Noisy at the Wrong Times (25 page)

I first hit it as soon as my second boot had locked the binding shut. Without a pause, I was on my back. Ice-skating was clearly no apprenticeship. True to form, lessons were nothing but a trial, preventing us flying off the side of cliffs as we tried to emulate whatever Austrian or Swiss nutter was star of Ski Sunday at the time. We paid no attention.

I was determined to master the parallel stop, which I had seen the locals execute with effortless ease. I particularly wanted to be able to do the version where snow sprayed in an arc into the air as you looked nonchalantly back up the mountain holding both sticks in one hand. I was nothing if not determined, and I tried and tried, crossing my skis so that I crumpled head first into the snow, or, more painfully, when trying to bring them together, sending my skis further apart. I only finally managed to achieve the parallel stop under duress. Heading for what looked like a terrifying precipice at breakneck speed, I had no option: fail to produce a shuddering stop and I’d be a goner. So I did. And it was a brilliant one. So brilliant, in fact, that my skis were immediately stationery, but unfortunately, I chose to stay upright rather than lean up the slope so the rest of me carried on and I went over the edge of the precipice anyway. It was my lucky day because what had looked lethal was merely an injurious ten-foot drop. I landed with a clatter, broke a stick and damaged my hand. But I had done it, and I was ecstatic.

Now that I had mastered the parallel stop, I practised the looking up the mountain bit. For a while I would rotate to look back and continue to revolve until I did a pirouette and landed on my arse. But I got to the point where I could look like I was gazing up the mountain, but really, under cover of my dark glasses, I kept a beady eye on the tips of my skis. Charging down the mountain at high velocity could now be achieved since I knew how to stop. What I did not bargain for was the imperfections in a ski piste, which would make the stylish halt redundant because I had already used the better part of my face to slow down. A kindly ski instructor gave me a nugget of advice that essentially said: you could only truly ski when you could descend a mountain as
slowly
as you wanted.

The skiing trip was also an opportunity to find girls. Italian
girls, I had warned my friends, were not like your average English strumpets who gave out at the first opportunity. Italian girls usually had backup in the shape of their father’s shotgun, so best to avoid them at all costs. This was easily done since there were plenty of English girls ready to give out at the first opportunity. I vaguely remember one occasion when Rob was snogging two girls at once but I don’t recall how he managed it. In any case, I was too busy perfecting my parallel turns to worry about such things, and when not on the slopes trying them out, I would work on my theories of trigonometry and physics to accomplish the perfect turn.

I also saved someone’s life.

The fact that it was I who had jeopardised his life in the first place was of little consequence to me then, but it was of critical importance to him. It happened on the chairlift one afternoon as we descended the mountain. Being late in the season, there was no snow below the ski station to enable us to ski back to town and so we had to take the main chairlift back to the valley floor. It was a two-man chair lift and to mount it required a simple but crucially important technique.

We were lined up in pairs ready to go down, and I was with a random sixth former who, in my memory, had a flashy one-piece ski suit. We would hand our skis to the attendant, who would put them in the holders on the back of the chair, and we were to hold our ski poles in our hands. The idea was to stand side-by-side, wait for the next chair to begin to swing round the large wheel and then step across to be in line with it. When it got to you, you just sat down and let it carry you away as you swung the safety bar down and locked it into place. I was on the left so I had to take two steps to my left to be in line with the far side of the chair, and my partner on the right needed to take two steps to be in line with the right side of the chair. Simple.

Except as the chair swooped around towards us, I took only one step to my left which meant he had to set off running to get around me in order to sit on the other side. Ski boots are not especially good for quick manoeuvring so he had his work cut out. He began his charge for the other side of the seat with an “Oh fuck!” and managed to incorporate a small spin in the middle. He reached the other side just as I sat, oblivious to his suffering, onto the wrong side of the chair. Unfortunately, his arse never connected, but the small of his back did, and he was hanging by his elbows as the chair continued towards the edge of the platform. At the edge was a large cargo net, designed, one supposes to catch dropped skis, poles or people riding a chair lift with me. By now I had awoken to the struggle for life to my left and had grabbed the collar of his ski suit.

“Jump into the net!” I advised with unfairness since the net was mounted over a void of frightening proportion.

“OK, OK. No, I can’t!” he wailed.

“Oh for fuck’s sake!” I moaned.

As this episode unfolded, we could hear the gales of laughter from our friends at the chair lift. Or at least I could. My partner was already frozen in terror and could probably only hear the pounding of his own heart. However, when we sailed over the net and my partner’s legs were hanging free below the chair lift, the laughter stopped and we could hear the eerie swirl of the wind across the mountain, even above the screams and pleadings of my partner.

I gripped his collar with my left hand whilst holding my poles in the right. At this point, I too was in some danger since he could have dragged me off the chair. By now, we had traversed the flat run below the lift’s first fifty metres and had passed over the ridge that dropped to at least 100 feet below. If I let go now, he would die. I considered letting go so that I wouldn’t die with him. His elbows were on the edge of the seat
behind him, and he was craning his head as far back as he could to provide some counterbalance to the enormously heavy ski boots that were fighting hard to drag him in the opposite direction.

“Don’t let go of me,” he pleaded with an intensity I still recall vividly.

“Of course I won’t let go, you stupid idiot! Just get yourself back up on the seat because I can’t hold you much longer!”

Fear was the reason for my lack of sympathy, but he was starting to annoy me.

“Look, let’s wait till we get to a low bit, you can jump down and maybe you will only break a leg,” I suggested.

“I don’t want to break a leg!!” he replied.

“Well it’s better than fucking dying you stupid fucking idiot! I’m trying to save your fucking life here!”

Even at such a moment, the words struck him as somewhat perverse.

“It’s your fault! Just pull me up, pull me up!!”

“I can’t!”

And so it went on for an eternity, but somehow, and I honestly do not remember how, I got him back onto the chair, and we dropped the safety bar. My heart was pounding and I couldn’t shake the visions of him falling to his death. He sat staring ahead for a moment, his breathing rapid and shallow. Neither of us spoke for a while until he broke the silence.

“Jesus Christ, Volps. You got a fag?”

It is a fitting footnote to report that he went on to be a ski racer and instructor for the army.

The spring term had ended with our customary triumph in the Suffolk Sevens tournament. I loved Sevens because it gave me a chance to run with the ball. We had a superb team, to be perfectly modest. We trounced everybody, which is a testament
to the coaches at Woolverstone, because everybody was bigger than us. Mum actually attended this tournament, which lasted the entire day at some school in Ipswich. She wasn’t able to visit frequently because having no car meant a tiresome journey on the train, but she would arrange to come down in the car of other boys’ parents when it was convenient.

She’d watched me play very little rugby – in fact, I think this was the first time – and her reaction to it was predictably hysterical. Standing on the touchline with absolutely no clue of what was going on, she merely cheered and clapped when everybody else did. On a run along the line, an opposition winger leapt onto my back and tried to bring me down.

“FUCKY LEEVIMALON!”

My mother was foaming at the mouth with bag in hand, ready to strike.

“Bastardo!” she screamed.

The poor boy who tackled me ran off in the opposite direction as I tried to assure Mum that it was OK and people were allowed to jump on me. I forgot to mention that this was, in fact, the final, so there were lots of people watching. Mum’s interventions wiped away some of the gloss from the victory since Seven’s tournaments gathered together in one place all of our vanquished opponents. For a star player on the winning team to have his mother squeal obscenities at anyone who dared touch him was not the stuff of strutting champions. It was the only time I hated getting a laugh.

* * *

“Despite Michael’s attempts to blame everybody else for his troubles, it must now be clear to him, as it has been to the rest of us for some time, that at present he is on a disaster course. He has done almost no work this year; he has upset a lot of people by his rudeness and behaviour.
Fortunately, it is still not too late. I hope he can get his attitudes sorted out quickly next term – if he can, I wish him well for the future. JM”

I reproduce, in full, John Morris’s end of year entry in my report book. Soon after, he left to join another school. It is a salient entry because not only does it chronicle my slide, it also demonstrates, yet again, the way in which masters at Woolverstone never seemed to give up on me. His encouraging note at the end was surely given in the full knowledge that indeed, it was too late, but he gave it anyway because I don’t think he felt able to write me off. If I am honest, I could scream when I read it. I could slap the boy he is talking about. There was one bright side to it all: I did take my English ‘O’Level a year early and would later find out that I’d passed, but that only makes my refusal to tackle other subjects with any real effort all the more unforgivable. I managed to prove my then English language teacher, Mr Taylor, wrong when he predicted in the report that although the exam was easily within my reach, I had probably blown it. The infuriatingly erratic self-destruction continued unabated.

Neil Clayton who was, in that fourth summer term, my cricket coach, brought the curtain down on the year:

“
Cricket – He was a nuisance because he could not keep his mouth shut. The promise he has, which is considerable, will never develop unless he can control himself.”

He could have been talking about almost any subject.

BRINGING THE HOUSE DOWN

Ridiculously self-centred. He should stop clowning and start working”

J M Hyde, Geography.

“Alas, he hasn’t bothered. Does he care? I doubt it”

Neil Clayton, English Literature

“School play. Absolutely first class. Utterly reliable, co-operative, sensible and a good actor. Well done!”

Neil Clayton, drama.

E
ntering what should not have been, but which I had determined would be, my final year at Woolverstone, the promise and potential I had shown at primary school had less than 10 months to produce the goods. Not that it stood much of a chance while my rampant adolescence was in charge of my behaviour. As the above extracts from the autumn term report show, the signs for the end of year exams were not good, and I wasn’t placing academic effort high up my list of priorities. Roughly in order, my priorities were me, myself and I. John Morris had left Woolverstone, and the new housemaster was Dave Morgan, the metalwork teacher. I got on well with Morgan and on the whole I wasn’t behaving particularly badly, I just had the most remarkable impudence and, if I am honest, the foulest, most explosive temperament. It showed itself moderately infrequently, but when it did I
could send a ripple through the school. I got into an almighty battle of wills with my physics teacher, whose loathing of me he did not even bother to disguise. Once he had found a reason to exclude me from the classroom, he decided I was never to return, which even I knew wasn’t allowed. I approached the headmaster for advice.

“Return to the classroom, Michael, I will talk to him”, he said.

The next day I entered the room and was instantly challenged.

“I thought I told you never to come into my classroom again Volpe?”

Knowing I had cleared things with the headmaster, I was not in the mood to show any form of contrition for past misdemeanours: politely, but with undisguised self-righteousness, I told him I had seen the head and that he should speak with him if he had a problem. And then I sat down with my back to the blackboard and began to do the mock exam that sat on the table as the master stormed out of the room. Ten minutes later he stormed back in and halfway through a question on refraction I found myself looking at the ceiling as the master, now livid after what had obviously been a fruitless discussion with the head, dragged me bodily along the floor and flung me into the corridor. He slammed the door behind him as he leapt back into the room. He
leapt
because I was halfway onto my feet and coming towards him. Rage had returned but this time he bought his pals Fury and Murderous Psychosis with him.

I charged for the closed door with wild abandon, screaming like a banshee, but the door had a strong lock and reinforcement on account of it being a physics lab. I took off, feet first, with the intention of kicking the door down, thinking that nothing would withstand my weight and power. Except,
as it turned out, the reinforced door of a physics lab. The soles of my shoes connected with it, and the rest of my body carried on, crumpling up behind my feet until my arse was the next thing to hit the door. Without drawing breath between volleys of invective, essentially because it had all been knocked out of me, I dragged myself to my feet and continued to gasp obscenities through the small head-height window whilst banging my fists furiously. I think I stood there, puce of face, for about ten minutes shouting and hollering and banging the door until I got hoarse and my hands hurt. My arse and feet were already painful. Something else was niggling me: my shoulders were bruised and scratched, so violently did he grip them when dragging me along the floor.