Harrow I was stamping around at Hoveton like a caged tiger. I was desperately keen to find out the score, and I well remember sitting in the hall after lunch on the Friday, the first day of the game, listening to the lunchtime scoreboard, which was a daily five-minute broadcast on the BBC Home Service. At the end of the county scores, the announcer said, ‘And now at Lord’s …’ and gave the score, although I have long since forgotten what it was. I think it was just about the most awful moment of my life, sitting there at Hoveton knowing that I should have been at Lord’s and in the thick of it, and there was nothing I could do about it. I think even Grizel was hard-pressed to entertain me that afternoon.
At first, in spite of my determination to go back to Eton for that last week, everyone shook their heads and wondered if it was sensible. I suppose that as I had been so close to snuffing it, this was hardly surprising. But all the various bits and pieces seemed to mend quickly enough, and in the end I got my way. The old Rolls was in business once more. I don’t imagine anyone has ever been more delighted to return to school than I was then. Of course I found that I was Exhibit A, and from the moment I shook Bush Forrest by the hand – I don’t think he said ‘oh dear’ – everyone stared at me, not because I was in any way disfigured, although my nose had seen better days, but in sheer disbelief that I was there at all. That week I behaved exactly as if I was an ordinary member of the school, attending the appropriate divs and joining in everything. I even played in the semi-finals of the house sides’ cricket competition. Forrest’s were playing Tiger Wykes’s on Agar’s Plough.
I can’t remember if I was allowed to open the innings, but I must have batted near the top of the order. There was one perfectly ghastly moment when I was made to realise all too vividly the effect my beastly accident had had on my cricket. NGW’s (Wykes’s) main opening bowler was dear old Edward Scott, who I know felt in a predicament as he ran in to bowl to me. He obviously didn’t want to hurt me, and was reluctant to bowl flat out. Even so, he still seemed quite brisk to me. But I coped well enough defensively, and picked up the odd run here and there. Realising that I was not as bad as he had feared, he then ran in and bowled me a short one. I had always been a good hooker – a dangerous thing to say in the modern world – and I loved to hook anything short. As soon as I saw the ball was dug in, my instinct told me to hook, but I was unable to alert my feet of the need to make the appropriate movements. It was as if they were stuck in concrete, and all I could do was flap in a ridiculous, firm-footed way at the wretched ball, and somehow fend it down. The signal system had gone, and my reflexes were in no sort of condition. I don’t know how many runs I made. It can’t have been that many, although I was cheered off – because of my mere presence rather than any cricketing brilliance. The fact that I could take my place in the side without making a fool of myself did me a lot of good, even if it left me with that one nagging doubt. I didn’t attempt to keep wicket, which seemed too risky.
I sang my verse of the ‘Vale’ at the school concert, and my rendition was a tuneless rival to that verse of ‘Cock Robin’ in my first school concert at Sunningdale. I remember waking up on my last full day at Eton and feeling so sad that this was the last time I would be putting on the stick-up collar and tying the white bow tie – at school at any rate. I had the same feeling when I climbed into that splendid assortment of sponge-bag trousers, coloured waistcoat and floral buttonhole that members of Pop wore, and that made me look like a peacock on a day out. The old Rolls was in business again the next day as I was ferried away to Hoveton with as many of my Eton accoutrements as could be fitted into it. An era had passed, and another one was about to begin. At the time I had no idea of how precariously placed I was to face up to it.
My accident had prevented me from taking the entrance exam to King’s College, Cambridge, where both Tom and my brother John had prospered notably on the academic front. The clout on the head at least saved me from failing that entrance exam, and King’s, in their infinite wisdom, took me blind. It took me two years to teach them the folly of their ways. Tom had always regarded Cambridge as the pinnacle of his education, and when King’s said they would take me in October that year, there was no alternative as far as he was concerned. With the advantage of hindsight, this was one decision he got wrong. He may have felt that if I had refused the invitation, it would not apply to the following year, and I might after all have had to take an exam which I would have failed by a good many lengths. Maybe, too, my outward appearance and the speed with which I had mended physically made him think that all would be well.
I did not suggest that I was not fit to go up immediately; in any case, at that time children by and large did what they were told over something like this, and I longed to get back into the mainstream of life. Nonetheless, the fact was that after 7 June I had been laid out for a long time, and the doctors had warned about brain bruising and its effects. Yet here I was, clocking in at Cambridge in the first week of October. It was hardly the moment for me to start a new life in much more of a man’s world, where I was likely to struggle on several fronts. Also, my one strong point, namely cricket, had been at least partly taken away, although I was certainly not ready to admit this. I am sure that Tom and Grizel must have agonised for ages about what I should do next. Maybe they felt it would be psychologically bad for me not to be allowed to carry on as normal.
I played a few games for Norfolk in August with little success, which was another thing I should never have done. I had become a less confident chap, and it was probably a bit much to expect me to hold my own in Minor County cricket so soon after my accident, even though I was desperately keen to play.
Although I was alarmed at the prospect of starting out in a new, more grown-up world, I was happy that Cambridge was to be my lot. Plans were laid, and I was allotted rooms in a lodging house in Newnham Terrace, run by a Mr and Mrs Hughes. She was large and tough, bossy and without much humour; he was small, with a faint moustache, and was generally a rather grey character who did precisely what he was told. I had a decent-sized sitting room and a small, pokey bedroom up two flights of gloomy stairs in a house that smelled mildly but permanently of stale cooked cabbage. It was into this far from prepossessing milieu that I was dumped by Tom and Grizel, not in the old Rolls, which had been put on ice, but in a new and sleek dark-green Jaguar which Tom sometimes liked and at other times felt rather ashamed of. His friends in Norfolk mischievously pulled his leg for buying such a fast car.
They decanted me into my rooms with a few pictures, which they helped me hang, and the odd suitcase. Then it was a quick peck on the cheek and they jumped into the Jaguar and drove off to Harwich, where they boarded the ferry to spend a few days in Holland to visit some antique-dealer friends in Amsterdam.
Thus began two years in which I never felt fully at ease, and which I did not enjoy as I should have done. National Service had not quite come to an end, and I had been heading for the Rifle Brigade, but when I had a medical the quacks all threw their hands in the air with horror when they heard the details of that encounter with the bus. Almost every other undergraduate had done National Service, and was two years older than me. I was just eighteen, and at that age two years is a lot. At school you were a trifle subservient to boys two years older than you, and at first I found it hard to realise that in spite of the age gap we were on level terms. Another sea-change was that I was expected to call my tutors and supervisors by their Christian names, which was difficult after ten years in the world of ‘sir’.
I was reading history, the subject I had specialised in at Eton after scraping through eight O-levels. Those, incidentally, were the last exams I ever passed in my life. King’s was an intensely academic college, and I didn’t fit in on that score. My supervisor, Christopher Morris, made some allowances because I played cricket (his son Charles had played against me while he was at Marlborough), but otherwise I was some way from being his favourite pupil. I had heard he took a dimmish view of Old Etonians, but I suspect the main reason was the awfulness of my weekly essays.
I soon found that I loved the social side of life at Cambridge, which, not unhappily, took me away from King’s. I became a member of the Pitt Club, which was founded in the memory of William Pitt the Younger. I would have loved to have eaten lunch and dinner there rather more often, but I was not
