Chapter 2. All My Sins Remembered: Another Part of a Life

Newman was in his study – the same that had once been the Holy of Holies of poor God – Almighty Shaw. He welcomed me and very soon we were talking about his House and its affairs. I thought he was ill at ease. His wife came in and we had tea. She was a large, florid woman, unattractive by virtue of a prominent robust Roman nose – rather like a bird of prey I thought. Her brother was the music master who had been one of the heroes of myself in common with my contemporaries and previous generations of school fellows, the composer of the militant Christian battle hymn of ‘Onward Christian So-ho-ho-hol-jers on to the cookhouse door!‘ He and Newman were great friends and so it was no surprise that a romance had sprung up between Newman and the musician's sister. It was said, in keeping with Newman's well-known loyal and statistical bent, that he boasted that their union bound together four school families and their seventeen genealogies.

It was not an easy party. I was awed by weight of reminiscent but somehow jaded grandeur. It was not simply that the lady's beauty was of a kind that eluded me, clothed as it was in the fleshy armour of rectitude, but … but … well, when she had gone and tea had been cleared away, Newman leant forward and in confidence laid bare the mystery: he had taken to drink. In shocked and almost whispered terms he confessed. I suppressed an impulse to laughter, which was so out of keeping with his unmistakably serious distress. I had noticed that he had offered me a glass of sherry before lunch; he had I think even taken one himself. I remembered thinking at the time, how unlike the school I had known before the war when the puritan sanctity could not have been invaded by – sh – alcohol. Alas; Oxford and the West Front had disguised from my own eyes the deterioration

in my moral standards, a deterioration so great that I had not even observed the depravity of my old friend – for even as a schoolboy I had been very fond of him. I thought he looked