Noisy at the Wrong Times (21 page)

The appalling atmosphere caused by Paddy’s death hung
around the school for months. His legacy was to be found in the individual remembrance of each of us. There may have been longer-serving, even better headmasters than Paddy, but he was the only one I knew, and he was one of the few adults in the world for whom I had an instinctive respect and affection. I understood deference, but I never proffered it without design or consideration, rarely did I find a natural urge to be respectful, but I knew the value of affecting it, and Paddy attracted my natural regard for all the reasons I have elaborated upon elsewhere. The lasting effects of his death would either become evident or they would remain hidden among all the other reasons for my personality traits, but his passing certainly sounded the starting gun for the demise of Woolverstone. I would not be aware of this until years later, but it was the first blow against the survival of the school. Soon, a new headmaster would replace Paddy, and his was an entirely different outlook. Some said he was a Trojan horse, sent in by the powers that be in London, who disapproved of the privileged funding Woolverstone received. The school had already been turned into a comprehensive – our year was the last of the grammar intake – and eventually Woolverstone would die a slow, painful death, the victim of political doctrine and the sort of educational theory that these days sends too many sixteen-year-olds out into the world armed with little more than rudimentary skills and a flick knife.

Paddy’s loss also signalled a material change in the attitudes of some of the masters, as well as in many of us pupils; some of them left and new masters, palpably from a different brand of thinking and dedication, joined. For my part, I think the shock of it all calmed me down and subdued my wayward nature for a period, and my report book is good for that term when Paddy’s hand is suddenly absent from the page, now replaced by the equally fluid pen of David Hudson. There is
talk of me ‘turning a corner”, and Morris pointed out that I had become “determined to do what is right”. Halls won the house rugby championship, and along with playing well in the final, I “encouraged others to play well too”.

Paddy had fruitlessly attended to my pastoral wellbeing for three years, had watched and worried over me, pushed and pulled me in the directions he thought would be of greatest benefit. All of it was seemingly worthless, negated by my own boneheaded intransigence, yet all it appears he had to do was die for me to take heed.

Individuals like Paddy and those teachers who had been with him were the glue that held together the entire edifice of a place like Woolverstone. It is clear now that they were fighting a rearguard action against politicians whose cruelly pursued doctrines, based on a perverse, inverted snobbery, were slowly making inroads into the school’s chances of survival. They had already succeeded in turning the place comprehensive and had designs on closing the school altogether. What often seems to outsiders like anachronistic traditions and principles, often unspoken ones, were carried in the hearts and minds of such people as Paddy and then passed onto us. Of course, we resisted them to begin with and if I were being generous, those at County Hall who hated the style of the school more than we might have done were probably of a view that they were protecting us. But those people were wrong. This is not a debate, to my mind, about comprehensives versus grammar: those two principles now exist in our system when perhaps they shouldn’t, and another book is probably required for that. But nobody was protecting me when they took cold and malicious advantage of Paddy’s death to further their own aims.

At Woolverstone there was a through-line of expectation, achievement and spirit that new teachers who came and went would either pick up or not, but it was people like Paddy who
laid it all out for them. With the arrival of a new regime, there was a slow and unmistakable re-positioning of the school’s ethos, and lots of us began to give up on it all. But that was some way into the future. For now, we tried as best we could to adjust to the change that had been brutally and suddenly imposed upon us, and the term went on in as normal a fashion as possible. We won the Suffolk Under 14s Sevens Cup, and I worked stage crew for the Rock Prom where Rob and a boy called Holloway sang a passable version of “She Loves Me” by The Beatles.

Spring term 1979 was potentially the fulcrum of my entire school career. It may well have been the point at which my life could have taken a different direction had I allowed myself to follow it. Everything was still in the balance but I appear to have had a sort of epiphany, and the optimism of masters who had hitherto been depressingly pessimistic about me began to shine through. I had every reason to feel good about myself. But I didn’t.

* * *

Rage.

Rage arrived back at school with me in late April 1979 for the summer term. It was a new feeling that differed from the bad temper that had always been my trademark. This was something altogether more malignant. I don’t think that I differed from many boys of that age, yet at times I felt like an alien. When rage took over, I paid no mind whatsoever to consequences, and once I had decided on a course of action precipitated by rage, I would proceed with gusto. Walking out of classrooms, refusing to do what I was asked, total insouciance towards prep and not even half-hearted effort during the end of year exams became the order of the day. I
was a disaster in the making. In fact, I was already a fully-fledged catastrophe. I found time to do archery, Cadets and Halls won the house cricket, too, but the word on the street was “relapse”. I find it almost impossible to remember what was happening at home between terms. I imagine Matt was as dedicated a recidivist as ever, the police probably kicked our front door in once or twice and girls were definitely a focus, an obsession even. During holidays, I fell in and out of love on a weekly basis, which was emotionally exhausting.

Nevertheless, I had developed a nasty habit of meeting fire with conflagration. My violence towards others was still responsive inasmuch as I did not go around punching people for the entertainment, but any affront was met with overwhelming force. I was hit around the ear by a sixth former wearing a plaster cast because he thought I had made a remark behind his back. I was walking with Rob when, out of the blue, my ear was walloped and, looking up to see the perpetrator, I punched him so hard on the chin that he fell flat on his back. Later that night, one of his cohorts came to the house to warn me against hitting sixth formers and I told him to eff off too. I suspect he did not pursue the matter further because he saw Rage. One senior boy took a golf club to one of our number who was a tough, resilient cookie, but even his bones succumbed to the wooden driver and he ended up with multiple bruises and a broken arm. So we went to the senior’s room to warn him that any repeat would result in a certain visit to hospital. By now we were strapping fourteen-year-olds and five or six of us were a force to be reckoned with. I say all this because none of what I have just imparted was normally permitted at Woolverstone. You did not hit or threaten sixth formers, and you did not disobey masters. But I didn’t care. Rage made sure of that.

In that third year there was a flu epidemic, which really
meant only three boys actually got flu and 150 pretended to have it. We developed techniques for duping Matron and most popular was quickly putting the bulb of the thermometer against the hot metal radiator in her laundry room when her back was turned. Sometimes, boys held it a fraction too long, which meant the thermometer reported temperatures similar to those found on the surface of the sun. Matron was inattentive and trusting, but she wasn’t stupid, and such mistakes meant you would be sitting in English lessons with only four others whilst your friends enjoyed all day in bed.

Soon after the bogus flu epidemic I actually did contract viral meningitis. As with my broken arm, it went unattended for three days, during which I lay delirious in bed with a headache registering 5.8 on the Richter scale, unable to open my eyes to the light that sent them into spasms. As it was viral and not bacterial meningitis, I was presumably at less risk, but it wasn’t as if anyone was paying attention to know whether that was the case. Dragging myself to sickbay and the doctor again, I was given tablets that I later discovered were soon banned. I have avoided finding out why.

The Butt and Oyster at Pin Mill became a frequent destination. The landlord was a curmudgeonly old goat with a huge handlebar moustache and it will be of no surprise to learn that his nickname was “Handlebars”. He was also about one hundred and three years of age and hated Woolvo boys with a vengeance, but for some reason he allowed us to sit in the smoke room, giggling and guzzling the Butt cider that was brewed on the premises. We were fourteen, but we had begun to look a lot older, and in rural Suffolk I don’t suppose they worried too much about under-age drinkers. Butt cider was syrupy, golden and lethal. Obviously, it was an opportunity to drool over “Jugs”, the voluptuous and sweetly brainless barmaid, who never failed to fall prey to our japes, like phoning
the bar from the nearby phone box and asking to speak to Mike Hunt. “Mike Hunt? Is Mike Hunt here?” she would call through the pub.

One or two pints of Butt cider left us struggling to put on our Wellington boots in the lobby of the pub, falling about the place and shouting, and it was in this state that we had to trudge through the darkness and mud along the foreshore back to school, hoping to get back into the grounds, into the house and under the covers without being caught. Sometimes, a master would spot something going on out of the corner of his eye from the study or whilst on a patrol around the house, and we would have to charge up the stairs and dive into bed. Through the door would crash the master, switching on the lights. If you were lucky, he would go into the wrong dorm first, giving us a few seconds to disrobe. If he chose well, then you were under covers fully clothed with shoes on and I was more than once trapped by the telltale mud on the blankets.

Pubescent, fit and arrogant: our third year at Woolverstone was possibly the most entertaining and carefree of our time there, despite my frequent angry clashes with authority. Work was substantial and, whilst I took a lesser amount of care over it than I might have, I was getting on with it more or less. We were growing up fast and few of us were coping with it as well as we thought, yet Woolverstone was home, even though it was struggling to make us conform entirely. Quite how quickly we were growing up was evidenced by the work we undertook in the school holidays – money, or the pursuit of it, occupied us greatly. Fashion was becoming a factor in our lives and it needed to be paid for. So did football.

Chelsea FC was the abiding passion of Rob and me. School holidays meant trips to Stamford Bridge where I had been torturing myself for several years. The ground was a toilet in the seventies, a large bowl, a swirling wind and a distance
between pitch and terrace so vast that it later provided land for hotels and a couple of hundred flats. The “Shed” is where we squeezed ourselves in, by the white wall, two young kids screaming obscenities. We just screamed when a couple of hundred West Ham fans once announced their presence among us. As we leapt the wall at the front of the terrace, a policeman tried to get us to jump back in.

“Fuck off! You go in and sort it out,” I said.

“If you think I’m going up there, you must be mad!” he replied. The battle that raged involved horses, dogs and the kind of territorial madness that football in the seventies was famed for. I shall never forget the Chelsea fan who sat on the crush barrier imploring everybody not to run and then being engulfed by scores of attacking fans, the scarves tied to his wrists whipping and flowing like flags as, still sitting on the barrier, he threw punches in his defence. Stamford Bridge in those days could be terrifying and exciting in equal measure; in and around the ground there was a tactical war every Saturday, with a malignant atmosphere you could almost smell, especially when other London clubs came west.

Thinking about it, I am surprised that football violence never appealed to me more. Perhaps my desire for tribal aggression was sated by rugby, when we indulged in a class war against those who thought themselves better than us. Football violence was a serious thing in those days, but it was more a spectator sport as far as we were concerned. Chelsea’s ‘firm’ was a significant player in the world of hooliganism, and there was more than a simple male aggression thing going on; it had a fashion, music and a lifestyle all its own. Hooliganism was a social problem inasmuch as it caused a lot of trouble on the streets, but it was never, as far as I could discern, the result of social deprivation, because these people had jobs and normal lives and just liked fighting. We knew all the faces and learned the ebb and flow of
a vicious conflict, egging on the participants, whose waves of attacks across the sloped terraces would create undulating, pulsating patterns like those on a medieval battlefield as retreat and clash were acted out. It could be beautiful, in a grotesque and brutal way. We were too young to be of any real use in all this ferocity, but that never stopped us getting swept up in the whole thing. A police horse even bit me once. Anyway, we cheered on the tribe because cheering the team got us nowhere. The awfulness of the later seventies Chelsea was only occasionally punctuated by great highs; wins against Liverpool in the cup spring to mind. Otherwise, a win was always a surprise. Fuelled by Guinness, we enjoyed the camaraderie and the testosterone, but again, it had to be provided for.

The father of one boy was the chief of a London fire station, and his men frequently took alternative work on their four days off. He had contacts with various agencies and was able to find jobs for us in the holidays. At fourteen, I was able to pass for a lot older so spent many holidays working in warehouses, packing goods or heaving boxes. I worked in a distributor of toiletries for a period, on the strap-bander that tightened a metal strip around a box of heavy items. If I wasn’t mistiming it and causing the bander to wrap thin air, I was getting my hand caught between the strip and the box, thus binding myself to a carton of Eau Savage.