Stand Before Your God: A Boarding-School Memoir

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At the age of seven, Paul Watkins was roughly transplanted from his home in Rhode Island to England's Dragon School. He was greeted by a delegation of bullies who, in time, would become his friends and whose rules would become his own. For at Dragon, and later at Eton, "there was no middle ground. You could not go here and come out not caring one way or the other. You had to stand before your God and commit."

In this enthralling and sometimes ...
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Overview

At the age of seven, Paul Watkins was roughly transplanted from his home in Rhode Island to England's Dragon School. He was greeted by a delegation of bullies who, in time, would become his friends and whose rules would become his own. For at Dragon, and later at Eton, "there was no middle ground. You could not go here and come out not caring one way or the other. You had to stand before your God and commit."

In this enthralling and sometimes harrowing memoir, the acclaimed author of The Promise of Light gives us a masterly companion to such classics as Brideshead Revisited and A Separate Peace. Here are the masters who paddle boys for small infractions and then offer them sweets; the seniors who pamper pretty favorites and subject all others to humiliating servitude; the deep friendships and sudden, devastating betrayals. Above all, here is the exhilaration of a boy discovering own capacities for learning and creativity, in a book that conveys with astonishing insight the pangs of growing up.
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Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly
``I grew up in jolts, from one suddenly realized thing to another,'' writes Watkins, whose first novel, Night Over Day Over Night , was nominated for the Booker Prize. In this first nonfiction work, he applies his generous, fully controlled prose to an examination of his not-so-distant boyhood and the sources of his calling. American-born of Welsh ancestry, Watkins was sent at the age of seven to the Dragon School, an English boarding school, where he would prepare for his later entrance to Eton. His moving, unsentimental narrative captures his responses to being separated from his family and thrust into another country and, simultaneously, his feelings of becoming an alien in his own land, which he visited on vacations. Recollections of loneliness and schoolboy cruelties blend with memories of his Rhode Island home, time spent with his family and his awareness that his father was dying. Yet Watkins credits the rigors of English schooling with prompting him to ``chisel out an hour here and there . . . setting sail in the great full-sail schooner of my dreams.'' (Mar.)
Library Journal
Watkins, the promising young American author of such novels as Promise of Light ( LJ 12/92) and In the Blue Light of African Dreams ( LJ 8/90), spent a privileged if difficult boyhood and adolescence in English boarding schools. In this illuminating account he tells of his introduction, at the age of seven, to The Dragon School, where constant pranks, shifting alliances, and seemingly ludicrous rules of conduct served to prepare him for his later years at Eton. Never fully accepted by his British peers--``the English were too good at spotting intruders''--and finding himself out of sync with his American friends during holidays and summers at home in Rhode Island, Watkins by necessity became self-sufficient. The author's reminiscences of school life are fascinating, but his accounts of the seminal experiences that compelled him to begin writing are even better. Highly recommended wherever Watkins's novels circulate.-- Mark Annichiarico, ``Li brary Journal''
School Library Journal
YA-When he was six years old, Paul Watkins's Welsh-born parents, who resided in America, dressed him up and delivered him at the imposing building outside Oxford. He soon realized, as his father left, that he would be here for far more than a few hours. ``Here'' was the Dragon School, a boarding school in the English countryside, and Paul was to study there for about six years, before entering another bastion of British public education, Eton. With humor and pathos, the young ``Yank'' from Providence tells of the years that molded him. He does not seek sympathy, for much of what he gained in independence and self-knowledge is a direct result of his schooling, but he shares with readers his sense of isolation and lack of identification with either of his national backgrounds. The boyish pranks and disasters as well as the triumphs in this privileged atmosphere contrast with his vacations at a Welsh farm with paternal relations or at home in Providence. He finds that writing gives him a ``place'' to belong and is his safety valve. His stories flow from his sense of ``search[ing] for a homeland, to be worthy of it and to be accepted, even to have a homeland at all.'' This book will appeal to YAs because of its immediately identifiable feelings and the universal themes of growing and finding one's niche.-Susan H. Woodcock, King's Park Library, Burke, VA
Gilbert Taylor
Mention the English all-boys school and traditionally hoary props materialize, such as awful food, silly rules, snotty aristocratic classmates, and furtive buggery. Rather than chipping at these stereotypes, Watkins builds on them to embed into the universal artifice of growing up his personal education at two schools, Dragon and Eton. In his case, Watkins can look back with some formative, yet wistful satisfaction, for at age 29 he has written four novels, one bad but three of them good like "The Promise of Light". He alludes to his initial stirrings to write, but his main subject is his friends, the making and losing of them. When one pal (nicknamed Cuddlybum) asks to inspect the willy of Watkins (nicknamed Watty Dog), Watkins responds with a knife to the throat, thus clarifying his position on the matter. Such maturation by "jolts" marks his experience, jolts represented by his father's death, a melancholy visit to World War I's Western Front, or an aborted trip to London's brothels with snooty mate Rupert. This memoir should keep Watkins' readers at bay pending his return to fiction, a field in which he excels rather better than here.
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Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780679420569
  • Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
  • Publication date: 2/15/1994
  • Edition description: 1st U.S. ed
  • Pages: 240

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