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eventually restored, but as Dr Rogers noted, there were ‘very Spartan conditions right up until 1975’.
    Eminent Marlburians who preceded Nick at the school include the craftsman, poet and political activist William Morris; poets Siegfried Sassoon, Charles Sorley, Louis MacNeice and John Betjeman; Conservative politicians R.A. (‘Rab’) Butler and Henry Brooke; round-the-world yachtsman Sir Francis Chichester; and the travel writer Bruce Chatwin. During the 1920s the school was attended by one Anthony Blunt, later curator of the Queen’s pictures, and later still the most infamous British spy since Kim Philby.
    Betjeman loathed his days at Marlborough; the old dining room, he later recalled, always smelt of Irish stew. The school spanned the main road through Marlborough, and the road was straddled by a bridge known to pupils as ‘The Bridge of Sighs’, as it took them from the boarding houses into their classes.
    During Nick’s time the school’s population was 800, all boys, all boarders, all away from home. Dennis Silk recalled the routine: ‘Classes until lunchtime, classes after lunch on Monday, Wednesday, Friday. Half holidays on Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday, and after lunch on half days, games. So it was work, work, games, prep, house prayers, more prep, bed. We bored them silly.’
    It was while at Marlborough that Nick really began to blossom and bloom. Here he was exposed to friendships and influences which would endure. Nick was one of a freewheeling group of pupils who shared a love of rock ’n’ roll, smoking cigarettes and draught beer. There was a mutual antipathy to school regulations, lessons and homework. David Wright remembers listening with Nick to the Cassius Clay—Henry Cooper bout of 1963, on a transistor radio on top of the Mound, one of the many medieval sites which circle Marlborough.
    Set amid the rolling Downs in the lush and still rural county of Wiltshire, Marlborough was another idyllic backwater. With a population of barely over 6000 in Nick’s day, the town was quiet and untroubled. But by the middle of the 1960s, and to the delight of its schoolboy inhabitants, a mere three hours away, down in London, things were beginning to get seriously swinging.
    At the school itself, Dennis Silk recalls, ‘We used to have a House Dance with a local girls’ school, the usual sort of cattle market, and Ican remember one such occasion. It went like a dream. It was about 1964, when the House was still biddable, and we were still in charge. We had this dance, and ensured that no girls were hurt by being left on the side, and programmed dances, and every boy had to dance with every other girl at some stage of the evening. I can remember … lovely quiet music, “Sleepy Lagoon” and things like that, and my wife giving them dancing classes before.
    â€˜A year later, the dispensation had changed, and against my better judgement, allowed electronic music. No one could speak to anyone at all, the records were so loud … The whole atmosphere of the House had changed, and we were no longer in control, we were swept away by this amazing new liberating thing.’
    The public-school ethos hardly lent itself to the dropped aitch rowdiness and two-fingered rebellion of rock ’n’ roll. Public-school rock ’n’ rollers are at best a footnote to any rock encyclopaedia: Genesis first convened in the hallowed halls of Charterhouse, the school which would later offer house room to World Party’s Karl Wallinger. Harrow played host to Island’s Chris Blackwell; Peter & Gordon and Shane MacGowan attended Westminster; Roxy Music’s Phil Manzanera and This Heat’s Charles Hayward studied at Dulwich College; Kula Shaker’s Crispian Mills was at Stowe. But in general there wasn’t much room for the hoity-toity in the hurly-burly of rock ’n’ roll.
    The Beatles had rewritten the rule book. Far from