that godless people could remain good. Neville Keynes disliked the idea of his children being reared without religious influences. In January 1884, at six months of age, the baby was therefore baptized by his grandfather at the Bunyan Meeting in Bedford. Nevertheless, when Maynard was eleven, his father was ‘appalled’ by his ‘ignorance of Bible History’. Maynard was a witty, self-confident boy who reacted against his father’s pessimistic anxiety by developing an outlook of sunny optimism. He stuttered, especially if excited or tired by pressure, but was outspoken, as his father recorded in 1888 when the boy was five: ‘Maynard generally likes to go to chapel with us in the morning, although he gets rather bored when he is there. To-day as we were returning home other members of the congregation surrounding us – he cried out in his loud clear voice “It is the prayers that I dislike the most!”’16
Maynard Keynes entered a kindergarten in 1889. Three years later he began at St Faith’s preparatory school in Trumpington Road. The headmaster at St Faith’s, Ralph Goodchild, proved to be a formative influence. Educated at the Clergy Orphan School at Canterbury and Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, Goodchild had been appointed headmaster of St Faith’s in 1883 at the age of twenty-three. He was trusted as a kindred spirit by Neville Keynes, who recruited him from St Faith’s in 1909 to become assistant secretary of the Cambridge University Appointments Board. From the outset, Goodchild was impressed by Maynard’s brightness and pluck. At the age of nine the boy had finished book 1 of Euclid, was studying quadratics in algebra, Ovid in Latin and Samson Agonistes in English. Algebra was his forte. ‘Maynard’, noted his father in 1894, ‘is in high glee because he is to have two hours special mathematical teaching four days in the week.’17
Keynes absorbed much from his father. He did school work beside him in the study at Harvey Road, and dealt with his father’s post when the latter was away. For a time the logician Willy Johnson, a Fellow of King’s, lunched at Harvey Road almost once a week. The two men would sit endlessly over their meal discussing logic: ‘I would be in a fidget to be allowed to get up and go,’ Keynes recalled, and yet he learnt rudimentary ideas which contributed to his later work on probability. At his father’s table he heard, said Jack Sheppard, his colleague at King’s for forty years and occasional sexual partner, ‘the courtesies of conversation and the thrust and parry of high argument’, and thus enjoyed formative training. ‘Maynard to me was’, said Sheppard, ‘always gracious and serene. Those who were privileged to visit Harvey Road with him, I think, know why.’18
While a pupil at St Faith’s, Maynard shared his father’s enthusiasm for stamp-collecting, golf, puns and word-play. Conning and appraising stamp catalogues as a boy was training for his adult skill in scrutinizing catalogues of rare books (butterfly-collecting and classification was the avocation which Neville shared with Margaret and Geoffrey). Maynard played golf with his father at Royston links, and compensated for his indifferent performance in competitive games by his cleverness at sporting statistics. Neville took him to circuses, firework displays and theatres. All the children enjoyed happy, revitalizing holidays at pretty, salubrious middle-class resorts, notably Hunstanton, Ventnor, Tintagel and the Lake District.
‘Goodchild is still most enthusiastic about Maynard,’ Neville Keynes noted in January 1897. ‘I am already too proud of the dear boy. My pride in him and my love in him feed each other.’ When Maynard went to his grandmother’s house at Bedford for ten days that April (bicycling both ways), Neville was doleful and apprehensive. ‘I have got Maynard & his school very much on my mind just now,’ he wrote when the boy had been gone for twenty-four hours. His quandary was whether to enter the boy prodigy for Eton’s scholarship examination. ‘It worries me at night & in the early morning.’ He brooded over the boy’s imminent departure from day-school and home. The fact that the boy’s voice began to break and that he grew three inches in the first half of 1897 only emphasized the looming changes, and the end of an idyll. In the week of Maynard’s fourteenth birthday in June father and son began rising early so that they could have an hour’s cramming before breakfast. He received intensive tuition in maths and classics from other coaches. His stammering increased under the pressure. ‘It is a grief to me’, wrote Neville that month, ‘to think that the dear boy will not … do his work very much longer with me in his study. I like to see his books arranged opposite me; & I like all his little ways.’19
On 5 July both parents took their son to Eton, where they installed themselves in lodgings in the High Street. This intrusive parental involvement must have set Maynard apart. It is improbable that both parents of other scholarship candidates journeyed to the town in order to form a tight protective phalanx around their sons. Their fretting may not have helped. ‘Frightfully noisy,’ Neville fussed about their lodgings. ‘Maynard went to bed a little after 8.30 and at 10.30 I found him still awake, and again at 11.15. We then went to bed ourselves but were worried at the idea that Maynard might still be staying awake.’ The boy seemed calmer than his father. His parents fed him Valentine’s Beef Extract to fortify him before the day’s examinations. Sixty-two candidates sat seventeen papers over three and a half days: their examinations lasted from 7 a.m. until 5 p.m. The general paper required an essay of up to thirty lines on a choice of subjects which show the disposition of the Eton beaks: ‘The uses of an aristocracy’; ‘Your favourite poet with reasons for the choice’; ‘Westward the tide of empire holds its course’; ‘God made the country, but man made the town’; ‘Free Trade and Protection’.20
Neville Keynes itched with disquiet until on 12 July a telegram confirmed that the boy was placed tenth among the scholars. Mathematics had proved Maynard’s strongest subject. The family were acclaimed in Cambridge: congratulations tumbled through the letter-box; when Florence attended garden-parties, her reception ‘seemed like a triumphal progress’. In addition to swimming-lessons as preparation for Eton, Maynard was taught by the Harvey Road cook how to fry, boil, scramble and poach eggs: ‘Skill in this respect will be required of him by his fag master.’21
The squalls of puberty had blown up. ‘The dear boy Maynard worries both Florence & me just now by a certain fractiousness & apparent want of consideration for others,’ Neville noted in September. ‘Every point must be argued, & to get him to do anything that he at all dislikes doing is an arduous task.’ His parents hoped that school life would improve him, and ‘correct our tendency to spoil him’. Certainly he was seldom punished as a child, but subjected to the discipline of reason.22
For five years, from September 1897, Maynard was a King’s Scholar of Eton. He was demarcated from the ruck of Etonians by living in College – that is, at the centre of the school buildings rather than in one of the surrounding boarding-houses. The seventy Collegers were distinguished by wearing gowns, and hence had the epithet of ‘Tugs’ (alluding to togas) applied to them. Keynes as the star product of a Cambridge day-school was typical of Collegers in coming from a less smart preparatory school than most boarding-house boys. This disparity rooted the conviction in other pupils that Collegers were their social inferiors, and that ‘brains were no part of a gentleman’s make-up’, according to Esmé Wingfield-Stratford, who went to Eton a year before Keynes and was elected a Fellow of King’s in 1907. In Harvey Road Keynes had appreciated the studious habits, intellectual ambitions, restrained emotions and moderate behaviour of his parents: he found nothing there to resent or fight. At Eton, too, he found no causes for rebellion. His fag-master (son of the head of detectives at Scotland Yard) was considerate. There was much to stimulate, amuse and fulfil an inherently happy boy. The beauty of the buildings, their historic associations and time-worn fabric, enchanted and transmuted him: the imaginative pleasures of living in College amid such beauty made him a devoted Etonian for life. As a pupil there, he was flecked with the dust of apathy or boredom less than most. Living in College with other cerebral King’s Scholars, there was little impingement
