Noisy at the Wrong Times (23 page)

In the first term of fourth year I did allow myself to achieve something in the classroom as well as on the rugby field. I think I only ever did this to prove that if I wanted to do well
academically, I could. Once demonstrated over the course of a term, I seemed happy to put it aside again, justifying to myself that I, and I alone, knew what would be best for me after Woolverstone. I had already decided that staying on to sixth form and university was not going to happen and thus I had two years to enjoy myself doing precisely what I wanted, and nothing more. That first term ended with a glowing school report, and the new headmaster was moved to remark that I was “becoming a mature and sensible young man”. The kind of crazy logic that was going through my head at the time I shall never really understand, but every time I grabbed the lifeline being offered by the school, I pulled myself to the bank, only to let it go as helping hands stretched out to yank me up.

Spring term saw the predestined decline in scholastic application, which took greatest expression in the wanton baiting of certain masters. In this respect, we showed commendable powers of discrimination because some masters would not have any nonsense whatsoever in their classroom. It is easy to portray my younger self as an out of control little git whose masters ran scared, but that was not the case at all. Oh no, not at all. Once, a huge, red-headed chemistry master, known affectionately as Honey Monster, called me to the front of the classroom and proceeded to hang me like a smoked kipper by the locker key rope that swung from my neck. He hitched me to a hook in the frame of the blackboard and watched me kick my feet furiously for a while before unhooking me and sending me back to my seat. There was a peculiar ignominy to this reproach since I lost the power to speak as I dangled by the throat, and my expression, which could always be relied upon to display defiant insouciance, betrayed me horribly by transforming itself into a look of terrified panic. As ever, I was not to be defeated, and although I never directly confronted him again, I did find ways to make
myself noticed by him. The most outstanding example of this was when I opened the gas tap on the workbenches and lit the stream of fumes, sending a jet of flame across the classroom, scattering several boys off their stools as they sought to escape the inferno. He admitted defeat with that one and sent me to the headmaster. It did not occur to me in victory that the only loser in all of this was standing in front of the headmaster with a smug look on his face.

Other masters were never challenged because they commanded great respect or because they were bloody big and not afraid to bring that size to bear upon the person of a scoundrel. Others, however, we circled and attacked like a pack of tiger sharks. Mercilessly. It did not help the master in question’s cause if he had a habitual way of imploding emotionally when it all got too much. We simply enjoyed provoking whatever pyrotechnic temper tantrum was in the offing. A French teacher had cracked the wall plaster behind his chair, which would slide at the speed of sound into it as he catapulted himself to his feet to scream obscenities at the class. This only happened after twenty minutes of digging away at him with silly requests to go to the toilet, constant talking and general silliness. His floppy fringe fell across his ever-reddening face, and his hands would be clasped in front of him on the desk, his knuckles whitening as quickly as his face flushed. Then the eruption would arrive.

“YOU BUGGERS WILL STOP BLOODY PISSING AROUND IN MY FUCKING CLASSROOM!”

And we would all cheer.

In the house we were just as cheap with our shots. Morris was a no-go for obvious reasons. But when he was off duty and other masters would be supervising the house overnight, we felt freer. Mr Cromarty was our favourite target. “Crom” was Scottish and a gentle soul. He looked ninety when he was forty
and only looked his age when he actually hit ninety. He was an academic of ferocious repute and taught Latin, Greek, Religious Education and anything considered impenetrable. Crom had an explosive temper, articulated in a wonderful Highland burr, but it took more effort to draw it out of him. When we did so, he would charge into the dormitory as violently as his shuffle would allow and order all of us down to the hallway outside the study for a mass slippering. In we would go, one by one, where Crom would not be able to find it in his heart to hit us particularly hard. Once done, we would re-join the end of the queue, so when you arrived back at the front of the line, it was fifty-fifty that he would remember he’d already slippered you. The record was three, I think.

I have a sense of guilt as I recount these stories because these were good people. Dedicated, kind-hearted and excellent teachers, they did not deserve half of what we threw at them. They were entirely different from those genuinely malignant teachers who revelled in their power over small boys or who liked their company more than is healthy. Whilst I never heard of any direct pederasty, even as fourteen-year-olds, we knew those whose pastoral care needed watching like a hawk. Announcing open house for nights of baked beans and Luxembourg radio, one master knew he’d attract a crowd and relished serving the food to all-comers in his skimpy white shorts that only fractionally covered his dangling testicles. He just liked the thrill of it, I think, but if we had had any guts, we would have given him as hard a time as it was possible to give. But he was feeding us extra food so we let him off. Cromarty’s crime was to be kind and gentle.

Homosexuality was probably no more or less prevalent at Woolverstone than at any other public boarding school. We all seemed to be obsessed with girls, but I suppose some might have affected this out of peer pressure. It was never a real issue
as far as I can recall it although we might have teased anyone who was effeminate. Among three hundred and sixty young men, there is likely to be at least a couple of dozen who are gay, and, of course, in British culture, the public school is supposed to be a hotbed of such activity. I am sure, too, that there were inappropriate liaisons between older and younger boys, including those that were not entirely voluntary. Someone in our dorm did once wake up in the middle of the night to find a sixth former’s hand on his crown jewels, but the darkness and speed of escape by the offender meant we never knew for sure who it was. Another of our friends once walked into the communal showers to find a boy tootling on the pink oboe of another of the same age. Come to think of it, it was probably rife in the place, but either they were incredibly discreet or I was just blind to it and ignorant.

But girls were our obsession and we spent most of our time chasing them, either at home during holidays or at school discos when a couple of bus loads would be shipped in from Ipswich. It was about this time several of us began to visit the home of a female French exchange teacher. She was in her early twenties but enjoyed the company of fifteen-year-old young men, in whose eager fumbling she could indulge herself. Visiting her house
en masse
, we took over her living room and kitchen, but some drifted to her bedroom. I preferred emptying her drinks cabinet to fulfilling her fantasies and left that sort of nonsense to others less discerning. They obviously considered themselves to be the lucky ones, but I had begun to develop my own tastes in the opposite sex and a podgy French nymphomaniac wasn’t in the running. Maybe she never wanted to be in the running, but neither of us ever found out.

After one such visit, we were walking along the main road at the top of the school drive, a carload of locals screeched to a halt after someone had hurled a box of matches at their car.
Everyone scattered, and I sprinted up the driveway, which is precisely where the car came screaming in pursuit. My only escape was to dive over the barbed wire fence and into deep, watery cattle slurry, where I lay up to my neck, watching the “yokels” hunting fruitlessly for me in the darkness. There were four of them, all of them large adults, and I found being soaked with cow shit preferable to getting a shoeing, but that was the dirtiest I ever got visiting the Mademoiselle.

My general behaviour during the fourth year was not overtly obnoxious, despite an emergent and misguided sense of respect and pride that frequently led to me turning into an outraged, righteous bore. You simply did not offend me, whether teacher or pupil, because I wouldn’t back down. You either had the patience and humility of a saint to apologise or you put your fists up. Predictably, there were those who felt the need to invite and then challenge the righteous indignation I carried around with me like a zealot with a prayer book.

* * *

“Just call it off, Mike”, Rob advised, “He’s big!”

“I know, but I don’t think he wants to let it go.”

* * *

As all but the portion in my hand spun violently into the air, my club suddenly lost its status as ‘leveller’. It wouldn’t have been too bad if, after receiving the blow across the top of his head, Washburn had crumpled unconscious to the ground. But he didn’t. He staggered backwards, stunned but most definitely conscious, and then came charging back at me. I looked at the four-inch stump in my hand, stared up at the bull flying in my direction and nearly pissed in my pants. I had tested that club
on tree trunks, walls and a metal gatepost. Yet when I whipped it out from the back of my jacket and brought it down on Washburn’s crown, it disintegrated like a cinnamon stick. I was mortified. In movies, the buggers go down. At Woolverstone they just got angrier.

Today I am upset at the way in which I thought nothing of using such a weapon on another boy, even one much larger than me. I was not sadistic or gratuitously violent at Woolverstone, although this and other stories might bring you to the alternative conclusion, but I honestly think my arrogance is what led me to wield such a tool. To me, it was the obvious tactic, so I used it.

Truth may well be that I would do it again today.

I wielded a small gatepost for the infamous battle of Freston Crossroads. In fact, there wasn’t a battle at all, as I shall divulge, but about fifty boys had tooled up for a spontaneous challenge from some local skinheads. Dez (he of the bay tree Afro, which by now was more football size) had reported, late one Saturday night, that we were being “offered out”. I have absolutely no idea how he would know such a thing, but word was spreading fast through the school. By the time we had begun to gather on the cricket field there was a pack mentality developing. Highly excited but probably intensely nervous, we set off to walk the two or so miles to Freston Crossroads. The destination was simply what it says – a crossroads in the middle of nowhere, channelling four roads in different directions. There were a couple of houses along one of the lanes, and this is where we had been told a party was being held and whence the challenge had first emerged. Our intended silent approach turned into more of a hum, but it didn’t seem to matter since none of the houses showed signs of partying or skinheads. I suspect many of our number were breathing sighs of relief when suddenly, out of nowhere, several police cars screamed
into the lane with sirens blaring and blue lights flashing. As they did so, the air became thick with wood, chains and sundry weaponry as boys set off running in all directions.

On either side of the lane were wheat fields with waist-high crops and I found myself running parallel to the road through one of them with Rob, Dez and Cyril Offiah. Cyril was a magnificent athlete. His younger brother who was in the year below me would become one of the most legendary rugby league players in Britain, but he wasn’t a patch on Cyril. Cyril could play cricket, football, and rugby as though he was born doing it. He could have done anything he wanted in the sports arena – which is probably why he became a musician. People whose gifts are so great that the things they do with such ease cause weeping among observers and contemporaries often choose do something else. The effortlessness with which they perform the activity makes it uninteresting: when all around them are pleading for them to pursue glittering careers, the Gifted One is yawning.

In the wheat field, Cyril was a panther, quick as the wind and twice as elegant. Whereas I ran as though my life depended on it, he breezed along as if on a conveyor belt, his running style poetry, whilst mine was coarse rhyming couplet. But relative speed counted for nothing when a disturbed pheasant took shockingly to the wing with a loud squawk. The surprise meant that Rob also took to the wing, but with a “Fucking hell!”, and came screaming past all of us. After fifty yards we stopped and crouched beneath the crop cover. We could see police up and down the lane searching for us, and Dez spotted a friend hiding in the hedge. As he tried to get his attention, I warned that there was a policeman walking along the lane at that precise point. Dez couldn’t hear me and continued to call out in a way that he thought was quiet but was, in fact, like blowing a trumpet. I stood up to move closer to him, and as I
did so a bright torch swung round to shine directly at me. I froze. Beneath me, at my feet and hidden by the wheat, Dez laughed quietly. “Don’t fucking run, you, we have dogs on the way!” barked the policeman, who didn’t seem to need dogs at all. I whispered out of the side of my mouth for my comrades to give themselves up with me. Some hope. The only consolation was that I got a lift back to school in the back of a panda car.

The whole idea of a violent clash with a bunch of skinheads was absurd anyway since the majority of those on the sortie to Freston were in no way equipped for the kind of wild-eyed violence mass brawls generate. A few of us had once encountered skinheads in a collective sense during a school holiday. At a party in a hall in Fulham, we had been set upon by some and Dez had a gin bottle brought down on his skull that succeeded only in denting his scalp and provoking him into knocking the attacker into next week. But the desire to be on the Freston journey, whatever each of us thought would be at the end of it, was powerful and strong. As ridiculous and thuggish as the enterprise was, it was hugely exciting. Would fifty Eton boys cross the fields of Berkshire in the dark to fight with a load of oiks from Slough?