I spent the first three months of 1955 at Bishop's on my Practice Term from the Diploma in Education course at Oxford. The Staff Common Room then was on the first floor of a building on the East side of Exeter Street. The inhabitants of the Staff Room were, on the whole, an amiable bunch. Most were men in young middle-age who had served (some hazardously) in the Second World War. They were variously eccentric, sardonic, cynical and idealistic, but few had any illusions. They were content to live-and-let-live. In the pre-Suez 1950s, by today's standards pressures for good exam results and university places hardly seemed to exist.
William Golding seemed older than most: an impression enhanced by his piratical beard - an unusual adornment in 1955. We knew that he had taught at Bishop's before the War and had served in the Royal Navy during it, but these were not exceptional attributes in those post-war years. He was more unusual in his detachment from Staff Room concerns: the banter, the jokes, the internal politics, the casual chat. His Staff Room appearances seemed limited to collecting his mid-morning tea and sitting, in an uncommunicative but not unfriendly way, chain-smoking Woodbines while reading Homer - in Greek. Any conversation was conducted in a quiet, gentle, almost other-worldly tone. Though he had been at it long enough, he did not seem to be a totally committed schoolmaster, either in the pedagogic or the career sense.
Of course, everyone knew that he was an author, which fact alone made him someone special. Lord of the Flies was in the bookshops, though it had yet to make its later impact. It was said that Golding's second novel was with his publishers and that he was currently giving birth to his third. This latter fact may well have explained his preoccupied demeanour and the insistent clatter of his elderly typewriter from the little ante-room nearby whenever he had a free lesson. My impression remains that this ante-room was somehow off-limits to others (and certainly to the student-teacher) while Golding was in full flow.
In a Staff not devoid of 'characters', he seemed apart and different. The others called him 'Bill' (I never dared!) but this seemed to arise from familiarity, not intimacy. I can recall only one conversation with him. It must have been during a mutual 'free' in the Staff Room and goodness knows how it started. However, the burthen was Golding confiding to me that New York skyscrapers had two types of 'elevator': express lifts rose swiftly and stopped at every tenth floor, while slow lifts stopped at every floor. Golding had learned, while in Manhattan during the War, that the quickest way to get to (say) the 38th Floor was to take the express lift to the 40th and then the slow lift down to the 38th. He commended this piece of wisdom to me as the bell summoned us to the next lesson, but as though he had passed on the Secret of Life. At the time, I thought either that he was enjoying some kind of joke at my expense or that he was endowing the mundane with undue profundity.
It was clear that he was no ordinary man, though nobody could have foreseen his later fame. I have to say that I suspected some of his characteristics of contrivance. An author and a loner, certainly, but did he also cultivate an image? My recollections and residual judgements are those of a very young man, fresh from college, and green inexperience. The Goldings of this world are not as other men. Perhaps they ought not to be measured in the same way.
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