The History Boys Read Free

remembered how I’d got the scholarship three years before, and as I began to cram for finals I adopted the same technique, reducing everything I knew to fit on cards which I carried everywhere, just as I’d done before. There were more cards this time but the contents were much the same: handy arguments, quotations, an examination kit in fact.
    I also twigged what somebody ought to have taught me but never had, namely that there was a journalistic side to answering an examination question; that going for the wrong end of the stick was more attention-grabbing than a less unconventional approach, however balanced. Nobody had ever tutored me in examination techniques or conceded that such techniques existed, this omission I suspect to be put down to sheer snobbery or the notion (here ascribed to Hector) that all such considerations were practically indecent.
    What we were supposed to be doing in the Final Schools was writing dry scholarly answers to academic questions. It’s Mrs Lintott’s method, with at Oxford a model answer often compared to a Times leader. In my case there wasn’t much hope of that, with the alternative journalism of a lowlier sort, the question argued in brisk generalities flavoured with sufficient facts and quotations to engage the examiner’s interest and disguise my basic ignorance. This is the Irwin method.
    Once I’d got into the way of turning a question on its head in the way Irwin describes I began to get pleasure out of the technique itself, much as Dakin does, sketching out skeleton answers to all sorts of questions and using the same facts, for instance, to argue opposite points of view, allseasoned with a wide variety of references and quotations. I knew it wasn’t scholarship, and in the Final Honours schools it would only take me so far, but it was my only hope.
    I duly took the examination in scorching weather, two three-hour papers a day and the most gruelling five days of my life. At the finish I’d no idea how I had done and was so exhausted I didn’t care and went to the cinema every afternoon for a week.
    The results came out about six weeks later, after a viva voce examination. In those days everyone was viva’d, coming before the examining board even if it was only for half a minute, with a longer viva meaning that you were on the edge of a class and so likely to go up or down. Mine lasted half an hour and went, I thought, badly. I could see a couple of examiners were on my side and endeavouring to be kind; the others weren’t interested. I went back home to Leeds in low spirits.
    A friend who was in Oxford when the list went up sent me a postcard. It came on Monday morning when I was working at Tetley’s Brewery, rolling barrels. My father was ill and out of work, and he and my mother brought this card to the lodge at the brewery gates, where I was sent for from the cellars. They weren’t sure what a First was.
    â€˜Does it mean you’ve come top?’ asked my mother, not particularly surprised, as from their point of view that’s what I’d always done ever since elementary school.
    I went back to pushing the barrels around, hardly able to believe my luck. It was one of the great days of my life, but it was luck. I was right: I hadn’t done well in the viva , but another candidate had and with approximately the same results as mine had been put in the first class so I had to be included too. It was a narrow squeak.
    With a First, a research grant was a formality, so I stayed on at Oxford and for a time even convinced myself I was a scholar, coming up twice a week to read manuscripts at thePublic Records Office, then still in Chancery Lane. But I was more a copyist than a scholar, since that was all I did, copying out medieval records with no notion what to do with them, and the longer I did it – for five years after taking my degree – the more dissatisfied with myself and the bigger fraud I felt. The