Semi-Detached (25 page)

RSM Mason,
in his tin Nissen hut at the end of the Chase, happily provided ordinary khaki
ones to any member of the Brentwood School Cadet Corps. He might have been
surprised how many ended up on parade at the Isle of Wight Rock Festival. But
mine was distinctive: a very long, darkish-grey-blue and double-breasted
Russian number. Even Tompsett admired it. Honoured, I lent it to him, and he
wore it to a rock festival somewhere.

Later
that week I was parading about in it in the dining room in front of my cousin
Jane and one of my mother’s fearsome friends. Attempting to borrow some money,
I idly put my hand in the pocket and pulled out a condom. It wasn’t used, but I
think the ladies were impressed. I blushed. ‘I lent it … to Tompsett … the
coat, I mean.’

I was
probably on my way to spend half an hour leafing through album covers in a
record shop. We were quite content to flip exhaustively through the stacks,
hardly ever buying, just admiring the majesty of
Uncle’ Meat,
the Frank
Zappa double gatefold, or the mysterious, semi-surrealist splendours of
Tales
From Topographic Oceans.
Alas, it was a
time when the objects of our
worship were hardly ever content to stick out a
single album any more.
So fecund was their genius that double or even treble albums were clogging up
the bins, and since we were rather keen on anything wilfully obscure, these
were severe tests of a limited budget.

It was
a major investment to get hold of
Trout Mask Replica.
My copy was,
pleasingly, an American import, which meant that it came in a distinguished
heavy cardboard, like a washing machine package, as opposed to thin and wibbly
card, like a milk carton. But
it
was a
lot of money for a record which
was distinctly difficult to listen to more than once. Gotley topped it. He
suddenly appeared with a
copy of Wildman Fisher, a protégé of Frank
Zappa, discovered on a pavement offering songs for a dollar. It was a treble
album of utterly tuneless hollering. Its only function was to supplant Deep
Purple at a
party and initiate a
row.

More
than anything we wanted long hair. As the seventies ground on, even
newsreaders got bangs. Ted Heath grew side-boards. John Prescott must have had
a magnificent hairdo to maintain such a silly pudding-basin funerary memorial
to it today. But at the end of the sixties the size of your cock was as nothing
to the size of your barnet. Even Tiny Tim’s waist-length tresses were envied by
us schoolboys, who felt silly at rock festivals. Beads and kaftans, with short
back and sides? No, no, no. When we went to watch Arthur Brown set fire to his
head in Victoria Park, we would have willingly swapped our snakeskin cowboy
boots for five-foot-wide Marsha Hunt sprouting-broccoli hairdos or lank Dave
Gilmour waist-long hirsute tents, just to allow us to pass unnoticed in the
queue at
the Jamaican pattie counter.

We
battled the forces of conformity. But, sadly, searching out long hair was the
second master’s favourite pastime (after spotting coloured socks). He would
stand at an upper window, bored with teaching, and pick on a
passing
lower-sixth-former below ‘You, Bell, see me, nine o’clock tomorrow with a
proper
hair cut,’ Bell might invest in liberal platings of VO5 Extra-Hold. He could
fold his tresses up using hair pins. He could arrive sporting a masterpiece of
the perruquier’s art with the consistency of a crash helmet, but the school
prevailed.

By the
time I got to university even the porters had long hair. Bah. I shaved my head.

As we
lay and listened to
Atom Heart Mother
in the dark, on our new stereos
(mine was made up by adding a separate speaker box to the Dansette), or decided
to wake up the house with a blistering burst of
Chicken Shack,
or
despaired when Marc Bolan went ‘commercial’, or went all fey with Principal
Edward’s Magic Theatre; as we back-combed our hair and put on fur coats, to
make little pilgrimages to the ‘Third Ear Café’ by the World’s End Pub in the
King’s Road, and ate tasteless brown rice and horrible beans; as we sat under a
plastic sheet in Hyde Park listening to Canned Heat and puffed on our first
joint, we firmly believed we were part of the alternative society. We went off
to a
little wood at the bottom of the school, tootled on pipes and
banged tablas, made a disjointed film and thought we were at least as good as
the Incredible String Band. But it wasn’t a
new age. It was sixth-form
age. Who could have imagined as we grooved to ‘Set The Controls For The Heart
Of The Sun’ (‘no, no, listen to the stereo effects’) that what we were actually
listening to was the beginning of Arts A-level Culture World.

The
Wake Arms was where I first saw Ozzie Osbourne. We rather rated Black Sabbath. Uriah
Heep not so much. I remember the lead singer leaning in after three cacophonous
numbers and urging us to ‘listen to the lyrics of the next one’ and then crashing
into another hugely pompous and deafening prog-rock anthem, within which any
distinction of individual words would have been quite impossible. There were
huge stacks of speakers for such a tiny place. We got as close as we could to
them, and wobbled our heads to Argent or the Pink Fairies. We were particularly
keen to catch the Edgar Broughton Band. They managed to combine two popular
themes of the era, black magic and revolution, into one song: ‘Out Demons Out’
(which, as far as I can recall, consisted of that one phrase, repeated to the
same riff for several hours).

But if
the homework was relatively light and I had the bus fare, I would get along to
almost anything, and leave two hours later, partially deafened, with my ears
buzzing into the next morning. It was beyond comprehension why some of these
pub rockers were to become international stars and others simply faded away.
They all seemed astonishingly loud and equally basic.

One
Saturday afternoon my father sat in his usual chair and read the
Daily
Telegraph.
‘Look here,’ he said, poking at the bottom of one of the grey
pages of endless print. ‘This article here is quite right.’ There was a
picture
of various hair styles. ‘It has been scientifically proven that various types
of long hair have become a badge of degeneracy amongst teenagers.’

‘Well,
that’s just nonsense,’ I retorted, shaking my delicately coiffeured curls.

‘No,
look.’ His voice was rising. ‘Look, from the teddy boy through to greaser, you
simply cannot deny that the link is obvious. I’m not accusing you,’ he
continued, though, by now, I had decided that he clearly was. ‘It is merely a
matter of association. It matters what people think. You are in danger of
being naturally associated with the criminal class.’

‘That’s
what you think of me. I’m a
criminal, am I?’

Three
minutes later I had grabbed my fur coat, flounced out of the house and was
heading down Station Road towards Epping Underground. I simply wasn’t going to
stand for this sort of ignorant behaviour based on some rubbish in the
Daily
Telegraph.
If I wasn’t free to live and dress exactly as I pleased then OK,
I would go my own way. I was old enough to live on my own. I was working hard,
doing perfectly well at my exams. It was all just so they could show off to
their friends anyway. Did they really think it made any difference to me? Well,
sod that. I was quite capable of looking after myself.

As I
reached the bottom of the. hill he drove alongside in his car, begging me to
return. Silly man, did he really think I had anywhere to go? He was an
innocent. If it had been me, I’d have let me get on the tube. Where on earth
did I think I was going, dressed like that? Not that it made any difference. I
was far too much of a conformist anyway. Rebellion, hah! I was on my way to
Cambridge.

11. Reunion

On a late afternoon in
October, I drove myself out to Brentwood. The route was utterly familiar. I
take it most weekends to get to Suffolk — down through Clerkenwell, where I
once lived, through Hoxton, and up under Banksy’s smiley-faced riot police
mural up on the railway bridge. The car could almost drive itself. I was
wearing a
suit. I was on my own in the car. I felt slim and purposeful,
because this wasn’t routine or part of the loose fabric of my life. I was
deliberately breaking out, going home for a
while. I felt excited. I
felt like I was in a film. I decided it could be a film. There was one already,
with John Cusack. He went back to the school reunion and he was a serial killer
and he killed some people. I felt like a
serial killer. It was the dream
of escape. I was momentarily sloughing off my present. ‘Bring your wife or
partner,’ the yellow slip had invited, but I didn’t want that. Nor did anyone
else. There were to be very few wives or partners at the ‘Forty Years On’
reunion dinner.

The
school was as one might expect a
school to be at
seven in the
evening, deserted and too dark. I parked by the pavilion, where we had had the
discos upstairs and where the fencing champions had trained. There we are. I’d
never been in those lower changing rooms at all. They were reserved for the
sporting stars, and the balcony above them for the headmaster and the visiting
headmaster and the visiting headmaster’s satraps.

Right
across the way was the sacred piece of grass that boys were not allowed to
cross, between the undistinguished Queens Building for science and the back of
the staff common room. But I crossed it now, for devilment, and walked towards
the front of the building. Was it ever this deserted? There was no sign of
anything happening. At the front the school entrance was solidly shut. It
always was. There was a
porch with stained glass windows, but they only
ever opened that for public days. (We weren’t a public day then.) The Memorial
Hall was dark. I had thought we would be in there, fêted, at dinner in the
heart of the school, in the smelly assembly hall with the portraits of
headmasters looking down, but there were only piles of music stands in the
gloom. To my surprise, the corridors were carpeted. The place had lost its stinking
soul.

I
walked blindly on. Everywhere the lights were off. Beyond the chapel the
concrete floors had gone and the empty corridors became like the corridors of a
hospital, with fuzzy carpet and fire doors and unfamiliar offices and nobody
around at
all. The old Big School, the original schoolroom, was lit but
deserted. Stuck to the door was a
list of names. I assumed they had
already met for drinks and then gone on to the dinner.

I
stared at the printed page. It included Horth, Tompsett, Smith, Bagnall, Thorogood,
Woollard. There were other names, some that I didn’t remember at
all. I
took it down. It might come in handy.

I
walked on, past where Mr Ricketts lived. He saved me from ignominy in Latin,
because he could teach the subject. How? Who knows? Enthusiasm, perhaps. He
spoke his Latin with a
strong Italian accent and expressive hands like a
proper Mediterranean, and he got me to hurdle the ablative. We liked him
for
it,
as we always admired those straightforward, determined teachers
who seemed to have set themselves a
target and went straight for it. And
he had lived in that little cottage on the other side of a
beech hedge
in the middle of the school.

‘Are
you lost?’ A bald man was advancing on me out of the glare of some floodlit
practice pitches. He was smiling. He must be a
teacher. Not one of mine,
I decided, though it took a moment to accept that my teachers, looking much the
same as this one did with his fringe of white hair and sensible clothes, were
all probably dead now.

He was
there to hurry me along, past the new floodlit tennis courts and into a
noisy
company of forty or so men holding wine glasses.

And now
I was stuck. Who were these blokes? I started talking to the headmaster, for
safety, I think. But for the most part I just stared around with an expression
that I would rather not have worn. I couldn’t recognize the majority of them.
They seemed to be of all ages. We were unaware of it then, but I can see having
watched my own son grow up, that boys at fourteen, fifteen, sixteen have no universal
age. There are big, deep-chested ones who shave twice a day and tiny,
fresh-faced, girly ones and boys with explosions of acne and others who attain
ethereal beauty which as soon deserts them, none of which meant anything to us,
then.

But that
was then. This was now. Some of my former school friends looked like old
men. Others were youthful, gangly and spiky-haired. I recognized Smith first.
Having been the conservative and blushing giant of South, he had now become
cool, with long yellow hair. But he was still the tallest.

‘Is
that Smith?’ I asked crudely. I needed some sort of order. I needed some
questions answered. I wanted a
register read, or a formal presentation
made. I could hardly ask Smith himself. ‘So, Smith, you were always a
very
straightforward sort of bloke and here you are now with long blond hair,
dressed in velvet. How so, old fellow?’

‘Yes,
Smith,’ the person standing next to me said, ‘and that’s Horth. He looks just
like he did when we were here, doesn’t he? Remember him?’

Of course
I did. I’d met him quite recently. It was the person talking to me that I
couldn’t place. They would slot in, wouldn’t they, if I stared hard enough? But
I mustn’t stare. So I wandered Horthwards, to my own gang.