[Q] So more than 60 years after this, you're still emotional about the award of the scholarship.

Well, I... I was going to say, first of all the main thing was that I had not only got a scholarship to Cambridge, I had got a scholarship which enabled me to write to George Turner saying, that I did not need a Closed scholarship, I had got a Major Open scholarship. The main reason that I am emotional about it is that it was... well, I mean, that it was an opportunity to stuff it right up where Charterhouse hurt. Incidentally, I had not done very well at my Latin verses, my Greek was not particularly special, but my English essay, which I had prepared entirely on my own, was really what got me the scholarship. And I had prepared it on the... I had noticed among the old Charter... all the old papers to Oxford, there was always a question about the Arts in the general paper. It was put one way, it was put another way, but the Arts. And I was actually extremely keen on painting and I had won the third prize in the House painting competition at Charterhouse. I liked to paint, and I had a daughter as you know, I think, who was a great painter. Anyway, I loved to paint, and I collected all those Penguin books of [Victor] Pasmore and [William] Coldstream and... who all else. I knew a lot about art, I read a lot. But I also, once I saw that this was in the paper, I... you know, I boned up a great deal. So when the paper came, when I was at Emmanuel – the general paper – one of the questions was: the Arts and their relation to life. A good question. And I wrote, this happens to you in life – doesn't it? – I wrote at the top of the page, the first page, 'Art is one of the four things that unite men – Turgenev'. And as I wrote that down, I thought – and I've thought on other occasions in different ways, and I'm sure everybody has according to the kind of things they do: it's done. I mean, if ever there was a winning number that was it, and I then wrote about Japanese painting, I mean I knew a lot of stuff, I knew all the names, I knew the dates, I'd taken trouble.

If there had been vivas at Cambridge, which there weren't, unlike Oxford, some surly shit would have said to me: Turgenev – tell me about him. Because the truth was, I didn't know anything about Turgenev, I didn't know what the other four things... or three things that united men were; one of them, you may depend on it, is anti-Semitism, but we can come to that later. However, I did not get quizzed and I did get the scholarship. I was told by my excellent Howland, that I ought to work very hard during the period between now, which was the end of December, and coming up to Cambridge in October – scholars didn't have to do national service before they went to Cambridge, they wanted to have them while they were still good. So I then decided that I would leave Charterhouse and pursue Hilary Phillips or somebody else if I couldn't get her, in a rather more urgent way than I had before.

So, I left Charterhouse. And I wasn't given a leaving scholarship of books, which every other scholar, Major scholar in Oxford... Oxford and Cambridge, was given almost automatically. And off I went.