summer term 1955, I had at sixteen sat for a state scholarship, or S Level. I think I passed, but state scholarships were means-tested and it was judged that my parents could put me through university unaided by the state, so no scholarship was awarded. But Dad did not want to be the only shopkeeper on Ashford High Street whose son left school at sixteen, so he begged me to stay on the extra term and leave at seventeen. I agreed, but idleness was not exactly what Tonbridge had in mind.
My obsession with warplanes and flying magazines brought nothing but frowns, and I was soon required to attend a long interview with a gentleman from the Public Schools Appointments Bureau, who came down for a day to look over the winter leavers. He was genial enough, a bit of a Colonel Blimp type, and he sought to interest me in becoming “something in the City.”
Eyes alight with enthusiasm, he proposed an interview with Shell-BP or a major bank. There might even be an opening as a stockbroker. There was no point in protesting. I feigned enthusiasm, took his numerous career brochures, and slipped away. But I had fooled no one. Strings were pulled in the background, and I was secured an interview at Clare College, Cambridge. With the master, no less. For my schoolmasters, this was close to a visit to Parnassus.
I was furnished with a rail warrant to London and another from London to Cambridge, return. I set off, crossed London by bus, arrived at Cambridge station, and walked to Clare College, nestling by the River Cam, and presented myself at the appointed hour. I was in school uniform, but without the absurd straw boater, which I had been allowed not to wear. A porter showed me up to the master’s study.
The luminary behind the desk was studying a file. It appeared to be about me. He clucked several times, raised his head, and beamed.
“Still sixteen,” he said. “Fluent in two languages and conversational in Russian. Sounds like the Foreign Office.”
It was not a question, so I said nothing. Undeterred, his beam never faltered.
“So, do you want to try for the Foreign Office, young man?”
“No, Master.”
“Ah, well, never mind. So why do you want to come to Clare?”
There are times when dissimulation has no point and straight-up honesty is the best policy. I decided this was one.
“Actually, Master, I don’t.”
This time, the beam did falter. It was replaced not by anger but by an intrigued puzzlement.
“Then what are you doing here?”
“Tonbridge sent me, Master.”
“Yes, I see that.” He gestured at the file on his desk, which had clearly preceded me. “In that case, what do you want to do when you leave school?”
“I am going to join the Air Force, Master. I want to be a fighter pilot.”
He rose and came round the desk, the seraphic beam back in place. He wrapped an arm around my shoulders and guided me back to the door, which he opened.
“Then may I wish you the very best of good fortune. And thank you.”
The good wishes were agreeable, but . . .
“Why ‘thank you,’ Master?”
“Because, young man, you have just given me the shortest and most honest interview I have ever had in this room.”
I made my way back to the station, thence to London and on to Tonbridge. A week later, his report arrived, and I went under a very large and very black cloud. But tenacity is a rather British trait, and Tonbridge certainly had it. They sent for my father.
I was not in the room, but he told me about it later. There were four of them: the headmaster (whose summer repose I had ruined), my housemaster, the head of studies, and the chaplain. He said it was like a summons to the high court. They were all in their scholastic robes, graduates of Oxford and Cambridge. The shopkeeper they confronted came from Chatham Dockyard and they knew it.
The lecture was not hostile but deeply earnest. His son, they told him, was making a grievous mistake. Brilliant exam results stemming from an expensive education. The sort of background that could one day, after two more years at Tonbridge, result in an exhibition, possibly even an open major, to Oxford or Cambridge. A first-class degree could open the doors to the Civil Service. Why, his son might even be able to return as a junior master at Tonbridge, something they clearly regarded as the pinnacle of achievement.
And in the face of all this, the lad had some weird dream of becoming little more than a mechanic. It was all very infra dignitatem—beneath one’s dignity, a Latin phrase my dad had never heard.
In the raging snobbery of those days, it seemed that Dartmouth College (Royal Navy) or Royal Military Academy Sandhurst (Army, good regiment, of course) was just acceptable, but volunteering for boot camp, RAF, was distinctly bizarre. It was his (my father’s) clear duty to do everything in his power to dissuade his son from avoiding those last two years at school and inexplicably declining to go to Cambridge.
My dad heard them out, one after the other. Then he spoke very briefly. He said, “Gentlemen, if my son wants to become a British fighter pilot, I intend to give him every conceivable support and encouragement of which I am able. Good day to you.”
Then he left, drove back to Ashford, and reopened his shop. He was a great man. I left school that December, still under a cloud.
LEARNING SPANISH