The Chronicle January 2020

6 ST EDWARD’S CHRONICLE

Did you get into trouble at school or university? At university, I remember an occasion when I got up bleary eyed and turned the tap on in my room to shave. No water came out. Without thinking anything of it and, as I subsequently learnt, not turning the tap off, I headed off to lectures. I came back at lunchtime and I noticed that the floor was damp and the carpet had been rolled up. And then a stream of important people I’d never met before like the Dean and the Master came to question me: Had I not seen the sign on one of the noticeboards to say that the water was going to be turned off in my building? I had not. It turned out that the water had damaged enough books in the main college library to close it for a year and had threatened to damage the contents of the Pepys Library – an irreplaceable national treasure. Justice was meted out - a £5 fine. So when did you work out what you wanted to do? I had one or two false starts. I did a PGCE at Cambridge. I knew by about halfway through

Bridge to the Underground station. My Confirmation at St Paul’s Cathedral was dramatic. I was supposed to go with friends but didn’t for some reason, so I found myself alone in an underpass with a group of young Londoners walking towards me. I tried to make myself as inconspicuous as possible – and the next thing I remember is sitting on a stool outside a café on Ludgate Hill, with the Italian woman who owned it asking me if I was all right. My nose was bleeding and I had blood all down the front of my white shirt. My mother completely freaked out when she saw me. So apart from making you an intellectual snob and exposing you to casual violence – what else did your schooldays leave you with? Did they give you all those characteristics so regularly discussed today such as resilience and tenacity? Maybe, but just as schools shouldn’t take all the blame for the bad characteristics you have, they can’t take the credit for all the good things. I think the values of my home

life and my time at Cambridge were equally important to my development. I largely enjoyed my schooldays but took a long time to play myself in at Cambridge. The games played at Cambridge were different, and weren’t always the ones I wanted to play. There was a lot of tweed around at my college – not really my scene. I had friends who knew instinctively that they should take advantage of the opportunities for advancement. What else do you remember from Cambridge? I remember being a little bit bored. We had been so hothoused at St Paul’s that everything we covered in the first and second year I had already studied at school, so nothing progressed and I didn’t get any better at anything. And then a fantastic change happened in my third year – we were allowed to specialise, so I specialised in classical art and architecture and I really enjoyed it. I spent a couple of summers on an archaeological dig near Orbetello on the Italian coast.

Above and right, Stephen with his wife Alison at the 150th Gaudy in 2013.