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.

The war over, a student exchange takes him to a lycée in Versailles, where lessons occupy twice the time they do back home and no sports are played. On his return to Christ’s Hospital, he has a leg broken for him on the rugger field and in the school sickbay is then tended by a thirtyish night-nurse, to whom he loses his virginity. It is not entirely clear whether she has already lost hers or not. At all events the encounter is a happy one. Having won a scholarship to Keble — a college then distinguished for the dimness both of its lighting and its members — Magee must first do his national service.