How Clayesmore Helped to Make a Writer
This was a rash undertaking and one I actually volunteered for! Clayesmore's presence in what I have written...Well, I was at Clayesmore from September 1948 to December 1953, a mere five years, albeit very formative ones, and I have been writing professionally since 1967, for thirty-two years, during which I have published as many books, lots of short stories, articles, reviews and so forth, and even some poetry. So how does Clayesmore figure in all this?
Not a lot, at first sight. Only one book, which I will return to shortly, uses the landscape, which leaves me, rather embarrassingly, with characters.
Most writers deny they base the characters they invent on real people, to do otherwise is to invite litigation, but I'll take a risk or two for the sake of the Old Clayesmorian Newsletter. Almost all my first twenty or so books were broadly characterisable as thrillers. That is there were often spies in them, murder, and mayhem, though I like to think most of them were creditable novels as well. They were not whodunits in the conventional sense but more in the vein of Graham Greene or Eric Ambler.
Anyway, the second was called Hand Out. The central character is a spy who travels across Turkey into Russia. My best friend at Clayesmore was, well, I'm not going to give his name, am I? who took the Russian option with the Royal Navy for his National Service, and then... disappeared, only to resurface ten years later as a prep-school teacher in a school on the Welsh borders. Very John le Carré. And really, as I remember it, the only real connection between my friend and my invention, was the Russian course, yet he wrote to me with the words "I think you've written a book about me...."
Then there was Humph, Humphrey Moore about whom I had very mixed feelings indeed. On the one side I hated him for beating me for not making my bed properly when I was captain of Tower Dorm, on the other side I was immensely grateful to him for all sorts of things including nurturing my love of classical music and his inspired teaching of biology in the broadest sense and Natural History in particular. He even made counting dead toads on the Blandford-Shaftesbury road at dawn seem like a major step in the advancement of knowledge... The result is he appears twice in one of my best books, A Spy of the Old School, once as a grossly unlikeable Housemaster, and once as the eminently likeable teacher at the hero's school who opened his eyes to the injustices of pre-war society.
But the book which owes most to Clayesmore in an up-front sort of way is The Last English King, which has two heroes -- Harold, of course, and his house-carl Walt. And Walt, an Anglo-Saxon thegn, is born and brought up in Iwerne, falls in love with a girl from Shroton, with whom he, um, dallies on Hambledon, and whose wedding feast in 1066 has remarkable similarities with the Shroton Coronation Fte of 1953. The one thing every Clayesmorian must be marked by is the glory of the countryside the school is set in, which, taken with the freedom to ramble over it that we had, in my day at any rate, is as good a reason for going there as any. At the time of writing there is a very good chance The Last English King will be filmed - I hope they film the Hambledon scenes on Hambledon...
At the end of the day it is not the particular that counts. Whatever gift I have for writing was stimulated and rewarded at Clayesmore by publication in the Miscellany and the Clayesmorian, by poetry and story-writing prizes, and above all by the teaching and friendship of the man we called uncle Apples. A love of landscape and a good eye for it came from doctor, clergyman, painter the Rev. Scadding, an appreciation that history is made by people from Mr Spinney. And you'll find a lot of history in my books.
Above all, and I really think this is a must for anyone who aspires to be a writer, perhaps an artist of any sort, a deep respect and for and joy in the arts, a love and respect for all humanity, a hatred of anything which stunts and destroys, a cheerful, easy-going hedonism. Some would say too easy-going. When you've been taught to enjoy life you don't go out into the world hungry to make an impression or screw the opposition, and enjoying life is what Clayesmore taught me more than anything else. I hope some of that comes through in what I've written.
Julian Rathbone (48-53)
Sept. 1999