Notions of honesty and honour often seem to me to be central to the reputation of Western Europe as the fountainhead of merchant and democratic values. Democracy and satisfactory commercial relationships are built on understandings that voters will not be deceived and that contracts will be honoured. Many peoples’ worries for Europe’s future in the 21st Century spring from a concern that “You can’t trust anyone any more”.

I often wonder whether there was ever a widespread sense of trust in any society. I was certainly brought up in an atmosphere of trust.

In school, and in the organisations to which I belonged as a boy, there was a great emphasis on the importance of telling the truth and on promises, pledges, rules and laws. The ideal was to do ones duty to God and one’s country.

I still believe in the aspiration to good citizenship represented in the simplicity of that ideal. I recognise the difficulty of reformulating it in contemporary terms and realise that the mechanisms by which the ideal was transmitted to me no longer exist.

I was confirmed within the Church of Ireland in 1955. This was also the year in which I participated in a typical boarding school raid, qualified recently in dinner party conversation as “a disgusting and criminal breach of trust”.

The life of most Christians and law abiding citizens is a life with degrees of tension provided by the temptations of “sinning” or taking a chance. The tension is acceptable as long as you are not overburdened by guilt or found out. Christianity claims to offer relief through repentance and forgiveness. In the secular world, the penalty depends on your being found out, on your being dealt with by due procedure, and on the likely formal or informal retribution. A key element in the sanction of Christianity and most religions is that you are always found out because “no secrets are hid”.

One of the most important moments of tension in my life took place in the rector’s study in the vicarage of St. Bartholomew’s Church on Clyde Road, a short walk from the St. Andrew’s College of my time. Whoever was rector of St. Bartholomew’s was responsible for teaching the pupils from Church of Ireland families during the scripture periods timetabled for every class each week. This accident of geography exposed St. Andrew’s boys to a more exotic high-church version of the Church of Ireland than the liturgical fare familiar in most city and country parishes. In St. Bartholomew’s there was a robed choir of boys – none of them from St. Andrew’s. They served the “sung Eucharist” on Sundays. (In most other parishes the flagship service was “family communion”.) Because at St. Bartholomew’s a sanctuary lamp was kept burning, and the clergy and choristers spent a lot of time bowing in the direction of the altar, there were stories that at the start of one school year two new boarders had written home after their first Sunday service to tell their parents that they had been brought to a Roman Catholic Church.

As I was a weekly boarder when I reached confirmation age, it was decided I should be prepared for confirmation in St. Bartholomew’s Parish. This involved going down to the rectory for an hour, one evening a week, before returning to the school’s own evening study sessions of supervised class preparation, known as “prep”.

The confirmation classes were spread over a month and brought myself and another boy from the parish, who was not a St. Andrew’s boy, into the care of the then incumbent of St. Bartholomew’s’, one of the few rectors from my time who ever managed to maintain discipline in his scripture classes. His name was Craig and I remember him as a tall, dark, ascetic figure, notable for wearing a cassock at all times, even for the walk up Clyde Road from his church to the school.

St. Bartholomew’s Church, parochial hall and rectory make a notable architectural contribution to Clyde Road at its junction with Raglan Road. The grey stone and steepled Church fills the apex of the junction, and the hall and rectory on the line of Clyde Road carry Victorian authority in their brick and stone. Inside, the rectory was dark and serious and the rector’s study at the top of the stairs was heavily shelved with books and had the air of a monastery library.

Throughout his course of confirmation classes the rector made clear that his job was to prepare us for a personal decision, that each of us would have to sign solemnly in his presence that we wished to proceed to the sacrament of confirmation. The bishop’s laying of hands on our heads would be the outward and visible sign of God’s confirmation that the pledges made on our behalf by our godparents at our baptisms were now our own. It was made clear to us that the decision to proceed to confirmation lay at the heart of personal salvation, preparing us for the gift of Christ’s flesh and blood through the Eucharist. The preparation for each confirmation class was intended to make sure that we knew and fully understood the centrality of the Eucharist in the life of the church.

As the programme of confirmation classes neared an end I became worried about the final class at which the rector would ask me privately whether I wanted to proceed and if I knew and understood exactly what I was doing. I was worried because I was not sure I could believe that Christ, as a real human person, had risen from the dead. I was worried because having once told a group of Crusaders I had been “saved” I could not understand their excitement and enthusiasm – and didn’t like it. I was worried because I was all the time “sinning” in small ways, and knew I always would, and I was contemplating the enormous sin of proceeding to a sacrament as a doubting participant.

On the evening of the last class, hating myself for my cowardice and wearing my best suit, I followed the example of my confirmation classmate and went alone into the dark study to declare to the rector that I wished to be confirmed and knew what I was doing. I wished to be confirmed because I did not know what would happen if I went back to school and home to Florence and Stephen to say that I had decided not to be confirmed. I was glad to get back to “prep” because I was sure Craig didn’t really believe me. My cowardice at that time contributed in its own way to strengthening my resolve to try to live as an honest person.

Would Kingsley Scott have known anything of his influence on me? Mr Scott made a dramatic entrance when he arrived to teach French at St. Andrews. Wearing cap and goggles and a huge trench coat whose sleeves disappeared into enormous leather gloves he rode into the school yard on the biggest motorbike most boys had ever seen. Having heaved the bike up on to its stand, the figure which emerged from beneath cap and coat was a towering man with thick black hair rising from a centre parting and with a sports jacket and trousers in much more lively colours of tweed and corduroy than usually appeared in the staffroom. At closer range, the boys wondered further at his brightly-coloured tweed tie and his shoes like moccasins on thick crepe rubber soles.

Interest in Mr Scott’s bike and appearance was succeeded quickly by respect for his classroom performance. He was a forceful and enthusiastic teacher. A couple of early incidents quickly revealed that he was prone to bursts of temper sufficiently outrageous to frighten even the most daringly wayward pupil. He was passionately interested in the theatre and started involving the senior school in winter term productions. His choices of melodramas like “The Shop at Sly Corner” and “The Monkey’s Paw” were particularly inspired, winning the applause and admiration of pupils and parents alike.

Kingsley Scott moved into the school as a housemaster, occupying a small bedroom on the top floor of the corner of the first Wellington Place house. The few boys taking honours leaving-certificate French were invited from time to time to this room to work on their spoken French, discussing a newspaper article or a poem. Because I took French and worked as an assistant stage manager for one “Scott” production, I got to know the upstairs room and to hear a bit about Kingsley’s experience as a student and teacher in France and North Africa.

The gramophone record most frequently played on class visits to the room was an LP by an Algerian singer called Mouloudji, whose name I recognised over many years as one of the most highly regarded of French musicians. Kingsley had covered the walls of the bedroom with bookshelves and boys began to ask themselves what kind of books their avant-garde teacher might read. He only showed them a few French paperbacks, some of whose page openings had to be cut with a knife because of French habits of printing and binding. Boys with wandering eyes reported that Mr Scott’s collection looked as if it might include some “dirty” books. One believed he had spotted Henry Miller’s “Tropic of Cancer”, said to be the dirtiest book of all.

Curiosity about the lifestyle of Mr Scott and, in particular, his taste in reading led to the hatching of a plot to raid his room one day when he was out. I was glad to be in on the plot and was glad to be nominated as one of the boys to rifle the shelves carefully while at the same time ensuring that everything would look exactly as it was on completion of the raid. Younger boys were put on watch at various key points in case of the French teacher’s unexpected return. The boarder best known for breaking into lockers and other staff rooms quickly opened the simple lock on Kingsley’s bedroom door.

Until very recently, when my story at dinner one evening of this inspection of the Scott collection was greeted by a guest as “a quite horrible example of childish breaking and entering”, I had never thought of the incident as other than a schoolboy prank which had had a positive long-term effect on my own literary tastes. Was Kingsley Scott aware that boys had furtively fingered not only “Tropic of Cancer” but the same author’s “Tropic of Capricorn” and “The Rosy Crucifixion”? Would he have hated this intrusion or would he have been glad to know that at least one intruder had sneaked away wondering about Samuel Beckett and “Editions de Minuit”?

As far as I know the carrying out of the Scott raid passed completely unnoticed by staff. The fear at the time was of detection. I don’t remember sin as an issue and none of the likely school punishments, including a possible caning in the headmaster’s study, was considered a serious deterrent. The episode was exciting at the time and remains a valued memory. That it took place at all was an indication of the powerful image projected by Kingsley Scott. In my current wardrobe there are ties, jackets, trousers and shoes which bear witness to the lasting impact of that image.

Read more: 1956 – Influences