Diary – 3 May 2018

After reading Christopher Isherwood’s Lions and Shadows, Somerset Maugham remarked: ‘That young man holds the future of the English novel in his hands.’ Isherwood never quite fulfilled his early promise, but Lions and Shadows remains an entrancing book. I relish in particular the history teacher, of whom Isherwood recorded: ‘Almost everything Mr Holmes did or said contributed to a deliberate effect: he had the technique of a first-class clergyman or actor. But unlike most clergymen, he was entirely open and shameless about his methods. Having achieved his object — which was always, in one way or another, to startle, shock, flatter, or scare us for a few moments out of our schoolboy conservatism and prejudice — he would explain to us gleefully just how this particular trap, bait or bomb had been prepared.’ Isherwood observes that, while they laughed at other masters, ‘We couldn’t laugh wholeheartedly at Mr Holmes, because even laughter would put us, we felt, under a kind of obligation to him; would, in some way, subtly involve us in his plans. Besides, we were never quite sure that he mightn’t be laughing at us.’

When I read Lions and Shadows I had a shock of recognition. I realised I had encountered Mr Holmes before, had indeed been taught by him. Last Wednesday, 21 former pupils gathered at a dinner at the Garrick Club to celebrate Graham Stephenson (GGS), head of the Sherborne School history department, who died last year aged 89. Like Isherwood’s Mr Holmes, he had a stutter, which he deployed to hypnotic effect. Like Holmes, he manipulated us, taking delight in building up a thesis, then tearing it to shreds. He defined history as a ‘course in scepticism’. He had been taught by A.J.P.