Thriving in adversity

This book takes up the story, told so memorably in his Clouds of Glory, of Bryan Magee’s early years in working-class Hoxton. In the first chapter, the now nine-year-old Magee, always precocious in his search for knowledge, is learning about the facts of life from one of his chums. Soon after, separated from his family as a wartime evacuee, he is learning the facts of provincial life first in a remote Sussex village where only two people own cars, and then in Market Harborough where a high percentage of the inhabitants have never travelled farther than to Leicester.

At the age of 11, the already intellectually robust, ambitious youth wins a scholarship to Christ’s Hospital, an ancient foundation far wealthier than Eton, where he enters a totally different world. However, always adaptable, he soon feels totally at home in it. When during the holidays he revisits his former schoolmates in Hoxton, they are all amazed and amused by his accent — the general reaction being one of ‘Cor blimey, just listen to ’im!’ Magee now talks posh, totally unaware that he is doing so.