Great masters

Frankly, I wasn’t a great success at school — although I like to think it was more a case of peaking at prep school, where I was captain of football, a prefect and even managed to pass Common Entrance, thank you very much. And then it all went downhill.

No excuses (plenty actually), but one reason for failing to dazzle at Eton was because my classical tutor cast such a long, dark shadow over me that by the age of 16 all my energies went into disliking him as much as he clearly disliked me.

His name was Fred How and he was a bachelor so set in his creaking ways that even the swots and goodie-goodies struggled to find anything pleasant to say about him.

We dreaded our weekly sessions in his pokey ground-floor flat in the cloisters not far from the Head Man’s plush quarters. It seemed that he went out of his way to say nasty things in his reports (‘Palmer displays jaunty incompetence’ was one of his kinder comments) but thankfully my father — who never had a bad word to say about anyone — did not take it too seriously because How had taught him 30 or so years earlier.