Paul Harrison 1953-2022

I think of Paul, who taught English at Sevenoaks from 1979 until his retirement in 2017, walking towards the station, briefcase, rolled umbrella; that particular smile as he asks a gentle, courteous question; the surprising – no, wholly unsurprising – width of his knowledge: and realise how much the school and his friends owe him, someone who shared so generously of his intellect, humour and kindness. Recalling his time in prelapsarian Kabul, writing of India, talking of the garden at Magdalene, his enthusiasm enveloped one. With the arts also: never conservative in his taste he was nonetheless more an admirer of Borromini than Bauhaus, a reason why at Cambridge, and to the immense benefit of so many future pupils, he switched from Architecture to English Literature. He enjoyed others’ views and interests: you might mention a lesser Edwardian novelist – J Meade Falkner for instance – and he would light up and say he’d just seen a copy in Hall’s Bookshop. To the end he remained open to new pleasures: Fauré’s chamber music or an unfulfilled wish to see the Cambridge exhibition of the treasures of ancient Uzbekistan.

Besides his learning, the backdrop to his life was his family and the lovely flat in Tunbridge Wells that it delighted him to tell you was where Thackeray’s sister had stayed. The elegant bookshelves lining the
corridor he built himself. But sustaining him, especially in his illness, were his wife Louisa and son Thomas: their importance for him would be hard to exaggerate and they were indeed fortunate in each other.

As a teacher he ranged from The Tale of Genji to The Winter’s Tale, a play ‘reserved for especially privileged classes’. He liked to quote Thomas Mann, ‘Only the exhaustive can be truly interesting’ – and it is a rare teacher able to embrace both. Education, teaching, were about opening windows to those things that really matter. As he wrote to me: ‘I’ve always been grateful for attending a school where art and music were taken as seriously as anything else: I remember (one of those “spots of time”) listening to some pieces of Debussy piano music one sunny morning in a Sixth Form class, thinking to myself, “Life can get no better than this: whatever unpleasantnesses may be in the world, this will be there too.”’ As on so many things, how right Paul was.

John Guyatt, Undermaster 1990-2003