Have any of you read Jane Eyre?

It happened during an English Literature class at school when I was about 14 or 15, but I still remember it as if it was yesterday. Like most teenage kids, I dreaded looking silly in front of my classmates – particularly my friend “Fizz” who sat next to me. (In those days, I was known as “Buckets”, incidentally.) Fizz already thought I was crazy for getting a book called Letters of Giuseppe Verdi out of the library, and he also failed to see how I could find a book with a title like Memoirs of an Interpreter interesting.

But this particular day, our teacher, Mr Hodgkins, casually asked the class, in passing: “Have any of you read Jane Eyre?” If I remember correctly, one of the girls immediately put her hand up. A few seconds later, I put my hand up, too. This was an important test for me, you see, because of my religious convictions: I needed to tell the truth at all times and at all costs. Why the few seconds of hesitation, then? You’re probably ahead of me: I hesitated briefly (and humanly) because I didn’t want to look silly in front of Fizz and all the others, obviously. And if you’d been there, you would indeed have heard some sniggering when I put my hand up.

There is, however, one problem with that explanation: despite all appearances, it’s simply not true. It just so happens that fear of possible ridicule was not the reason I hesitated at all in this particular case. In fact, I would have been very proud to “admit” to having read the classic novel by Charlotte Brontë – and, indeed, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by her sister Anne Brontë, if it came to that (so there!). The reason I hesitated was because I was struggling to resolve a serious problem: I didn’t know whether or not I would be telling the truth if I put my hand up, because – get this – I honestly and sincerely didn’t know whether or not I had actually read Jane Eyre (or The Tenant of Wildfell Hall either, if it came to that)!

Confused? You bet I was. No, sorry – I mean: “And so you should be”. But, you see, the fact of the matter was that I had listened to the entire unabridged text of both of those books broadcast over the air as serialisations on BBC radio in the evenings. But I had no recollection of ever having set eyes on a single printed page of either of the two books. So had I read Jane Eyre? Well, I thought to myself, it depends what you mean. Yes. No. And also Yes-and-No. All three at once, in fact. But how do you indicate all that by putting up your hand, not putting up your hand, and putting-up-and-not-putting-up your hand all at the same time? Quite a problem, isn’t it? And there wasn’t a moment to lose! The question sent my mind (and my pulse) racing. Fortunately, I managed to figure out the right response in time. Phew!

If I’d got it wrong, though, maybe I could have emulated what Giuseppe Verdi did once after he made a social gaffe: “In a fury, I took a revolver and fired it into my mouth. It was made of chocolate. And I live – alas! alas!”

Did your parents come to this school?

At the age of 11, on an introductory visit to Maldon Grammar School, where I would shortly start attending, I was asked an apparently simple question by my future form teacher: “Did one of your parents come to this school?” I answered, “Yes.” Next question: “Was it your mother or your father?” “My father,” I replied. “And do you know which house he was in?” “No, I don’t know.” Easy as ABC, wasn’t it?

Well, hold on a moment…

You see, in my eagerness to answer truthfully (combined with my well-known ability to misunderstand the most “obvious” things), what I actually meant was: Yes, my father came to this school a couple of weeks ago to attend an introductory evening for parents. (He had had his entire schooling several hundred miles away up in Scotland and had never previously set foot on the premises of Maldon Grammar School in his life!) Maybe, I surmised, they had divided the visiting parents up into sub-groups called “houses” for some obscure reason, but my father certainly hadn’t told me anything about that when describing his visit. So, in the words of Mark Twain, “I was gratified to be able to answer promptly, and I did. I said I didn’t know.”

During the summer, I was away visiting relatives in Scotland with my mother and sisters. On our return, my father showed me a letter he had received from the Headmaster, stating: “You child informs me that you are a former pupil of this school but was unable to tell me which house you were in...” – and inviting him to provide the missing information “so that we can continue the family tradition”!

My father, convinced that I would never have said anything like that, had immediately written back acknowledging receipt of the letter, “which I can only assume has been sent as the result of an administrative error”...

So I managed to get some unwelcome attention from the Headmaster, and maybe even appeared to be a liar because I had endeavoured to tell the truth.

And you thought you had problems!

PS: Amusingly enough, I learned later that my score on the entrance exam had been 100%. They tested my “verbal reasoning” skills – but not, apparently, my common sense!