Lessons and Discoveries

At the age of fifty, Martin Rigby Smith, an English lecturer working in France, embarks on a creative writing course beginning with autobiography. Prompted by his tutor, Martin looks back on his teenage years at boarding school in northern England in the 1960s, which provides him with plenty of material for his course. He finds that writing about his youth brings it back vividly. Memories of his teachers and their lessons flood back, and he remembers too pastimes outside the classroom, such as the hated Combined Cadet Force, and sport and chapel (mostly enjoyed). He records on paper, for the first time, the joy and the heartache of romantic love. Above all, though not unrelated, comes the literature and philosophy which stimulated and influenced his thinking or imagination during his teenage years. Authors such as Wordsworth, Keats and Shelley, Tolkien, Plato, Kierkegaard and Camus. And there is music too, popular and classical, which shaped his emotional life in the early 1960s.