3.

At the Eton new boys’ tea party I eyed up my fellow new boys with suspicion. Parents and their sons milled around a table of sandwiches and cakes on the ‘private side’ of Baldwin’s Bec, the Eton boarding house at which I was freshly enrolled. The house had a view of Windsor Castle on one side, and a graveyard on the other.

There was a wiry boy with a Ringo Starr pudding-bowl haircut named Craig Brown, with a pleasingly anarchic air about him; a good-looking sporty boy named Lord John Montagu Douglas Scott; and a beaky blond in glasses, Trelawny Williams, whom I had met once before as fellow pageboys at my uncle Anthony Coleridge’s first wedding. There were other new arrivals too, but it was Craig, John and Trelawny who stood out.

That first evening, getting ready for bed in an alien environment, I went to brush my teeth in a large bathroom lined with basins. Two sixteen-year-olds entered the bathroom. They ignored me, of course, and spoke only to each other.

One asked, ‘Did you have a good holiday, Alex?’

‘Yah,’ replied the other. ‘My father said it was okay to go to the pub, now I’m sixteen. So I did that every night. Actually, it was a bit of a problem. My father said I shouldn’t drink in any of the pubs on our estate, because it wouldn’t be fair on our men, when they’re trying to relax … so I had to drive six miles each way to leave the estate.’

‘Yah, I get that,’ replied the other boy. ‘It wouldn’t be fair on one’s tenants either, to drink in one of one’s own pubs.’

I remember thinking: this is a very smart school I’ve arrived at. My own parents, disappointingly, didn’t own any pubs at all.

Having scraped into Eton by the skin of my teeth, it was no surprise to find myself in the bottom stream – F14 – a sort of holding pen for the academically challenged, presided over by an exacting midget, Mr Martin Shortland-Jones (‘Shortie Jones’), a former Fives Olympian.

Many of my fellow F14ers seemed to live in Norfolk or Leicestershire, notoriously dozy counties, and are now Lord Lieutenants and High Sheriffs of their various patches. Other inmates, such as Benjie Mancroft and Percy Weatherall, went on to champion the Countryside Alliance in the House of Lords and to become Tai-pan of Jardine Matheson in Hong Kong, respectively. But, in September 1970, our highest aspiration was to make it through Trials, the end-of-term exams, and thus be allowed to stay on for a further term.

The Eton I encountered in the early seventies had hardly changed in many respects since the Eton of my father, thirty years earlier, with fagging and ‘capping’; the latter a weird ritual whereby you raised your right index finger towards your forelock as though doffing an invisible top hat, whenever you passed a ‘beak’ (master) in the street. There was a full lexicon of school slang, now almost all swept away: ‘socking in the street’ (eating alfresco, forbidden), ‘Which Tutor’s are you in?’ (Which house?), ‘Who are you up to?’ (Who is your form master?) For the first year, my fagging duties involved making the bed each morning for George Ramsden, now an antiquarian bookseller in North Yorkshire, though fortunately his expectations were low. He was very decent.

But it was also a school in transition. The corridors of Baldwin’s Bec vibrated to the muffled beat of Led Zeppelin and the Grateful Dead, and the musky smell of marijuana. Boys clad their bedroom walls with rolls of kitchen tin foil, or Indian drapes and posters from the Isle of Wight rock festival. My friend Craig Brown subscribed to Oz and It magazines, and became an important and subversive influence on my world view. Each day, I ‘messed’ (had tea) with Craig, John and Trelawny in one of our rooms, where we ate toast spread thickly with Nutella, and bowls of cereal drowned in chocolate Nesquik. In those days, boys with country estates brought braces of pheasant, woodcock and partridge back to the school, which were left to hang outside their windows, creating a macabre spectacle as you strolled down Keates Lane or Common Lane, like the cold room at a game butcher’s. These birds were eventually taken to Rowlands, the school tuck shop, where Mr Wells plucked and roasted them, and delivered them for tea with sides of Brussels sprouts and bread sauce. The rest of us ordered Brown Cows (a pint glass of Coca-Cola with two scoops of Wall’s ice cream bobbing about in a vanilla scum) and plates of chips with a dipping bowl of ketchup. Or we hung out in a squalid back room in Tudor Stores, a rival tuck shop where the genteel Spellar family presided over a deep-fat fryer serving shrivelled bacon and fried eggs, with complimentary ‘trash mags’ (war comics) available to read at a special Formica-topped chef’s table.

Thus my early years at Eton passed. At the end of each term the 250 boys of my year assembled in the Farrer Theatre for ‘reading over’, when your precise exam position in Trials was revealed by the Lower Master in reverse order, starting at the bottom. You sat in nonchalant suspense, hoping your name wouldn’t be called out too early – certainly not in the first twenty – and then, as the occasion wore on, you eventually heard the names of the King’s Scholars and brainboxes jostling for top position.

I had one lucky advantage. In those days, there was much learning of poetry by heart in the Eton curriculum. It was called a ‘Saying Lesson’ and you were set a poem a week to memorize, which you declaimed in turn. I found myself being set the same poem over and over again.

An English master would say, ‘Seeing as we have a Coleridge in the division [slang for class], I suggest we all learn Kubla Khan by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Is he, in fact, a relative, Coleridge?’

‘Er, vaguely, sir.’

‘Good. Then please do Kubla Khan for Saying Lesson next week.’

Then, the next term, the same thing would happen with a different teacher. And then again. I’m still word perfect. ‘But oh! That deep romantic chasm which slanted / Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!’ et cetera, et cetera.

A distant cousin, F. J. R. Coleridge, was Vice Provost of the school, a towering, formidable, senatorial figure in his mid-sixties, former housemaster and renowned sportsman. Towards the end of my first year, Fred Coleridge and his wife, Julia, kindly invited me to tea in the Vice Provost’s Lodge.

‘Have you been rowing for your house junior bumping four?’ he boomed at me.

‘Er, I’m afraid not, sir.’

‘Well then, did you play for your house first year Field Game side?’

‘Er, sadly not, sir.’

At this point, I could see on his face the panicked look of someone who has entirely run out of conversational leads, and is casting about for anything at all. Fortunately, Julia, a talented watercolourist, invited me out of pity to view some of her recent paintings of Cannon Yard and Lupton’s Tower, so the tea party was partially retrieved.

Around the time I turned sixteen, my Eton career started to pick up. Having struggled through O Levels, and thus able to jettison all the subjects I was bad at, it turned out I was quite good at the remaining three. Almost overnight, I transformed from dimwit to clever-dick intellectual and, with all the zeal of a recent immigrant assimilating to a new culture, I embraced my new status. I started writing for the school magazine, the Eton Chronicle, in those days a weekly newspaper printed on yellowing faux-parchment. I joined the Debating Society with Craig Brown, which met amidst the panelled splendour and classical busts of Upper School, and where the perennial motions for debate were: ‘This house would ban fox-hunting’ and ‘This house would ban tailcoats as school dress.’

Craig and I joined the school debating team, along with Oliver Letwinfn1 and Charles Moore,fn2 competing for some South of England Rotary Club schools debating trophy. We cruised without effort through the first few rounds of the competition. Oliver had a reputation as the cleverest boy in the school; Charles was a quixotic intellectual with a deep fringe of black hair who laughed easily. Our rival in the finals was Wycombe Abbey, the serious and brainy girls’ school, and we travelled over to Wycombe in a Transit van, jotting down a few random notes for the debate as we went.

As we approached the school, we noticed a team of bricklayers raising the height of the perimeter school wall; if you know Wycombe Abbey, it is a very long wall, a mile at least. The Headmistress explained, ‘We have had a most unfortunate incident involving lewd young men from the town. They parked a lorry against the wall, stood on the roof, and wolf-whistled at our girls playing netball. We had no option but to build the wall higher.’

There was a judging panel of ten judges, all dignitaries of the Rotary Club – actuaries and county solicitors, local councillors and Lady Mayoresses.

The motion was ‘Coca-Colonialism. This house regrets the baleful influence of American popular culture upon Western civilization.’ The Wycombe Abbey girls were up first. They were disconcertingly well rehearsed, arguably a bit dull, but word perfect, having learnt their speeches by heart, sing-song fashion.

Next came Eton, amateur, facetious, extemporizing. Letwin was bafflingly intellectual, interrogating the very concept of Western civilization, standing the motion upon its head. The panel of Rotarians deliberated for all of twenty seconds before delivering their damning verdicts in turn: Wycombe Abbey, Wycombe Abbey, Wycombe Abbey … Eton lost ten votes to nil. I cannot pretend we were surprised or particularly mortified.

Not long afterwards, Craig and I won a newly established school cup for debating – the Jeremy Thorpe Cup, named after the Old Etonian Leader of the Liberal Party. (It seemed no sooner had we won it than Thorpe was prosecuted for the alleged attempted murder of a boyfriend, the male model Norman Scott. The cup was hurriedly renamed the Eton Debating Cup. ‘Winner of the Jeremy Thorpe prize at Eton’ felt like a liability on a CV.)

One evening, while watching Top of the Pops on the giant TV set in Rowlands, David Bowie appeared on screen performing ‘Starman’, with his spiky orange hair and Kansai Yamamoto bodysuit. The tuck shop was filled with Etonians, many returning from cricket matches in cricket whites, staring stupefied at the television. No one had seen anything like it. Despite a groundswell of derision and booing (‘Who the hell is this poof?’), I found him mesmerizing.

It was the start of a lifelong fandom, and the very next day I bought at Audiocraft, Eton’s record shop, the entire back catalogue: Hunky Dory, Man Who Sold the World, Space Oddity, all of them. On Christmas Eve, I went with Craig to see Bowie in concert at The Rainbow, Finsbury Park; an outing necessitating a complete change of clothes – sailor-suit top, silver satin strides – in the train lavatories between Haslemere and Waterloo. I remember being more convinced by Bowie than Craig was – I had drunk the Kool-Aid hook, line and sinker, while Craig remained sceptical. He always had a keen nose for anything pretentious.

Craig was a talented playwright and satirist, with pitch-perfect ear. Aged fourteen, he could parody the literary styles of authors and public figures as adeptly as his Private Eye satires forty-five years later. We put on plays together. Sinderella (with an S) was billed as ‘Eton’s first pantomime’, to be followed by a multi-cast rock musical mocking the impending royal wedding of Princess Anne to Captain Mark Phillips. It was a bonus when The Sun newspaper devoted most of page three to the supposedly scandalous production: ‘Eton boys in a royal howler … Queen “deeply offended” say palace insiders.’ We loved it, we were publicity whores.

We set up a club to invite celebrities to the school, lent fig-leaf respectability by its lofty name, ‘The Contemporary Arts Society’. For additional gravitas, the society was given a Latin motto – Lumines Nomine Noscere – which translates as ‘To get to know the stars by their Christian names’. Brian Eno, lank-haired genius of Roxy Music, was the first guest, followed by Angie Bowie, wife of David, who ate asparagus in a thrillingly sexy manner in The Cockpit, a teashop on Eton High Street.

We spent our days feeding 10p pieces into coin-box telephones, pestering publicity girls at record labels and befriending celebrities’ PAs, wheedling our way into their diaries.

Eventually, Elton John was signed up. He was already an A-list star and arrived in a gold Rolls-Royce, which made a lap of honour around the parade ground, much envied by all, not seen as remotely vulgar by the boys. As our guests were forensically interviewed by Craig and me onstage, the two of us basked in the reflected glory. There is a historic photograph of Elton standing on the steps of the school theatre, surrounded by a throng of random Etonians. In the picture, I can be seen with a boscage of curly hair, next to an already almost-bald Elton. Over time, Elton’s hair miraculously regrew, while mine gradually evaporated. My hair in the photo looks like an ungroomed cat ready to leap from my head onto his.

Craig and I took over the Eton Chronicle and edited it in succession. The yellow parchment paper and letterpress were replaced by white stock, the pagination doubled, sports reports and obituaries of dead beaks were ruthlessly cut back to make space for gossip columns, celebrity interviews and tabloid-driven editorials in the style of the Daily Express’s Jean Rook. There was a censor, a Classical civilization master named Pete Needham, who was supposed to vet the articles in advance and suppress contentious material. We avoided this by the simple ploy of removing from his pile of proofs anything likely to offend him, until it was too late. His bald head, criss-crossed with knotted veins like electric cables, trembled with fury at each new issue.

‘Why was I never shown this seditious garbage?’

‘I’ve no idea how that happened, sir. It must have slipped through the net in the production process.’

I became political, canvassing for the Liberal Party in Slough at the 1974 General Election. This was entirely due to Charles Moore, then a proselytizing Liberal whose father wrote Jeremy Thorpe’s speeches, and who recruited Craig and me into the cause.

Slough was a rock-solid Labour seat, with the fiery Socialist Joan Lestor its unassailable MP. The Liberals fielded Philip Goldenberg, a bearded local councillor of zero charisma. Every afternoon, we bicycled to a different inner-city hotspot, delivering leaflets and sweet-talking the voters. Many had chained Rottweilers in their front yards, all had red Labour posters in their windows. The appearance of three Eton boys on their doorsteps, however persuasive, made zero impact on their voting intentions, and Joan Lestor sailed back to Westminster undented.

A crucial part of my Eton was Tap, the school pub, which occupied half of a Georgian house on the High Street, with a narrow back garden. I went most days. It was run by an imperious landlady (never barmaid), Mrs Moulton, and opened its doors for drinks at 11 a.m., so you could have a pint or two of Carling at elevenses, in the break between lessons. This surprising tradition continued for decades until some killjoy noticed it was odd to be serving alcohol to sixteen-year-olds so early in the morning.

The food in Tap was magnificent: avocado and prawns, smoked salmon on rye, a ‘long egg’ (open bridge roll with scrambled egg and cress on top). Furthermore, you didn’t need to pay at the time. ‘Down on the National Debt, Coleridge?’ Mrs Moulton would ask, adding it to a tab.

Everything about Tap in the seventies seems impossibly swanky and privileged. And it was so. My sons report that, today, the only food available is microwaved cheeseburgers and crisps, Mrs Moulton has been succeeded by an ex-policeman, and boys must be fingerprinted before each drink order, triggering a computerized record of consumption.

Late one evening, I was strolling back from Tap to my boarding house and noticed two hooded figures wrapped in overcoats, attempting to sleep outdoors under the stone porch of the school library. They turned out to be exceptionally pretty girls aged thirteen, who had missed their coach back to their boarding school, Heathfield, and had no money for a cab. I suggested they might be more comfy dossing on a sofa in Baldwin’s Bec, and sneaked them inside. Pandora Stevens and Laura Leatham became good friends.

Pandora was the daughter of Sir Jocelyn Stevens, owner of Queen magazine and Chief Executive of Beaverbrook newspapers, who was to have an immense impact on my career. Pandora was warm, funny and beautiful, with blonde bobbed hair, huge eyes and freckles. She looked in those days like a perfect cross between her three famous daughters, the Delevingne girls: Chloe, Poppy and supermodel-turned-movie-star Cara, my god-daughter.

She had a gift for making everyone in her orbit fall instantly in love with her, and want to help her. Through Pandora, I soon met her circle of friends – Laura Leatham’s twin Alice, and a girl named Birdy Rose, who wore Japanese geisha make-up. We hung out at Françoise, a basement nightclub in the King’s Road, opposite Peter Jones, and at the Stevens’ houses in Chelsea and Hampshire. Pandora’s mother, Janey, wrote the shopping column for Vogue, and I remember spotting a stash of Vogue writing paper on her desk and being weirdly impressed. It held an almost totemic allure, and I longed to be the sort of person who kept Vogue stationery in their study.

On the terrace at the Stevens’ enormous Queen Anne country house, Testbourne, on a bend of the River Test, with an ever-hovering butler named Vipers, was a set of twelve green canvas director’s chairs, each with the words ‘Jocelyn Stevens, Editor-in-Chief’ stencilled on the back. I was fiercely envious of these chairs, recognizing something to aspire to in their tycoon swank.

Returning to our house in West Sussex, which always seemed to have shrunk after a visit to Testbourne, I described the chairs over supper in awed admiration. My mother declared, ‘Goodness, they sound rather show-offy to me.’

Shortly afterwards, I was invited to Pandora’s sixteenth birthday dinner at San Lorenzo in Beauchamp Place, then the most fashionable restaurant in London.

Twenty-five teenagers had been asked to the dinner, seated at one long table in the main dining room, surrounded by tables of other customers. Jocelyn was a charismatic, impulsive, matinee idol, leading member of the Princess Margaret set and cameo attraction in every gossip column. At the end of dinner, he stepped up onto his chair, silencing the entire room. ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he boomed. ‘I am Jocelyn Stevens. Tonight is the birthday of my beloved daughter, Pandora, and I want everyone – everyone in the whole restaurant – to drink a toast to her. Lorenzo, Mara … bring champagne, champagne for every table. Pandora, happy birthday! Happy birthday!’

I was impressed to bits by this glorious, confident bravado. I remember thinking: this is the last thing on earth my own parents would do, stand on a chair (‘I am Jocelyn Stevens’) and order champagne for multiple strangers.

I realize that I have not, thus far, given any proper description of my father and mother. All parents create a particular microculture of their own which delineates the boundaries and expectations of family life, and our family microculture was a very happy one.

My father had an unusually calm and consistent personality; one of the kindest of people, who I never saw agitated at any time in his life. Mathematically astute (he could calculate figures in his head to four decimal points), he was intellectually idle, reading only one book a year, generally the latest blockbuster by Wilbur Smith, poolside on his summer holiday. He almost never referred to his work at Lloyd’s, and had less personal vanity than anyone I’ve met. I can see, now, how unusual that is amongst prominent businessmen, who generally bore-on about their accomplishments and define themselves by them. When my father became Chairman of his firm, Sturge, then the largest Lloyd’s underwriter, and simultaneously Chairman of Lloyd’s of London, it came as quite a surprise to his children, since he had never mentioned such a possibility before. He always preferred to ask other people benevolent questions than to talk about himself. I think he genuinely considered his job uninteresting to others, and did not wish to inflict it in conversation. He had the gift of being able to speak to anyone, with ease and without condescension. He loved jokes, especially long-running ones. An instinctive Conservative, his only vehemently held views were negative ones about Labour politicians (‘Healey is a ghastly man’, ‘Gordon Brown is perfectly useless’, ‘Tony Blair is the worst Prime Minister since Lord North’, and so forth).

He told his sons, ‘I don’t mind what you decide to do when you grow up. Do any job you like, whatever you enjoy doing. Don’t feel you have to go into the City. But one thing I do mind about. You have to get a job, any job, and turn up, not lounge about in bed all morning.’

Wonderfully relaxed in his own skin and in every conceivable social situation, he felt no need to impress. He adored my mother, loved his sons, loved his garden and his azaleas, enjoyed ordering claret from The Wine Society and mixing Bloody Marys with the full set of ingredients. The life created by my parents was one of complete order, comfort and certainty, meticulously planned, often months in advance. ‘Do you know if you’re coming to us for Christmas this year?’ my mother would ask in, say, February. ‘I would like to know, I’m starting to make plans.’

Inspired by my mother, my parents are alarmingly punctual on all occasions, and this became a family thing. If, say, a church service at South Harting was at 11 a.m., and it was fifteen minutes’ drive from home, we would agree to assemble, ready to leave, at 10.30. But at 10.15, everyone was ready and waiting. Any family member assembling at 10.20 would be considered late. To this day, I am seldom late for anything.

My mother was the engine of the marriage, the person who initiated plans, chose holidays and our daily food, organized dinner parties, remembered birthdays, oversaw decorating schemes (the sofa covers at their houses were in perpetual process of upgrade). She noticed everything, and this is a habit (for better or worse) I have inherited from her – noticing entertaining oddities of dress and speech, a tilted lampshade, a rumpled rug. She has a great horror of unplumped sofa cushions, relishing the sensation of entering a perfectly fresh drawing room or study, with no evidence of recent prior occupation. She is unexpectedly well-informed on subjects which interest her, being an attentive reader of modern novels and glossy magazines, which she studies closely. Brought up in Knightsbridge, her London consists of a tiny and civilized triangle bounded by Sloane Street, the King’s Road and Brompton Road, with Chelsea Green at its epicentre.

As a parent, she instinctively prioritized her children over everything else, seldom accepting a dinner party invitation during the school holidays, or going on a holiday that wasn’t a family one. The things she dislikes are bad manners, thoughtlessness to staff such as cooks and cleaning ladies, tattoos, piercings, men considered ‘too pleased with themselves’, new technology (my parents have no email, my mother not knowing ‘where one would put one of those ugly computer things’ in their large house) and grandchildren who don’t write thank-you letters. Perhaps it is her influence that none of her children or grandchildren have either tattoos or conspicuous piercings.

Our home life at this point was divided between a long, narrow, tile-slung house in Sussex, from which my father commuted to London each morning by train, and a small flat in Cranmer Court, a mansion block on Sloane Avenue largely inhabited by elderly Tory-voting widows. My parents had had a third son born thirteen years after me (‘our afterthought’), my brother Christopher, who was at nursery school in Midhurst, thus leaving the run of Cranmer Court to Timmy and me. It quickly became a dosshouse for friends, sleeping on every sofa and spare inch of carpet.

Timmy, considered handsome, was cat-nip for Tudor Hall and St Mary’s boarding school girls in skin-tight jeans, Alice bands and velvet jackets, who shrieked and yelped at the slightest provocation, causing a stream of complaints from our geriatric neighbours.

Once, after a particularly rowdy Pimm’s-fuelled party at the flat, ten girls squeezed into the tiny lift. Already inside was a uniformed Cranmer Court porter, accompanying a long, narrow canvas bag. Only halfway down was this revealed to be a body bag, concealing the just-dead Brigadier from the flat upstairs.

Our social life on the West Sussex–Hampshire borders was comprised of gloriously juicy convent school girls, leavened by bohemian Bedales’ sixth-formers.fn3 My school friends Craig Brown and Napier Miles lived nearby, and we met up at The White Hart, a pub in South Harting, or at The Three Moles in Selham, having driven over on mopeds (mine was bright orange). It was our custom to minutely analyse and critique the characters and appearance of all the local talent, and so engender a happy feeling of superiority and male bonding.

In the days before mobile phones, it was a complicated business to ring any girl at all. Most families we knew in West Sussex had only one landline extension, positioned in the hall or sitting room. There was no privacy to place or receive calls. If you wanted to speak to a girl, you dialled their number while your own telephone was unwatched. You heard it ring.

‘Hello. Fernhurst 212.’ A haughty mother’s voice.

‘Er, hello, can I speak to Miranda, please?’

‘Who is this speaking?’

‘Er, Nick Coleridge.’

‘What are you to David and Susan?’

‘They’re my parents.’

‘Well, do please give them my love, and say we’d adore to see them sometime, we really would. Now, Miranda is out riding her horse at the moment. But I shall tell her you telephoned, and I shall ask her to ring you back before lunch, at twelve fifty …’

In our immediate vicinity, there were two sorts of teenage parties: the flashier ones centred around the Cowdray polo set at Easebourne; others, more parochial, over the Surrey border into stockbroker country towards Haslemere. Here the girls were less polished, often day pupils at local convent schools, and regarded as more promiscuous when warmed up.

Drinks at these gatherings consisted of a wishy-washy punch served in a metal cauldron, known as a ‘witches’ brew’, comprising one part cider to three parts orange juice and a gallon of soda water. The challenge for guests, of course, was to find means of tipping as much brandy, rum, gin, vodka, tequila, anything alcoholic, into the bowl to get the party rocking. The final record of the night was always ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’ by Procol Harum, the snoggers’ call to action.

One of my early romantic episodes took place at just such a party, held in a stockbroker Tudor-style mansion on a Haslemere road. Behind their house, our hosts had a brick Victorian game larder, filled with several dozen dead pheasants, partridges, duck and hares suspended from metal hooks, bounty from recent shoots. As the party unfolded, I found myself with a hefty, predatory girl in a black lace blouse; she must have been fifteen, with conspicuously large bosoms. When she suggested we ‘get away from this party for a bit’, I was only too willing to go along with the plan. It seemed rather flattering. Though I became dubious when she led me towards the brick game larder. ‘Don’t worry, I have a key.’

Once inside, she immediately peeled off her blouse and black bra. I stared, mesmerized, at the massive, swollen mammaries being presented: I had, quite literally, never seen anything like them before.

‘Don’t you want to touch?’ she asked, impatiently.

Staring down at us, on all sides, were dead birds and ground game, impaled on their grisly hooks. Gingerly, I reached towards a nipple, which stood out like a plastic thimble. At that moment, the face of our stockbroker host leered at the tiny, misted-up window. ‘Stop that at once,’ he commanded, ‘and unlock this door.’ The girl was promptly led away and sent home, while I was free to rejoin the party.

When my father came to collect me at midnight, the stockbroker explained. ‘No hard feelings, and Nick wasn’t in any way to blame. We’d been warned in advance about this girl. Suffice to say, she has serious mental issues. I was asked to keep a close eye on her, which fortunately I did …’

These county jamborees were all very fine, but the parties we wanted to be at were the London ones – gatherings of a thousand or more guests, like the annual Feathers Ball at the Hammersmith Palais, at which the cream of the nation’s posh teen talent congregated for a mass groping session. Here was the pick of the crop, stir-crazy from a term in purdah, desperate for human contact and completely undiscriminating. In a way, events like the Feathers Ball anticipated, by several decades, speed dating and Tinder, with their emphasis on instant connections based solely upon first appearances. The deafening music, the shrillness and excitement of the guests, made all conversation impossible.

Afterwards, boys would ask each other, ‘Did you enjoy the Feathers? Any luck?’

‘Yah … five.’ (That meant five snogs with five different girls over the course of the four-hour event.)

‘You?’

‘Nine.’

‘Christ, that’s obscene, Johnnie! Really?’

‘No swanks.’

There were other lesser balls too, generally held in aid of some comically inappropriate medical charity, such as throat cancer or gynaecological research. I wonder whether the distinguished professors and pioneering fertility doctors realized the degree of louche behaviour which lay behind the raising of their vital research funding?

I remember going to just such a party at the Rubens hotel, opposite the Victoria and Albert Museum, staged in aid of breast cancer. After the ball, half a dozen Eton boys had been invited to sleep on the floor of a friend’s flat, an Edwardian mansion block on Campden Hill Road. We were having a final nightcap before turning in, when the mother of the house entered the room with a plate of warm mini-quiches. She was rather a prissy lady, who spoke with carefully enunciated vowels.

‘Would any of you young gentlemen like a little warm tart to take to bed with you?’ she innocently enquired, handing them round.

We fifteen-year-olds rolled about in hopeless mirth, unable to stop, tears flowing from our eyes.

The first glossy magazine I ever opened was a copy of Harpers & Queen. I was sixteen at the time, ill in bed, and borrowed a copy from my mother who was a subscriber. That first couple of hours with a glossy changed my life. I was mesmerized by the wit, by the blend of serious journalism and trivia, by the glamour of the fashion photography, sheen of the paper, gentle waft of fragrance from the advertiser’s scent strips, punning headlines, understated snobbery, zeitgeist-interrogating social commentary … all of these things I found spellbinding, and I knew in a heartbeat I wanted to make a career in glossy magazines.

As a glossy-mag virgin, touched for the very first time, it occurred to me that if I could somehow write an article for this magazine, and have it published, I might somehow enter this tantalizing through-the-Narnian-wardrobe world that magazines seemed to offer. So as my quarantine dragged on, I scratched out 1,500 words on ‘How to survive teenage parties’, then trudged the half-mile to the post box at the end of our lane and sent it off. Handwritten (how amateur), addressed to The Editor.

And, lo and behold, they bought it and printed it, and the typography and glossy paper made it look ten times better, and I had a byline. And, not long afterwards, the magazine invited me to a party at the Park Lane hotel, filled with 300 of the most glamorous, semi-famous people – writers, fashion designers, socialites, politicians and models – not one of whom I knew but several of whom I had read about in Nigel Dempster’s Daily Mail gossip column (he was also a guest). It was Xanadu. Certainly several steps up from the game larder.

Meanwhile my happy school life continued. I considered myself lucky to have Giles St Aubyn as my Eton housemaster. A distinguished historian and author, eccentric, complex and not without his demons, his non-sporty, mildly sophisticated house suited me. His study displayed glorious paintings of St Michael’s Mount, the St Aubyn family island in Cornwall, where he had grown up, and outside Baldwin’s Bec were parked an astounding collection of cars – Aston Martins, Mercedes, Bristols, two Bentleys, and for a while a Rolls-Royce. Not the cars of visiting parents, but Giles’s own cars.

He invited amusing bachelor friends to lunch – the Queen’s Private Secretary Sir Martin Gilliat, the Sunday Telegraph diarist Kenneth Rose, the artist Derek Hill. The Queen Mother came as a guest to house plays more than once. And Giles was not above a little harmless showing off from time to time.

As a housemaster, he found conversation at lunch – ‘Boys’ Dinner’ as it then was – excruciating, and who can blame him, eating with the same group of adolescent louts day after day? Sometimes he ran short of things to say.

On such occasions, he would announce a competition to the table. ‘In my pocket, I have a certain sum of money,’ he would say (much jangling of coins). ‘I do not myself know precisely how much money. I would like everyone at the table to make a guess, but first you must weigh the probability. I am well known to be quite a rich man, the richest housemaster. So, I could reasonably have a very LARGE amount of money upon my person. On the other hand, rich men seldom carry much cash. You should take both these facts into consideration.’

About fifteen boys then had to guess, their estimates noted down by the House Captain.

‘Er, two hundred pounds, sir?’

‘Er, one pound, seventeen shillings and sixpence, sir?’ and so on.

Nobody ever got it right. Had you done so, you were promised to keep the money. Thus lunches were occupied at Baldwin’s Bec.

There were all sorts of early legends about Giles, which people repeated as fact, thus adding glamour and lustre to his personality. It was said that he’d been a great ‘deb’s delight’, as a young master in his youth, who would turn up to teach wearing white tie and tails, having come directly from dances in London. It was even said that he’d once been lined up as a possible husband for Princess Margaret. Frankly, by the time my year group arrived at the house in 1970, it was hard to visualize our intelligent and urbane but intensely private and sometimes diffident housemaster as a dashing deb’s delight … but perhaps it was so.

He had the most distinctive of signatures: like a coil of barbed wire above a First World War trench, with a great rococo flourish at the bottom, swirling and looping back and forth. Everyone in the house spent months learning to forge it. Thirty years later, a group of us had dinner with Giles at the restaurateur Gavin Rankin’s place, Bellamy’s of Mayfair, and all had a crack at doing his signature on paper napkins, with Giles judging which looked authentic. It felt desperately radical to be forging his signature in his presence, under his eagle eye.

He taught me the history of the Victorian Church and the Tractarian Movement for A Level, part of the Divinity courses. Attentive readers will recall that Scripture was my strongest academic suit, though its name kept changing: Bible Study becoming Scripture becoming Divinity becoming Theology and Comparative Religion.

Craig (another Theologian) and I took pleasure in inventing entirely new verses and texts from the Old Testament and the Synoptic Gospels and slipping them into essays, banking on no teacher bothering to check. It was satisfying to find a big tick alongside a fictitious manufactured quote from Isaiah or Ezekiel.

In the holidays, I did social work on a project for underprivileged children in Southwark, consisting mostly of teaching five-year-olds how to swim in a municipal baths and hanging out at an adventure playground. Charles Moore and James Leigh-Pembertonfn4 were my fellow volunteers. It seems strange today that we would be put in sole charge of forty inner-city kids at a swimming pool, with no background checks at all, but it was so. In the evenings, we sought out authentic pubs in South London, led by Charles who was an unlikely champion of the Campaign for Real Ale. We hung out in a pub called The Black Dog in Vauxhall, drinking Old Speckled Hen and Charles Wells Bombardier, while Charles lectured us on the excellence of Jeremy Thorpe and his imminent political breakthrough, then an almost-credible proposition.

Recently, I found a cache of forgotten photographs from this period, including one with fifteen of my school contemporaries hanging out at some school event: Craig (now the Private Eye satirist), John Scott (Islamic expert, living in Istanbul), Trelawny (financier), Napier (medical negligence barrister), David Ogilvy (musician), Gavin Rankin (nightclub manager turned restaurateur), Charles Moore (Editor and biographer), James Baring (estate agent, musician), Christopher Figg (film producer), Oliver Leatham (food entrepreneur), Geoffrey Adams (knighted Foreign Office mandarin and ambassador), David Shaughnessy (Los Angeles TV soap director), Kio Amachree (Nigerian rock composer), Rupert Forbes Adam (muralist, died young), James Rankin (criminal law barrister). It surprises me how many of them I still see, and like seeing, either by design or because our lives overlap. Numerically, perhaps a quarter of my closest friends are Old Etonians, but their networks are as deep and pervasive as Japanese knotweed.

As the end of my Eton years loomed, I had no idea what I might do next. John Scott was heading to the Courtauld to do History of Art, Craig to Bristol to do Drama, Trelawny to university in a Confederate American state where you couldn’t even buy a beer. For me, the future was wide open. Not for the first time, Scripture came to the rescue. Charles Moore was off to Cambridge, to Trinity, and suggested I do the same. ‘You should enter to read Theology,’ he advised. ‘You can always change later. Anyone can get in, if you apply for Theology.’ I took the backhanded compliment on the chin.

According to Charles, there were at least five Theology dons at Trinity, all with endowed sinecures, who were crying out for pupils, it being vaguely embarrassing to have nobody to teach.

A couple of weeks later, I was sitting in a set of rooms in Great Court, being interviewed by Bishop John Robinson, a notoriously trendy bishop whose book Honest to God, questioning the existence of the Almighty, had made waves at the time.

He could not have been more genial, offering me a thimble of Madeira and a place to read Theology next October, in that order. The whole interview took forty minutes.

‘I shall look forward to seeing you,’ he said, as I strode out into the sunshine of Great Court.