My Year Off Read Online Free PDF Page A

the headmaster of Rugby School, an institution immortalized in
Tom Brown’s Schooldays
; my father, Michael, was the senior tutor of Corpus Christi College; as newlyweds, they were living in college lodgings. Later, we would move nearer the fens and the River Cam to Ashton House, a fine old eighteenth-century turnpike lodging house with a bumpy flagstone vestibule, overlooking Newnham Road.
    For a child, Cambridge is a kind of airy green paradise, and my memories of those early years before I went to prep school at the age of nine are filled with play, sunshine and laughter, and the high wide skies of the fens. After primary school, I went briefly to the celebrated King’s Choir School, known throughout the world for its choral tradition and the Christmas Eve service of Nine Lessons and Carols, though I was not a chorister and cannot sing. Now my own life began to follow a pattern set down by my father, literally at birth. I was entered for the English upper-middle-class handicap, a well-worn human steeplechase that involved negotiating a series of academic jumps. So, after a year of King’s, I was sent to Horris Hill, a remote boys’ prepschool housed in a mock-Tudor monstrosity in the Berkshire countryside not far from the Greenham Common air base that would dominate British newspaper headlines in the mid-eighties during the row over the deployment of Cruise missiles.
    Boys: in the McCrum family, wherever you looked there were boys. The women seemed to produce nothing else; I have two brothers; my father would later become Head Master of Eton, the most famous boys’ school in the world, and I know that the world I’ve begun to describe here is a ‘boy’s world’. When I married Sarah my secret prayer was that, if we should have children, they should include a girl.
    At Horris Hill (often known to its inmates, predictably enough, as ‘Horrid Hill’) I wrote my first novel in a Lyon Brand exercise book, a story of some one hundred pages in the Daphne du Maurier tradition about a gang of smugglers who came, as far as I can remember, to a sticky end at the Plymouth assizes. It was at this prep school that I had my first, and until my stroke my only, experience of hospital. In the autumn of 1964, when I was just eleven, I developed septicaemia in the forefinger of my right hand and was routinely treated with penicillin. The septicaemia spread rapidly and settled in the the ankle of my right leg, which became as painful and swollen as if I had suffered a sprained ankle. That, however, was not half the problem. The penicillin failed; the septicaemia raced through my body; I became seriously ill.
    I was rushed to hospital in nearby Reading. The failure of the penicillin treatment meant that the ankle had to be ‘aspirated’ (i.e. drained) under general anaesthetic while the doctors found an antibiotic that was effective against the infection. Night after night I waswheeled into the operating theatre, and once the danger was over I remained hospitalized for several weeks with my leg encased in plaster. Not until the plaster was removed would I know whether I was to be crippled for life with a ‘game leg’. As it turned out, I made a complete recovery, but I can still recall the shadow of potential disability looming as I rested at home (listening to Flanders and Swann on the family gramophone) while my parents tried bravely to prepare me for a life of physical restriction.
    At thirteen, fully recovered, I cleared another academic hurdle and went to Sherborne School, in the midst of Thomas Hardy’s Wessex. The English boy’s education at prep and public school is a rite of passage that’s been described many times. I can add no thrilling detail to the shame, the cruelty and the indignity that has not already been told by others, except to observe that those horror-stories are all true, in my experience. By the age of sixteen I had galloped doggedly over these fences and got my scholarship in history to Corpus Christi