I WAS EDUCATED at Marlborough College, a traditional British public school. I returned there recently with Richard Wilkinson, a good friend who shared a study with me in my last year. I had come back to Marlborough with Richard to discuss the impact that the school had made on me. Although I had gone on to Cambridge and then to theological college, I felt sure that I had been most profoundly shaped by my school days. I also wanted Richard to help me determine whether I was justified in looking back on Marlborough in the way I did. Not only had he been very close to me during my time there, but he had ended his teaching career at Marlborough, having earlier been the headmaster of two other schools. Although he had retired from teaching full-time, he still kept in touch with Marlborough by teaching at the summer school there.
Now, the two of us stood in the spacious courtyard, or quadrangle, that lies at the heart of the school. At the far end of the courtyard stands an imposing early eighteenth-century mansion, which was built for the Duke of Somerset and later converted into a coaching inn for passengers travelling from London to Bath. The college then turned this magnificent building into a boarding house for boys and it became known as ‘C House’. At the other end of the courtyard, near the gates, stands the college’s other notable building, the chapel. Tall, thin and long enough to accommodate nearly nine hundred worshippers, the chapel is an inspiring example of high Victorian Gothic architecture. When I was a boy at Marlborough, we were obliged to go to chapel every day, where we regularly got down on our knees and confessed our sins in the words of the Anglican Prayer Book, begging God ‘to have mercy upon us miserable offenders’.
Opposite the chapel is one of the less impressive buildings surrounding the courtyard, a late Victorian block of classrooms. Richard recalled how a scripture teacher had strutted up and down one of those classrooms, with his thumbs in the waistcoat of his tweed suit, bawling at the boys, ‘I don’t understand all this rot about Christian humility. I’m not humble and I don’t have to be. I’m Colonel Harling and I’m a damn fine fellow!’
Marlborough was founded in 1843 for the education of the sons of the clergy, but, in spite of its ecclesiastical origins, it did little to convince me personally that the best way to live life was to ‘humble myself in the sight of the Lord’, or to be confident that ‘He shall lift you up’ (James 4.10). Rather, it taught me that life was all about striving to be ‘a damn fine fellow’ and lifting myself up without help from anyone else. Preposterous though Colonel Harling seems to me now, to my mind he truly represented the ethos of my school years at Marlborough, an ethos in which humility seemed to have little or no place. Success was what counted, and the only successes that really seemed to matter were those that were athletic or academic. What’s more, our successes were ascribed entirely to our own efforts. The gifts we had been given at birth, the circumstances of our lives, and the advantages of our earlier education were not taken into account when our achievements were considered.
In spite of its religious tradition, Marlborough also seemed to be a place where learning was confined to the dictates of reason. I didn’t come to understand until much later in life what imagination and other forms of perception could teach me. Nor did Marlborough encourage questioning in my experience. Everything was black or white. Religion appeared to be more about morality rather than experiencing God, and the school’s particular brand of morality left me with a heavy burden of guilt about my burgeoning sexuality.
I realise that this description of my school days must present a very black picture indeed, and, as I have said, if there is one thing I have learnt from India, it is to appreciate how little in life is totally black or, indeed, purely white. There are many men of my generation who look back with gratitude at Marlborough, and it is certainly in part my own fault that I don’t. But all I can do is describe honestly the influences that Marlborough had on me personally. Those influences stayed with me until I began to understand something about Indian philosophy, religion and culture. Indeed, it was partly as a result of the extent to which those influences had unsettled me, destroyed my self-confidence and undermined my religious beliefs that India eventually made such an impact on me. So if I was to write a truthful book about the influence of India in my life, it seemed necessary not only to discuss these earlier influences but also to authenticate them, as I am attempting to do now.
Richard and I started our visit by walking to our old House, which was tucked away in a corner of the courtyard. The Marlborough website describes ‘B’ house as a square building built around a court. However, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that dark green and black were no longer the dominant colours on the walls and that the ground floor had light, modern furniture. But nothing could disguise the layout of the interior, which reminded me of a prison, with high railings piled floor on floor, surrounding what we pupils had called a ‘well’ rather than a ‘court’. It had seemed like a grim place to live, but – now I thought about it – had life there really been so grim?
Before revisiting Marlborough, I had re-read John Betjeman’s long poem ‘Summoned by Bells’, which is about the poet’s childhood and undergraduate days. Luxuriating in his bath and looking back on his days at Marlborough, Betjeman ‘reflects in comfortable retrospect’:
… ‘thank God
I’ll never have to go through them again.’
As with my toes I reach towards the tap,
And turn it to a trickle, stealing warm
About my tender person, comes a voice,
An inner voice that calls, ‘Be fair! Be fair!
It was not quite as awful as you think.’
These words came back to me now as a timely warning about my own memories of my schooldays. ‘I must not,’ I thought, ‘exaggerate their awfulness.’ In fact, once I had got over the tears without which I never succeeded in leaving home, I had enjoyed school life. I had been good at being ‘one of the lads’, aided and abetted by my crude sense of humour. I had never been short of friends, nor had I been over-awed by senior boys. Beatings were unpleasant but – as Betjeman said – ‘brought us no disgrace only a kind of glory’.
When I was there, Marlborough had a reputation for being a tough school, but I think it was probably less harsh than many other public schools of the period. When I mentioned this to Richard, he agreed with me. ‘I think there is more bullying now,’ he said. ‘When I was teaching here not so long ago, one poor boy was accused, wrongly, of reporting a senior for coming back drunk and stuffing juniors’ heads into the lavatory. He was so badly bullied, had his bed stripped every night and other things, that he left the school.’ He continued, ‘Sometimes senior boys were bullied too. There was also a case of a boy who was not allowed to work, as his tormentors kept on banging on his door. I put that kind of bad behaviour down to money,’ he explained. ‘Marlborough’s a rich children’s school now, but it wasn’t in our days – what with all those sons of badly paid clergymen. Rich boys think they can do anything they like. They have far less humility.’
‘Isn’t this part of the whole modern business of worshipping success?’ I wondered. ‘Because their fathers are revered for being rich and successful, the boys think they have the right to do whatever they like?’
‘You know,’ Richard sighed, ‘I think it also comes back to what we have often talked about in the past – competition and the school going in for this encouragement of success.’
Success in our days had always seemed to be very narrowly defined, such as coming top of the class or being on the first team. But what about those poor unfortunates who weren’t going to achieve either academic or sporting honours? Richard agreed with me, reminding me of the lists of marks and places in classes that used to be read out at the end of term in front of the whole school. In the case of the lower forms, the bottom place could be as low as 120th. A friend of ours often used to come near the bottom of the lists, and Richard believed that the repeated humiliation of this experience had gradually destroyed his self-confidence. But Richard was not criticising healthy competition, nor was he of the view that results aren’t important. He firmly believes that teachers should encourage children to get the best results possible.
I had not been in the top flight at Marlborough, even though I passed the entrance exam well and had initially been put in the same stream as those who, like Richard, had won scholarships. Surrounded by my new companions, I was at first ambitious to win the accolade that was the highest mark of success at Marlborough: a scholarship in classics at Oxford or Cambridge. But I was soon told I wasn’t up to that. After our first term specialising in classics, my year was divided into sheep and goats – fast stream and slow stream. Demoted to the slow stream, I felt that my peers and I had been condemned to failure, and there seemed little point in doing more than the bare minimum of work. In this attitude I was certainly not alone, as our class of goats became renowned for being a bolshy lot. Being bolshy and rebellious became the means through which I established my identity and attempted to satisfy my need to stand out, to have other boys take note of me. I didn’t realise that this behaviour was a form of egotism, that finding myself and my own sense of destiny was what should have mattered, not worrying about being judged by others
Richard had timed our visit to coincide with one of the rare compulsory chapel services. The pews run parallel with the nave down the length of the chapel, and we sat in the back row, which was reserved for masters. Above us were plaques displaying the names of those men of whom Marlborough was proud. One of them had been a hero to both Richard and me: Sir Nigel Gresley, Chief Mechanical Engineer of the London–North Eastern Railway. He had designed the streamlined locomotives that pulled the London–Edinburgh expresses, one of which still holds the world speed record for a steam engine.
Pre-Raphaelite paintings of biblical scenes ran along both walls of the chapel. Opposite me, a particularly ferocious Abraham was depicted, his hand raised and his dagger poised over his son Isaac, who was strapped to an altar. A nervous angel fluttered above them. When I was a boy, this picture had added to my confusion about the nature of Christianity. I couldn’t understand why God would have wanted Abraham to be so afraid of Him that he was prepared to offer his son as a sacrifice. How could this version of the Almighty tally with a God of love? It already seemed to me then that love and fear did not go together. However, the chapel was nevertheless a place in which I found a lasting meaning in life. It gave me a faith I have never lost (although I have come near to it) and an abiding love of the Anglican Church and its liturgy.
To me, the liturgy is like poetry. It inspires rather than explains. It is like a mantra too, a permanent and always reliable source of comfort and strength. It was at voluntary evensong on Sundays, the most peaceful service of the week, with a small congregation and a full choir, that I started to understand the strange paradox of liturgy. It is familiar yet awakens a sense of a mystery that is beyond all understanding. In a school where the emphasis was mostly on rational thought, evensong was the one time when it seemed to me that there might be some level of comprehension beyond reason.
In later life, John Betjeman also came to appreciate the liturgy he had absorbed at Marlborough. For him, it was an antidote to a form of religion that was too rational and which put all its emphasis on understanding rather than experiencing. ‘With age,’ he confided,
… I find myself enjoying more and more the words and rhythms of the Book of Common Prayer. Apart from their meaning, they sound right and they are not talking down by being ‘matey’, and where they are a bit vague and archaic, that makes them grand and historic. The words give me time to meditate and pray; they are so familiar, they are like my birthplace, and I don’t want them pulled down.
Seated in the back row with Richard, I was disappointed that this service was not liturgical. I had hoped to hear the familiar words sung, but they were not. There was also something about this particular service that Betjeman might have described as ‘matey’. For instance, when I was a pupil, the chaplains used to wait in the vestry until the organist pressed a bell to tell them that everyone was seated and silent. Then they would emerge and process solemnly to their pews. In contrast, this Sunday the chaplains busied themselves in the body of the church, doing I know not what, as the boys and girls straggled in, chattering. The preacher didn’t mount the pulpit to preach, but walked up and down the nave, as if he were in conversation with the congregation. The chancel was filled with students seated on ugly red chairs that detracted from its sanctity and the majesty of its golden reredos. But for all this ‘mateyness’, the boys and girls didn’t seem to sing the hymns with the same vigour and assurance as we had done. I thought this was perhaps just an old man’s nostalgia, but Richard agreed, saying, ‘They don’t sing like we did because they think it’s not “cool”. What’s more, they don’t have the congregational practices that we had.’
One of the chaplains later explained to me that a liturgical service would have no meaning for those children who only went to chapel when it was compulsory. But then, were those same children were not being given any opportunity to learn to love the liturgy, to acquire a treasure that they might not appreciate at the time but which they would perhaps find valuable in later life? It seemed to me that Marlborough had retreated in the face of the secular onslaught. I couldn’t help regretting that a school with such a strong religious tradition did not appear to be putting up a robust fight to save its Anglican inheritance.
When I was young, my understanding of Christianity led me to believe that it was immoral not be a socialist. So when we used to sing the popular hymn ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’ in chapel, I was offended by the suggestion that ‘the rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate, God made them, high or lowly and ordered their estate’. Surely it was the rich man’s greed that had made the poor man poor, and it was our duty as Christians to ensure that the poor man would no longer have to sit around outside his gate waiting for the crumbs from his table.
My socialism was also, I admit, another rebellion against what I felt was the dominant ethos of the school, and as such it became something that gave me an identity and made me stand out from most of the other boys, who were Conservatives. During the 1950 general election, the school held a mock election and we socialists barely got into double figures. I took my socialism home with me, telling my father it was unjust that I went to an expensive boarding school while most of the boys where we lived had to go to the village school. He was not amused and would tell me angrily, ‘You don’t appreciate the sacrifice I’ve made to send all of you children to good schools!’ As there were six of us, my father’s sacrifice was considerable, but I am afraid I didn’t take that into account.
On leaving school I was conscripted into the army for two years’ National Service, during which I was commissioned, much to my surprise. But that achievement did not remove my sense of inadequacy and I remained a rebel. My socialism gave me the doctrine to justify my actions, and the privileges of an officer gave me yet another cause to rebel against. I defied the tradition of drinking fine wines on mess nights and made a point of ordering beer, which was regarded as the working man’s drink. There were very many other minor and, in retrospect, rather stupid rebellions, but the Adjutant only gave up on me when I wrote an essay claiming that the morale problems of the army would be solved if the distinction between soldiers and officers was abolished. The Adjutant returned my essay with ‘The red flag flies …’ scrawled in red ink at the bottom of the page.
But for all my socialist arguments, it never occurred to me to rebel against going to public school during the time that I was there, nor later to refuse my commission on the grounds that there shouldn’t be any officers. I took my privileges as my destiny. I had been born the son of a man who had become comparatively rich through hard work. I therefore took it for granted that a private education and army commissions were what happened to boys like me. At Marlborough we were not taught to be grateful for our privileges; instead, most boys simply accepted without question that they had a right to their education and the social status that went with it. We were not taught to be grateful for our talents, either. We were not reminded that we had been given those talents, nor that, although we may have nurtured them, we hadn’t created them. The competition and the emphasis on success bolstered our belief that our achievements were all our own doing. However, the tragic reverse of this was that many boys felt that their lack of success was all their own fault and gave up trying, as I had in classics.
I now think of life as a hand of cards that we are dealt. We can’t change our hand but we can play it either well or badly. Knowing how misunderstood the concept of fate is, I asked Richard whether he thought this idea was nonsense. ‘Not nonsense at all,’ he said. ‘It’s profoundly true. The old Calvinist doctrine of pre-destination has a lot of truth in it. What we get from our birth and our parents we have no right to be proud about or indeed feel any guilt about.’ He quoted a Methodist scholar who had come to speak to one of his classes and told them that ninety-five per cent of life was predestined and only five per cent influenced by free will, but that five per cent was ‘jolly important’.
Richard’s personal views on destiny had been reinforced by his experiences as a visitor to a young offenders’ prison, ‘I see boys there,’ he explained, ‘banged up for committing crimes that are sometimes really deplorable – violence, sex, a lot of drugs. They come from homes where, almost invariably, there has never been a father. Many of them have never had a home at all. Many of them are not very bright. Part of my job is to write letters for them because they are illiterate. I find it very helpful, and I hope I get this right when I reflect on what an appalling deal they have had. I don’t condone their actions, but compared to my good fortune, they’ve had a miserable deal. When you reflect on why they are that way it makes you realise the extent to which we are all victims of our fate.’
Although Marlborough was a religious foundation, it was also a school of the Enlightenment. All the emphasis in the teaching was on reason. When it came to religion, the arguments for the existence of God were emphasised. It was a given that anything that could not be supported by reason had to be taken on trust. We were told that faith bridged the gap. But that faith was primarily a faith in the authority of the Church, accepting what it taught – a faith imposed from outside, not the faith that grows within. There was little or no mention of experiencing God personally, which later in life I was to appreciate as being so important. However, while at school I was inspired by the palpable goodness of the Chaplain, John Miller, and comforted by the kindness he showed me. He allowed me to see him whenever I liked and helped me to wrestle with my confusion and self-doubt. But I don’t remember talking to him about experiencing God.
We were told to accept the authority of the Church in chapel, and in the classroom we were told to accept the teacher as the absolute authority. Marlborough was, as I have said, a school of the Enlightenment, but we were not encouraged to reason or to work things out for ourselves. We were instructed rather than taught. Almost all my teachers gave me the impression that there was only one answer to every question, and that was the answer they gave. All I had to do was to learn that answer and reproduce it correctly when tested.
In that same block of classrooms in which Richard had been taught scripture, the suave Frank Shaw had dictated notes on ancient history to our class, notes which we had to learn by heart. He kept a gym shoe in the drawer of his desk for beating anyone whose Latin or Greek prose contained a careless mistake. In the room above his classroom sat one of Marlborough’s great eccentrics, Geoff Chilton, who seemed to revel in being a caricature of a school master. He taught Homer, but the teaching was all about the great poet’s grammar. The beauty of Homer’s poetry barely got a mention. When Chilton gave us a grammar test there was always what he called ‘a face-slap question’, which would be a trap. If a boy got the answer wrong, the bulky Geoff Chilton would squeeze onto the bench beside him and administer a sharp face slap or pinch his bottom. Year after year Chilton set the same test each week, until our lack-lustre class stupidly put up such a remarkable performance that he realised we must have asked the previous year what the test for the week was going to be. ‘Oh, you are a lot of sods!’ he sobbed.
Richard’s own teaching experience has shown him that it is the teachers whose lessons children enjoy that get the good results. There were, indeed, masters at Marlborough whose classes I did enjoy, but unfortunately I was only taught by them briefly. For the most part I had teachers such as Frank Shaw and Geoff Chilton, who did not encourage straying beyond the text book or reading for ourselves. Therefore I didn’t learn to take my own notes. I always crammed for exams, which fortunately I had a knack of passing. That was how I got into Cambridge, which was much easier in those days. But when I went up to my college I found myself wholly unprepared for the essays that my supervisors asked me to write. For the first time, I had to read for myself, take my own notes and balance arguments rather than repeat facts.
Although Richard had won a scholarship to Marlborough, he too felt that he had not been particularly well prepared at school for using his powers of reasoning, which was what was required at Cambridge. But now, looking back on his career, he doesn’t think Marlborough was worse than many other schools. ‘The fine line between instructing rather than teaching is a perpetual problem for teachers,’ he said. ‘After all, good teachers know what they are talking about and children are there to learn, so in a sense it’s a bit like Christ preaching to the disciples in the Sermon on the Mount. But on the whole instructing is inefficient teaching and, what’s worse, it discourages any form of disagreement.’
Since in our school there was only one answer to every question, it is probably not surprising that I never considered there might be other ways to God than Christianity. Yet I couldn’t understand how, if Jesus was right in saying, ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life. No man cometh unto the Father but by me’, that way was not always clear and that truth not certain. I had been educated to believe in facts, in certainties, in a sharp divide between truth and untruth. However, in the 1950s scientists, historians and theologians themselves were casting more and more doubt upon the story of Jesus as told in the Gospels and its interpretation in the Epistles. Science particularly worried me. I thought of it as entirely factual, based on certainties, and I dreaded the possibility, as I saw it, that scientists would prove Christianity was untrue and there was no God.
It was only when I went to Cambridge and was taught by the Dean of Trinity College, Harry Williams, one of the most influential spiritual writers of the twentieth century, that I began to understand that it was experience, rather than learning, and the heart, rather than the head, that deepened trust in God. In her introduction to the recent edition of Harry Williams’ collection of sermons called The True Wilderness, the novelist Susan Howatch writes: ‘He could only preach what he had personally experienced.’ In his own introduction, Harry Williams wrote: ‘Christian truth, in other words, must be in the blood as well as the brain. If it is only in the brain, it is without life, and powerless to save.’ Marlborough was all about brain, and so it’s not surprising that my early Christianity lacked blood.
*
My blood added to my confusion about Christianity at Marlborough. We were told that all sexual activity outside marriage was a sin. One evening the headmaster went round every house to announce that he had expelled a boy for homosexuality, as though homosexuality were the cardinal of the cardinal sins. The only education we were given in sexuality that Richard can remember was when the headmaster told leavers, ‘It’s not clever to go to brothels.’ I was acutely aware that Jesus had warned, ‘Whosoever looks on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery already with her in his heart.’ But nevertheless I committed adultery in my heart many times a day when I looked at girls. I suppose that, although an Anglican, I suffered from what is often called ‘Catholic neurosis’. I was told that Jesus had died to save sinners but I was obsessed with my sin.
It would be unfair to Marlborough today to suggest that it is the same school now as it was fifty years ago. These days, Marlborough accepts girls, which must make a great difference. It is less sexually repressive. Richard said any teacher who suggested, as we were taught, that people should remain virgins until they marry would be treated with contempt by the class. And, although in the old days beatings could bring glory, it can’t be argued that their disappearance is regrettable. But Richard said Marlborough was just as competitive and less tolerant of eccentricity than it had been. There was more pressure to conform.
I first went to boarding school at the age of five, and remained incarcerated until I was eighteen. From school I went into the army, which was not so very different. So it was not until I reached Cambridge that, for the first time, I began to live a life that was not institutionalised. Just as I had to begin to read and reason for myself at Cambridge, so I had to learn to make my own decisions. A boarding-school education is said to make children independent. In my case it didn’t because so many decisions were taken for me. Perhaps it is not surprising then, that I was swept off my feet by that first experience of freedom as an undergraduate. Looking back on it, maybe my behaviour was no more outrageous than that of many other young men who feel that they have been let loose at last when they reach university.
At college I was torn between wanting to appear outrageous and wanting to prepare myself for a career in the Church. In spite of my upset at being grouped among the goats for my classics lessons, Marlborough’s competitive spirit had imbued in me an urge to shine and to be a success. I still measured success at university in academic terms, but my failure to be in the top class at school had already destroyed my self-confidence and I didn’t believe I had any chance of getting a first class degree. At Cambridge, my supervisor’s reaction to my first essay persuaded me yet again that I had no idea how to achieve academic success. So I reverted to the role that had at least got me noticed at Marlborough, the role of a rebel.
This time, my rebellion took the form of establishing a reputation for myself as a drinker. This reputation was enhanced when I came back late one night after a heavy session at our regular haunt, Morley’s Wine Bar, also renowned for its beer. Finding myself locked out of the college, I got stuck on a spike while trying to climb over the college walls and tore the flesh off my calf. The accident got me admitted to hospital and featured in the university newspaper.
But I still believed I had a calling to be an Anglican Priest and attended the college chapel regularly. I also experimented with the many other traditions of Anglicanism available in Cambridge. I rejected the call to be saved at an evangelical service and came down on the High Church side of the fence. So there I was – a notorious drinker yet a regular churchgoer, a recipe for inner conflict.
The conflict was deepened by my religious doubts. Marlborough’s rationalism had left me with the need to be convinced that God existed but tormented by the thought that no proof was available. The 1950s was a time when it was widely believed that science disproved not only the existence of God. Metaphysics was also still reeling under the attack of the ‘logical positivists’, who insisted on empirical evidence before verifying a statement. Moreover, Don Cupitt, an Anglican priest and Cambridge theologian, had founded a school of theology known as ‘The Sea of Faith’, which seemed to write off God too. I remember my tutor, Robert Runcie, who went on to be Archbishop of Canterbury, saying that some priests thought being the Dean of a college was a cushy number, but they didn’t realise how lonely a Cambridge Common Room could be for a Christian at that time.
To add to my confusion, Cambridge was the first opportunity I had to acquire a girl friend, but I was afraid of women. Marlborough had left me with the feeling that my sexual urge was evil and that women would be disgusted by my desires. So I was tormented by the frustration of that urge, compounded by a sense of guilt which was deepened by the drinking. Yet the ambition to become a priest and my love of the Church would not go away. I became like the Indian philosopher-poet Bhatrihari, popularly believed to have been a king, who is said to have renounced the world seven times in order to enter a monastery, only to return to his wife and his pleasures six times. He wrote one hundred poems in praise of erotic love, one hundred poems in praise of a prudent worldly life and one hundred poems on renunciation.
Like Bhatrihari, I too finally entered a monastic institution. Although the battle between the Bible and bottle had not yet been decided in my life, Bob Runcie supported me through Cambridge in spite of all my rebelliousness, and agreed that I should go to Lincoln Theological College after I graduated.
There were a few married students in Lincoln Theological College but the majority of us lived what was essentially a monastic life. The days passed in work and regular worship, and we had little freedom. I did, however, lead the party that found time to visit the Adam and Eve pub most evenings, but that didn’t particularly strain my conscience. What did was my sense of sexual conflict, which was heightened by the conviction that real priests did not marry.
Although at Lincoln it was sex rather than drink that caused me to doubt my ability to lead the life of a priest, those doubts were finally resolved by a spectacular drinking accident. I had met one of my closest Cambridge drinking friends, Victor Forrington, in a Lincoln pub at lunchtime. Vic merrily assured me that there was no danger of my getting legless because the pubs had to close at two o’clock. But I think he had deliberately chosen the Market Pub as our venue, because it was market day, which meant that the pub was allowed to stay open all afternoon. The result was that I arrived back in time for evensong, if not legless, then distinctly the worse for wear. After this episode, the Bishop of Lincoln told me he thought I would be more at home in a public house than a pulpit. So I ended my academic career with a sense of failure and, like that other old Marlburian John Betjeman, turned to the last resort of young men with indifferent degrees and no career plans: Gabbitas, Thring and Company’s scholastic agency. Like Betjeman, I too became a temporary schoolmaster.
Nearly fifty years after leaving university and theological college I naturally regret that I didn’t experience the excitement of learning there. After all, I would be much more learned now if I had. But, strangely, I am now grateful for the confusion in my mind as a young man and my sense of failure. Without them I might have been content with myself and perhaps not so open to new influences. I might have spent my time in India as a foreigner, as an expatriate, instead of developing an interest in the country that has become a lifelong passion, keeping me there long after my retirement from the BBC.
Richard’s difficulties at Marlborough and Cambridge were less acute than mine, but, I wonder, if he had been a prefect at Marlborough as he had wanted to be, or got the first he was certainly worthy of at Cambridge, would he have had such sympathy with the children he taught later, particularly the less obviously gifted ones? The writer-priest Harry Williams was able to preach only from experience – rather than repeat what he had been taught – after he had passed through his personal wilderness, which took the form of a nervous breakdown that was so devastating he couldn’t preach in his college chapel at all for two years. Only then did he realise that he had been using religion ‘as an attempted escape from the ambiguities and anxieties which belong inevitably to being human’.
The immediate result of my education was a sense of failure and a closed mind. I still prized academic achievement above all else and I had not achieved it. I still believed in the utter supremacy of reason but feared that it would disprove the existence of God and so destroy the Church, and its liturgy, which I loved.
It was India that truly opened my mind, that led me to value experience as well as reason, and that taught me the experience of God is so widespread I need not fear the death of religion. But above all it was India that taught me to see my failures and achievements in context, to value humility, to suspect certainties and to seek for the middle path. So how might the lessons India has taught me be relevant to the way we all live? That is what I am going to discuss next.