I honestly didn’t realise I’d been to a ‘minor’ public school until my first term at Christ Church. Before that, I thought — as all of us did at my alma mater — that though of course there were lots of other public schools out there, Malvern could hold its head high with the very best of them. So coming up to Oxford was a bit of a shock. As far as the Etonians and Wyckhamists and Wets were concerned, my school was so obscure and worthless I might have attended a shabby comprehensive.
Among those who very much gave off this vibe was David Cameron. Dave was never aggressively snobbish but then Etonians are much subtler than that. They assert their superiority with tiny signifiers, like the way they talk about ‘school’ as if it has a capital S, and also with that weapons-grade charm. They’re so grand they don’t even look down on you, rather they feel awkward for you: ‘Such a pity, you poor dear chap, you didn’t have the education we did…’
Anyway, the other day I found myself back at Malvern for the first time in two decades and I felt instantly ashamed for ever having felt ashamed of it. God, what a stunning place! The Worcestershire Beacon looming dramatically above that classic Victorian public school gothic main building, and below it the first XI pitch (which of course I never graced, except when it became the finishing line for Malvern’s famously gruelling cross-country run, the Ledder). You take these things for granted when you’re there, but now I was seeing it anew, this time through the eyes of Girl, who knew instantly she wanted to come here more than she’d ever wanted anything in the world. Girl is right. Why did it take me till now to appreciate just how lucky I was?
On our tour of the school, I kept being assailed by Proustian flashbacks: the signed moon-landing photograph by Apollo astronaut Jim Irwin, who’d come to give the school lecture in my second year in 1980, and had rather unsettled me by declaring: ‘God walking on the earth is more important than man walking on the moon’; those prints by Ceri Richards whose degree of fame I was never sure of at the time and still am not now; the Gaunt study centre where I sat warding off hay fever in the summer of ’84 by the huge gothic window looking out onto the far sports fields next to the spy centre formerly known as the RSRE, reading Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid because it’s the kind of obscure book that gets Oxford interviewers really impressed.
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