The Nobel Laureate in Literature for 1983 William Golding (1911-1993) was born in Cornwall, and educated first at Marlborough and then Oxford. His first job after graduating from university, however, just before the Second World War in 1938 was as an English and Music Teacher at Maidstone Grammar School. The School had relocated from its original site to a new one a decade before he arrived. His time at the school was brief and ended with him first moving to another school in Worcester and then joining the Royal Navy to serve during the war in 1940. Even so, the fact that he married a local of Maidstone in the Register Office in the town during his time there meant it left a lasting mark on his life.
Golding is a writer better remembered today for novels of almost stark moral austerity. `The Lord of the Flies’ (1954) is the best know through being filmed, and placed on examination syllabuses for many years. But `The Spire’ (1964) about an almost obsessive desire by a cleric to build the great Salisbury cathedral, and `Pincher Martin’ (1956) telling the story of a man stranded on an island are both centrally concerned with humans wrestling with extremes spiritual or material crisis). His career as a somewhat chaotic schoolmaster both in Maidstone, and later after the war in Salisbury, seems to sit a little oddly with the almost prophetic reputation he gained later in his life.
Golding had gone to Maidstone being pursued by his old college at Oxford for debts (a matter that was not resolved till the mid-1950s). He was penurious enough to lodge in council supplied housing along 53 Hastings Road in the town (an address to which one of the letters pursuing his college debts came). As for his teaching, it seems to have been more for his music ability (for which he had a piano qualification) than English that he was employed. While at the school, he took part in performances of Snow White, and Shakespeare’s `Julius Caesar’ and even conducted the choir in a performance of a work he had arranged for the Christmas concert.
While already involved with someone else (a woman called Molly), on a visit to London in mid-1939 he met Ann Brookfield. She was, fortuitously, from the town he happened to be living at that time. As his biographer, John Carey remarked, `In social terms [Ann] was a cut above Golding… which may have made her more desirable… The Brookfield family owned a high-class grocery shop, Ibberson and Wood, in Lower Stone Street, Maidstone, and were well known in the town’ (John Carey, `William Golding: The Man Who Wrote the Lord of the Flies’, Faber and Faber, London, 2009). A year before meeting Golding however her father had died of cancer, and her brother had been killed in Spain, fighting as part of the International Brigade as part of the Spanish Civil War. Despite doing well at school she had not gone on to university. At the time of her marriage, she was working in the nearby Reeds paper mill in Aylesford as an analytic chemist. Somewhat surprisingly for a family in business in a place as staunchly Conservative as Maidstone, the Brookfields were renowned for their Communist sympathies. Despite Ann too also being embroiled with someone else, she broke off her engagement. The two were married on the 30 September 1938, and remained together for the rest of his life (54 years).
Golding left Maidstone after being sacked from his position, though it is unclear why. Quoting Golding himself, Carey states that it was `an unacademic combination of drink, women and politics.’ The writer was as left wing as his new wife, and vocal about his sympathies. People at the school at the time remember him as `sociable, gregarious, active, energetic, often at the centre of a knot of interested schoolboys.’ He was also remembered for wearing trousers with holes patched up on them.