Chance of a lifetime

With the same coat of inevitability with which everything else gets glossed, it now seems inevitable to me that
I ended up at Eton. But it was never any such thing. None of my family had been to the school or anything like it. Like most parents, mine had put their faith in state schools, not simply because they believed in them but because no other option was viable. I attended the local state primary and secondary schools and then to what had been a grammar school, but was now an inner city comprehensive.

My parents had been promised that the old grammar school standards and ethos remained, but none did. By the time I arrived the school was what would now be described as ‘an inner-city sink school’, a war zone similar to those many of the children’s parents had escaped from. After I left, a pupil went to prison for raping and threatening to kill one of the female teachers. My parents withdrew me after a year. By now I had become a voracious reader and, thanks to a free local music school and gentle parental encouragement, a musician. As a result I won a place at a small but good local independent school. And it was after a spell there that, one day, a peripatetic music teacher my father knew suggested I try for something called the sixth-form scholarship at Eton.

I suppose I was getting itchy feet anyway. Fifteen is a good time to leave home. With my parents I looked around a number of schools which had scholarships for sixth form. And one afternoon my parents drove me out to Eton.
I still remember the familiar squash of nerves, and that faltering teenage effort to cover them up with insouciance. But from the moment I arrived I knew I wanted to stay.