In the interim, I had grown accustomed to life in England. Dad had erected a 24-foot diameter above-ground unheated swimming pool in our back garden, and the factory invited the pop singer Adam Faith to see it, which he did. I was on the soccer team, and won the swimming prize three summers in a row, perhaps in part because the school’s swimming pool was so cold I wanted to get out of the water as quickly as possible. Neither pool, to be fair, was a match for that at the Caracas Sorts Club, the hub of our family’s social life for years, with long hot days spent there, eating a picnic lunch with refrescos bought from the club’s poolside kiosk, chatting with friends from school. I had even learned to do a running jack-knife off the high diving board as a result of persistent coaching from a Czech Olympic team swimming instructor who had become exasperated by our apparent failure to “point fingers” when practicing bouncing on the board, until we realized he had thought ‘fingers’ was the English word for ‘toes,’ and then our diving dramatically improved.
On holiday in 1962, we drove across France, from the ferry at Calais to Perpignan at the Spanish border, near where my father had been arrested by German soldiers in 1944, and thence to a rented villa near Barcelona on the Costa Brava, in search of the sun, returning by way of the tiny Pyrenees principality of Andorra, enjoying French cuisine, particularly restaurant potage, most of the way. It was good to hear Spanish again and lie on the beach– a sandy one, this time– and the Vauxhall doubtless enjoyed driving on the right-hand side of the road again.…
In my last year at our school, I was appointed a prefect, and had weekly prefect meetings with the headmaster, usually about school-related issues of routine and conduct, and prepared for the Common Entrance examinations for entrance to “Public” (i.e. private secondary) School. At a final concert at Dane Court, I sang cheerfully with the other boys school songs that had now become part of me. For the first time, I felt I fitted in. Notwithstanding Colonel Allfooll, I was English. I was proud to be at the school, but C.S. Lewis’ two American stepsons, David and Douglas Gresham, who had been sent to Dane Court a few years before us, did not enjoy it. In his memoir Lenten Lands, Douglas Gresham speaks of being a victim of bullying there, and concludes “it was a waste of my time and [Lewis’] money,” but he was a boarder, not a day boy like Desmond and me. We were not bullied, and we did not waste our time. The money was well-spent. In the C.E. exams, I did predictably disastrously in algebra, geometry, and arithmetic, but very well in English and history, gaining the English and French prizes at the end of the spring term. But I was never to go to Framlingham College, as we were shortly to leave for Toronto, where my father had been offered a job with Imperial Oil, as Esso was then known.
