Broken Music: A Memoir (9 page)

Very little of what passes between my parents as conversation isn’t freighted with sarcasm, acrid and barbed, and sadistically fashioned to hurt and gouge and scarify. My brother and I learn the terrible language of destruction. This is the trench warfare of our childhood as my brother and I sit out the poisonous clouds of abuse that explode above our heads, and we don’t know when it will ever stop. When words fail her, my mother will throw whatever is at hand at
my father’s head, but he never retaliates, he will reply with a dark threatening look or a piece of quiet sarcasm, then silence, and this infuriates her all the more. Perhaps any kind of physicality was my mother’s unconscious need, and perhaps my father in his own unconscious knew this too, and did not respond, but the child in me was grateful that blood was never spilled.

Today’s row is about the car, the precious Vauxhall Victor. It’s a Thursday, Mum is about to go out to Nancy’s, she wants the car, and for some reason Dad is balking on the arrangement.

“Where you off to?”

“The same place I go every Thursday night,” she replies.

“And where’s that, then?” he asks, with a flimsy veil of politesse masking a truculent irony.

And then it starts, round and round the same circular carping, a thrust concerning her vagueness, a parry about his sarcasm, neither of them able to come out and say anything directly until, frustrated and cornered, my mother is screaming like a banshee and unable to counter my father’s barbs, and nothing he can say or do will placate or please her.

While my little brother sucks his thumb I sit and play the guitar, silently praying that they’ll stop. If they split up I’ll stay with my father, I know I will. I love my mother deeply, but I trust my father with my life. He is a good soldier, brave and honest, grounded by the ballast of his stoicism, while my mother is already a shrieking ghost. I have a strange and terrifying prescience that she will die young.

My mother will win this particular argument purely on points for vitriol and high decibels, and storms upstairs to change. I leave by the back door unnoticed, and wait with my bike around the corner of Laurel Street.

After twenty minutes she emerges looking flushed and beautiful
with a skittish energy like a hunted deer. As the car leaves I follow at a distance so she does not see me. Nancy lives a mile away to the east, but it quickly becomes obvious that she is not going in that direction at all. She has doubled back off the High Street and I follow, but with an increasing feeling of panic. I’m gaining on her, pedaling furiously. She has to see me in the mirror, she just has to. The car is now in high gear and I pedal faster as the exhaust fumes leave their blue trail in the air. I hear the accelerator and the noise of the transmission and the grinding of the gear box as she disappears down the road.

When I get home I walk past the closed door of my parents’ bedroom. My father must be having one of his migraines, at least I think it’s his migraine, as he is weeping softly, but I don’t know how to comfort him.

I WILL BEGIN MY TIME AT ST. CUTHBERT’S GRAMMAR SCHOOL in Newcastle in September of 1962.

I leave the house at eight every morning and catch the commuter train to the Central Station. From here I catch a 34 bus up the West-gate Road to where the school is located in the west of the city. It takes me the best part of an hour to get there. The main building of the school viewed from the drive is as grim and forbidding as the opening shot of a horror film. The eye is drawn to the threat of dark-mullioned windows in a towering and blackened fist of gothic masonry, and then to the dull gray classroom annexes that cling awkwardly to the central structure like a spreading disease. This is where I shall spend seven years of my young life, and my first day is far from promising.

My mother is accompanying me as far as the school gates. It’s not that she’s worried about me—I’m used to traveling alone, far and wide—she’s just curious to see the place. I know this is a mistake, as is her insistence that I wear short pants and a ridiculous school cap. I am furious with her all the way to Newcastle in the train, and even more so on the 34 bus, where everyone apart from my mother is in the claret jacket and striped tie that is my new school uniform. Like
most of my fellows, I have been culturally conditioned in the unconscious mores of our society that this ritual rejection of the mother is an essential requirement of becoming truly male; that a man must not be tied to his mother’s “apron strings,” and that the consequences of such a connection for one’s burgeoning “maleness” would be dire. I stare fixedly out the window, doing my best to dissociate myself from the pretty blond woman to my left who insists on paying my bus fare and talking to me incessantly.

By the time the bus reaches the Fox and Hounds pub, which is where we alight for the short walk to the school gates, I am insane with fury. I try to create some distance between myself and my mother by setting off at speed, hoping that no one will notice my attendant parent, but I can’t shake her off until we reach the school gate. It is here where she seems to lose her nerve. We both wilt visibly at the sight of the grim institution at the end of the drive, but this does give me the opportunity to escape into the throng of students even though I feel like running back with her all the way to Wallsend. I don’t look back though, and this must hurt her, to stand alone, abandoned at the gate without so much as a “bye.” It must have been a long and sorrowful journey home.

Being accompanied by my mother on my first day of grammar school is the very least of my embarrassments. I am still a head and shoulders taller than everyone in my year, taller even than those in the year above. I look like a third year, and these short trousers make me look preposterous. I will suffer weeks of embarrassment over this, mainly from the older boys who see me as some kind of Neanderthal throwback and an affront to their own manhood. I bristle awkwardly under the unflattering soubriquet of Lurch, the lugubrious giant butler in
The Addams Family
.

I somehow manage, through a combination of wit and diplomacy,
to avoid beating the crap out of these morons or being beaten myself. It wasn’t until winter that my mother agrees to shell out the money for some long gray flannels and I am grateful and relieved. But by then I have, after all, managed to quietly assimilate myself into this strange, eccentric place.

There are over two thousand boys at the school. The catchment area is unusually wide, as pupils are drawn from the parish schools as far north as the border hills. There is also a wide, middle- to working-class demographic, where the sons of Catholic doctors, lawyers, and the professional class are thrown together with the sons of coal miners, shipyard and factory workers—and one milkman’s son.

Some of my new classmates live in Darras Hall, a well-heeled enclave to the northwest of the city, where at weekends I will be invited to large detached homes surrounded by landscaped gardens, with two-car garages, walk-in refrigerators, paintings and books, stereo systems, and all the accoutrements of the burgeoning middle classes. But while being taken out of the back lanes of my childhood and deposited on suburban lawns was, I suppose, an encouraging metaphor for the opportunities that my education would provide for me, it also made me feel inadequate and alienated, not quite good enough, marginalized, and resentful both of where I came from and what I was being led to aspire to.

St. Cuthbert’s is run by a group of priests; the headmaster, the Reverend Canon Cassidy, is as fearsome a man of God as ever walked in a black cloak. A bald head and thick black eyebrows beetling over dark impenetrable eyes and a sunken cadaverous face give him an expression of permanent, theatrical anger, like a villain in an opera. I know of no one in the school who isn’t deathly afraid of this man. I have absolutely no doubt that he is essentially a good and decent person with
our best interests at heart, but the school is controlled by the threat of his demeanor and with an unyielding and harsh discipline. The headmaster’s deputy is the Reverend Father Walsh. Father Walsh, as far as I know, does not teach, and his only apparent function in the school seems to be the caning of those boys unlucky enough to be sent to his office for offenses as minor as turning up late, excessive blotting of an exercise book, or the rare instances of cheek, swearing, smoking, or fighting. In one year I would hold the record for sustaining forty-two strokes of the cane on my rear end, in seven agonizing bouts, that for the life of me couldn’t have been justified by my behavior. I just seem to have put myself in the way of trouble, been in the wrong place at the wrong time, with the wrong friends and the wrong look on my face.

“Six of the best” is a quaint euphemism for the ferocity of this excruciating torture. One is normally “sent up” to the main building after lunch. On the left as you enter is the school chapel, where a lingering trace of incense from Wednesday’s Benediction gives the air in the narrow corridor an unmistakable fragrance: it is the sanctified odor of ritual sacrifice. There is usually more than one victim waiting in a sorry line outside the office. The school settles into an eerie silence as afternoon classes begin: the clock in the hall is ticking slowly; we wait like the condemned, not daring to speak. We continue to wait, and wait, and I know from past experience that this is quite deliberate psychological torture.

I project myself into an imagined future, years hence in the urbane security of an adult life, where I can look back upon this trial and others like it with a detached and amused nostalgia. “One day, this won’t seem so bad,” I tell myself, and this trick will work for me in a number of stressful situations, but only up to a point. The school clock is still ticking and the office door creaks open slowly. Sometimes I’m called first, sometimes in the middle, sometimes last. Perhaps
it’s best to get it over with, or then again, if you delay, there’s always the chance that the good father may be called to a telephone and cancel the whole disciplinary session because his mother has just died, or perhaps an earthquake will shake the school to its foundations, and I imagine rescuing a grateful Father Walsh from the rubble of his office.

“There’s a good lad,” he’d say.

But despite my imaginings, it’s a heroism of a different kind that is required here.

“Take your jacket off, and put it over the chair.”

The study looks out over the playing fields, where I can see a football being lobbed effortlessly into the air and a straggling line of cross-country runners. No one seems to have a care in the world out there.

“Bend over, facing the window.”

Sometimes, with some foresight you can be wearing an extra pair of underpants beneath your gray flannels, but this is as rare as it is unlikely, and an exercise book down your trousers only works in the comics. There is a sudden swish of air in the room behind you and then what feels like a cut from a rapier across the cheeks of your arse. The shocking pain reflexively has you standing bolt upright and winded.

“Bend over.”

He can’t possibly be going to hit me again.

Whoosh!

In almost the same place or at least within a millemeter he delivers a second stroke with quantum precision. Up you go.

“Bend over.”

The man on the crucifix by the window averts his eyes from the torture; is this really being done in his name?
Whish! Up
you go.

“Bend over.”

If there is any homoerotic component in all of this, it is totally lost on me, and I suspect totally lost on the good priest. Caning is simply stupid, pseudoacademic, pseudoreligious, medieval violence, mindless and institutionalized.
Whack!
Up you go. I swear that after four of these appalling deliveries, no matter how tough you may think you are, you will be crying, less from the pain than from sheer, bloody, murderous rage. Surely that is enough. What could I possibly have done to warrant this?

“Bend over.”

That even the threat of this barbarity is effective in keeping us compliant, quiescent, and largely obedient is not in question. It is brutally effective. I just wonder whether those who suffered this painful indignity ever turned out the way they were supposed to. My suspicion is that, if we were to evolve into responsible and law-abiding citizens, we would do so despite this treatment, not because of it. Any idea that I would become an unquestioning and uncritical follower of the church’s wisdom flew out the office window as the final swipe found its target at the seat of my resentment.

    I’m happy to say that the school today by all accounts is a happier place, such barbarity having been outlawed for years, but there were also some fine teachers in the school, transcendent lights in the largely oppressive gloom that stalked the halls of the academy like a dark spirit. These men shone with an illuminating passion for the knowledge they were imparting; for them, standing in front of a class was as blessed a calling as the priesthood and far more than just a job. The best teachers were those who could galvanize an entire class solely with the charge of their enthusiasm, and it was these rare and exceptional men who would kindle in me an abiding and consuming interest in words, books, and the way of the world. I was inspired and
infected by their energy, and I wanted to learn because learning seemed like an adventure, as if a dark continent were waiting to be discovered, dense, layered, and compellingly hidden.

Mr. McGough is a gaunt, stick insect of a man, well over six feet tall, with an enormous dome of a head that floats, disembodied and ghostly, over the lowing herds of schoolboys as they hurry to their classes along the dark corridors. He will be known, in a triumph of school irony, as Tiny, although I know of no one brave enough, or foolish enough, to ever call him by this name within earshot. A black gown hangs loosely over a gray three-piece suit molded closely to the angular wire of his body, and two or three books are as usual tucked under the crook of his long arm. If you dare to look as he makes his way through the halls his face is invariably set in a mask of displeasure and withering contempt, his dyspeptic, pitiless eyes observing and passing sentence on the world below. I imagine that from this Olympian height we must all look like pygmies to him, physically and intellectually stunted dwarves whom he is forced to live among like a sullen Gulliver in Lilliput.