Alex Grant

The International Centre, Sevenoaks School, in autumn 1990 (above) and autumn 1991 (below). In both photos Jim Scouse (in glasses) is in the front row, just to the right of the Winter family, and yours truly is in the middle row, second from the right end (wearing John Lennon-style specs).

I was sorry to hear last month that my old housemaster had died. That’s a very English sentence, and a very class-bound one. Anyone who’s been to an English boarding school will immediately know what I mean, but others may not have a clue what I am on about.

The housemaster was a man called Jim Scouse, and this is really a global story, not just about an English housemaster, who had a lot to teach me and others. It’s a story about globalism, and the part a particular brand of Englishness can play in it.

The house was the International Centre (IC), for sixth form boys, most of them from overseas, at Sevenoaks School in Kent. When I arrived at the IC as a 16-year-old in September 1990 it still had an unmistakable whiff of 1960s idealism about it. One of its early housemasters had been a man called Jonty Driver, a former president of the National Union of South African Students who had been detained without trial, in solitary confinement, for suspected involvement in the African Resistance Movement. I never met Driver, but felt that he still watched over us. In the early 1990s House photos, with a glamourous Driver and his wife, still lined its walls, 20 years after he had moved on. Driver was already a legend, and stories of him as a polymath, anti-Apartheid hero, poet and all-round good egg were still handed down.

It dawned on us that the IC was a special place: not just any old public school boarding house, but somewhere where independence of mind was valued. The house was ultimately run by its housemaster and tutor, of course, but much of the day-to-day discipline was overseen not by appointed prefects, but by a chairman and committee, elected by the boys every half term (I never made chairman, but I did serve as washing-up co-ordinator in my first term).

I was one of a few token Brits in an intake of 25 16-year-olds from all around the world. I certainly wasn’t there as a role model: in my late teens I was a bit of a wally (many would say I still am). This wasn’t the United Nations: more a cross-section of the global elite (the Sudanese guy in my year was the son of the general manager of Khartoum Airport), most of us doing the International Baccalaureate, and a few of us A-Levels, before going on to good universities in Britain, Europe or America. There were some other Brits, but unlike me most of them were the sons of expats who’d spent their childhoods abroad. There were some self-confident Germans and Dutchmen with names like Maximilian, Sebastian and Michael. But many of the others were slightly lost: boys from countries as far afield as Malaysia, Lesotho, Mexico, Canada, Kenya, Japan, Brazil, Egypt, Czechoslovakia, and Norway. They might have struggled to fit in at an English school which valued academic rigour, and in which few allowances were made for those who did not speak English as a first language (or in some cases, even as a second). That they thrived was in large part down to Jim Scouse.