I was born on 23rd Dec. 1947 in Shanklin, Isle of Wight, England to Marjorie and Dennis Cooper. I was there until I was five when we spent at year in Carnduff, Saskatchewan, Canada. The idea was that my father, a teacher, would teach his way round the world, but the adventure finished after a year when we returned to England, first in Manchester (my mother's hometown) for a year and then to Bognor Regis in West Sussex. There I attended the local grammar school which, when I joined, was just in its second year and therefore only had two years of students. It was a formative experience to attend a school in which one was among the senior students from the beginning. We got to do everything from the start: act in the plays, sing in the choir, play in the orchestra and also play a role in the formation and organization of the school. Looking back, I think already from the age of 11 I got a taste of what was involved in creating a good collegial working environment. This was the late fifties and early sixties and it felt like new and revolutionary ideas that students should be listened to and could contribute to building the school. And I benifited a great deal from the kind of individual attention you get from teachers who only have a small number of students to deal with. Unfortunately, a few years after I left, Bognor Regis Grammar School was folded into a comprehensive school together with the nearby secondary modern school and our headmaster was moved to another school in another town. The optimism and idealism that had gone into the formation of the grammar school was wasted in the end -- except for the lasting influence that it had on those of us who had been lucky enough to be there at just the right time.
When I went for my interview for an undergraduate place at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge I enthused about the advantages I had gained from attending Bognor Regis Grammar School in its early days, little thinking that my interviewers might be underwhelmed when comparing my background with that of candidates from well-known schools with a long and distinguished history. This notwithstanding, I was offered a place to read Modern and Medieval Languages (German and Russian). The choice that I should read modern languages had been made three years before when it came time to decide which A-levels I should take. I was very interested and physics and mathematics and cherished for a while the idea of becoming what was then known as an "atomic physicist". However, I was also interested in languages and my exam results there were better so I was advised to go the languages route, which, given the way that British education worked back then, meant that I studied for two A-levels (German and Russian). (I also did music A-level, but my study for that was outside of school.) This meant that, at about 16, I stopped doing everything else and just concentrated on this (with a little French and slightly more Latin, which was needed for the Cambridge entrance exams back then). Soon after my arrival in Cambridge, I discovered that academic literary criticism was not my thing.