His house master – “a rotund gentleman in a morning suit and bow tie” – introduced himself with a command to meet him that afternoon in the squash court at 4 o’clock. “I won a chess competition to prove that I was not stupid.”īack in London, as peace took hold across Europe, he was enrolled, not at Harrow, but at Mill Hill where his eagerness to play sports rather than pursue academic study was indulged from day one. There, he learned to play cricket, honing his skills as a batsman with the assistance of a revolutionary spring-loaded bowling machine, invented by one of the teachers, which flung down balls of every speed and guile: “I got on well there,’ remembers the doctor of his time in Devon. Mother was a teacher who evacuated Vincent and his older sister out of London, away from the Blitz on their bikes to stay first with relatives in Reading and then, for Vincent, a boarding school in Devon. Vincent’s father was a Great War veteran, packed off to Gallipoli as young marine in 1915 and then promptly invalided out to hospital in Egypt after contracting hepatitis, spared the slaughter inflicted by Turkish guns in that mis-begotten campaign. His immediate concern was that his eagerly awaited breakfast was now glued to the ceiling. He recalls how one day he had his spoon poised ready to tuck into his egg when a German bomb landed next door. He speaks of hearing the pilotless V1 and V2 rockets which were lobbed across the English Channel from France.įood rationing meant that he had just one egg a week to look forward to. ![]() Nights were occasionally passed in the shelters and windows were criss-crossed with sticky paper in a bid to lessen the injuries caused by flying glass fragments. Growing up was disrupted by World War Two: “I remember running down the road and into the bomb shelter,” he reveals. ![]() But such insights were beyond rare in the 1930s, so he was left to fend for himself in an education system which made no allowance for his being differently intelligent. An aversion to reading, the ‘Telegraph’ excepted, and an inability to grasp foreign languages support the diagnosis. In retrospect, he reckons that he may be dyslexic. ![]() Stupid! Eight decades later, the grown man relaxing in his sitting room is clearly anything but stupid. However, that plan was jettisoned when the headmaster of the preparatory informed his parents that Vincent was stupid, and they would only be wasting their money trying to educate him.
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