We paid a visit to another old school of mine (I have several), the Reading Oratory in Berkshire. This is the only school to be founded by a Saint – Cardinal Newman. At first he only had seven boys. One of his ideas in education was that the headmaster should know all his boys’ names – not too hard with just seven! I paid a visit to Norris House where I was a boy. It was sad to see a picture of my late brother there. Underneath it, there seemed to be a picture of my youngest son – but it was me forty-five years ago. Anxious, serious and surprisingly neat.
We were taken to the old chapel. In my day, we had a choice at 7:30 of prep or Mass. Mass was preferable, because one could go to sleep there. It seemed as old and as unchanged as ever.
Thank you to Clive Dytor, the Headmaster, for taking us round and for turning the school around to become one of the best Catholic schools in the Country. Newmanesque, he knows the names of all the boys. In my day, the head was a kindly but fierce Benedictine Monk who, for some reason, wouldn’t let me go to Winston Churchill’s lying-in-state, He thought my studies should come first and that it wasn’t fair on the other boys who didn’t have a ticket… Fair enough.
At school, I went into the bottom set – 4d (yes, there was a 4a, 4b and a 4c). They told us that Latin was beyond us, so I led a revolt, saying we should be allowed to do it. To the credit of the authorities, they let us. It was my earliest political victory. There haven’t been many since.
