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Down Chancery Lane
- Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society
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Down Chancery Lane By NICHOLAS TARLING Writing one’s own history seems but to emphasise the insecurity of any kind of historiography. If there are written records, they are subject – even in the case of diaries – to the fallibility of other written records. What was the purpose in writing them? has it shaped them? what has – by accident or purpose – been left out? If there are no written records, we rely all the more on memory, ours, others’. Yet memory is unreliable, selective. What we recall is said to change each time we recall it. Sometimes it is no more than what we think others have told us, itself only what they recall and see fit to tell us: family legend, old wives’ tales. His father told Jorge Luis Borges that there were no true memories of youth, ‘for each memory was distorted by successive repetition, and “if in every repetition you get a slight distortion, then in the end you will be a very long way from the issue.” Young Georgie found that “a very saddening thing”.’1 It is perhaps easier to recollect with some accuracy what may be regarded as facts than it is to recall feelings. Moving through school, for example, remembering the names of teachers and textbook authors, examination prescriptions and results, provides a framework. But how does one fit into it? what was the mix of choice and circumstance? Looking back, I find it difficult to make about myself the bold statements historians are often prepared to make about their subjects. Still less does it seem possible to recall the ways in which one’s understanding of a particular subject developed. Were there significant stages? was it a long, if not indeed never-ending, process? A built history surrounded my youth, for, in search of a good education for their growing family, my parents had moved in 1937 to St Albans, where the great abbey church, partly constructed from the remains of the old Roman city of Verulamium, had become a cathedral, and an old clock tower stood in the market-place. No one in the family had ever been to university, but my father was a keen reader of Churchill and of T.E. Lawrence, and their books stood on the shelves along with my mother’s Shakespeare, a school prize, and her beloved Dickens. 131 1 Edwin Williamson, Borges A Life, London: Penguin, 2004, p. 47. History was a compulsory subject for most of my school years, as it was for other pupils, and I have always been amazed and indeed appalled by its limited position in New Zealand schools. In my recollection Ancient Britons and Romans seem to bulk rather large at the primary level. At secondary level the curriculum continued to focus on British history, with a strong dash of imperial and in particular British Indian history. The names of the textbook authors – Ramsay Muir, R.M. Rayner – recur. We used to work our way, chapter by chapter, through these even then rather dated works, perhaps also used indeed in British India. Before School Certificate, which I took in 1946, the school timetable made us, rather unfortunately, choose between history and geography, and I chose the former, though also liking the latter, and still regarding the two, as a Southeast Asian historian must, as intimately linked. After School Certificate the school divided Sixth Formers into ‘Arts’ and ‘Science’ streams. It seems that I had intended to follow the latter, and surprisingly I cannot remember why in the summer of 1946 I chose the former. My results in Mathematics and Additional Mathematics had been very good, and in Physics with Chemistry I did well enough. Perhaps advice from teachers or elder brother’s example led me to the Arts side. I now feel – if I did not indeed then – that, while I could perform in Mathematics, I had no real conceptual capacity for it. Whatever its source, the decision to ‘drop’ it was therefore wise. An historian might see this as a ‘turning-point’. Moving to Sixth Arts Lower did not mean, however, that I was a history specialist, even though, housed in the old monastery gateway, dating back to the fourteenth century CE, we were surrounded by history, and we had a good history teacher in H.E. [Squits] Wortley. I doubt indeed that his methods would now be approved, though eccentricity is surely more or less essential to sound teaching. The occasional brilliant lesson was sited among silent sessions...