Читать книгу What it Means to be Human - Robert Rowland Smith - Страница 10

Colin’s parents, Rowland and Beatrice, divorced early in his life. At the tender age of eight, Colin, an only child, was packed off to an English boarding school in leafy Sussex, called Hurstpierpoint College. This was in 1945, just as the war was ending. I picture the school as a rural haven from the disarray in cities to the north. It was set, as if to a metronome, to the consoling tempo of public-school life – cricket matches, prayers, tea, weekly baths. But rationing was still in force, those baths were cold, and the school will have had its share of bullies. Female presence was limited, and academic study came a long way ahead of emotional development.

Beatrice, his mother, went to live a hundred and fifty miles away in Birmingham. Rowland took a new wife and had four more children. To begin with, they set up in Hove, adjoining Brighton, and a mere ten miles from Hurstpierpoint. Later, they moved to handsome surroundings in Bungay, Suffolk, which was scarcely any nearer than Birmingham, and required of my grandfather a lengthy commute into Liverpool Street station.

Hurstpierpoint College

So, from the age of eight to eighteen, the Neo-Gothic flint castle of Hurstpierpoint College would have been my father’s entire world, a colony unto itself. Apart from school holidays, that is. These he spent with his mother in Birmingham. There, as a fifteen-year-old, Colin met his wife-to-be, Patricia. A year younger than Colin, Patricia had already left school, and was doing a clerical job in the Midland Bank not far from the Bull Ring. As a girl in the 1940s and 50s, her education wasn’t deemed important, though that didn’t suppress her aspirations to improve her working-class lot. She dreamed about one day having a son and sending him to Dulwich College, the famous public school of which she had once heard as in a legend. With his Queen’s English, shiny bicycle and public-school credentials of his own, Colin appeared in Patricia’s life like the key to a door. For his part, he found a first meaningful female connection. The relationship flourished.