Cobb A Classical Education

1. Auflage 2013
ISBN: 978-0-571-30927-6
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 156 Seiten

A Classical Education was first published in 1985. It followed immediately after Still Life and is again autobiographical though of a somewhat more macabre hue. At the centre is a murder committed by a school friend of Richard Cobb's. 'What gives A Classical Education its fascination is the author's description of how he himself, a shy and introverted schoolboy from Tunbridge Wells, is drawn into a nightmarish melodrama from which it seems he was lucky to escape... this book is beautifully written'. Richard Ingrams, The Times

Richard Cobb (1917-1996) was born at Frinton-on-Sea, Essex, brought up in Tunbridge Wells, and educated at Shrewsbury School and Merton College, Oxford. His first calling was as an historian, he was Professor of Modern History at Oxford from 1973-1984, and his passion was for France and more especially the radical phase of the French Revolution. He was winner of Wolfson Prize for History in 1979, and received several honours from the French government. Later on in his life he turned to autobiography for which he had an idiosyncratic talent. Still Life and A Classical Education are two memorable examples of his writing in this vein.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Cobb, Richard

Leseproben

1

Gare Saint-Lazare

I was waiting at the barrier at the far right end of the Gare Saint-Lazare, near the post office and the exit leading down to the level of the rue du Havre. It was sometime in the spring of 1950. I have always liked that station, which seems to float in the air, high above the Quarter, once marshland, to which it has given its name; and there is no more exciting meeting place, especially if the meeting is for the first time, than in front of the huge war memorial at the far end of the immensely long Salle des Pas Perdus, the point of departure of many dreams and hopes. Facing the barrier and prominently displayed on the wall just behind me – I knew it by heart, it had greeted me so many times – was a large poster: ‘When in Paris, Harry’s New York Bar, SANK ROO DONOO’ (an approximation of the address of that once-familiar establishment, 5, rue Daunou, near the Opéra). No doubt this was the first message of Paris that would catch the eye, as it was meant to, of wave after wave of American tourists just off the boat train from Le Havre or Cherbourg. I was meeting the former.

The train came in dead on time, the enormous engine showering steam from all its elaborately displayed guts, as if it had been turned inside-out, so that, for a moment, the passengers, as they approached the barrier, were partly hidden in the hot mist. I soon caught sight of Edward, towering above the others and striding out importantly, like a Foreign Minister walking towards the film cameras on his way to an international conference and with no time to stop. His head of reddish curly hair was as abundant as ever, his high-coloured face had broadened, while retaining its juvenile expression of surprise; there was the same charming, welcoming smile in and around his very blue eyes, but he seemed to have put on a good deal of weight since I had last seen him nearly fourteen years before. He now looked quite hefty, and when he came level with me and started pumping my hand, greeting me in his beautifully modulated voice – he knew how to please and seldom failed to do so, especially on first encounter; but I think on this occasion his pleasure was quite genuine, as indeed was mine – I noticed that he had acquired the beginnings of a paunch. It is true that, for the last thirteen years, he had led a pretty sedentary existence; but he had never been very keen on physical exertion. He still looked very much like the schoolboy of years back, though blown up a bit.

I think, after our greetings, I got in first, telling him I wanted a full account, from start to finish: we had had to be careful about what we had put into letters, and there was so much to catch up on. His first words to me were surprising, though I should have known by then never to have been surprised by anything he said or did. ‘What a pity,’ he said, without a trace of that buoyant flippancy that had been very much part of his attraction, at least in my eyes, ‘what a pity that we went to a classical school!’ I was puzzled at this, for he had always referred to his father and to his mother under the names of a Greek god and a Greek goddess; so I asked him why it had been a pity. ‘How would you wash an axe if it had traces of blood on it, and you wanted to remove the traces?’ accompanying his question with one of his most engaging smiles, as if he were about to let me in on a delightful secret. ‘I suppose I would boil some water and put the axe into it,’ I replied. He looked at me triumphantly (he always liked being in the right) and said: ‘Well, that is exactly what I did; and Chief Inspector Mahoney told me that that was just where I went wrong: it got the blood encrusted in the pores of the metal. He said I should have washed it in cold water, which would have left no trace.’ He seemed quite genuinely aggrieved about this gap in our education, as if Shrewsbury had let him down personally. This was typical of him, for he had always expected everything to be laid on, often at short notice or with no notice at all, for his own personal convenience. I said something like: ‘Really, Edward, you could not have expected the school to have put on axe-washing classes just for your sole benefit; it was not a requirement of the syllabus, even if you had been on the Science Side, and you were on the Classical Side.’ But this was to misunderstand Edward; of course Shrewsbury should have provided axe-washing classes, the school should have been able to look into the future and meet his later needs, when they arose. He was quite convinced of this. Why had he not been told at the time? What a lot of trouble would have been avoided if he had been properly taught! He was perfectly serious, and did not even realise that I was making fun of him.

He was incorrigible. I should not have been so surprised to find that he was as lacking in even a glimmer of self-awareness as ever. Why should he have changed, with all that time on his hands, with nothing to do but think about himself, about his own condition, about his changeless environment, about the unsuitability and uncouthness of some of his companions? (‘Just peasants,’ he was to complain later in the day, getting quite red in the face with indignation, ‘brutes who had murdered their wives with scythes and that sort of thing, anything that came to hand.’) He had been so preoccupied with his own situation that outside events had largely passed him by: the Popular Front, Munich, the war and its aftermath, the beginnings of the cold war. There was even something reassuring about his changelessness, his simple, unquestioning self-centredness: still the same old Edward, in a slightly enlarged version, that was all. His steadfast egotism seemed to offer a sort of refuge in a sea of uncertainty. For the moment, we were both back at the beginning: two schoolboys at Rigg’s in our two-boy act of provocation, the enjoyment of a coded language designed to exclude others and the preparation and the realisation of noisy assaults on the solemnities of collective conformisms.

It was very nice to be together again, after all these years, though, of course, they had not weighed as heavily on myself as on my friend. There was nothing much likely to endanger my enjoyment of the moment. I could, after all, ration my encounters with Edward; one needed to space them out, otherwise he could become an awful bore. I had plenty of other friends and activities that would have been quite unfamiliar to him. His clock had stopped in 1936, whereas a great many things had happened to me since then. But, for the moment, I was quite happy to find myself renewing my compère act. Edward had, after all, been largely my discovery, and this seemed as good an occasion as any to get him to display his somewhat limited talents. The opportunity for this, I thought, would come that evening over the dinner table, when we would be assured of an audience, some of which would understand English; and both Edward and I had loud, confident public school voices. There had always been a strong element of showmanship and provocation in our relations, I taking the part of a sort of montreur, and Edward responding with eager enthusiasm, as we both became more and more excited by the realisation that an increasing number of people were listening to our exchanges which were not designed to be private.

This is in fact exactly what had happened in the restaurant – a large and rather gaudy affair with seats in red plush along the walls, off the rue Marbeuf – that same evening – as Edward, guided by my frequent promptings and requests that he go back over that particular bit of ground again, gave his blow-by-blow account in happy, ringing tones that created around us spreading eddies and rippling circles of horrified silence, as even knives and forks were stilled. Some people called for their bills and started to leave hurriedly, as Edward’s voice gained volume, interrupted every now and then by fits of uncontrollable giggles, his face quite purple and his blue eyes watering with merriment. This was inevitably a star performance, as it was the first time we had been back in the act together for a very long time. But there would be many others; and, with each repeat, our standards improved, or so it seemed to me. Edward was, after all, something of a rarity, and I quite enjoyed displaying him. On each of these occasions the years rolled back, and, almost unconsciously, we resumed, well on into our thirties and forties, our dual bit of schoolboy fooling. Some people never grow up; Edward was one, and, in his company, especially in public places, I soon found myself shaking with gust after gust of irresistible adolescent laughter, choking over the wine, the tears falling into my plate. Edward’s quite childlike merriment had always been extremely infectious. I have had other partners in this sort of game later in life but between Edward and myself there remained a mutual triggering-off process that would start off quite calmly and soberly, gather speed, and culminate in quite helpless fits of hilarity, as we shook like jellies over our plates. Edward was a perfect partner in these somewhat indecent games, because I could always be quite certain of his responses; he had the reliability of a perfectly tuned instrument. Shocking perhaps, certainly in the worst possible taste; but we just could not help it, a single glance between us would be enough to set us off.

I remember listening once to two old Saumurois in their eighties, as each evoked, in the semi-coded language and vigorous military slang of nineteen-year-old cavalry cadets, some of the pranks that the two of them had got up to while training at their...