Brian Johnston E-Book

Tim Heald

• Herausgeber: Dean Street Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

DescriptionHow did it work, exactly, that Johnners magic? Brian Johnston was arguably the most distinctive and best loved voice in British broadcasting. Elder statesman of the Test Match Special team, he was also Britain's most entertaining commentator with an irrepressible and infectious sense of humour. Johnners also had an enviable talent like few other broadcasters of making his listeners feel like close, personal friends.Drawing on Brian Johnston's own papers and other previously unpublished sources as well as conversations with an enormous selection of his friends and colleagues, Tim Heald's fully authorised biography brings to us the many different sides of Johnners and encapsulates brilliantly his truly remarkable life.Praise for Brian Johnston'Tim Heald is a good writer, an assiduous researcher and an experienced biographer... The result is outstanding, so revealing that you have to refer to the dust jacket to reassure yourself this is authorised... There has never been an Englishman quite like Brian Johnston. Tim Heald, without rocking boats or destroying legends, has written a masterpiece which will humanise the legend' Daily Mail'Heald's light touch and anecdotal approach are entirely in keeping with the man -Johnners would have approved' Time Out'Packed as sweetly as some rich cake with... fun and humour... Inspired' The Times'Delightful' Daily Express

Leseprobe

Tim HealdBrian JohnstonTHE AUTHORIZED BIOGRAPHY

How did it work, exactly, that Johnners magic?

Brian Johnston was arguably the most distinctive and best loved voice in British broadcasting. Elder statesman of the Test Match Special team, he was also Britain’s most entertaining commentator with an irrepressible and infectious sense of humour. Johnners also had an enviable talent like few other broadcasters of making his listeners feel like close, personal friends.

Drawing on Brian Johnston’s own papers and other previously unpublished sources as well as conversations with an enormous selection of his friends and colleagues, Tim Heald’s fully authorised biography brings to us the many different sides of Johnners and encapsulates brilliantly his truly remarkable life.

Praise for Brian Johnson

‘Tim Heald is a good writer, an assiduous researcher and an experienced biographer... The result is outstanding, so revealing that you have to refer to the dust jacket to reassure yourself this is authorised... There has never been an Englishman quite like Brian Johnston. Tim Heald, without rocking boats or destroying legends, has written a masterpiece which will humanise the legend’DAILY MAIL

‘Heald’s light touch and anecdotal approach are entirely in keeping with the man – Johnners would have approved’TIME OUT

‘Packed as sweetly as some rich cake with... fun and humour... Inspired’THE TIMES

‘Delightful’DAILY EXPRESS

Author’s Note

I first met Brian Johnston at Headingley during a Test match against Australia just a few years before he died. I had been asked to write a magazine piece about Test Match Special, and Brian had agreed to be interviewed in the commentary box.

When we had finished our interview we went off to lunch, walking along the back of the Headingley ground which doubles up as the home of the Leeds rugby league football club. At one point Brian half tripped on a bench and said, quite angrily, ‘Oh, bugger!’ I remember the sense of relief. It was not a word he would ever have used on air or in public. For a moment that veneer of self-control had slipped. I thought to myself, ‘Oh good, he’s real.’

My next encounter was in 1989, when I was editing an anthology about Lord’s Cricket Ground for MCC at the behest of E.W. Swanton. Although the fee was derisory Brian was happy to write about his favourite ground and contributed a typically charming, anecdotal piece. For forty-two years he had lived within walking distance of the ground – two minutes from the Cavendish Avenue house, eight and a half from Hamilton Terrace and sixteen ‘on a good day’ from Boundary Road. That summer he commentated on his fifty-second Lord’s Test which must, as he remarked, be why he thought of the place as ‘My Lord’s’.

Most of our communication was by post. His came in the form of blue postcards covered in spidery blue writing.

Thereafter I bumped into him from time to time at cricket grounds. We chatted at Wormsley on the opening day of John Paul Getty’s magnificent country house ground, and we said an affable hello behind the pavilion at Lord’s. He was always smiling, polite but faintly remote. In no way could I claim friendship. When he died I shared in the national mourning, but only as an acquaintance and admirer.

Then one day I came home and found a message scribbled in my younger son’s handwriting. I was to ring someone called Pauline Johnston.

I duly telephoned and she explained that she was Brian’s widow and was looking for someone to write a book about him. Would I be interested?

When I met Pauline and Brian’s children it transpired that various other writers had been keen to write his life but there was a feeling within the family that there was more to Brian than cricket. Nearly all the other potential authors were very closely identified with the game and while it was obviously a passion of his he had other interests and loves. In later life Brian had become almost inextricably identified with Test Match Special and chocolate cake. I could see that they both loomed large but I sensed, as his family obviously felt, that any book about him should reflect his varied life as a whole.

Brian, of course, had written a good deal himself. In all, if you leave out a posthumous volume of jokes, he published fifteen books, all more or less autobiographical. Clearly these were an important source, especially It’s Been a Lot of Fun, which he wrote immediately after is formal retirement from the BBC in the early 1970s. Brian disliked waste and when, some twenty years later, he wrote Someone Who Was – Reflections on a life of Happiness and Fun, the material was rearranged into a different sequence – alphabetical rather than chronological – but otherwise remained substantially the same.

I had a slight problem with these books and in particular with Brian’s polished anecdotes. Roy Hudd, in his foreword to Brian’s final book of jokes described him, affectionately, as ‘the wicked old poacher’, and Brian made no bones about the fact that many of his jokes and routines had been picked up in the comedian’s equivalent of the Oxfam shop. And from time to time they were lightly moulded to fit in with his own experience.

So there is, in these books, an element of fantasy and myth-making. Does this matter? Not if one is simply interested in entertainment. If, on the other hand, you want to know what Brian Johnston was really like, then the well honed patter can be frustrating.

I have tried to sort out the facts from the fantasy, particularly where it really does affect his life story. Two events in particular seem to me to be significantly underplayed or distorted – the death of his father when he was a small boy and his winning of the Military Cross in the Second World War. It is all part of his constant attempt to be sunny and smiling no matter what. His own version of his life makes it look as if it was all wonderful, rollicking fun, with never a bleak moment or an untoward reverse. I think that was what he wanted us to believe and perhaps what he believed himself. But I’m not wholly convinced.

He kept diaries, but he was no Samuel Pepys or even Alan Clark. His diaries were like most people’s – small dog-eared books which fitted into a jacket pocket – and were used to log appointments. Lunches at Boodles, haircuts, Test matches, yes... but no revealing passages of introspection or reflection.

Nor was he a passionate letter-writer. He preferred postcards – often naughty seaside ones – which on the whole were no more easily decipherable than the diary entries. But most of his communication was oral. He was an assiduous telephonist in regular communication with a wide interconnected but carefully compartmentalised circle of friends.

And, of course, there are tape recordings of his famous one-man show and also of the various BBC broadcasts he made. These, though incomplete, go back to his very earliest days ‘going somewhere’ in the late 1940s. They are nearly always interesting but obviously aimed at the general public so that, on the whole, they reveal little of the inner man but are mainly a confirmation of the personality known to millions.

There are other published sources. Many of his fellow cricket commentators have written memoirs and autobiographies and all include a number of Johnston anecdotes – usually the same ones, though often told from a slightly different perspective. However the most valuable sources in this area have been various autobiographies by William Douglas-Home, possibly his greatest friend, but one who was often perceptive about Brian, albeit in the most affectionate way. Maddeningly, both William and Brian tell many of the same stories but frequently differ on several points. As they have both died and as there were often no other witnesses you simply have to pay your money and take your choice.

Another invaluable source is Summers Will Never Be the Same, the valedictory volume of tributes assembled by Christopher Martin-Jenkins and Pat Gibson. Not surprisingly it is weighted in favour of the later years and of cricket.

The most tantalising sources have been those who knew him best. Here too there are dangers. Memory is often faulty, particularly at a distance of seventy odd years and without much chance of written corroboration. I confess I did become mildly dismayed sometimes when, arriving at the home of one of Brian’s old school chums, one was greeted with infinite politeness, a glass of sherry and, ‘I’m afraid I’m not going to be able to tell you anything you don’t know already’, or, ‘You’ll know all the stories by now’, or, ‘The thing about Brian is that what you saw was what you got. No hidden depths there... Ha! Ha! Ha!’

His immediate family were the most revealing. Pauline and the children were generous with their time and disarmingly honest in their recollections. They obviously loved him very much, but this did not blind them to his eccentricities and foibles.

Partly because, despite some modern newspaper obituarists, it is still bad form to speak ill of the newly dead, many of those to whom I spoke tended to be quite bland. It is not part of my brief to suggest that Brian wasn’t an extremely nice man, but even among those who might be expected not to enjoy those jokes or sympathise with his conservative and Conservative tendencies there was a palpable reluctance to saying anything remotely critical. It was as if one were inviting someone to make a rude remark about the Queen Mother.

I hope this doesn’t sound churlish. Almost everyone I asked for help was charming and hospitable and demonstrably fond of Brian. At the same time they nearly all seemed perfectly happy to accept the version according to Brian, the one he spent all his life perfecting. This, I concede, was part of the story, but I am still not convinced that it was the whole story. His was an almost constantly urbane, even suave façade, but I hope I managed to get a glimpse of the man behind the manner. I think there was more to him than met the eye. That doesn’t make him any the less admirable or likeable but it may make him more complicated, interesting, brave and, perhaps above all, mysterious.

Prologue

May 16th 1994. It was a typically early cricket season sort of day: no rain to interfere with play, but enough crispness in the air for sweaters. It was the sort of weather Brian would have associated with the first match of the summer tour at Worcester.

Half an hour before play was due to begin, the queue stretched hundreds of yards back from the Great West Door of Westminster Abbey. It snaked all along the railings into Parliament Square and it contained the great and the good and the plain ordinary, which was just how he would have wished it. The Secretary of MCC, Roger Knight, and the President of MCC, Dennis Silk, alighted from their taxi at 11.30 at almost exactly the same time as a tousled David Gower, grinning in that characteristically sheepish way as he walked to the back of the queue.

‘How did you know him?’ I asked my neighbour as we shuffled towards our pews.

‘Oh, I didn’t,’ he said, ‘but I admired him.’

Brian would have enjoyed the ties, for he had a penchant for old-fashioned meaningful stripes. There were rhubarb and custard MCC ties, and duck egg and black Old Etonian ties, and Lord’s Taverners ties and Eton Ramblers ties and hundreds of others signifying membership of cricket clubs obscure and famous. ‘I thought of wearing my MCC tie,’ confided the Prime Minister a little later, ‘but I thought it might look like showing off.’

The Abbey Church was packed out. Indeed it was a mightier congregation than you would find at most county championship matches these days, especially on a Monday morning in May.

The service itself was billed as a ‘celebration’, so that although it had its solemn moments there was laughter and fun as well, which was surely as he would have wished. The band of his old regiment, the Grenadier Guards, played the ‘Eton Boating Song’, and provided the most affecting moment of the service when two soldiers, one on fife and one on drum, slow marched the length of the church playing that soulful regimental lament, ‘The Grenadier’s Return’. Each of his three sons, Barry, Andrew and Ian, gave readings – verses by his old friend William Douglas-Home, a passage on the meaning of life from his own book, Someone Who Was, and a foreword to another of his books by Bud Flanagan. Colin Cowdrey and John Major both spoke. Trollope was invoked. And the Grantland Rice poem which ends with the sentiment that it matters not who won or lost – ‘but how you played the game’. Lord Runcie, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, led us in thanking God for him; Richard Stilgoe recited some verses he had composed specially for the occasion; Michael Denison read Neville Cardus on the Long Room at Lord’s; and Melvin Collins read his own poem – ‘Johnners – From a Blind Listener’. The service ended on a characteristically Johnstonian note. It must have been the first time that the theme from Neighbours and ‘Underneath the Arches’ were played in the Abbey church. Brian’s musical tastes were always catholic. The Dean had agreed to these selections, on condition that he didn’t actually have to process down the aisle to the tune of an Australian soap opera.

Afterwards a host of his friends adjourned to the Banqueting House in Whitehall for a jolly lunch. Pauline had asked that ladies should wear ‘bright clothes’, and she herself set a good example by wearing vivid pink and also making a festive speech of thanks of which Brian would have been proud.

The room was full of laughter and at the end of the buffet meal strawberry and banana messes, the traditional Eton summer pudding, were handed round.

‘Can I get you a drink?’ someone asked Brian’s old friend, Denis Compton, the greatest living English cricketer, who was limping heavily on a single crutch.

‘No thanks old boy,’ said Compton. ‘The Prime Minister’s getting me one.’

And, sure enough, Mr Major presently appeared with a glass of red wine from the bar.

It was an exchange which Brian Johnston would have enjoyed. It was all too easy to imagine him chortling at the idea of the Prime Minister being Compton’s personal wine waiter. He relished that sort of mild and wholly English absurdity, just as he relished life in all its richness and variety, always taking rough with smooth, though kidding the rest of us that there was no such thing as rough.

Once or twice in that convivial throng someone said something which brought back a memory of ‘Johnners’ so vividly that for a second or so there were tears amid the laughter. That seemed right too. They were wiped away quite fast, but it was meant to be a poignant occasion as well as fun.

The great sadness was that he was not there to share in the jokes and the reminiscences and the fondness of friendship recalled. And yet, of course, he was there, lingering on in everyone’s mind, that utterly distinctive voice and character, symbolising so much of what was good about England, especially on a summer’s day. Few others ever have so effectively talked their way into the nation’s affection, and for those thousands who, through his broadcasting, came to think of him as their personal friend he’ll never really be that far away. As another Etonian writer put it,

Still are thy pleasant voices, thy nightingales, awake, For death he taketh all away, but them he cannot take.

Brian himself might have thought that a little far-fetched and over the top. In any case, he would probably protest, you couldn’t possibly say his voice was like a nightingale’s – more like an amusing auk or a humorous macaw.

But I think, deep down and perhaps without even acknowledging it, he would have known what I mean.

1. Silver SpoonThe Little Boy in The Big House

In later life one of Brian’s great gifts was to fulfil most of the requirements of Kipling’s ‘If’. In particular he had the ability ‘to talk with crowds and keep your virtue... walk with Kings – nor lose the common touch’.

He always seemed completely at ease with everyone from the dustman to the Duke and yet he was, undeniably, born with a silver spoon rammed firmly in his mouth. His friend and sparring partner, Don Mosey, who came from uncompromisingly humble Yorkshire origins, used to say to him, ‘You’ve never had to struggle.’ Like most of those who encountered Brian, Mosey didn’t hold it against him, as he did with other silver spoonees, but there is no getting away from the fact that Brian was born privileged.

In the rarefied pecking order of the English class system the Johnston family probably stood somewhere on the border between ‘upper-middle’ and ‘upper’. Their antecedents were ancient and their circumstances comfortable.

Earlier Johnstons were grander than Brian’s immediate family, for in the seventeenth century the main branch was elevated to the peerage and became the Lords Johnston of Lochwood. As the name suggests, this was a Scottish title. Brian’s distant ancestry was not, as his voice and manner might suggest, Home Counties English, but Lowland Scots. Subsequently they did better still, becoming first Earls and then Marquises of Annandale. Another cadet branch of the family, the Johnstones of Westerhall, became baronets and fabulously rich, but the seventh baronet managed to ‘dissipate’ it in 1912. The Westerhall family tended to spell their name with an ‘e’ unlike the senior branch and Brian himself.

Annandale, a few miles north of Lockerbie, in the Scottish border county of Dumfries, was where the first Johnstons, believed to be of Norman descent, received a grant of lands in the twelfth century. That land was called Johnston, and they built a great house there called Lochwood, now ruined.

Apart from Johnstons, Brian could claim one or two intriguing ancestors who married into the family. These included, in the seventeenth century, the granddaughter of a ‘celebrated Borderer’ called Auld Wat of Harden and his wife Mary, who was known as ‘The Flower of Yarrow’, as well as a number of cattle rustlers. Strangely, Brian never alluded to these colourful sounding characters when talking about his family tree – which, actually, doesn’t seem to have been something which enormously interested him.

His mother’s maiden name was Alt. The Alts seem to have been resolutely upper middle class and included explorers, Oxford dons and an Air Chief Marshal. His uncle, Brian Alt, was killed in the Boer War, and Brian was named after him.

On the Johnston side, the first of Brian’s ancestors to move south seems to have been a Francis Johnston who was born in 1757 and died in 1828. He was the father of nine children, including Edward Johnston, who founded the Johnston family coffee company which was to play a significant part in Brian’s life and of which more later.

Apart from the coffee merchants, Brian’s Victorian family tree is dominated by Army officers, the occasional clergyman, and even a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford – Henry Wakeman, son of Sir Offley Penbury Wakeman, Bart. Brian’s grandfather, Reginald, who was in his mid-sixties when Brian was born, had been Governor of the Bank of England a couple of years earlier.

Into this interesting old family, now very much a Home Counties clan, Brian was born on 24 June 1912 at the Old Rectory, Little Berkhamstead. His father, Charles, was thirty-four at the time. His mother, Pleasance, came from a similar sort of background, her father being Colonel John Alt, CB. Brian was the fourth and last of their children. The eldest was his sister Kathleen Anne – invariably known by her second name – and two brothers, Michael and Christopher, born, respectively, in 1908 and 1910.

The family moved before the outbreak of the First World War, so Brian never really had any memories of the Old Rectory. The new house, also in Hertfordshire, was a sizeable mansion called Little Offley House. Brian describes it as ‘a lovely Queen Anne house’, but actually it seems to have been a typical English mixture of styles and periods including tall Jacobean chimneys and a fine William and Mary front door. His brother, Christopher, has described it as having Tudor origins with a Queen Anne front. In any event he too recalls it as being ‘lovely’.

With Little Offley House went 500 acres of farmland and although the village was half-way between Hitchin and Luton, this was in Brian’s time very much part of rural England. Many of his earliest memories were of ‘calving, bulls having rings put through their noses, and large farm horses being shod’. The family wagon was pulled by two prizewinning shires named Boxer and Beauty. Brian once rescued a black piglet, the runt of the litter, which the pigman was going to kill, and took it to his mother’s bedroom. On another occasion he fell off a cart during haymaking and developed periostitis, a bruising of the membrane of the bone.

Pleasures were simple and old-fashioned. Brian used to remember rat-catching with dogs and sticks, and being allowed to ‘help’ with harvesting. Almost best of all was being allowed to stand on the ‘up’ platform at Hitchin when the Flying Scotsman came pounding through ‘with steam belching out and the wheels of the train going biddle-de-dum, biddle-de-dum, biddle-de-dum’. On Sundays he and the others would walk one and a half miles to church, leave the dog at the Post Office, collect the vicar, Mr Gatty, and try not to giggle during his sermon. If they succeeded it was meringues for tea.

Brian, as nearly always, made those early years sound quite idyllic. Even the war was dismissed simply as ‘uneventful except for one bomb which was dropped on Hitchin and killed a chicken’. Somehow this is typically Brian. Yet his father was serving on the Western Front for the duration and was seldom at home. He was a Lieutenant-Colonel and won the Distinguished Service Order as well as the Military Cross, which his son, Brian, was also to be awarded in the Second World War. His father’s absence on dangerous active service must have been a concern and a worry. In 1915 his uncle Geoffrey was killed in France while serving with the Essex Yeomanry, aged only twenty-six. Brian, then three, would have been too young to have a very clear idea of what was going on. Although there was plenty of farm produce, his mother insisted that they stick to rationing along with everyone else. So there were meat coupons, maize bread, maize pudding, and they even ate dandelions instead of lettuce.

After the war, life reverted to normality, though because of a crisis in the coffee business Colonel Johnston was compelled to work unsociably long hours in the City. He used to commute by train although he owned one of the original Ford ‘Tin Lizzies’ which would transport him to and from the station, as well as a Fiat Landaulet built by the local garage, which was capable of astonishing speeds of over fifty miles per hour.

The chauffeur’s name was Wakefield. In addition there was a groom to look after his father’s hunter, a gardener and boy, a butler, a parlourmaid, a housemaid, a ‘tweeny’ and a cook. Sixty years later Brian looked back on all this with amazement. For all his fame and success he himself was never able to maintain an establishment on anything like this lavish scale.

This charmed family life could not go on for ever. First Michael and then Christopher went off to boarding school. For a while Brian shared a succession of governesses with his sister. Brian always blamed Anne for the high turnover in governesses. The average was apparently two or three a year. Brian claimed that he was less trouble than she was, but he used to dread ‘those wet kisses’ when he went to say good-night. This dread of ‘wet kisses’ remained with him and became one of his standing jokes within his own family.

Eventually he, like his brothers, was judged too old for a governess at home. A new stage in his life was set to begin.

2. Golden TongueGrove of Academe

Sir James Barrie once said that ‘nothing that happens after we are twelve matters very much’. The remark is quoted, with evident approval, on the flyleaf of the official history of Brian’s preparatory school, Temple Grove.

In Brian’s case it is obviously an exaggeration and yet it has an element of truth. What happened to him before he was twelve mattered very much indeed, and in many ways he remained throughout the remaining seventy odd years of his life very much the same person as the little boy at Temple Grove.

It was an old and rather grand establishment, founded in 1810, and originally housed in Lord Palmerston’s old house in East Sheen between Mortlake and Richmond Park. It is now in a house just south of the Ashdown Forest, but in Brian’s day it was in Eastbourne, near the Saffrons cricket ground, where it moved in 1907.

Something of its character may be guessed from the fact that the school played an annual cricket match against the Etonian old Temple Grove boys. A famous old boy was Cornet Bankes of the 7th Hussars, who was awarded one of the first posthumous VCs at Lucknow in 1858. Others included Lord Grey of Fallodon and M.R. James. A former music teacher had been Sir Arthur Sullivan, composer of the Savoy Operas. Another famous Temple Grove product was Douglas Bader, a few years senior to Brian. Brian remembered him as a brilliant cricketer whose exploits were rewarded with a series of celebratory half holidays.

Brian arrived to join his elder brothers in 1920 when he was eight years old.

The official story is that most old boys looking back on their schooldays much preferred Temple Grove to the public school which followed. This doesn’t seem to be the case with Brian who always said he adored Eton but remembered Temple Grove as ‘pretty tough’, with the ‘usual amount of bullying’. There was a peculiarly unpleasant initiation ceremony which took the form of a concert in which all the new boys had to recite or sing. If they faltered the senior boy present hit them on the head with a large book.

Even at this stage in his life Brian was displaying a precocious ability to make people laugh. His brother Christopher remembers this from the earliest years. As Brian used freely to admit, he could tell bad jokes which amused everyone and led, usually, to him getting off more lightly than his fellows. The standard of joke can be gauged from the one about the headmaster’s eye. The Rev. H. W. Waterfield, otherwise known as ‘The Bug’, had lost an eye while playing squash. The school joke, which assumed the status almost of a mantra, ran as follows:

‘The Bug has got a glass eye.’ ‘Really - how do you know?’ ‘It came out in the conversation.’

This strikes me as a prototype Johnston joke.

The school at this time seems to have run on Latin, Greek, team games and corporal punishment. The Bug beat Brian once, giving him two of the best with ‘a thick short cane which looked like a rhinoceros whip’. Mr Fritch regularly beat boys over the head with his knuckles – a painful practice known as a ‘fiddler fotch’. Mr Bellamy had a round ebony ruler and also used to hit boys across the head. Mr Taylor kept a cane under his desk, contrary to school rules, but one day a daring boy called Corrie took it away from him and broke it across his knee.

Many phrases and customs were derived from Latin or Greek. At the end of every term, for instance, there was an informal auction of unwanted possessions with the vendor calling out ‘Quis?’ and the bidders shouting, ‘Ego!’ The school song, ‘Omne Bene’, was in Latin, though only the first verse seems to be seriously translatable. It runs:

‘Omne bene, sine peona Tempus est ludendi; Venit hora absque mora Libras deponendi.’

This, more or less, means: ‘All is well, it is time for playing without punishment; the hour is coming without delay for putting away books.’

By the penultimate verse we are in deep linguistic waters:

Horum scorum sancti morum, Hamm scarum ibo, Rag tag, willy willy wag, Hic haec hoc redibo.

Then all attempt at Latin was abandoned, and the song ended:

Jolly good song and jolly well sung, And jolly companions everyone: Holla, boys, holla, boys this is the day, Holla, boys, holla, boys, hip hip hooRAY.

This, like the school joke, strikes me as very Brian. The word ‘jolly’, for instance, remained an important part of his vocabulary throughout the rest of his life. And he always enjoyed jingly lines and rhymes. Temple Grove, naturally, had its own variation of one of the common chants of the English prep school, certainly from 1920, when Brian first joined, up to 1957, when I left a similar establishment.

This time next week where shall I be? Not in this academee: No more Latin, no more Greek, No more cane to make me squeak, No more German, no more French, No more standing on the bench, No more greasy bread and butter, No more water from the gutter, No more spiders in my tea Making googly eyes at me!

Food at boarding school has always been a cause of complaint. Brian used to put down the awfulness and paucity of the Temple Grove food to the fact that the war had only just ended. It seems more likely that the fault was endemic. Brian’s parents, like those of other boys, supplemented his rations with a termly ‘Tuck Box’ and regular supplies of biscuits and ‘Marmite’. Marmite in those days came in a white jar, unlike the treacle brown one of today, and was pronounced ‘Marmeat’. Brian continued to have Marmite with practically everything for the next seventy years.

Like many pupils at boarding schools, the Temple Grove boys made a regular running joke out of the school cuisine, something Brian was to do at the expense of his wife’s cooking years later. The taps on the cocoa urn at Temple Grove were popularly supposed to be placed so high that the dregs could be used for making the following Sunday’s chocolate pudding; tapioca was fish eyes or frogspawn; mince pies contained old gloves; mincemeat was alleged to be hashed cat or rat; dogs’ graves in the grounds were supposed not to be canine at all but to contain the remains of former Temple Grove pupils who had died from malnutrition. And so on.

The Rev. Waterfield had taken the school over in 1902, supervised the move to Eastbourne and introduced a number of reforms. Hitherto there had been an impossibly arcane system of coloured caps and cap bands, all designating tiny steps in the hierarchical ladder. At the instigation of Mrs Waterfield (‘Mrs Bug’) the multicoloured caps were abolished at a stroke and replaced by a single black and green one. According to Brian she had an enormous bottom, walked almost parallel to the ground on account, possibly, of arthritis, and was scarcely seen except on the last bath night of term, when she made sure everyone was returned home clean behind the ears.

Matron had a bosom as enormous as Mrs Bug’s bottom, allowed Brian to listen to her cat’s whisker radio, on which he first heard a comedian called ‘Stainless Stephen’, and once stole or ‘confiscated’ a packet of his illegal BDV cigarettes. These were very mild, and Brian and his chums used to smoke them behind the fives courts. He didn’t care for them much so their loss was no great problem. Matron’s dentures were notoriously insecure.

There was also, believe it or not, a school butler called Wilkins who had entered service with the Waterfields as a page boy in 1877. He always, of course, wore morning dress and had a single strand of wispy grey hair arranged across a pink pate.

Electricity and central heating were not introduced until two or three years after Brian left. All lighting was by ‘incandescent’ gas mantles.