An Education by Lynn Barber Page A

Anna, Leonora's sister, who was married to a Leeds solicitor and kept a kosher house, so he had to learn the rituals of Judaism at the same time as learning the rituals of boarding school. He hated his prep school so much that he was reluctant ever to talk about it, but he mentioned the cold, the terrible food, the loneliness. Many years later, when our elder daughter Rosie turned eight, David sank into a strange depression and eventually explained it was because he was remembering being sent away to school when he was Rosie's age. Of course it was quite normal then (many expats sent their children ‘home’ to England at five or six), but whenever Leonora went into one of her raptures about what a doting mother she was, I always had to bite my tongue not to say, ‘But you sent David away at eight !’
    Anyway, he survived prep school, and Eton afterwards, with stoicism but fairly deep unhappiness I think. When, many years later, we used to take a friend's son out from Eton for Sunday lunch, I begged David to at least show me round the chapel, but he never would – he wouldn't even get out of the car. The one saving grace at Eton was that he had a great art teacher, Wilfrid Blunt, who allowed him to stay in the art studio when everyone else was out rowing or playing beastly games. He virtually lived in the art studio and his best friends at Eton were other artists, notably Edmund Fairfax-Lucy, who became an RA, and Nick Gosling, son of the art critic Nigel Gosling, who ran the film society.
    David would have liked to have gone to art school but his parents took the conventional line that he must get a proper degree – he could always paint in his spare time. So he went to New College, Oxford, to read PPP – philosophy, physiology and psychology – a singularly useless degree which, according to David, entirely consisted of observing rats in mazes. More enjoyably, he served on the college art committee and spent many happy days in London choosing prints and paintings for the JCR. He also drew beautiful cover illustrations for Isis and other student magazines.
    So this was the David I met in 1966. He was far more cultured than me. He had spent more time abroad than he had in England; he had been to the opera at La Scala, and to lunch with Harold Acton at La Pietra; he had visited the Grand Canyon and all the great Mayan temples; he could speak good Italian, French and a little Spanish; he had eaten at Michelin three-star restaurants and could talk about truffles; he knew famous writers and artists like Leonora Carrington, Stephen Spender, Lawrence Durrell, as family friends. On the other hand, I was often surprised by what he didn't know. He had hardly been anywhere in England and was thrilled when I later took him to Cornwall and the Lake District. He was terrified of bills, of tax forms, of policemen, of doctors, of any kind of authority. He was also weirdly scared of working-class people – it was always left to me to sort out which cleaner, gardener, plumber, electrician we should hire because he was equally alarmed by them all. Later, when he claimed to have become a Marxist, I said he couldn't really be a Marxist and hate the working class. He said he didn't hate them at all – but he worked on the assumption that they all hated him.
    When we first lived together in Stockwell, he was painting and drawing but making no effort to sell his work or even show it to anyone. He had just enough money to live on because his parents were still stationed in Mexico and had put him in charge of letting Little Haseley, their house outside Oxford, and had told him to keep whatever rent was left over when he'd paid the maintenance bills. He filled the house with Oxford friends and we used to go down at weekends to have hot baths and collect the rent.
    But when we left Stockwell we needed more money to live on, so David had to get a proper job. An Oxford friend, Paddy Scannell, was helping to set up a brand-new course, media