Noisy at the Wrong Times (9 page)

* * *

Exhibit two.
Lee Majors,
aka
Steve Austin
aka
The Six Million dollar Man. Steve was busted to bits when he crash-landed his space-ship-rocket-shuttle thingy. But they could rebuild him. And so they did rebuild him, giving him bionic eyes, bionic arms and bionic legs. They also managed to invisibly repair all of the scars on his handsome face, unless, of course, the crash that took three quarters of his limbs and managed to burn his eyes out of their sockets had miraculously left his fizzer untouched. But I digress. George Williams, my bespectacled best friend
du jour
at Addison, and I were S.M.D.M crazy. We drew pictures of Steve leaping over buildings and chucking cars, we knew every word of the episodes and we could make
all the noises that would accompany his super-vision. We used to run around the playground in slow motion, just like Steve did; cleverly, instead of bothering with special effects, the programme makers just slowed down the film whenever Steve was meant to be running as fast as a villain’s Ferrari. Super-SloMo equals blisteringly fast.

Genius.

Our obsession led us to invent a new game, which involved leaping off the swings from as high as we could, pretending to be Steve pouncing from a building onto the escaping criminal. Playgrounds didn’t have soft, Health and Safety-friendly rubber tarmac back then. They just had tarmac. Hard tarmac. Every landing sent a sharp shock of pain exploding through our growing ankle joints. It would hurt for five minutes, but we’d be back on the swing as soon as we could walk again. When that became monotonous (for repetitive pain was never a reason to stop), real rooftops replaced the swings and we would leap across voids, twenty feet above the ground, climb drainpipes or scramble up trees. We risked life and limb, but not for a second did we think of it as dangerous.

I even began to believe that George was as shatterproof as Steve Austin. Which is probably why one morning in the playground, when he had angered me for a trivial reason, I clumped him across the side of the head with my donation for Harvest Festival – two tins of custard in a carrier bag floored George in a heartbeat. I hadn’t expected him to hit the ground so quickly. In fact, I thought he would raise his bionic arm and fend off the blow, leap over me, fix me with his bionic eye and finish me off. Instead he fell straight to earth without even a stumble or stagger, his legs dissolving under him. I accused him of being soft. He was still my best friend, but our Six Million Dollar Man games came to a stop because he clearly wasn’t up to it.

* * *

At Waterloo, we had to gather at the coach designated to our House. I was to be in Halls House with Serge. There were sixty boys in each house and six houses – Halls, Berners, Johnston’s, Hanson’s, Orwell and Corners. The latter was based a mile and a half from the main building in an old convent so I was glad I wasn’t there. Berners boys were in the main building, and the other four houses were modern constructions arranged in two pairs joined by a long corridor. Aware of the need to develop a history, Woolverstone named three of the four modern buildings after their original housemasters, and the last was named after the river upon which the school sat. The whole concept of houses to which one gave unswerving loyalty wasn’t too difficult to grasp since it was just being a member of another gang as far as I was concerned – or a tribe – something to fight over even? What
did
worry me was the urgent need to confirm my place in the pecking order; even then I understood the principle of survival of the fittest.

The pushing episode and the unfamiliarity of so many of those around me was chipping away at my resolve. Thank goodness for Serge and his friends. If I ever acted my age or was ever shaken by the vulnerability of childhood, if I had ever wanted to run and clutch at my mother’s apron, it was at the moment I took my seat on the coach with boys known to each other, noisily notifying us newcomers that we were at the bottom of the pile. The Six Million Dollar Man had vanished. If I could, I would have run in Super SloMo off the bus, leapt Waterloo in one huge bound and scurried off to Fulham and my ice-cream Kingdom. I wished George Williams were there. I wished Manus Egan and Danielle Pike and the boy in the Plaster Trousers were with me. Hell, I even thought I’d like Marcia by my side.

Saying goodbye to my pals had been a cursory exercise, to be gotten out of the way so that my adventure could begin, but it was at that moment the first ever real lesson I’d had in the value of friends. Gazing through the window at the scuffed and dirty pavement of the Waterloo side street, wondering what was to come, I was even prepared to allow George a free whack with a couple of tins of Batchelor’s soup. I longed for my
fuck-yous
and
bollocks-ya-wankers
as we escaped the porter’s angry grasp, and I pined for our frosty bedroom with its torn wallpaper and rickety headboards. I knew something exciting lay ahead of me, that I would begin new friendships, have adventures maybe, but what would replace the sweet home comfort of Mum’s post-bath pasta fagioli, served up in the hot glow of a two-bar electric fire just in time for the latest episode of “The High Chaperone’ or ‘Star Trek’? What would stand in for the inky smell of the paper shop, whose sweet stock we so frequently raided or the rancid stench of the overflowing bins or the strange hybrid aroma of piss and bleach that filled the stairwells in Fulham Court? What arguments would replace those between my oldest brother and us when we wanted “Top of the Pops” and he demanded “Tomorrow’s World”? There would be no more football in the estate playground, no more clattering across the rusty rooftop of the covered car park and no more being chased by the unruly estate dogs who were let out like children, to play and return home when hungry. Who would sneer disapprovingly at the policemen who came to arrest my brother? Who would help Mum at five in the morning when she took the washing to the local baths to use the industrial sized laundry there? What would become of the flat on our balcony in which a fire had taken the lives of three of our playmates after their mother had locked them in to go to the pub? Would other children take up residence in its rooms, which had seen their horrific history
brushed away by a tin of cheap council paint? Who would play with
them
? Who would teach
them
to climb roofs, or get
them
free ice-cream and tell
them
of the ghosts that haunt their house?

All these things spun around my head as I shrank inside my bulky school jumper, feeling lost and alien. All that I had been so eager to replace with Woolverstone I began to cherish and desire like a hungry man craves stale bread. Neither the petulant, ungallant water hog nor the phone box staller was anywhere to be seen. Gone were the nun-baiter and the roof-climber. All of them had run off with Steve Austin. There were others on that coach in the same position, yearning for a thousand similar things, but knowing it offered scant consolation. Later that night I would share a dormitory with nine other new boys. Each of them had left behind lives they might have taken for granted as negligently as I had mine, and, at that moment, the spectacular opportunities of Woolverstone that should have been, but never would be, offered to all like us, were buried beneath the apprehensions of us lucky few. On that first frightening night in Suffolk, many unfamiliar and threatening miles from home, all ten of us sobbed quietly into our pillows.

* * *

Relevant footnote –
first days at school revisited.

Soon after my son was was born, I recall the wife of a wealthy Opera Holland Park sponsor excitedly tell me of a brilliant school I ought to consider for him. She was Eastern European, I think, and had heard I lived in Maidenhead and Windsor and thought the coincidence too great to leave unmentioned.

“Oh, Michael!” she cried. “That’s so convenient. There is
a fantastic school near you, and both of our boys went there. It’s called Eton, have you heard of it? Get his name down now because it is very popular.”

She was a lovely woman and meant well, but I think she found it hard to believe that anybody sharing dinner with her would be unable to afford such a school’s fees.

Anyway, my son’s choices of secondary school ranged from the merely poor to the unspeakable. I considered not sending him to school, making a stand and going to prison for keeping him away. They do that now, don’t they? Put the parents of truants in prison? If you stay there long enough you’ll meet your progeny in the slopping out room. Apparently, our schools are so good, we shouldn’t dare think badly of them.

Cutting a long story short, I managed, through a combination of undignified pandering and something not dissimilar to begging, to exploit the last vestiges of the poor man’s quality education system and got him into a local grammar school that has been going since the 17
^th
century. It has the sort of anachronistic traditions that Woolverstone had and although it is not a boarding school, when I read the school booklet it took me back a bit. Another obvious difference is the social status of the intake, which is exponentially more wealthy and middle class than Woolverstone’s was. At any rate, the point of this diversionary guff is to say that I went to pick him up after his first day and I felt
nervous
. I was more intimidated by his school than I thought possible. I thought how he must have been feeling as he took his first steps into this new larger, more demanding world, and I remembered Waterloo in all its visceral, heart-stopping mystery and anticipation. When I was eleven I thought I could take on the world, and would have tried given half the chance, but I saw my son as a little boy. Did he feel like one or was he just the same as me inside? When he approached me, smiling, I breathed a sigh of relief, and whilst
driving him home in the car I peppered him with questions, trying to discover how he had dealt with the day. Brushing each away nonchalantly, he did at least agree that the sixth formers looked like adults. But the prefects were helpful, and nice apparently.

Is nothing sacred these days?

RULES, RULES, RULES

S
econdary school is daunting for all children, even those at ordinary day schools, and so that first night at Woolverstone was always likely to feel like the last night on earth. We had excitedly discovered our dorms, chosen beds, lockers and sets of drawers in Halls house, a modern prefabricated two-floor affair that was clad in wood from which the paint was peeling in parts. It had a strange smell too – disinfectant, musty blankets, and, occasionally the sticky aroma of municipal food that emanated from the kitchens located in the corridor connecting Halls with Johnston’s house. It didn’t smell a
lot
like Stamford House, but there was a faint recognition, which didn’t do much for my impression of the place. It was both exciting and frightening, and on that first afternoon we buzzed around until bedtime – a moment so ordinarily mundane, but which was as profound an introduction to independence as any of us had previously experienced. This was for keeps, and almost to a boy we would be spending the first ever night away from home without a parent. But young boys are adaptable if nothing else and the acute anxiety soon subsided. After a few days, things were a little different. Better. Now we had to get our heads around the regime of the place.

We had two or three days of orientation, were given our class diaries, had the rules of the house and our duties explained to us, were told of the meal schedule, our responsibilities in the house, when we had to change laundry
and our bedding. It was a whirlwind of times, rules and regulations and it was perplexing. We were made aware of the punishments for certain misdemeanours, like walking on the grass; received reports of the legendary examples of slipperings or canings; and had it pointed out which masters possessed the strongest arm. Corporal punishment very quickly emerged as the great unseen demon lurking in the shadows but one several of us would soon provoke.

We discovered that there were not one but two types of detention: the Saturday afternoon masters’ detention and then the Sunday afternoon Prefects’ detention, which was the first sign of the self-policing strategies that Woolverstone had in place, that and Prefects were to become the bane of our early Woolverstone life. We also learned that lights went out in the dormitories at a certain time for each of the year groups and that talking after lights out was not permitted, a rule that was especially difficult either to obey or understand.

We were subjected to a framework of control that hardly any of us had ever experienced and thought only existed in the army. You might expect that imposing such a regimen on children like us would be akin to containing anchovies in a tuna net, but I often wonder why it was we fell so easily into line – for into line we most certainly did fall, despite the grumbling and the grizzling we were prone to. Maybe it was peer pressure, a self-policing routine that meant second formers policed first formers, third formers policed second formers etc.
We did it so YOU have to do it
and so on. Perhaps it was the new boundaries we had never before lived within? They say children like boundaries, but I am inclined to think we were just a bit stunned, too afraid of this new world to countenance even questioning it. So much was unknown; we knew nothing of what was to come and how it would feel when it arrived.

Every day there was a chore to be done. Sweeping,
mopping the showers, swabbing the tables after meal times etc, but I had a peculiar loathing for the milk collection in the mornings. The milk was given out at break in small individual bottles with foil tops, and the milk truck would deliver the crates to a bay at the back of the building where Halls joined with Johnston’s house. On cold, frosty mornings blue tits would descend in great numbers and peck holes in the foil tops, sucking out the creamy head, and if you were too late, the boys performing a similar duty for Johnston’s would have got to the crates first and left you with only those filled with the perforated lids. That’s when you could get in trouble with the older boys, because few wanted to drink from a bottle whose milk had first been violated by a tit. I had less trouble with the sweeping of the hallways but despised the mopping of the showers or the cleaning of the boot room. The worst chore of all would come in a year or two: laying up the dining room for breakfast was horrendous since it meant getting up earlier than everyone else.