Semi-Detached (14 page)

Now, in
the infinite blackness, my father starts breathing heavily. Like the steady and
remorseless sloughing of a long surf on a gravel beach, a slow in-drawing of
breath, followed, one would think almost deliberately by a hesitant pause.

It
reminds us we are in a box, the reverberative sonority of which Mr Wharfedale
would have appreciated.

Suddenly
we are transported into an episode of
Doomwatch.
We would have clapped
our hands to our ears and creased to our knees like Robert Powell, if we weren’t
stuck full length in our bunks. A resonating, booming bass note starts
somewhere deep in the back of my father’s throat, gargles up through his oesophagus
and emerges, half from his mouth and half from his capacious and hairy nostrils.
What had been up until that moment a fitful and disturbed attempt at sleep in a
damp and unconducive environment is about to become hell in the dark. That
first, mucousy gelatinous rattle means my father is about to start snoring.

At the
start of the holiday, we snorted back, coughed or finally lost patience and
shouted ‘Please!’ into the darkness. But this was always met with a startled
croak as he struggled up from the bottom of some deep well to break the
surface.

‘What?’

‘You’re
snoring.’

He
would smack some moisture into his mouth. Breathe more insistently, normally
and tut.

‘Oh.’
And then, after a rueful pause, ‘How can I be snoring? I wasn’t even asleep.’

‘Well, you
were.

The
response was a disappointed sigh and a rustle of his bed nylon. Now we were all
awake, lying damp and uncomfortable, the night stretched ahead like an endless
sentence and nocturnal birds mocked our imprisonment by wading in the shallows
and softly cooing to each other.

So,
after a few days on holiday, we usually let him be. Eventually you fall asleep.
And anyway, by the time I was twelve, my brother, three years older than me and
destined to grow big and bearded, had already begun to rival my father in the
glottal drain-clearing, snot-shovelling, nocturnal trumpeting division. No
noise could equal the disgusting broken wheezing of their accursed duet. And
yet we seem, eventually, to have slept through it. How, I have no idea.

Inevitably
it became time to venture out on the sea. We had explored Mersea, Goldhanger
and Tollesbury and had got as far as Brightlingsea at the mouth of the river.
The first time we ventured up the coast, my mother was sent on ahead by car.
She diligently drove to the end of every pier and headland and could be seen
waving a handkerchief as the little boat slowly ground its way north.
Eventually the Suffolk river system opened up ahead, and, exhausted by our mammoth
journey, we put into Harwich. This was an error. Harwich was built to take
ocean-going cargo ships and cross-channel ferries. We tied up out of the way
in Bathgate Bay and tried to get ashore using a teetering vertical ladder
covered with green slime that looked about a hundred feet high.

Having
done it once, we did it every year, admittedly in bigger boats.
Xara
was
big enough for all of us to sleep on, as long as my brother didn’t come, which
rather suited my brother. He went sailing properly with the Ocean Youth Club
instead, and we went exploring the Stour, Orwell, Deben and Alde, much prettier
estuaries than the Blackwater, with swelling banks and narrower channels
leading to sleepy, appealingly dead towns like Aldeburgh and Woodbridge.

They
were still tidal rivers. Even at famous beauty spots like Pin Mill at low tide,
there could be a few feet to negotiate before you got to the hard. The dinghy
would have to be rowed as fast as possible for the last few feet, with the oars
digging in, bodily pushing the little boat and its passengers up and on to the
ooze. Already the mud, like crawling paint, would have worked its way past the
hafts of the oars and gobs of the stuff would be flying up and spattering us.
And we would arrive at the famous beautiful pub covered from head to foot in
stinking goo. Perhaps it wasn’t that deep after all, but nobody ever tested it
out. I only discovered you could walk on it by accident when I was sixteen.

Under
the influence of the Incredible String Band my mates and I decided that it was
spring and we wanted to spend Easter amongst the flowers. It was early March.
The Romantics were wrong. It was freezing. Never mind the blackbird singing in
the tall larch, we stayed in the green caravan filled with old Micky Spillane
thrillers my father had bought to stay in when the boat had been too small. It
sat in a caravan park just below a high sea wall in Maylandsea. There was
nothing to do but go for a walk and look at the caravan park from a distance.
Eventually we started jumping across the saltings. We discovered that, if you
ran at the mud in the shallow areas and kept moving, you didn’t sink.
Gradually, we became bolder. We took longer excursions out across the sticky
surface. If you stopped, even for a second, you started to go under, but if you
ran, you flew, leaving a great trail of putrid black foot steps behind you. It
was like discovering flight, or that you could walk on water. What had been
terra infirma became, intriguingly, ours. There was nothing to be gained. Even
if you got somewhere (to the water’s edge, across to a
mooring or over
to a boat) you couldn’t stop. You would slide beneath the ooze. It was just the
thrill of riding on a deadly crust singing, ‘Hunting gibbons out in India!’ — a
Bonzo Dog Dooh Dah Band track —’Hunting gibbons, out in May-land-sea. Out, in,
out, in, out in May-land-sea.’

In the
1990s, I was in my own small boat in a similar Suffolk gut, only we’d left it
far too late to get back to the mooring. We were doing an east-coast creep,
sneaking up a channel with the water rushing out like an emptying bath,
touching the bottom, pushing off with an oar, feeling the way up until we stuck
and realized that we weren’t going to get there. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said
and threw an anchor over the side. ‘The boat will just sit here until the next
tide.’

‘What
about us?’ someone asked.

There
were three of us. Two writers had come up from London and ‘quite fancied a boat
trip’. Even as we anchored, the rest of the water sluiced out. We were sitting
in the familiar sea of mud. The shore was fifty yards away. ‘You can run across
it,’ I said, ‘as long as you keep moving. Watch.’ I lowered myself over the
side. It was years since I’d done it.

I ran.
Gouts of liquid mud flew up as I slapped away, but I stayed up. I reached the
sea wall, shouted deliriously and ran back to the boat for good measure. ‘See!’
I said breathlessly, gripping the side to prevent myself being sucked under.

Andy
smiled. ‘OK.’ He stepped over and ran. Splat, splat, splat, splat and he got to
the wall. ‘Yes!’

Henry
came next. He was bigger than Andy. Henry was over six foot. It was difficult
for him to get out easily and prepare himself, because somehow he was just too
gangly. The sides of the boat were too low. Perhaps he was worried about his
Musto jacket and new jeans, but he just didn’t seem to overcome the viscosity
in the same’ way that short people did.

Pretty
quickly we could see that Henry wasn’t quite gliding. He wasn’t even slapping.
Like some giant panic-stricken frog, with each twitch his feet were plunging
further into the ooze. So he worked his legs faster. Up and down went his
thighs like pistons. Faster and faster went his feet, huger and huger rose the
fountain of black sticky mud. Now, like some mad engine, he frenziedly gyrated
his limbs until all we could see from the shore was a berserk, thrashing whirlwind
of flying black slop which, to our amazement, like something out of Ali Baba,
gradually started to move towards us. He made the shore, a slimy zombie, and
staggered across the grass. He opened two black and white minstrel eyes. ‘That
was quite fun,’ he said.

6.
The Back Route

‘Where are we going now?’

‘We’re
going to go on to Brentwood, the back way,’ I told my mother, driving on up
towards Stonnard’s Hill playing field, half-way out of Epping.

Having
the others in the car was just an excuse. I should have walked up the hill,
just as I had … how many times? Senior school is a demanding lump of our
lives: seven years; three hundred and sixty odd weeks; six days a week. (Leave
out the holidays, of course. You can do the maths. It was never my strongest
subject.) Yes, six days a week. The blasted school had boarders, so the rest of
us had to turn out on a Saturday for their convenience. The school didn’t want
the inmates loose in the town at the weekend.

‘They
wanted you to board originally, said my mother.

‘They
didn’t?’

‘Oh
yes. But you wouldn’t have it. So we settled on a year. You were going to be a
year as a day boy and then go boarding.’

This
was a fine time to be telling me this. ‘I’ve never heard this before.’

It wasn’t
because the school wanted to clap me to its echoing and smelly bosom. It was
because of the distance. Brentwood is twelve miles from Epping. I was well
outside the school’s natural catchment area for day boys.

‘Well,
that’s what they wanted, but you started and they never mentioned it again.’

Bancroft’s
in Woodford, which also seemed miles away at the time, was probably first
choice, but I must have flunked the exam. There was talk of Chigwell Grammar or
Merchant Taylors or Haberdashers Aske’s (maybe that was a department store).
Most of these ‘good’ suburban grammar schools were founded by City Guilds or
self-aggrandizing potentates in the Tudor age, to take the place of the monks
seen off by the Reformation. They served the same purpose: churning out well-mannered
bureaucrats. Sparsely dotted around the green belt, in the late 1960s they
encircled London with good A-level prospects. I didn’t know then that many of
my future adult friends, like Clive Anderson and Geoffrey Perkins, were banged
up in similar establishments further on around what is now the M25 in suburbs
like Stanmore. My wife was at a place in Ealing. This was the ‘direct grant
grammar school’ era.

I don’t
believe that my father ever seriously considered any sort of public school. He
was from Welsh high-academic-performance state-school stock himself. So I went
for an exam in the Bean Library and an interview with the chiselled Mr
Tarrant, a Mount Rushmore of a geography teacher, and I was admitted to the
imposing place with ‘the old red wall’. It would take fifty-five minutes to get
home by bus every afternoon, but I got a lift in the morning from Robert
Dickenson’s father, who worked in the labs at Ilford Films.

He
would pick me up opposite a big housing estate of mock-Georgian terraces, built
in the grounds of what must have been some important suburban mansion.

‘I don’t
recognize any of this.’

‘Yes,
you do. We came this way thousands of times. It was the way we came to avoid
the - main roads.’

‘Not
this way.’

‘Yes!
This way! It was this way.

How
many times, then? Of course, I have to leave out the Saturdays, because Mr
Dickenson didn’t work Saturdays, so I had to get the bus. And holidays. So five
days a week, forty weeks a year for six years. Leaving out sick days and other
arrangements, I must have made this journey at least a thousand times.

I got
us lost almost immediately, but in peaceful countryside: copses, river valleys
and high hedges, less manicured than its equivalent in Surrey. I had never
noticed it all before. I was too busy wittering on at Mr Dickenson, a nice,
quiet man with glasses, about why cars should be designed more racily and what
was happening in last night’s episode of
Ironside,
the show with the
disabled detective.’

My
mother and I gawped at the route now, as if for the first time.

‘We
used to go through Ongar.’

‘No, we
didn’t. You must remember; there was terrible fog sometimes.’

‘Oh, I
remember the fog. We once had to ring the headmaster, because we couldn’t get
through to pick you up after a play rehearsal and he had to put you up. He wasn’t
happy about that.’

Wasn’t
he? I remembered only the amused condescension. It had seemed a huge joke to
him and an awful disaster to me. But then we boys always seemed funny to Mr
Sale. With his hooded eyes and wispy smile he came across like Dennis Price
after a particularly ingenious murder. All headmasters have an act. His was
very successful, if a little cold. I remember my uneasy sense of intrusion
that night when Sale, who never seemed to stoop for anything, stalked into the
rehearsal and led me off to his very own house. It was over on the other side
of the school where we day-boys never went; a large Georgian pile, fronting on
the green. His wife was Italian, but I had never met her before either. None of
the parties seemed that keen to associate off duty. He marched me up to the top
of the house, through upper corridors of sharp-green limo, to a cold bed. I can
still hear the ghastly ancient plumbing in the frozen lavatory. Still feel the
horrible sense of breaking all the rules. In the morning, I was dispatched to
the dining hall to eat a breakfast of squishy tomatoes and paper bacon with the
boarders. What on earth was my mother doing, presuming on the headmaster, as if
he were just an ordinary human being? I would rather have walked the fifteen
miles home in the darkness through the fog, pushing the car.