AC Grayling: ‘I ran away from school to escape the thrashings and beatings’
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I was born in Africa and didn’t leave until I was 18, so all my schooling was there. My father was a bank manager; we were living in what is now Zambia in a big old colonial bungalow on the Copperbelt, just a couple of miles from the Congo border.
My parents were rather remote individuals and I never had a close relationship with either of them, especially my mother. She was a bit of a landmine, really, and didn’t particularly like children, so I kept away from her as much as I could.
Although my mother hated Africa, we lived a very comfortable life with lots of servants, which was the reason she put up with it, although she was a dreadful racist. She was frightened of Africans, called them “black bastards” and so on. But Johnny Penze, our head servant, used to sleep on the stone floor next to my bed when I had night terrors, which was very often, and I loved him, and his wife, who was my nanny. They inhabited the kitchen, which was where the nice food was, and the fun and the laughter too. The rest of the house wasn’t like that.
I suppose the salient memory of that time of my life was the immense pleasure that reading gave me. There wasn’t any telly then and you couldn’t go for a walk as you would have been eaten by lions, so I would read about Plato and Aristotle and Socrates in these encyclopaedias we had, bound in dimpled red faux leather, which I spent many hours paging through, lying on my stomach on the cool flags of the verandah during school holidays. Many were the discoveries and sensations provided by those volumes and I longed to understand what these works were about.
In the heat of the tropics, junior school started at seven in the morning and ended at midday, so we went home at lunch time, and the afternoons were so hot that everything then just stopped. My father would be at the office, my mother would take to her bed, the servants would have a nap, and so for several hours there was nothing to do but read. In the rainy season there would be this spectacular sequence of events in which the storm clouds would build up and this fantastic storm would develop: a deluge of rain accompanied by great thunder and lightning, and then for a little while after the air would be fresh and the birds would sound as if they were delighted at the very smell of the air. Those were the times I read. I read vast amounts, and those were the happiest of times, losing any sense of myself. That was where I had my education, not really from school.
My first boarding school was in what is now Zimbabwe, a school called Falcon College, located on the site of a disused mine. My brother and sister were considerably older than I and, when I got to Falcon College, my brother was chief prefect and head of my house. I was full of admiration for my brother: he was a great sportsman and a very good prefect. All the boys liked him, so I was proud of him. And we are still the best of friends and as close as you can imagine, although, all through our childhood and even now, all these decades later, we still call each other by our surnames, as a result of being at boarding school together.
At the beginning of each term my brother and I would travel to the school by train. It took four days to cross Africa, but the train journey was terrific, I absolutely loved it. For one thing it was a narrow gauge railway, so the speed at which the train went was just perfect for being lulled to sleep. Also, these trains were full of schoolboys, and schoolgirls too, although in separate carriages, all running amok. It was just hilarious and great fun, and when we got to Victoria Falls we all waited with the carriages’ leather bolsters in our hands, and as we crossed we would hurl them out of the window.
Falcon College was a boarding school which ran itself along English boarding school lines. I have no memory of any teacher at that school who was in any way impressive or made an impact on me, other than one, negatively. That was my housemaster, a dreadful man called Montgomery Woolley who I believe to be dead, but – if he isn’t – let us libel the hell out of him because I would like to be able to do him an injury. A week never went by without two or three beatings administered by him. I was being caned for every misdemeanour, and I was frightened and terrified of him, and in pain a lot of the time. I mean, this was a pretty serious case of abuse, really. It got to the point where I had blood blisters, bruises and stripes all over – my backside was an awful mess. One morning I couldn’t get my pyjama trousers off, they were sticking to me as all the blisters had burst, and that is when I decided, right, that’s enough, I’m off. I ran away to get away from all the thrashings and beatings.
I made it to a railway station hoping to catch a train going north but I was caught by the police and taken back to the school. The headmaster, a deity who was held in great dread and awe, wanted to see me. I went to his study and was immediately ushered in. “My dear boy, what is this all about?” he purred, in the gentlest of tones. Now, had I been more on the ball, I could’ve said, “What is it worth for you not to have it told that I was beaten to the extent I ran away?” and held him to ransom. But he was there before me. “There will be no more beatings this term,” he declared.
When I got home in the holidays I told my parents what had happened, and my mother, who was a very unsympathetic character, said, “Well if you’ve been caned so much it’s probably because you deserved it.”
For many many years I dreamt of Falcon and the brutality there, and the dream would involve being told that I would have to go back, and not wanting to go back because I was in the presence of an enemy, a hostile force, this awful man, Montgomery Woolley.
Anyway, my parents finally took me out of that school, and I then went to a place called Llewellyn for a year. But some lights were turned on for me at my next school, St Andrews in Blantyre, because there were two teachers who really did spark some things. One was a man called Jim Marshall who taught English. He taught it with great relish, and had a love for poetry and language, and was very at home with Shakespeare and quoted him all the time. His classes were the vestibule to revelations, introducing a brilliant sense of possibilities. And they turned me on; I was always the kind of boy that, if I got interested in something, I wanted to know everything about it. And, as a result, I read every single word Shakespeare had written and completely fell in love with his works.
There was also another teacher named Peter Williams who was a great big fat man with a lisp and a withered left arm as he’d had polio as a child. He was teaching in Africa because, being gay, he couldn’t be in England before homosexuality had been decriminalised. He was a marvellous character. He had a very smelly dog called Nietzsche, and he drove a Mercedes one-handed: as the gear shift was on the side of his withered arm, he had a very distinctive way of driving around the town. He was a marvel; reading aloud Virgil, Ovid, or even Livy, his lisp turned the ancient tongue into a magical incantation. Williams also talked about philosophers like Wittgenstein and Heidegger and French philosophers like Sartre. I was ravenous to get my hands on their works but, being in the middle of Africa, there were very few resources, apart from an eccentric library in N’Dola, so I wasn’t able to get hold of any contemporary philosophy. I only could when I went to England for university at the age of 18. But Williams kept those fires alight.
And so I honour those two men, Williams and Marshall, for being the kind of teachers that I think a teacher should be: a teacher who inspires a student to want to find out for themselves. That’s real teaching.
