, sprang into view, and not only the lost Edwardian world but also my own past hovered in midsummer air, revisiting the light.

Next, we moved on to the other novel set for examination: Wuthering Heights. Again, I was transported to another country. My paternal grandmother had been born in Leeds, and even after moving south to Frinton-on-Sea and then Broadstairs, she still had the trace of a Yorkshire accent. Out of loyalty to her, I supported Leeds United, making myself very unpopular with my school friends, who were all fans of Tottenham, Chelsea, West Ham or Crystal Palace, the clubs you could actually get to. On one occasion I was nearly assaulted at Crystal Palace: they were playing my team, who were in their brutal, magisterial prime, and Jonny Giles turned on a sixpence and fired a perfect shot into the corner of the net. I yelled with delight before being rapidly stifled by my friend Robin – we were standing among the Palace supporters, not penned in the cage with the fearsome-looking followers of Leeds.

My family took a timely holiday walking on the Yorkshire moors, where we visited the Brontë parsonage in Haworth and hiked to the ruins of Top Withens, the farmhouse supposed to have inspired the location of the novel. I had no experience of the magnetic emotions that drew Cathy and Heathcliff together, but the wind on the moor taught me how the imagination could be fired by a place, an atmosphere. The book made me into a romantic, longing for the day when I could feel as Cathy felt when she says, Nelly, I am Heathcliff – he’s always, always in my mind – not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself – but, as my own being.

The language of Wuthering Heights was more alien than that of The Go-Between, the narrative structure far more complicated. Looking around the classroom, I could see that I was in a minority in my enthusiasm for it. It was so confusing that Catherine Earnshaw loves Heathcliff but marries Edgar Linton, with whom she has a daughter called Cathy, while Heathcliff takes revenge by marrying and abusing Linton’s sister, and they have a son called Linton Heathcliff, who marries his cousin Cathy Linton, but soon dies, after which Cathy marries her other cousin, Hareton Earnshaw, the son of the first Cathy’s cruel brother Hindley, who was hated by Heathcliff, who has no surname. Why did old Mr Earnshaw pick up this wild, ‘dark’ boy on the streets of Liverpool? Was he a ‘gipsy’ or Irish or a ‘lascar’ from the East Indies or a child of the plantations in the New World? Was he indeed Mr Earnshaw’s illegitimate son, in which case he was Cathy’s half-brother and there was even more intense incest than that of all the cousin-marrying? Did his dark character and the alcoholism of Hindley Earnshaw have something to do with Emily Brontë’s bond with her charismatic but dissolute brother Branwell, who died the year after the novel was published, having claimed that he was its author? The narrative was braided together by eating disorders and episodes of insanity; the language peppered with frenzy, disordered nerves, brain fever, alienation of intellect, mental illness, indeed the concentrated essence of all the madness in the world. At times, the extremity of behaviour reminded the class of nothing so much as the excesses of the Piranha Brothers in everyone’s favourite television show. Monty Python: ‘Nail his head to the floor.’ Emily Brontë: I knocked over Hareton, who was hanging a litter of puppies from a chairback in the doorway.

My brother, a mathematician and engineer, had been forced to study the novel for his English Literature O-Level. It had frustrated his powers of logic. The equation whereby Wuthering Heights equalled primitive passion and Thrushcross Grange equalled genteel elegance made sense to him, but his scientific mind could not bend to the paradox whereby Heathcliff is both hero and anti-hero, perpetrator of appalling domestic abuse and cruelty to animals, yet a man of absolute charisma and a monomaniacal capacity to love Cathy ceaselessly from their childhood play on the moors until the moment when he wills his own death in order to join her in the grave.

I didn’t want to know Heathcliff’s precise origin – he was the archetypal outsider who survives through the force of his own will. As a boy, he peers in through the window of Thrushcross Grange, rather as in The Go-Between Leo is given a glimpse of life at Brandham Hall; as a man, he becomes master of not only Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange, but also the destiny of the next generation. His scheme of revenge for Edgar having become the legitimate lover of Cathy brings no joy. For the illegitimate Heathcliff, as for illegitimate Edmund in the equally foul-weathered King Lear (to which Mr Lockwood alludes early in the novel), the only satisfaction is death. I didn’t believe in ghosts, but I understood the idea of Heathcliff being haunted by Catherine. Where The Go-Between felt real, as an evocation of a boyhood, a class and an historical moment, Wuthering Heights exposed the limits of realism by reaching towards a more mysterious, profounder truth beyond that of the everyday. I struggled to articulate the force of my reaction to the novel. I think that in the exam I fell back on the old staple of writing about the importance of the weather. Later, when I was a university student, Virginia Woolf gave me the words about Emily Brontë that I could not find myself:

We are given every opportunity of comparing Wuthering Heights with a real farm and Heathcliff with a real man. How, we are allowed to ask, can there be truth or insight or the finer shades of emotion in men and women who so little resemble what we have seen ourselves? But even as we ask it we see in Heathcliff the brother that a sister of genius might have seen; he is impossible, we say, but nevertheless no boy in literature has a more vivid existence than his … It is as if she could tear up all that we know human beings by, and fill these unrecognizable transparencies with such a gust of life that they transcend reality. Hers, then, is the rarest of all powers. She could free life from its dependence on facts; with a few touches indicate the spirit of a face so that it needs no body; by speaking of the moor make the wind blow and the thunder roar.

It was this rarest of all powers that readied me for Shakespeare.

The plaque on the wall on the way to school