Adil Jussawalla, poet and archivist extraordinaire, told me about how he had first heard of Dom Moraes in the 1950s, when both were at scho...
Adil Jussawalla, poet and archivist extraordinaire, told me about how he had first heard of Dom Moraes in the 1950s, when both were at school, Adil at Cathedral & John Connon and Dom at St Mary’s, a Jesuit institution.
“I had a friend who had also been to St Mary’s who told me about this prodigy whose essays were legendary,” Jussawalla said.
I thought about this when I saw a certificate Dom had won at St Mary’s (Cambridge Section) on 1 December 1951. It was for the “The English Essay Prize”. Only the certificate was for a scholarship; the word “scholarship” had been scored out and The English Essay Prize inserted in its place.
That was what The Cambridge Section of St Mary’s was like; that was what the city was like; that was what the country was like. It was a time of making do. And so both young men of promise left and went to England to study. They had very different experiences there with very different results.
In 1959, Dom Moraes would come back to the city of his birth to write about it and about India.
He was by now a certified prodigy; he had won the Hawthornden Prize...
