Semi-Detached (26 page)

The
bloke with the short hair was Graham Jimpson, my best friend. He was relaxed
and laughing. They must have managed to throw off all this gawping puzzlement
earlier. Perhaps they had had their shared moment before I arrived, like wakers
from a
frozen state, feeling their way back to life, sharing the
experience of letting the mainframe boot up at the canapé stage.

Graham
Jimpson saw my confusion. He welcomed me like the junior relative of a senile
politician. ‘You remember Fabian?’ Of course I did. But Fabian was different in
some way. He was stocky and plump, yes, but we were all stocky and plump. I
knew it was him. I had guessed it was Fabian when I saw him across the room
from the doorway, but something was different about him, and I stalled. I could
hardly say, ‘I didn’t recognize you with your hair long and pulled back and in
these casual clothes and oh …’ I realized what it was. He had done something
to his teeth.

‘You
remember Chislett,’ said Graham, and I did, but not before that precise moment.
It was like retrieving a file. I could even recall his house. I could see the
stripes of his tie. He had every right to be remembered as well as anybody
else. I knew that. He had been part of the gang. We had joked, played football,
probably even had a
fight, but I had wiped him from my memory bank. I
had got along happily without ever needing any stored information about my good
friend Chislett. But it was there. Over the course of the confusing evening I
rebuilt a photo album. After the pudding he came over, and I suddenly saw him
in the Corps uniform with his hair gathered up into his beret. The essence of
Chislett returned.

‘I see
Paul Morris,’ Graham Jimpson was saying. ‘He was my best friend really over the
last thirty years. Him and Paul Callick. You remember him. He used to play at
the folk club.’

I didn’t.
I could see the folk club in a
room in the high school and the girl with
the wool-ball hair who used to pluck a
Spanish guitar and that other
bloke who wrote very complicated songs which were extremely difficult to play
but seemed entirely tuneless, as if simple tunes with three chords were the
most difficult things of all to construct, as indeed they may well be. Was that
Callick? ‘Veness?’ I asked.

‘He’s
in the City somewhere.’

‘And
Bean is second in command at the Bank of England.’

‘Yes.
And Martin Thomas I keep in touch with: Martin the bright, Martin who won all
the prizes.

‘He’s
trying to take up an academic post in Mexico.’

‘He’s
an academic?’ I liked the idea that people I had known at school were now
distinguished.

‘Yes. A
professor, but he’s giving all that up.’ Martin was in love with a
twenty-eight-year-old Mexican.

It was
as if all of us had reached this point and suddenly needed to take stock.
Perhaps they were all writing books.

‘But
Graham, what happened?’ I needed to know ‘I just want to know the details. What
happened to the people who went to Oxbridge to rule this country? Don’t they
rule the country?’

‘No. Only
you and Anthony Blear.’

I
paused. Not something else that had slipped. I don’t remember him.

‘You
do,’ Bagnall told me. ‘He’s the Prime Minister.’

‘Tony
Blair!’ I had misheard. Of course — Graham had been at
Oxford.

‘I
threw a
bowl of rhubarb fool over his head at a dinner party, I was so
annoyed by what he was saying. He was just someone in this band then.’

We were
happier talking about the little things we remembered, like the league
ladders. ‘With the perforated slots … Each team on a
separate
cardboard tag so that you could move them up and down … a
sort of
chocolate brown.’

When
Graham imitated little me, he’d do me posh, using long words. ‘Let us find
accommodation on the upper deck of the omnibus.’ But that was Essex talking. I
was surprised to find how joined at the hip we were. He knew the boat, my
sister, my friends in Epping.

‘You
were a
good drawer of studied anatomical drawings of ladies.’

Hm.
This was an accomplishment, then.

‘Really
big on the blackboard in Upper 5. It was a
bit
Encyclopedia
Britannica
anatomy section, but the idea was that
you threw the
board rubber and scored points — called “the Olymptits”. A big thing, until Mr
Cluer came in and found us.

And
then in the sixth form the two little boys drifted apart. ‘You became a
hot
gospeller, didn’t you?’ I said.

Graham
buried his head in his hands. ‘At one party in the sixth form I went off with
Martin Hope, and we made a
sort of pact that we would become celibate.’

And
Graham had taken on the selfless moral imperative for the rest of his life.
While I went off on a cruise he went to Tanzania. In Oxford he opened a
fair-trade shop called Uhuru, still operating today, and he became a
revolutionary socialist, heavily involved in student politics. He left to work
in Oxford sink estates, as a
youth worker, which is where I’d last
brushed into him, twenty years ago.

Some
there, like John Squire, watched us through narrowed eyes, standing to one
side, as if suspicious of the event. Perhaps he carried too much baggage. I
certainly did, but mine was a
suitcase of self—consciousness. He had
packed his closely around him — slipped it into his dark suit pockets. Nobody
was really helping very much. I wanted some order. What was the headmaster
there for if not to organize this? Get all of us, one by one, to give an
account of ourselves why don’t you? Forty years was a colossal time. They had
lived a
life which could be measured out against the patterns of the
twentieth century. I had skipped off the tracks by accident and rumbled about
in the fields like a
railway accident: a public opportunist. I wanted to
know what they had done.

Over
the meal, small connections clicked into place. We were surprisingly benign.
Why this warm feeling? We pitied those who had decided not to resurrect their
past. We laughed when one of the masters said that
one old boy had sent
his wife to answer the phone and to tell the school never to bother their
household again. Not us. We were here and we seemed happy.

It wasn’t
the school itself. Bagnall and Thorogood openly regretted the place. They felt
that the academy had left us quite unprepared for the reality of civilian life.
So what was it? For one evening we embraced what? Not the bland security that
old boys seek in the old boys club, surely? Not even the rebellion that Fabian
found there, nor the identity that the ritual offered. It was the vigour. We
had allowed ourselves to taste being seventeen again.

After
dinner we reverted. We gathered round the headmaster, a
younger man than
any of us, and told tales out of school. We jabbered at him about Bilge and the
corporal punishment he dispensed so casually. We told him stories of outrageous
teacher behaviour, how we saw through the headmaster’s
act,
how one
teacher was a pederast and another lusted after rent boys, and he looked on,
fielding all this with a
slight, bemused smile.

I was
sorry that it came to an end. Most people were keen on doing it again. ‘Let’s
not leave
it
another forty years.’ But I sensed that we would. Perhaps
we didn’t really want to confront the reality of our school friends’ actual
lives.

I went
back to my car, drove back towards the barrier and found that, while we had
been eating, it had locked me in. The sports centre was deserted. Chislett and
some of the others walked past and cackled at me through the side window. They
had parked sensibly in the available car park, not swanned into the centre of
the school like a
would-be visiting dignitary. I scurried back to find
the headmaster. He was perplexed. He didn’t have any keys. It was a
separate
security operation. Eventually he found a
cleaner, who traced a
night
watchman, and they buzzed me out, the last to leave.

And I
left confused. Perhaps it was because we had returned to take the place at
night, when it was just a black shell and lacked the constituents that made
it
today’s working school. There were no inquiring grubby faces, or lines of
girls in badly fitting skirts, or clamouring noise, which meant that we had
been able to reoccupy it.

But the
visit had also laid a
ghost. We had been told we were part of a
progression, a
force for betterment, the embodiment of a particular
education. I had used it as a prop myself. ‘Brentwood was up there with
Manchester Grammar, you know. Do you know how many of my year went to
Cambridge?’ I was still on the honours board. I had been able to see it over
Bagnall’s shoulder as we ate our lamb noisettes — three of us with Exhibitions
to one college. Gosh. But it was just a
school. We weren’t some golden,
blessed generation sitting in that canteen. We were just some blokes from Essex
hankering after irresponsibility.

12. Ugandan Affairs

At one time or another I
had possessed a box full of torrid letters from my late teens, hadn’t I? My
mother had dumped it on me some time in the eighties. Was I fantasizing? I
could vaguely remember that I had been fascinated enough to open the box but
not quite fascinated enough to read them. What had I done with all this
flaming, passionate adolescent birowork?

I found
it in an old oak bureau (disappointing some future grandchild, no longer able
to say, ‘I wonder what’s in this old oak bureau?’). The letters were in a
shoebox.

This is
what a ‘musty’ smell smells bike — a
flimsy airmail letter left for
thirty-five years to absorb damp and rot slightly. Some of these letters were
written by myself on my first trip away from home, but most of them were
messages from the massed girl-correspondents of 1972. I have no idea how my
mother came to collect them all together (although one of those
girl-correspondents had been my mother herself). Did I really leave them lying
about White Lodge so cavalierly? But I was trembling. Quite honestly I had
completely forgotten that I had had so many massed girl-correspondents.

Jill,
Wendy and Jane had written to me in the sixth form from their respective
boarding schools. ‘I’m just writing this in the dorm before lights out. Don’t
forget, please, please, please send me another funny letter.’ Wow. But Jill,
for whom I pined, was just teasing me. She may have been intimate in her
letters from Felixstowe after prep, but she was icily remote in the flesh
during the holidays in Epping. Obviously I could present myself as a loopily
entertaining, wild and crazy guy to a
trapped and lonely girl, as long
as it was in writing. Could I follow through? It was worth persevering.

The
other letters were from Beth, Dale, Karen, Bev and another, quite different,
Jill. They were about walking the dog, the extreme cold, French exams and how
funny I was with my crazy letters again. (Listen, they were seventeen and
easily impressed, and they all came from distant Canada.) I turned over one of
the flimsy airmail envelopes, and a photo of Karen dropped out. In blue and
green tartan trousers and a tight sweater she was seventeen and pretty, sitting
on the porch in front of her house in Nova Scotia, and smiling at me. Oh,
Karen. I must have, found this all heart-stopping then. I am pretty jealous of
my former self now There was a
picture of Bev too: with red hair, a coy
smirk and a purring invitation to Ontario. I must have been a
letter-writing
machine. I had forgotten the names, but I remembered the general idea. All
these Canadians had been part of a mammoth, group, ship-board romance which had
lasted no more than a
week but was followed by months of diligent
pensmanship all through my ‘gap year’.

It wasn’t
a whole year. In 1970 I had sat
the scholarship exams for Cambridge. The
sixth form was dispersed. A levels were over. But a
select few came back
in the autumn to take ‘Oxbridge Entrance’. For a
term we did little
except try to appear remote from the concerns of ordinary schoolboys and take
desultory instruction in ‘thinking’ from the deputy headmaster. The exams were
taken in the ‘Old Big School’, somewhere I had rarely ventured before. Amongst
the black beams, carefully preserved ancient graffiti, and on a wonky floor I
was invited to write speculatively on utterly generalized subjects. Luckily, I
had spent every Saturday night for the last two years in a kitchen in Upminster
arguing the existence of God with Jimpson.

A
telegram arrived at White Lodge. I had got an Exhibition at
Emmanuel. I
wrote to Felixstowe Pam to tell her. She wrote back her congratulations. ‘I
didn’t even know you were artistic.’ My father seemed pleased that this meant
money and hardly disappointed at all that it was no more thirty pounds a year. What
it really meant was that the palpable result of all that homework could be
left on the sideboard to be picked up, smoothed off and re-read with decreasing
incredulity. But it was Christmas. I was eighteen. Cambridge started in
October. ‘Oh that magic feeling, nowhere to go. Did we call them ‘gap years’
then? It was nearly a
whole year off as far as I was concerned.

I had
to earn some money. If in a
very good mood I sometimes try to get
friends’ children temporary work in television. Wielding her more limited
influence, my mother found me work counting lamp posts. If their street lights
went phut, the residents of Epping complained. They were told to make a
proper
report and furnish the council with the number of the malfunctioning lamp. It
was stencilled in black on the side of the pole. Unfortunately, the council had
no record of which number corresponded to which lamp post. So to prevent
council bulb-replacement operatives, who only worked in daylight, aimlessly
meandering down mock-Tudor avenues, they hired me to make a
definitive
survey.