At last, a private education that wasn’t unmitigated misery

There has been a spate of books recently about private education, ranging from academic denouncements of their malign effects on society, such as Francis Green and David Kynaston’s Engines of Privilege, to Charles Spencer’s grim chronicle of neglect and abuse, A Very Private School. Though technically falling within this genre, 1967, the singer-songwriter Robyn Hitchcock’s diverting account of his formative spell at Winchester College, seems to hail from a rosier era. It is one where matron’s buttered crumpets rather than bullying were the chief topics of Billy Bunter-esque reminiscences that proclaimed schooldays the happiest of one’s life. Indeed Hitchcock even wonders whether his parents got their ‘money’s worth’, since, contrary to expectations, he was not ‘beaten up, sodomised or ritually humiliated by the other inmates’. He seems almost dis-appointed in retrospect that nobody stuck his ‘head down a toilet bowl’ or ‘stripped and mocked’ him.

Instead, Winchester, or more specifically the communal gramophone in his school house, was to give Robyn (born in 1953) the musical marrow to suck on that has provided him with a decent income for close to half a century. It was there that Bob Dylan, the post-moptop Beatles, Syd Barrett’s Pink Floyd, Jimi Hendrix and the Incredible String Band all came his way. The chorus refrain of ‘How does it feel / to be on your own?’, from ‘Like a Rolling Stone’, heard blaring from the house gramophone shortly after he was deposited at school by his parents, made him an instant Bobcat convert. Dylan, he felt, seemed to be addressing him personally – those lyrics speaking to his own sense of ‘being marooned alone in an alien world’.