My mother Jean was a widow who raised four children alone. By necessity she scrimped on clothes and holidays. But books and school fees were sacred. "Your education is the one thing that no one can ever take from you," she always told us.
The best schools in our part of California were run by fundamentalist Christians, and that is where Jean sent us. We were not allowed to wear mini-skirts or make-up. Jewellery, dancing and the cinema were forbidden. As a child, I learned about the hypocrisy of adults. I learned to defy authority and to escape from absurd constraints by moving elsewhere.
Elsewhere was the big, open and deliciously "heathen" world of the University of California, where I decided to major in French at the age of 17. My higher education took place between 1974 and 1980 - an ideological limbo between the hippie/Vietnam era and the conservative conversion that afflicted younger friends in the 1980s. I and my friends were truly apolitical. None of us ever joined a political party or participated in a protest march.
Under the US system, I had to struggle through freshman mathematics, chemistry, sociology and psychology, when all I really wanted to do was read Balzac and Stendahl. Maths and chemistry required concentration, but having skipped all of the lectures, I managed to get an A+ in sociology by speed-reading the textbook the night before the final exam and using common sense on the multiple-choice questions.
I spent my junior year abroad at the Sorbonne. There were no more multiple-choice questions, but I was struck by the impersonal nature of the French system, and the arbitrariness of exam results, which seemed to bear no relation to the amount of work I did or my own evaluation of my essays.
When I arrived at Brasenose College, Oxford, to study international relations in 1978, the first thing that impressed me was how much more my fellow students knew than I did. This was in part because of my late move from French literature to politics, but at Oxford even first-year students stunned me with their eloquence and grasp of history. My US education had not equipped me to discuss the Chinese revolution or Latin classics. Sadly, the snobbery of Oxford students was commensurate with their knowledge.
At first, I mistook Oxford for a big, colourful party. One of my tutors used to invite students for sherry in his study, then snore in his armchair while we read our essays. In my second year, I realised I would not complete my thesis on French defence policy - or receive the degree my poor mother sacrificed so much for - unless I started working. If the US system taught me to memorise and cram, Oxford taught me that there is no substitute for the long hard slog. In journalism both have proved useful. Reporters often jump late into a story, feverishly reading newspaper clippings on the way to an important interview. But the best pieces we write are the result of years of familiarity, of many hours invested in learning.
More than any particular educational system or methodology, I was marked by the personalities and enthusiasm of my professors. From Bonnie Campbell, my first French teacher in California, to Sir Michael Howard, the military historian who supervised my master's thesis at Oxford, I was fortunate to encounter men and women who helped me organise and discipline my mind, who broadened my outlook on the world.
It was a shock to realise that diplomas and degrees in no way guaranteed a sinecure, or even gainful employment. The real work - and my real education - began on the autumn day in 1980 when I took up my first salaried job at an obscure defence magazine in Paris. Nearly 20 years and several magazines and newspapers later, I have gained immense personal satisfaction from speaking French, and it has proved essential in places as far-flung as Nicaragua and Azerbaijan. Things military have also been a constant - as if poring over all those back issues of Defense Nationale in the Codrington library doomed me to live through many bombardments.
But the sheer pleasure of language, partly innate, largely a gift from my teachers, remains the root of everything.
