| Liaquat Ali Khan once commented wryly that the word Commonwealth was a misnomer, for there was nothing common about the wealth of its member nations. Similarly, taking an English public school at face value can be misleading, for there is nothing public about it; it is both private and exclusive. Berhamsted was that kind of school. Those who had not been there pronounced it Berkhamsptead, making it sound like another northern suburb of London. Those who had gone there knew better. |
| One way of reaching Berkhamsted was by a train journey via Watford which normally took an hour. The small town lay north-west of London on the border between the counties of Hertfordshire and Buckinghamshire. An old and rarely used canal bisected the small town. On the northern side lay the gray stone ruins of the ancient Saxon fort where in 1066 William the Norman conqueror halted to receive the submission of his new Saxon subjects, and on the other stood the newer Berkhamsted, with buildings which symbolized the continuous arc of its history from the early Norman church to the old Crooked Billet Inn of the eighteenth century, to the green-domed cinema built after the First World War. Midway between them lay the irregular accretion of classrooms, halls, laboratories, chapel and other buildings which constituted the school which had been founded in 1544 and whose first building – School Hall – was still in use over five hundred years later. |
Published in THE NATION 1 October 1992, and reprinted in THE ARMLESS QUEEN (1994). |
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