The Blue Touch Paper (6 page)

Is this why I became a Christian? I don't know. Something inside me was susceptible when I started reading the Old Testament and believed it to be true. Maybe I just inherited my mother's Presbyterian guilt about daring to exist at all. I remember weeping on my knees beside my bed in terror at some of God's bloodier threats, and believing that I fell clearly in the group singled out for eternal damnation. Fifty years later, an incumbent Archbishop of Canterbury would make me happy by praising the perceptiveness of my writing about the Church of England, but the original reason for my six adolescent years as a believer had not been at all high-minded. Simply, I was impressionable. I was vulnerable not to Christ, but to His Father. The prospect of hell seemed real.

Religion was one of the many things my mother approved of in principle, but did little about in practice. So it was at my own initiative that I started attending Sunday School at St Stephen's Church up the road, and then, more enthusiastically, Crusader class in the afternoons. There I enjoyed weekly evangelical uplift. Under Crusader auspices I could also go off to annual summer camp – white cloth tents pitched in fields twice outside Aviemore, and twice at Studland Bay in Dorset, both bracing locations well suited to lung-filling open-air hymns and frying sausages. I even once stepped forward, in a moment of miserable foolishness, at the end of a Baptist service to declare myself for Christ, à la Billy Graham. Walking home, even I apprehended that this had been an embarrassing thing to do, and I avoided the follow-up meetings which were scheduled to make sure that I would stay born again. When I was pilloried at school by a boy who claimed to have seen me coming forward,
I lied and denied it had ever happened.

The onset of religion made me sanctimonious. My insecurity, my own deep certainty that I was unlikeable, was now lacquered with a glossy layer of stupid ideology. My sister and I had a fight on the stairs at home over ownership of a Bible and I screamed at her, ‘It's the word of God.' She laughed and said it wasn't one word, it was many. Religion to me was an alternative, a second life which might vitiate the pain of the first. I liked being in a relationship with Our Lord because it meant I had something which nobody else could touch. It didn't give me immunity, but it did mean that what I regarded as the dismal story of my life wasn't the only story. But piety also offered me a shield against the discomforts of class. To a group of rough boys who assaulted me on the way home from school for no other crime but going to a private establishment and wearing its distinctive blazer, I shouted again, ‘Christ would be ashamed of you.' Looking back, it's hard to say who Our Lord would disown quickest in that encounter, but I would be the leading candidate. Christ would certainly have had something to say about my mother's fear of being thought common. To be fair, it grew not out of a dislike of the working class but out of a heartfelt fear of them, fuelled by so many nights as a young woman in Paisley scurrying past drunks. But considering how little money we had, and how insecure was our own social status, it's amazing that so much effort went into dissociating ourselves from manual workers. Margaret was forced to go to visit the Botwrights at No. 36 twice weekly to watch
Emergency Ward Ten
, since we were not allowed to have ITV in the house. It was vulgar. Only the BBC for us. And we were particularly forbidden to pick up penny chews and Wagon Wheels from the Cosy Café in Sea Road, a place of abundant runny egg sandwiches
and steamed-up windows, which filled my mother with a horror which was all the more real for being ridiculous.

The shortage of money in our family meant that it would be essential for me to get a scholarship in order to continue in private education. As I moved past the age of ten, I began to become affected, trying out attitudes I thought fitting for advanced and superior people. My grandmother Euphemia had described football as ‘eleven grown men chasing a wee bit of leather', and I reported her description to the referee one day, who looked back at me as if he had heard it all before. This contempt provided me with convenient cover for my own uselessness. I did have a brief, unlikely interest in boxing, which turned out to be one of the most practical elements of my education. The blinding shock you suffer when hit full on the nose by a boxing glove is electric. Since I possessed neither strength nor agility to avoid pain, I had instead to learn how to manage it. I found this priceless in later life. But even more useful than learning how to sustain blows was learning how to dodge them. Even today, I am expert at swerving. As the years went by, I was able to see the aggressor coming from an ever greater distance, thanks to the radar I acquired in the boxing ring. At some enduring level of consciousness, I also know that I can take the blow and survive.

For any young person, the words ‘Bexhill' and ‘boredom' were joined at the hip. That was what older people liked about it. I slowly became aware that adults were recovering from a traumatic event. It was called the Second World War. Whatever psychological damage it might have done was never referred to. The only available therapy was silence. The whole nation agreed that what was needed now was a bit of peace – something which Bexhill was in prime position to provide. The
words ‘nice' and ‘quiet' were tautologous. When Marty Wilde, an insipid rocker of the mid-fifties, was scheduled to appear in a leather jacket and singing ‘Teenager in Love' at the De La Warr Pavilion for one night only, the protests to the local paper briefly sprang the whole town from its deckchair. The sharp-elbowed old ladies who muscled their way to the front of the queues in Sainsbury's were in uproar against his swaying hips. But far more dangerous than Marty's moral turpitude was the fact that he dared to make a loud noise.

In Newlands Avenue, time moved achingly slowly, whole summers seeming to last a decade, no house ever changing its appearance, no inhabitant ever changing their characteristics. Everyone in the street – Sparrowhawks, Botwrights, Hares, Yearwoods or Richfords – simply continued like characters controlled by the mechanical story-book of a soap opera. They clucked with disapproval at any element of change. So it was paradoxical that, by some unlikely affinity, only the game of cricket could joyfully speed things up. Simply by walking onto a cricket field I was able to stop looking at my watch. Time used to deliquesce in the most sensual way, so that sun, grass and linseed oil would become a druggy concoction in which whole afternoons passed without noticing. I may not have been very good as either batsman or bowler, but that was not the point. Better just to linger on the boundary, and wake when it was evening. Even now, as a playwright, there is no compliment I treasure more than when an audience member remarks, ‘The two hours flew by.'

In April 1956 my mother had taken me to Glyndebourne, not to the opera but to the off-season East Sussex Youth Drama competition. Among the entries was a supposedly hilarious play in which Shakespeare hid in a trunk. It was received in arctic
silence. In spite of this chilling initiation into the unmistakeable sound of a flop, I had begun to have ambitions for my gallery of Pelham puppets. They were wooden-blocked characters with eight strings leading to a starfish-shaped hand control. At the suggestion of Michael Yearwood next door I helped form my first theatre company, which was called PHY, after the initials of the three puppeteers, Porch, Hare and Yearwood. Michael Yearwood's advanced tastes spurred us to attempt dramas we scarcely understood, just as he had inveigled me into the hopeless venture of trying to make pinball machines out of cardboard. Now we built a puppet theatre and painted little sets to present in our living room a version of Dorothy L. Sayers' snobbish thriller
Busman's Honeymoon
, with Lord Peter Wimsey, Harriet Vane and their devoted valet Sergeant Mervyn Bunter, who had seen his master through the horrors of shell-shock at the end of the First World War. Unfortunately, there was some complicated and unreliable string-work in the climactic murder which involved dropping a miniature flowerpot and cactus on the back of an unsuspecting puppet block-head. This rarely worked. But the ambition of staging wooden Sayers was as nothing to our next project, full-scale wooden Wilde.
The Importance of Being Earnest
was presented at the Thalia School theatre. Because we performed it at numbing length for charity, our initiative and altruism were praised in a glowing editorial in the
Bexhill Observer
. P, H and Y were, apparently, exactly the kind of young citizens Bexhill needed more of. The hopeless tangle of strings caused by trying to hand over the cucumber sandwiches in the first act was generously overlooked.

Up till then, my taste in reading had been largely for Richmal Crompton and Agatha Christie. They both cleverly appealed to a child's desire for a world more solid, more substantial than
the one the child knows. But aged twelve I had taken to Oscar Wilde big-time, no doubt because of his witty outsiderism. One of the first features of the school magazine which I started with my friend Christopher Hudson was a serialisation, painfully transcribed from the original, of
The Canterville Ghost
. But our publication hit the buffers with the third issue. We had begun to go round Harewood with clipboards, doing an opinion poll to discover who was the most popular master, though most of us suspected it was the ageing and arthritic Colonel Doughty, whose idea of teaching history was to sit on the edge of his desk and recount the strategic details of various twentieth- century battles he had taken part in. News of this plan to award rankings to our teachers reached the headmaster, who reacted badly, as he did to almost everything except mass executions of trade unionists. He knew perfectly well that he was personally unlikely to excel in any such exercise.

By this time, I disliked Mr Phillips with a passion. His temper had not been improved by the events around the Suez canal, and even less by the petrol shortages that followed. A man who had divided his school into houses named after three historic British military victories, Trafalgar, Blenheim and Waterloo, was unlikely to take kindly to our government being thoroughly outwitted by socialist Egyptians. Phillips had been revealed to all his pupils as the worst kind of bully and boor, who liked to put a smiling face on for parents, while behind their backs hitting their children as often as he could. Somewhere Philip Roth argues that ‘a writer
has
to be driven crazy to help him to
see
'. Well, Harewood was the experience which first drove me towards the edge. One evening, while we were all in silent ranks doing homework downstairs, we heard on the ceiling the sound of struggle from his study above us. A boy
called Larkin, rather than accept some arbitrary punishment, had had the courage to take on the thirty-year-old Mr Phillips in a knock-down physical fight, man to man. After some time, Larkin, a burly lad, appeared bleeding from the nose, his shirt torn to the waist, and with blood running from scratches all the way down his chest. He moved back silently to his place and resumed his work. I have always had too easy an access to anger, but generally my aim is good, and my feeling for justice as deep on another's behalf as on my own. Larkin became not just my hero but the hero of the whole school. Mr Phillips, presumably marked from the fist-fight as Larkin was, did not appear for a day or two. Nothing further was said.

Ever the bright kid, I was taking all my learning in my stride and was untroubled by the prospect of sitting for a scholarship for Winchester. Everyone promised me that it was regarded as the most academic of Britain's private schools. Winchester did not offer its examination until the very end of the scholarship season, implicitly daring only those who thought they might succeed to pass over their chance of going to easier schools. Only one school in the country, Lancing College, was so keen to attract brains that it would hold a scholarship for a boy while he went off to sit the later exam for Winchester. So for no other reason, I was put down to try first for a school of which neither I nor my parents had ever heard. We certainly had no notion of its High Anglican traditions. Nor indeed did we know that the famous character of Lady Bracknell had originally been named Lady Lancing, and that, auspiciously, our puppet play had been redrafted many times under that title until it was eventually immortalised as
The Importance of Being Earnest
.

The night before the written exam, my mother was dangerously ill. From the room next door, I could hear the most
terrible groaning and wailing, followed by her screaming, ‘Don't come in, don't come in.' My sister finally disobeyed, and found her distraught. Mum had lost all balance in her inner ear, and thereby control of her bowels. A doctor was called, who was mercifully quick to diagnose, but the memory of that awful night henceforth added to her generally fraught nerves. I was supplied with a letter of explanation which was slipped in with my exam papers and sent on to Lancing. It said, ‘This boy may not have done as well as expected. That's because he spent the night cleaning up his mother's bed.' Such a message might have caused suspicion among more cynical souls, but at Lancing it aroused compassion. Although I was myself biliously, rackingly sick in a ditch outside Polegate on the way to my interview, I was awarded a major scholarship.

In my last term at Harewood I was required to become a weekly boarder, in order to get into practice for leaving home. One afternoon, I malingered, faking an illness I only faintly sensed, when in fact I wanted to skip football. I was sent home, where I woke up next morning with scarlet fever. It was a satisfyingly dramatic illness, which involved high temperatures, projectile vomiting, peeling skin, complete isolation and the need, for some reason, to burn my sheets, my books and indeed anything with which I came into contact. The attempt to send me to Winchester was at once abandoned, on the grounds that I could not be expected to emerge from my fastness. The suggestion of putting Winchester exam papers under the bedroom door was vetoed on the grounds that they would be returned contagious.