2.

It had been suggested to my parents that the kindest way to deliver their eight-year-old son to boarding school for the first time was by train, where several carriages were reserved at Victoria Station to ferry pupils to the school near East Grinstead. The idea was that, during the train journey, I would bond with my fellow new boys and thus arrive at Ashdown House with a circle of firm friends.

So we said our farewells on the platform, and I clambered aboard in my grey corduroy shorts, grey shirt and snake belt, clutching a pencil case in which an array of new pencils, rubbers, protractors and compasses nestled in their plastic pouch. I remember my waving parents as the train pulled away from the platform, past the sooty shunting sheds surrounding the station, then the miles of suburban houses lining the tracks, and eventually out into open countryside beyond Croydon and Lingfield, and on to East Sussex.

I wish I could report that, as the train rattled along, I was soon the locus of a gregarious circle of welcoming schoolmates, but I was too shy to catch anyone’s eye, and sat as still and inconspicuously as possible, hoping to evade notice. Meanwhile, hordes of rampaging older boys – they must have been twelve or thirteen, their shorts faded to light grey from constant washing – ran amok between the carriages, conducting trials of strength by hanging from luggage racks, and flicking each other with ties like bullwhips.

Eventually the train arrived at East Grinstead, we transferred into coaches and arrived at the school, at the end of a long rhododendron-lined drive. Ashdown House, near Forest Row, was considered an A-grade prep school at the time, with a good record of getting scholarships to Eton, for which it was a feeder school. The main building was an imposing Georgian mansion by the architect Benjamin Latrobe (who later designed the front portico of the White House in Washington DC), with sweeping grounds down to the River Medway. If you wanted to make a film, set at a picture-perfect English prep school, you might easily choose Ashdown, with its Lutyens-style cricket pavilion, grassy ha-ha, copses of Scots pine and an ancient spreading beech tree, the branches of which gave shade to a perfect lawn.

Behind the school lay several acres of wild scrubland known as ‘the jungle’, with winding paths and thickets of bamboo and brambles providing hiding places and secret camps. In the middle of the jungle was a concrete outdoor swimming pool, unheated and algae-green, in which school swimming galas shared the water with colonies of frogs, newts and sometimes grass snakes, which slipped in for an icy dip from an adjacent compost tip.

Presiding over the school and its random, ramshackle teaching staff of incompetents, bullies, recovering prisoners of war and borderline paedos, was the headmaster, Billie Williamson MA, a terrifying, caustic Classicist, upon whose rages and mood swings the tone of the establishment turned. His sheer physical bulk, his ability to speak fluently in Latin, his weekly sermons delivered from the pulpit of the school chapel in which he raged against Socialism, the Beatles (‘Despicable, talentless baboons’) and the hippy movement (‘Layabouts’), left me cowed, and I did my best to avoid him at all times. Unmonitored and unrestrained by any higher power, his word was law, and his sudden spontaneous furies developed in me both a fear and an intense dislike of irrational explosions of anger, and perhaps an exaggerated respect and appeasement towards authority, which took years to loosen its grip.

Billie’s wife, Mrs Williamson, privately known to the boys as ‘Bicker’, was a confused, genteel lady in pearls, herself much bullied, I suspect, by her husband; she hovered ineffectually around the margins of the school, preparing finger sandwiches and mini-eclairs for prospective parents. Billie had the power to charm and, when in a benign mood, made jokes in his daily spiel at the end of lunch, at which everyone knew to laugh compliantly. He was particularly adept at charming parents, and this ability drew ever-more prominent pupils to the place. Princess Margaret and Tony Snowdon sent David Linley, who wisely bailed out before the end. Borisfn1 and Rachel Johnsonfn2 and the actor Benedict Cumberbatchfn3 are always evoked as prominent old Ashdownians, though not contemporaries of mine.

It is only with hindsight I can begin to comprehend the peculiar roster of masters corralled to teach us: Mr Ebden, clinically obese, reputed to have once been a chess Grand Master (a rumour he encouraged) who taught nine-year-olds maths; Mr Keane, Irish Jesuit, whose tiny bedsit was imprudently sited directly between boys’ dormitories, and whose wandering hands were so busy that they barely raised eyebrows; Mr Tidmarsh, Latin and chapel organist, rumoured to be in recovery from some unnamed trauma of the First World War; Mr Gabain, French, who may or may not have once been a member of the French Resistance, who drove me to his home in Forest Row to collect a toboggan from an attic and, while holding me up to retrieve it from the overhead trapdoor, nonchalantly slipped his fingers inside my gym shorts and explored away.

In numerous respects, the staff of Ashdown House during that period recalled the cast of the seventies TV sitcom Are You Being Served?, only more sinister, with their line-up of army retirees and befuddled duffers. One master, Mr Sheridan, who taught me history for a year, I found inspiring, though his days were numbered owing to a beatnik cascade of shoulder-length hair. His career at the school came to an abrupt end on Sports Day when he slipped into a lavatory marked ‘VIP – Strictly Private’, reserved for the personal use of Princess Margaret. Billie Williamson ushered the Princess to her special restroom, and was perplexed to find it already occupied. After much knocking, there was the sound of a cistern flushing, a bolt being drawn, and there stood Mr Sheridan, with a disagreeable pong wafting behind him. He disappeared soon afterwards.

The daily routine at Ashdown in no way resembled the lovey-dovey, four-choices-of-main-course lunches, Superman-duvets, strawberry yoghurt, salad bar prep schools that my own children would encounter forty years later. Before breakfast, we marched and did stride jumps in an exercise yard; dormitories were wilfully spartan, with metal beds and balding candlewick counterpanes; underpants and socks were changed once a week; food consisted largely of mince and tinned sweetcorn, or slices of corned beef encased in a sleeve of deep-fried batter. Bad table manners were punished with a spell on the Pigs’ Table, at which boys ate in silence for a week. A running list of candidates for the Pigs’ Table – the ‘Mensa Porcorum’ – was kept on the dining-room mantelpiece, illustrated by a cartoon of a pink porker holding a knife and fork, greedily stuffing its face with food. Once twelve names were on the list, a ‘Mensa Porcorum’ was convened.

For a school with such a tip-top academic record (scarcely a year passed without top scholarships to Eton or Winchester), it was a shame that I benefited so little from it. Having arrived at Ashdown towards the top of the class, I quickly plunged down the charts, and then fell further, until firmly categorized as ‘thick’. Several different masters struggled impatiently to teach me Latin, but I never got the hang of it, nor Maths, nor French, nor Science. Like Bertie Wooster, Scripture was my one redeeming suit, and the termly Scripture Prize was mine by right.

Scripture at Ashdown was taught as an entirely non-theological, non-spiritual discipline, and consisted of learning long shopping lists of synoptic trivia.

Q: ‘What were the six things the Prodigal Son’s father gave him when he returned?’

A: ‘A robe, sandals, fatted calf, music, dancing and (trick answer here) a kiss.’

Q: ‘Name seventeen living things that visited the infant Jesus in the stable at Bethlehem?’

A: ‘Three Kings, three Shepherds, an Angel of the Lord, six sheep, four cattle.’

To this day, I am rather fond of numerical quizzes of this sort. On long car journeys, I challenge our children: ‘Name ten houses belonging to the British Royal Family’; ‘Name ten albums by David Bowie.’ Useful, life-enhancing knowledge.

But, notwithstanding my biblical knowledge, I was soon firmly embedded in the dimwits’ stream, along with barely-English-fluent sons of South American ambassadors and a pair of bedwetting twins. It is tempting to pin my dismal academic progress firmly upon the school. But perhaps I was simply entering a seven-year period of extreme dimness which would not lift, like early-morning Moroccan mist, until later in the day.

It should not be supposed I had no friends or fun at Ashdown. In fact, I had plenty of both. Hopeless at team games, and grown accustomed to being amongst the last boys picked for any sport, I was a fervent stamp collector, destined to become Deputy Secretary of the Ashdown House Philatelic Society. The Secretary of the club was Andrew Mitchell, later MP for Sutton Coldfield and unfortunate star of the ‘Plebgate’ episode outside Downing Street. I was greatly in awe of Mitchell and his extensive collection of First Day Covers, and still recall the joy when he reviewed my own collection of British and Commonwealth specimens (1919–1968) and commended my meticulous stamp hinge technique.

It became my habit on sunny afternoons to slip away into the shallow ha-ha which marked the boundary between lawn and cricket fields, and conceal myself in a particular spot in the ditch, where a wooden footbridge and thicket of long grass provided almost complete cover, and read the historical novels of Ronald Welch; the sensation of blazing sunshine overhead, the smell of mown grass, of refuge from an alarming world, held an appeal which has never entirely left me.

A journalist named Tom Stacey came and gave a lecture to the boys (itself a surprising occurrence, journalists normally being placed in the same reviled category as hippies and the Beatles) and he mesmerized me with stories about life as a foreign correspondent. From that day on, journalism loomed as a possible career. I started a school newspaper, the Ashdown News, which ran for two issues. The first issue was headlined ‘Exclusive: Princess Margaret to visit Ashdown?’; and the second ‘Princess Margaret visit a success, says Headmaster.’

On Saturday evenings, films were projected in the school playroom. Although suitable movies were generally rented for the occasion, the school actually owned one film itself, the 1958 Carve Her Name with Pride starring Virginia McKenna; it was about a heroic British spy parachuted into France to disrupt Nazi occupation, who eventually gets caught, is tortured and dies in a concentration camp. This film, being free, was projected frequently, and after each showing Billie Williamson would address the school, on the brink of tears, urging us to show similar patriotism and fortitude when the occasion arose. After that, we sang the National Anthem.

One sunny Sports Day, I must have been nine or ten, my parents broke it to me on the picnic rug that my adored Granny Coleridge, the Girl Guide leader, had died of cancer aged sixty-one. To this day, I remember the sensation of abject misery and grief I felt at that moment, ham sandwich in one hand, can of Coke in the other. My grandmother had been quietly dying for a year, riddled with the disease, but didn’t want the grandchildren to be aware of it. So strong was my reaction, I was sent home from school on compassionate leave for the weekend, and excused from participating in the ‘patrol relay race’, which cannot have been a great loss for the Elephants’ Patrol (my school league).

As the years passed, and the Common Entrance for Eton loomed larger, it was increasingly signalled that passing the exam might not be quite the walkover that was part of Ashdown House’s promise. My encyclopaedic knowledge of New Testament parables and miracles would not, of itself, secure entry, and in all other subjects, including all the important ones, I was definitely borderline.

Billie Williamson, his personal esteem tied up with getting pupils into Eton, began to fret. I was encouraged to take school books home for the holidays to revise, but somehow textbooks looked out of context at home, their dingy front covers and graffitied marginalia at odds with the smartness of my mother’s interior decoration, so I scarcely opened them.

I sat the exam and, to no one’s great surprise, failed it: the first Ashdown boy to do so in living memory. Billie Williamson took to his bed in dismay, and was not glimpsed for seventy-two hours. It was said he was gripped by depression, and by feelings of humiliation at having a pupil fail Common Entrance for Eton, and was only coping by bingeing on claret and whisky.

Fortunately, my father’s old tutor, Giles St Aubyn, for whose Eton house I had been registered since birth, saved the day. Perhaps still feeling guilty over the Oxford scholarship debacle, when the overlong pub lunch had led to my father missing the Christ Church entrance exam, Giles offered to keep a room empty for a term, thus enabling me to have a second crack at Common Entrance.

This time I scraped in. My essay on the parable of the Prodigal Son hit the bullseye, and days later we were congregating at an Eton tailor, Tom Brown, where I was measured up for a tailcoat.

At my final prize-giving at Ashdown, I was presented with something called ‘The Time and Talent Award’ – an annual booby prize presented to a pupil who had served the time but with no discernible talent.

To this day, I remain profoundly ambivalent about Ashdown House. I was seldom happy there, and it made me watchful. Decades later, I was invited to give the speech at Sports Day, a task always undertaken in my time by war heroes from the Battle of Britain, but latterly fulfilled by Boris Johnson and celebrity film actors. As I drove down the drive for my first visit since 1969, I was struck by how every bend in the road, every Scots pine and rhododendron bush, was still deeply engraved upon my memory, and I felt myself overwhelmed by a regressive wave of nausea, which only with effort did I manage to conceal.

Whenever I run into fellow Ashdown alumni, I cannot feel altogether untroubled, as though complicit in some conspiracy of omertà. Then again, I have a theory that early tribulations are a spur to happiness and enterprise later on, and certainly heighten appreciation for life outside.