trips to explore ancient Welsh castles, historic sites and any available country houses. These he felt would provide his fertile historical imagination with the scope that the humble back streets of Leicester lacked.
The first surviving diary in his archive, which describes one such trip, is the work of several hands (including his first history master, Mr Joels, who later taught me) but it is dominated by Plumb, as he was called by his school friends and, more surprisingly, by his father. It is always Plumb doing the planning, Plumb dominating the talking, and Plumb whose experiences are being recorded. Even the fact that “Plumb’s poor little snub-nose” suffered the worst sunburn was faithfully recorded for posterity. This diary (neatly typed out and decorated with photographs of the travelling party) offers some revealing insights into the young Plumb, as do the postcards he sent home. Some surprising clues to his early self- image and his relations with his parents come from one such postcard signed (surely rather remarkably) with the words “from your only handsome son”. It also contains a rather snide reference to his handicapped elder brother (described as “the Loved one”) who he always felt enjoyed an excessive amount of parental attention, which could more deservedly have been directed to him.
He always felt that he had been starved of affection in infancy because Sid, the elder of his two brothers (the other was called Bert), had had to undergo major brain surgery just when Jack was born. Not surprisingly his mother was distracted by the joint arrival of a very demanding new baby and another son suddenly reduced to total dependence on her. As a result Jack was that very rare twentieth-century infant who was breast-fed not by his own mother but by a friend of hers who volunteered to act as a wet-nurse. Seeing Louie Moodie (the wet-nurse in question) and Mrs. Plumb together I always felt that it looked as if Jack had sucked far more than simple nourishment from the ample breasts of Mrs. Moodie. Where Sarah Plumb was small and bony and bird-like, Louie Moodie was stocky and muscular and mesomorphic. Where Jack’s mother was reticent and discreet, his wet-nurse was boldly outspoken. Where the birth mother seemed indecisive and lacking in energy and drive, the surrogate mother exuded physical stamina and the self-confidence that came from her certainty that she was always in the right. She was born to take charge and she ruled her family with Napoleonic decisiveness. Even on her deathbed when her relatives were trying to tempt her to eat by offering to open a precious wartime tin of salmon, she barked with Plumb-like ferocity, “You leave that alone. I want that kept for the guests at my funeral”. One always felt that there was a lot of Louie Moodie in Jack. He quickly assumed power over the other members of his family (many of whom, again rather remarkably, also always called him “Plumb”). He, too, was never reluctant to take decisions on their behalf. He, too, expected his extended family to heed his wishes, obey his instructions and “do what I bloody well tell them to do!” Like a cuckoo in the nest, he came to occupy a disproportionate part of the house, and take up a disproportionate part of his parent’s attention. His mother always took him morning tea in bed and his father always polished his shoes.
More importantly he always planned ahead – whether for his life, his death or for his future education.
His first school was Narborough Road Primary School, but winning a scholarship to Alderman Newton’s Grammar School was his first significant step on the educational ladder. Known as the Green Coat School because of its distinctive green blazer, it was the oldest grammar school in Leicester (having been founded in 1784) but was by no means ranked as the best.
The history of the school is scarcely mistily nostalgic about its building or its setting. It opens with the words “Alderman Newton’s is not an impressive building. Its Victorian drabness is not improved by the scars inflicted on it by a modern industrial city. Its position scarcely serves as an inspiration to a scholar. The thunder of traffic produces an atmosphere even less conducive to academic work.”
One has to concede that its position in the centre of Leicester was very far from the pastoral ideal of the many schools that consist of distinguished architecture set in arcadian surroundings. The only grass to be seen at Newton’s was not the rolling acres of playing fields but the thin strips surrounding the gravestones that we overlooked from the playground. Newton’s was closely hemmed in by the cathedral cemetery, a large municipal bus depot, a huge hosiery factory, and, on the fourth side, a building works called, to all small boys’ delight, “British Erections Ltd” which operated on Peacock Lane.
I much prefer to recall William Cooper’s description of Plumb’s and my old school in the opening words of his brilliant first novel Scenes from Provincial Life (1950), which was published when I was there in the V1th form:
“The school at which I was a science-master was desirably situated, right in the centre of the town. By walking only a few yards the masters and the boys could find themselves in a cafe or a public house.
“I used to frequent a cafe in the market place. It was on the first floor, and underneath was a shop where coffee was roasted. A delicious aroma drifted through the maze of market-stalls, mingling with the smell of celery, apples and chrysanthemums: you could pick it up in the middle of the place and follow it to the source, where, in the shop-window, a magnificent roasting-machine turned with a flash of red enamel and chromium plate – persistently reminding you that coffee smelt nicer than it tasted.”
That was the cafe – called Bruccianis, which opened in in 1937 and is still operating in Leicester to this day- in which historians from Newton’s spent many hours of their schooldays educating themselves in seemingly endless debates and successive cups of coffee. It was a bit like the common rooms I later encountered in Cambridge colleges, panelled in oak and restricted to “gentlemen only”. If my schooldays evoke nostalgic reminiscence, it is the aroma of coffee and the memories of robust argument at Bruccianis that flood back not the grim Victorian pile opposite the bus station. It was our common room and debating society all rolled into one. Its significance was that we were allowed to use it in school hours, indeed we were strongly encouraged by the charismatic history master H.E. Howard to do so. It was symptomatic of his teaching methods which launched so many historians (including Plumb and myself) on their route to Cambridge.
Plumb was one of the first of many that Howard set on this path even if his launch was initially to prove abortive and embarrassing, This was all the more disappointing because Howard had quickly recognised that with Plumb he had a candidate of exceptional promise with a very clear idea of what he wanted to do. When asked by Roy Plumley on Desert Island Discs what his earliest ambitions had been, Plumb replied promptly “To write”, adding that he had initially wanted to teach (“What bright little boy doesn’t want to teach”), but by the age of fourteen or fifteen he had decided on a writing career. By the age of 15 he had mapped out a whole series of Mercian novels after the model of Hardy’s Wessex series, but admitted that they never got beyond a list of titles. He was, he said, a boy of “infinite curiosity”, and history seemed likely to offer him endless possibilities on which to exercise it.
So his education was always his first priority and there was never much doubt that he would seek it initially as an historian. Even as a schoolboy he claimed that he was engaged in critical assessments of historical sources – carefully comparing the accounts of the fates of Charles I, Strafford and Cromwell as recorded by Clarendon, Gardiner and Carlyle. Such an intuitive critical response to history boded well for his future. His teachers’ assessment of his abilities boded even better. So urged on by his remarkable schoolmaster, H.E. (Bert) Howard (later immortalized by C.P. Snow as George Passant in his Strangers and Brothers series of novels), who had such a profound influence on him at Newton’s, the goal was ambitiously agreed on – to get him to Cambridge to read History.
Howard’s teaching methods, as I learned from first-hand experience in the 1940s and 1950s, were robust and relaxed and relatively free from normal schoolmasterly formality. At times they were so relaxed and so free as to excite much head-masterly disapproval. He smoked in class and he drank heavily out of class. He encouraged his pupils to do the same – meeting the sixth formers in raffish pubs near the school at the end of school hours, to argue
