Letters to Verges
In 2009 I had an e mail from someone I remembered from school but hadn’t clapped eyes on in over 40 years. What I remembered him for was his Verges in the final school production I took part in, ‘Much Ado About Nothing.’ Though I was Benedick, his - as one of Shakespeare’s great sidekicks - was the stand out performance; John Sincler, for whom the part was probably written, would have approved. Sincler himself was long and skinny, a contrast to the Chesterfield Grammar School Verges, short and comfortable looking. I still occasionally call him Verges, I notice, in what follows.
We didn’t re-meet for some time after his initial approach and I’m pleased to say the correspondence became the basis of what has proved a late flowering friendship. Keith - his real name - had succeeded me after a couple of years as Head Boy at school, followed me to Cambridge and, indeed, taken over my old digs – though I don’t remember him at all as an undergraduate: there was a two year age difference and by the time he arrived at Queens’ I’d rather moved on from school, or felt I had. (‘Sophisticated, God I’m sophisticated,’ as Daisy Buchanan says, excoriating herself, in ‘Gatsby.’) But in my sixties – 62 when these e-mails began - I was clearly aching to get back to school and the town as I remember it. ‘Getting back to the garden,’ as the great Joni Mitchell has it. Read on...
Letters to Verges 1
Letters to Verges 2
Letters to Verges 3
We didn’t re-meet for some time after his initial approach and I’m pleased to say the correspondence became the basis of what has proved a late flowering friendship. Keith - his real name - had succeeded me after a couple of years as Head Boy at school, followed me to Cambridge and, indeed, taken over my old digs – though I don’t remember him at all as an undergraduate: there was a two year age difference and by the time he arrived at Queens’ I’d rather moved on from school, or felt I had. (‘Sophisticated, God I’m sophisticated,’ as Daisy Buchanan says, excoriating herself, in ‘Gatsby.’) But in my sixties – 62 when these e-mails began - I was clearly aching to get back to school and the town as I remember it. ‘Getting back to the garden,’ as the great Joni Mitchell has it. Read on...
Letters to Verges 1
Letters to Verges 2
Letters to Verges 3