it was like a balancing act in a circus. He had a genius for making the learning of Latin seem interesting, entertaining and good fun, when it was palpably none of those things. By then, of course, we were well past the ‘Caesar conquered Gaul’ stage, which had seen Miss Paterson rise to fevered levels of ferocity in the second form at Sunningdale. At Eton we were very much free-range pupils, by comparison to what we had been at our preparatory schools. Now a good deal of our work had to be done in our spare time.
Once a week we had to construe a piece of Latin prose written by some Godawful Roman no-hoper such as Livy or Cicero. At early school, which began at 7.30 a.m. after a hasty cup of tea in the Boys’ Entrance, Gad Tait, who called everyone ‘Old You’, would charmingly put us through our paces about whatever piece of Latin he had chosen. With equal charm he would exact retribution upon those who not done an adequate job. Also once a week, we had to learn a ‘saying lesson’, which involved him dictating a piece of verse which we wrote down in a flimsy blue notebook – I still have mine. It says much for Gad Tait that even today I remember most of his saying lessons. The principal one was Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses’, which we learned in three successive weeks. Others included part of A.E. Housman’s A Shropshire Lad and Cory’s ‘Heraclitus’.
There were about thirty of us in his ‘div’ (division), and we had to recite whatever piece of verse we had been given to learn in groups of ten. Gad Tait watched closely but effortlessly, and although ten people were speaking at once, he could tell exactly who had not learned the words properly, and distributed penalties accordingly. When, just occasionally, I had written a particularly successful piece of Latin verse or whatever, he would give me a ‘show-up’. This meant that he wrote nice things at the top of my work, which I would then take to pupil room, where GWN would gratefully and happily endorse it with his initials. These were useful brownie points. Whenever Gad Tait gave anyone in M’Tutor’s a show-up, GWN, who was a more than useful cartoonist, would almost inevitably draw a picture of an old ewe on the paper. When it was handed back the next day, Gad Tait always had a chuckle at this. I can’t remember any of the other beaks I was ‘up to’ in my first half, which is a measure of Gad Tait’s skill as a schoolmaster.
Soccer and fives were the two games which occupied me in my second half, the Lent half, and then it was the summer, and cricket, which I had been longing for. I spent my first two cricketing halves in Lower Sixpenny, which was for the under fifteen-year-olds, and immediately made my greatest cricketing friend at Eton. Claude Taylor (CHT) had won a cricket Blue at Oxford, for whom he had made almost the slowest-ever hundred in the University Match, and had gone on to play for Leicestershire. He was the dearest and gentlest of men, and a wonderful coach who loved the beauty of the game more than anything. Grey-haired by the time I knew him, he had the knack of being able to explain cricket, which is not an easy game, in the most uncomplicated manner. He understood the mechanics of batting so well that he was able to dissect a stroke into a series of simple movements that when put together cohesively made not only a hugely effective stroke, in attack or defence, but a thing of beauty. He loved, above all, the beauty of the game. He taught Latin, although I never had the luck to be up to him. He also played and taught the oboe, and married the sister of Ian Peebles, a delightful Scotsman who bowled leg-breaks for Oxford, Middlesex and England. Peebles was a considerable force in a City of London wine merchants, and wrote charmingly, knowledgeably and extremely amusingly about cricket for the Sunday Times. Before the war Peebles had shared a flat in the Temple with Henry Longhurst and Jim Swanton, whom he relentlessly called ‘James’. It was a most distinguished gathering.
We began my first summer half with new-boy nets, and it was then that I caught CHT’s eye for the first time. I immediately found myself playing in ‘Select A’, the top game in Lower Sixpenny, of which he was the master-in-charge. I had a fierce competitor for the position of wicketkeeper called Julian Curtis, a wonderful all-round games player who probably lost out to me because I just had the edge in the batting stakes. In that first year, 1953, the Keeper (captain) of Lower Sixpenny was Simon Douglas Pennant, with whom I went on to play for the school and later for Cambridge, who bowled left-arm over-the-wicket at fast-medium. Edward Lane Fox was also in the side, but now that we were playing against opponents that were better-versed in the art of playing left-arm spin, ‘stumped Blofeld bowled Lane Fox’ became a less frequent entry in the scorebook. It was a memorable first summer half.
My cricketing activities went on much to the detriment of my work, and I must admit that, as at Sunningdale, my greatest ambition in the learning department was simply to get by. This attitude never received Tom’s blessing when my school reports, which were always of the ‘must try harder’ variety, were up for discussion. But as far as I was concerned, it was only cricket that mattered. If it was not Lower Sixpenny matches against other schools, it was Select A games, nets or fielding practice, and I am afraid I was the most intense competitor. The school professional at the time was Jack O’Connor, the dearest of men, who batted a time or two for England in the thirties, and played for many years for Essex. He ran the Bat Shop, just at the start of the High Street, next door to Rowland’s, one of the two ‘sock’ shops, where we guzzled crab buns and banana splits. Jack sold sporting goods, and whenever any of us went in he would give us a smiling and enthusiastic welcome. He was to become a great friend and cricketing confidant. Buying batting gloves, wicketkeeping inners or whatever from his modest emporium always involved a jolly ten-minute gossip. Once or twice CHT brought him to the Lower Sixpenny nets to watch some of us batting. Jack always gave generous, smiling encouragement. Once when I was batting he turned his arm over; so began a lifetime of misery and mystification for me as far as leg-spin and googly bowling are concerned. I still have nightmares of an umpire signalling four byes.
The winter halves were, for me, little more than an inconveniently large gap between cricket seasons. There was nothing so gloomy as going back to school towards the end of September, when the weather was gorgeous but all, or most, of the cricket grounds were strung about with goalposts. What made it even more depressing was that my return was often just a couple of days or so before my birthday. Various wrapped presents were always tucked away in the bottom of my suitcase, but opening them alone in my room between breakfast and going to chapel was a cold-blooded exercise if ever there was one. They did, however, usually contain a couple of cricket books, which helped.
In the Lent half I tried my best to impress those who mattered with my ability on the fives court and between the goalposts on the soccer pitch, but I never quite made it on either count. Soccer was run by a wonderfully bucolic former Cambridge cricket Blue called Tolly Burnett (ACB), a relation of the novelist Ivy Compton-Burnett, who added greatly to the gaiety of nations in just about everything he did. He was large, if not portly, marvellously unpunctual, rode a bicycle as if he was, with much pomp and circumstance, leading a procession of one, or perhaps rehearsing for a part in Dad’s Army, and walked with an avuncular swagger. I am not sure what Captain Mainwaring would have made of Tolly. He drove an exciting sports car, and took biology with considerable gusto, especially when it came to the more pertinent points of reproduction, in a div room just around the corner from Lower Chapel. If you stopped him in the street to ask a question, he would clatter to an uncertain halt and invariably say in somewhat breathless tones, ‘Just a bit pushed, old boy. Just a bit pushed,’ then off he’d go with a bit of a puff. What fun he was, and how we loved him. I am not sure the authorities at the school entirely agreed with us, for although he was, I believe, down to become a housemaster, the position never materialised.
Tolly captained Glamorgan during the summer holidays in 1958. The Glamorgan committee felt, as they did from time to time, that Wilf Wooller, the patriarchal figure of Welsh cricket, was too old and should be replaced. In their infinite wisdom they brought in Tolly for a trial as captain for the last eight games of the season. His highest score was 17, and the dressing room came as close to mutiny as it gets. In September he was back teaching biology at Eton, and Wooller was still the official Glamorgan captain. By the time Tolly’s moment of possible glory came, his girth would have prevented much mobility in the field, his batting was well past its prime, and his ‘Just a bit pushed, old boy’ might not have been exactly what the doctor ordered in a Glamorgan dressing room which was pure-bred Wales
