In my second year at Surrey, 1969-70, the works of Ludwig Wittgenstein cropped up on Irene Brennan’s reading list for metaphysics and epistemology. He was the first genius I had encountered, at least in the guise of a thinker. I lapped up Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, notwithstanding the fact that Anglo-Saxon philosophy had moved on. It remains… Read More »
I eventually went to university in the autumn of 1968. The route had been circuitous. I had somehow gone from being an ‘Oxbridge possible’ in 1966, to exploring a course in economic history at Nottingham (and buying my first pipe) in 1967, to A-level re-takes and a choice between Hull and Surrey in 1968. Why… Read More »
This fragment makes good an omission. I have been only too aware that so far my father Ron has outshone my mother Margaret. Margaret’s presence has been a shadowy one. This is no way reflects any differential of love, parenting, significance or causal input into who I was or have become. I have been following,… Read More »
For a long while I assumed that I was a laggardly reader in my early years, but I am no longer sure this is true. Certainly my parents helped teach me to read and kept me supplied with reading matter, mostly through attendance at Worthing library in the parsimonious1950s. I was familiar with Enid… Read More »
The ends of sociability through my secondary schooldays were met largely via ecclesiastical means. There was a moment of religiosity too, an embarrassment now, but an interval to which I return below. It was in my early teens that I first visited St George’s Church in, appositely, St George’s Road, East Worthing. The trigger was… Read More »
We always managed a summer holiday during the six-week school breaks. Options were limited in the absence of surplus income and cheap flights, but we had always had a car. Initially, two black Jowetts, kept on the road by piecemeal engineering: I recall my father’s tie resuscitating the fan belt on one, and the strategic… Read More »
It was the radio that entertained and diverted us in my early years. I overheard Grace Archer expire in the Archers. Wilfred Pickles’ Have a go’ was routine fare, a jar of homemade honey a likely prize for champion competitors. Later, Round the Horne was a favourite during Sunday lunches (followed by the unimaginably tedious… Read More »
I was at Worthing High School in my early teens when three of my grandparents died. My earliest recollections of both sets go back to Barnet in North London, but by the mid-1950s they had all migrated to Sussex, Ron’s parents to East Preston and Margaret’s to Rustington, then rural villages ten miles east of… Read More »
Worthing High School for boys was an awakening. I was randomly assigned to ‘Jutes’, one of four ‘houses’, the others being Angles, Saxons and Vikings. Grammar schools aped the independent sector. My first-form teacher, Mr (‘Horace’) Anderson, called me ‘Scambler’ while others were greeted by their first names. He took the trouble to tell me… Read More »
Quite aside from the challenge of re-accommodating to a tamer and routinized lifestyle, postwar returnees like my father, Ron, found themselves jobless and under-prepared for an uncertain future. The shipping industry in which he had been constructing a promising career had sunk, much of it literally. His choice of schoolteacher was impromptu and circumscribed. I… Read More »