She was a widow and I don’t think I ever knew her name. In a way she was one of my tutors because the growth of the author requires many varieties of compost and I needed that because I wasn’t working at school and school wasn’t working for me.
It was a decent school, the teachers were the usual bunch (usual at least in those days): some enthusiasts for their subject, some who could inspire, relics of the war, the needlessly sarcastic, and, of course, the madman, the latter a general favourite with every boy in the school.
My fellow pupils, too, were from Central Casting, most with their eyes firmly on their A levels and a good job, a few who shouldn’t really have been there, the bully, the weird kid, and the troublemaker, which was me.
It was the worst of times, it was the … no, let’s stick with what we’ve got, it was definitely the worst of times, because I was the troublemaker. Picture the scene: the 1960s were moving sluggishly into High Wycombe and, regrettably, my headmaster considered himself a stalwart against sixties behaviour.
As a matter of fact, mostly the kids really just wanted to get their qualifications, just as I did. But when I brought in a copy of Mad magazine I was apparently a bad influence. Me! The kid who would spend so much time in the library that he would have to blink before he could get used to daylight again. I was astonished, and I have to say that Mad magazine in those days did some remarkably well-observed parodies of Broadway shows, often with a soup?on of harmless political humour and downright comic book fun, but to the headmaster it appeared to be a harbinger of the breakdown of society and indeed his society was under threat. But I just liked the magazine, and then on another occasion I was caught with a copy of Private Eye, apparently another crime against society. In fact, I was an amiable if somewhat talkative kid who liked reading anything and didn’t even own a Bob Dylan record, making me possibly unique among my peers. In truth, Harry Ward was probably a good teacher, although I don’t think that he was a good headmaster, or at least one who understood that adolescents were going to be, well, adolescents and very few of us were really any kind of a problem. We all carried a knife, a penknife, much better than a pencil sharpener if you had to do, as we did, a lot of technical drawing. I can only recall one occasion when one was actually proffered in a fight, and that was by the weird kid, who left shortly afterwards. But Harry made the classic mistake of the tyrant, seeing rebellion in the most innocent transgression, and transgression in the most innocent activity or none at all. I recall a boy I shall call Charles who had the misfortune to be born with an amiable disposition and a face which automatically composed itself into a cheerful grin. Its only other expression, as I recall, was a mild kind of sullen puzzlement when a cheerful grin got him into trouble. And so the suspicious atmosphere of the school meant that he was seen as either a clown or exhibiting dumb insolence. The influence of Harry got him coming and going.
As a natural idiot I was also in permanent trouble with the bully, because I preferred to use my voice in an argument and he preferred his fists, but a friend of mine from those days gleefully recalled to me the day when I lost my rag and ran at the kid down the length of the room, hitting him amidships so hard that he went down and cut his head open on an iron fireplace. After that I became apparently invisible to him, there wasn’t any trouble. The schoolboy code was that short of murder you left authority out of it.
Recently a fellow pupil from those days told me that long after I had left (earlier than expected) he spoke as a sixth-former with the headmaster and learned that the man had been affected by the dreadful scenes he had witnessed during the Second World War, and was sure that this contributed to the man’s itchy trigger finger. I can’t say.
Knowing now the theatre he had been in, I can sympathize, but how could I have done so then? Besides, I was at worst a clown, and by heavy-handedness the man created what had not been there in the first place. But I thank him in absentia for firming up my decision to quit school before taking my A levels, a previously unthinkable occurrence. I knew I wanted to be a writer. I’d won a prize in a Punch competition, and sold two short stories to science fiction magazines. But being the son of my parents, I researched, and realized that the odds of making a living as a writer were, for practical purposes, zero, whereas a newspaper journalist gets paid every week. Still at school, and lined up for the head librarianship, I wrote to the editor of the local newspaper, the Bucks Free Press, asking if there was likely to be a vacancy in the following year, and he wrote back instantly saying, “I don’t know about next year, but we have a vacancy right now.”
Thanks to Harry Ward, I went to see him on the following Saturday and on Monday walked to school and handed back all my schoolbooks, and left by the door that could only be used by prefects and visitors, a delightful sensation. The school could be a petty place, and my decision was prompted by the knowledge that Harry was publicly adamant that I could not have the prefectship that traditionally went with being the head librarian. I learned this by nefarious means. I had been spending every Thursday evening tidying up the library and repairing books, and this was an act of malice, sheer malice. Having been a prefect looks good on a CV, and might have come in useful; on the other hand, Arthur Church, editor of the Free Press, gave me the job right there in the interview. In recollection, he said, “I like the cut of your jib, young man.” Did he really say that? It would have been in character. But remember, my subconscious is that of an author and a former journalist, and probably believes that every quote would benefit from a bit of a polish by an expert. As I believe Douglas Adams once said, sometimes after talking about yourself so often you’re not exactly sure how real some things are.