My Natural History (4 page)

It was like seeing the Holy Grail bobbing about in the river and watching it float by. Isn’t that the meaning of life? Never mind, what have we got for prep? The thing I sought more than anything else in the world was already in plain view, and I did nothing. In this way, life, wild or tame, carries on. And so I went out and coxed the Colts A, brought them back for once unscathed, caught the train to Streatham, changing at Clapham Junction, wishing I had already done my prep. Wondering why life was so dull.

5. Adder

Vipera berus

H
e was pretty formidable. He had heavy black glasses, side-whiskers that reached his jawbone and an air of knowing what he was about in the world. We had never spoken: he came to Lower Six Arts by a different route. That’s why I expected him to be a second-rater, but right from the start, it was clear that he had the sharpest mind in the history group, the only one of us with a proper grasp of the subject. He was in a different English group, but I gathered that he excelled there, too. So I was distinctly wary of him. It was he that spoke first, observing that I had come to school with an armful of LPs borrowed from the gramophone library in Streatham; I was planning to change them on the way home. I can’t remember what the records were, probably Bach. We established that he too
had a taste for music. He was especially fond of the Bartok string quartets. This was a bit beyond my scope, but I countered gamely with Scarlatti harpsichord sonatas.

His name was Ralph, rhyming with safe rather than Alf; though Ralph was never safe. He was the most dangerous boy in the school. I had no objection to that. Gradually, a new alliance was formed. I started to spend time with Ralph and his friend Ted. Ted was an artist’s son,
shockhaired
, singular, with a mind that strove constantly for the bizarre. Radical politics became part of our conversation: here, Ralph was the leader. We let our hair grow. I
abandoned
cuff-links and tab-collars: I reverted to my
first-form
scruffiness, save that this state was now cultivated with dandified care. We affected illegalities of dress: Ralph had black flared (flared!) trousers worn with brown zipper boots; I had grey suede Chelsea boots.

It is accepted as a truism of history that the 60s were about pleasure and excitement, that all young people were on the same side, that everyone who lived through those turbulent years was part of it, out there on the cutting edge, having the time of his life, enjoying guilt-free
pleasures
, cultivating an exotic appearance, rebelling against outmoded traditions, establishing a new and vibrant future. But it is a flagrant lie. It wasn’t like that at all. It was a time of polarisation: of bitter oppositions.

The strongest opponents of these burgeoning freedoms, this incipient rebellion, were our own classmates. It was
not the masters but the prefects who lined up against us. They saw themselves as mature. They aped their elders. They dressed as smartly as possible. Most importantly, they sincerely believed that conformity was not a matter of taste and temperament but a moral obligation. My French group was asked to write an essay about the Anouilh play,
Antigone
, declaring whether we sided with Antigone and the forces of freedom and individuality, or Créon, conformity and obedience. Four of the class, all of them prefects, took Créon’s side: so much for the wild 60s. They didn’t know, or if knowing, didn’t care, that the play was a coded examination of the polarities of Nazism and the French Resistance, and that Créon spoke for the Nazis.

I was in the forefront of the Sixth Form Resistance myself. Momentous things were happening in society: momentous things were happening to me. I too was taking part in a drama: I had a part, and it wasn’t Créon. I had an identity. I wasn’t bored. I read passionately, and Ralph and I talked books eternally: he was for Lawrence, I was for Joyce. Art mattered. For the others, art was just a subject useful for the passing of exams, we scoffed. We knew
better
. And when we walked through the school, people knew who we were. We were stars. I was no longer a reluctant football-player in a tab-collared shirt: no longer a
third-rate
imitation of the “mature” boys, the would-be prefects. No: I was a first-rate intellectual dissident – the best the
school could come up with, anyway – with hair bouncing on my coat-collar. Ralph and I helped to set up a
unilateral
sixth-form council, a piece of insurrection that alarmed the headmaster and absolutely horrified the prefects. We were proposing democratically elected leaders instead of unilaterally appointed ones: this had to be stamped out, and was. Still, we had a fine old time stirring things up.

A moment of apotheosis. Ralph had pinned to the
noticeboard
an inflammatory document, calling on we the undersigned to condemn something or other: the way the school was run, or maybe the way the headmaster refused to speak against American intervention in Vietnam. The subject doesn’t matter. What mattered was that the
headmaster
, Charles Kuper, elected to make the judgment of Voltaire. He made a fine speech before all the school, speaking about the freedoms a previous generation had fought for, and said that while he disagreed with the
document
, he would defend to the death our right to pin it to the wall.

“Why has it been taken down then?”

What? Interrupting the headmaster? Interrupting the headmaster in the middle of Assembly? Six hundred heads swivelled through 180 degrees and looked up at the
gallery
, the place sacred to the sixth form. In the very back row, shoulders against the wall, each with two feet on the chair in front, three wild and dangerous rebels: Ralph, the one who had spoken, long black curls like a judge’s wig,
dangerous glasses and those ferocious whiskers; Ted
making
the entire concept of uniforms and uniformity
meaningless
; me. And no, it wasn’t a great moment of rebellion: rather, it was a great moment in the establishment of
personal
identity. We three: we rebels. (It turned out that the head prefect had taken the document down on his own initiative. He refused to return it, despite the headmaster’s overt approval. He said it was undermining Authority. Never mind what the headmaster said: it was immoral and it had to go.)

Ralph became part of my family. He was always around our house, and was a great success with everyone. We established running jokes: Ralph is part of family folklore to this day. His sharpest remarks, his always exaggerated – so he claims – faux pas, his jokes crop up whenever two or three of the family are together. It was one of those friendships of early maturity that is almost like a love affair, but with all sensual elements removed. There is a greater intimacy in such a friendship than is ever found in the alliances of maturity. We knew each other’s secrets. We knew each other’s weaknesses. We knew all each
other
’s jokes. We knew each other’s embarrassments, each other’s triumphs. We were, for a time, each other’s
completion
: each other’s validation.

Ralph started coming on holiday to Cornwall with us. We had been brought up to love the dramatic landscapes of that extraordinary place: but Ralph seemed to have a
deeper and subtler understanding of it. It was not wildlife with him, not exactly. Rather it was the shape of the land itself that moved him: the sensation of the landscape as a narrative, as a tale still being told, as a place trodden by humans from one millennium to the next.

For our view of the world was changing. We no longer saw the way ahead as one of violent revolution. We weren’t Marxists or Maoists any more. We were now impelled towards a romantic anarchy. We sought instead a revolution in thinking, a revolution in seeing the world, a revolution in understanding life. Landscape was part of this: most especially, the landscape of Cornwall. Through this wild place, it was surely possible to reach a more important understanding of human significance and of human insignificance. Through landscape we could
appreciate
where we had come from: the better to understand where we had to go. It was from Eden we had come: it was to Eden we should return. Or at least die in trying.

Does that sound frightfully adolescent? Well, so it bloody well should. We were bloody adolescents. Why do we sneer at adolescence? Why, when we look back in maturity at the wild notions and the demented hopes and the illogical beliefs and the ephemeral soul-deep passions of our adolescence, do we feel it our duty to sneer? Or apologise? Why do we not instead believe that
adolescence
is not a cursed but a blessed period of life: a
whitewater
ride down the river of time. These rapids are not a
place to spend a lifetime, but they are an essential
transitional
process if you wish to be an adult with any kind of life, any kind of passion, any kind of meaning. True, the stuff we came up with was half-baked: but then neither it nor we had been in the oven for terribly long. We were celebrating our newness, our rawness, celebrating the
irrefragable
fact that life was all before us: for us to change, for us to be changed irretrievably by.

So no: I don’t have a single regret for all the bollocks we talked, for all the guff and blather that had so much meaning for us back then. Ralph and I would sit on the bouncy pile-carpet of thrift by Seagull Gully, looking down at the white birds wheeling in and out, or go down at Basher’s Cove where the sea swept in with such style, or perhaps take our favourite spot at Bishop’s Rock, a seat in an amphitheatre in which the stage was the sea. And we would talk of girls and love and God and society and life and death and books and landscape and painting and music and Joyce and Lawrence and girls: and all around us, the sea shifted and the landscape stayed still and things grew and things lived.

We were wild rebels: so obviously, we needed drugs to prove it to ourselves. Eventually, we managed to buy some. We got hold of some dope, or shit, as it then was called. We were staying in Cornwall, we had the cottage to ourselves (and if you don’t leave it immaculate you will never go there again). We had left school by then, but we
made a ceremonial return visit and, with splendid
appropriateness
, we arranged a deal in the tuck-shop. As a result, a package arrived at the cottage by post, humorously addressed to CC Kuper. It held an instruction: Do Not Burn. Generous of him to put that in: for this was grass, not shit, and we were hardly capable of telling them apart. It would have been a sad thing to set these expensive leaves on fire.

We had smoked before, but never really got off on it. Now, clumsily, with unpractised fingers, we skinned up a joint and daringly smoked it. We smoked until I noticed I was high. By the time this important fact had sunk in, I was, as we were to learn to say later, out of my head. I had to lie down for, it seemed, several weeks, half appalled and half delighted by the state I was in, half in terror and half in joy. Ralph, however, didn’t smoke tobacco, and was unable to inhale the smoke. Instead, he swallowed it. While I was seeing visions and dreaming dreams, Ralph kept belching out great plumes of smoke – an alarming sight under the influence of mind-altering drugs – and complaining bitterly that it had no effect.

But a couple of weeks later, Ralph and I reconvened at Ted’s house. We sat in his sunlit garden and smoked the rest of the stuff. Ralph had been practising hard with
cigarettes
, and had cracked the inhalation thing. Within a
matter
of moments he was out of his own head. I don’t think I have ever seen anyone so sublimely happy: at the triumph
of getting high, at the highness itself, at the garden, at what the garden revealed to him. The afternoon was, for all of us, a kind of ecstasy, the kind of ecstasy that
unperplexes
, but for Ralph, lying stretched out on the grass, it was a moment of ultimate perfection. After that, he was always keener on drugs than I was: mainly, as he has said many times, in a doomed attempt to refind that brief, but endlessly stretchy moment of joy. He kissed the earth, again and again: he could feel every blade of grass, he could feel the great movements of the entire planet
shifting
underneath him. He was at one with the earth. And he laughed.

It was, as we also learned to say, good stuff.

Drugs were part of life for a while. We dropped acid together: a great and fearful adventure. I hated it, to tell the truth, but because of the exigencies of the time, I had to pretend I loved it. In truth, my only good memory is the coming-down: a moment of soul-deep rejoicing in the fact that it was all beginning to be over. I seemed to be in a hammock in Ted’s garden on another sun-filled day,
transfixed
by the beauties of a hoverfly. It hung in the air above me, motionless as time: a wild and beatific vision of
everything
that I loved.

Ralph and I were in Cornwall again. We had hitched down as usual. It was a beautiful day in May. Everything was perfect. Ralph decided to drop a trip; I declined his offer that I join him, though I pretended to think about it.
But Ralph was in sublime form, and I revelled in the
contact
-high of intimacy and acid. After a while we went for a walk along the cliff-tops: and we lay in a little hollow where the wind never penetrated. It was suddenly and astonishingly warm. Ralph stretched himself out to soak in the sun, to drink in the air, to embrace the landscape. And then a moment of high drama.