Long life: Polite silence on my old prep school’s possible paedophile

It is usually a mistake to return to places one has known as a child. I have only once been back to the large, white-stuccoed, early-Victorian manor house in Hertfordshire where I was born and brought up, and it was a dispiriting experience. Although the house was near to the town of Ware, less than an hour’s drive from central London, it was set in unspoiled country alongside a village in which the names of some of the inhabitants had been there in the Domesday Book. Apart from a small row of bleak pre-war council houses on the edge of the village, there was nothing there to offend the eye or to suggest proximity to a great city.

My parents, finding the house too expensive to run, sold it in 1959, when I was 19 years old, and I didn’t go back for some 20 years after that. But when I did, I found that everything had changed dramatically for the worse. The walled kitchen garden had had maybe a dozen houses built in it, and there were more new houses along the short drive to the house, which itself had become some kind of grim residential institution. I may have idealised my childhood somewhat, but I didn’t want my memories of it ruined for ever. So I rushed away, vowing never to return.

Last weekend I took another risk by visiting the prep school, Pinewood near Shrivenham in Wiltshire, where I had boarded for five years from the age of eight and which I had not revisited during the subsequent 60 years. An invitation had arrived out of the blue from the present headmaster, Philip Hoyland, to a lunch ‘for the Old Pinewoodians 1930–1959’, referring to the years in which we had left the school.