A spiritual autobiography

National Review, Oct 13, 1997 by William F. Buckley, Jr.

This essay is drawn from the first chapter of Mr. Buckleys Nearer, My God: An Autobiography of Faith, just published by Doubleday. Copyright 1997 William F. Buckley Jr.

IT was during the summer of 1938 that we were given the dreadful news. I forget from whose hands it came. Probably from "Mademoiselle, our governess. She was the authority in residence at Great Elm, given that my mother, my father, and three of my older siblings were traveling in Europe. That left six children to romp happily through one more summer in Fathers large house in Sharon, the village designated by the Garden Club of America two years before as the most beautiful town in Connecticut after Litchfield. The six of us left behind ranged in age from Jim (15) to Maureen (5). We were superintended by Mademoiselle Jeanne Bouchex and by three Mexican nurses; fed and looked after by a cook, a butler, and two maids; trained and entertained in equestrian sport by a groom and an assistant, making use of Fathers eight horses; instructed in piano by a 23-year-old New Yorker who came and stayed with us three days of every week, giving us each a lesson every day on one of the five pianos in the house; and instructed in the guitar or banjo or mandolin (we were allowed our pick) by a Spanish-born violinist who traveled once a week from Poughkeepsie.

It might have been Mademoiselle who told us what Father had decided, or it might have been Miss Hembdt, Fathers secretary. She lived in Yorktown Heights and regularly relayed to us bulletins from Father, transcriptions of letters he would mail her, mostly to do with his business affairs but now and then including something directed to one or more of his absent children, supplementing what we would learn from letters received from Mother or from one of our siblings traveling with them. With these notes came our monthly allowances, a directive or so touching on this or that subject, references to a book Father had just read which we should know about, or read ourselves. . . . That dreadful day in August the directive, however transmitted, was as horrifying an edict my two afflicted sisters and I agreed as had ever been sent to three healthy and happy children from their father. The directive was to the effect that the next school year Jane, Trish, and I would pass in boarding schools near London, the girls at St. Marys in Ascot, I at St. Johns Beaumont, in Old Windsor.

The news fractured the arcadian spirit of our summer. We had got used to quite another routine, where summer vacations evolved almost seamlessly into a return to school, where academic life required no radical departures from our way of life and none at all from our surroundings, because we were taught by tutors right there in the same rooms in which we played when indoors during the summer. When school began for us at the end of September we continued to ride on horseback every afternoon, we swam two or three times every day until the water got too cold, our musical tutors continued to come to us just as they had done during the summer, and some of us would rise early and hunt pheasant before school; our classes began at 8:30, ended at 12, and there would be study hall and music appreciation between 4 and 6. Three or four neighborhood children joined our school, and though we sorely regretted the summers end, the academic regimen was light, and at our ages Jane had turned 14 that summer, Trish was 11, I was 12 the schooling we got was as tolerable as schoolwork could be. Now, suddenly, we were to go to boarding schools in England. Why?

We fled to Aunt Priscilla. She lived with her maiden sister in a house nearby, returning home to Austin, Texas, in the fall. We went to her: Why? Why? Why? Aunt Priscilla was infinitely affectionate, sublimely humorous, but also absolutely self-disciplined. After hearing out our outrage, she agreed to write to Father in Europe to put our case before him: What really was the point in going to England to school? We had all already been to England to school . . . only five years ago it was there that Trish and I had first learned English. Jane, Trish, and I had gone to Catholic day schools in London, the oldest four to boarding schools, the two girls to that same St. Marys, Ascot, where now Jane and Trish would go.

THEY hadnt liked St. Marys, hadnt liked it one bit. Aloise, the oldest, had been 14, possibly the most spirited girl the dear nuns at St. Marys had ever come across, with her singular, provocative independence. They had got on at Ascot because by nature Aloise and Priscilla (11) were irrepressible; but they had never pretended to like their school. John (13) and Jim (10) had gone to the Oratory Preparatory School in Reading. John had kept a diary at the school and was manifestly amused by his foreign experiences, which he depicted in words and in drawings. But the entire family had been shocked and infuriated to learn that not once but t-w-i-c-e our brother Jim had been caned! Called into the headmasters study and told to lean over. The first time, he had received one "swipe. The second time, two swipes. Not quite the stuff of Nicholas Nicklebys Dotheboys Hall, but news of the punishment was received as such in the family corridors, and the rumor spread about the nursery in our house in London that Father and Mother even considered withdrawing the boys. It did not come to that, but Jim was for at least a year after the event regarded by his brothers and sisters as a mutilated object. He, being sunny by nature and serenely preoccupied with his interest in flora and fauna, hadnt actually thought very much about the episode. For the rest of us, it was the mark of Cain, discoloring our year of English schooling.