The house was getting my mother down. Friendless once more, and resigned to a loveless marriage, she spent her days fighting the dirt that sifted like creeping death into the house from the surrounding woods. After Bill became disenchanted with the Dobermann’s Quisling1-like ability to change sides in a crisis, he got rid of it and bought an Alsatian, an albino with pink eyes, strange-smelling breath and a permanently moulting dry coat – not the kind of dog you wanted with deep-green carpets – and Kath found she had a new enemy to oppose. Whenever anyone went near the beast it bared its teeth, even when it was being friendly.
It seemed impossible to imagine that my parents had ever found anything in common at all, but the thought that they might get a divorce seemed as likely to occur to them as the idea that Homo sapiens had evolved from wheelbarrows. In Bill’s book, no divorcee should ever be allowed to walk around with her head held high, not unless the word SLUT was branded across it in poker-work.
Kath tried to make Cyril Villa more cheerful. She bought a rickety telephone table for the dingy hall, even though we had no telephone. She had paid for it with coupons collected from her packets of fags. Presumably it had not crossed her mind that having to smoke that much to get a telephone table would quite possibly prevent her from speaking in anything above a croak when she did finally get a telephone. After all, the lady who lived down the hill had chain-smoked Kensitas all through her pregnancy because she was collecting cigarette coupons for a pram.
After Kath’s pale, ethereal mother had evaporated entirely beyond the mortal coil, her sweet existence reduced to a faded sepia photograph on the beside table, my mother realized she was truly alone. She began to look permanently tired, as if she was preparing to go next. At least I had started my new school and was out from under her feet, so she could concentrate on looking after Steven and keeping the rising tide of drifting dog hair at bay.
I had unintentionally become the keeper of my mother’s secrets. I was the only person to whom she could really talk. It was a burden I hadn’t wished for, and one which Kath had not meant to bestow on me. Sometimes, when she sought me out for a talk, I hastily made myself invisible, heading off for a long walk without a destination in mind. I got just one chance to explore the area on my new bicycle before it was stolen, but it was obvious that there was nothing much to see. I did, however, discover Plumstead Public Library, which had a lending record section and a peculiar museum above it, which contained dusty cases of coins dug from the Thames, a length of hair from a medieval dog, and bits of grey wood from two-thousand-year-old boats. But age alone did not make the exhibits interesting, so the curator had extemporized unlikely handwritten stories for each find, carefully using phrases like ‘this was thought to belong to …’ and ‘might well have been of the type used …’ I could tell that the good people of Plumstead weren’t too interested in local history, because whenever I visited the museum the curator had to come and turn the lights on.
The record section’s most recent acquisition was an album by the Rolling Stones, purchased as a sop to those who complained that the library did not stock modern music. However, they did possess a complete set of Sir Malcolm Sargent’s Gilbert & Sullivan LPs, which came with notes explaining the topsy-turvy world created by their composers.
I fell in love with their concept of paradox, which in The Pirates of Penzance dictated that because Frederic was born on 29 February in a leap year, he only had a birthday every four years and would therefore not be indentured as a pirate until he was in his eighties, on his twenty-first birthday. Similar rules explained why Nanki-Poo could marry Yum-Yum for one month on condition that he would then be beheaded in The Mikado, or why Iolanthe’s member of parliament Strephon was a fairy down to the waist and a human below that. Wherever Gilbert set his verse, he was always writing about the absurdity of England. He must have got right up Queen Victoria’s nose.
The library was guarded by an eagle-eyed matron who held every LP up to the light and compared it to a chart, marking each new scratch. Every time she spotted some damage, she added two shillings to the bill that I knew I would never be able to pay. When I eventually peered over her shoulder and saw that I owed over seven pounds, I was forced to admit that I was broke.
‘Don’t worry about it,’ said the collection’s guardian with a conspiratorial smile. ‘These record-ledgers are so complicated and confusing that no one in the Council will ever be able to work them out.’
‘Then why do you put them down at all?’ I asked.
‘The by-laws only state that the fines have to be noted,’ she explained. ‘No one ever got around to setting a date for their collection, so I marked it down as a leap year.’
It was an explanation worthy of W. S. Gilbert himself.
1 Norwegian fascist whose surname became an eponym for ‘traitor’. Not to be confused with Kipling, who became the butt of a seaside postcard joke. ‘Do you like Kipling, Miss?’ ‘I don’t know, I’ve never Kippled.’
22
Bad Influence
THE SCHOOL HAD been bombed during the War, and was still housed temporarily in a series of asbestos-riddled bungalows on a piece of waste ground in Lewisham while a new modern building was being constructed. I was eleven, a new boy in a class of hostile, suspicious pupils. I wanted to have a black friend because I only knew white kids, but the only black boy in the entire school was a geek called Jeremy who longed to be a Young Conservative. English children of the period knew no one other than those like themselves. It would have been exciting to make friends with kids from different cultures, just to vary the stultifying predictability of daily suburban life, but in Greenwich there was as much chance of sighting a Martian. From what we learned in books and films, dark-skinned races seemed less emotionally guarded than we were, less arrogantly convinced that they were born to govern the world, plus they ate exotic food, dishes that came seasoned with spices instead of being smothered in rubbery gravy. Mrs Harper, the woman in the fish shop, said she knew a Caribbean lady, but this friendship was so jealously guarded that no one ever got to meet her. We finally decided that Mrs Harper had invented her to sound more interesting.
On my first day, I was seated next to Simon, a pasty-faced boy with freckles, an insolently knotted tie and a silly haircut. The teacher warned me to stay away from Simon during break as he had an attitude problem, which in those days merely meant impertinence, whereas today it usually means carrying small firearms. When I looked in his eyes I could see something untameable and mad. It was the start of a lifelong friendship for both of us.
I had been born unfashionable, from my Oxford toe-caps to my short-back-and-sides haircut. Pens leaked in my shirt pockets. I always wore my cap. I was a classic hopeless case, and, worse still, I knew it.
School was a different planet. To get there, I had to pass through Blackheath, which was filled with dark antique shops and genteel tea rooms, and called itself a village. The residents would have liked to build a moat around the place to keep out the proles. Later it filled with crimson boutiques selling lime-green miniskirts, much to the horror of the retired colonels who lived there. But it was a better place to hang out in than Abbey Wood, not least because there was less chance of being murdered by someone from a rival school who had decided you’d looked at him the wrong way.
When you found yourself being bullied, I discovered, it was best to team up with someone frightening and unpredictable. United by the fact that our classmates went out of their way to avoid us, Simon and I proceeded to bring each other’s most disruptive qualities to the fore. First, we reduced our maths teacher to tears of frustration, contributing to his decision to embark on a year-long sabbatical in Wales. Then we started on the English master.
Our friendship was a source of great mystification to all. When he was sixteen, Simon horrified the teachers by riding to school on a motorbike like the one in Easy Rider, and suggested that we should take the headmaster’s car to pieces behind his back; we laid it out in the school car park as n
eatly as a stemmed Airfix kit. The art master was thrilled because in Simon he recognized a true rebel who, when asked to create a piece of art for the school corridor, produced a plate of ketchup-smothered fish and chips.
We began manufacturing a libellous magazine in Simon’s bedroom, and recording sarcastic comedy radio programmes mocking everyone we knew. Our symbiotic partnership was deplored by all, as Simon was seen to be perverting me from the course of true devotion to learning, and I gave Simon a devious sense of credibility that encouraged teachers to grant him a stay of execution every time he glued the school cat to something or made prank calls around the neighbourhood masquerading as a telephone engineer, encouraging locals to whistle down the phone in order to test its acoustics.
Boys never tire of bad behaviour. Quite the reverse; we developed sophisticated new techniques for disturbing our elders and disgusting our classmates. Through years of fine education, through the principles of economics and the laws of physics, through the Wars of the Roses and the symbolism in Shakespeare’s sonnets, we cut open golf balls and tied pupils up in elastic, carved rocket ships into desks, forged each other’s signatures and translated jokes from Monty Python into pig-Latin. Drawing enormous pleasure from defacing the English classics, we targeted Anthony Trollope’s novel The Warden for destruction, simply because it was the most unforgivably dull book ever written – and we got away with it, not because we were arrogant or privileged, but because we were bright and bored, and didn’t even realize it.
Simon made me look cool. I made Simon look academic. Simon’s mother wore a business suit and made transatlantic phone calls. My mother wore a Sainsbury’s apron and made buns. Simon wanted to ride a Harley across America. I wanted to get through the day in one piece. Simon laughed. I worried.
In desperation, the careers officer asked us to provide him with clues to our futures. Simon said he would like to design cars. I said I wanted to write novels. With a barely suppressed smirk, the careers officer advised me to go into insurance, and suggested that Simon should enlist in the territorial army. As we left the room, we wondered what kind of loser would want to be a careers officer anyway.
By now, we had become obsessed with Monty Python, remaining fans even after John Cleese left, when a fourth series exhibited a devil-may-care attitude and featured some of the most surreal writing ever produced in the UK. Monty Python created a true generation divide. Without jokes to cling to, many audiences found themselves adrift, and an older generation used to punchlines involving black people, the Irish and mothers-in-law turned off in droves. Python was not the only bizarre comedy around; Charlie Drake’s experimental TV series The Worker also reflected British playwrights’ fascination with stripping back reality to surrealist arguments and set pieces. Incredibly, it ran for decades. Simon and I wanted to create feverish, disorienting fantasies, not kitchen-sink chatter. Dialogue, we knew, was not conversation. If we didn’t bother to investigate our dreams we wouldn’t catch glimpses of our souls, and without souls Simon said that we were mere ambulatory meat-sticks. True surrealism was ageless because its roots ran deeper than current fads. Plus, you didn’t have to explain it to anyone.
Simon said that the further West you went the more everything was explained to you, so that even death was shown to be not only safe and harmless but also tastefully decorated. In Eastern Europe, where death still maintained a strong link with the living, surrealism was alive and well. It survived in any books and films where dislocating events went unexplained. The critic Kenneth Tynan pointed out that you didn’t need to know why two people fell in love, only that they did. So many irrational events were happening in the world, but it seemed that in England they were rarely put on paper. The English still liked their stories with neatly tied-up bittersweet endings.
Rebellion; it was all very annoying and predictable, my mother thought, but Bill was convinced that decency had departed the world when National Conscription ended. Kath merely endured her children’s teenage years; Bill would have preferred us to have prison sentences, or at least classes in engine maintenance.
Puberty reared its ugly head in the form of spots, silly clothes and even worse haircuts. Simon bought a leather jacket. I opted for an orange nylon polo-neck shirt with Velcro fastenings, bought from one of the catalogues my mother worked for at the time.
Nobody in our class ever got a chance to speak to an actual real live girl, because it was an all-boys school where strapping chaps played lots of healthy contact sports in shorts. In due course I discovered that our head boy and the gym master were involved in these contact sports in the shower room after games. Years later, someone told me they were still running one of Blackheath’s antique shops together.
Simon met a girl called Jane, although she only ever saw him from around thirty feet away. He worshipped her from afar, because ironically the school’s toughest rebel had a secret – he was too shy to talk to her. I had to make the phone call, but as we still had no phone on the hall table at home, Simon and I had to go to the urine-reeking public callbox next to the campsite in the woods.
‘Hello, Jane, you don’t know me but I’m a friend of Simon … Yes, Psycho Simon, that’s the one … Well, he wondered if you’d like to go out with him … No, why would I be joking?’
Simon was hopping around outside the callbox, desperate for an answer. ‘Well? What did she say?’
‘She says thank you very much, but could you continue to stay more than thirty feet away from her?’
Simon insisted I had misheard and made me call her back half a dozen times. There were no restraining orders in those days, otherwise we might both have gone to jail.
The only other way of meeting girls was to sign up for the annual operatic production arranged with our sister school, Prendergast.1 Simon naturally baulked at this, but only after I had already foolishly joined, assuming that he would too. Consequently he got to hang around with girls backstage while I made nightly appearances as a dancing villager in a shrill, off-key production of The Bartered Bride.
We double-dated. Simon met a blue-eyed blonde called Erica, whose breasts were each bigger than her head. Erica had a look of sensual insolence that suggested she would introduce herself by sticking her hand down your pants. I got her best friend Dina, who had legs like a bentwood chair and a complexion like wood-chip wallpaper. She wore so much make-up that I couldn’t touch her for fear of getting it all over my clothes, like fresh paint. Even in summer Dina usually had a vest on over her bra, then a shirt, then a jumper, and only allowed me to touch certain parts of that.
Simon played it cool at the school disco, refusing to dance to T Rex’s ‘Ride A White Swan’, while I put my back out moving spastically to Led Zeppelin’s ‘Stairway To Heaven’.
Simon bought a purple E-type Jaguar before he was old enough to drive it, not because it attracted girls but because he really liked the engine capacity. I had a pushbike and a bus pass.
I hung around Simon’s place so much that his mother must have thought I’d been recently orphaned.
We made lists of all the things we wanted to do. I said, ‘I’ve always wanted to go to Paris. Frank Knight in Upper-4 B says I would make a total branleur.’ I thought it sounded cool. I didn’t know it meant wanker. And also ‘I’m thinking of taking up pottery.’
Simon said, ‘I’ve worked out how we could burn down the school without getting caught.’
Sometimes I wondered what on earth our intense friendship was based on. Then I realized: Simon stopped me from being beaten up. He gave me visibility, confidence and a kind of filtered-down charisma that reached me like the effects of secondary smoking. He stopped me from feeling that there was no one else in the world who would ever understand. And there he remained, in my mind and heart, comfortable and constant throughout the years, like Peter Pan’s shadow, ready to be re-attached if ever I needed it.
When Simon came to my birthday party many years later, friends said, ‘Are you sure this is your old rebel schoolfriend? He’s
got a grey moustache.’ I had to assure them that this was indeed the same boy who had once circulated a press clipping of a former classmate convicted of being an axe murderer with the words THIS IS WHAT A GRAMMAR SCHOOL EDUCATION CAN DO FOR YOU emblazoned across it.
But all that was a long way in the future.
Meanwhile, Simon and I decided to write and distribute a humorous magazine, and discovered how to press the Greek technique stichomythia into service. Short, sharp volleys of conversation had been used for comic effect by everyone from Oscar Wilde and Noël Coward to Saki, Joe Orton and Monty Python. We stole jokes, re-wrote old gems and stumbled across new ones, but the material remained stubbornly scatological, stolen, scurrilous, sophisticated yet childishly obscene. Anyway, Simon soon became more interested in engines and girls, in that order, and I returned to filling up exercise books alone.
In order to allow myself more time to concentrate on books I broke up with Dina, telling her that I didn’t fancy her any more. This proved to be a case of poor judgement and even poorer timing, as no one had ever denied Dina anything before and she ended up hanging on to my ankles in the middle of Woolwich market, screaming, until a policeman apologetically trotted up to make sure that I wasn’t a mugger.
1 Where did these names come from? It sounds like a passive verb describing the state of being horrified by the sight of suspenders.
23
A Nice Day Out
‘I THINK WE should have a nice day out.’ Bill stared out of the window, jingling the change in his pockets. ‘That looks like a barge full of wood heading for Dagenham.’
It hadn’t stopped raining in over a week. The woods behind Cyril Villa had sprouted into a murky, dripping jungle. Somewhere far above us, water dripped steadily through the attic beams on to the floorboards below. Bill had spent the previous day hammering at the other end of the house until there was a dangerous-sounding crack followed by ominous silence and a sheepish retreat. When it came to DIY, his motto was ‘There’s no job that can’t be started.’
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