Flying Free (4 page)

Where had this zeal sprung from? I don’t know. Maybe it did have its origins in my experience of unjustifiably assumed authority at prep school or in the ‘none of your concern’ attitude with which my parents had
attempted to defend me from knowledge for my own good but which had in fact left me flailing in the dark. Maybe it was the combination of my limitless inquisitiveness and the ‘Because we say so’ which then greeted all childish enquiries.

I like to think that it was simply a keen critical faculty and a highly developed sense of justice and fair-play. No one should ever be denied an audience nor any idea denied consideration, whether by law, by jackbooted stormtroopers or by a smug elite. No one was ever going to tell me what to think.

Others rebelled by growing their hair or shaving it, by flouting conventions of dress or speech, I by declaring the freedoms of fools, especially since there has never yet been a great idea which was not once deemed folly.

I was fourteen when, one lunchtime in the school library, I came upon John Stuart Mill’s magnificent statement of those freedoms in
On Liberty
. I felt as if, having lived an entire life amidst aliens, vaguely persuaded that something was amiss, I had at last come upon another of my own kind.

These instantly became sacred words. They remain sacred.
Self-determination
– the freedom of all save minors and the mentally incapable to go to hell in their own way, however apparently ill-advised, without interference from others – remains at the heart of my moral beliefs and was to become the core principle of my politics.

For politics were, willy-nilly, to enter my life.

Dulwich was a school at which politics were not merely theoretical or academic. They were real and alive all around the school. They seethed and burbled in its corridors. As I have said, many pupils were on bursaries and came from widely diverse backgrounds and nationalities.

In 1981, the economic and social tensions resulting from mass unemployment, shoddy policing and racial intolerance were to explode into riot in Brixton, just down the road. The police used the college as their base throughout the disturbances. Some 279 police and forty-five members of the public were to be injured and over 100 vehicles torched.

For those who read of the riots, it was no doubt a simple matter of
law-abiding
and lawless, white and black, native and immigrant, right wing and left. We knew better. We had Asians, Afro-Caribbeans and the children of the unemployed amongst us, and there was nothing predictable about their political affiliations or tribal loyalties in Britain.

No matter what your affiliation, what your loyalties, it was hard to be proud or hopeful in late-seventies Britain. Politicians still postured absurdly in the fairy-tale guises of working or upper class and declared themselves left or right wing. They maintained these sad, hackneyed roles at the expense of pragmatism and common sense.

Encouraged by such play-acting, the trades unions threw their weight about – Cnuts, feverishly building, at huge expense to others, futile breakwaters against an irresistible tide. Their equally foolish opponents adopted the wicked, moustachio-twirling baronet role from melodrama. The result was a paralysed nation.

In order that we should keep bearing children, maintaining the law, watching
The X-Factor
and the like, humans tend to forget or to downplay past pain and so, when crippled by opium addiction years later, we accuse the doctor who first prescribed morphine. Whatever the views of Margaret Thatcher today, few can deny that she and her reforms were desperately needed back then.

In 1978, as the Winter of Discontent loomed, Sir Keith Joseph, the initial architect of Thatcher’s success, came to Dulwich to address the school.

Joseph’s was a lucid intellect, which is probably why he would never seek the highest office. He also had impeccable manners.

His vision was limpid and beautiful. Citing the example of British Leyland, he argued vehemently against public ownership of industry (not least because industry cannot wait around for public and bureaucratic sanction for every move nor be subject to just such vote-hungry posturing as was then petrifying public services). He damned the self-feeding, infinitely proliferating quangos which had sprung up under a Labour government ruling by patronage and appeasement.

He envisaged a Britain – and so Britons – free to deal as they would with one another and with the world. He had that trust in the people which, though sometimes misplaced – and that is the cost – is the
sine
qua non
of democracy. Ultimately, the people and the market will regulate themselves.

I had never joined anything in my life, but the following day I joined my local Conservative Party.

It is almost as hard for those who were not there to understand the gloom into which the nation was plunged as it is for us to understand how otherwise intelligent people espoused Marxism or Fascism in the thirties or, indeed, shoehorned Britain into the ‘Common Market’ in the aftermath of World War II, firmly convinced that they were justified in deceiving the public because they were ensuring world peace.

The echoes today are striking. At the end of the seventies, worldwide unemployment soared. The energy crisis sent oil prices sky high. The price of gold attained a record high point and the US dollar plunged to an
all-time
low. The troubles and the outrages continued in Northern Ireland and the European Court of Human Rights found Britain guilty of maltreating prisoners there. Public service strikes saw unburied corpses and garbage piling high. Only the rats have it down as a boom year.

I was never to be an ardent Conservative activist. I helped out at a couple of election nights. I attended a few functions. As an individualist and a libertarian, however, I was an enthusiastic supporter of Maggie and a believer in the self-reliant, self-determining society which she envisaged.

One of our history masters at Dulwich declared that, no matter what their guiding principles, the British remain temperamentally divided by one crucial distinction: we are always Cavaliers or Roundheads.

The Roundheads, of course, were characterised in
1066 and All That
as ‘right but repulsive’ because, having faith in their own rectitude but not in other people, they saw fit to impose their ideas upon everyone else. There were almost as many of these dry as dust dirigistes in the Tory party as in Labour. Maggie, however, was a Cavalier in their midst, and I, an individualist and an anti-authoritarian, was ardently pro-Cavalier.

When, in May 1979, she became Prime Minister, it was as if the
pebble-dashed
back wall onto which our windows had for years looked out had been demolished to give us glimpses at least of rolling hills and a bright sea.

And we who were young could actually set forth that way…

Aside from my passionate defences of just about any defenceless cause, which drew requests for temperance and some exasperation from my seniors and teachers, my greatest transgressions in my undistinguished school career involved alcohol. I suspect that this was due not so much to genes as to another legacy from my father – the association of alcohol with independence and adulthood in defiance of domestic restraints.

I was only in the fourth form when my friends and I pooled our money and brought a half-bottle of Teacher’s whisky into school. We met early by the cricket pavilion on a misty September morning. Impatient and heedless of proprieties, we thought it best to dispose of the evidence there and then.

We felt very warm and contented as we heard the headmaster’s admonitions at assembly that morning, and we bellowed
Jerusalem
with unwonted fervour – all save Winterbourne. Winterbourne’s internal organs were evidently more fragile and startled than ours. They did not know what to do with such sudden stimulation. To our horror, the boy turned white, clutched at his stomach, winced, lurched and collapsed like a stringless puppet.

They gathered about him, teachers and matrons, and they performed a rapid and accurate diagnosis. One whiff of Winterbourne’s breath would have given the game away.

An unnecessary but exhaustive enquiry was launched. It was principally unnecessary because our colour was high, we were shifting from foot to foot and repeatedly swallowing jagged chunks of nothing and our breath too must have stunk of Scotch and Maclean’s spearmint. Nonetheless,
procedure must be followed, the empty bottle retrieved from behind the big roller, evidence sought and justice seen to be done.

At lunchtime, we found ourselves in the anteroom to the Middle School headmaster’s study, overseen by his secretary. We shrugged shoulders every minute or so, tapped our feet and considered the pattern of parquet very seriously.

I was the last to go in.

It was bravado rather than any desire to emulate that lickspittle brat Washington which saw me crossing my legs, soigné like, and explaining, ‘Well, sir, it was a beastly cold morning and there was some whisky, so I just thought it would be a good idea – you know – to have a couple of nips to keep out the cold before plunging into the fray.’

‘Who supplied the whisky?’ demanded Mr D. V. Knight.

‘Oh, sir, you know I can’t tell you that.’

The other boys were staggered when they heard what I had done. ‘You’re in the shit,’ they told me. ‘Why admit it, you berk? We just denied it straight out. He can’t prove anything.’

That evening, we were summoned once more to face judgment.

Again for some reason I was the last to be admitted. I sat there in the twilight hearing the swish and the thwack of the cane. My fellows emerged one by one, biting their lower lips and flapping their fingers. I braced myself, adjusted my waistband to no obvious effect and entered the headmaster’s room.

Classic stuff – hackneyed but effective for all that: Knight standing there chiaroscuro, the light from his lamp picking out the gilt on the leather desktop, dabbing the tweed lapels, his cheekbones and his brow, streaking the folds of his gown and outlining in silverpoint the cane which should, it seemed to me, be smoking. My arse twitched. My genitals bunched. My stomach whimpered.

‘Farage,’ he said after a suitable pause. ‘I am not entirely sure what I should do with you. You are a bloody fool like the rest of them, but you’re the only one to own up. Get out of here and please do your best to develop some sort of a brain…’

I obeyed the former order at once. I have falteringly attempted to obey the latter.

Certainly I have never had cause to question the wisdom acquired that day. True power is arbitrary, and, when you’re firmly and unequivocally hooked, the best policy is to laugh and leap into the frying pan. Wriggling is tiring, futile, inelegant and irritating.

I am still vaguely ashamed of my next alcohol-related transgression.

It was CCF field day, and Simon Pipkin and I were appointed to the very important role of emergency support services. This meant that, whilst the rest of the army section yomped around on the South Downs, attempting to find their way back to base by means of compasses, a map, trigonometry, the growth of lichen and trails of breadcrumbs or something, we were meant to occupy a position outside a red phone-box in anticipation of calls informing us that they had fallen down crevasses, been savaged by dormice or whatever.

In our defence, it was a sweltering hot day, so the dangers of hypothermia, avalanche and ice-related injuries were small. The dangers of sunstroke were real, but we felt that we were exposed to them as much as, if not more than, our harder-working fellows. There was, too, no entertainment beyond watching sheep up there in that desolate spot. A thoughtful
eighteenth-century
person had, however, taken mercy on the traveller and built a pub up there.

We manned our position gallantly until roughly eleven o’clock in the morning. At that point two things happened almost simultaneously. The pub’s front door rattled and swung inward and we, who had studied the subject in our First Aid manuals, detected unquestionable symptoms of sunstroke in ourselves. There was the rasping throat, for example. We agreed that we both had that. The delirium seemed to be kicking in early too. We were both hallucinating, mostly about beer, and I said that Pipkin was gibbering. He was of the opinion that it was I.

We were vital components of the orienteering exercise. It would have been totally irresponsible of us to have risked collapse and death by the roadside. We could always return to the phone-box from time to time. If anyone were dying, they would just keep trying, wouldn’t they…?

So we swaggered into the pub in our battledress, ordered what we felt to be the certain cure and, for want of stretchers or truckle beds, sprawled on a banquette.

There was, I believe, a period of euphoria, but we knew this to be a common feature of delirium. We ignored it.

By two thirty, our worst fears were realised. We were both drooling and feeling queasy. Our faces were very red, our eyes blurry. We adjourned to the beer garden. We kept taking the medicine.

By five thirty, when the school coach came to pick us up, it was clear that we had made the right decision, because all the other boys, though dust-coated and complaining of sprains and bruises, were evidently hale and well, whilst Pipkin and I were falling about and vomiting copiously.

School coaches did not run to loos in those days (and that, on reflection, is a very odd sentence). We vomited principally, therefore, on the upholstery, our kit and our clothes. Just occasionally and for variety, we vomited on other people’s kit and clothes.