David Mitchell: Back Story (16 page)

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 debating 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.

Unlike the school play. I was cast in
Much Ado about Nothing
. Leo played Benedick, the romantic lead. I wasn’t so fortunate and was cast in the tiny role of Verges, Dogberry’s sidekick. Not even Dogberry. Still, my friend Harry was even worse off than me, playing Third Watchman. At least my character has a name, I thought.

Creatively there wasn’t much about this production to get my teeth into. I decided to play Verges as very, very old. Humorously old, was the idea. It also occurred to me that, if I was to be noticed by the audience, I would have to make something special out of the few bits I had to do. This, with great solemnity and energy, is what I did. I dread to think how over-the-top, scene-stealing and yet unwatchable I was. I imagine that I drew the eye like a pile-up.

At one point in rehearsal, Harry did an impression of my exaggeratedly doddering gait and the weird intense expression, with jaw thrust forward, that I’d decided to assemble on my face. Thankfully Harry wasn’t a very popular boy, so this moment of mockery wasn’t picked up on by the group. The fact that I remember it, however, suggests it touched a nerve and that he was making a fair point. So the evidence points to my performance being awful. No one, apart from my parents who were, as always, effusive in their praise, commented at all, either positively or negatively.

The sad truth is that you can’t triumph with a part like Verges. People tell you that you can – that a small, perfectly formed jewel of a performance will draw the eye and mean you land the lead next time. But that’s only possible if you get at least one moment when you’re supposed to be the centre of attention: one scene, one speech, one pratfall. When you’re just there to say a handful of lines and populate the stage, you won’t be noticed unless you do something incongruous to get attention – and that very incongruity will, almost invariably, be a bad acting choice.

This is what is so sad for extras (or ‘supporting artists’ as they’re now known) on TV. Most of them want to be actors and for that to happen they think, quite reasonably, that they need to get noticed. But in 99 per cent of situations where extras are used, they’re not supposed to be noticeable – not individually anyway. They’re there to fill the back of the screen, to make it look like there are people at this party/pub/shop/public execution. But if any one of them does something to make you look at them, he or she has already made a mistake. As an extra, if you do your job well, no one will notice.

The main reason I wanted to be noticed and praised for my performance as Verges was that I had fallen in love. That’s probably a rather grandiose term for a schoolboy crush, but I use it because that’s exactly how I felt about it at the time. It was unlike anything else I’d previously experienced. This was very exciting. The object of my affections was the girl playing Beatrice, the female lead. (She was from one of the two private girls’ schools in Abingdon – they were allowed to come and be in plays with us, which meant that the dancing girl roles such as the one I’d so memorably filled, aged ten, at Mr Fezziwig’s party were no longer open to me.)

As soon as I spotted her, I was obsessed. I couldn’t stop looking at her, watching her move and listening to her speak. I desperately wanted to get near her and spend time with her. Obviously I knew about sex at this stage, though I was far too innocent to have any organised thoughts in that direction – but I had lots of disorganised ones.

I quite wrongly thought that these powerful new feelings were a good thing. I was going to be happy forever with a wonderful new girlfriend who I’d probably have sex with quite soon and then marry at some point and just generally everything would now be fine. It never really occurred to me that she wouldn’t fall in love with me. Such was the strength of my sudden feelings that I assumed she would have reciprocal ones about me. I wasn’t hoping for that – I just took it for granted that it would be the case. That’s how I thought the universe was constituted.

One of the advantages of that assumption was it meant I didn’t have to make any sort of move, or so I thought. This girl, I should explain, was in the year above me and had a reputation for being a bit of a goer. Who knows what that meant she actually got up to – maybe nothing, maybe she was an embodiment of the Kama Sutra – but she certainly usually had a boyfriend. So it was for her, I reasoned, to broach the subject of our colossal mutual attraction and thus officially inaugurate Happily Ever After.

Consequently, I barely spoke to her. I smiled, I was pleasant but I in no way even courted her company. In fact, I had no idea what she was like, only what she looked like which, from memory, was absolutely fucking terrific. As the weeks of rehearsal wore on, I very gradually became concerned that her attitude, of not really knowing who I was, might not just be a front. I had absolutely no idea what to do about this. I decided that if I went a bit quiet, she might ask me what was wrong. You won’t be surprised to hear that this approach was not blessed with success.