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By Root 1554 0

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