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Boaters at the school end of the train were crammed on the heads or waved airily by impossibly mature-looking twelve-year-olds; we new boys braced like mules and clutched on to our mothers as the prospect of months of separation in the company of these frightening-looking seniors approached. ‘They’ll think I look stupid.’ ‘They’ll think I look weedy.’ ‘They’ll think I look common.’ All kinds of immature waves of inadequacy rolled over me. I am not even sure that I knew what ‘common’ meant. It was two years later, reading Nancy Mitford’s indispensable Noblesse Oblige , that I discovered it turned out to be a word only ever used by ‘common’ people in the first place, which is rather a lowering thought.
    Before Paddington station was finally cleaned, rejigged and renovated ten or so years ago, complete with the statue of its famous and noble bear, I could never go near the place without my bowels turning to water.
    Everybody else new you ever meet, and this continues throughout life, is stronger than you are, knows the system better and sees right through to the back of your brain and finds what they see there to be wholly inadequate. Everyone you encounter carries, as it were, a huge club behind their back, while all you hold behind yours is a weedy cotton-bud. I think I may have written this before, or possibly stolen it from someone else: it is, in any case, hardly a fresh observation, and I should be very surprised if it does not strike home with you. The rest of the world was at That Lesson, the one we missed because of a toothache or diarrhoea, the one where they – the rest of the school – were told how the world works and how to comport themselves with confidence and ease. We all missed it and have felt insecure ever since. Other people know some secret thing, and no other people know more than children who are just a few years older than you are.
    To go to a prep school 200 miles away at the age of seven seems, like the fish-cart, the 1880s servants’ bells or the cook receiving vegetables from cap-doffing gardeners, madly silly, English, grand and old-fashioned.
    You should know, then, before I go any further, that, contrary to the implication of all that has gone before, we were poor . Not dirt poor, not peasant poor obviously, just poor compared to all the kinds of people who sent their sons to the same kinds of schools, poor compared to the kinds of people my parents had to dinner parties. Yes, dinner parties where the men wore black tie and the women ‘withdrew’ from the dining room to the drawing room after the cheese to allow the men time for strong talk, cigars and port. My mother confided in me her probably accurate opinion that this old and now defunct ritual (defunct even in Royal Palaces I am able to tell you – more of that later too) was in fact a way of allowing women to go to bathrooms together without drawing to the attention of their men that the sweet creatures possessed such things as bladders which needed voiding just as much as any man’s or horse’s did.
    We were poor in that my mother drove an ancient Austin A35 with flicky-uppy indicators and my father an Austin 1800 from the heyday of British motoring incompetence (after he had driven an old Rover 90 into desuetude). We never went on holidays, and every time my mother and I went into a shoe or clothing shop throughout my childhood and adolescence I remember squirming and writhing with embarrassment as she complained (very loudly to my ears) that such and such a pair of shoes were ‘shatteringly expensive’ and that she ‘couldn’t possibly afford’ those trousers. I did grow very fast, of course, and she had a small budget from which to buy anything. The school fees themselves (somehow we found ourselves, my brother and I, going to two not wildly grand private schools that were nonetheless just about the most expensive of any in England) were paid for, I am certain, by my mother’s father, the beloved