Barnes. Pdf

7. THREE SIMPLE STORIES 
[p. 171] 
I 
I
WAS A NORMAL
eighteen-year-old: shuttered, self-conscious, untravelled and sneering; violently educated, socially crass, 
emotionally blurting. At least, all the other eighteen-year-olds I knew were like this, so I presumed it was normal. I was 
waiting to go up to university and had just got a job as a prep-school master. The fiction I had read predicted gaudy roles for 
me - as private tutor at the old stone mansion where peacocks roost in the yew hedges and chalky bones are discovered in the 
sealed-up priest's hole; as gullible ingénu at an eccentric private establishment on the Welsh borders stuffed with robust 

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J
ULIAN 
B
ARNES
: A History of the World in 10 ½
 
Chapters 
55
drunkards and covert lechers. There would be careless girls and unimpressable butlers. You know the social moral of the story: 
the meritocrat becomes infected with snobbery. 
Reality proved more local. I taught for a term at a crammer half a mile from my home, and instead of passing lazy days 
with charming children whose actively hatted mothers would smile, condescend and yet flirt during some endless pollen-
spattered sports day, I spent my time with the son of the local bookmaker (he lent me his bike: I crashed it) and the daughter of 
the suburb's solicitor. Yet half a mile is a fine distance to the untravelled; and at eighteen the smallest gradations of middle-
class society thrill and daunt. The school came with a family attached; the family lived in a house. Everything here was 
different and therefore better: the stiff-backed brass taps, the cut of the banister, the genuine oil paintings (we had a genuine oil 
painting too, but not as genuine as that), the library which somehow was more than just a roomful of books, the furniture old 
enough to have woodworm in it, and the casual acceptance 
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of inherited things. In the hall hung the amputated blade of an oar: inscribed in gold lettering on its black scoop were the names 
of a college eight, each of whom had been awarded such a trophy in sun-ridden pre-war days; the item seemed impossibly 
exotic. There was an air-raid shelter in the front garden which at home would have provoked embarrassment and been 
subjected to vigorous camouflage with hardy perennials; here it evoked no more than amused pride. The family matched the 
house. The father was a spy; the mother had been an actress; the son wore tab collars and double-breasted waistcoats. Need I 
say more? Had I read enough French novels at the time, I would have known what to expect; and of course it was here that I 
fell in love for the first time. But that is another story, or at least another chapter. 
It was the grandfather who had founded the school, and he still lived on the premises. Although in his mid-eighties, he had 
only recently been written out of the curriculum by some crafty predecessor of mine. He was occasionally to be seen 
wandering through the house in his cream linen jacket, college tie - Gonville and Caius, you were meant to know - and flat cap 
(in our house a flat cap would have been common; here it was posh and probably indicated that you used to go beagling). He 
was searching for `his class', which he never found, and talked about `the laboratory', which was no more than a back kitchen 
with a Bunsen burner and running water. On warm afternoons he would sit outside the front door with a Roberts portable radio 
(the all-wood construction, I learned, gave better sound quality than the plastic or metal bodies of the transistors I admired), 
listening to the cricket commentary. His name was Lawrence Beesley. 
Apart from my great-grandfather, he was the oldest man I had ever met. His age and status induced in me the normal 
mixture of deference, fear and cheek. His decrepitude - the historically stained clothes, that dangle of egg-white slobber from 
the chin - set off in me a general adolescent anger against life and its inevitable valedictory condition; a feeling which 
smoothly translated itself into hatred of the person undergoing 
[p. 173]
that condition. His daughter fed him on tins of baby food, which again confirmed for me the sour joke of existence and the 
particular contemptibility of this old man. I used to tell him invented cricket scores. '84 for 2, Mr Beesley,' I would shout as I 
passed him snoozing in the sun beneath the gangling wisteria. 'West Indies 790 for 3 declared,' I would insist as I delivered 
him his child's dinner on a tray. I would tell him scores from matches that were not being played, scores from matches that 
could never have been played, fanciful scores, impossible scores. He would nod in reply, and I would creep away, sniggering 
at my tiny cruelty, pleased that I was not such a nice young man as he might have imagined. 
Fifty-two years before I met him, Lawrence Beesley had been a second-class passenger on the maiden voyage of the