| It is difficult not to pick up an English accent while studying at an English public school. It happens as unconsciously as catching a verruca infection from the school swimming pool. Inevitably, living amongst boys who come from a certain strata of British society makes one absorb the subtler nuances of the English language, expression which are contemporary and growing, catch-phrases and foreign clichés which in vogue and likely to remain au courant for the next decade of one’s maturity. |
| Developing an immunity to the English weather is another benefit such costly schools provide. Years of playing rugger in the winter months on fields furrowed by studded boots, and tackling an opponent to the ground sharp with jagged icicles, or having to spend wet Sunday afternoons tramping on windswept commons and then returning to a frigid unheated common room gradually inure one’s body to the coldness of an English winter, a season defined by the warm-blooded poet Lord Byron as ‘ending in July, to recommence in August’. By the time I left Berkhamsted school in the second last year of the 1950s, winters had shortened, commencing in late September and continuing for six or more months in one seamless awning of slush grey clouds from which leaked even darker rain. |
Publsihed in THE NATION 26 Nov. 1992, and reprinted in THE ARMLESS QUEEN (1994). |
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