Noisy at the Wrong Times (20 page)

Samantha’s letter coincided with several others to my friends saying pretty much the same thing. There had obviously been a summit meeting of Alison and Samantha’s friends, who had all decided that ‘saving themselves’ for a bunch of boys they wouldn’t see for another six weeks was no fun. No fun at all. I composed a stinking reply to Samantha, full of emotional blackmail and angst, pointing out that golfers wore shit jumpers. Soon, a procession of my friends was asking me to write something similar to their treacherous former girlfriends.

Those poor girls would gather together and bemoan the viciousness of the onslaught. Eventually, Alison, with whom I was still friendly, told me they realised that one person was writing all of the letters and that I was the main suspect. To be perfectly honest, I did take a bit of pride in knowing that.

Woolverstone life was settling into a pattern, and the second year was about as uneventful and sterile a year as I would have at the school. My reports suggest a relatively happy boy who was taking part in all sorts of new things such as debating forums, badminton, gym club, drama, pottery club, woodwork and so on. I have to chuckle at my involvement in the debating society. Debate, per se, was not something I excelled at, and I have no memory of any of the meetings. I can only deduce that I debated with the same singular and offensive vim that I used in every other discussion I ever had. Pottery club I
do
recall. It was an extension of our art classes, but we could make extra stuff outside of the curriculum. Creativity engaged me throughout school life, but, as with most endeavours, I failed to bring the requisite patience and thoroughness to my work. I tried, I really did try. Working the clay to rid it of air bubbles began slowly and I treated the material with loving tenderness, but after ten minutes I was beating it with a rolling pin. Once done, I set about making my item by rolling the clay and cutting it to shape, getting a finger full of slip and carefully sealing the edges – at least, for another ten minutes. And so it went on. I marvelled at one boy’s ability to spend half an hour rolling a small piece of clay until it had the consistency and smoothness of a crisply ironed shirt. He would then skilfully slice it into shape before applying it to his masterpiece. In this way he produced the most exquisitely delicate model of a vintage Rolls Royce.

My own tour de force was going to be a bowl of fruit so life-like that viewers would be fooled into breaking their teeth
as they bit into the remarkable facsimiles of pears, peaches and bananas. What I ended up making was half an apple, a dark green and white glazed lump of gnarly clay that adorned my mother’s coffee table for decades. It was forever to my frustration that I could
see
what was required, and
knew
what rewards awaited patience, but I just couldn’t do it. It was the same in woodwork, a craft I adored but where my dovetail joints looked like an old sailor’s teeth; and my mortise and tenon joints required so much packing with slivers of wood that’ when viewed from the end, they looked like marquetry. The lathe offered solace inasmuch as it produced things quickly and I once turned two beautiful mahogany candlesticks on the lathe. All I had to do was draw lines where I needed to apply the chisel, and the lathe did the rest in about thirty seconds: no joints, no measuring, just eyes half-closed, a shocking shower of sawdust,
et voila
!

Rugby continued to be a huge influence on our lives, and our success as a team was up to Woolverstone standards. Our back line was scintillatingly good, with Gareth Brunt at fly half, Seaton Jean in the centres and Rich Henry, who had begun as a prop but had been moved to the wing, running in try after try. We played rugby endlessly, either in training, school matches or in house matches, when I got to wear the hooped green and white jersey of Halls House.

Of course, as second formers, there were now boys below us, and it was time to have our own fun with them. As far as I can recall, instead of bullying them, we chose to sell things to them. As the saying goes, you can take the kid out of the street etc., so our extracurricular activities involved enlightened enterprise of a kind found frequently in the back alleys of estates in London. We supplemented the pocket money our parents had sent us to school with by renting out porn magazines to first formers and selling them dried banana skins
rolled into joints for £1 a go. That was a lot of money even then. It was whilst persuading the buyers that a couple of grams of Fyffes finest was actually the best stuff that I first experienced the placebo effect. Having run off to the bushes with several friends to share his illicit ‘narcotic”, the junior, along with his squad of willing dope-heads, would return to the house giggling, falling about the place and saying ‘man” a lot. Renting “lech mags” was very lucrative and well-worn copies of Razzle, Penthouse and Mayfair were distributed to boys, priapic with the anticipation of it all, for anything up to £2 per wank. Orders and instructions about sticking pages together were strictly enforced. Being in possession of such magazines was forbidden, and Morris would throw surprise locker inspections in order to find such items or illicit tuck. We kept well ahead of him, though, and the business thrived: on some Sunday afternoons the entire stock would be out constantly. Readers may draw their own mental image.

The booty paid for trips to Ipswich, tobacco and any number of illicit pastimes, including on one occasion a home brewing kit with which we produced some dreadful beer, to be consumed after the Christmas dinner. We had set up the brewing barrel in the bushes on Orwell side. It was terribly cloudy and bitter, but we drank it anyway and it kept the chill from our bones in the dark, wet and windswept shrubs. It would have kept angels from heaven, such was its sinful dreadfulness.

My mood around the school seems to have been pleasant, if master’s reports are anything to go by, but by the spring term I had begun to believe my own publicity, becoming “loud, arrogant and difficult” or “critical, slapdash, lazy and disruptive”. You may take your pick.

Paddy, as ever, took a positive view, although even he had to recognise what was becoming a pattern. In his report he says,
“Michael is a great mixture of energy and enthusiasm on the one hand, and carping criticism on the other. He must not allow this abrasive side to dominate his pleasant nature.” I am not able to explain why there was a sudden change of such perplexity, but it was as clear as day. Confidence might have something to do with it. Rather than clash with every rule and oddity I encountered, as I did in the first form, I had developed a system whereby I could circumvent some of the rules, adapt to others and work out strategies to render the rest easier. General familiarity with my surroundings played a part too. As a result, I think my mind began to wander towards other things, and not just how to survive. Those alternatives obviously included a process of reverting to type.

My legal extracurricular activities were multifarious, and drama was beginning to be a theme in the reports. It seems we had done a house play that year, probably up in the village hall, and I was still doing puppet club. Morris accused me of ‘yapping’ too much during the house rugby matches. By the end of the summer term, things had not really improved, and there was a wild inconsistency in my approach to subjects. In chemistry I took “absolutely no trouble with written work”, but in art I showed “very good work and effort”. Encapsulating my entire character set with perspicacity, my cricket master Kev Young said I was “an aggressive batsman, a hostile bowler but lacks direction in both”. Despite my Damascene conversion from the ways of physical discrimination against my weaker housemates, I was nevertheless a bit of a handful.

Something was clearly amiss: everybody could see it and for the first time there was concern. It was my erratic nature that drew most alarm, with great swings in attitude and behaviour from term to term. I tend to the view that I was just a growing adolescent with an outlook that mirrored the wild ups and downs of hormonal growth and development. On the
other hand, I was turning into a conceited, careless and self-destructive shit. I had begun to make distinctions between what I wanted to do and what I didn’t, and I would resist and display my displeasure at subjects I felt less inclined towards. I simply considered myself to be too good for them. From time to time, Paddy would call me aside and give me a few corrective words, and I would fall back into line for a short time, but I was an incorrigible attention seeker, and spasmodic effort punctuated long periods of reactionary, petulant laziness. If I had any saving qualities it was that I threw myself wholeheartedly at whatever I decided I liked: rugby, drama and being jack the lad.

I think I wanted to succeed but was sliding back into the habit of mistrusting anyone, with the exception of Paddy, who suggested I could be a success. My second year at Woolverstone drew just about satisfactorily to a close. I was relatively applied, not beyond redemption at all when it came to my behaviour, and I had started to enjoy the school. Still to arrive was the persistent suspicion on the part of masters that their efforts were fruitless, but a few had their eye on me, that’s for sure. With his blessed patience, Paddy said I was “all over the place, but he has been quieter recently so perhaps a good year is just around the corner”.

The year ended, we went on summer holiday and I began to grow some whiskers and pubic hair. I didn’t need the added complication of my endocrinal rampage and neither did the school.

* * *

It was spring term 1979. I was thirteen years old, not far off fourteen. The first term of my third year at Woolverstone had again been blighted by a lack of control and academic
inconsistency. Teenage intensity had crept into my dealings with teachers, and it was becoming harder to forgive my indiscretions. Although I’d had a great term in rugby, I had been sent off in a match towards the end of the season. We had returned back to school after the Christmas holidays, and I was a tiresome, unpleasant bore.

Things were to take a turn for the worse.

With rumours spinning through the school, David Hudson, the deputy headmaster, walked onto the stage at assembly one morning during that spring term in 1979 and, with a shaking voice, spoke a sentence that I recall verbatim: “Patrick Richardson was involved in a car accident last night in London. He was killed instantly”.

And we laughed. Well, I and a few others did. I remember it.

I think we laughed out of shock. The stunning effect of that announcement was horribly palpable, the sharp gasp in the hall sucked the oxygen from the room and my ears began to ring with the awful silence that descended. But a few of us laughed. A short, snorting snigger would better describe it. I think a few announcements were made by other masters, and the head boy said something about it being a difficult time and that we had to all pull together, but it was academic, really. I was horrified and devastated, and I think I even felt angry with Paddy. The effect of the sudden, shocking death of someone prominent in the lives of so many young people is profound. Being there as the jolt blasted through over three hundred boys is to experience something I have never since encountered. Each of us who heard the announcement had their own experiences of Paddy, their own feelings and memories, and was suffering their own sense of loss, but it remained a collective understanding. Our disbelief and upset lifted into the air above our heads and formed into a black cloud that hung ominously over all of us. How could this be true? How
could Paddy, who to many of us epitomised Woolverstone, be gone? Dead? He
was
Woolverstone.

It would take us some while to adjust, although I am almost certain I never really did.

Immediately after assembly, a few of us crept through the gardens behind the old chemistry laboratories and picked a small bunch of flowers, took them to the back door of Paddy’s house and knocked. Jill, his widow, opened the door, and Rob handed the flowers to her, which she graciously took. I can still hear his children in the kitchen, wailing with grief. Remarkably, more than thirty years later, Jill Richardson would come across my name in a publication whilst she visited Opera Holland Park as a patron. She left me a note, and I called her, telling her that I was amazed that she should remember me after nearly three decades.

“I remember how you came to the door with flowers, Michael,” she said, “how could I forget that?”

Since we spoke, I have taken the view that even the smallest gestures make their mark at such times, and any urge to resist making them should be overcome. One other thing struck me about our conversation: quite how moved I was to be talking to her, to be recalling those days. As I spoke down the telephone to her, I was choking on the fresh memory of that day, now revived and intoxicating. I was trying not to let it show in my voice. She said it was half a lifetime ago, that she had enjoyed a wonderful life since and that she had fully recovered from it.

Perhaps I hadn’t. In the years since his death, Jill and her children had moved on, made other, new lives. We, though, had that screeching halt, the shock – as nothing to his family’s – remaining as a pungent memory. I suppose we thought their lives would stop at that point too. We were children after all.