Both of my parents had strong Presbyterian backgrounds. My father's first wife had become a Catholic as an adolescent, when her whole family got caught up in the Gothic Revival. He came back from India to marry her, but the only way to do this expeditiously was to become a Catholic himself. To him, this would have been no more than re-rigging with new canvass, the timbers were solid, and he neither changed the sail-plan, nor even less the course already laid. For thirty years, that first marriage lasted very well until my father chose the wrong time of year to go to Bad Homburg on one of his five-yearly visits. He drank the waters to tidy up his liver when it suited the time-table of the Indian service, not necessarily when it was the Spa season. So that couple drank the waters in the rain while they both caught colds. He knew a sovereign remedy: “walk it off”. They marched around the Taunus until their colds became bronco-pneumonias. My father's first wife died in their hotel room and my half-brother had to come out to collect his mother's coffin and his sick father.

Convalescence in England gave my father time to make some disagreeable discoveries about Austin then his only son. Austin's eyesight had ruled out the Navy but, as he was ingenious and alert, he had been sent on from Downside to read engineering in Cambridge. At Trinity College, he made a name for himself socially by serving dinner backwards to his guests - starting with a liqueur, then coffee and so on in reverse to end up with soup. In the early 1900’s, there had been an undergraduate fashion for putting a miniature photographic portrait on ones visiting cards. Austin had had his taken from behind, claiming that this was his best profile.

Engineering did not really appeal to my half-brother, but he was a good pianist. He avoided the engineering schools, and spent his Cambridge years perfecting his understanding of Chopin while using the remains of his public school Latin and Greek to take an ordinary degree in Classics. With his father away in India Austin would have been able to get away with all this, but soon, with father back and mama dead, there was hell to pay. His father was a man of action. Since there was no question of his son ever becoming a sailor, and since he was not even fit to become an engineer, the sights were lowered. Austin was taken up to Edinburgh, put into the Faculty of Medicine, placed on a frugal allowance, and his father stayed on a few months to institute a proper disciplined regime before returning to India. No sooner had he got to Calcutta, than he was offered an Admiralty job which amounted to sitting with High Court Judges and telling them the difference between port and starboard. This brought my father back to the United Kingdom and gave him the opportunity to make inspections in Edinburgh. Poor Austin became so harried that he quite simply had to get his MD in self-defense.

My then widowed father had two savage bull-terriers. He was walking them in the Edinburgh Park when they started leaping up at a young woman and there was a fearsome cracking of the whip before order could be restored. It seems that the lady took all this in her stride with the end result that my father married her not too long afterwards.

The Catholic Church had previously served my father perfectly well. Consequently, two people both reared as Presbyterians, one aged twenty-three and the other a good forty years older, were married in the Catholic Church. I was to be their only child. The interval between their marriage and my arrival was spent in Florence, my father returning to England whenever the Admiralty or Appeal Courts needed him. By the time the 1914 war arrived, they had settled with their infant son in Cornwall.

As soon as I could stumble along with my father on his walks, he taught me the points of the compass and a sense of geographical direction - this latter was very idiosyncratically expressed, as he had given new names to the principal features of the estuary alongside which we lived. Once back in the house, I always had to recite the itinerary of our ramble.

The tiny Cornish river, the Gannel, had had all its little features renamed to suit a supposed resemblance to the reaches or points of the Hooghly from the Bay of Bengal to Calcutta. My accounts of my outings must have sounded like quotes from an East India Pilot-book. This is the less surprising because our family had started serious piloting and oceanography for the Honourable East India Company at the end of the 18th century. My ancestors had played a major part in the creation of the Port of Calcutta.

My father's successful career had ensured me a secure and sheltered childhood in Cornwall where, after his retirement, he lived a quiet country life in the Edwardian style which in that County still prevailed well into the 1920s. Winter was punctuated by musical evenings once a fortnight, and summer by wonderful picnics, both organized by my then absurdly young mother. Twice a week my father, with sandwiches in his pocket and field glasses over his shoulder, went for an all-day twenty mile walk, usually with his friend Mr. Gage, a profoundly serious amateur astronomer who spent his nights in his own well-equipped observatory mapping that share of the heavens entrusted to him by the Astronomer Royal. The floor of Mr. Gage's observatory was covered with the butts of his Burma cheroots which we retrieved to make a stinking infusion for the roses in my mother's garden. This kindly bachelor had but one worry: he risked inheriting the Viscountcy; it almost happened when his unmarried uncle nearly died. To his great relief, this uncle not only recovered but married and produced a son so at last he was able to relax. My infant perception was that peerages were uncomfortable and dangerous
Cornwall in my childhood was other than today's holiday ant-hill. Newquay, then a little fishing-port of four thousand inhabitants, had drawn down from London such men as the poet Ernest Dowson and that painter of exquisite fans, Condor. It was a romantic, kind, gulf-stream embraced land, occasionally awakened by Atlantic gales. It was an idyllic, innocent, childhood. I played on the beach with Donald Maclean whose father was our Liberal MP.

My father's dog was called 'Prinny'. When I was about eleven, I asked my father how that name had been chosen because it did not seem to be a dog’s name. He said that the chief dog's name had always been Prinny; it was so in his father's time and for that matter in that of his maternal grandfather's. Yes, you could say that it was an established family habit invented to get back at the Prince Regent who had attempted to settle a debt he owed my Great Grandfather Cripps by telling him to christen his son George. The Regent had assured him that he would have the boy commissioned in the Foot Guards. As his wife was pregnant at the time, there were high hopes that all would work out well but she was delivered of a daughter. They did call her Georgina, but nothing came of it and the Prince never redeemed his note. In order to pay, Grandfather Cripps had to sell his Maulden house and double up on his Indian efforts. He did to some degree get his own back by calling his dog Prinny. The habit got stuck in the family. Today, in Morocco, the eldest son of our Labrador bitch is called Prinny.

As for the future, I, like my father, was going to be a sailor. When some wise adult told me that it would be a rough life with a hard bed, I met the challenge with immediate rebuttal. "No," I said, "it will be all right. I shall sail the ship close to the rocks and come home every night for supper." This, in a sense, is what I have tried to do for the rest of my life, though once or twice I scrambled ashore too late for what had hoped would be waiting for me.

In a wider sense, life started for me when my half- brother, Austin, got his first long leave after the war in 1921. In 1914, he had been a RNVR Surgeon-Lieutenant on a fortnight's training, but he managed to get a permanent commission thus prolonging his stay in the Navy for the next twenty-five years. In that 1921 long leave, he became real. Until then he had been the unknown being of whom I had had to say nightly, "God bless brother Austin and bring him safely home from sea." When he did come home, he opened a window for me onto the world outside.

I have but sporadic memories of my contacts with the adult world before the time of this landmark leave: there is a vision, deep in the back of my adult head, of a military band leading a column of soldiers marching to the railway station, of the grown-ups struggling with tears, and of my Father reading the newspaper and shouting, "The Brutes, The Brutes".

My mother had explained to me that it was the Germans that made him angry but that had failed to make me any the wiser. Cornwall had received thousands of Belgian refugees from front-line districts, amongst them a convent of nuns who opened an infants’ class not far from our house. So I started my school life speaking French thanks to Soeur Benetile. Even a subsequent public-school education, in which it was not done to pronounce French properly, failed to crush this gift from Belgium. My English was constantly corrected by my father who detested slovenly speech, so for my age, my way of talking English was undoubtedly pedantic while, most happily, the French somehow got stuck inside me. When Austin arrived for his long post-war leave, he brought with him a keg of salt olives and a case or so of Samos muscatel with Byronic overtones that delighted my father. He also brought Plymouth gin, rose-petal jam, Turkish-delight and Halva. He hired bicycles and taught me to ride one. He provoked my father into buying a car. Our quiet house learnt of the existence of cocktails, and my father accepted to keep an open door for those young people in our part of Cornwall who had survived the war.

Even as a child of eight I was brought to feel the absence of those who had fallen in the war. They were missed, even on the happiest of our sorties - the picnic fire would not light and someone might say, "Guy would have got it going, he had a magic touch." I could have asked why they had not brought him along and might well have been told that he had gone down in the Dardenelles. The absence of those who had not come back was a reality felt in those early twenties. Those whose wounds had left them handicapped and my own age-mates who were fatherless did not allow us to forget the war. I mention this because it certainly conditioned my own attitude to practical politics later in Cambridge. My age group was short of role-models because we were so short of men of the uncle generation. Uncles do not present the oedipal pitfalls of fathers.

I was an only child. My mother was conscious of this and saw to it that I was not tied to her apron strings. After all, she herself was about the same age as my half-brother. I was often the youngest in a string of children scampering amongst the cliffs and caves between Porth and Bedruthen Bay. My father had an imperious temperament and his word was our domestic law. As a result, that part of the household that was seen to be my mother's responsibility was conducted in a way agreeable to its oldest male component. Thus, though all that was modern was Edwardian, the basic fabric of our life was really Victorian which in a way suited me well. I was indulged in private while in public I was encouraged into hardihood. I tended to take my elders seriously; they dealt with matters outside my scope. The very fact that they were all busy about something told me to watch my step and keep out of the way. This was particularly so when there was any question of a journey, whether by car or by train. Austin opened my eyes to another view of the adult world when he told me how to keep a railway carriage to oneself. "All you have to do,” he explained, "is to open the window in the door, and lean out as it draws into a station. If anyone comes forward to get in, put on a broad smile, show your teeth like the Cheshire cat, and beckon them on with your crooked forefinger. They will back-off at once, as long as you do this at each stop you will have a peaceful journey." Beneath what appeared to be a very correct naval exterior, Austin was a man of fantasy and of unaccountable responses. In those days it was unusual to go about without a hat; once, when Austin was hatless, we were in a shoe shop and a woman customer (I should perhaps have said lady; she was rather refined) perceiving hatless Austin as being something to do with the shop, asked him if he had any really good quality walking shoes. Austin was slightly taken aback, but he found an answer: "Madam, in this shop there are big shoes and little shoes, black ones and brown ones. There are very special boots for very special people, and I believe there are still some very particular, very tiny, shoes for a very particular purpose. What more can I say, Madam? Alas, that is all I know but...”. By this time the lady was backing out of the shop. Austin smiled at me and said laughingly, "That will teach her to look twice at people before treating them as servants." When I asked what were the very particular purposes for which the very tiny shoes were made, all I could get out of Austin were gales of happy, delighted laughter. Finally he told me that he was sure I would eventually find out for myself; “everyone has their own way”, he said, as he relapsed into delighted chuckling.

Austin's bursts of fantasy contrasted with his routinely sedate senior-service comportment, but it is hard to know what really went on in those days. His photo-albums with pictures of whalers, manned by seamen, all bedecked with wild-flowers sticking through their cap-ribbons, rowing back their officers back from picnics on Greek islets, suggested that Pan had survived the 1914/18 war. Maybe he also skipped around the coasts of Cornwall. It was not until a few years later that it became obvious to me (I don't think it occurred to anyone in our Cornish circle) that my sailor half-brother led a well balanced and active homosexual life.

Intellectually my mother was a hard-headed Scotswoman who had always been top of her class at School. She had persuaded her father, a prosperous Edinburgh merchant or what used to be called a “drysalter”, to allow her to train as a nurse in the Royal Infirmary. She had obviously been trying to get away from the constraints of home and to think for herself. It was no doubt in a mistaken pursuit of that end that she allowed herself to be carried off by my father. His dashing appearance from India, coupled with the chance to leave the Edinburgh of 1910, had evidently appealed to her. I believe it all went like a dream until the war. Then, and later on in the 1920s, the conservatism of my father's advancing age and the steady degradation of the purchasing power of his fixed income, all started to have a paralyzing effect on her initiatives. My father never did anything by halves, and so it was in matters of religion. The whole household was punctual in the observance of Sunday Mass. The Parish Priest had a standing invitation to lunch every Thursday. "They live on the smell of an oily rag; the man must have a decent meal at any rate once a week," ordained my father. A few years later these two regular contacts between my father and the Church resulted in me being brought face-to-face with the paradoxical nature of my family's Catholicism.

The earlier of those two collisions revealed itself through certain Sunday sermons in which Father McGuiness railed against 'concupiscence'. This he did on several separate occasions, denouncing, at length and with vigour, the immodest clothing and loose behaviour that, it seems, was rife on the Cornish coast in 1919, or 1920. Such sermons became a feature of the summer season. On the way home one Sunday my father said, "That good man's become absurd, shouting at us all about sin; I shall have to talk to him next Thursday."

So, over the roast beef, Yorkshire pudding and claret, my father duly said, genially enough, "Father, I don’t think our little parish is in such danger from the sins of the flesh. You must take a look at us before going on at us as you have been doing lately." It was the Captain talking to the ship's Chaplain. The reply came in force from the Irish priest, assured of his apostolic delegation by his years in the Maynooth seminary: "What I say from the pulpit, Captain, is my concern and mine alone." It was the first of several collisions; that weekly lunch was ceasing to be a success. I have reconstructed my account, partly from memories and partly from my mother's later stories of the dispute. At the time I understood nothing of the real nature of the controversy, the less so because I had taken in the phonetics of the key word without understanding its meaning. To me, the priest had been angry with someone who had the odd name of 'Konk-you Pissance'. As this sounded to me like the rude farm language that I had been warned to avoid. I, naturally enough, asked my father why the priest used words like 'pissance'. He roared with laughter and adopted that neologism as a label for any nonsensical proposal.

The second factor that helped to sink poor McGuiness was his refusal to take part in the dedication of the local war memorial erected on the Headland dominating the town. He refused to take part in this public event because the Anglican priest and the Non-Conformist minister were each going to say a prayer, and he was expected to do likewise. He held that inter-confessional activity was not acceptable to Rome as it would be a tacitly condoning heresy. Father McGuiness had been an Army Chaplain, and his refusal of my father's argument that those who had fallen together should be honoured and prayed for together sealed a final rupture to which my genuinely pious naval half-brother gave a reluctant consent.

At this point it is reasonable to ask what exactly was my father's attitude to my upbringing; what sort of a person did he want me to be? Just before I went away to school in Yorkshire my father said to me, "It's not what you get out of life that counts, after all you are not going to be an ignorant brute, it is the way you live your life that will make you and others happy." In 1921, the all powerful family doctor ordained that my nine year old self should have twelve months of open-air life. His prescription was that I was to 'run wild' for that period. This I did, for the whole of 1921/22, in a paradise called Trethellan Farm that could be reached by climbing over our garden wall. Farmer Rowe, the hearty bachelor tenant of this Duchy of Cornwall property, opened a new world to me. I lived with the four seasons over his four hundred acres. I rode, I even shot under his guidance. I saw it all through from the ploughing to the reaping, and then on to those wonderful suppers at the threshing of the wheat. I came to know every foot of all the fields and hedgerows, from the great Upper North field down to the little cozy Vineyard right by the Farm House which looked out over the River Gannel. I watched a steam plough being tested and approved the judgment that it was no match to the trio of immense geldings led by Hector, who obeyed shouted orders and chewed tobacco as a reward for standing still while being shod in the Smithy.

That year on the farm brought me immeasurable benefits and some lessons learnt in my first steps towards a wider world. When the old ship's bell on the verandah of our house rang, I could hear it from a mile away. It usually meant that I had to come back home, wash my hands and sit down to table. One afternoon it rang at what seemed to me a stupidly early hour so I took my time getting back. On my return, my mother, who was dressed to go out, said that I was now too late for me to accompany her to see Pavlova dance. I wept, I did not know who Pavlova was, but I had never before been taken as qualified for that sort of outing. The lesson was learnt, I became (and am still) punctually responsive to signals and appointments.

A little later I was given a second chance and was taken to hear Tetrazzini sing. She turned out to be an aging old harridan, singing only a few bars herself and then putting forward her favorite pupil to give the recital in her place. Such were the artistic high points of our country life in 1922. A Prima Ballerina Assoluta of the Imperial Ballet and a Prima Donna of La Scala presented themselves to the tiny town of Newquay with its four thousands inhabitants. Today, in such a provincial backwater, these are surely unthinkable events.

By 1923 it became obvious that I would have to know some elementary mathematics, history and geography before being consigned to one of three establishments Downside, Ampleforth or Stoneyhurst. My father always went for the genuine article, abominating surrogates. Beaumont was not even short-listed because my father regarded it as a Roman Catholic substitute for Eton which had itself been considered until Austin raised questions of its moral laxity. Stoneyhurst was rejected because my father disliked the Jesuits whom, though admittedly good disciplinarians, he viewed as crafty and deceitful. Downside was eliminated because it had not answered well with Austin. So they were left with Ampleforth. They had had good reports of the place from one of Austin's senior officers, whose son eventually ended up there as a monk. My father wrote to the school and I was accepted for the autumn term of 1923. Panic ensued because, at Austin's suggestion, I had been sent to a retired Peterhouse don for academic evaluation. Dr. Jeffries lived with his wife and two daughters in a house overlooking Newquay Harbour. His report was negative: I completely lacked what a small boy was supposed to know on entering a Public School. This scrupulous but kindly Doctor of Philosophy had resigned his fellowship because he had had "doubts" about the validity of the _XXXIX_ Articles.

He had retired to Cornwall to occupy himself with teaching his two daughters who had become incredibly erudite, reading the New Testament in Greek and knowing the names of all the rivers and capitals of Europe. He offered to take me into their class for the year that was left to me before going away to school.

That was an amazing year. Classes were in his dining- room. There was a break at 10:30 when the Doctor got under the table and pretended to be a bear while the girls pretended to be frightened, after which we all had Ovaltine and digestive biscuits before going on to arithmetic or natural history. I am still grateful to Dr Jeffries because he taught me how to learn and saved me from being treated as a dunce when I got to Ampleforth. He also brought me into trouble with my future classmates by augmenting my vocabulary and reinforcing my pedantic, Victorian, turns of phrase which I owed to the elderly book-lined world in which I had been brought up and which had helped me to become a rapid reader. It also opened to me the wider world of a culture that had given Europe a common language of thought. Later this was to allow me an instant empathy which persons as different as Basil Murray, Victor Bache, Hadji Michef, Prince Kutuzov and Cyril Connolly.

It was out of such a world that one September morning in 1923 at Kings Cross I was put into the School Train which ended on a now long vanished local line in Yorkshire. On arrival the boys embussed for Ampleforth while the luggage went up the valley to the School in the monks’ own light railway. The sudden separation from all that was familiar in my Cornish universe followed by my abrupt immersion into a relatively impersonal milieu, in which the community had more importance than the individual, was something for which I had been in no way prepared. This experience, almost as traumatic as a guillotine, was what I, an only child, really needed.

The Ampleforth microcosm was very complete. As befitted a solidly established monastery, it was centered on its own lands. It even had its own Post Office with its own postmark up on the main road where a solitary GPO employee handled daily mail equivalent in volume to that of a small village. Ampleforth lived as a great corporate proprietor in the North Riding of Yorkshire. Special ale was brewed in Malton for the monastery. Ampleforth's image reflected many of the past glories of such Abbeys as Rivaulx and Bylands before the Reformation, and we the boys together with the monks learnt to share a corresponding pride.

When the Ampleforth community, whose predecessors had been expelled from Westminster Abbey on the dissolution of the monasteries, returned to England at the very beginning of the 19th Century, they brought with them their own Benedictine concept of what makes a school. About the time I arrived at Ampleforth, they decided to exchange their older ways for a version of the British Public School, splitting up the boys into Houses, despite the fact the buildings were not particularly adapted to this separation. These changes injected a new sense of emulation and search for prestige in which the leader was a certain Father Paul with whom, from the beginning and for no discernable reason, I did not get on at all well.

Father Paul, apart from being Headmaster, taught Latin. I came to like coming out of Latin into English but, for me, the reverse process lacked charm. My failure to make adjectives agree with nouns drove Paul frantic, and he practiced a corporal punishment tariff, paying me for my bad grammar in terms of blows from an instrument called the "ferula". This converted Latin, previously a pleasure, into a grim risk. These penances were quantified in the school jargon as running from "twice six" to "twice two". This meant that at noon I would have to go to my House Master and ask him to strike me on each hand any number of times from six to two with an object that resembled a shoe sole made of stiffly cobbled leather. When I was older I learnt from the village saddler that he had refused to make up a batch of new ferulae; so, even in the 1920s, Yorkshire men must have been having doubts about corporal punishment. Though the ferula did frighten me, it neither improved my Latin nor my liking for its prescriber.

Life in Ampleforth was largely insulated from external realities. For example, I was at the school in 1926 during the General Strike. The only thing I learnt about it at the time was that the bolt-action of the rifles in the Officers Training Corps armoury had to be withdrawn and sent to York. If the scare had been that profound, it would be reasonable to suppose that it merited some discussion, but "Current Affairs" as an academic subject did not then exist. The glossy weeklies were in the Common Room : The Illustrated London News, The Sphere and The Sporting and Dramatic News. Occasionally, pages were removed when an illustration, in the view of higher authority, was "unsuitable". My first experience of press-censorship arrived when my half-brother Austin, who was in the Mediterranean Fleet and qualified as a Greek interpreter, thought that it would enliven my classical study of that language to read some modern examples. Austin therefore took to sending me an Athens illustrated weekly. It did indeed enliven our class and the monk who taught us used to spend the last ten minutes of the period on a little comparative philology, based on passages from this journal. It all came to an abrupt stop; Father Paul wished to know on whose authority I was receiving that most vulgar paper. He had detected a near-nude photo, then a cartoon in which, with Mediterranean brio, a politician was illustrated as farting, a policy statement with which the editor did not agree. This was the first of a series of mutual incompatibilities between myself and the Headmaster who thenceforward kept a closer eye on me. So, in those later 1920s, I went on through the school, an average student not very good at games. I enjoyed hunting with the Beagles while continuing to read widely. About 1927, I took off academically, moving up from the middle of the class to the front row. I became active in the debating and historical societies and played the bassoon in the orchestra. Moving on with age into the sixth form, I benefited from its very considerable privileges. I lived in a little double-room study, on top of the oldest building in the school. I shared it with Archibald Colquhoun who, after a war spent with the Italian Partisans, was to translate de Lampedusa's "Leopard".

Archie deplored the tepid intellectual atmosphere of the school and proclaimed an aestheticism which was as sincere as it was precocious. In 1929, we started a samizdat Magazine entitled "The Aspidistra" no copy of which has survived. The main part of Archie's life-span could not possibly be described, in Roman Catholic terms, as edifying. After the war he went to Lourdes to write a caustic article about the behind-the-scenes economics of that Holy Place. But nothing got written, as he found himself on the road to Damascus with a cataclysmic re-conversion to the faith of his earlier youth. He ended his days in a monastic retreat, devoting himself as a layman to good-works.

Ampleforth was untroubled by the heated sexual atmosphere sometimes found in British Public Schools. This was certainly helped by the fact that virtually all the teaching was done by monks (with good Oxford degrees gained while resident at the Benedictine House of Studies) to whom the vow of chastity was as real as to be a firm second nature. This is not to say that a romantic element may not have existed in friendships between some few of the boys, but any physical expression was very rare indeed; par contra, there was a vast amount of interest in the heterosexual possibilities of life after-school.

Ampleforth fees were high, and its entry was drawn from the privileged socio-economic group. Boys in the upper school would have been starting to encounter during the holidays the newer, less inhibited, social life of the generation immediately preceding them - the 'bright young things', the Eton-cropped girls and the dashing young men, of the 1920s.

That care-free London, inhabited by the post-war generation just ahead of ours, was known to us through the tales of older siblings. So, while not rejecting the quiet mores of Ampleforth, the reports reaching us on that outside world of the 1920s failed to dismay us as our preceptors would certainly have wished. Given that all this resembles a psychological pressure cooker, it is reasonable to enquire why there was no explosion of repressed libido. We certainly had energy going and to spare, but there were two safety factors. First of all there was little free time. Then each year there was a really well-produced play for which we had a properly equipped small theatre; there was the chamber orchestra; there were the Beagles etc etc. These were major contributions to a satisfying social day. The day was in fact filled with activities which, study and official sports apart, were intelligent and physically tiring.

My class-mate and great friend, Mark Farrell invented another way of consuming our restlessness. He was a good organizer who was later to run the Montreal Star. In conditions of great stealth, we would individually break out of the school in the small hours, cross the three miles of the valley, go over the Railway into the Gilling Castle estate and swim in the lake. We had to disperse and get back into our beds before sunrise. We were never caught, though we had some dodgy moments. It was repeated with variations including separate night-time trekking to points of rendezvous in the country-side. Sex had no part, though, if caught, our act would certainly have been suspect. In retrospect this must be classed as first class adventure training. Many years later I learnt that David Stirling, the creator of the SAS, was our successor in these exercises.

The school did not lack a good leavening of the noble-born, including the heirs to some long attainted Peerages that had been forfeit during the persecution of the Papists. Father Paul valued these aristocratic connections and had been making a recruiting drive amongst the Roman Catholic nobility. His basic ambition was to get the Duke of Norfolk to accept him as purveyor of education by appointment to the Ducal Family which would then have brought in all the Catholic Peerage. Father Paul's drive also covered the more anglophile European Patricians. They had to be Roman Catholics so he had to go further than Luxemburg on into the Hungarian and Polish chateaux. But a dangerous door was opened when, in his pursuit of blue blood, he had so victoriously brought into the school youngsters like Prince Ptocki and Count Apponyi. These two young men had, more than any of us, a detailed and healthy awareness of the facts of life, plus a liability to talk about them. This was only to be expected, since the droit de seigneur was still taken for granted in their home countries. Long after leaving school, my friend Count Karoly, solitary in his liberalism amongst the Hungarian nobility, confirmed that, right up until 1939, the major country houses always placed comely fresh village girls to warm the beds of unaccompanied male guests. Karolyi held this to be abusive but when, acting on principle, he had declined to sleep with one such girl, she had shown such distress at his seemingly disparaging rejection, that he had perforce been led, so he said "to restore her dignity as best I could". He was unable to explain how he had managed this without compromising his principles.

My father was very independent in spirit and had done everything to make me self-reliant. He ordained that I, and I alone, had to secure my entry to Cambridge. He would pay once I had got a place in Trinity, where our family was known, but it was up to me to get it.

Traditionally, headmasters used to look after university placements and were thus able to assure parents that, thanks their special connections, a place had been found for their son. In my own case, it was I who wrote to Trinity, answered their questions and received my acceptance. In juveniles, independence can be taken for cheek; to adults, who are only wanting to help, at best it can seem unflattering. Father Paul had found this arrangement odd, without precedent and quite evidently not endearing.

In the last term of 1930, I had at last discovered how to play rugby-football. Earlier on I had been notably poor at games, and there I was, getting my house colours and, moreover, being selected to play away-matches for the School second fifteen. I had also been made Band Sergeant of the OTC Band which, all in all, meant that I was on the way to ending up with a moderately successful schoolboy profile. This was not at all what my future had looked like two or three years before.

The next term had started well. According to my diary I came up from Cornwall on the night train on the 21st of January 1931 which gave me time in London to go to Zwemmer's where I ordered Le Roman Francais, a critical history of French literature, and took away with me Thomas Nash's Unfortunate Traveler. Despite a late switch from classics to natural science, I had kept earlier reading habits. The Christmas holidays had been pleasingly adult; I had been to my first Hunt Ball; I had been driving the car and, when I got back to Ampleforth, the events of the end of the last term all seemed very far away when, on Father Paul's direct instructions, I had been beaten by the Prefects. My fault had been taking a leading part in an act of collective indiscipline during a recreation period, which had involved throwing a fully clothed boy into the indoor swimming pool.

Father Paul acted as the supervisor of studies of the sixth form as well as being Headmaster. On the 26th of January 1931, he had just finished the routine review of my academic programme when he asked me to sit down again and produced a section from my previous year's diary for the period 12 October to 13 November of 1930. My notes on this interview, taken at the time, record that he held that these pages (which he retained and which had been physically removed from their binding) indicated that I was a dirty minded brute. He told me that on the mere suspicion of recidivism he would immediately expel me. The purloined diary entry to which he objected related to Mark Farrell's panic and confusion when, in his mother's presence, he had clumsily let fall from his pocket a condom obtained in the unfulfilled hope of its employment after a dance in some country house. I pointed out to Father Paul that this entry did not constitute a communication to anyone. By definition diaries were private. I also questioned the right to inspect personal diaries. This was indeed skating on thin ice, as there was the risk of his flying into one of his rages. I did offer as justification that, when adult, "I would be able to see what I was like when I was seventeen", which has turned out to be the case. This interview with Father Paul ended on an indecisive note; perhaps the claim for the privacy of diary entries had been persuasive. I remember it all surprisingly well because, as it was actually taking place, my chronic fear of the man suddenly went, thus the confrontation was easier. When leaving him, I knew that his refusal of all discussion had neutralized my respect both for him and for his office; there had been absolutely no meeting of minds.

The interview about that fragment of diary had been a nasty start for a new term, but I was not playing fast and loose. I realised that I would have to watch my step, but I did not feel in any sort of risk because I had neither sexual guilt nor prospects. I was involved in a number of constructive activities of which the school could only approve. The last Band Parade had been impressive; I had tossed that Drum Major's staff in the air and caught it in my stride, as our Grenadier Drill Sergeant himself said, "like a guardsman." I had believed that with Paul it could at least be live and let live. I hoped that by the year's end, especially if we got the Band prize at the Annual Public Schools' OTC Camp, Father Paul would see me retrospectively in a better light.

My class-mate and friend, Mark Farrell, came from that very special group of British Canadians who had made Montreal the Financial and Cultural capital of Canada. Even in the 1920s this group recognised the importance of the French language. His mother was as British as was her late husband, but she had become adamant about his need to be bilingual long before this had become a generally accepted policy in Canada. So Mark had been sent to Bordeaux to spend the 1931 spring term in total immersion in that language. I had stayed with them in Cheyne Gardens; we had developed a virtually familial mutual understanding so naturally we were keeping in touch throughout Mark's absence in France.

Soon after my tricky interview with Fr Paul, I had received from Bordeaux Mark's report of a very real predicament and of his urgent need for advice. He had certainly been achieving total immersion in French language and culture. Amongst the amenities proper to the prosperous bourgeois milieu of those times must be counted the bordel, to which Mark had been introduced by a member of his host's family. That Mark should have been offered such an outing would in those days have surprised few Frenchman; even a cursory reading of contemporary literature makes this evident. As we all know, maisons tolérées earned their toleration because they were considered to be socially useful. They were seen as a necessary evil which protected the family from the erosion provoked by sentimental intrigues within their own social groupings. Prostitution provided an outlet which the Church in France accepted as the lesser of two evils,

Mark was not being bothered about sociology; he was afraid that he might have caught a disease. This turned out not to have been the case, but when he wrote to me he was very worried. I have a clear memory of the way I addressed his problem and I still believe that I got it right first time. I made two points to Mark. The first point I made was not to feel guilty and to go and see a doctor at once. I said no doctor would despise him or try and make him feel bad about himself. I deliberately tried to boost his morale because he was obviously in desperately low spirits. I had no words of reproof or of moral horror. On reading my letter he would have felt that, had I been in Bordeaux, I would have accompanied him. I had understood that he was desperately upset, almost clinically depressive and that he needed support. He was so full of self-reproach that adding mine would have been in no way helpful. The logic of what I said amounted, in strict theology, to condoning his fault.

Quite apart from dealing with Mark's problem (and partly to take his mind off it) I had given him an account of my last interview with Fr Paul about that purloined entry from diary. As I had lost respect for Father Paul, my description of the interview with him would certainly have been written with the purple pen, nor should anyone ever underestimate the capacity of youth to see through and beyond adult posturing.

I had written this letter on Saturday the 31st of January 1931 and posted it the same day at the little GPO on the main road. It had eight pages according to my diary. Reviewed today, the style of the entries in that diary is pretty callow, touched with would be worldliness and leaning heavily upon whatever I had last been reading. I would have done my best to be mocking and superior and may well have shown some insight into Paul's preoccupations with all the cruel penetration of youthful eyes.

Soon after lunch on Thursday the 5th of February 1931, I was in the library when word was passed to me that the Headmaster wanted to see me. There was nothing remarkable about such a summons. It happened occasionally that he would see a need to discuss some project involving a sixth former. Disciplinary matters he dealt with in the evenings, with the subject being brought along from his dormitory. I walked over to his office wondering whether it was all about the expense of the new side-drums for the OTC Band, or about the planned field visit of the Historical Society of which I was Secretary. I went up the curving Georgian staircase to his floor which overlooked the same wide green view as my own study in the top attics of that same building. Knocking on the door, I went in. He was sitting behind his desk, he did not ask me to sit down. In my mind's eye I can see him still today; I see his pale rather swarthy face and my immediate sensing that something was wrong.

There were no preliminaries:- "You have had fair warning," he said, "you have chosen to ignore it, you persist in writing filth. I cannot keep a rotten apple in the School. You will leave this place in the next hour. Brother Peter will put you on the night train at York and you will be back in the care of your parents’ tomorrow morning. Your accomplice in vice, Mark Farrell, will not be returning to the school, and in the future you yourself may in no circumstances communicate with any member of the school community." This made me loose my footing and I slumped down on the chair beside his desk.

I was completely dumbfounded. I had done absolutely nothing which was remotely vicious or filthy. As I was saying, "But, sir, what have I done?" I saw, from my lower vantage point alongside his desk, the eight page letter to Mark that I had posted outside the school in the GPO box on the main road five days before. The stamped and postmarked envelope lay, open, beside it. He had abusively obtained the letter after it had reached the hands of the Post Office. There was little left to say, not that Paul was seeking any dialogue.

Unfortunately neither the text of my letter, nor that of Mark's, has survived. What became clear that wretched afternoon was that my mail, both in and out, had been under surveillance. This was confirmed later when I learnt from Zwemmers that the history of French literature had been posted to me direct from Paris. It never reached me, so it too, thanks no doubt to its French stamp, had been intercepted. I realised from Paul's manner that this was no bluff, that he would never back down. Anyone at a pre-war Public School had learnt to regard expulsion as a form of capital punishment. In my day, a body of opinion existed that no decent College in Oxford or Cambridge would accept an expulsee. There was no appeal, because there was no way back. I remember saying something about needing time to think and him not understanding that I could not leave a friend in the lurch. His reply still echoes back to me : "If those words were true, you would have brought that vile letter you answered with all this filth," pointing to my letter, "you would have brought it to me and I could have found help for the wretch you call your friend."

Paul was not in a rage, as on the occasion of that previous interview which had led to my being beaten by the prefects. He was cold, but filled with a sense of total repudiation of my being. There was an element of destructive ferocity in the way he addressed himself to getting rid of me. I think he must have wanted to do this for a long time. His knowledge of the life of the sixth form was detailed, but, for someone who was using the police technique of crushing omniscience, there were striking gaps in his information. For example he did not mention our midnight expeditions across the valley, but he laid at my feet everything that he found wrong within the sixth form which, had it been true, would have made me a potential genius. Later I had time to reflect on this patchiness in his information. My father was in his eighties and I was afraid that my expulsion might well give him a stroke. I raised the question of my father and mother, and here Paul momentarily showed both some gentleness and a degree of understanding. He said that he had talked to my mother on the phone and she would be meeting the train when I arrived the next morning, adding that my father was perfectly well, though very concerned.

He, Father Paul, was prepared to say no more about my leaving than was strictly necessary. He would permit it to be assumed, in a wider context, that I had been called home because of my father's health. In other words this was a private, rather than a public, expulsion. In return the least that he expected of me was that I mend my ways and try to become a good son, both of my parents and of the Church. Paul said that the car was already waiting outside. I said, "But what about my things? Can't I go to my study?" He would have none of it; the Housekeeper would pack my trunk, and everything would be sent on. In the event this was not the case; all my private papers in that study , my juvenilia, were retained. We did not shake hands nor did I look at him as I left the room. I was taken downstairs by one of his assistants, a younger monk who was somehow kind and friendly. My overcoat and the little Gladstone overnight bag had already been put in the car. The coup had been well timed and well prepared. I got into the front seat next to Appleby, the driver. Brother Peter, the bath keeper, got into the back. The monastery had but two of these unpaid lay-brother servants; the other one did the boots. There must have been a motive behind the delegation of the responsibility for seeing me off the premises to an NCO. I think it may have been to avoid any risk of a sympathetic conversation with an educated monk. By a fluke, I had the current year's diary in my pocket so it has survived until today.

It was not a chatty car journey. The paradox that Paul knew far more about our lives than he had a right to, contrasted with the fact that he was ignorant of all that had been confined to our own close-knit little set, was striking. His ferocious use of his patchy knowledge kept recurring in my desperately troubled thoughts during the hour and half drive from Ampleforth to York. It allowed me to reach an elementary conclusion: what someone does not know can often be more revelatory than what he actually does know. What someone does not know can help identify the source of what little knowledge the person has. Paul only knew about one part of the school, and not about another. He must have had a spy with a close-up view of one part of the boy's lives but with no view at all of another part. Who was so placed as to be able to give him such incomplete information? It was the boy whom we had thrown fully clothed into the swimming pool. Our earlier diagnosis was confirmed.

On reaching York station, Brother Peter, that trusty corporal, pulled my train ticket out of his pocket. The Aberdeen-Penzance Express soon arrived. Brother Peter produced a half-a-crown piece which he gave to the guard, asking him to ensure that I moved into the Newquay carriage when it was attached at Bristol. He then gave me three more half-crowns so that I could eat on the train. Ten silent minutes later it steamed out of York. Neither of us had said goodbye. He watched the carriage turn out of sight as, frozen in spirit and immobile, I looked out from the window let down on its strap. It takes a lot to crush someone of nearly eighteen. Once the train was under way, I did not feel beaten, but I did feel hungry so I used most of the money to have a steak and some beer in the Restaurant car. I suppose Paul may have been afraid to give me more in case I was to try running away.

I was exhausted so I slept heavily, being woken up in the small hours by the guard to move to the Newquay through-carriage when it was attached to the train. Looking back at it all now, I am surprised that Paul, responsible as he was in loco parentis , he had taken the risk of pushing me off on a night train, alone and in no small state of psychological disarray. The probable explanation is that he himself was more disturbed than was I.

Today it is easier to see what had happened: Paul, the adult monk, and I, the school-boy, had in common the fact that biologically we were both male. Paul had taken his vow of chastity with total seriousness while I had never even considered such a thing. His own success in suppressing his sexuality had been confronted with my own frank interest in its development. This had brought Paul face-to-face with intolerable matters he had wished to exclude from his own life; for Paul, the result was a psychological confrontation of Manichaean proportions to which he had responded by projecting his spirit of repulsion onto the party who had brought the conflict to his notice.

There is nothing fanciful in this explanation of Paul's attitude. Projection is one of the mechanisms by which the intolerable becomes bearable. It is most succinctly defined as the process "whereby emotions, vices and qualities, which an individual either rejects or refuses to recognise in himself, are expelled and relocated in another person." Paul had had confirmed, most comfortingly to his own psyche, the belief that sex is bad news by rejecting someone who had reminded him of that troubling subject. Paul, as the Emperors of old, killed the bearer of evil tidings. In his eyes this demonstrated both the value of his methods and the need for vigilance.

Then, in the early morning, came those friendly familiar stations: Par, St Blazey, Bugle, Roche. For the first time, I wanted to cry. I was to see those friendly names fourteen years later and once again at sunrise from a train window. Then too, I was to be not far from tears, but of course of this I had no inkling as I looked out of the window to see my mother standing in the early morning sun, alone on the empty platform. In the train I had felt horribly severed from what had become my frame of social reference. Seven years before to exchange my gently ambling life in Cornwall for total immersion in the world of Ampleforth had been a shock. To be ejected from what had by now become my norm, to be rejected overnight, should have proved a far greater shock than that original divorce from my childhood home. But the very moment I put my feet back on the railway platform and hugged my mother, I found again an older normality; it was in Cornwall, in my own home, that I felt myself to be once again on firm ground.

I was thoroughly debriefed. Then my father, as was his custom, went for a walk alone to think about what he had learnt. He came back with his verdict. "The man is a fool; he is running the place as though it were a school for monks, not for boys who are almost men." Next he asked a seemingly irrelevant question, "Is Kipling in the school library?" To my affirmative reply he said, "Well, that man had better look on his own bookshelves; Kipling says that Kim had shot his man and begot his man by the time he was your age. That may be too much for him and nobody is asking you to do the same, but that school is not in the real world, we were fools not to have realised this for ourselves."

My father went on to say that we all needed a rest, but first I should get into my head one bit of seaman's wisdom which I must never forget. "If you are trying to make a fast passage, put on all the sail you can but be ready to shorten while you are still able to handle the canvass. Leave it until too late, the wind may freshen to gale force and you will then have a wreck on your hands." I have never forgotten this though once or twice I have remembered it perilously late.

The next day was devoted to damage control. As after a storm, we secured what was savable, reckoned up what we had lost and cut loose the irreparable, dropping it overboard. My father's insistence that I conduct my own entry into Cambridge turned out to be a help. He told me to write at once to Trinity College to tell them of my change of address, explaining that anything concerning my matriculation should be sent to my home address as I was now living there.

Since I already had the then equivalent of two A levels (more than enough in those easier times) it seemed sense to create an academic bonus to compensate for any lacunae in my school history. My parents got Truman and Knightly to send a Tutor to smarten up my mathematics; down came a Senior Wrangler gone to seed. He would have made an excellent character in Evelyn Waugh's Decline and Fall, which had just come my way.

For the next month or so I spent long mornings studying. The afternoons were spent riding with a girl who lived nearby or driving my Mama on her rounds. On the country roads we often enough saw something that, even today, I still find heart-rending. In the early 1930s unemployment was rising, and taking to the road seemed for many a way of escape that might lead to a job. One could often find a man and a woman pushing an old wrecked pram along the County highway loaded with all the couple still possessed. Once started on the road, there was no way back. My mother usually stopped the car and sent me along with some of the groceries we had just bought or a few shillings. They were not beggars; they were the advance guard of the three million unemployed in the 1930’s Great Depression.

Throughout this period, I was consciously trying to settle myself into an adult skin. Cornwall was certainly a quiet county, and in this context I had to start being a young man rather than an older boy. I was desperately anxious to be mature, to meet the challenges of a wider social life. I was not a dashing character. The girl with whom I used to ride almost daily was simply the friendly neighbour I had known from infancy. When we went out with the Four Barrow Hunt she became a different person, other young men made her eyes flash. If I tried to register some progress with one of her contemporaries the spark just did not take; I was left opening gates while they sailed over hedgerows.

Today I can still see the wonderful fresh skins and the bright smiles of those girls when, at the end of a day's hunting, we would all be having drinks and sandwiches in someone's house before going home. Try indeed I did, but at best, not even one of those lovely creatures would be more than cursorily polite with me. I never achieved my ambition of pairing myself off with a mint-fresh sporting girl-friend. Even when very much later I did manage to get off with one of these Diana prototypes, everything went wrong.

Providentially at this stage in my career, my half-brother came home on leave, on the way to his posting as PMO in HMS Royal Sovereign, the pride of the Battleship fleet. He did indeed help me to see my position within the scale of the real world, not just in relation to the microcosm of Ampleforth. I was no longer treated as someone who had to abide by arbitrary adult decisions. My parents indeed understood; they knew that I had much to learn, but my status had changed and I started to find my place as a part of the adult world.

Today, in 1995, I have been trying to identify the nature of the imprint that I received at Ampleforth in those late 1920s. While it certainly was a nodal point in my life I do not share Cyril Connolly's “Theory of Permanent Adolescence” which postulates that: "the experiences undergone by boys at the great public schools, their glories and their disappointments are so intense as to dominate their lives. so that the ‘ruling-class’ in their early thirties are haunted ruins." School was a major influence certainly, but not quite that evoked by Cyril who, whatever he said, was no haunted ruin himself. In the 1920s, no one thought that civic or social studies had any place in the classroom, but so much was implied in the manner of our living that we did indeed grow up incorporating subliminal responses which tied us to a definite code of social behaviour. It is for the reader to read on and judge whether this made me a haunted ruin.

My generation did take it as axiomatic that privilege brought both duties and a responsibility of leadership which, so we learnt, could never be refused. The British Empire was then a reality of which we were then all proud, without thinking it to be particularly remarkable. The war of 1914 had not been forgotten; German was not taught at school. The OTC was a big factor, with its weekly full parade. We really did believe that "Dulce et decorum est pro Patria mori", so Wilfred Owen's agonizing poem of that title must have been amongst those we had yet to read.

So what was the bottom line? Where did those seven years of school take me? Academically it qualified me to go on to University, but what else did it do? I was still trying to find out the answer to that question when, in 1987, I was on one of my rare visits to England. My son, while we were talking about my school days, said, "Why don't we go up to Yorkshire and have a look - it's no distance at all on the Motorway." We did so and, deciding not to declare ourselves, we wandered about Ampleforth. I was in a state of gentle nostalgia. My affectionate gratitude to those monks who were more than just my teachers was re-awakened as we quietly walked around: Father Dunstan who knew just the right book for me to read; Father Felix who brought me to feel poetry; Brother Lawrence who taught me to listen and to follow an orchestral score; and, finally, Father Raphael who got me really looking, not glancing, at pictures. They were men of immense culture, deeply bound to their scholarly monastic tradition. They went far beyond the role of instructors.

As we were wandering quietly around, we turned a corner and were suddenly faced with a life-sized portrait of Father Paul. It was painted in a realistic, mildly hagiographic, style; it was an excellent likeness. The sight of this picture virtually threw me into an abreaction. The fact that I might be called a battle-hardened adult may have saved me from trembling but my psychological revulsion was profound. I then realised that all my relationships with authority were conditioned by my own early experience of arbitrary omnipotence. My contacts with Father Paul had taught me two things which he, for his part, had overlooked: dialogue is an essential part of civilized leadership. Power is more complete and effective when exercised with reciprocal communication up and down the line of command.

 

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