Aidan Hartley Aidan Hartley

Wild life | 25 February 2012

issue 25 February 2012

Kenya

 
At Nairobi’s Muthaiga Club this week I bumped into Stanley Johnson, author of the superb memoir Stanley, I Presume and father of Britain’s future prime minister. Mr Johnson and I have an English education in common. Apart from Oxford and Sherborne, we attended the prep school Ravenswood, on the edge of Exmoor. ‘On the whole, I still take a positive view of my time at Ravenswood,’ wrote Johnson — and I agree. His book motivated me to dig out my old school reports. I was astonished to find that the masters seemed kinder than I recall them. The curriculum was more advanced than it is for my two children at equivalent ages today. And my letters suggest I was having fun. For years I had dragged around memories of a cold, brutal hellhole. Perhaps it was better than that.

Naturally, we had ghastly food — what I called in one letter ‘munched-up meat and hardened potatoes’.

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