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By Root 1640 0

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