Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life

crisis of 1929. Britain’s politics had also been convulsed. There was radicalization on both right and left, including a blackshirted fascist movement which seemed to be a serious national threat for a moment. Nevertheless, though the structure shook a little, it did not seem, and indeed was not, on the verge of collapse. To judge by Britain, the world revolution would clearly take a lot longer than one supposed. Since, according to my diary, I did not expect to reach the age of forty years (at the age of seventeen even this seemed quite far away), perhaps I might not see it. But by this time the Comintern itself was about to discover that there would be no revolution unless the fight against fascism and world war was won first.

III

It may seem strange that I have said hardly anything so far about the institution I attended from the moment I arrived in England until I left it for Cambridge three years later, longer than any of my other schools in any country, namely St Marylebone Grammar School, on the corner of the Marylebone Road and Lisson Grove in central London. It had been my cousin Ronnie’s old school (I followed him by winning its Debating Cup). Like the Prinz-Heinrichs-Gymnasium, it no longer exists, though it was destroyed not by enemy bombing, but by the ideology of the 1970s, a bad era for secondary education. It refused the choice it was given – to turn itself into a non-selective ‘comprehensive’ school for all comers or to go private – and was consequently shut down. It gave me as good an education as any available in England in the 1930s and I owe its teachers an incalculable debt of gratitude. But, for reasons that still puzzle me, it contributed surprisingly little to my understanding of England, except the discovery that, unlike the Herren Professoren of Berlin, all teachers at St Marylebone had a sense of humour. (I made a special note of this.) What did not strike me at the time is that in Britain secondary- school masters might have belonged socially but not intellectually to the world of the university. Unlike those who would have taught me in the top forms of German, French or Italian schools, they were only in the rarest of cases researchers, scholars and future academics. They had their being in the separate sphere of schoolmastering.

More surprisingly, I established no serious friendships in my three years there. Almost certainly the historic gap between my old and new countries was too wide. By 1932 Berlin standards London seemed a relapse into immaturity. There was no way to continue the conversations of the Prinz-Heinrichs-Gymnasium of 1931–3 on the Marylebone Road of 1933–6. Except with my cousin Ronnie, already a university student, I resumed them only when I arrived in Cambridge. That may also be one reason why for the first two years I underestimated the modest, but real, political radicalization of several of my fellow-pupils. To judge by my diary, another reason was plain conceit. I thought of myself as intellectually on the masters’ level and superior to the rest. Nor did I take to the social aspirations of the school, a caricature version of the (non-boarding) bourgeois ‘public school’ – compulsory uniforms and school caps, prefects, rival ‘houses’, moral rhetoric and the rest, and did my best to indicate dissent. The school, in turn, was not quite sure what to make of the incompletely disciplined arrival from central Europe, ignorant of the rules of both cricket and rugby football and uninterested in both games, but too senior not to be made a prefect sooner or later and too intellectual not to be made editor of the school magazine, The Philologian. There, between reports of sports fixtures, my first printed writings appeared, all of which I have forgotten except a long review of the London Surrealist Exhibition of 1936, with one of whose exhibitors I spent some social nights in Paris later that year. Still, it was soon evident to the school that I took to examinations as to ice-cream, and might stand a good chance of a university scholarship.

What reconciled me to these pretensions of the school was the quality, and above all the devotion to their calling, of the masters, starting with the headmaster Philip Wayne (later the translator of Goethe’s Faust for the Penguin Classics), who, in our first interview, regretted that the school could continue to teach me only Latin but not Greek, and pressed a volume of the philosopher Immanuel Kant and a selection of the essays of William Hazlitt into my hands instead.

The Philological School had been founded in the 1790s for the sons of the modest but aspiring parents of Marylebone, and continued, eventually taken over by the London County Council, as a grammar school providing the sort of instruction needed by London’s lower middle class, who never expected to get beyond secondary education or to make much of a mark on the world. Fortunately for the generation of their sons who began to go to university from the 1930s, this was in no sense a second-best education, even though it sometimes seemed to come to us as a voluntary gift from those firmly established at the top to deserving social inferiors.

Harold Llewellyn-Smith, a handsome, well-connected, never-married pillar of the Liberal Party, son of the architect of the Labour policy of Edwardian and Georgian Britain and of a good part of the welfare state, who taught me history, steered me into Oxbridge, and eventually became headmaster of the school himself, knew that he came out of the top drawer – Winchester and New College, Oxford, war in the Scots Guards. If he had chosen to teach in an undistinguished state secondary school, the only one of whose Old Boys known to the outside world was that singer of London lower-middle-class adventure, Jerome K. Jerome, author of Three Men in a Boat, it was almost certainly for the same reason that he worked in a South London slum settlement. Leaving aside the attraction of working with boys, it was the desire to do good works among the unprivileged. He lent me his books, mobilized his connections on my behalf, told me (correctly) how to handle the Oxbridge scholarship examinations, which colleges were the right ones for me (Balliol in Oxford, King’s in Cambridge), and warned me that I would there have to live like the rich, among gentlemen. He clearly never regarded me even as potentially belonging to his world.

A similar social gap divided us from the most interesting of the masters, a young English literature graduate, who came to Marylebone from Cambridge bringing to those who wanted to listen – certainly to me – the great gospel of I. A. Richards’s Practical Criticism and F. R. Leavis. I gulped down New Bearings in English Poetry which he lent me, together with the editions of his most admired poets which he owned in private press editions, and moved me to name Leavis’s college, Downing, as my third choice in the scholarship exam (after King’s, and, because of the presence of Maurice Dobb, Trinity). Leavis’s reputation as a great literary critic has not survived the twentieth century very well, and by the time I came to Cambridge my own Leavisite passion had cooled, but no don in his century had a greater impact on the teaching of literature. He had an awesome capacity to inspire generations of future schoolteachers who, in turn, inspired their bright pupils. English, for Mr Maclean, was a crusade that had to be taken to the people. I am sure that he would have remained a teacher, had he not been killed during the war. Certainly his teaching inspired me. I felt he had much in common with me – if only because he also had an ugly, large-nosed, incompletely shaped face with brown eyes ill at ease under his horn-rims, a big, clumsy body which did not quite know what to do with its arms and legs, and a sensitive soul. Alas, I doubted whether he would make a Marxist.

For three years Marylebone was my intellectual centre – not only the school, but also, a few yards away, the splendid Public Library in the Town Hall of what was then a London borough, where I spent most of my mid-day breaks in omnivorous reading and borrowing. (Though I have never used the library since, this is the building which contains the Register Office where many years later, in 1962, I was to be married to Marlene.) I certainly did not get my education only at school. Indeed, in my last year there (1935–6) it was little more than a study where I did my own reading. But my debt to St Marylebone Grammar School is crucial, and not only because it introduced me to the astonishing marvels of English poetry and prose. Without its teaching and direction, I do not see how a boy who had never had any kind of English schooling, arriving in this country at the age of almost sixteen, could, in little more than two years, have got to the stage of winning a major scholarship at Cambridge and, once arrived there, have the choice of reading for a degree in at least three subjects. It was St Marylebone also who helped me to move from the no-man’s land in which (but for the family) I had lived since leaving Berlin, once again into the essential territory of youth: of friendship, comradeship, of collective and private intimacy.

IV

What had actually happened to that young man’s intellectual development in those three years? First, I had read more widely and generally during that time, particularly in literature, than in any period before or since. Since secondary-school examinations required far less in the way of specialized knowledge than universities, let alone research, they left adventurous pupils with