Noisy at the Wrong Times (17 page)

So, I was doing OK.

If that sounds a little underwhelming, it shouldn’t, because, even by Woolverstone’s standards, a boy like me doing ‘OK’ should be viewed with unconfined admiration, if not for the boy, then most definitely for the school.

It was at this point that the headmaster, Paddy, started to pay more attention to my development. Throughout my school life, there was always at least one teacher who has seen through me and found a way to control my temperamental unpredictability. At Addison primary, it was Rhiannon Morris. I met with her after many years, and she recalled how she could be sitting drinking tea in the staff room when a fellow teacher would put their head around the door and demand her attendance at an incident involving me. She would rush to the playground, to find me ranting and raving at all and sundry, the result of some insult or injustice. She would just have to bark my name at me, and I would be subdued, whereas countless other teachers trying the same thing had failed abjectly.

Paddy Richardson had the same effect on me. He sometimes called me into his office in his house and would ask how I was getting on which I never really understood. It was very benign and low key, but he might then fling me a nugget of advice or wisdom.

“I hear you have had some problems with maths, Michael?” he would enquire gently.

“Well, the teacher doesn’t like me, Sir,” I would reply. This is how I
always
replied.

“Do you think he might just be tired of your being disruptive in class?” Blaming me was a risky tactic, but he managed it without sounding as though he knew the answer.

“No, Sir, I don’t think it’s that, because I only become disruptive when he has been horrible to me or blamed me for something I didn’t do.” I would be careful to affect a wounded tone because after all, I actually believed what I was saying.

“Well,” Paddy would sigh, leaning back in his chair, “I think you may have a point when you say he doesn’t like you very much, but it’s not his job to like you. It is his job to teach you maths, which you won’t let him do. Why not try to let him? Maybe he’ll like you more, hmm?”

It was hard to argue with Paddy for long. I never wanted to get into disputes with him anyway, because I had obviously afforded him the status of “adult who understands me”. Added to that, agreeing that I was right about the teacher’s allergy to me was an exceedingly good tactic, and he did it in a way that still left the onus on me to do something about it. As long as I could tell myself I was right, perhaps I could find the good grace to give the teacher a chance. Paddy was no fool.

In the matter of people not liking me, I am an expert. A young boy is rarely aware of the spikes of his personality that hollow out the flesh of those around him. If those close to me complained, I would more often than not do whatever possible
to confirm every negative thought they had. Today, it is still the same inasmuch as people are inclined to instinctively recoil from me, but now there is a difference: I know precisely what is causing discomfort. Moreover, I have come to realise that when a thorn does penetrate, it is usually because a weak, tender spot exists, and I don’t think it is too malignant an idea that I should exploit that from time to time. Woolverstone didn’t want to knock those spikes off me: it just wanted to teach me to be more careful when brushing up against others. I find that the world is full of people who love to brandish their personality like weapons in the pursuit of dominance but who are at the same time totally unprotected from retaliation. Not only that, they are frequently surprised that a riposte should come at all, so it does them no harm to feel a sharp jab in the ribs from time to time. At school, you are not really supposed to probe the emotional or moral weaknesses of your teachers, but I tried my best.

Paddy obviously knew all of this about me before I did (self-awareness was a late-blossoming friend of mine), but getting me educated was not compatible with allowing me to experiment on the psychology of teachers whose
default
position, after all, was one of dominance. I just had to get on with it and play the game. It was his experience that allowed him to negotiate the minefield that he had almost certainly mapped out immediately after he’d met me for the first time. I quite relished being sent to him by other masters; I knew he would indulge me, and even when he wore a stern look he never let me down in that respect, always doing and saying the right thing and never turning on me. He was fair and understanding in a manner that the Daily Mail would ridicule today (you know, enlightened management of difficult adolescents). This is a skill that I am convinced only a few have. The subtle difference between command and encouragement
– but encouragement laced with expectation – is what set people like Paddy Richardson apart. Too often, I would detect too little expectation and too much command. Emotionally complex boys are manageable in a way that is not as difficult as it at first seems, and I think that people look more deeply into the problem than is necessary.

Paddy wasn’t alone in making a connection of sorts with me. My year card shows that very early on the school had assessed me as “a very opinionated, emotional boy who is prone to be argumentative”. There was no real secret to dealing with me, and several masters managed to grab my attention whilst delicately tiptoeing around my personality traits. But the school could not afford to be soft, and few masters were.

Paddy certainly wasn’t the sort to mollycoddle his charges. One afternoon whilst walking around the circle of lawn between the two wings of the main building, I got into a kicking match with a friend. We swung kicks and lobbed abuse at each other for no particular reason, but I was at a disadvantage since my opponent, the euphoniously named Adebola Adelano, was wearing violently tapered winkle pickers. As I carelessly drew back my crepe soled beetle crusher, I left myself open to counter-attack, and, while my stance resembled a runner caught on camera, Ade snapped out his foot in a heartbeat. I saw it coming and knew the extent of my error almost the instant my foot left the ground, but I was frozen mid-kick as I thought, “Oh no!” With perfect accuracy and deceptively terrifying velocity, the honed tip of his shoe connected with the underside of my scrotum, sending each testicle in opposite directions. If I’d had my hands in my pockets, I would have been able to catch them. Readers who have a scrotum will know immediately what happened next. During the time it took for my balls to settle back into their natural position, I stood in stunned, silent expectation of the
exquisite pain that would inevitably visit me. I bent at the waist with hands on knees, suppressing the urge to vomit until I softly keeled over onto the floor, where I lay motionless and dribbling. Testicular trauma, along with childbirth, is probably the most profound pain from which survivors emerge, and Paddy, being a man, must have known this. Ten yards away, from his study window, he noticed me prone on the floor in what he must have thought was a most unexpected place. He came out and walked over to me.

“What’s wrong with you, Volpe?” Paddy enquired.

I took a while to answer and when I did it was with something like, “Ki.. Ade.. balls.. Sir”.

“You’ve been kicked in the balls? Volpe? Is that what you said? You were kicked in the balls?”

“Ye... (long pause) Sir”.

He laughed and walked back to his house.

I liked my headmaster a great deal. It isn’t easy to explain this relationship – or my view of it at least. I don’t know about other boys from a similar background to mine, and I don’t want to be overly emotive about it, but I used to single people out as mentors and then proceed to put them to the test; to challenge them, to see if they would stick with me or just give up on me. Of course, it would often be a self-fulfilling prophecy. With Paddy, I had a conditional relationship that I would have set aflame and destroyed had he taken the wrong turn, but I went out of my way not to let him down, and if he praised me after a rugby match or some other minor achievement, it would be the praise I valued most. His was a guiding hand, and whenever Mum came to school for open day, Paddy would reserve some special words for whatever I had done that year. He never made a big deal of my misdemeanours, even though I was sent to him several times for such, and the sullenness that I liberally deployed in dealings with other masters, would evaporate on entering Paddy’s large study.

I realised later that he was not singling me out and that he did this for many boys. I suppose that is what made him such a good headmaster. If anybody performed the role of father figure in the absence of the real one, it was Paddy Richardson. To my mind, the lack of a father was never too great a burden for me; mine had made a run for the high road early so there is no significant moment of his departure. Nevertheless, our family’s subsequent belief that his contribution to our lives would likely have been minimal and destructive doesn’t detract from the reality that there was nobody to set me straight, set an example or provide a security framework for life’s vicissitudes. When he did pay attention to us, Dad was never very good at it; had he taken a similar approach to me that he chose for Matteo, the outcome would have been catastrophic, I suspect. Responding to a call from Mum, who was becoming desperate about my brother’s delinquency, Dad’s benighted answer was to give him a kicking in the Fulham Road. Such a course of action may have worked with someone else, but Matteo’s nefarious ways were never to be diverted by a thrashing. I can just picture Dad’s face as he delivered each corrective blow, and I can well imagine what was going through his head too: the boorish self-satisfaction of a man who hadn’t a clue who his son was or what he needed.

How Dad’s absence was affecting me I cannot, even now, say. I think it may be too easy to blame my father for the recklessness and unruliness we all showed at one time or another. Fatherless I may have been, yet my reparative approach towards key individuals suggests that I knew the value of a surrogate. There was nothing new in all this for Paddy, who was in charge of many boys like me and who, I later discovered, experienced the divorce of his parents at the age of twelve. I know it’s dot-to-dot behaviourism to suppose that the roots of Paddy’s
simpatico
reached back to his own family’s
fracture, but I think a life of fatherless existence allows me such romantic, rosy-tinted speculation.

* * *

The summer of ’77 arrived and with it cricket, late evenings and ever more mischief. Rob and I had become firm friends and we spent much of the school holidays together too. Rob lived in a large flat in Battersea with his Mum and two sisters, and there were frequent parties and get-togethers. All of us salivated over the blonde bombshells who were his older siblings. Actually, come to think of it, Rob’s world was a couple of times removed from my own, although he too had grown up without a father’s regular presence. Compared to me he was well spoken, and his Mum’s flat, which overlooked Battersea Park, was enormous. I’m not fully aware of what made us so compatible as friends, but we had got over the early pecking order stuff and were getting on with the business of sitting at the top of it together. As a part of that process, we had also developed into an enforcement squad, encouraged by our housemaster to sort out those kids who took bullying too far. Transferring to us the responsibility for protection was part of Morris’s clever plan to keep our minds off persecution. Our hearts were unequivocally in it, too, because by that stage, we had grown conscious of the effect our darker behaviour could have. When we realised that being bullied in a place like Woolverstone was hellish, we soon developed empathy for our fellow boarders. It might have made us feel warm all over to reprimand the bully, but it also gave us the opportunity to bully
him
officially. It is no laughing matter, of course.

I hate to think that once I might have been a bully: if I committed crimes against anybody on account of my ability to punch harder than they could, I apologise profusely. But I will
claim that my days as a threatening, antagonistic ruffian ended in about April 1977. I loathe bullies of all kinds, be they workplace bullies, people who gang up on others, racist bullies, political bullies, queue jumpers. I might so easily have continued to be a bully if something, someone, whatever or whoever it was, hadn’t diverted my undoubted capacity for aggression and violence onto the side of the victim. And I think my zeal is born of the fact that I do indeed understand the emotional poverty that drives a bully to do what he or she does. Of course, back at Woolverstone, I would still tease and assert my authority of sorts because I could never be expected to relinquish that in an environment like that one –
Lord of the Flies
was horribly accurate. Later, as a teenager, my propensity to meet fire with fire was unbounded, as a pair of skinheads following me in a Fulham street discovered late one evening. Their merry abuse of me, encouraged by their superior numbers no doubt, led to an explosion of violence that found its target on the first of them I could lay hands upon. I was enraged not by their abuse, but by their cowardice. At school, as a reformed bully, I felt sympathy for those who before had been my ‘victims’, and my righteous hostility spelled trouble for any middle-ranking tormentor looking to cut some teeth.

It wasn’t as if there were scores of helpless, pitiful boys wandering around the school like starving, abused refugees, but it didn’t take much for a boy to fall prey to more than just a bit of teasing. In most cases, the worst kind of bullying came from boys who were in the middle of the natural hierarchy, not at the top. They seemed to be motivated by bitterness and resentment that they themselves were from time to time bullied, and it provoked some viciously sustained cruelty. One victim in particular was crippled by an affliction that could not have been worse in such a place – he had trouble controlling his bowels, which meant from time to time he would have
about him a pungent smell. At first, we all joined in, unfeeling and callous in our torturing of this unfortunate child. But at some point during the year, probably after witnessing another spiteful and heartbreaking example of his misery, we started to line up on his side. I could no longer take his wobbling chin as he fought back his tears, his bowed head and the look in his eyes that cried out for his mother’s protective arms. He was weak and vulnerable, but I have never been called upon in my entire life to muster the kind of courage this child had to summon up every day. We should all feel shame at how we treated that boy and eventually, after a year and a half, he left the school. What troubles me is that such boys may remember me for the times I taunted them rather than for those when I protected them, which feels hollow since I had been very good at the taunting. At eleven, who knows these things? We were thrown into the pot and stirred, and few of us could resist the power among peers that suddenly became available to us.