Memoirs

Оглавление

William Rees-Mogg. Memoirs

Отрывок из книги

WILLIAM REES-MOGG

Memoirs

.....

In late May 1941 I was in my last term at Clifton Preparatory School when the German battleship Bismarck sunk the Hood in the mid-Atlantic. Only three of the Hood’s crew of 1421 survived. My mother and I were taken into Temple Meads Station in Bristol by my father; we went by train to Windsor where I was about to sit the Entrance Scholarship for Eton. Most public schools were by that time sending their scholarship papers to be taken at the preparatory schools, but Eton’s only concession to the problems of wartime travel was to put up the scholarship candidates in the boys’ houses. My mother stayed at the White Lion in the High Street; I was sent to Lyttelton’s House.

The three days of the scholarship examination were interwoven with reports of the pursuit of the Bismarck by the Royal Navy. On the last evening, the Bismarck was torpedoed from the air and sank the following day. The Hood had been avenged. I found the exam papers rather too difficult for me. My Latin, thanks to my father, was tolerable, though hardly up to scholarship standards; my Greek was negligible; my French was of Common Entrance standard; my mathematics was scarcely up to that. However, I enjoyed the history paper and romped away with the essay, which was set on Satan’s fall from Heaven as described in Milton’s Paradise Lost. It was just my subject:

.....