Life: An Exploded Diagram (9 page)

And she turned and smiled at George with implacable sweetness.

Also in the year 1956, a rockabilly American singer called Carl Perkins released a song called “Blue Suede Shoes.” Being a song about fashionable footwear, it left the people of Norfolk largely unmoved. As did “Hound Dog,” by Elvis “the Pelvis” Presley. However, in Norwich, two so-called coffee bars played the songsincessantly on their jukeboxes, and in full sight of passersby, black men from the nearby American air base jived with white girls. The police were summoned.

A film called
Rock Around the Clock,
featuring a fat-faced man called Bill Haley, who had a curl pasted onto his forehead and a band called the Comets, provoked young people to get out of their seats and dance in the aisles of the Norwich Odeon. The police were summoned.

That summer, six Teddy boys and their girlfriends appeared on the seafront at Cromer. The young men wore jackets — lavender, powder-blue, and pink, with black velvet collars — that hung to their knees. Their black trousers were tight on their skinny legs, and they wore suede shoes with thick soles. They sported Elvis hair, Brylcreemed into waves that met and slumped onto their foreheads, and long sideburns. Their girls wore tight sweaters over brassieres like the noses of jet aircraft, and loose skirts. They were surrounded by curious locals and photographed eating chips by the
Eastern Daily Press.
(The photo was published above the characteristically witty caption
The Teddy Boys’ Picnic.
) The police were summoned. The Teds were arrested on suspicion of Causing Excitement and put on the next train back to London.

Politicians and bishops and newspaper editorials thundered dire warnings about the pernicious effects of that latest vile import from America,
rock ’n’ roll.

It would also be the subject of Lieutenant Colonel Bloxham’s stern address to Clem’s first Newgate School assembly, in September.

The salesman at the school outfitters (it might have been Mr. Treacle himself, considering the slithery sweetness of his manner) got the measure of Ruth and Clem as soon as they entered the premises. He’d had a good many Scholarship boys through the doors that summer. Ruth was wearing her best clothes and spoke in her best Miss Selcott voice, but he smelled the anxiety coming off her, sharp as ammonia. When Clem was kitted out and staring, appalled, at his reflection in the full-length mirror, Treacle coughed behind his freckled hand.

“If I may suggest, Modom?”

Ruth blushed at him. Her head was full of panicky arithmetic, knowing exactly what was in her purse. And the price of the leather satchels.

“Boys,” Treacle said, “have the regrettable habit of
growing.
Especially at this particular age. They can’t help it, of course. One minute they are four foot six; the next they are five foot two. You purchase a pair of shoes, size seven, and by the time you get home, his feet are size nine. What is one to do?”

Ruth waited fearfully for enlightenment.

“I normally recommend buying larger sizes, Modom. A blazer of this quality is a considerable investment, after all. It would be not unreasonable to expect it to last two years.” He considered Ruth’s tired footwear. “Or even three. The cap is probably fine. In my experience, boys’ heads grow more slowly than the rest of ’em.”

Clem’s soul iced up. The cap was the worst thing imaginable. It was, like the stupid blazer, a pukey shade of green. It had a stupid button sort of a thing on the crown, from which four lines of gold braid descended, north, east, south, and west. Above the cap’s blunt peak, the embroidered badge — something like a dragon peering through a bunch of flowers — looked like a target a Nazi sniper might aim at. If only. Given the choice, Clem would have preferred his brains splattered over the mirror rather than be seen wearing the bleddy thing on the estate.

So when, on the first morning of the new term, Clem waited for Goz to come down the street, he wept.

“You look a right twot,” Goz said, stationary and upright on his bike.

“So do you,” Clem said, wiping his face with the overhang of his sleeve, pretending his tears were snot or sweat.

“I know. These caps’re a form of cruelty.”

“I’m not gorna wear it. Round the corner, I’m gorna stick it in me saddlebag.”

Goz nodded like a judge. “My spies tell me,” he said, “that if we’re caught not wearing them, we get our arse thrashed. And that it hurt.”

“Bollocks.”

“Yeah. Them an all. Ready, then?”

As soon as they turned onto the Aylsham road, they were ambushed by their former comrades, dressed in hand-me-down Secondary Modern uniforms. Clem and Goz crashed through with their legs kicking right and left, their brown leather satchels bouncing against their backs. A hail of stones and unripe conkers fell just short of their bikes, but the taunt reached them, echoing in the tunnel of the railway bridge:

“Grammargogs!
Grammargogs! GRAMMAR
GOG BASTARDS
!”

Later that same week, Edmund Mortimer suffered his first heart attack. Luckily, he was holding the telephone at the time — he was trying to get through to his son, Gerard, in Canada — and when he fell, he dragged the instrument off the desk. The crash brought his housekeeper hurrying to the morning room.

And in November of that momentous year, a boat called
Granma
departed the coast of Mexico and headed for the island of Cuba. It contained eighty-two hairy revolutionaries — among them Che Guevara — led by a man called Fidel Castro. Their lunatic ambition was to liberate Cuba from the American-sponsored dictatorship of a man called Batista. Improbably, they would succeed, and Fidel Castro would make a significant contribution to twentieth-century history and to Clem Ackroyd’s yet-undreamed-of loss of virginity. Clem would, no doubt, have been interested to learn this, but at the time his mind was on more urgent matters. When the
Granma
slipped into the Gulf of Mexico, he was in a tearful agony of dread. He and Goz had been bushwhacked by the Sec Mods again, and Brian Woods had thrown Clem’s cap into the back of a passing lorry loaded with beets. His dad was going to go mental.

I
’M NOT GOING
to bang on about my suffering, my brutalization, and my salvation at Newgate. Those long seven years. (Well, eight, if you count the missing year.) Lord knows, bookshop shelves already creak under the weight of Misery Memoirs and Teen Novels that might as well all be called
My School Hell.
I have no desire to add my small pebble to that avalanche of unhappiness. In any case, looking back at it from this distance, it seems mostly funny. Tragedy does sometimes look like comedy to the survivors. And I survived. There’s scar tissue, but after a while you stop seeing it in the mirror. Believe me. I know a thing or two about scar tissue.

So, briefly:

You walk through the school’s wrought-iron gates. (Which are massive. And there’s a carved griffin or some such thing perched on the stone posts at either side.) The original School House, three hundred and fifty years old, autumn-yellow creeper clambering up its russet face, is, actually and truly, beautiful. Between you and it there is a huge and immaculate lawn circled by a gravel path.

Rule 7: No one, other than the headmaster and his immediate family or guests, may set foot upon the school lawn.

Rule 8: Pupils walk clockwise around the school lawn, on pain of death. Only staff and prefects are permitted to walk anticlockwise.

(It occurs to me that I could convey the nature of my school experience simply by reproducing
The Newgate Rules.
I kept a copy for years, but I lost it somewhere between my divorce and my emigration to America. It was a little hardbacked book with a blue cover, the first book we were issued with. We were told to learn it by heart, and we did.)

For most of its history, Newgate had been a boarding school dedicated to turning the superfluous sons of moneyed families into military officers or, failing that, into the kind of brave, loyal, and gormless chaps who were the worker ants of the British Empire.

When Goz and I arrived, slack-jawed and fearful, many of Newgate’s ancient and honorable traditions were still in place. They included ritual humiliation, physical bullying, incessant sarcasm, public undressing, violent games, caning, snobbery, ferocious patriotism, and the singing of the national anthem on the least pretext. (Such as the Duke of Kent’s birthday or the anniversary of the Battle of the Nile.) There were still boarders. They lived — for want of a better verb — on the top floor of School House, accessed by a formidable back door.

Rule 13: The rear entrance is forbidden to all boys other than boarders.
(We all had a good snigger about that one.)

Most of the rest of School House was the generous living quarters of the headmaster, B. O. “Stinker” Bloxham, and his family. Since this family consisted only of the old tyrant, his fat strident wife, and his daughter (a rarely glimpsed teenager whose eyes aimed in two different directions simultaneously), they must have had little difficulty in avoiding one another. One huge room was the Head’s study. I was inside it only once, for an arse caning in 1958. Another was the Nelson Library, named after Norfolk’s best-known adulterer, which only sixth-formers were allowed to use. The real school, where actual teaching took place, was concealed behind School House: a ramshackle collection of ugly buildings surrounding the playground. “Playground” is what it was called, but the word suggests something inappropriate. Not much playing went on. Imagine it, rather, as the kind of bleak area vibrating with tribal hostility and potential violence that you see in American prison movies.

The boarders were there not on merit, like me and Goz, but because their fathers (military men, to a man) paid fees. They were generally, therefore, a bit thick.

But only sixth-form boarders could be prefects or house captains — or the Gestapo, as they were jovially called. Goz and I came up against the Gestapo on our first day, at lunch.

(
Lunch.
What a social litmus paper that word was! At Millfields Primary, we’d had “school dinner,” which we ate, uncritically, in the middle of the day. In the evenings, when fathers came home from work, we had “tea.” On weekends we had dinner at twelve o’clock on Saturdays and one o’clock on Sundays. We’d never heard of
lunch,
which was, it turned out, short for
luncheon
and rhymed with
truncheon.
We’d gone to a new school and discovered a meal we never knew existed. And we ate it in a room we’d never heard of: a
refectory.
There’s upward mobility for you.)

I was scooping pudding — semolina with a splot of thin red jam on it, like a clot from a nosebleed — into my mouth when Goz nudged me. I looked up and saw that a line of, well, men, blokes, was leaning against the oak-paneled wall of the refectory, looking down at us new boys.
Men
in
school uniforms.
Uniforms the same as ours, except that they all had long trousers (we wore chafing flannel shorts) and wore yellow waistcoats under their blazers. And they all carried bendy little cane walking sticks, like the one Charlie Chaplin had in the old silent movies. The one nearest us had a faint rabbit-colored mustache.

He said, “Well, Matthews, what are these, would you say? Worms or Maggots?”

Rule 32: Fee-paying first-year boarders are “Worms.” First-year Scholarship boys are “Maggots.”

The Gestapo called Matthews studied us and sighed. “Mainly Maggots, by the smell of ’em, Shipton. Seems to be mostly Maggots, these days, worse luck.”

Shipton said, “See anything you fancy?”

Matthews made another survey. Then he leaned forward, and, to my horror, placed the tip of his cane under Goz’s chin and used it to lift Goz’s face toward him.

“This one,” Matthews said, “is slightly interesting.”

“He looks like a Jew or something,” Shipton said.

“Are you, Maggot? Are you a member of the tribe of Israel?”

I sat there frozen, with a spoonful of gloop just below my gape.

Then Goz said something that doomed him to years of suffering and in the same moment secured my respect forever and ever, amen.

He said, “Piss off, you great poofter.”

The masters at Newgate were men who’d had the Time of Their Lives (good, bad, ugly, or all three) during the Second World War, or, in some cases, the First. Several of them were homosexual. (I use the term deliberately. Back then,
gay
still meant “energetically happy” or “brightly colored.” Moreover, it could not have been applied, accurately, to the tweedy, closeted buggers that taught us.) While it was puzzling that it needed three masters to supervise the boys’ showers after PE, I’d like to put it on record that I never witnessed any sexual abuse. (Some of them may still be alive and in touch with their lawyers.) And, as I recall, the homosexual masters were rather more kindly than the other sort, but I may be sentimentalizing. All masters wore black academic gowns that gave them a batty appearance. They smoked incessantly, even in class.

On Wednesday afternoons, they transformed themselves into army officers, the prefects turned into sergeants, and we boys became their toy soldiers. We wore itchy uniforms that were too big for our bodies, black berets too big for our heads, and incredibly heavy black boots. The playground became the parade ground. Assembled on it, we looked like rows of thin brown mushrooms that had been dipped in ink at either end. We were marched up and down and back and forth for half an hour while the Gestapo screamed incomprehensible orders and abuse. Then we were marched, shouldering disabled First World War rifles that were longer and heavier than we were, to the school playing fields, where we attacked one another. One miniature platoon, bleating cries of bloodlust, would attack the long-jump pit while another would defend it. The masters/officers would spin wooden football rattles to simulate the sound of machine-gun fire while smoking their cigarettes or pipes.

I survived these inglorious battles, and others. In large part, I owe this to the art master, whose name was Julian Farrow. (School nickname: Jiffy.) Which is odd, really, because we never greatly liked each other and he was usually disappointed with my work. Jiffy was a small, intense Welshman whose bird-bright gaze glimmered at you from beneath tangled luxuriant eyebrows. He always wore harsh clothes in shades of murk. Bristly tweed jackets the color of cow flop. Dun flannel trousers, brutal shoes like dead dogs’ noses. He dressed that way, I now think, because at Newgate, art was seen as a mimsy, girlish subject and he was desperately determined not to look effeminate. (“Bender” Bendick, the geography master, often wore gay cravats, but that was okay, because geography was a manly subject with military implications.) Inside Jiffy’s coarse carapace dwelled a passionate heart that pumped paint. He was a lover of violent color. The gods he worshipped were Cézanne and van Gogh and a Russian painter called Chaïm Soutine. Jiffy showed us the improbable colors — purple, rose, orange — that Cézanne found in a perfectly normal French landscape. He waxed lyrical about the slathers of thick paint that van Gogh used to depict the streetlights outside some café. He relished the sickly yellow, lurid red, and bilious green flesh tones in Soutine’s distorted portraits.

I didn’t get it. My favorite artist was Frank Bellamy, who did the
Dan Dare
strip on the front page of the
Eagle
comic. Bellamy’s art was clean and bright and hard-edged and knew what it was doing.

Jiffy would say, “What is Cézanne/van Gogh/Soutine telling us, boys?”

And I didn’t know.

I loved, love, the surfaces of things. What things actually look like. Or, rather, what they would look like if we were looking at them for the first time. Or if we had been suddenly cured of blindness. Back then I believed (and on my good days still do) that art explains the things that words can’t manage, merely by delighting in them. Fire flame reflected in the brown belly of a teapot. The echo of the eye in a spilled tear. Warped reflections in a car’s chrome fender. The shadow of Dan Dare’s heroic jaw as he contemplates the burning of a galactic battleship in a Venusian eclipse. The soft textures of a girl’s breast in furtive sunlight.

I fumbled and fought against Jiffy’s nurturing until the term we did Still Lifes. On Fridays he would give us the History of Art, closing the art room’s curtains and talking us through slides he slid onto the wall via an Aldis projector. We got about two minutes per image. Longer than that, and the projector’s lamp would melt the slide. In Year Four, we looked at Spanish and Dutch still-life paintings from the seventeenth century. Jiffy was sniffy about Still Life. He was all about what he called the “latent energy” of things. Objects that just sat there being themselves were not his cup of tea. (Whereas I was very interested in how difficult it was to draw a cup of tea.) So he taught Still Life in terms of composition. How the artist had used triangles, parabolas, and other geometrical devices to shape the painting. How light and shade were patterned. How these techniques might be used to paint something more worthwhile.

I sat there ravished, breathless, gazing at the treasures cast upon the wall. Hands and eyes that were now less than dust had painted things that were packed with life. The gleam in a pewter jug, the gloss on a dead bird’s wing, the mellow curve of a clay pipe, the silver glitter on the scales of a fish, the dash of pigment that became winter light on a wineglass. It was incredible. It was almost frightening.

One of the slides was a painting by a Spanish monk called Juan Sánchez Cotán. Bear with me while I describe it. Or try to describe it. My hobbling and pigeon-toed prose can’t do it justice, I know that. And, in fact, Cotán’s subject matter sounds pretty unexciting. All the same, I’ve stood in front of the painting — it’s in San Diego, California — on several occasions and spilled tears of envy every time. It’s a picture of five things: an apple, a cabbage, a melon, a pinkish slice cut from the melon, and a cucumber. They are exquisitely, almost obsessively, realistic, yet they look not merely natural but
super
natural. The apple (actually, it’s a yellow quince, I later discovered) and the cabbage dangle on lengths of coarse string on the left-hand side of the painting. The cabbage is lower than the quince. The melon, the segment cut from it, and the warty cucumber sit on what looks like a stone window ledge, protruding slightly from its edge. But the window — if that’s what it is — is utterly and intensely black. Blacker than any night sky in the darkest part of the universe. Darker than death. The whole middle of the painting is a terrifying void. But the fruits and the vegetables, those humble and edible objects, have their backs to that void. They bathe in the brevity of light, casting their modest shadows onto the stone. They say, they
insist,
that they briefly exist.

“Here we are,” they say. “Death is the default. There’s no avoiding it. It’s the background into which we will inevitably melt. We will rot and so will you. But in the meantime, eat, see, smell, taste, listen, touch. Look how commonplace and how beautiful we are.”