Noisy at the Wrong Times (27 page)

My ill-advised self-assuredness meant my disposition around the school and my attitude towards lessons was very much take or leave it. New masters continued to join, but few of them seemed to have a clue how to deal with us and nor did
they have any affection for the school as it had once been. By now, it had completely changed from its original premise and was essentially at the start of a decade-long, politically motivated demise.

For my part, respect for these teachers had become a cosmetic enterprise. I had none that was genuine, but I would approach their dealings with me as a shop assistant might talk to a difficult customer: with politeness, but also scarcely disguised loathing. One such youthful master had clearly decided he was going to pull me down a peg or two. Either he was aware of my nihilistic tendencies and wanted to provoke them, or he was a blithering fool who thought he could pull me back from the edge of the precipice, but I find it hard to believe that he never saw that I would pull him over that edge with me. If that were the case, he deserved the humiliation I would visit upon him, which involved threatening to throw him out of a window after he got a little physical when disciplining me. I could give you the full gory details of the events that led up to the exchange, but I find it too awful to recall.

Episodes such as this were not happening on a daily basis. In fact, this was the only such event in my last year at Woolverstone as far as I can remember. What characterised me through the spring term of 1981 was sullenness and uncooperativeness. I thought I knew where I was going in the world but was finding the journey exceptionally dreary and tiresome. In truth, I think I knew that my chosen course was the easy one. I had copped out, bottled it. There didn’t seem a way back, either, since my academic efforts had withered to nothing. I drifted around the school like a dour ghost, materialising into recognisable human form only when angry or doing something I wasn’t supposed to. I often wonder if what really made me reach the decision to jettison my chances of academic qualification was a doubt that I could actually do
it. I honestly don’t recall ever thinking that, but maybe hormones and the lack of a guiding hand were enough of a diversion to justify it to myself.

Back home, Serge was working in childcare, my eldest brother Lou was a photographer’s assistant and Matt, when he wasn’t in a correctional institution of some kind or another, was working on a barrow in North End Road market, dreaming of becoming a painter and decorator, and taking heroin. I thought I would surpass all of them. I had always been the most gregarious of the four boys, the loudest and most belligerent, but now I was the most self-confident and arrogant too. Whilst I can analyse myself and recognise the possible influences on my behaviour, I can’t genuinely feel any sympathy for the person that I was. I suppose a reader who might be a sociologist or behavioural scientist would apportion all manner of blame to several factors in my life. But when it comes down to it, I was as self-aware as any teenager has a right to be: I remember feeling so cocksure of myself. I didn’t need sympathy and understanding, I needed a kick up the arse, but of course, the last person to try that was threatened with expulsion from the nearest window.

I do have a shred of a theory, although I can’t say it has been thoroughly examined, which is naturally in keeping with the way in which I approached everything back then. It is that to boys like me and those like me at Woolverstone, the wrong things mattered too much: respect, being the toughest, being the bravest, being the loudest. It’s the same today with the youth who are busily carving each other up on London’s streets. The things that bring out the worst in us carry an importance that supersedes all that would make us productive and successful. To me, what mattered was being respected and being thought of as a sophisticate of sorts. I could act, I could play rugby, I could fight and I thought I had the mouth to win
me riches and success. It might be handy to have a few academic achievements to throw into the mix, but if not, so be it. It’s really that simple, and so entrenched were these views, nobody could get beyond them to articulate the potential benefits of academic endeavour. I certainly had the expressive nature to win friends and influence people because I was bright and engaging, which might also qualify as bullshit. This was certainly a plus point in my favour, but I suspect those without at least these qualities are the ones who stand no chance in life at all. I also had the example of a brother to know that I didn’t want to be a criminal either.

The spring term report included a comment from Tony Watkins about me being a confused individual. If he knew something I didn’t, I wasn’t prepared to give him the credit for spotting it. Morgan noted that my goodwill in the house had evaporated, and Jim Hyde condemned me as bone-idle and silly. In art, I was excelling but I had of course decided that art would be the only exam for which I would make the effort. I had one term left at Woolverstone and to write me off at that stage would have been the sensible and almost humane thing to do. To his credit, Woollet, the headmaster, still encouraged me to change my attitude because it wasn’t too late. He wasn’t to know that I had decided it was too late several months earlier.

* * *

And so summer term of my final year at Woolverstone had arrived. Most of my friends were dreading it because at the end of May would come the long stream of exams to sit. Riding on the results would be their ability to stay on for ‘A’Levels, a concept that seemed completely alien to me although, I would have been allowed to stay in order to resit ‘O’Levels. It was just
another opportunity I would fling back into the face of those offering it. The fear and trepidation of those around me merely added to my smug self-satisfaction that I needed to have no such concerns. Summer term 1981 offered nothing but fun and entertainment before I left to take my rightful place in the world.

Most of the term was spent playing football on the patch of grass outside Johnston’s house in the evening. I had decided to get fit and would go for regular runs along the foreshore, returning to play footy or squash or just hang out in the rooms of pals. Lessons and revision were given scant attention, and playing pranks in the house was more important to me. I kept singing in the rugby choir, and I spent a lot of time in the cricket nets, even though Pete Fart had decided to carry on the previous term’s rugby ban into the cricket season. The frequency of visits to the Butt and Oyster grew, and it would often be after such imbibing sessions that our ridiculously puerile behaviour in the house took flight.

Pranks are important to schoolboys and university students. I have no idea why, really. When I sit and reminisce with friends from Woolverstone, it is the pranks we recall most frequently. Every schoolboy has stories of such jollifications; ours may have had an edge on account of us being able to pull off jokes and stunts at night, but essentially, we are all the same. The best pranks, of course, are those that focus on an individual and expose them to the full force of our wit and invention. Bluntly speaking, it’s bullying.

Each landing of the house had a huge red fire hose perched on the wall. The roll of thick rubber pipe seemed to be more appropriate for the lobby of a skyscraper, as if the school had bagged a job lot. There was a mighty red nozzle at the end of the pipe, and we suspected that the water pressure was significant because from time to time we would turn the
stopcock on the wall and see the heavy reel of hose jerk and lurch as water surged into it. We had never, however, opened the nozzle, but several pints of Butt Cider encouraged me to do so one evening when the house was silent and sleeping. A boy who had always been the recipient of much japery was sleeping silently in his private room off the landing. He was fair game because, like some of the masters we tormented, he had a very entertaining way of reacting to adversity. He screamed. More specifically, he screamed like a small girl.

So as he slept, we concocted a prank that would surely elicit such a response. Unfurling the hose, I drew closer to the door of his room, opening it quietly and creeping in. Rob and another friend, Sean, were on the landing, and as they opened the stopcock I could feel the powerful rush of water through my hands. Although I was struggling not to laugh, I managed to feed the hose into the opening at the top of the boy’s sheets. He was sleeping on his back, mouth wide open, gently snoring, oblivious in his dreams to the rudeness of his impending awakening. I considered opening the nozzle into his mouth, but even in my inebriated state, I knew this might result in instant death. I opened the hose, and a geyser of water erupted from the nozzle, almost throwing me backwards. I let go of the pipe, which continued to fire a jet of water that could have cut concrete into the depths of Fox’s bed. He continued to snore for what seemed like quite a while until suddenly he awoke with an ear-splitting shriek, kicking wildly at his covers, not knowing in the almost pitch blackness what was happening. His frantic efforts to escape knocked the hose out of the bed and onto the floor, where it continued to writhe, spraying countless gallons of water around the room, up the walls and onto the ceiling. I stumbled out of the room and slipped on the wetness of the floor, crashing to the ground of the landing, which I noticed Rob and Sean had vacated. Rather than turn
off the stopcock I bowled through the door of the long dormitory, laughing heartily to myself as the victim continued to scream and wail over the roar of rushing water.

The wanton spitefulness of such a prank never occurred to me, not even when Morgan gated the entire fifth form of Halls House for it, but the boy wasn’t one for remonstrations, and so the enjoyment I took from it was allowed to stand unchallenged.

* * *

When the timetable of examinations was given to me, I took note of them with barely a cursory interest. I would attend the exams because I did not want the hassle of being chased around the school for not registering, but this I considered a huge inconvenience since there was plenty else I could be doing rather than sitting in a hot gymnasium for three hours trying to answer questions I hadn’t bothered to study for. As the term approached its climax, I began to feel more and more alienated by my lack of revision. My friends were all stressed and buried in books, writing notes for history, geography, biology, maths. Even people I thought took the same approach to exams as I did were getting their heads down, which I found to be something of a betrayal. People’s patience with me was short. I wasn’t prepared for how it made me feel, which was shit actually. I was faced with a choice; cram the revision, do my very best and go for it or forget about it, accept it was too late and look forward to leaving school.

Yep, you’re right. I took the second option.

So I sat through my exams. I pretended to write. I even answered one or two questions when I got bored, but if it is hard to imagine such a breathtakingly sinful attitude towards exams, it is even harder to fathom the lack of guilt I showed.
No, it wasn’t guilt I felt. What I was feeling under my bravado, my negligence, my disgraceful betrayal of everybody who had ever believed in me, was anger. Anger at myself. I was angry because I hadn’t the guts to turn the tide when it was still possible and I was furious that I could have elected to take that path. And I was livid that I still felt it necessary to keep up the outward charade that I didn’t care. I was a mess. Screaming inwardly at myself for my stupidity was evidence, I suppose, that I knew what I was doing, but it doesn’t make it any better. Decades later, I still feel awfully sick to my stomach.

So that would be my legacy at Woolverstone: as an actor, a rugby player and an idiot. Masters would look at me with pity as they collected my obviously incomplete exam papers and I could see it in their faces that they didn’t hate me or take pleasure in my failure: they had that disappointed commiseration in their eyes that appears when they see waste, squandered promise that they knew was inevitable, but hoped wouldn’t be. So hard is the memory to bear, I don’t even want to keep writing about it. So I won’t.

Leaving Woolverstone
was
a wrench, although I pretended it was the one thing I longed for. On a warm June day I trudged, for the last time, along the drive to the bus stop and waited for the transport to Ipswich station. I looked around me: at the village hall where puppets club had taken place, at the small house where the master with the dangling bollocks had cooked beans by the gallon. I squinted through the sunlight at the fields full of cows and the road along which the school bus would hurtle on the way back from rugby matches and I thought of my five wondrous, formative, hormone filled years of fun. I smelled the summers, I felt the harsh, frosty air of Sunday mornings by the foreshore. I heard my bragging to friends of how
we
did Oxford and Cambridge Examination Board ‘O’Levels, not crappy old London ones, the
easier
ones.

“We”?

What do you mean “We”?

I recalled how I first felt driving into the school on that damp September night all those years ago. I shuddered at Mum’s fight in the flats, protecting her honour and pride that we should be at such a place, and I shivered at how I had sailed, deliberately onto the rocks.

I didn’t want to leave. I wanted another chance.

Let me have another go
, I thought.

I could, couldn’t I?

This time I won’t be a loudmouth. This time I’ll show you that I’m not a waster. I won’t show off. This time I’ll take the opportunity with both hands.

Please?

My adult life was about to begin, and I had ensured it would be harder than it ever had to be, or ever ought to have been.

What an idiot. What an unconscionable fool. What a thief. I stole an educational opportunity from those who trusted me and dumped it by the roadside.

Fuck.

IDIOT

T
he last page of the previous chapter is the first time I have admitted to myself what was going through my mind as I trudged out of those gates in 1981 and I am being truthful when I tell you that I really can remember precisely how I felt at the time, it is no romantic invention to embroider the story.