Back Story

by David Mitchell

  Mum felt, and told me, that the school didn’t quite like the idea of a bright boy not coming from academic stock but from trade. She also, in rather more respectful language, made her feelings known to the headmaster. It’s interesting to note that this is a woman who, only four or five years earlier, seemed perfectly happy for another school to send me home covered in sick. But this suspicion of bias was enough to make her speak out. I don’t know if this was a sign of her growing confidence, her prioritising of the academic over the alimentary, or just inconsistency. I’ve never asked her. I suspect I will get an answer soon after publication.

  Anyway, she extorted an apology from Butch, delivered personally to me in a moment of acute embarrassment for both of us, and got him to concede that the prize was rightfully mine (although I didn’t actually receive it – nobody suggested that the winner should be stripped of it like an Olympic medallist after a drugs test). The following year I won it again – and the year after that. She’d made her point. Or perhaps she’d just terrified him.

  I don’t know if my mum was right about this bias. At the time, I accepted unquestioningly that she was. After all, I was being told it by the same person who had introduced me to the notion that it might not always be a good idea to shit in my trousers; looking to corroborate all facts when dealing with your parents can be a barrier to development in early childhood. Bias or not, it was unfair I hadn’t won, but was she right to speak out? Or should she have told me to accept the injustice as the way of the world, or reminded me that one boy’s academic attainment in a prep school didn’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world? (My mother talks exactly like Humphrey Bogart.) Whose sense of perspective was at fault – hers (and mine) at the time, or mine remembering years later and wishing she hadn’t said anything because the teachers must have thought I was a horrible, snotty little swot? And an unconnected one at that.

  I think I’m now glad she spoke out and explained her reasons to me. It gave me a small insight into how authority can be flawed and unjust – that the people in charge aren’t always right. I don’t want this to sound like a clip from The X Factor but, in order to succeed, you have to endure periods where the only support your ambitions receive is from your own self-belief. And your mum.

  But what the hell, it’s an unfortunate world. The majority of the vast population of Bangladesh live on a flood plain. It was good for me that, when I turned thirteen and strode out from New College School with as much confidence as I ever have about any new experience (i.e. not much), I was armed not only with a reasonable level of belief in my own intelligence and personality but also with the unsettling knowledge that life isn’t fair.

  - 15 -

  Teenage Thrills: First Love, and the Rotary Club Public Speaking Competition

  Down from Primrose Hill, parked on Regent’s Canal near London Zoo, teetering on the edge of the water, is a Chinese restaurant. On a boat. It’s one of the most inviting-looking restaurants I’ve ever seen: two storeys high and delicate, like an elaborate, claret-coloured imperial barge. It actually looks delicious. I’ve passed it many times, so the fact that I’ve never gone in must show how much I dislike Chinese food.

  Whenever a plan to eat out is in the offing, my priority is always to push fellow diners towards a venue where one of the many things I already know I like will be available – which means that my comparative unfamiliarity with Chinese, and for that matter Japanese, cuisine becomes self-perpetuating.

  I realise it’s not logical. If I’d never tried new things I’d still be eating rusks and goo. Somehow my food tastes have become acceptably broad and I’m grateful for that, even as I call a halt to further broadening. I’m glad I’m not one of those people who are genuinely intimidated by menus and are always trying to order something plain. They get silently sneered at for their fussiness – it’s considered unsophisticated.

  These people, I’m afraid, include those who suffer from ‘wheat intolerance’. I know there is such a thing, which can afflict even the sturdiest, most no-nonsense of souls and causes the consumption of foods containing wheat to bring on unpleasant symptoms that, while not at the same level as an allergic reaction, the sufferer would still want to do something about, such as stopping eating wheat, and that wouldn’t necessarily make them a tedious, attention-seeking wuss.

  However, I think the vast majority of people who cite the condition are tedious, attention-seeking wusses who mistake the normal symptoms of daily life – feeling sluggish after meals, tired in the morning, hungry before breakfast and generally not as though they want to leap around like someone in an advert – for there being something wrong with them. It’s not just wheat they’re intolerant of, it’s everything. They’re so dissatisfied with the sensation of being human, with the world’s constant assaults on the temples that are their bodies, that they’re now unwilling even to coexist with a grain.

  I sometimes think about this when I’m sitting on my special back-pain-reducing giant yoga ball. Basically, I’ve become chair intolerant. For me, the furniture equivalent of a wheat rejector, the long-established human way of sitting, handed down through the millennia, has been dispensed with in under a generation. Now we suddenly know better. Unlike all those stupid twats from the past who were wrong about everything. Those sexist, racist, homophobic idiots like Henry VIII, Vlad the Impaler, Hitler, Beethoven, Aristotle, Florence Nightingale and Julius Caesar. They didn’t understand human rights and the solar system, so why should we have any faith in their recipes or furniture designs? We’re so much wiser now, so let’s throw the eating bread and milk, using normal soap and sitting on proper chairs baby out with the stopping women from voting bathwater.

  That’s my problem with new-age stuff. In common with many irrational views it harks back to a sense of something ancient while rejecting anything provably historical. It’s like the miserable concept of Original Sin. There seems to be an obsession with the idea that there were ancient humans, uncorrupted by their capricious intellects, who lived in the ‘right way’.

  They didn’t eat too much dairy or any wheat. They didn’t sit down too long for their spines or walk around in posture-ruining shoes. They didn’t consume too many sugars or fats for their unblemished guts to digest, or pop painkilling and antibiotic tablets to deal with the short-term symptoms of long-term problems that should be dealt with by wholesale lifestyle change. They didn’t drink or smoke. They were perfect and we should sling out all our stuff and emulate them. Except they had an average life expectancy of about 18 and the planet could only support a few hundred thousand of them. Apart from that, good plan.

  But I am capable of sitting on a normal chair to have a meal. So nobody could call me fussy. I don’t insist on a ball. I won’t even mention it. To see me out dining, you’d never suspect I was anything other than a conventional, non-intolerant fellow. And the last thing I’d want to do is cock up this excellent semblance of normality by being fussy about my food. So, I avoid going to Chinese restaurants. I never know what everything is, what to order, how many of these things constitute a proper meal. I can just about cope with chopsticks but I’m not comfortable with them and I feel self-conscious. Yet I lack the social confidence to ask for a knife and fork.

  I know I should get a grip (metaphorically – a lighter grasp seems better with chopsticks) but the trouble is that I don’t tire readily enough of the dishes I already like to incentivise a search for new flavours. I would get bored if I had steak and chips for every meal. But I’m pretty sure that if I had it for one in four meals, I’d be fine. If it were one in ten, I’d be thrilled every time. Which means I only really need ten things I like in order not to be bored – and I’ve long since overshot that. So why would I go to restaurants with weird cutlery where they don’t serve any of them?

  The culinarily adventurous often deploy the phrase ‘You don’t know what you’re missing’ to try and persuade me – but I just think: ‘Well that’s all right then.’ Imagine if I’d never tried alcohol and d
idn’t know what I was missing there – well, that would be brilliant! I’d find other ways of avoiding boredom – read more, work harder, go to the theatre and cinema more often, and I wouldn’t have this expensive, health-jeopardising habit. I’m very glad I don’t know what I’m missing where cocaine’s concerned.

  I’m not saying Chinese food is a global scourge similar to alcohol and cocaine. But there was a terrible Chinese takeaway in Abingdon which once made me iller than either of them ever has. (To be fair, cocaine hasn’t really had a fair crack of the whip.) It left me with images of beansprouts and gloop, saccharine-tasting, psychedelic-coloured sauces clinging to gristly lumps of meat, of which Chinese restaurant food today, although better, still puts me in mind.

  The takeaway was near my new school. My awful new school. An avoidable takeaway was the least of my problems. Abingdon School was big – there were over a hundred boys in each year. It took me an hour to get there every day from Oxford, on two buses. And there was school on Saturday mornings.

  It had a paramilitary wing. And as well as the ‘Combined Cadet Force’, it pushed pupils towards the ‘Ten Tors Challenge’, an annual attempt by thousands of schoolchildren to die of exposure on Dartmoor; and, most unprepossessingly, the ‘Duke of Edinburgh’s Award’, which seemed to involve pretty much any kind of plucky unpleasantness you’d want to put yourself in for, but somehow with overtones of a posh man shouting at you – very much like the Spartan, self-improving education the Duke subjected his sons to at Gordonstoun.

  I wasn’t the cleverest any more. This was despite the fact that the boys from state primary schools (who arrived two years before those from private prep schools) had been warned by their teachers that we newcomers would be academically ahead of them.

  This was a public relations disaster as far as I was concerned. We were pre-stamped as snooty swots. There’s no doubt that, if people have told you that I’m a snooty swot and then you meet me, you’re going to think that it’s plausible. It’s like Jimmy Savile and child molestation – it rings true without being true. He in no way subverted people’s stereotypical image of a child molester, any more than I do their vision of a snooty swot. Whereas I imagine if someone like Thora Hird had turned her hand to molesting children, she’d probably have got a lot of it done before the finger of suspicion was pointed at her.

  Underlying all this was the extremely unsettling hormonal change of puberty. Thirteen is a very stupid age to make boys change schools.

  Abingdon School in the 1980s was trapped between its fears and aspirations, between jeopardy and hope. That’s the classic sitcom trait – it makes shows seem dynamic without the basic situation ever changing. Basil Fawlty is terrified of his hotel being closed down or going out of business and spends half his energy averting crises related to that. The other half is spent on scheming to escape his mediocre circumstances – to make the hotel posher, to be able to hobnob with the great and the good, to get rid of the riff-raff.

  Abingdon was in a similar bind. It was caught between its fears of being indistinguishable from the state sector and its aspiration to be as much like Eton, Harrow, Westminster and, most particularly, Radley, a nearby and much more expensive school, as possible.

  It was a genuinely old school. It had existed since at least 1563, at which point a man called John Roysse was known to have given it some money. That would make it an Elizabethan grammar school – like the one Shakespeare went to. Since the sixteenth century, it had moved sites and expanded in size and become a ‘direct grant’ school. The direct grant schools were independent schools which got a fair bit of state funding in exchange for charging lower fees and providing a wide range of bursaries. When the direct grant scheme was wound up in the mid 1970s, Abingdon decided to go fully private.

  Basically, the school was an honest place where a decent but unremarkable education had been provided for respectable townspeople for centuries. Abingdon’s headmaster wasn’t content with that. He’s the central comic character here except, if it really were a sitcom, you’d think they’d overdone it with the hair and make-up. He was a tall man with a large hooked nose, thick glasses and the most extreme comb-over I have ever seen anywhere, including Hamlet cigar adverts. He looked kind of magnificent but enormously daft. His name was Michael St John Parker, known to boys (in honour of his nose and authority) as ‘Beak’.

  Beak’s predecessor in the job, Eric Anderson, had gone on to be head of Shrewsbury and then Eton – so Abingdon seemed like a perfect springboard for high flying. Unfortunately, the next headmastership for Beak, of a richer swankier school, didn’t seem to come five years after he’d arrived, as it had for Anderson. Or ten years. By twelve years in, when I turned up, I think he’d begun to suspect he was there for the long haul. The boys’ theory was that, in the absence of the headship of a posh school, he was trying to make the one he was already head of as posh as possible.

  He often spoke of evidence of a school in Abingdon long before 1563, with links to Edmund of Abingdon, who was a thirteenth-century Archbishop of Canterbury and then a saint. Beak desperately wanted St Edmund to have gone to or founded the school, and he may have done. And he may not have done. But it really seemed to matter to Beak: in the absence of any Prime Ministers among the Old Abingdonians, someone who may be hobnobbing with the apostles in the next life is a pretty good substitute.

  The official foundation date of the school has since been adjusted by 300 years. I joined a 424-year-old institution, but now get letters from one that’s over 700. Boy, does that make me feel old.

  The boys, sons of the provincial middle class, had a normal old-fashioned snobbery about the local state schools. On the other hand, there was an even stronger inverse snobbery that led us to despise Radley. We played them at sport and desperately wanted to win but seldom did. Their money, it seemed, had made them physically better than us. Why do we play them, I always wondered, if it causes us such pain? These are their games – we’ll never win.

  The boys’ insecurity at losing was only intensified by the suspicion that Beak would rather have been headmaster of Radley. We felt like the dowdy wife of an ambitious man who nags us that we let him down and, when he takes us to parties, spends the whole time flirting with someone thinner.

  But maybe we were wrong. After all, he did co-write a history of the school, published in 1997, four years before he retired. So perhaps he came to love the place in the end. And perhaps he withstood an avalanche of offers from other schools. But I prefer to think of him as like Windsor Davies in Never the Twain, bitterly shaking his fist at supercilious Radley’s Donald Sinden.

  Of course, the social gap between Radley and Abingdon is far narrower than it used to be; the gulf now is between independent schools and any other sort. Over the last two decades, they’ve become, as a sector, vastly more expensive; fees have gone up way ahead of inflation. There is no way that two polytechnic lecturers like my parents could afford to send their sons to Abingdon nowadays. That’s always in my mind when I get newsletters from the school and am asked to lend my support – always very nicely and by charming, well-meaning people. But I can’t escape the thought that this place isn’t for the likes of me any more. Independent schools have never served the majority of society, but, in a generation, they’ve gone from being within the financial reach of perhaps 20 per cent of the population to well under 10.

  I started to enjoy Abingdon more when I was about fifteen. It had a debating society. I loved the way the motions were expressed as ‘This House’ would do such and such – withdraw from the EEC, become vegetarian, institute communism, ban immigration, make Morrissey king, abolish the monarchy, etc. It sounded so parliamentary. The boys who were good at debating seemed popular while also being a bit swotty – I was heartened that such a combination was allowed.

  So, nervously, falteringly, I started to get involved. At first, I was intimidated. Then the society went through a really bad patch of pointless, childish, ill-attended debates: I was in my element. My de
bating technique was entirely based on raising as many laughs as I could in the hope that this would then make people vote for whichever side of the motion I was advocating. It completely worked – and it was immediately obvious to me that I didn’t really care about winning the argument. It was the laughter that made me feel good.

  By the Fifth Form, I was enough of a debating regular to be chosen to represent the school in the Rotary Club Public Speaking Competition alongside Daniel Seward, one of the state primary boys who was already at Abingdon when I arrived but whom I managed to befriend across this great cultural divide, and Leo Carey, a friend from Form VI at NCS. I’m pleased to be able to say that I’m still good friends with both of them. Daniel is now a Catholic priest and Leo is an editor at the New Yorker. With hindsight, we were quite an interesting team. Without it, we were three spotty nerds.

  Most of the teams in the Rotary Club Public Speaking Competition were dire: three girls from a convent school primly reading out something worthy about the environment, or three chippy lads from a local comprehensive explaining their interest in the guitar, while the Rotarians fatly glazed over. In contrast, we were very slightly amusing. Not so as to be entertaining in any other context but, like a donkey’s fart in a vacuum, we were the nearest thing the judges got to a breath of fresh air. We took part three times and we always won. This gave me something to feel good about and focus on other than academic work, now that I was no longer the cleverest. It was a setting that gave me the confidence to be the centre of attention.