Early in 1968, when I was just 13, my father came home one evening with a letter in his hand and an uncomfortable look on his face. ‘You’ve won a big scholarship…’ Long pause. ‘…to Glenalmond.’
‘But you promised I was going to St Edward’s,’ I protested. St Edward’s was the principal school in the scholarship scheme in which I was indeed a big winner. We had been to see its red-brick campus in Oxford and I was braced for my first boarding experience there. But Glenalmond? Where was it anyway? We had to find it in a road atlas, 300 miles away in rural Perthshire.
I was nobody’s school hero, but I was a Darwinian survivor with a touch of swagger
The scholarship was accidental in the sense that my mother, asked for an alternative to St Edward’s on the application form, had named the Scottish school of which she knew nothing because a friend of hers had two boys there. I continued to sulk as we packed the car, drove north, approached the castellated Victorian frontage in its wooded setting, and met my housemaster-to-be.
‘A creep,’ I muttered from the back seat on the way home. As for the school, ‘it looks like a prison’. But I was firmly told to shut up, this being the age before children were entitled to opinions. And in September off I was packed, with a Sunday kilt from the emporium of R.W. Forsyth in Princes Street, Edinburgh, and a comical pair of long green woolly boxers for underneath, never once to be worn.
