Books have been the centre-piece of my life.  I read them, write them and for a number of years, I even created a bookshop to be able sell them. I began to read purposefully at the age of fifteen. Accidentally able to turn a phrase, I chose essay-based subjects for my A Levels and eventually won a place at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, to read English. In the Sixties you had to apply to Oxbridge with your results achieved; this presented us with nearly a year to prepare. I received an impossible reading list from my eventual mentor and lifelong friend, Professor Derek Brewer, C S Lewis’s successor as Professor of Mediaeval Literature.  On that infamous list were all the major texts ever written by anyone of note in all cultures throughout history. It began with Homer and ended with Hughes and was superseded within the week by a second list with all the world’s great philosophical tracts arrayed and an apology, explaining that several undergraduates had expressed disappointment with the original fare, claiming they had already read most if not all of the texts listed. Later I challenged him on this claim and, sure enough, once, a long time ago, some inconsiderate one sent him such a letter. It was none of my generation. I began the list. By the time I arrived at university I had reached the middle of the Eighteenth Century. When I left I had finally reached the position from which I was meant to begin.

 

I decided against research, convinced that I was not what was thought of as a scholar when I declared that I couldn’t spend three years of my life studying writings I didn’t actually enjoy. This was considered decadent. I went instead to the City and did mysterious things with the first generation of Main Frame computers that provided me with the means to stop working for a while to sail and write and broadcast and begin the novel that would, in time, be published as “To Weave a Rainbow” [available in all good libraries, including the school’s!] I remember the delight on Derek Brewer’s face when I gave him a copy of the novel, describing it as my forsaken doctorate.

I became a teacher to finish a book and whilst I have completed several novels since that time, for much of my life I have continued to teach: at Brentwood School in Essex [before it was Essex], King Edward’s School in Birmingham, Mander Portman Woodward Sixth Form College, Writer in Residence at Cranleigh School, in Surrey and for the past twelve years at Nottingham High School.

 

I remain as enthusiastic about literature now as when I began on that impossible intellectual odyssey all those years ago. I have never really thought of the fictional text as an escape from the unpleasantness of today but more the opportunity to enter new and troublesome realities that might engage the reader emotionally, annoy him philosophically or politically, occasionally make him laugh, even more rarely make him cry. The great texts of literature realign the being; they change you. My task as a teacher has been to entice students to dare to make that interchange. My task as a writer has been to offer an antidote to the potentially destructive nature of ‘philosophy’ that can ‘clip an angel’s wings’ and ‘unweave’ the mysteries of the rainbow but rather, I prefer to reinvent that beauty and weave rainbows instead.