The Blue Touch Paper (9 page)

My political education was running alongside my cultural. Again there was a crisis of sorts, this time brought on by my sending off a postal order to the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament to buy myself a badge. I remember the expectation of slipping it out of its tiny brown envelope and fixing the familiar symbol, designed from a combination of the semaphore flag signals for the letters N and D, proudly to my jacket. I was ordered by a prefect to take it off, an order later confirmed by a master. When I then wrote anonymously to
Peace News
to tell them that I had been prohibited from wearing evidence of my most profound beliefs at a place of learning where Christians were freely allowed to display theirs, to my amazement, the organ of the peace movement not only published my letter but also responded by offering to send down an investigative reporter to give more comprehensive coverage to this obvious outrage. It did not take long at Lancing for my anonymity
to be unmasked, and I was hauled in front of the headmaster, William Gladstone. He told me I had done a very dangerous thing. It was, he said, easy to destroy a school. All you had to do was go to the North Field and set fire to the corn. With a following wind, you would soon burn down every building. It was only by the exercise of common restraint that institutions survived at all. I had abandoned that restraint.

In return, I questioned Mr Gladstone's sense of proportion. I did not think it likely that a single unsigned letter of complaint to
Peace News
had threatened the long-term future of Lancing College. But I kept my scepticism to myself. How on earth could an institution which I had imagined to be strong be revealed in its own imagination to be so weak? Previously I had assumed that authority was sure of itself. That's why it was authority. Now I could see authority was an act, a pretence. Underneath it all, its representatives were often as insecure as I was. My mother had ingrained in me the idea that we must pay particular attention to men in suits who occupied official positions. We must obey them for no other reason but that, when it comes down to it, they know and we don't. Teachers, bank managers and solicitors are to be respected and feared. But with this fatuous line of argument from an incumbent headmaster, the scales fell from my eyes. I did not become anti-authority, but I did henceforth expect authority to be able to produce convincing arguments. I remain uniquely unimpressed by men from public schools who sit across desks. Because of my own education, attempts at class bullying and blackmail by a David Cameron or a George Osborne fall flat. I am immune to the assumption of command such people adopt when they attempt their familiar trick of asking the poor to pay the bill for the rich.

My schoolboy politics were best summed up by a remark I had
memorised of Françoise Sagan's: ‘In any given case of injustice, the man or woman of the right will say it's inevitable. The man of the left will say it's intolerable.' I had not been overdramatising when I had described my desire for unilateral nuclear disarmament as my most profound belief. In the 1950s and after, intelligent thinkers worried principally about the bomb and overpopulation. Recently, politicians have surrendered themselves to more fashionable concerns and these two existential threats have plummeted way down society's anxiety list. I have no idea why. They still seem to me far more important than any others. At Lancing we were thrown further off kilter by the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962 – one boy told me in complete seriousness that there was no point to doing our homework that night because we were all going to be dead tomorrow – than we were by news of Kennedy being shot in the head the following year. That potentially lethal stand-off between two, as it turned out, posturing superpowers ended with a climbdown more by luck than by design. It was thinking about the divine futility of a world containing the means of its own obliteration which started my move away from the Christian faith. But my departure from the Anglican church was accelerated by the pending service of confirmation, which was filling me with misgiving. When I had arrived at Lancing, I had sometimes acted as server to the chaplain in a side-chapel at unimportant services, often at six thirty in the morning, with only a few worshippers. Once I was confirmed, the chaplain said, I would be able to serve the far more important function of sacristan at the Sung Eucharist in front of five hundred people. When, he asked, would I be coming for my pre-confirmation confession?

It sounds shallow if I say that I ceased to be a Christian because I didn't want to confess my sins to the school chaplain.
That reluctance is in itself, I suppose, the sin of pride. But that's how I felt. The idea of parading my faith also disgusted me. Faith must by definition be private. I had already been thrown out of the Eastbourne ABC for laughing myself silly at Audrey Hepburn in
The Nun's Story
, so it was clear which way the wind was blowing. If I did have any relationship with God – and now, after reading Sartre, Camus and Bertrand Russell, it was tenuous and frayed – the last thing I wanted to do was walk up an aisle, turn round and be seen to help administer the host. Later, it turned out that my entire professional life would be dedicated to the act of scrutiny which is at the heart of public performance. The theatre would be valuable to me for precisely that act. In the theatre as nowhere else, the authenticity of a thought or feeling may be examined and judged by the process of acting out. How often have I stopped a rehearsal and said of my own writing or directing, ‘Sorry, but I don't believe it'? I was aware that if ever I consented to become a performing sacristan, with an audience's eyes upon me, I would be revealed as the biggest hypocrite alive.

I went through with the service of confirmation, which served as a convenient final staging post for my loss of faith. By the time I was fifteen, I was changing fast. I was no longer desperate to ingratiate myself. When I had arrived at Lancing, a certain jostling proximity in the way of life had been attractive to me – the rough and tumble contrasted with Bexhill – but after a year or two any slim crevice of privacy had become more valuable. We all lived in an environment where total nakedness seemed to be expected half the day. We slept in dormitories together, we showered together and in the evening we took baths together. The lavatories were often lockless and some had no doors. Whatever age, pupils were also required
to go unclothed in the swimming pool on the unlikely pretext that if we wore trunks the fibres from our garments would clog up the pool's filters. It was noticeable that visiting clergy never missed an opportunity to cruise the swimming pool on their school tour, however brief. They would stand on a high, chlorinated balcony in intense theological conversation, lingering longer than in other, less exposed parts of the school, kneeling to do up that pesky shoelace, or once more elaborately wiping that stubborn speck of dirt from their glasses. So it was a relief, in these ogling circumstances, when I came upon one thing at least that we involuntary bathing belles could do alone and unobserved. I took up smoking. I found its solitary rituals and necessary secrecy comforting.

After a couple of years I had also befriended a pupil in my own house, a little older than me, and sometimes he and I would stroll together up past the sanatorium and into the woods to have a couple of crafty cigarettes. James Watson was sardonic, a touch anguished, right out of the heart of the English middle class but trying to work out whether his easy assumption of the qualities of a natural leader was going to be a trap or an asset in later life. It was with James that, after O levels, I hitch-hiked to Stratford and slept in a haystack until, exhausted by the cold and the surprising hardness of bundled hay, we joined the queue to get day seats at the very back of the theatre. In the next couple of years, we would often sneak out to permissive working-class pubs nearby to enjoy a pint of mild or of Watney's Red Barrel on a Saturday night. Some of my best times at Lancing were spent taking tea in a weird cottage where an old biddy seemingly out of Thomas Hardy, standing in an apron and slippers, still served soft-boiled eggs and buttered soldiers from a blackened stove in what looked like her front room. Or
on blazing days, lying on our backs in a cornfield, staring at the sun, smoking a Player's Medium and leaving our exam revision neglected in the long grass. Walking away from the school came to be a greater pleasure than walking towards it.

Unsurprisingly, a lot of our talk was about girls, and how hard it was, within our designated way of life, to meet any who were not family friends. James and I had both cottoned on to the fact that one of Lancing's principal educational assets was its closeness to Brighton. Every generation has a Brighton of its own, but ours was still convincingly bohemian. The town was less tarted-up and less prosperous than it is now. The early sixties were not that far distant from 1938, either in time or spirit, and you could still catch the reverberations from the random bursts of violence which had made Graham Greene the great Brighton poet, with Patrick Hamilton his crapulous equal. In side-streets, we were told, there were basement nightclubs for both transvestites and transsexuals, but we never saw them. Our time was spent at the Continentale in Kemp Town watching Jeanne Moreau movies – the best was one in which you could see her right breast in the bath – then going on for vindaloos and chop suey in the first Indian and Chinese restaurants of our lives. Later, we hung out at dances under the pier. The acned bands playing there modelled themselves more on the Swinging Blue Jeans than on the Beatles, all in neat little suits and polka-dot shirts, kicking their legs in rhythm like Tiller Girls whose batteries had run down. On the floor, the girls were wonderfully made up, with soft pastel sweaters and slacks in minute checks. I was a useless dancer, but an OK conversationalist. When today I come upon agony aunts in newspapers advising that wit is the most attractive quality, and that, from a woman's perspective, nothing is more seductive in a man than
the ability to listen, I think, ‘Hmm, maybe, but not in Brighton in 1964.' I spent many long hours listening.

It was in Brighton that I had another experience which overturned my future thinking. Of all the commonly cited factors which led to a transformation of social attitudes in the 1960s, the most frequently overlooked is the television series
The Great War
, a documentary narrated unforgettably by Michael Redgrave. With its inexhaustible flow of unseen contemporary footage, it revealed to an angry public the full extent of the military and political establishment's indifference to their own men's lives in the First World War fifty years earlier. Haig and his gang of blood-soaked enforcers were revealed as something near criminals in the scale of their recklessness. Now, with my English teacher Donald Bancroft, I was part of a group of boys who were allowed to go to the Theatre Royal Brighton to see the B cast in a long-touring production of
Beyond the Fringe
, which played on some of the same sensitivities.

We had looked forward to this event for months, since among our Françoise Hardy and Billie Holiday LPs most of us had an original cast album of this much-discussed Oxbridge sketch-show. We knew it and could imitate it more or less word for word. Given that I had been forbidden to do maths at A level because the curriculum would not allow me to mix literary and scientific subjects, I was studying an enjoyable mix of French, English and Divinity. Donald was therefore one of my three principal teachers, and one I hugely liked. A short, pugnacious Northerner, he had a remarkable gift for taking the most obscure classic literature and laying out a clear understanding of its essential subject matter, and only thereby considering its method. It was an approach to which I responded. There are a thousand ways to approach a work of art, but ‘What is it
saying?' remains the most useful question you can ask. What other question comes close?

I was therefore astonished when, coming out of the theatre, Donald took violent exception to a sketch by Peter Cook called ‘Aftermyth of War', which parodied all those films I had seen at the Playhouse Cinema, in which stiff upper lips are maintained throughout and people go laughingly to their deaths without complaint. Walking away down the street, Donald was puffing at his pipe, saying that the evening was an insult to the brave men and women who had sacrificed their lives for a generation which was now rewarding them with nothing more than mockery and ingratitude. Bewildered, I pointed out the sketch's title. The object of the satire, I said, was not the British military themselves but the ridiculous myths that had been propagated by their phlegmatic misrepresentation in countless bad films and television series since 1945. Famous actors and directors had grown rich by propagating a stupid lie, that there could be such a thing as a war which was moving without being upsetting. In truth, it had been six years of slaughter and violence. It was high time someone came along to point out the difference between reality and fiction. Donald turned to me, unforgiving, still missing the point. ‘I doubt if you lot would have done any better . . .'

Taken aback by obtuseness in someone I knew to be perceptive, I realised that night that I was dealing with something more than generational conflict. Donald, whose profession was the seeking out of meaning in literature, could not, on this particular occasion, see past his own value system. It blinded him. I was facing direct evidence of how much we all have invested in the story we tell ourselves about our own lives. In every human being there is a reef of conviction which grows up like a continental
shelf. I began to appreciate how rich is the interaction between what happens to us and what we come to believe. I did not at this point have any presentiment that I would spend years fascinated by this subject, or that it would one day lie at the heart of a catalogue of plays. How could I, when I had no intimation that I was going to be a writer? But I did start to examine my own prejudices, and to see how relative they were. Thenceforward, although I would continue to end up alongside father figures, no doubt to replace my absconding biological dad, I would never expect any single man or woman to have all the answers. I would always be alert. In adult life, pompous films of Jungian quest and discovery, a ubiquitous genre after
Star Wars
, would bore me as formulaic – and worse, at the deepest level, inhuman. Everything which generalised about arcs or journeys was by definition piffle. Anything which set spiritual quests in outer space or in oatmeal-robed prehistory was a waste of children's time as much as adults'. I couldn't give a damn who found the rabbit's foot or the magic mug, or where it was buried. The self-importance got up my nose. Anything valuable to be uncovered was likely to lie in the everyday, the specific.