by Nick Webb
There has been research that suggests that fathers are important to a child’s development of self-esteem. According to these theories, even if the relationship between mother and father is like something out of Strindberg on a bleak day, just having a dad around is good news. This is contentious work, however, and particularly irritating to those for whom the idea that children are resilient is a key component in an ideology that grants a licence to adults to look for happiness where they fancy. In Douglas’s case, his father was around, and available—albeit ten miles up the road with a new family in a different universe.
In Douglas’s archives there is a complete run of Aston Martin magazines that Douglas either collected at the time or inherited from his father. There’s also a black and white photograph of Christopher Adams putting petrol into the unmistakeably elegant flank of a DB5. Douglas must have been playing with an enlarger and some photographic paper, for this image has been printed—sometimes cropped in a slightly different way—again and again and again.
Douglas Adams did not go through life scarred by his childhood. He was fond of his extended, albeit unusual family, and he adored his mum. Yet, sometimes, in later life, he was assailed by profound bouts of insecurity, and he could sink into a kind of dark, inner emptiness for days. He could be quite childlike and mawkishly self-absorbed, but then that is not uncommon with writers whose solitary art can be lonely, especially if they are, like Douglas, people who need company.
To some extent the public Douglas, the wildly creative jolly green giant, was a mask. But in a sense we all play the role of ourselves in the world, so any word that suggests something to be put on and taken off at will is quite the wrong one. Man and mask are inextricably melded together. As a child, Douglas lived a great deal in his head. Fortunately for the rest of us, that turned out a wonderful place to be.
Emotionally, Douglas was as large as his giant frame, and he made correspondingly huge demands on those close to him. Sometimes he wept, a gift lost to many men, and sometimes he displayed the emotional intelligence of a refractory brick on a not particularly sensitive day. But most of the time he was the inventive, funny, extravagant lunk who inspired such affection in those around him. And if there were some psychological itch that he could never quite scratch, the world should be grateful, because it made up part of his genius.
Publishers know that writers with a lot of craft can be counted on to deliver a competent book, but the best books, the ones that shimmer on the page, grow like pearls from some internal irritant. Douglas Adams would always have been clever and funny, but it’s doubtful that he would have given the world so much if Mum and Dad had been a happily married nurse and teacher living lives of stodgy contentment in deepest Essex.
Zaphod couldn’t sleep. He also wished he knew what it was that he wouldn’t let himself think about. For as long as he could remember, he’d suffered from a vague nagging feeling of not being all there. Most of the time he was able to put this thought aside and not worry about it [ . . . ] Somehow it seemed to conform to a pattern that he couldn’t see . . .
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Chapter 14
All writers put themselves into their work—how could they not?
TWO
Finishing School
“I was at Brentwood School for twelve whole years. And they were, by and large, in an up and downy kind of way, pretty good years: fairly happy, reasonably leafy, a bit sportier than I was in the mood for at the time, but full of good (and sometimes highly eccentric) teaching. In fact, it was only later that I gradually came to realize how well I had been taught at Brentwood: particularly in English, and particularly in Physics. (Odd that.)”
DOUGLAS ADAMS, The Best of Days?
Memories of Brentwood School* 36
All boys’ schools seem to have their own dire song. Some have verses that have to be destroyed by controlled explosion. Decades after leaving, the alumni can only bring themselves to sing the words after much forehead-smiting and six pints of beer. Brentwood School has a fine example of the genre called “The Old Red Wall,” a reference to the handsome brick wall that contains the grounds; it’s a truly gruesome mix of cruelty and sentiment.
According to the song, the institution was founded in the mid-sixteenth century following a spasm of guilt over the public burning to death of an innocent lad. Despite these inauspicious beginnings, the lyrics assure us that there is no question so vexed that it cannot be settled with a good chat by the stove for “why we conquered and how we strove/They tell of it still by the old school stove.” Brentwood was endowed in 1558 by Sir Anthony Browne, a clever time-serving career lawyer, part-time land speculator and an early prototype of Essex Man. 37* It was a grammar school in which a boy could learn Latin all day and be beaten for mistaking a declension. He could also be expelled for syphilis or lunacy. There was no namby-pamby counselling in those days.
These days, however, Brentwood includes girls among its 1,500 pupils. The school stands in seventy-two acres of its own grounds with an appealing miscellany of buildings, from eighteenth century to modern. The facilities are by any standard—and especially those that prevail in the State sector—excellent. It even boasts that essential accessory, ghosts. Countless Tasker, who lived in Middleton Hall until the turn of the nineteenth century, left that handsome building as a legacy to Brentwood and it now houses the Preparatory School. It is said she occasionally makes a visit, and in her posthumous incarnation she is known as the Blue Lady.
Brentwood School was perhaps the only cliché of Douglas’s life. He attended for twelve years, having started at the prep school. His mother recalls that he loved it. When she told him, five years after her divorce from Douglas’s father, that she was remarrying, he burst into tears because he thought he might have to leave school. He magically cheered up when told he would be staying.
Brentwood gave him a fine formal education and a grounding in all the odd social and moral apparatus of an English public school. It boasted Praeposters (up-market prefects), a house system (Douglas was in School House), an improving motto (“Virtue, Learning, Manners”), mud, cold showers, rugby, and innumerable societies. Above all, it kept the forces of change at bay and frowned upon tawdry competitiveness—while encouraging it in matters of personal merit and team spirit—by endless regulations.
A host of rules defined the school uniform. Even today school uniforms are the last refuge of the visually illiterate. Perhaps the roadkill ties and staphylococcus yellow and bruise-purple blazers are thought to discourage vanity, but the worst of contemporary designs are as nothing to the prickly horrors we wore in the fifties. They seemed to have been woven out of cardboard and gravel. Douglas and his fellows were lucky inasmuch as the uniform was designed by one of their famous old boys, Sir Hardy Amies, the couturier to the Queen, who devised an elegant grey check—albeit surmounted by an absurd straw boater for especially embarrassing occasions. Nevertheless the blazer was woven, or perhaps constructed, from intensely scratchy material. Can worsted really be derived from sheep? Or are there herds of wild worsteds with hides of steel wool that evolved to repel the predators of the plains?
One of these regulations obliged Douglas to wear shorts at prep school. To his horror, when he graduated to the main school, the shop had no long trousers with a sufficient length of leg to fit him. For a whole month at the age of twelve he had to wear shorts, despite towering over his contemporaries and most of the masters. It is a fact clear to all schoolboys that to carry on wearing shorts after the age of twelve indicates some profound psycho-sexual confusion or, worse, a tragic yearning to become a scout-master. Douglas describes it as so mortifying that for four weeks he played on the edge of station platforms and forgot the Highway Code when crossing roads.* 38 All his life he was rather clumsy, and at school his uncontainable arms and legs, pumping gallantly but to little effect, made the role of sporting hero impossible. (Most large men know—pace American footballers—that well-knit, compact blokes tend to be much better
sportsmen than ill-coordinated giants. Alas, they are usually tougher too, as large males, offending merely by an accident of size, sometimes discover in rough pubs.)
In Douglas’s day Brentwood was—and probably still is—a very good school in a fee-paying, curriculum-heavy, sport, values, and nicknames sort of way. Is there anywhere outside an English public school or a P.G. Wodehouse novel where so many soppy nicknames are still to be found? Where else can you meet “Squiffy” and “Bunny” and “Spud”? Brentwood teachers included—inter alia—“Tusky” and “Funf.” Such schools, especially for boarders, create an entire world, safely equipped with rules, regulations and the society of peers in the same boat. If the regime is basically fair-minded—as it was in the 1960s under the headmastership of Richard Sale—such worlds can have huge appeal to their inmates. Douglas was a boarder from the age of eleven. Beyond that Old Red Wall lay uncertainty.
For its size, Brentwood has produced a good crop of old boy high-achievers: several bishops, a Home-then-Foreign Secretary (Jack Straw), Robin Day, who broke the mould of abject deference when interviewing shifty politicians on TV, Noel Edmonds, Griff Rhys Jones, some superior journos (Peter Stothard and Brian MacArthur for instance) and a fair sprinkling of senior lawyers, scientists and military men. The teaching itself was very competent. The older teachers were drawn largely from a generation when the Depression drove a lot of people with first-class minds into the profession, and the younger staff were often men with good degrees and a sense of vocation.
Douglas attended Brentwood for twelve years in all. It wasn’t his very first school. That honour goes to Mrs. Potter’s Primrose Hill Primary in Brentwood town. At six he took the exams and had the interview for Brentwood’s prep school. Middleton Hall was not just a machine, like a foie gras factory, for stuffing little boys with enough academic learning to cope with promotion to the senior school. It had traditions of its own, lovingly maintained by generations of formidable headmasters. Jack Higgs was the legendary head whose philosophy of character development lived on there. He maintained that it was a school’s duty to turn out pupils who were not only adequately briefed with knowledge but who were “honest, kind and useful.”* 39
It was while Douglas was still in the prep school that Frank Halford awarded him the legendary ten out of ten for a story. Frank Halford, by then Deputy Head, retired from Brentwood in 1991, and he is still remembered with great affection. In his piece in The Best of Days? he records his pleasure that this perfect mark later became such a morale-booster to Douglas when the muse was being capricious. Years later, in 1992, Mr. Halford met Douglas again at a speech day celebrating the centenary of the founding of the prep school, and he also attended the secular but nevertheless touching version of a christening for little Polly Adams.* 40
When Douglas moved up to Middle School, his housemaster was Micky Hall, referred to, naturally, by all students as Henry. Assiduous digging through the well-produced school magazine* 41 reveals that for some years Douglas excelled at being tall, but took little part (or at least not prominent enough to be mentioned) in the many extracurricular activities. In 1964, however, he participated in the Sir William Wynne-Finch Award in “A” camp. It was some kind of privately sponsored version of the Duke of Edinburgh Awards, for it featured orienteering, pitching a bell tent, coastguard training, map reading and various other chunky, practical skills. It conjures up a vision of freezing wet boys, soggy canvas snapping in the wind, and burnt food floating in cold water.
When he was ten, Douglas heard Hank Marvin and the Shadows, and was entranced. His mother recalls that he wanted Hank to come down to Essex and play on Douglas’s birthday, and was bemused when she said it wasn’t possible. “But, Mum, it is possible,” he said. He knew his geography and could see no physical impediment. “There’s even a plug.” It was the start of his intense love of music. His enthusiasm for the Beatles went almost beyond passion; he was totally besotted. In 1964, Douglas was given his first left-handed guitar, and he taught himself to play it by studying the finger-picking styles of guitar heroes and by practising relentlessly. For the piano he had more formal training, and he shared a teacher with Paul Wickens—aka “Wix”—who was supremely talented and went on to become the keyboard player in Paul McCartney’s band. Later Wix was to play an important role in Douglas’s passion for music as an adult. “Wix and I were both taught music,” he said, “but in his case it worked.”
Douglas was actually a proficient left-handed guitar player, but his standards in music were as demanding as his standards in writing and he knew that his playing would never catch fire in the way he so admired in great musicians. All his life a streak of perfectionism ran through Douglas like quicksilver, both a boon and a torment.
He was also in the choir, singing like an angel until his voice broke, and he remained an assistant in the chapel, towering over the other choristers. Rather incongruously for one destined to become a militant atheist, he won a Service in Chapel Prize in 1966.
The Beatles, however, were his first love. Douglas used to tell a story of bunking off school on Friday 20 March 1964, to sneak into town to buy “Can’t Buy Me Love” from Radiogram in the High Street. He fell over and badly cut his knees on the way back, though he pointed out that knees are self-repairing whereas self-repairing textiles are still decades off. Lacking his own record player, he snuck into Matron’s office and managed to play the record three times, bleeding profusely, before being caught, bandaged and slippered.
Such was his passion for the Beatles that the only time anybody can recall Douglas using his awesome bulk for intimidation was when he learned that another boy had heard the latest Beatles single, and insisted that he hum it. In The Salmon of Doubt, Douglas is quoted as saying the song was “Penny Lane” from the Magical Mystery Tour, so it must have been 1967. He added: “People now ask if Oasis is as good as the Beatles. I don’t think they’re as good as the Rutles.” For Beatles fanatics who would like to compare judgements, there is an appendix listing his favourite Beatles’ tracks in order of preference in the form of an elaborate document devised by Richard Curtis and others on 25 May 1999.* 42
In fact Douglas seems to have been a gentle boy, and well enough liked if sometimes a little lonely. His mother recalls that he had a good friend called Steven Prosser, whose surname he appropriated for the jobsworth character from the local authority whose plans to knock down Arthur Dent’s house for a bypass were frustrated by the end of the world.
The question of Douglas’s great height is easily over-egged. We’re all aware of our bodies and conscious of how conspicuous, attractive or grotty we appear to others. In a closed order like a school he must have been aware of it all the time. When you are over six foot tall at twelve with legs like a wading bird, and you blush easily, it is hard to hide in assembly. Looming over masters, not fitting easily into uniform, or beds, or desks, or team games, tolerating the incontinent trickle of schoolboy humour (“Meet me under the Adams”)—all would contrive a feeling of difference that must have contributed to his sense of looking at the world from an unusual angle.
The first documentary evidence of Douglas’s time at Brentwood was in a sixth-form debate. The motion was that “This House should shave its head.” Skinheads did not grace the streets until the seventies, so this was more of a contemporary allusion to the long-hair moral panic (druggy threat to the social fabric) than the later short-hair moral panic (brutal, druggy threat to the social fabric). Using a remarkably sophisticated idea for a schoolboy, Douglas proposed the motion. The argument went like this: let’s invent a character, Johnny the Happy Skin, whose bonce looks exactly like everybody else’s. How can he express his individuality? Not through follicular fashion, clearly—only by his life and work. Axiomatically this is a Good Thing. Motion carried.
In the course of that debate Douglas did also commit in public a terrible pun that would have had all those smart public schoolboys groaning. Johnny the Happy Skin, he observed, is part of the “aggrocultura
l revolution.” Hold my aching sides. But even as a schoolboy, he could write with considerable wit. Sue Adams, a county away in her boarding school in Felixstowe, recalls that Douglas would write to her regularly, and that his letters were so funny that she would read them to her schoolmates. After a while the arrival of a letter became a source of some joy to the girls, Douglas’s very first fans. Unfortunately, the letters are lost.
Later that same year, 1968, Douglas appears again as an author of spoof reviews in Broadsheet, the boys’ cyclostyled and stapled arts magazine. (There was another, more literary, magazine called Green Wood, a superior miscellany, for which Douglas also contributed the odd piece.) Douglas’s parodies were in a chirpy tabloid style, not bad for a schoolboy.
Hamlet: Feeling depressed? Read this account of life before Yeastvite and think how lucky you are.
Oliver Twist: Tale unsuitable for those with a social conscience in a starving world: glutton makes good.
And so on . . . The magazine was edited by a sixth-former called Paul Johnstone. It contains much good material, but possibly the most remarkable thing about it, something shared with many of the extracurricular activities of Brentwood, was the sheer confidence it displayed. The sense that the boys could turn their hands to anything, and expect to succeed, was the most valuable of all the school’s gifts to its students.
There follows a brief diversion for serious Hitchhiker’s fans.
Do you remember when Arthur and Ford stow away on the Vogon starship, get captured and are taken into the bowel-churning presence of Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz? Of course you do. The Vogon subjects them to ordeal by poetry before, with characteristic meanness, throwing them out of the airlock into the icy vacuum of space. The book comments that Vogon poetry is only the third worst in the universe. The second worst is by Poet Master Grunthos the Flatulent. Douglas notes that during the recital of Grunthos’s “Ode to a Small Lump of Putty I Found in My Armpit One Midsummer Morning,” four of his audience died of internal haemorrhage, and that the President of the Mid-Galactic Arts Nobbling Council survived only by gnawing off his own leg. The very worst poetry of all, according to the first edition of Hitchhiker’s and the original radio broadcast, was written by one Paul Neil Milne Johnstone of Redbridge, Essex.
