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no one at home was ever told of the misadventure—but I sat there, my head covered in plaster, until one of the children, alerted by the noise, summoned a teacher. I can remember her gazing at me with an expression half-shocked, half-amused.
    We seldom went straight home after school. My small minder had a fertile and slightly morbid imagination (but who am I to complain?) and would lug me down to the river in the hope of seeing drowned bodies of which he seemed in daily expectation. We were disappointed, but I do remember being taken to see a man who had broken his arm. He was sittingin the back garden on a kitchen chair, nursing his arm and moaning, and we children gazed at him through the chink in the wooden fence in fascinated anticipation, although he was a very poor substitute for a drowned corpse.
    The two medical problems of the school were nits and ringworm, the second the more serious. Those afflicted would have their heads shaved and subsequently wore small cotton caps, a badge of shame, in which they looked like diminutive clowns. One compensation, however, was that girls with straight hair—regarded as an affliction in those days—frequently grew it with curls after the shaving.
    My second school, which I remember much more clearly, was the British School, a red-brick building on Old Street, fronted by an asphalt playground and iron railings. The school was named British not from patriotism or any necessity to distinguish it from alien establishments, of which in Ludlow there were none, but because it was one of the schools founded by the British Society, a voluntary and charitable organization established in 1840 to provide elementary education for the children of the poor. The children of the early nineteenth century would still have felt perfectly at home in it. And the name was not inappropriate. A map, permanently displayed in the largest double classroom, with its splurges of red—Canada, India, Australia, New Zealand—its small islands like splashes of blood in all the oceans of the world, enabled our teacher to point out that this was, in truth as well as legend, an empire on which the sun never set. Empire Day was a notable event celebrated with a march round the playground and a salute to the flag. The teaching was not jingoistic but we were imbued with a belief that the empire was beneficent and the rulers well-intentioned, a view which may have been simplistic but was probably no more damaging than the present belief of some young people I meet that everything that has gone wrong with the world in the past century is the fault of Britain.
    My generation’s early years were dominated by the 1914–18 war, a catastrophe which none of us were old enough to remember but which had scarred the lives of our parents’ generation and cast over our own a shadow of uncomprehended vicarious sadness, a universal grieving which reached its apogee on Armistice Day when, on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, the country would virtually come to a stop as we stood for the silence.
    I learned to read very young, certainly well before I started school, and I can remember the day when it happened. My mother would buya comic each week,
Tiger Tim
or
The Rainbow
, and would find time to read it to me. From the moment the comic was handed over, the waiting to hear it read was intolerable. And then, one morning, to my astonished delight, the curved and angular shapes under the pictures suddenly came together and made sense. From now on I would need no help. I could read. I must have been helped by the pictures and it was probably a matter of relating words to image. But it is one of my earliest memories of great happiness.
    The school had no library and I can remember few books except Piers Plowman’s
History of England
. History lessons were my joy. In memory they are a jumble of marvellous tales: myths, legends and facts, continents, centuries and characters blissfully muddled together so