Time to Be in Earnest Read Free

shared with the family, Mr. Crook describes it as “tolerable.” Lunch was followed by afternoon school until 3:45, unless the weather was fine when games would be played instead. Evensong was at 4 o’clock and there was then a further choir practice for the boys until teatime. This, like breakfast, was a miserable affair, consisting of tea and “toke” with black treacle, which had spread all over the plate on which it was served before the boys arrived. (This was the practice my mother continued during our childhood. Breakfast was always bread, butter, treacle and tea, and the treacle would be spooned on to our plates the night before so that by the morning it had completely covered the plate up to the rim. In childhood we only had an egg occasionally, sometimes on a Sunday morning.)
    Bedtime was early for the boys at Colebrook House. My mother or her sister, my Aunt Marjorie, would take a dish of “toke” and a jug of cocoa to the schoolroom, after which insubstantial supper the boys would go up to the dormitories. As one might expect, Sunday was a particularly busy day for the Choristers. The first service would be 11 o’clock Mattins occasionally followed by a Choral Communion. The most important of the Sunday services, however, was Evensong at 3:30, and this included a lengthy anthem. It was to be many years before Holy Communion became the main service at the Cathedral.
    The boys were inevitably educationally disadvantaged by the demands of the Cathedral services, but my grandfather was a conscientious schoolmaster and did his best. I don’t know whether I actually remember what he looked like, or whether the image firmly fixed in my mind comes from a single photograph. In this he looks very like Edward VII: heavily built, bearded, bespectacled. He was a good teacher of English and was genuinely musical, but he was a severe schoolmaster and it was good for the boys that this severity was tempered by his assistant, Percy Spillett. I remember my mother speaking of him with great affection. He seems to have been one of those gentle and erratic schoolmasters, typical of his period: a bachelor, tall, thin, moustached, scholarly, soft-voiced and with a passion for palaeolithic artefacts. Sunday afternoon walks over St. Catherine’s Hill were a hunt for the prehistoric treasures which never came to light. Between them Edward Hone and Percy Spillett seem to have given the boys as good a general education as was possible under the circumstances.
    Both my grandfathers were schoolmasters and both were fond of music. My paternal grandfather, Walter James, was also a good linguist who for some years worked for the British and Foreign Bible Society. I know little about him, but I do remember visiting him and his wife when I was about ten and they lived in a small terraced house in South-sea. He had by then retired, but was an organist at the Garrison Church. Some of the anthems he wrote for the choir were published, but none, as far as I know, has survived. I think he was largely self-educated; certainly I can remember a framed diploma in the hall which I think was awarded by London University after he had taken an external degree. I have always believed that he was Welsh, although I have never been told so. Certainly I see his, and indeed my father’s, face very clearly when I am in the Principality. My father was born in Reading, but I have no idea what my grandfather was doing there at the time. Some of his brothers and one sister were certainly born overseas, and I am told that for some years Walter James acted as tutor to the children of the Rajah of Sarawak.
    My father never spoke of his childhood but I don’t think it was easy. Money seems to have always been short. Certainly he left school at the first possible time and entered the Patents Office, I think at the age of sixteen. He is an example of the waste of intelligence which was tolerated during the first half of this century. Just before the First World War