A Young Man's Passage (9 page)

DESPITE THE BEATINGS
I had endured in the middle school at St Benedict’s, it was a relatively cosy environment.

You could get lost in the upper school, consisting as it did of a great modern concrete-and-glass assembly hall attached to the less ostentatious block of airy classrooms, which in turn was connected to the original ‘house’, dark, ornate staircases and levels you never ventured onto unless summoned to where the monks, masters and prefects had their offices and suites.

There were corridors and staircases all over the shop and strange, unexpected burrows where monks would appear or disappear from like something out of
Alice in Wonderland
. There was a grand oak-panelled reading room and library, with mice carved into the chair legs. You could go there to study, and silence was ensured by the presence of a monk or master on a raised pulpit-like desk, who threw a threatening glance at anyone who so much as cleared their throat.

There were various smells pervading the various parts of the school, a rich menu of sweat, urine, cigarettes, chalk dust or floor polish, depending on where you found yourself.

And looming over us all was the abbey itself, quite cheery with its sandstone colouring and surrounding trees. Huge and unfussy with the obligatory spires and stained-glass windows, it is both modern and gothic, functional and mysterious.

Each class had a form master who would remain with you until you reached the sixth form, and each year had a division master, a less intimate, more fearful figure to whom you would be sent if you did anything wrong, and who had the authority to beat you and the weapon to do it with.

The form master for upper 4(2) was Mr Klepacz, a youngish man who wore flares and had frizzy hair like Marc Bolan and a moustache. He was quite down-to-earth and rather shocked me once when I asked if I could be excused to go to the toilet by saying, ‘Go on then, go for a piss.’

Division master for the upper fourth year was Father Kasimir: short and stout, in his late fifties or early sixties. He didn’t seem to wash much or change his cassock, the same stains and sprinkling of dandruff from his silver head of hair apparent on his shoulders and beyond week in and week out. He walked with a strange, purposeful strut, as if he just knew he was about to discover some wrongdoing round the next corner. He always seemed to be cross, possibly because his dog collar was worn far too tight round his thick token of a neck. I was scared of him, which I’m sure was the general idea.

As it turned out I had good reason to be.

ALTHOUGH NOW IN
different classes, Barry Jones and I were still friends, travelling home together on the bus, and meeting up at Kingston Rowing Club where he was now a cox too, even if not blessed with such a glamorous, successful crew.

On the first day of the new term in the upper school, in the autumn of 1972, we met up at break time and he introduced me to a new boy called Nicholas Reader. Nick, who was dark haired with full lips and perfect white teeth, had been sat next to him over in upper 4(1) and Barry had been given the responsibility of looking after him and showing him the ropes, as it were.

Nick lived near the school in Ealing with his father, whom he called ‘Bill Boy’. He was far more worldly wise than us, cooked his own meals, read
Melody Maker
and
Record Mirror
, watched television until gone midnight and showed a daring disrespect for the school rules. He was also very smart academically, ahead of the game in Latin and ancient Greek (which only a few of the brightest boys studied anyway), and funny, able to mimic classmates and monks, draw hilarious caricatures and slip in and out of an array of comic personas. Within days he’d given each monk and master a nickname. He also pointed out that ‘Father Fox’ – a smiling, somewhat fey monk – glided about silently as if his cassock concealed a set of wheels.

I was delighted to discover it was possible to make fun of those in authority. It had never occurred to me before. Every time Father Fox glided by on lunch hour patrol duties, we would nod at each other knowingly and laugh. For a whole term we took to following him around like private detectives. I would follow him down one corridor while Nick loitered at the noticeboard, then he would take over. In our schoolboy eyes the man was simply touring all the school toilets in the hope of finding who knows what. We couldn’t do anything with this knowledge but we were certain we had his number.

We were secretly laughing at everyone’s expense, not just the teachers. Parents, the goody-goody prefects, the bullies, the rugby types, the dimwits et al. We were ruthless. Everyone was caricatured and given a code name. We were in different classes, so we would save up incidents or anything we deemed a faux pas to tell each other in the break.

An unfortunate-looking boy called Gallagher, who spoke as if he had a permanently blocked nose, was told off in my class once for wearing a bracelet.

‘But, sir,’ he cried, ‘them’s me love beads!’

We howled over that one for weeks and it became our catchphrase of the moment.

Pretty soon Barry Jones became the victim of our disdain. I don’t think he did anything in particular to deserve it, he just wasn’t quite on our wavelength. Nick and I so delighted in each other’s company that Barry got squeezed out. We were now exclusive to each other, turning on our weaker friend with all the cruelty of hungry pack dogs in the wild.

Once Barry didn’t come to school for a couple of days, but we didn’t care.

To the untrained eye we were model schoolboys, well spoken and well behaved. We observed the school rules, handed in our homework on time and kept ourselves nice. Until we ejected Barry, our private amusements were known to no one. Then one day Father Kasimir exposed me with such a torrent of invective that I wrote it down.

Private Diary, 14 May 1973

Today during RE class Father Kasimir turned to me and in a worked-up, loud voice said: ‘Oh yes! Butter wouldn’t melt in your mouth, would it? But underneath you are a filthy bully. Oh yes – I know! I suspected you all along. Oh, I’m disappointed in you, you great bully! You are like a rock with beautiful flowers over it but underneath is maggots and earwigs, filthy stinking earwigs!’

Twice more in the class he said similar things. Then as I opened the door for him when he left, he said, ‘Come with me!’ and in the corridor said in a calm voice: ‘You know what I was talking about in there, don’t you?’

‘Yes, father.’

‘Well, try and be nice to poor Jones. He’s been very ill you know, seeing special doctors and having nightmares. You didn’t know that, did you?’

‘No, father.’

I did feel a pang of guilt for my old chum, but nightmares and ‘special’ doctors all seemed a tad overdramatic and unfortunately the whole episode lent itself rather well to our particular brand of parody. My friendship with Barry had run its course and no doctor, special or otherwise, could do much about it.

Nick and I were now free to be best friends and neither of us had much time for anyone else. The fact that we were always together, whispering and giggling, didn’t go unnoticed. We became more overtly camp with each passing day. We started to be known throughout the school as ‘Daffodil and Daisy’, or ‘Pinky and Perky’, and cries of ‘Poof!’ or ‘Queer!’ were shouted by just about everyone whenever we were ‘in public’. Walking down a corridor from one classroom to another became a hazardous exercise, and as the years passed the persecution only increased, becoming more vehement, vocal and ultimately violent with each term.

Then my mother gave me
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
by Muriel Spark to read, and the philosophy of the book’s heroine became our Bible. We saw ourselves as ‘la crème de la crème’, and when Miss Brodie told her girls to hold their heads ‘up, up like Sybil Thorndike’, we took her at her word. Miss Brodie championed individuality and eschewed conformity, and so would we. We drew parallels between the Brodie set and ourselves, between the Marcia Blaine School for Girls and the dull, stifling modus operandi of St Benedict’s.

I struggled through maths and physics, yawned through history and geography, but I couldn’t wait for English. My very own Jean Brodie came in the shape of Frances Hanley. She was young and beautiful with flowing red hair and her classes were a joy to me. She let me exercise my imagination and was full of encouragement for the results, returning my essays to me peppered with big red ticks in the margins.

She wasn’t at all stuffy, like the dusty old monks who taught most classes. And although our class was always quite noisy and a bit of a handful, she inspired us all, and was having none of my nonsense when I rather pompously wrote at the bottom of one essay: ‘The lack of imaginative sentences is probably due to the lack of silence I require for successful work.’

She replied, ‘No, if you really want to concentrate you will do so. Besides, don’t try to stifle a little noise – it’s life, exuberance, real.’

Most of the stories I wrote as a schoolboy feature strange, often mad, diva-like women, for example: ‘Mary Ross was outrageous. In everything she did she wanted to amaze; every head must turn in wonder at her, everyone must notice her. It is only when people point that she is happy.’

On my end-of-term report she wrote: ‘The sky is his limit!’

Love blossomed in the staff room for Miss Hanley and soon she married Philip Lawrence. When she left to have children I was devastated, and although I continued to do well in English, it wasn’t the same without her. Frances Lawrence used to bring a record player into class and tell us to write whatever the
Enigma Variations
suggested to us. Her replacement told us to write a story about ice hockey – not something within the scope of my experience. I ask you.

My attempt survives.

‘OK, lads, put yer gear on.’ I went to my locker and got out my pads. I sat down on the bench beside Buddy Holder.

‘Looks like a hard one!’ he said, sucking his teeth then letting them go suddenly, making himself look very serious.

‘Oh, really?’ I said, pretending I didn’t know what he meant. He gave me an amazed, almost cross look and pulled his mask on.

NICK HAD AN
extensive record collection which I borrowed and absorbed. At that time David Bowie was in full throttle as Ziggy Stardust, and we started with him, soon branching out to the delights of Lou Reed, Dana Gillespie and Iggy Pop. Glam rock amused us too, and all of this served to give our already effeminate natures some credibility, at least to ourselves.

Our greatest love was reserved for a number of soul divas. Aretha Franklin primarily, but Patti LaBelle, Linda Lewis and Thelma Houston were favourites too. Anyone loud and black got our approval.

Our classmates were all into Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple, music so far at the other end of the spectrum it only strengthened our resolve to have nothing to do with them.

We were very excited when we heard that LaBelle were doing a concert in London, riding high on the success of their single ‘Lady Marmalade’, which contained the line, ‘Voulez-vous coucher avec moi?’ The audience were instructed to wear something silver, so after my father dropped us off outside Drury Lane Theatre we rushed to the loo and stuck silver ‘merit’ stars all over our faces and thought we looked fabulous. The show was a theatrical extravaganza, beginning with Patti LaBelle’s descent from the ceiling in a silver space-age costume, festooned in feathers, shrieking as only she could, and continuing with Nona Hendryx giving her all in ‘The Revolution Will Not Be Televised’. We were totally smitten: the dressing up, the emotion, the glamour of it all absorbed by our impressionable brains and incorporated into our day-to-day lives. We now knew there was a life outside school where childish name-calling and cane-wielding monks had no role.

My head was similarly turned by visiting my sister Frankie in the chorus girls’ dressing room at Richmond Theatre after a performance of
La Vie Parisienne
, given by the Kingston Amateur Operatic Society: the make-up, the costumes, the excitement were all things I wanted to be a part of my life, too. Frankie soon became a professional dancer and I was fascinated by her new career and the contents of her wardrobe and make-up box.

During her first job in panto, at Eastbourne, she started having a passionate affair with a guitarist in the band, and in her dressing-table drawer one day I found a stash of his intimate love letters. I rushed into school the next day to tell Nick of his specific request to ‘sit on my face’. This, of course, became our catchphrase of the week.

The sex life of Frankie and Kevin we lived and breathed, recreating the private moments I had read about in the most explicit and disgusting cartoons. These we drew during the less engaging classes, folded and hid in the palm of our hands and swapped discreetly in the corridor between classes. Luckily our furtive communications were never spotted and confiscated or we’d have been in serious trouble, doubtless receiving the beating of Father G’s dreams.

Apart from Frankie and Kevin, the cartoons featured Bill Boy and Big Bren (my mother) and a gallery of invented characters (Millie Slut, Gay Lusac, Rose Steptoe and Sambo, to name a few), saying and doing the most obscene things we could come up with. Schoolboy sexism and racism were commonplace. One I drew that Nick remembers featured a girl saying, ‘Oh, Sambo, I just love the way you pass chewing gum from your mouth to mine when you kiss me.’