Free Nick Drake by Patrick Humphries

work ofanother of Sartre’s contemporaries, Albert Camus. Camus, who died at the age of forty-seven in a car crash in 1960, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, having become a landmark figure for a generation of disaffected young people with classic novels of alienation like
The Outsider (L’Etranger).
His
The Myth Of Sisyphus
was the last book Nick would read before his death.
    The end of Nick Drake’s education at Marlborough came in July 1966. He had switched from History and Classics to study English rather late in the day, but it seemed to suit him much better. He continued to play a full and robust part in the life of the school, at the same time as pursuing his own extracurricular interests, and this was recognized when he was made Captain of his House. His final months at Marlborough were also marked by distinction on the athletics track, when he had the honour of competing in the Wiltshire Junior Athletics Championship. Nick’s housemaster wrote about him at the time: ‘a most talented athlete, who was never really deeply interested in breaking records which were well within his grasp. He is probably one of the best sprinters we have had at Marlborough since the war, and yet he would much more often than not be found reading when he should have been training.’
    Throughout his years at Marlborough, Nick had enjoyed the pubs of the nearby town. The local beer, Wadworth’s from nearby Devizes, was a potent brew, and frequently Nick and Jeremy Mason, David Wright, Simon Crocker and Michael Maclaran would sneak off to the Bell in nearby Ramsbury, or pubs in Marlborough like the Cricketers or the Lamb, to drink beer, smoke cigarettes and put the world to rights. But none of Nick’s friends or acquaintances from school remembers any evidence of drugs during their time there. David Wright: ‘I don’t ever remember any dope at Marlborough, but interestingly enough, I was chatting to a friend who was there the year after Nick and I left, which would be 1967, and it was around then.’
    In his final term Nick took A-level exams again. He had sat some the previous year, but the results had been disappointing. This time around he brought his tally of passes up to four – History, English, Latin Translation with Roman History, British Constitution – and managed to improve his grade in English to a B, making a university place likely. The Marlborough College Register lists ex-pupil N.R. Drake simply as ‘a guitarist, and composer of folk music for the guitar’.
    In recommending Nick for a university place, Dennis Silk displayed an obvious fondness for him while suggesting that he had yet to achieve his full potential: ‘Nicholas Drake is a boy who has taken a long time to mature scholastically. His IQ, measured when he first came to the school, was high enough to make us hope for a much more dynamic approach than he showed for several years. One always felt there were possibilities here and yet he seemed incapable of producing it …
    â€˜He is essentially a rather dreamy, artistic type of boy, very quiet, verging almost to the side of shyness. He loves English and this last year had a timetable especially prepared for him, by which he was able to spend a lot of time reading by himself. His whole written fluency developed enormously and people who had written him off were forced to eat their words …
    â€˜He was someone who everybody liked enormously here, despite his reticence and the difficulty of getting to know him well … In conclusion I would say that he is a genuine late developer who is only now growing into his academic potential. For a long time we have despaired of him but now I genuinely feel that given a chance to read English at the university he would prove a great success and in more spheres than the purely academic one. He could give a lot to the community as well as getting a lot. He is a most delightful person to deal