A Very Private Celebrity Read Online Free

plenty of brains and common sense but is inclined to that opinion himself, which alienates his elders.’ His classroom achievements were high though not uniform. Records show that his mathematics results were truly abysmal in his early years, for he obtained nought out of 100 in two exams – a fact he was inclined to boast about later on. Perhaps he made up for this by readingextensively. He said in later years that Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and George Bernard Shaw’s plays had helped form his political views – a tribute to Westminster’s encouragement of self-education.
    It was Dr Costley-White who revived rowing (‘water’ in the school slang) and this is how the young Freeman got to know him. His obituary in The Times centred on his Christian faith: ‘Costley-White was a man of deep religious convictions, which permeated all his work. He was a forceful and fluent preacher; he had a keen and active mind and was a lover of music, a subject he did much to encourage at Westminster.’ He left the school to become a distinguished Church of England clergyman. Since Freeman later acknowledged his debt to his former headmaster, the question arises as to whether this influence extended to Freeman’s faith too.
    The answer must be ‘no’. The Christian religion (Church of England) was routine at Westminster, and the fifteen-year-old Freeman submitted to Confirmation as a rite de passage , administered to him by the Archbishop of Canterbury. He recalled feeling the weight of the ‘apostolic hands’ on his head and noted that they trembled. Instead of accepting this as a transmission of the Holy Spirit, he remembered thinking: ‘The old boy’s not long for this world.’ Nor was he: the Archbishop died a few months later in 1930.
    Although Freeman felt no confirmation of faith as a result of this experience, nor did he feel indifference. Years later, he told his High Anglican friend Tom Driberg that although he lacked ‘the gift of faith’, he ‘had no difficulty in doing anything officially expected in this field’. Perhaps sympathetic agnosticism summed up his attitude, or was it just the relaxed tolerance that stemmed from Westminster? Incidentally, his mother was a regular churchgoer, though his father was ‘a total agnostic’. Additionally, Freeman’s third wife wasa Catholic, so all three of their children were baptised as Catholics, with his approval.
    In later years he showed respect towards other people’s Christian beliefs. He wrote in the New Statesman in 1963:
    I’ve always been intrigued by (and respectful of) the views of Christian socialists. Their essential belief, after all, receives much countenance from the Gospels – though precious little from the churches – and the notion of the equality of men before God is profoundly attractive and the very foundation of the respect for individuals which should be the purpose of socialist morality.
    The Gospels appealed to him much more than the conservatism of the Church of England: Tranquilla Non Movere should be its motto, he wrote on another occasion. 3
    It was a feature of public schools at this time, and for at least thirty years afterwards, that the school prefects had more authority and status than the assistant masters. For example, at many schools the prefects could administer corporal punishment, while the teachers could not. This odd inversion went back to Thomas Arnold, the headmaster of Rugby 100 years before, whose ‘praeposter’ system (literally ‘placed before’) installed the senior boys as the custodians of discipline, subject only to his control. The tradition was tellingly satirised by Lindsay Anderson’s film If … (1968), in which it led to a violent school insurrection that must appeal to the fantasies of public school boys whenever they watch it. It was also common practice for the head of house to write a confidential ledger about his term of office, open only to his successors. The Busby