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1(a): First Post

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« on: August 15, 2023, 08:59:28 am »

1(a)

IT was purely on my athletic record that, after leaving Cambridge, I became an assistant master at a well-known Public School. At my own school, Marlborough, I had been in the Cricket Eleven for three years, and in the Rugger Fifteen my last year. At Cambridge I had done pretty well all round at games and had kept well within the Old Boy network. That was the important thing for job-getting in those days. It more than counteracted a poor II 2 in Classics and an even poorer Third in English. Even so, becoming a schoolmaster was less a decision than an acquiescence. A very curious conspiracy of silence had surrounded my choice of a future. For some inexplicable reason the problem had never been raised at home, where I was the fourth of five children in a parson’s family. It wasn’t that there was no necessity for me to earn a living. True, there was money about with the grandparents on both sides of the family. But there was no question of private incomes or allowances. Why, then, at no time was I asked what I wanted to become, what I wanted to ‘do’? At school no one had advised me to give it thought. No one had wondered or asked what I was going to Cambridge for. At Cambridge, the years had slipped by under the shadow of a wasteful attachment to a friend. And still no don, no brother, no parent had put it into my head to ask myself what I intended to do with my life. And---but this was characteristic of me at the time---it never occurred to me to think about it for myself.

It was already June of my last year, with my last term finished, and the results of the exams awaited with some trepidation, when I ran into Derek Mullogh. Mullogh was an old Marlburian, a superb athlete, perhaps the finest hockey player England had produced, with a marvellous ability to keep the ball as if glued to the stick through manoeuvres however complicated. A man of great energy and drive, hearty without being aggressive, he was himself an assistant master at this school which arrogantly called itself just ‘College’; and I knew him because he had every year been a member of the Old Marlburian cricket team whose tours in the West Country occupied me and my friends throughout every August.

Mullogh was the first person to put this important question to me: ‘And what are you going to do now?’

I hadn’t, I confessed, the slightest idea. The question really did come to me, incredible as it seems, fresh, and for the first time. What was I going to do now? Mullogh wasn’t the man to countenance indecision. His great virtue as a schoolmaster was his capacity for infusing his own energy and attack into other people. He soon had me summed up and my future fixed; ‘You’d better come and join us at College. Ever thought of being a beak?’

No, I hadn’t.

‘Well, why not? It’s a good life. Plenty of games, plenty of holidays, adequate pay and a job worth doing. What about it?’

‘But could I get a job there?’

‘You leave that to me. I’ll see to it.’

It was as simple as that. The question as quickly put, the decision as quickly taken. And Mullogh did fix it. Within a fortnight I was summoned to an interview with the Master. Within a month I was appointed to the staff on probation. Mullogh, who ran the cricket and the rugger and the hockey, needed a recruit to help with the Colts, the under-sixteens. The Master was not one of those headmasters who think athletics all-important; but Mullogh had a strong personality, and whatever the Master may have thought of my scholastic qualifications, he gave way. I seemed the right type.

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