by Ray Connolly
We lived on the outskirts of a small town in Somerset, just a little place, with a street market on Thursdays which had been given a Royal Charter in the thirteenth century (and because of which the pubs were allowed to stay open all Thursday afternoon). There was a dance hall, two coffee bars and a couple of grammar schools, one for boys and another for girls, and never, it was decreed, should the twain meet. I suppose some of the other boys did get to know girls, either through sisters or maybe if they had girl neighbours, but for most of us in that sixth form of 1958 girls were those strange creatures you had private fantasies over, but who you never actually came into contact with. There was just no way of ever meeting them. No-one ever dreamed that boys and girls should meet at inter-school socials, and virtually every kind of activity in our town seemed to be sexually segregated. Occasionally there would be a school scandal when one of the more wayward youths would be found talking to a girl from the Girls’ High in the coffee bar, and not wearing his cap, and he would be threatened with expulsion. But by and large life went on fairly happily without the question of sex ever arousing its tempting head. When I think back now I wonder what we talked about all the time. I suppose logarithms and lateral moraines must have had some spell-binding fascination which kept us from dwelling too much on the frills we saw reflected now and again when a flighty lady in patent leather shoes swung her satchel our way on the road home.
In 1958 I was eighteen, had been offered a place at Bristol University and by June had only my A-levels to pass to ensure that I became the first member of the Maclaine family to benefit from such exalted further education. I’d never found school difficult, and the forthcoming exams held no terror for me at all, but for virtually the first time in my life I felt the claustrophobia of the person who is being pressurised.
I’d always been good at art, and I suppose I’d half fancied the idea of being some kind of Bohemian art student living in a loft in London, but when at sixteen I’d suggested this to my mother she’d quickly made me put the idea out of my head. Art was all right for a hobby, she would say over and over again, but you needed proper qualifications nowadays if you were going to get anywhere in life, and she hadn’t kept me at school all that time just so that I could end up drawing those stupid pictures they did these days. Consequently, and I must admit, with hardly a murmur at the time, I agreed to specialise in history, English and Latin, for no other reason than they were the subjects in which I got my highest marks. And in June 1958 I approached the end of my school life, with the calmness of the confident and the disinterest of the totally bored.
In a way, my teens had passed by virtually without my noticing, and teenage behaviour, or those aspects of it about which I read, like taking girls out, necking, petting, and all the other fun things that the Daily Mirror said my generation was doing to excess, were all subjects of my private fantasies, things to romance about in bed at night. To me it seemed that being young was to do with being American: all the best songs in those days were American, and all the good films, too, and they all told about a way of life, a culture, I suppose, of drive-ins, graduation balls, high school, which I couldn’t hope to emulate, living in the wilds of rural Somerset.
The last Friday before exams was a hot sultry June day. All week we’d been hearing about nothing but last minute revision, and I was properly fed up to the teeth with the way all the masters kept carping on at us. All I could think was thank God that school was nearly over.
Outside on the playing fields I could hear some of the younger boys playing cricket in the nets, shouting to each other as they bowled and batted, fielded and chased, and all around me in the class the twenty or so boys I’d grown up with listened with a passive disinterest to Mr Selmes, our history teacher. He was a chalky man, withered and dry, like his teaching technique.
‘At this stage there’s not much I can do to help you…’ His voice droned on like an old fashioned aeroplane. I looked around me at the other boys, hands supporting heads, blazers slung over the backs of chairs, eyes unblinking in the monotony. Behind me my friend Terry was looking alert and interested. That amused me. Trust old Terry to be getting every last ounce of education before the moment of trial began. Very worthy was Terry.
‘… and you still have the weekend for last minute revision…’ Bloody hell, would it never be four o’clock I thought, and began to doodle on my pad, ‘.. but I’d just like to remind you that that old favourite “outline the events leading up to the French Revolution” hasn’t been set in the last two years …’ I looked at my sketching. It really wasn’t bad. My mother should have listened when I told her I was a talented and individual artist. But she never listened to anyone. That was her trouble …
‘Maclaine!’ Mr Selmes brought me back to earth with that special voice which teachers like to imagine implies authority. I didn’t even bother to look up, but paused in my drawing and waited for the inevitable question.
‘Maclaine … what did Britain gain from the … the…’ I could sense that he wasn’t even sure what to ask me. He was so dozy, ‘… yes, what did Britain gain from the Treaty of Utrecht?’
I stared at my pad. Outside someone hit a cricket ball particularly hard and I turned and looked out of the window. The sky was clearing. Going to be a nice evening. I could sense Selmes’s eyes on me. It was nice to be a teacher’s pet. He’d had great hopes for me, and had been very annoyed when I hadn’t even bothered to think about Cambridge.
I paused a moment before answering, maybe to make him think I didn’t know: ‘The Hudson’s Bay Territory, Gibraltar and Minorca and Louis XIV agreed to recognise the Hanoverian claim to the English throne.’
I didn’t have to look up at him to know that he was pleased. Satisfaction emanated from Selmes like an aroma. Poor sod. This was his big moment. For seven years he’d been teaching us history, taking us from the Ancient Britons and an awful day out to Stonehenge when it rained and he tore a hole in his suit on the barbed wire near the altar stone, through the Wars of the Roses, the Reformation, all the sin and sex of the Restoration and right on through the French Revolution, Robespierre and the Congress of Vienna. He told us once that he’d been to Vienna for his honeymoon, and I was dying to ask him if he’d enjoyed having congress in Vienna. But in those days that sort of smutty remark would have got a clout around the ear.
I went back to my sketching: ‘Well … yes — well done, but pay attention will you lad, and eh, just fasten that tie.’
I moved my hands up to tighten the knot on my tie, but his attention was immediately elsewhere and I left it.
‘Now, there’s not much more I can say, boys. It’s up to you, and as it’s nearly four o’clock, I think you might…’ I’ll never know what he was going to say, because with that implied dismissal, the whole class, that great somnolent pimple of adolescence, suddenly burst into life, and grabbing blazers and satchels, books and pens, slammed a din of desks, and moved in a contortion of swiftly released energy towards the door. Old Selmes watched in dismay. No-one said thank you for teaching us for the last seven years: thank you for enlightening our youthful days with those sterling stories of national heroes. No-one said anything.
Goodbye, Mr Selmes,
He thought,
Though we didn’t say it.
And although we laughed
When he cut himself on the barbed wire that time
He didn’t think we meant it.
We did.
Goodbye, mister, he probably thought,
I’m really a block off the old Chips.
Terry Sutcliffe had been my friend since childhood. He lived near us and ever since primary school we’d gone to and from school together every day on our bikes. At first they were little second-hand Raleighs with no gear change and bald tyres that seemed to puncture every other day; but later we graduated, me to a BSA racing model with four gears and drop handle bars, and Terry to a sit-up-and-beg Hercules three-speed. The Hercules suited Terry. It looked upright and sturdy. Terry was very u
pright.
It’s difficult to understand now why we were friends for so long, since our interests could hardly have been more diverse. Terry’s father worked as a sorting clerk in the Post Office, and was a firm believer in achievement by effort. Stick at your job, keep your nose clean and one day you’ll see the Kingdom of Heaven in the form of a bonus in your wage packet, Mr Sutcliffe believed, and poor old Terry accepted the promise of cream cake to come without question. All his life his father had had to be up at some unearthly hour to sort the post, and the idea that teachers should start at nine and finish at four, with eight weeks’ holiday in the summer had so come to obsess him that if Terry had ever thought of being anything other than a teacher, it was squashed for life during the formative years of his pubescence. Sixteen pounds a week, over three months’ holiday a year and short hours; what more could a working-class lad aspire to? Terry’s life plan was laid out before him like the map of a route march.
At times he would annoy me so much that I would wonder why we were friends at all: he always put such a downer on everything. But we’d been close when we were younger, and gone for rides on our bikes together, cigarette packets clipped against the back wheels, so that it sounded as though we were riding motor bikes. That was when we’d really been friends.
Terry also had a sister called Jeannette. She was younger than us, and went to the Girls’ High School. She was all right.
‘You coming to the coffee bar?’ Terry and I were getting our bikes out of the shed. I’d been to the Capucino quite a few times, mainly just to play the juke box and sit and pretend I was having a good time, but Terry hardly ever came. Besides you weren’t supposed to be seen in there in school uniform.
‘No, I’d better get on with some swotting.’ He was making excuses again.
‘Come on and I’ll tell you what George Sherman said he did with his sister.’
Terry looked up with sudden interest. Clean of leg and limb he may have been, but one thing you could say about Terry Sutcliffe was that his mind was adolescently dirty.
As it happened George Sherman hadn’t told me anything about what he may or may not have been doing with their Gillian, but by the time Terry got to the coffee bar he’d forgotten all about that and was rambling on about the art of off-spin bowling, or some other manly pursuit. He rather fancied himself as a cricketer, I think.
The Capucino was the better of the two coffee bars in our town. The other one was really a bit seedy, more like a transport café really; it was near the bus station, and the girls who went in there would have laughed at a school blazer on an eighteen year old.
We left our bikes in the passage alongside the Capucino, and I adjusted and slicked my hair while Terry clipped a padlock and chain around his front wheel. He never took any chances.
Sitting inside by the window was a group of younger boys from the fifth form, Johnny Swinburn, and a couple of others. I never really knew what to make of Johnny. He was a couple of years younger than me, but he was much more self assured, a bit of a loud mouth really, I think. He was always talking about girls, and sex, as though he really knew about girls and sex, and it was said that he’d first had it when he was fourteen. I didn’t want to believe it, but I was afraid it was true. He just didn’t care what anyone thought of him, and he wasn’t afraid of being repulsed, so he’d probably taken his chances when they came.
There was another thing about Johnny Swinburn that I coveted, too. He had a band … well, in those days he called it his combo because Elvis’s group was known as Bill Black’s Combo, but what it meant was that Johnny Swinburn could play guitar, and sing, and wasn’t afraid to do either in public, from which he earned a few bob most Saturday nights.
I would never have liked to admit it even to myself but it was difficult not to envy Johnny Swinburn his brashness and complete absence of embarrassment. I was a madman for rock and roll, but inside me a little cautioning voice would always say ‘come on … grow up’, and though I could play a nice bluesy harmonica, I’d never had the nerve to go out and buy a guitar. That would somehow have been inviting ridicule.
‘Save us a place and I’ll get the Cokes,’ I told Terry as we took up a vantage point by the juke box, and I went to the counter to order.
‘Hello then,’ Johnny Swinburn had beaten me to it and was leaning with the nonchalance of the super-cool against the counter. His greeting wasn’t unfriendly, just a bit patronising, I think. I imagine he suspected that a bit of envy lurked around my subconscious.
‘You’re early,’ I said, for something to say.
‘Nipped off from the cricket.’ He said that with an almost smug satisfaction. Probably he’d wanted me to ask so that he could show what a rake he was. I changed the subject.
‘How’s the band going?’
‘Not bad. Dave’s getting a new Gibson for his birthday.’ Luckily I knew enough about rock music to know that a Gibson was a make of guitar. I smiled, hoping that I looked casually knowledgeable. Johnny, recognising comprehension, carried on. ‘His old one went up in a bloody great blue flash at a dance last Saturday night. Nearly fused the whole place he did. The lunatic could’ve killed us all.’
’Too much,’ I said, and then feeling instantly silly at using such a blatantly transatlantic expression picked up my Cokes and crisps and rejoined Terry who was taking a sly look at some Ovid.
‘“Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven” ’, I said, surveying the drabness of the coffee bar, the conspiratorial middle aged ladies, the travelling salesmen and the housewives on shopping expeditions.
‘What?’said Terry.
‘Wordsworth – you should know that, you know.’ Clearly the irony had been wasted on my companion, but Terry didn’t appear overly concerned and sucked noisily at the straw in his Coke bottle, almost as though he were purposely trying to show me up by his conspicuous show of adolescence.
‘What did your mum say about you going to art college?’ he asked. I’d forgotten that I’d even mentioned that I’d again been trying to get my mother to reconsider her obsession with university.
‘No,’ I said. ‘She said no.’
‘She’s right, there’s no money in it, you know. No future at all.’
In the window table Johnny Swinburn was sharing some vulgar joke with his friends. No mother was ever going to get in his way, that was clear.
‘That’s what Johnny Swinburn’s mother says about his band.’
‘Yes … and she’s right, too.’
I think I would have replied with some searing comment if at that moment we hadn’t both been distracted by the appearance in the coffee-bar doorway of a couple of grey-blazered fifth formers from the Girls’ High School. I’d known they came in regularly after school, although frequenting houses of such ill repute was against their regulations, too. I’d also found out, by a circuitous route of casual questionings, that they were called Helen and Shirley, but I’d never actually been able to get to talk to them. After all, what were you supposed to say to girls anyway?
At the window table Johnny Swinburn and his cronies went into their confident routine of clicking their tongues and passing comments in a way which might have been successful, had they looked a bit older, but my luck seemed to be in, and Helen and Shirley made their way, provocatively, self-consciously, over to the table next to ours. Immediately both Terry and I pretended to be engrossed in a discussion of European history, and not to have noticed them, but they weren’t fooled for a minute. With a half whisper in Helen’s ear Shirley got up and went across to the counter to collect their drinks.
Despite myself my eyes followed her as she went, listening to her summer dress swishing against her thighs as she walked. She was a tall girl, with a long mousy pony tail, statuesque, I think, and she knew she was the centre of attention, as the salesmen watched and Johnny Swinburn eyed her roguishly from the window. Even Terry looked at her for a moment before going back to Ovid. From the corner of my eye I watched as Helen, a blo
nde and busty girl, opened her satchel, and began feeling around inside, eventually producing a packet of cigarettes and a box of matches. Slowly and deliberately, as though savouring her moment of total defiance, she lit one and inhaled deeply. For sixteen years old, Shirley and Helen were without a doubt a couple of real ravers.
‘Got any money for the juke box?’ Shirley was back at the table and talking in a loud, and come-on voice at me. I could hardly believe it, but inside a warning voice told me to play it cool, the way James Dean would; better look as though I expected tarty school girls to make overtures towards me all the time.
So I rubbed my nose, and coughed and said: ‘Yes … yes,’ all casual like. ‘What d’you want on?’
‘You choose. Let’s see what your taste’s like.’
For a moment I caught a note of condescension in her voice and I began to wonder if I’d blown it already. Maybe I sounded too American or something. I could hear the girls giggling to each other as I leaned across the juke box, and finding a sixpence chose a Chuck Berry record. At the sound of the familiar guitar break introduction, Terry pulled a face and began to pack Ovid back into his satchel, while Shirley and Helen just sat and mouthed the words.
Up in the morning and out to school
Teacher is teaching the golden rule
‘I only like American records,’ I said, in an attempt to continue the conversation, but Shirley and Helen were in some kind of reverie and didn’t answer. Quickly the record spun its little life away, and as I couldn’t think of anything to say I just sat and ate my crisps. Terry looked ready to go, but I was beginning to fancy my chances. You never knew what these situations could lead to. At length silence fell over the coffee bar again, and the girls came back to consciousness.
‘You two got exams next week?’ Clearly Shirley must have known we were in the sixth form. I wondered if she had been finding out about me as I’d been checking out on her. Things were looking better all the time. I nodded, as nonchalantly as I could.
