What I Was (2 page)

2

Rule number two: Keep something back.

I
will tell you that I’m not one of those heroes who attracts admiration for his physical attributes. Picture a boy, small for his age, ears stuck at right angles to his head, hair the texture of straw and the colour of mouse. Mouth: tight. Eyes: wary, alert.

You might say that superficial flaws were not uncommon in boys my age, but in my experience this was untrue. Stretching left, right, up, down and diagonally in every St Oswald’s class picture were boys of a more usual type – boys with strong jaws, straight noses and thick hair of definite colour; boys with long, straight limbs and bold, confident expressions; boys with skills, inborn talents, a genetically determined genius for politics or Latin or the law.

In such pictures, my face (blurry and unformed) always looked shifty and somewhat imbecilic, as if the flesh itself realized that the impression I was making was a bad one, even as the shutter clicked.

Did I mention that St Oswald’s was my third school? The first two asked me (not entirely politely) to leave, due to the deplorable nature of my behaviour and grades. In my defence, I’d like to point out that my behaviour was not deplorable if by deplorable you mean rude, belligerent, violent and antisocial – setting fire to the library, stabbing or raping a teacher. By deplorable they meant ‘less than dedicated to study’, ‘less than competent at writing essays’, ‘less than interesting to the head and board of governors’. Given my gentle failings, their assessment strikes me now as unnecessarily cruel, and makes me wonder how they labelled the student who opened fire with an AK-47 in the middle of chapel.

In fact, my lack of distinction was mainly restricted to photographs and schoolwork. When it came to opinions, I was (I am) like the sword of Zorro: swift, incisive, deadly. My opinions on the role of secondary education, for instance, are absolute. In my opinion, this school and its contemporaries were nothing more than cheap merchants of social status, selling an inflated sense of self-worth to middle-class boys of no particular merit.

I will, however, grant them something. Without the first school, I would not have ended up at the second. Without the second, I would not have attended St Oswald’s. Without St Oswald’s, I would not have met Finn.

Without Finn, there would be no story.

3

It all began on the coast of East Anglia, past the indentation where the River Ore ran salt and melted into the sea. There, a bit of land stuck out from the mainland, a small peninsula roughly shaped like a rat’s nose. In maps (old maps) this peninsula was labelled The Stele, after a seventh-century commemorative stone marker, or stele, found very near to school property in 1825.

The letter my school sent to prospective parents contained a three-quarter page description of the area. Location was a selling point (
salt air contributes to strong lungs and clear minds
) and elegant italics explained how the stele was found half-buried in earth, the stone large and heavy and probably transported from Lindisfarne on the Northumbrian coast. Such markers were not uncommon in this part of the country, but this one boasted an excellent carved portrait of St Oswald, a seventh-century king of Britain, with the Anglo-Saxon equivalent of ‘Oswald Was Here’ carved on it. The stone itself is long gone, moved to the British Museum.

St Oswald’s School for Boys, which you won’t have heard of, was situated two miles inland. The school road ran between the A-road and the coast in a more or less straight line, with a footpath running parallel for most of its length. At the sea, the road turned left (north), while the footpath turned right (south). Following the footpath, you could reach The Stele in about twenty minutes – or at least you could reach the canal of deep water that separated it from the mainland. For only a few hours a day, when the tide was very low, the little peninsula could be accessed via a damp sand causeway. All around it, salt marsh and reed beds provided homes for nesting waders and waterfowl – oyster catchers, little terns, cormorants, gulls – and had once done the same for Roman, Saxon and Viking settlers.

A few miles and a million light years away was my home from home, Mogg House, a four-storey building with studies (tiny as tombs) on the bottom floor, communal dormitories in the middle, and bedrooms with living rooms on the floors above. Boys my age lived on the top floor in rooms designed for two, which now housed four, thanks to our bursar’s desire to maximize revenues. Loos were located on the ground floor, and to this day I believe I retain exceptional bladder control thanks to the inconvenience of the conveniences. It was something we developed with time and practice, like proficiency in maths or arpeggio technique.

Despite the brutality of the coastal winters, we lived without heat. Warmth was considered antithetical to the development of the immune system and we were expected to possess an almost superhuman tolerance for cold. On a positive note, the conditions at my previous school –situated two hundred miles further north – had been worse. There, we kept warm in winter by sleeping in our clothes, in woollen jerseys, socks and trousers with pyjamas layered on top, and awoke most mornings to banks of snow under the open windows and ice in the toilets.

At St Oswald’s, we fell out of bed at the sound of a bell, buttoned a clean collar (if we had one) on to our shirts, pulled on yesterday’s underwear, flannel trousers, socks and heavy black shoes, and headed downstairs for a breakfast of grey porridge and cold toast. Post-war rationing had finished eight years before, but the habit of mean, depressing food lingered in school kitchens throughout the land. After breakfast came chapel, then five lessons on the trot without a break, followed by lunch (pink sausages, green liver, brown stew, cabbage boiled to stinking transparency), followed by an afternoon dedicated to sport or the tedium of cadet parade, followed by supper, followed by prep, followed by bed.

Beneath this relatively straightforward schedule lurked the shady regions of school life where the real dramas were played out, where elaborate hierarchies established life’s winners and losers, ranking each carefully according to the ill-defined caste system of school life. As in the outside world, social mobility barely existed; one’s status at the start determined whether life would be filled with misery or triumph. I don’t recall any boy improving his lot significantly in the course of his school years, though perhaps memory fails me.

‘Oi, you!’

Three days in, I emerged from my own thoughts to meet the gaze of an imperious Upper Sixth.

‘You!’

Yes, I sighed inwardly.
Me.

‘What’s that?’ He pointed to the bottom button of my school blazer.

It’s a woodpecker, you creeping maggot.

He reached over with calm deliberation and tore the button off. It’s worth noting that this required considerable effort. And left a large hole.

‘
Un
buttoned,’ he spat. ‘Understood?’

I stared.

‘The correct answer, scum, is
Yes, sir.
’

‘Yes, sir.’ I had learnt to imbue a lack of sarcasm with infinite subtlety.

He turned on his heel and stalked off, while I scrabbled in the grass for my button. I felt no particular shame, having encountered dozens of chippy little fascists in my time, but continued to wonder at their delusions.

Our world revolved around school rules, rules as mysterious and arcane as the murkier corners of a papal cabal. Bottom button of blazer open or not, left hand in pocket or not, diagonal or straight crossing of the courtyard, running or walking on the lawn, books in right hand or left, blue ink or black, cap tipped forward or back. There was no crib sheet, no list to consult, no house book embossed
Rules.
Regulations merely existed, bobbing to the surface of school life like turds. We took their randomness, their rigidity, their sheer number, for granted and we obeyed because they were there, because we were newer or younger or weaker than the enforcers, because to fill our heads with more meaningful information might require the use of our critical faculties. Which would lead to doubts about the whole system. Which would lead to social and economic collapse and the end of life as we knew it.

It was easier just to get on with it.

Let me be clear: many boys (popular, clever, athletic) had a perfectly happy time at St Oswald’s; I simply was not one of them. And yet I had certain attributes – a face that hid emotion, a healthy contempt for fair play – that served me well. I was not destined for glittering prizes, but I was not without qualities.

Our lessons took place beneath the draughty high ceilings of the main school building, always accompanied by the random clatter and crash of nineteenth-century plumbing. Day after day, I sat with an earnest but uncomprehending look on my face, knowing that it was exactly this expression that made teachers skip to the boy on my left. They hated explaining things over and over – it bored them, caused them to despise their lives.

Despite (or perhaps because of) the depressing familiarity of these conditions, I settled into St Oswald’s at once.

4

One of the more notable facts about the stretch of coastline I have just described is that it is sinking at great speed.

This is the sort of fact about which it has become fashionable to panic in the middle of the twenty-first century, when nearly everyone agrees that our planet is on its last legs, but it has been true of this stretch of land for at least a thousand years. In contrast, the opposite coast in Wales is rising, which suggests that all of England is slowly tipping into the sea. Once the eastern coast sinks low enough and the western rises high enough, the entire country will slip gently under water in a flurry of bubbles and formal protests from the House of Lords. I greatly look forward to this gentle slipping into oblivion and believe it will do our nation no end of good.

Back then I might not have agreed. For one thing, I was less interested in geological catastrophe. For another, my contemporaries and I tended to view the future as a vast blank slate on which to write our own version of human history. But all this took a back seat to the real work that occupied each day – perfecting our lines for the drama of school life. It was important to be able to perform them without thinking – the not talking back, the respectful dipping of the head to teachers, the unsarcastic ‘sir’, the stepping aside for bigger boys.

I rarely thought about the schools I’d left behind; whatever impression they had made had been all bad. Getting ejected from the first had been effortless, requiring nothing more than an enthusiastic disdain for deadlines and games. Even without much of a reputation to uphold, they were pleased to see me go.

Expulsion from the second required slightly more effort, and the help of materials readily available from any school chemistry lab.

It occurred to me, however, that falling out of favour with St Oswald’s (which specialized in low expectations) might be more difficult. Even the teaching staff, a ragtag bunch of cripples and psychological refugees, appeared to have few prospects elsewhere. Mr Barnes, a victim of shell shock with a prosthetic bottom and one eye, taught history. He had occasional good days during which he spoke with almost thrilling animation about battles and treaties and doomed royal successions, but the rest of the time he merely sat at the front of the class and stared at his hands. From motives having nothing to do with compassion we left him alone on his black days, tiptoeing out so that his classroom echoed with silence by the time the bell rang.

Thomas Thomas, a refugee from All Souls, Oxford, with a stutter and lofty ideals, attempted fruitlessly to seduce our souls with the poetry of Wordsworth and Keats. Even without the idiotic name he’d have been branded a victim; with it, of course, he was doomed. We all knew his type: tall, dreamy and peevish, author of an unfinished novel destined to remain unfinished forever. It was easy to make him weep with frustration until he got the hang of school life, at which point (despite his aesthete tendencies and long white hands) he became our year’s most enthusiastic applier of the cane.

M. Markel was always willing to set translations aside to recount his experiences with the maquisards, his comrades in the French resistance. We adored tales of torture and self-sacrifice under Vichy rule, but never heard one through to the end. The stories inflamed his passions to such a degree that, partway in, he would lapse into the impenetrable Basque patois of his youth.

The rest barely deserve mention. Mr Brandt (dull). Mr Lindsay (effeminate). Mr Harper (hairpiece, vain). Last, and least, was the dreaded Mr Beeson, headmaster (thick), who also taught RE. It’s not that we thought we deserved a Mr Chips-type head (kindly, bespectacled, inspiring), but Mr Beeson barely topped five foot two, had the ruddy, unimaginative face of a butcher’s apprentice, and cherished a private passion for Napoleonic battle re-enactments that far exceeded any interest he had in the teaching profession. Rumour had it that he had gained the post due to the unfortunate shortage of candidates in the years following the war. The fact that his knowledge of Latin and Greek seemed scarcely better than our own bore this out.

Have I forgotten to mention sport? Daily drilling in cricket or rugby took place under the relentless eye of Mr Parkhouse, who was a fiend for what he called ‘conditioning’. This entailed long runs across the muddy countryside on days when weather conditions prevented actual games. I can still hear the dull thud of all those feet, more than eighty at a time, propelled by sweaty thighs and wildly swinging arms, clambering through hedges and over stiles, too tired to express resentment but not too tired to feel it. To vary the routine we sometimes ran along the beach, panting along the damp sand in twos and threes until cramp or insurrection put an end to forward motion.

It is always Reese I think of when remembering these runs. He had taken to seeking me out, trailing me like a shadow, mistaking the person least interested in tormenting him for a friend. He had a disturbing tendency to pop up in exactly the place I least expected him to be, tangling my feet like a jungle snare, and most of the time all I wanted was to shake him off.

This combination of unwanted exercise and unwelcome company occasionally caused me to call a halt to the entire proceedings – once I lay flat behind a stand of trees, another time I crouched among the reeds until the thundering mass of boys disappeared from view. At those times, I felt a profound sense of release as I wandered back, admiring the mackerel sky and the soft silent swoop of owls.

This particular September morning was warm and intermittently sunny. Gold and purple heather set the marshes ablaze, and beyond lay the dark green surface of the sea. The low tide had created a long stretch of clear sand between the beach and The Stele, and Mr Parkhouse led us out on to the causeway at a brisk gallop. My breath, hoarse and loud, drowned the outraged calls of shore birds. Ahead was a small group of abandoned fishermen’s shacks, mostly locked up and rotting with blacked-out windows. As we rounded the point, a feeling that irreparable damage had been done to my Achilles tendon made it clear that I should sit down, and I took advantage of the first shack to disappear from view.

As the rest of the boys ran on, Reese jogged on the spot, his desperate smile twisted into an unintentional leer. ‘What you doing?’

‘Bugger off,’ I said. He turned beet red and legged it.

A dreamy silence settled on the spot. I lay slumped against the shack watching the soft rise and fall of waves, silencing my own breathing until there was no sound and nothing left in the world except sand and sea and sky. After a few minutes, the cloud cover gave way to a burst of brilliant sunlight and the slow dull sea leapt with diamonds.

The voice when it came was clear, oddly inflected, not unfriendly.

‘What are you doing here?’

I looked up, startled. In front of me stood a person about my own age, with black eyes and a quizzical expression. He was slim, slightly taller than average and barefoot, his thick dark hair unfashionably shaggy. A heavy, old-fashioned fisherman’s sweater topped baggy long shorts, chopped down from trousers and rolled.

He looked impossibly familiar, like a fantasy version of myself, with the face I had always hoped would look back at me from a mirror. The bright, flickering quality of his skin reminded me of the surface of the sea. He was almost unbearably beautiful and I had to turn away, overcome with pleasure and longing and a realization of life’s desperate unfairness.

‘I’m sorry,’ I managed to stutter, pulling myself to my feet.

He gazed at me, taking in the exposed, blue-white schoolboy flesh, the stiff cotton shorts, the aertex vest plastered with sweat. From behind him a small grey cat gazed, its tail erect and twitching, as if testing the atmosphere for spies. Both looked, and neither shouted at me to leave. I took this as encouragement.

‘I don’t suppose I might bother you for –’ I fought for an excuse, any reason to stay – ‘a drink?’

The boy hesitated, reluctant rather than unsure, then shrugged, turned, and disappeared into the little shack. The cat stalked behind him, crossing one delicate paw in front of the other as he went. I followed, delighted and amazed by this unexpected turn of events. Compared to the beautiful boy and the cat I felt scruffy and crass, but I didn’t mind, being not unused to scraping dignity out of pathos.

It took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the interior of the hut. There were only two rooms: a tiny sitting room at the front facing the sea and an equally small kitchen overlooking the reed beds. Flattened, nearly colourless rugs covered rough pine boards, and the chipped remnants of a once-fine set of china sat neatly on wooden shelves in the kitchen. Two smallish front windows opened on to sweeping views of the sea. Across the room, a narrow staircase led to what I assumed was a sleeping loft; a shallow pitched roof indicated that the space would be cramped. Beneath the stairs, a cupboard closed with a worn wooden latch. Simply framed photographs hung in uneven intervals on the wall above the staircase: a bearded man with a weathered face. A portrait of a young woman. A fishing boat. A shire horse.

All black and white. All decades old.

The low, banked fire in the iron stove threw off enough heat to make the hut feel warm and comforting as soup. Settled in front of the stove, the cat never took its eyes off me.

‘You can sit if you like,’ said the boy in a slightly stilted voice, as if he didn’t speak English fluently or perhaps had lost the habit of speaking. He poured water from a large metal tin into a kettle and placed it on one of the hotplates.

I thought of the dreary Victorian schoolrooms of St Oswald’s, of the freezing brick dormitories, of my parents’ home with its gloomy semi-rural respectability. This place was unassuming and intimate, its spirit soft, worn and warmed by decades of use. It was as if I had fallen through a small tear in the universe, down the rabbit hole, into some idealized version of This Boy’s Life.

Remembering what I had in the way of manners, I gave the boy my name and he didn’t flinch – a rare enough reaction, and one I appreciated. Panic began to overtake me at the thought of having to drink my cup of tea and return to the reality of school food and school rules and school life. I sat, photographing the scene with my eyes and looking around for signs that the boy lived here with a grown-up of some description. The hut was very small, but also very tidy. The floors were free of sand, and there were none of the usual cheery beach relics crowded on to window sills. The cotton rugs, though worn, were immaculate. A large pyramid of wood had been stacked neatly beside the stove.

Not a detail out of place.

The boy returned to the little sitting room carrying a teacup with roses on it. ‘It’s black,’ he said, handing me the tea, with no apparent desire to know if that would do.

‘Thank you.’ I raised the cup and gulped a hot mouthful. ‘Do you live here alone?’

He did not welcome questions, this much was clear. Without answering, he turned back to the kitchen, followed by the cat. I waited for him to volunteer an explanation, but it didn’t come so I jabbered instead, uncomfortable with silence.

‘I’m at St Oswald’s, a boarder. It’s diabolical,’ I said, in an effort to prove somehow that I was
on his side.
‘I hate studying and I’m no good at sport. It’s cold all the time and the food is inedible. It’s the most idiotic waste of time.’ I looked up from my tea, anxious for sympathy. ‘And money.’

He appeared not to be listening.

‘Do you have a name?’ I asked.

‘Finn,’ said the boy.

‘Nice to meet you, Finn.’

I finished my tea slowly, but once it was gone could think of no reason to stay. ‘I’d better go then,’ I said, with what sounded even to me like a lack of conviction.

‘Goodbye,’ Finn said and I felt like weeping.

Outside, I turned to wave, but Finn had already shut the door on our encounter. Back at school I’d missed breakfast, chapel, and the beginning of Latin. Which meant detention and fifty extra lines.

And bothered me not at all.