First Confession Read online

  In the last few years some sad and depressing stories about paedophilia at St Benedict’s have hit the front pages of newspapers. There were suggestions that it must have been a grim Dotheboys hell-hole in my day. Far from it. We were beaten from time to time. That happened at most schools, and it was generally regarded by teenage boys as one of life’s rites of passage. Otherwise I was in clover, never bored, well taught, not remotely bolshie and surrounded by friends, some of whom I still see. Sport mattered, and it helped that I was good at cricket and rugby, captaining the school at the former and getting my colours at both. All those years with my father on the beach and throwing a squash ball at the garage door paid off. I also learned from the Benedictines a sort of restrained moderation about the way we should behave even in religious observance. A monk who taught us French, Father Casimir, who had lost some of his toes to frostbite as a naval chaplain in the Arctic convoys in the war, used to denounce excessive displays of piety: ‘rosary clanking’, he used to call them. I am not sure that he would have liked to know it, but he was as loveable as he was fierce in insisting that we all acquire a pretty comprehensive knowledge of French irregular verbs. He would begin most classes by throwing a blackboard cleaner or book of grammar rather indiscriminately at his expectant class. We learned to duck, and also that ‘demander’ took both ‘à’ and ‘de’.

  There is only one thing that I should add, shamefaced, about my afternoons on the games field. I became prey to an insane superstition. I would have laughed off the obvious ones that are so often contradictory. Is it ‘warm hands, cold heart’ or ‘cold hands, warm heart’? I had no problem stepping on cracks in the pavement. But for some reason I became obsessed with the magical properties of the number 3 and its multiples. Whoever taught us that the digits of any number multiplied by 3 always add up ultimately to another number divisible by 3 should have been shot: 27, 1,008, 3,942, etc. I have no idea what name this function bears in maths; mathematicians will doubtless snigger. But, for reasons deep in my psyche, the impact was profound. I uttered instructions or urged the team on with phrases of 3, 6 or 9 words. Thus, ‘Come on, boys’, but not ‘Come on, you boys’. The number 4 being close to 3 was almost as unlucky as the number 8 because of that digit’s proximity to the heroic 9. (I was later to learn that 4 is also regarded as unlucky by the Cantonese because it is homophonous to the word ‘death’ in their language. The number 8 on the other hand – how complicated – is lucky in China because it sounds like ‘prospers’.) As captain of cricket, I naturally bowled myself for 3 overs not 4, 9 overs not 8. The penalty for a failure in superstitious numeracy was naturally sporting calamity, a dropped pass or catch. This lunacy leaked into my behaviour at other times and it still does. Driving along in the car, minding my own business, I realize suddenly even today that I have not really been daydreaming at all but aggregating the digits on car number plates until I get to a number which can pass the ‘divisible by 3’ test. I suppose this certifiable lunacy is harmless enough, even for a Cabinet minister, and that psychologists would think of some reason for it, like the number of times I have recited the Nicene Creed with its ‘three in One’ deity and the third day resurrection. At least I walk under ladders and do not try to count exactly how many words I write on each page to ensure the triumph of three. For your information, the last sentence contained twenty-seven words – 2 plus 7 equals 9 divided by 3 equals 3. Phew!

  At the age of eighteen (another lucky number) I set off for what had long been regarded, with no shortage of immodesty on the part of its beneficiaries, as the great launch pad for success in public life. Geoffrey Madan, the collector and creator of aphorisms, who himself went to Balliol before the First World War with Ronnie Knox and Harold Macmillan, noted what he and his college contemporaries took to be the remorseless and inevitable ascent of their kind. ‘At the top of every tree,’ he wrote, ‘you will find an arboreal slum of Balliol men.’ Another Balliol writer, Hilaire Belloc, wrote a poem on the same subject which, happily, is not as well known outside the college as his Cautionary Tales for Children. We all know about Matilda, who told lies and was burned to death, and Lord Lundy, who was sent out to govern New South Wales. But Balliol produced a regiment of Lord Lundys in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries who went out to run the British Empire. Belloc’s emotional poem ‘To the Balliol Men Still in Africa’ praised them all, noting the role that the pupils and disciples of Balliol’s most famous Master, Benjamin Jowett, had played in standing up for their country’s honour thousands of miles from Balliol Hall and Cumnor Hill. Here was a college, Belloc thought, that:

  […] armours a man

  With the eyes of a boy and the heart of a ranger,

  And a laughing way in the teeth of the world

  And a holy hunger and thirst for danger.

  He concluded with words that used, I am sure, to echo around Balliol Hall at college feasts and gaudies:

  Balliol made me, Balliol fed me,

  Whatever I had she gave me again:

  And the best of Balliol loved and led me,

  God be with you, Balliol men.

  Though dedicated to those in Africa, like the curious, mostly German Lord Milner and his ‘kinder-garten’ of officials containing so many Oxford men in his government of the Transvaal and Orange River Colony, it was perhaps even more appropriate if one considers the college’s role in India. From 1853 to 1947, 350 Balliol graduates went out to India to serve what Professor Judith Brown called ‘the Balliol Raj’. One of them, whose life and death was not celebrated by Belloc, was eaten by a tiger. A college which numbered about 300 in the 1920s and 1930s was, as Professor Brown also noted, ‘a kindergarten for national and public life’.

  So did that explain me, thirsting for danger, another colonial Governor to add to the long list, like Lord Maclehose, my predecessor but two in Hong Kong? In a way I suppose it did, though by the 1960s there was quite a lot of cynicism about any sort of institutional aristocracy, let alone about imperial obligations and ambitions. But one thing for sure is that I was taught by a galaxy of brilliant and eccentric historians, all of them both clever and kind. I just missed Richard Southern, who was one of those who examined me but had gone to a Chair at All Souls before I arrived at Balliol. He was one of the greatest historians of medieval Europe, and rather typically donated a large prize that he won for being regarded as such to St Hilda’s, a poor college, to establish a fellowship in medieval studies. He helped to rescue medieval history from its former preoccupation with constitutional development and wrote several books, three of which influenced me especially at the time: the seminal The Making of the Middle Ages: Western Views of Islam, which bears re-reading today, and a biography of St Anselm, a saint whose life fuelled his own sense of a faith seeking understanding. He was a committed member of the Church of England and a great teacher.

  In his place, Balliol elected another very fine medieval scholar, Maurice Keen, a quiet and charming angler from Anglo-Irish stock who wrote a book almost as important as Southern’s Making of the Middle Ages, called Chivalry. He exhibited the knightly attributes in his own life. He gave me my first intellectually scorching experience of tutorials, the Oxford system of one on one, or one on two, teaching. Maurice had a set of rooms near Balliol’s back gate full of books, sagging furniture and ashtrays. He stammered a little, smoked filthy little cheroots and as he wandered about his room listening to undergraduate essays would occasionally stop to dip a finger in a pot of Oxford thick-cut marmalade, which he would suck ruminatively in between puffing away. I began reading an essay on Charlemagne with a magnificent schoolboy generalization. ‘Charlemagne,’ I said, ‘can truly be regarded as the founder of modern Europe.’ I heard Maurice stuttering away behind me, ‘I b-b-beg your pardon?’ Flatulent clichés should be among the victims of a good education. Maurice helped to inure me against the sort of Euro-waffle which I later had to encounter in Brussels, even while I argued that you did not have to indulge in this vacuous stuff to make a good case for t
he continued existence of the European Union. To this day, when I hear people talking about the need for ‘a vision’, I think of Maurice.

  Maurice Keen’s first year teaching as a Fellow of Balliol coincided with that of Richard Cobb, whose eccentricity was even remarked on by his obituarist in Le Monde – ‘l’étonnant Cobb’, the paper called him. Richard and Maurice encouraged one another’s anarchic spirit, especially – and this was pretty frequent – when tanked up with ‘the lovely stuff’. Singing Irish Republican songs under the bedroom window of the Master, an Ulster constitutional historian whom no one would have regarded as keen on larks (particularly after an early bedtime), was a typical end to one of their cheerful evenings. Arriving one day for a tutorial in mid-morning I found Richard sitting under his desk nursing a hangover. Cobb was a great historian of the French Revolution but wrote about all things French in a way that became literature. He was fascinated by ‘la vie en marge’, writing about prostitutes, thieves, drunks, the poor. He recognized that his own principal weakness as a historian was a lack of sympathy for anyone seeking power for whatever cause. Naturally, he hated Robespierre. I am not sure that he would have been happy to teach anyone who did not share his dislike of this self-righteous, Uriah-Heepish Puritan. But how many other monsters could have matched the Frenchman’s wickedly sanctimonious remark: ‘To punish the oppressors of humanity is clemency; to forgive them is cruelty.’ He was always on the lookout for Robespierre reincarnations. In addition to his books and essays, Cobb was a hugely productive letter writer displaying a total indifference to political correctness, a rather absurd snobbery (he loved teaching toffs and receiving academic gongs), and a reckless pursuit of fairly harmless academic vendettas. One of his great school friends had killed his mother; Richard wrote a very funny book about this sad business and, to his credit, remained a friend of the matricide. When the man was released from prison, Richard invited him to dinner at the college and introduced him to fellow diners at High Table as someone with a particular interest in penal policy. A friend of mine going to see him on his deathbed in Abingdon Hospital found him asleep, and walking around his bed waiting for him to wake up glimpsed the nurse’s instructions written on the clipboard attached to the bottom rail. ‘This patient,’ it said, ‘will not take his fluids.’ It was the only time in his life that this can have been true of Richard.

  Cobb himself was fascinated by the idea of identity and its complexities, partly because of his own work as a historian and partly because, though English, he spoke and wrote perfect French and fitted into any French social setting like cassis into Bourgogne Aligoté. Among Richard’s villains were those sociologists who tried to define identity clearly with statistical tables and computer printouts. For him I suspect that the accused peasant poisoner Marie Besnard, about whom he wrote an essay, was a parable. In a series of murder trials in the 1950s and 1960s she escaped conviction despite the evidence of lawyers, criminologists and scientists as she demonstrated that the experts had muddled up the evidence, putting one person’s gall bladder with someone else’s kidney. Above all, an eye had departed its real cadaver for a foreign skeleton. I always thought that for Cobb that eye looked unblinking and sceptical at all those who thought that identity could be easily explained and defined. Cobb taught me to distrust sweeping generalizations, particularly those that exclude the passions, and pecadilloes, of humanity.

  My other two tutors were less eccentric in behaviour. John Prest taught modern history, and wrote fine biographies of nineteenth-century politicians. He was a courtly man with apple cheeks and beautiful manners. On one occasion when I overslept and missed the beginning of a tutorial, he arrived with my fellow tutee, entered my bedroom with a polite knock and woke me with the words, ‘Good morning, Mr Patten. Mr Massey and I have come to read you an essay on the Great Reform Bill. You may have heard of it.’

  What of the historian who had so inspired Paul Olsen to push me towards Balliol? Christopher Hill was described by a fellow Marxist historian as ‘the dean and paragon of English historians’. He was certainly, with Eric Hobsbawm, one of the two most influential British Marxist historians of the last seventy years. He transformed studies of English seventeenth-century history, and in particular that of our own Revolution. A member of the Communist Party until the 1950s, he was of course – like Hobsbawm – a subject of interest to MI5; the spook-hunters might have spent their time better in Cambridge than Oxford. Quiet-voiced and personally kind as he was, it was difficult to imagine him having anything to do with the barbarities of a regime which he defended until after Stalin’s death. Today I suppose that we all underestimate the moral and intellectual impact of the 1930s at home and abroad on so many clever young men and women. The indefensible things that they witnessed pushed them into defending things that were equally indefensible, and whose true nature they tried not to see. At the very least they were gullible. Hill had two lasting impacts on my personal life. He had been my moral tutor at college, taking a particular interest in my academic development, though the eagle-eyed will have observed that being taught by a great Marxist did not turn me into a raving leftie. But when it came to my later vetting for a civil service post in the Cabinet Office, the men in raincoats who came to interview me were clearly deeply suspicious of whatever effect Hill might have had on me. As a result, the process of my positive vetting dragged on for some time.

  Second, Hill (actually his wife, Bridget) left one really substantial and much more important mark on me: without them I might never have met my own wife and best friend. Hill had a party every term for Balliol’s historians – beer, cider, hunks of bread and lumps of cheddar. (These were the days before Bulgarian Malbec.) To make for a jollier atmosphere, Hill used to ask Bridget to invite some girls from the college, St Hilda’s, where she was Bursar. Bridget in her turn asked Christopher’s niece, Pene, now a retired professor of history but then an undergraduate at St Hilda’s, to rustle up some female company. One of Pene’s friends, Lavender, was the woman I later married, after a few twists and turns. Like a character in a Hollywood musical (‘a look across a crowded room’, and all that), once I had met Lavender I never thought I would marry anyone else, never. I courted Lavender pretty assiduously. She had told me that she did not get much post. In those days, there were three postal deliveries around the colleges every day. I sent an invitation to tea in three parts, so that only the third post completed the message. This seemed to amuse her and to do the trick. But, as she has pointed out to me from time to time, I have not subsequently written to her three times a day. The most glamorous date in our time at Oxford was a ball at Magdalen at which a sullen ‘Rolling Stones’ band was the star attraction. They had been hauled back from their first tour of the USA because of a prior contractual commitment, agreed before their first hit made them famous. Later on, I almost lost Lavender for good; too timid to ask her to marry me (and only twenty-one). I went off on a scholarship to America and she fell for someone else. Fortunately, I got a second chance to make up for my folly, and here we are still, together for forty-six years.

  Oxford in the early 1960s was on the cusp of previously unthinkable change. Young women went to ‘women only’ colleges. They could not even be members of the Oxford Union, the university debating society and one of its more prestigious clubs. They could only enter men’s colleges – or, more particularly, men’s rooms – during the afternoon, the assumption presumably being that intercourse was somehow physically impossible between lunch and supper. Colleges locked their gates at 10.30 p.m. or shortly after, with sanctions against late return. Most colleges turned a blind eye to the hazardous routes which allowed undergraduates to climb in after hours, running risks of serious injury – spiked limbs or broken bones – while simultaneously preparing them for any future Colditz escapades. (Cambridge went further, turning night climbing into a sport; a book about this was written pseudonymously by a certain ‘Whipplesnaith’.) Politics at Balliol were routinely left wing – Vietnam, nuclear weapons, South Afri
can apartheid. Peace and happiness were largely sought through tobacco and alcohol; I remember one term when I took to drinking stout and cider, a poor man’s Black Velvet, which looked like the oil residue you discover when dropping the sump on an old car. As we all know from Philip Larkin, sexual intercourse (though rather discreetly) and widespread drug use lay just over the horizon. I once shared a very soggy joint with a friend who went on to become a very senior judge. Until then I had honestly thought that a joint was what arrived at 1 p.m. on Sundays with Yorkshire pudding or mint sauce. I disliked the whole experience, mostly because I seemed to get nothing pleasant out of sucking on someone else’s spittle-soaked stub. Perhaps it was just another Woodbine, not marijuana at all, but how would I have known? Perhaps, like President Clinton, I simply did not inhale. Anyway, I have never repeated the experience. So while I missed the perils, if such they were, of California’s favourite crop, there was one fellow undergraduate for whom cannabis made a spectacular career: Howard Marks, the most celebrated of all my contemporaries and the most dashing and charming Welshman I have ever met. Howard was apparently introduced to the weed by Denys Irving, my next-door neighbour in college, a beautiful, wild spirit, whose denim-clad figure and rock’n’roll music had greeted me when I arrived at Balliol in my sports jacket and cavalry twills, rather alarming my parents who had driven me to Oxford. Alas, Denys was to die not long after leaving Balliol in a hang-gliding accident. Marks wrote very entertainingly about his own life as an international drug dealer. There have been umpteen films about him and cutting rooms full of press interviews. He was courteous, brave and often kind, but the courts inevitably judged him.