When the child was eighteen months old the family moved to Ewell, on the southwest fringe of London. Frayn says: "Everyone puts down the suburbs but they're very pleasant places to live. It's quite amazing how little they've changed in 40 years. They should be taken more seriously." He attended what he describes as "a dreadful private day school at Sutton, where the headmaster used to cane about 20 boys every morning after prayers." He went on to Kingston Grammar School, which he found "merely rather dull and shabby, an imposing brick facade disguising an awful lot of corrugated iron."
He left with a State Scholarship to Emmanuel College, Cambridge, but first had to do his two years of national service, from 1952 to 1954. Starting out in the Royal Artillery, he was recruited to learn Russian--fourteen hours a day for eighteen months, billeted in villages near Cambridge. Instructors reminded him: "At any time, any time, you may be parachuted behind the Russian lines. You do understand that"" In his first year at Cambridge he read Russian and French, but found that though "he got on well with the language, when it came to the literature he couldn't see for the life of him what to write down." For his remaining two years, he changed to moral sciences (the department name has since been changed to the more usual philosophy).
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