LIFE’s itineraries unfurl in apparently wanton ways, but so many you can trace back to school. If vital interventions at key moments are what change lives, I’ve ended up the Pope’s biographer because of Mike Margrett, writes Austen Ivereigh.

He taught me Spanish at Worth School in West Sussex back in the late 1970s and early 1980s. But more importantly, he bestowed attention on an angrily troubled kid, and offered him a way out. 

To this day I can recall something Margrett told my parents on one of those excruciating “open days”, held each year, when you toured the school with your progenitors, moving from table to table to hear from each of your teachers a report on your progress or lack of it.

Adding to the stress in my case was a constant fear that the hostility between my energetically divorced parents would spill out into open warfare.