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Me and my school photo: Horror writer James Herbert, OBE, remembers east London markets and being bad at maths
By Yvonne Swann Mail online 29 June 2012
Writer James Herbert pictured in his old school days in Highgate
This is me aged 12 at St Aloysius Grammar School in Highgate – not the happiest of places for me. I grew up with my two older brothers – Peter and John – in London’s East End.
My father, a market trader, was called Herbert Herbert. No, I’m not joking – using your surname as a Christian name too was quite usual in the East End. Everyone knew him as Herbie.
We were always financially in trouble and lived hand-to-mouth. Rats ran in the alleyways and over the bomb sites around us – scenes that inspired my imagination and early gift for telling dark tales to my friends.
Columbia Road nursery was my first school. It’s a flower market now and the Guinness Trust building where I was born is still standing. From there I went to a Catholic-run school in Bethnal Green called Our Lady of the Assumption.
I liked it there, but my brother Peter was always playing truant and the Reverend Mother hated him. He was a bit of a lad, whereas I got away with things because I worked hard and I made people laugh. I was a skinny little kid but I never got bullied. In recent years former schoolmates have told me that was because I always had ‘
I was best at English. Maths bewildered me. Luckily my best friend couldn’t do English but he was good at maths, so I copied his calculations and he copied essays I wrote for him. Those were happy days until I passed my 11-plus and got a scholarship to St Aloysius.
At that time we lived in Whitechapel and I used to queue up every morning with the factory workers waiting for the bus to Highgate, and as I was always shoved to the back of the queue, I got the cane every week for turning up late.
One morning it was pouring with rain and my smart new uniform got soaked. Someone must have seen this because the next morning there was a knock on the door and a stranger handed my mother an old raincoat. I never forgot the kindness.
Author James Herbert as he is now
At St Aloysius the maths master was a drunken Irishman. I can only describe him as an utter swine.
He used to terrorise me, and once when I gave the right answer – one-twelfth – to a question, but pronounced it ‘one-twelf’ in my East End way, he humiliated me in front of the class, making every single one of the 32 children say it correctly and forcing me to copy them.
By the time I was 13 I knew what I was going to do – art. I left school at 15 and went to Hornsey College of Art.
A year after I left a friend of mine, Dennis Barker, told me he’d just got a job in an ad agency and had another interview lined up that he wouldn’t be needing.
He told me to go along, so I went – as Dennis Barker – and got the job in a small agency, John Collings, in the art department.
After two years I joined a company called Charles Barker and I never looked back. I became an art director in my twenties – and then the novels took over and I started the more solitary life of a writer.
James’s new book, Ash, will be published by Macmillan on 30 August.
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