Escape into happiness

The central and the longest part of this all too brief memoir concerns a boarding school in Scotland, the Benedictine Abbey of Fort Augustus.

The day-to-day atmosphere of the school was philistine, though the Abbey was not … Most of the boys were Scottish thugs or colonial expatriates, and some of the masters seemed to me certifiably mad … I became a crippling snob in self-defence, and this caused a regrettable narrowing of sympathies which only London eventually erased. I learnt one new thing there — hate … I am often struck by the blandness of other people, with their vacant, trusting countenances. They were not tormented by ‘Dolly’ MacKenzie and his fellow prefects.

This is a painful book to read, but it is also a glorious one, since it is ultimately an escape story. It leads in a very decided direction, namely the discovery that aesthetic passion, especially for architecture, can shape a human life, and bring satisfaction, even a degree of happiness. (This last word is often placed in inverted commas by the author, as in ‘happily married’).

The author distinguishes clearly, throughout the school chapters, between those older monks, intelligent, sensitive men who still kept going the glories of the ancient Western liturgy, and the appalling sadists who ran their school for them. You would have expected, then, that the author should have developed into a Catholic aesthete, albeit one who quotes with approval Gibbon’s adage, ‘The Catholic superstition, which is always the enemy of reason, is often the parent of taste.’ We meet Dolly Mackenzie who makes Robinson count the grains of spilt salt, and sends him for constant beatings by the monks. There is coarse talk but no compensatory sex. The author’s mother never kissed him after he went away to school.