This Much Is True

From the junior school we moved to the lovely old buildings at Banbury Road. This had been the original Oxford High School, founded in 1875 but now it held only the senior school. There was a tuck shop opposite: great excitement when sugar came off the ration in September 1953. My favourite was sherbet with a liquorice straw in the middle of the packet, through which the sherbet was violently sucked.

It was in that old building in Banbury Road that the bulk of my schooldays were passed. From the lower fourth to the third year sixth I was with the same form-mates, the same teachers. It was a powerful, female world and it satisfied every need I could have for learning and for companionship.

Finally, while I was in senior school at Oxford High, we moved from Banbury Road into the new buildings in Belbroughton Road. (‘Belbroughton Road is bonny, and pinkly bursts the spray/ Of prunus and forsythia across the public way.’ That, for your delectation, is from a Betjeman poem about Belbroughton Road.)

Mummy was entirely right. Oxford High School wasn’t just any school: it had pretensions. It would have been a difficult job to be headmistress there because the parents would always have thought they knew better: the dons of Oxford are a conceited bunch. But our imposing headmistress, Vera Stack, had a proper respect for academia. When Sir Arthur Norrington, Master of Trinity, came to the school — his daughter, Pippa, was a pupil — Miss Stack practically genuflected. Pippa was a very tall, slim, clever girl, who looked rather like Virginia Woolf; she became head girl. One exciting day her corsets were found in Lost Property. The news ran through the school, inflaming everyone but only enhancing her popularity.

Miss Stack always put Gown before Town, and her social and intellectual attitudes permeated the school. ‘Scholarship girls’ from the county, who entered after passing the eleven-plus exam, were conscious of being second-class citizens, although I’m ashamed to say I never realised that until many years later when, at one of our old girls’ reunions, Catherine Bowley said, ‘You never asked us to your parties.’ Yes, I was a snob too.

The school also had a sense of itself as academically pre-eminent, perhaps because many of the pupils were daughters of dons, including J. L. Austin, the philosopher; J. R. R. Tolkien, the writer; Russell Meiggs, whose subject was ancient history and who looked like Wild Bill Hickok; and William Walsh, another philosopher, whose daughter Catherine was in my form — she came to stay with us when her mother was having a hysterectomy, and she was quite surprised we didn’t wear gloves at teatime.

Catrina Tinbergen, in the form above me, became a good friend. Her father, Niko Tinbergen, won the Nobel Prize in 1973 for Physiology. Deh-I Hsiung’s father wrote a successful play Lady Precious Stream performed in London and on Broadway. Teachers told us later that our form was a remarkable year and I think it must have been. It is those form-mates who made my life at Oxford High School so glorious — I can name them all without a pause. I think of them often and cannot ever express how happy their friendships made me, how deeply I am in their debt for the fun we had — the walks home from school with Catherine Pasternak Slater (niece of Boris, the writer) and Anna Truelove, my particular chums — and the discoveries of Life we shared.

After school, I would often go to Catherine’s house in Park Town, full of her grandfather Leonid’s oil paintings, and listen to her mother and her two handsome brothers, Michael and Nicholas, playing Scriabin on the piano. Her mother, Lydia, would make us borscht and I was allowed, for a while, a glimpse into the Russian intellectual environment. Mrs Pasternak Slater was determined her children would go to Oxford. They all went; they all got starred Firsts and were brilliant and, to Anna and me, fascinating. Lydia was a distinguished poet in her own right so she found me unbearably trivial. But Catherine laughed at my jokes — she still does.

Anna’s parents were much racier: Anna called her parents by their first names — Joan and Sidney (Mummy thought that was rather shocking). They were remarkable personalities: Sidney Truelove, jokey with a bushy moustache, was a specialist in ulcerative colitis at the Radcliffe Hospital; Joan was larky and elegant and beautiful. She lived to be nearly one hundred and never lost her humour and vitality. Anna and Catherine continue to live in Oxford; they are still precious to me.

I will be forever grateful to my parents for paying for my schooling — I wasn’t clever enough to win a scholarship, and the gift they gave me has lasted my entire life. It was a special place and it will always hold a special place in my heart.