What Fresh Lunacy is This?

by Robert Sellers

Oliver’s memories of Hoe Place are typical of those who had to endure life at boarding school: smelly, soulless dormitories and a ridiculous school uniform, in this case a pink hat. There was also the obligatory monstrous matron, who tended to Oliver when he caught a particularly virulent strain of measles that left one of his eyes permanently damaged with a squint that he did his best to hide. The headmaster, whose breath invariably smelt of malt whisky, was a Mr Sinker, so he inevitably went by the nickname ‘Stinker’. If it were possible, Mr Sinker was even more rabidly patriotic than dear old Lancelot, and the classrooms were festooned with military posters and maps showing in bright red the all-conquering exploits of the British Empire.

  As at Squirrels, lessons were a distraction for Oliver. He judged the teachers to be decrepit relics of a bygone age. Often his impatience with them resulted in a smack across the head with a ruler, or he’d be lifted from his desk by one ear and deposited in the corridor. Such antics, realized Ollie, drew the attention and enjoyment of his mates and he began wearing the persona of class clown with pride. ‘No memory of learning clutters my memory of Hoe Place.’

  They were out after a few months anyway, because Peter could no longer meet the fees as he was finding work hard to come by, and for a time the boys found themselves allocated to various relatives. David still remembers sitting next to his grandmother’s radio with Ollie listening to the latest instalment of Dick Barton. Sundry aunts and uncles also treated them to Saturday-morning picture shows where they followed the adventures of heroic figures like the Lone Ranger. ‘We lived in very simplistic times,’ says David. ‘It was the days of radio, there was no television. And because it was largely radio your imagination was left to put faces on the voices, you could imagine them as you wished: much better than it is for modern kids, where everything is there in front of them and no imagination is required at all.’

  In yet another new school concerns began to be raised that Oliver’s education was suffering perhaps more than David’s. While his brother already knew his alphabet and could spell complicated words like ‘cul-de-sac’, Ollie stuttered with even the simplest words, much to everyone’s exasperation. ‘He’s impossible. What can we do with the boy?’ It was decided to place him back into the care of his father, who had now settled into married bliss with Kay in an apartment in Merton Mansions in Bushey Road, Raynes Park, near Wimbledon.

  Suddenly acquiring two sons would be daunting for any new wife, but Kay pretty much took it in her stride. When the boys turned up, Oliver put out his hand and said, ‘Hello. Are you my new mummy?’ With the flat now too small for them all to live in, Peter and Kay rented a farmhouse near the village of Langton Green on the outskirts of Tunbridge Wells in Kent. The day of the move arrived with everyone clambering into Peter’s Austin Seven. For Ollie, the highlight of the journey was making cocoa bombs out of tissue paper which he and David threw at poor cyclists coming the other way. On arriving at the house the family had to knock at a nearby farm to borrow some shears to battle their way through a mass of brambles and stinging nettles to the front door. The house, unlived in for years, was similarly neglected: the front door creaked like the soundtrack of a horror film and the floorboards buckled underfoot. For the children, though, it was an enchanted place and the next morning they set about exploring, especially the cellar, where Peter told them smugglers used to hide their booty from the king’s men.

  Because Peter had found a job with a firm of London bookmakers, he and Kay decided to live at Merton Mansions for the week and drive the forty-odd miles each Friday night to stay the weekend with Oliver and David. It was a strange arrangement: they would go on car trips together as a family, but most of the time Peter spent up in an attic room pounding away at his typewriter, trying to resurrect his career as a freelance racing journalist. Then, come Sunday evening, he and Kay would pack up and return to London, leaving Ollie and David with very little discipline or supervision. ‘Over time we had two or three au pair girls looking after us,’ recalls David. ‘But largely we were left alone. We went out scrumping, we camped, we lived an outdoor existence and developed this ability to just lead our own lives. We had total freedom because no one was really there looking after us, so again we really bonded as brothers.’

  One of these au pairs was French and went by the name of Monique. One morning the boys were playing up in the attic when Ollie put his foot through the ceiling of the bathroom beneath them and there was poor Monique taking a bath at the time. ‘God knows what we were really doing up there,’ says David. ‘Certainly not with the intent of spying on Monique. But Ollie’s foot did make a very big hole and no doubt he had a splendid view of Monique below in the bath.’

  Nineteen forty-seven began with a hellish freeze that broke records and almost brought Britain to a standstill. For Oliver the snow was a mixed blessing: there was no school and he could ride his sledge in the steep cow field at the back of the house, but usually there would be no water for his bath because the pipes were frozen solid. Peter came up with the inspired notion of taking a blowtorch to them, but instead he set the surrounding dry timber ablaze and the two boys put the fire out by lobbing snowballs at it.

  The weather remained bitingly cold until well into March. It was a winter Oliver would never forget. Back at school, he failed to impress yet again. ‘I sank to the bottom of the class in a bubblehead of daydreams.’ For a term he and David attended Langton Green Primary while they waited for a place at another boarding school. According to David, this was the only time the Reed boys ever attended a state school. ‘It was also the first time we ever went to a mixed school, and there were girls there!’

  What was holding Ollie back at school was his reading and writing; even as an adult he was hopeless at spelling. His inability to get letters or numbers in the right order on the page or even the right way round condemned him to lessons with children a year below him. At first his dunce status was laid at the door of his squint and a specialist in London was consulted, but things did not improve. Eventually he went into hospital for an operation, sharing a ward with grown men, many of them ex-army, really rough types who were forever trying to put their hands up the skirts of the young nurses.

  Oliver had noticed that some of the men’s heads were wrapped in bandages and their eyes covered with gauze pads. One day he plucked up enough courage to ask what all this might mean for him. ‘Well, lad,’ one said. ‘They’ll hook back your eyelids, pull out your eyeballs, cut ’em up a bit and shove ’em back in again.’ It sounded barbaric but that’s almost exactly what they did. When Peter and Kay arrived at the hospital and saw poor little Oliver sitting up in bed resembling a panda with a bashed-up nose crusty with dried blood, they both burst into tears. ‘As it was described to me,’ says David, ‘the doctors took the eyeball out and tightened one of the muscles to straighten the eye up. Oliver had a definite cast one side, so he looked straight with one eye and the other always looked askew. And he always had a slight weakness there, and that’s why, if you see him in movies, he very often looks vaguely sideways to cover that. He wasn’t very good at ball games either, in adult life, like tennis or badminton. He’d put the racket right in front of his face and you had to serve it straight at him otherwise you were a rotter.’

  Even after the operation, worries persisted about Oliver’s poor grasp of learning, while his teachers’ indifference towards him caused him to have angry outbursts. His school reports reveal a boy who either doesn’t seem to be trying or simply can’t cope. ‘His extremely poor standard of work has been a great disappointment,’ reads one. On the subject of mathematics a teacher wrote: ‘He’s very confused and makes little or no effort to conquer the elementary.’ And, revealingly, this: ‘In class quiet, but dreamy. Out of class quick flashes of temper when things go wrong.’ This wasn’t the only report to make issue of Ollie’s quick temper.

  Amid the negative verdicts there were chinks of light. Nearly every child has one or two subjects at which they show at least a little promise and f
or Oliver these were geography and drawing. One school report reads: ‘Drawing very good, original ideas.’ Perhaps Oliver felt drawing was one of the few subjects in which he could allow his vivid imagination full rein. ‘He was a great cartoonist,’ confirms his widow Josephine. ‘He had this great flair for scribbling cartoon characters, he’d often draw them in his scripts.’

  There is also an interesting handwritten letter to Peter from a no doubt exasperated headmaster that more than adequately sums up his younger son’s academic progress: ‘Frankly, I do not think he will profit by remaining . . . I cannot move him down as he is already six months over the average age of his present class.’ David puts it more bluntly. ‘He was asked to leave. That letter was a very polite way of saying, “Take your child away.”’

  Ollie was thirty-eight years old and taking a piss in a pub toilet when he saw a piece of graffiti scrawled on the wall in front of him: ‘Dyslexia rules – KO.’ Dyslexia was a word that wasn’t used when he was growing up. Nobody apart from medical people knew anything about it, and if you had dyslexia you were simply considered a bit thick. In the intervening years it had become more widely understood, but it was too late for Oliver. At least he’d found the reason why he’d done so poorly at school, why teachers in the end simply gave up on him, but the damage had already been done. For the whole of his life he was deeply self-conscious about his lack of education. ‘He was nobody’s fool,’ says David. ‘But he always felt intellectually he wasn’t the equal of others, so rather than expose himself to the threat of being discovered he would shout loudly or act loudly.’

  To overcome his dyslexia when he became an actor, Oliver would study his scripts carefully and methodically, spending hours memorizing his lines. If he had trouble with a certain word or sentence he’d simply write it down and go over it again and again until it stuck. Oliver was fortunate in that he had a very good memory and over time he learned to live with his dyslexia and to a great extent overcame it.

  And what of Marcia during his education, for her absence is thunderous? It seems that David and Ollie were an impediment to her overriding desire to gallivant around and have fun. David’s wife Muriel doesn’t mince her words when she calls Marcia ‘a very self-centred, selfish woman; all she could think about was herself. But she was very beautiful. And she loved men and had an enormous amount of affairs, and the boys got in her way. She adored Ollie, but in actual fact she never really cared for her children. She hardly ever made an effort to go and see them at boarding school. She didn’t have any motherly instincts at all.’

  Because Marcia was such a gaping hole in the boys’ lives there was always an attraction in going to see her, even if they had to tell fibs about it to Kay. ‘You didn’t mention Marcia’s name around Kay,’ reveals David. ‘So our visits always had to be done rather surreptitiously.’ Marcia had recently moved in with another man, Bill Sulis, and they lived near Worthing. David remembers one occasion when he and Ollie cycled there from Tunbridge Wells just to see their mother, a round trip of nearly ninety miles. ‘Can you imagine, cycling to Worthing, for two boys, a bloody long way? And Ollie’s bike got a puncture and we didn’t have the means of repairing it, so we stuffed the tyre with grass. We made it in the end, though.’

  Kay’s unwillingness to even hear Marcia’s name mentioned was perhaps born of anger at the way she’d treated Peter, but also the fact that she was now expecting his child and felt proprietorial about starting her own family with him. On 5 August 1947 the baby duly arrived and was christened Peter Simon Reed. A proud Peter drove his wife and newborn son from the hospital to their home, where Ollie was waiting at the bottom of the lane and given the task of carrying indoors his new brother, who was asleep in a small wicker basket.

  By the time Oliver had reached the age of about ten he was already built like the proverbial brick shithouse, a fearsome sight only slightly offset by the fact he still wore, at his father’s insistence, short trousers. ‘I looked like Charles Bronson dressed up as a Boy Scout.’ Anger at his teachers had also given way to outright rebelliousness, which, while it made him a hero to the other boys, also resulted in harsh punishment and sometimes expulsion. However, Simon, as the youngest boy was always known, believes Oliver’s discipline problem at school ran much deeper. ‘It was plain insecurity. The anti-establishment thing came later on, that’s for sure, but at that stage he was just a troubled boy who was going through a troubled time because of the problems with my dad and his ex-wife, and Ollie took the side of the ex-wife. And there was also something in his nature that was provocative, seeking out confrontation; all that stuff was going on.’

  Back in Wimbledon, Peter hoped to enrol Oliver at the prestigious King’s College School and so placed him at a preparatory school in the hope that it might improve him academically. In September 1949 Oliver started at Rokeby School in nearby Kingston upon Thames. Alas, the results were much as before and within six months Peter was informed by the headmaster that basically Oliver hadn’t a cat in hell’s chance of making it into King’s. ‘Not up to standard,’ he reported in unequivocal terms. ‘Leaves at my suggestion.’

  Peter had no option left now but to send Oliver to a private establishment that specialized in taking boys who had failed to gain the qualifications needed to get into a top-rank public school. Ewell Castle, which Oliver referred to as ‘a school for dunces’, stood in fifteen acres of private land on the edge of the Surrey countryside, just outside London. Built on part of the site of the ruins of Henry VIII’s Nonsuch Palace, the school looked like a boys-only version of St Trinian’s. It was a grand place indeed and Oliver was to enjoy his time there. ‘The secret society of schoolboy ritual appealed to me.’

  Ollie came face to face with this on his very first night there, in the form of an initiation test that he recognized as a ‘primitive ordeal – a test of character’. Stripped and blindfolded, he was made to crawl along the corridor and kiss the ‘Blarney Stone’. As he imitated loud snogging noises his head was thrust forward and his nose touched bare flesh, followed by a jet blast of foul air into his mouth. The blindfold was removed and there was the Blarney Stone. ‘It was the bare arse of the fattest boy in the school. He was amazing. He could fart at will.’

  Oliver’s stay at Ewell Castle was the longest of any school and also the most rewarding. Initially he and David were boarders, until they moved in with their father and Kay and became day boys, travelling to the school by bus. For two years Oliver made a point of sharing his double desk with a pupil called Charles James, who all these years later is still mystified as to why it was he that Oliver took a special shine to, since Ollie was by nature a secretive and solitary boy. ‘Oliver didn’t have many friends at the school. A lot of the boys went round in groups but he didn’t, he really was a loner. I was one of the few people who were close to him.’ During winter they used to hang out in the corridor together between lessons, huddled round a radiator to extract some warmth from it. In summer they’d wander around the school grounds or go down to the village. On Wednesday afternoons, which were free time since pupils were obliged to come in on Saturday, they might see a film at the local fleapit.

  One benefit of being Ollie’s friend was that nobody picked on you. ‘If I was having problems with anybody Ollie would jump into the fray in a threatening manner,’ recalls James. ‘Or if there was trouble brewing he’d give you a penetrating stare.’ At Ewell Castle Oliver learned an important lesson: life was cruel and the strongest succeeded while the weak got abused and ignored. And so he chose to become a bully; the little boy who cried in the rhododendron bush at Hoe Place had been buried for ever. ‘I was bully boy Reed. Jack the Lad. I had swagger.’ Very quickly Ollie forged a reputation at school as someone to whom you showed the utmost respect. ‘You didn’t argue with Ollie,’ says James. ‘He was a powerful chap, everybody was sort of in awe of him. He really was a strange mixture in many ways, he was a cultured boy, very well mannered, as was his brother, but could be very tough: you didn’t cross h
im.’

  Oliver’s own comeuppance arrived one day in the shape of a hard-nosed little Scottish boy who, when Ollie made a disrespectful remark, punched him in the head and sent him reeling. ‘From then on Ollie kept well away from this kid,’ says James. ‘But everybody else was in awe of Oliver.’

  Academically things were still tough. It didn’t help that Ollie never bothered to do his homework and every morning grabbed James’s exercise book to quickly copy out his work before class. At home Peter was reaching infuriating heights of exasperation. One of Simon’s earliest memories is of the time his father tried to teach Ollie how to spell the word ‘hippopotamus’, indeed vowing that he would be barred from leaving the house until he got it right. Of course, ‘hippopotamus’ was like a foreign land to Oliver: he hadn’t the first clue where to start. Simon watched all this unfold and, being then what he now describes as ‘a bit of a smart-arse’, retired to his bedroom to have a go at it himself. Having mastered the word he walked triumphantly back into the room and spelt it out perfectly, no doubt to the embarrassment of Ollie. ‘God knows why he didn’t hate me because of that,’ Simon says. ‘It was a pretty disgusting thing to have done.’

  Using his physical attributes, Oliver instead began to excel as an athlete. He made the school boxing team but it was on the running track that his strength truly lay, particularly over long distances. He’d pad round the school field on his own, lap after lap, hour after hour, in training. He was incredibly determined and if there was a challenge he would meet it and win. Ewell Castle had a good cross-country team and Ollie was soon its star, taking part in schoolboy championships. ‘That was his major claim at school,’ says James. ‘Athletics.’

  The games master, and also Ollie’s housemaster, was Geoff Coles, a Ewell old boy who’d returned to the school after the war from the Fleet Air Arm. As perhaps the first teacher to recognize Ollie’s difficulties, he would play a crucial role in his early development. With Coles’s help and encouragement Ollie developed an aptitude for reading and learning poetry and it wasn’t long before he began to do better at English literature. ‘He was very keen on things like Shakespeare,’ remembers James. ‘We did Twelfth Night at school, and he was always very good at reciting, he put everything into it. The majority of schoolboys at that age aren’t particularly interested in learning Shakespeare but Ollie was. He really threw himself into it.’