Basil Street Blues (25 page)

There were to be other symptoms of this process, such as the vanishing of blatant facts and events. I have no idea where I was when President Kennedy was assassinated or Queen Elizabeth crowned; I do not remember my army number; I do not know what examinations I passed or failed at school. Of course I could find out about the exams, but perhaps the truth is better conveyed by not doing so. For I have never been questioned about my qualifications and nothing in my career has depended on them. I do remember that I had the choice of going up to either Oxford or Cambridge (though I cannot recall to which colleges), and that this was partly based on interviews.

My one anxiety during this last year at Eton was how to escape my father’s generous plans for me. I simply did not want to be a plasma-physicist. During the holidays, I had continued my intermittent and alternative education at Maidenhead Public Library and become convinced that I was more at home in the arts. One evening at Norhurst I tackled my father, blurting out that I could not go up to university and read science – I really had no talent for it. He gave a long sigh and entered the battle. We argued quite violently into the early morning, and my father, by brute force of speech, appeared to demolish my carefully-prepared position – though I continued to defend it with desperate obstinacy.

Much of what my father said was true. Many people had made sacrifices to send me to Eton, he reminded me, and now I was proposing to throw it all away. Very well. He could not stop me. But perhaps I would be kind enough to inform him what I was going to do – other than live off other people all my life. There was, of course, one practical alternative open to me, and it was an index of my thoughtlessness that I had not mentioned it. He was referring to the Rajmai Tea Company. This was a fine business, he would not deny that. But if I wanted to go in that direction it would mean my travelling out to Assam and starting at the foot of the ladder. Did I have the guts for this? Did I have any guts at all? If I had he would do everything in his power to help me. He would have a word with my grandfather in the morning and set the wheels in motion. I was lucky. Not every boy had a second chance like this. I had only to say the word. When I mentioned that I had been tentatively thinking of taking up writing, my father sat back and laughed. It was not a happy sound. No one, he assured me, would prevent me writing. How could they? My evenings and weekends on the tea plantations of Assam would be my own, just as my school holidays had been. Perhaps I already had some masterpiece in my pocket. He would very much like to read it. He really would. Meanwhile we had better come down from ‘Cloud Cuckoo Land’.

I hardly slept that night and felt wretched in the morning. But my father, who had been so triumphant in the night, also looked drained. His tone was now altogether different. He told me that he had hit on a solution to the problem. If I could argue so persistently why shouldn’t I take up a profession that paid me to argue? He meant the law. Many of the Holroyds had been lawyers, so perhaps their genes were shaping my destiny. I had probably left it too late to read law at university, but I could become articled to a firm of solicitors. He knew some solicitors in Windsor and would make inquiries if that was what I wanted. The relief between us was palpable, and I welcomed his suggestion gratefully. It would mean postponement of my National Service, but that was no disincentive. I had little desire to go to university because I had little notion of what life there might be like. In any event, it seemed beyond my range. What would I do there? I was not attracted to the idea of reading Classics; I had never heard of the humanities; and besides my father would certainly not have paid anything to see me waste my time on such subjects. Later, it seemed to me, I had been shut out of Eden and that everyone at university was clever and in love, and the sun always shone there. Later still, I reacted from this sentiment and congratulated myself on the advantages of having so little to unlearn. Now, I see the advantages and disadvantages as more evenly spread.

There was a strange postscript to our night of argument and morning of reconciliation. For, although my father had dominated the agenda, one of its eventual consequences was to be our collaboration on a history of the world in verse – which really was entering ‘Cloud Cuckoo Land’.

For the last few months of my time at Eton I left my dead frog in its formaldehyde haze and the bunsen burners with their orange and blue flames, left my logarithmic tables and blackboard algebra. But what was to replace them? I asked Purple Parr whether I could study English Literature. There were not many boys who did this at Eton and Parr, not liking to take the risk, shook his head. It would hardly be appropriate, he thought. I had heard there was a subject called Psychology and I asked him about my chances there, which gave him the opportunity of explaining that I didn’t have the brain for it. Eventually it was decided that I should start Spanish (and resume French) in my last half. From this new language I retain just one phrase, ‘Que lástima!’, which sums it up.

But it was during this last half that I came across a genuine intuitive teacher among the masters. This was Peter Spanoghe, a name that does not appear in the volumes I have read about Eton. He was not one of those caricatures, like ‘Bloody Bill’ and ‘Hojo’, garnished with stale school jokes. There is no obituary of him in the
Eton Chronicle
, and none of the Head Master’s files of that time survive. Nothing exists about him beyond a note that he arrived in 1934 and taught German and French. Yet he was a remarkable man. He lived in Willowbrook, was married to a beautiful woman in a wheelchair, was himself partly disabled and walked with a pronounced limp. He was nevertheless one of the most active people in the school. He taught me French – and suddenly I was top of the form. Spanoghe knew no boundaries and we moved easily between French and English literature, from the past into the present and back again. Before this, French had been taught to me as a dead language; English was presented as a set of grammatical rules and obstacles; history a procession of dates and battles, kings and treatises. Spanoghe changed all that. He was quick-witted and made it all fun, made it easy. Somehow he engaged me in the subject so that my feelings were involved, I came alive and no longer felt slow. This was the magic of teaching, and no sooner had I glimpsed it than it was time for me to leave.

I left Eton at the end of 1953, and Peter Spanoghe himself was to leave a year later. I heard a rumour that he was involved in an affair with some girl and I was told that Pamela Spanoghe was divorcing him. Eton was still ludicrously sensitive about such matters (only ten years before, the Provost had informed a housemaster who married the innocent party in a divorce case, and whom he had met only after the divorce, that he was a habitual adulterer). I caught sight of Spanoghe one more time, at a delicatessen in Chelsea during the mid-fifties, but was stupidly too shy to go up and thank him. He must be long dead now. Looking through the telephone book, however, I see there is a P. Spanoghe listed as living in Chelsea still, and suddenly it becomes a matter of urgency to contact him. I telephone: but there is no answer. Then I write. But I am too late. He died a few months earlier, his widow tells me, and so I have missed him again.

What I would have thanked him for, besides his teaching, was a letter he wrote to Purple Parr which was forwarded to my father. Though he lost it, he was impressed by the notion that I was rather a promising tortoise. It also had some influence on Parr himself, ‘I agree very much with Spanoghe’s letter,’ he wrote to my father.

Michael has indeed a critical mind and its full value will probably not be appreciated for a long time. Indeed, it is in some ways a handicap at the moment. He is still very much an observer of life, even though he cannot detach himself completely. He sees more sides to a question than most schoolboys and is slow in decision because he genuinely wants to be right rather than merely expedient… He is neither a disciplinarian nor a rebel, and much of his work as Captain of the House must have seemed to him not right or wrong, but merely petty… He is not nearly (thank goodness!) at his peak yet: his honesty, determination, shrewdness and sensibility will come into their own when he has become, as inevitably he must, a little coarser-grained.

Parr’s previous reports had emphasised rather less appealing aspects of what he called my ‘doubtful temperament’: my nervousness, indecision and egocentricity. He thought, though I cannot recognise this in myself, that I was swayed by superstition (‘he lacks robustness against omens!’), and told my father that I had a disbelief in ultimate success that I communicated to others – though this, I think, reflected Parr’s own disbelief in my success. But after reading Spanoghe’s letter, he gave a far more amiable interpretation of these qualities. ‘He has been exceptionally mild, but not thereby ineffective,’ Parr wrote. ‘He has been respected and liked by all classes… I could have wished that he had, in his Eton life, ventured further outside the house. But he kept to his own ploy and was in consequence little known. From those who have known him he has always earned golden opinions...’

My mildness, and the ripples of popularity it briefly spread, can be accounted for by a decision I made to discontinue house beatings. I did not announce this as a new policy (not being a rebel), but simply beat no one. This was unusual in the early nineteen-fifties, but I got away with it because it became the practice almost before anyone noticed.

In his last letter to my father about me, Purple Parr described himself as ‘a friend who has now known and liked him a long time’. But over five long years he had been unable to communicate this friendliness. His shyness, detachment and egocentricity (qualities I saw in him curiously similar to those he saw in me) put him beyond my reach, and beyond the reach of other boys.

A year after I left Eton, in the autumn of 1954, I wrote to Purple Parr asking him for information that the Law Society needed relating to my registration as an articled clerk. In the course of my letter I mentioned that I was writing a book. ‘I imagine [it’s] a novel,’ he sighed. ‘...I should think at least one leaver every half writes (or at least begins) a novel in his first year away. You wd certainly be surprised at the number who have from my house.’

This characteristic, slightly discouraging comment was to gain unexpected irony a few years later when David Benedictus published his
succès de scandal
,
The Fourth of June
. Benedictus, who had also been at Purple Parr’s, was three years younger than myself. Like me, he became Captain of the House and abolished beating. But by then Parr’s was once more becoming a brilliant athletic house. The dining-room glittered again with silver cups and shields, and the dull brown and mauve quarters of his house colours excited admiration on the playing fields. One consequence of this new climate was that David Benedictus had a more awkward time than I did, and was not permitted the same ‘mildness’. His novel, written partly in reaction to these difficulties, is a satire that shows up Eton as a totalitarian city state of snobbery and sadism. ‘It is inevitable in a book of this kind that some lonely person somewhere will imagine himself portrayed,’ he wrote in a careful preparatory note. ‘...care has been taken to avoid such portrayals.’ In the novel itself the word ‘lonely’ is applied to the calculating pusillanimous housemaster, Manningham, and, despite the care taken to convert him into an imaginary character, no one who reads the book and knew Parr can fail to recognise some borrowings. Parr himself read the book in 1962 and was obviously affected. It was adapted for the theatre and, around the time we all saw it in London’s West End, he suddenly died, leaving us with very ambiguous feelings of regret.

My first half-dozen years after leaving Eton were strikingly indecisive. They began with two minor operations. The first – to correct some complications in my right knee caused by squash-playing – was counted a success (though it actually masked an injury that led to more serious damage years later). I was given a general anaesthetic and stayed several days in hospital. It was the first time I had been in hospital since having my tonsils and adenoids out as a child, and I was taken aback by how much the experience disturbed me. In the ward men lay groaning, men lay dying. Between the rows of beds marched a starched army of nurses with glinting thermometers and watches, and among them moved a clattering rabble of cleaners and kitchen staff wheeling their trolleys. They looked exceedingly happy, often stopping and laughing among themselves, overcome with hilarity, as if unaware of the sounds of pain and fear all round them, as if they were somehow inhabiting a parallel world where these ranks of sick people were invisible. I could not believe what I was witnessing. I felt I was in hell. After my operation I told the ward sister that I wanted to discharge myself and complete my convalescence at home. But during those early years of the National Health Service, patients were not moved along like a fast-moving queue of ‘customers’ or treated as expensive ‘consumers’ to be ‘targeted’ with medicine; and the practice was to keep them in hospital until the doctors were confident they had fully recovered. The ward sister told me not to be so stupid and, as a precaution, hid my clothes. But I found them, dressed myself, hopped out into the night and took a taxi back to my bedroom at Wetherby Gardens where I felt much better.

It was in this bedroom that I went through my other operation – a succession of primitive and painful clearings of the nasal sinuses by an ear, nose and throat specialist called Miss Wadge. She would stick a thin metal instrument right up my nose, above my eye, and pump sterilised water through it for an hour. After half-a-dozen visits, I was cured of sinusitis. Not long afterwards I suffered the first of a long, though not frequent, series of migraines in the very place where Miss Wadge had been needling me. Perhaps unfairly, I have always associated my migraine attacks with her operations.

Around this time, and in the same bedroom one night, I had a frightening experience that enables me now to tell a miniature non-fiction ghost story.