Ramsgate is a seaside resort town on the far eastern toe of Kent. I went to school there. To be precise, I went to St Lawrence College, a boarding school exclusively (then) for boys. I was there from the age of 13 up until the week before my 18th birthday. My family were in Kenya, and flights were expensive, so I would go home just twice a year – once at Christmas and once for the summer holiday. Some years I was among the small handful of boys who stayed even during half terms and Easter while everyone else had gone home. It was a pretty austere place at the start. Dormitories were unrelentingly cold. Discipline was fierce. Junior boys were still ‘fags’ expected to wait upon senior boys, to fetch, and carry, and mop, and polish. Prefects could (and did) still thrash fags with a cane. It was all very Tom Brown’s Schooldays. But our generation of pupils were witnesses to change. We were the very last fags, and the last to be flogged. We were part of a great movement in the 1960s of enlightenment and modernisation. Thank God! And I don’t hesitate to say I enjoyed school. I did. I made good friends. I loved sport. I performed Shakespeare. And Ramsgate, on the whole, was a pretty fun place. It was good. All good.
I went back a couple of years ago. I was invited to talk to sixth formers about being a novelist. How strange it is going back to your old school. So much had changed. There were no dormitories. There were girls. New buildings had appeared and old ones had vanished. And yet so little had changed. I guess that’s how it works. In my novel ‘The Notable Brain of Maximilian Ponder,’ the character, Adam, ends up at a school in Ramsgate. I’m sure it must be somewhere similar.
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