Semi-Detached (17 page)

‘Aww
ginn’ was the noise that Mr Gilbert made when ‘thinking’. It could be reduced
to a simple ‘awwww’, delivered under the breath, faintly, imperceptibly, to
begin with, but growing in intensity with repetition. Any mention of any of the
key words might start a sudden rustle. Should the ignorant teacher taking
morning assembly be unlucky enough to have to use the number thirty-nine, or
mention an Earl of England called Percy, or have to refer in some way to the
nearby suburb of Warley (where it was widely bruited Mr Gilbert had been
incarcerated in a mental hospital for some of his adult life), a noise like
unto a gathering wind would pass through the inmates of Mr Dotheboy’s prison
camp.

‘Awwwww
…’ it would start, very softly. Nobody could be fingered. It was impossible
to apportion blame. ‘Awwwwww …’ the sound would get louder. The schoolmaster
would adjust his spectacles. His myrmidons, the house praeposters, over from
the senior school, some of whom
could already be seen smirking,
would
start pacing the butts, trying to identify the offenders, but with straight
faces, the noise would continue rising in volume, a nasal, flat Essex drawl, ‘awwwwwwww
…’

‘Silence!
I will have quiet! I promise you, you will all be facing detention if you do
not stop this instantly …’

And it
would fade, as if by secret signal. Though a bolder boy might just pretend to sneeze
‘gin!’, and the hall would erupt.

‘Silence!’

It was
the great divide. Like a Spanish tyrant in Sicily, the governance of the school
refused to even acknowledge the injustices of one of its satraps. It pretended
that everything about Mr Gilbert was normal. It was we who were mad, and so two
hundred little boys registered their protest through acts of dangerous
absurdity. They must have cursed the number thirty-nine.

Every
boy, on his arrival at Brentwood School, had to learn the details of the ‘Blue
Book’. It was a natty, bound volume, similar to Chairman Mao’s
Little Red
Book
though without the plastic cover. (Actually, Tompsett once wrote to
the Chinese Embassy and claimed to have converted a factory to Communism. ‘Would
it be possible,’ he inquired, ‘to supply us with a number of Little Red Books
for our revolutionary studies?’ The Chinese Embassy provided eight books and a
poster. We were impressed. The rest of us sent letters too. Eventually the
embassy ran out of books, or perhaps they worked out that all this Maoist
fervour was really sixth-form Cultural Revolutionary kitsch.)

They
never ran out of the Blue Book. It was a detailed repository of all the rituals
and laws of our school. The prefects were called ‘praeposters’ . Their ranks
and powers were listed in the Blue Book. Where boys were allowed or not allowed
to walk, the size and names of the boarding houses, the whereabouts of the
Chase, the Old Big School and Houghs were all laid down in the Blue Book, as
were all twelve verses of the school song, a doggerel guide to the origins of
the institution.

They bound a lad to a green
elm tree,

And they burned him there for
the folks to see.

And in shame for his brothers
and sisters all,

They built them a school with
a new red wall.

There
weren’t in fact any shameful sisters at Brentwood while I was there. There are
now I came back to sign television spin-off books at Burgess’s book shop in
the eighties and found it full of girls in uniform — military uniform. The boys
had turned their back on the Army Corps when it became voluntary, but the girls
had keenly adapted to it and become a rather distracting presence.

The
school army play-acting never drove me to anguished despair like some of the
more morally acute members of my sixth form set. Public-school ritual is a perfectly
rational way of running any institution: regiment, fire service or
prisoner-of-war camp. The gang mentality works particularly on little boys, who
would happily choose cruel temporary leaders, curious nicknames and colourful
uniforms if left to their own devices. It could even provide a lump in the
throat if you let it, and there are few things more enjoyable than a lump in
the throat.

House
loyalties worked for me. We used to have a house music competition. The bigger
boys were left to train the trebles and, for once in this world of thick-headed
junior pomposity, the fey musical types were put in charge. I can still sing
bits of ‘The Ash Tree’ or ‘They Told Me Heraclitus’. Each house had to massacre
the same part song, but they were left free to work up a ‘unison song’. (I can
also get through the ‘Pirates’ Chorus’ from
HMS Pinafore.)
But East
House’s musical leader was the son of an ambassador, so he taught us ‘The East
Is Red’ in the original Chinese.

‘Dong
fang hung, chai yang sen, chung qui choo liaou ke Mao Tse Tung.’ It was a
belter.

Did we
win? I don’t recall. But I can remember that first verse of the song, and I can
remember at the age of thirteen the excitement of the night — the school hall
crammed, the deafening cheers, the bright-eyed commitment and the rivalry. It
was the sort of occasion that P G. Wodehouse yearned for all through his adult
life. We only got a taste of it from time to time. Perhaps any school which was
largely a day school had difficulty working up that sort of thing on a regular
basis.

For our
part, as absolute beginners, we were glad that some of the traditions were
falling away. The year before I arrived they had finally abandoned summer
boaters, so we stood a little less chance of getting beaten up. But we stuck
out like sore and slightly furry thumbs anyway because until the sixth form we
wore grey flannel suits — quite enough, we felt, to make us conspicuous on the
bus.

‘We may
ride by land, we may ride by sea’, but there are few places more deserted than
the outskirts of a suburban town in the middle of the day In Brentwood in 2005,
I stepped out into another empty dreamscape, with a
solitary window
cleaner walking by carrying a
ladder and whistling, like a
fake
extra. We used to get on my bus here, by the station. Originally, we waited in
the middle of the town, but it got too busy. so we walked the extra distance
down the hill, often following a
couple of hairy blokes in the year
above us who wore exceptionally pointed Chelsea boots with the heels worn down
so that they loped like Mexican cowboys.

The
stop was till there, in front of that deserted parade of shops, opposite the
Essex Arms. Five minutes, ten minutes a day, ten thousand minutes — a
hundred
and sixty-seven hours of my life spent waiting for a daily bus, and the only
specific incident I recall was the day that Jimi Hendrix died.

It was
on the front of a copy of the
Evening Standard.
We leaned down to peer
up at the headlines, until, irritated, the man in front of us in the queue lent
us the front page.

Hendrix
dead! And we had never even seen him ‘live . Jimpson was particularly upset. He
had adapted like the rest of us into a
cool sixth-former schoolboy, with
dog-fringe hair, but, like the rest of us, hung on to his fourteen-year-old
obsessive collecting habits. In the sixth form it was live performances. It was
why rock festivals were so popular. You could knock off nine or ten
international guitar heroes on one ticket. It would have always been Graham
Jimpson and me at the bus stop. We took the 339 home together every day for six
years.

My old
bus no longer ran from the station, so I walked up the hill through the quiet
town towards the school, past the Ursuline Convent, presumably still a
hotbed
of what we thought of as the naughtier gels, and stood finally in front of the
main red-brick block and clock tower. There was not much visibly stirring at my
school either. The front — the imposing main entrance under the tower — was
never used by anyone except passing members of Royalty. It was half past ten. I
felt like a voyeur on my own life. The dense red brick walls revived only a
slight
anxiety: the trepidation of dreams about abandonment and inadequacy.

I didn’t
have to go in. I could easily revisit the place as if in one of those dreams. I
can trace the topography like a
half-complete computer-game. Drifting in
by the side gate, past the crumbling Essex red-brick walls, facing straight on
to the fat
,
flat end of the old junior gym (the one run by Mr Odell, the
trim and moderately sane old boy instructor, who wore a
pair of tightly
drawn up white trousers and a singlet), I can easily walk down that alley in my
imagination, leaving the bicycle shed to my right, cross the playground asphalt
and enter the junior school, Lawrence House.

It had a
flecked concrete floor. There were steps up into an assembly hall. Nothing
ever seemed to happen in that room except morning assemblies, presided over by
Mr Taylor, a
French teacher and the head of the junior school, who had a
demeanour of weary concentration. I can clearly remember his fishy eye and
his seeming lack of direct contact, a
good protective amphibious skin.
You never cheeked mystery in the junior school.

I could
slow down now for a few seconds. There were two scuffed and battered double
doors on either side of this assembly hall. The left-hand side was my
staircase. I spent the first year at the top of it in Middle Two, at a desk
half-way back in the middle of the second row away from the window.

I had a
briefcase. That was important for some reason. It might have been bought to
calm my nerves about the frightening, new, big school, because I remember the
ritual of it and the slight foreboding I associated with these new plasticky,
smelly things: the tubular pencil case with a zip around the top and the
Perspex protractor and the silver metal pencil sharpener fitted under an
elastic retaining strap.

We did
the ‘new maths’, so soon I had a
slide-rule too, in a
grey
plastic slotted case — nice but never quite the best. Some boys had very swish
ones. But I feared slide-rules anyway because they were to do with maths and I
found maths — new, old or ancient — perplexing and time-consuming.

I
recall that even the blackboards in my new classroom were different from St
John’s Junior. They seemed to be a deep, deep green, not black at all, and they
slid sideways. The masters wrote on them furiously, urging us to ‘get this down’,
with lumps of chalk breaking off and flying across the room in their haste to
impart all the necessary instruction. The mummying had gone. I wasn’t the top
of the form at this school. I was struggling to keep up.

It was
here, on this first floor, that I wandered up one lunchtime when I should
properly have been outside and heard a
painful, breathy sobbing. I
glimpsed, in the further classroom, a
boy darting about. I can’t recall
his name, but I knew that he was soppy and a
pain, not a friend of mine,
but one of those boys who gradually and effectively alienate the masters,
because they never do exactly what they’re told, or look wrong or talk funny or
just fail.

He was
running around the desks that lunchtime, refusing to do what he was told
again, with a master, one of the younger, tougher, geography teachers, in
pursuit, holding a
gym shoe in his hand, trying to get him to stay still
long enough to be beaten. Both were pleading, the one with the other. The
master with the boy, to try and make him accept the inevitable, and the boy
with the master, refusing, crying and running around the room, pushing desks in
front of him.

I had
to press myself back against the wall, in case either saw me there: a
voyeur,
witnessing something that I certainly didn’t want to see. I didn’t want to
experience it either. Somewhere in this school there were canes, and boys were
severely beaten. The theory was that once you’d had it, you could take it
again, but I never wanted to have it. Most of all I was scared that I would be
like the crying boy, unable to face the ordeal itself.

Moving
back, back down the stairs, there would have been that room where we sat for a
year in Upper Three, quite a
small class. Mr Rance (with his red
face and hunched body) taught us history in that lower room. We liked him
because he had been a wing commander in the war and at least he could be
diverted off any subject with astounding ease. ‘Please sir, please sir, are
these Huguenots a bit like German pilots, sir?’

‘What
do you mean, Phillips?’

‘Well,
sir, didn’t they defend themselves with cunning and guile too?’

‘Yes,
yes, I suppose …

‘What
was it like, though, sir, when the Germans attacked?’

‘They
came with very little warning. One minute it was a
blue sky up ahead and
the next you saw them …
ah,
Phillips, are you trying to distract me
from the lesson?’

‘No,
sir, but did you fire straight away?’

‘No. You
see, we only had a limited amount of ammunition …

If I
walk out of the back of the building and turn left there was a
metal
door down there in the back of the swimming pool which we only penetrated
later because it led to the rifle range. When I was in the Corps I had a
go
at shooting two-twos and I like the fact that when I am caught in a log cabin
and the red Indians are rushing round outside and the women are loading rifles
over on the table I can be at
the loophole with my jacket off, the
ineffectual schoolteacher figure in glasses, but nonetheless a pretty decent
shot.