Breaking the Code

by Gyles Brandreth

  I let the phone ring and ignored the texts and emails. I said ‘no’ to the Today programme three days’ running (not like me) and then – I’m not quite sure why – I said ‘yes’ to The Week in Westminster. I suppose I thought it would be ‘safe’ – and there was a fee. I played a straight bat – or so I thought. I said there was no ‘black book’ (well, there wasn’t); I said we kept notes (because we did); I said… Never mind what I said. I did myself no favours. Afterwards I made the mistake of checking out the Twittersphere and (this is the price of narcissism) read the usual rants that we ‘Tory bastards’ seem to inspire. The tweets had a common thrust: ‘Brandreth should stop digging’, ‘Why is he defending the whips?’, ‘What’s he got to hide?’, ‘He should think about the victims for a change.’

  As it happens, I do think about the victims – quite a lot. I know about the reality of paedophilia. When I was a child I was ‘groomed’. Yes, I was ‘a victim’ once upon a time. The experience lasted two years. It was a long while ago, but I remember it as if it were yesterday.

  In the summer of 1959, when I was eleven, my parents sent me away to boarding school. It wasn’t that they didn’t like me: it was simply what middle-class parents of their generation did. I was sent to a preparatory school in East Kent to prepare me for my Common Entrance examination. I think my mother hoped I would go on to Eton. I think my father had Winchester in mind. I liked my boarding school at once.

  It was a happy school. (Bowden, in my dormitory used to cry himself to sleep most nights, but he was only seven, poor mite.) It was a small school – a hundred boys or so – set in a handsome and historic country house in the middle of nowhere. Wet runs, cold showers, lots of Latin. It was a typical English boys’ prep school of its time – except there were no beatings. That’s how my parents found the school: they were looking for one that did not believe in corporal punishment.

  The school had joint headmasters, two thoroughly decent men whose bearing and manner epitomised ‘the best of British’. Mr Stocks turned eighty-one in the year I arrived at the school: he was a classicist, scholarly, short-sighted, a little slow on his feet, mild-mannered and infinitely courteous. He believed in hard work above all else: ‘a busy boy is a happy boy’, he used to say. (‘Keep that Latin accurate’ was his other mantra.) Mr Burton was a generation younger: a good-hearted, robust and enthusiastic character, keen on games and much liked by me because he produced the school plays and gave me the best parts (Feste in Twelfth Night one year, Rosalind in As You Like It the next). Mr Burton had silver hair, pink cheeks, leather patches on his elbows and a gammy leg – the result of some heroic action during the war.

  The war still echoed around the school. We boys made models of German fighter planes from balsa wood and plastic Airfix kits and, under the bedclothes by torchlight, read Pan paperbacks with lurid covers featuring chilling accounts of the horror of Japanese prisoner-of-war camps. The Wooden Horse and The Cruel Sea were the films we saw as end-of-term treats. I don’t believe any of the masters had professional teaching qualifications, but most of them had impressive war records and were known by their military rank. Colonel Thomas, tall, austere and shy, taught mathematics. Major Douch was smaller, jollier and sported a little moustache that made him look like an odd amalgam of Hitler and Oliver Hardy. He was a kind man, one of my favourites: he taught Latin and, in the army (I discovered this years later), had been best friends with the actor Roger Moore.

  Most of the masters were married men and their wives were very much part of school life, supervising at meals, cheering from the touch-line, helping make the costumes for the school plays. The other women I recall were the matrons – one older and a bit of a dragon; two in their twenties and very pretty – and Miss Loewen, who was tiny, ancient, mittel-European, and taught art.

  And then there was Mr Harkness. He was a bachelor, in his early thirties, I suppose – perhaps a bit older: his hair was thinning. It was dark brown hair which he wore swept back. He was of medium height and slim build; he dressed well (he owned a pair of blue suede shoes) and his fingers, though stained with nicotine, had nails that were noticeably well manicured. He taught English and music. He was in charge of the school choir. In my first term I joined the choir and, quite quickly, became his pet.

  Each evening, by tradition long established, just after ‘lights out’, there was a close of day musical ritual. It was known as ‘Nightingales’. On the landing, outside the boys’ dormitories, three or four choristers would gather, in pyjamas and dressing gowns, and stand in a semi-circle around Mr Harkness. He would then strike a tuning fork to give us the note we needed and conduct us as we sang, a capella, a verse or two of ‘The day thou gavest, Lord, is ended’ or another, similar, evening hymn.

  One evening, when we choristers had finished our singing, and were trooping off to our dormitories, Mr Harkness called me back to have a word. Once the others had disappeared and I stood facing him, alone on the darkened landing, he put his hands on my shoulders and bent down to kiss me. He kissed me on the mouth, quite gently. He smelled of tobacco and Old Spice. That is my most vivid recollection of him.

  When Mr Harkness kissed me, I did not respond. I just stood there, accepting what was happening. Over the next two years I accepted his attention without questioning it and without complaint. And his attention was considerable. Every day he found a moment when we could be alone – on the landing, in his classroom, in the school chapel, in the vestry of the beautiful church where the choir sang on Sundays, in his bedroom. When he kissed me (which he did daily), when he put his hand on my knee as I sat next to him on the organ bench, when he let his hand stray inside my shorts as I sat on his bed learning my lines for my part in the school play, I knew it was wrong, but I did nothing to stop him. Instinctively I understood that what he was doing was transgressive (without knowing the word), but I acquiesced. I did not complain. I did not protest. I did not like what he did to me, but I did not mind it that much. I felt neutral about it and I felt no pressure – and certainly no desire – to respond. I never touched him. I would not hold his hand. When he said, ‘I love you’, I did not reply.

  I suppose I liked him. At least, I was flattered by his attention. I think I felt it was my due. I was eleven, twelve and thirteen when this was happening and quite full of myself. Mr Harkness took lots of photographs of me. We both admired the results. And I enjoyed the treats. He allowed me to use his bedroom whenever I wanted and provided little ‘feasts’ for me: fresh crab in soft white rolls was my favourite. He lent me books (I still have the copy of Little Boy Lost by Marghanita Laski that he gave me), he read out loud to me (he was a good reader), he helped ‘improve’ the poems that I wrote for the school magazine.

  I remember that he had an adult friend called Rex who drove down to the school one day and took us on an expedition to Deal or Folkestone. Another boy in my year came with us for the outing. I realised that day that he was another of the choirmaster’s pets. ‘I don’t love him like I love you,’ Mr Harkness assured me later. I was not bothered. I was not jealous. I was not emotionally involved.

  During term-time, I spent time with Mr Harkness every day. During the holidays I did not see him, but he wrote to me. I have kept the letters. (That is not especially significant. I keep everything.) The letters are affectionate and chatty, but circumspect. They do not give much away. My parents noticed their arrival, of course, not only because twelve-year-olds don’t get much correspondence, but also because Mr Harkness wrote in an elegant, rather flowery script and used turquoise ink.

  Was it my parents who brought it to a head? Did they speak to the school about it? I don’t know. I never discussed it with them. All I know is that during my final term at school, I learnt that Mr Harkness was moving on. He was returning to his own part of the country to teach at a girls’ school. And, one day, I was invited to have a chat with Mr Burton, the co-headmaster. Unusually, the conversation did not take place in his study. We went for a walk around the school forecourt, accomp
anied by another of the masters (the new games master, I think it was). Tentatively, they asked about Mr Harkness and his behaviour towards me. Was it as it should be? They mentioned the police – and wondered if there was something they should be told? I said I didn’t think so. It was an awkward walk. As I remember it now, thinking back, I can picture the gravel beneath my feet. I must have been looking down. I am afraid I was not very helpful to them with their enquiries.

  Has this experience of being a victim of child abuse had a lasting effect on me? I do not know. I certainly don’t feel traumatised by it – nor even resentful. I did not complain then and I am not complaining now. I don’t feel that I was robbed of my childhood. I haven’t turned to drink or drugs or been haunted by the memory of what happened – though, now I have stopped to think about it, I am startled by how much I do remember and how vivid are the details. Yes, my innocence was violated and it was wrong. It should never have happened. The man should have been stopped – and I hope he was. He was clearly discovered and he moved on. Maybe he mended his ways. We will never know: he is dead now.

  Apart from being a reasonably robust and self-confident little lad, and coming from a secure home with a loving family, I suspect that one of the reasons I did not feel traumatised by the experience is that I took it as part and parcel of boarding-school life, something you had to take in your stride, something that happened to lots of people. Perhaps for my generation it was.

  And perhaps for the next generation, too. My wife and I decided to send our son to a day school, St Paul’s in west London, an outstanding school, I’d say, where, mercifully, he went unmolested. Now I read in the Daily Mail that St Paul’s and its prep school, Colet Court, have been hotbeds of paedophilia for years. Indeed, my son’s old history master has just received a two-year suspended sentence at Southwark Crown Court for possessing hundreds of extreme images of naked boys. And in today’s paper I have just seen the headline ‘Boris Johnson’s former prep school headmaster arrested on suspicion of child sex offences’. I haven’t bothered to read on. I can imagine the rest.

  From his prep school, Boris went on to Eton. My parents decided that I should go on to Bedales, a co-educational boarding school in Hampshire. I imagine they thought the co-ed element advisable after my prep school experience. And certainly at Bedales I came across no predatory teachers – though a girl in my class did have an affair (and a baby) with one of the French masters. She was a teenager and he was in his twenties, I think. Both left the school and, in time, they were married and had more children, though the marriage did not last.

  Adults in positions of trust should not abuse that trust. Older animals should not take advantage of younger ones – emotionally, physically, or in any way at all. We know that. We are all agreed on that – absolutely – and yet, as a society, we appear conflicted, too. In fashion and advertising, we tolerate the sexualisation of pre-adolescent children; the country’s bestselling newspaper continues to publish naked pictures of very young women on a daily basis; Sky TV offers pornographic channels where the youth and ‘innocence’ of the girls on display (seemingly dressed in school uniform) is very much part of the sales pitch: ‘barely legal’ is the voice-over’s killer turn of phrase.

  There is nothing new in this confusion. I remember how at TV-am in the 1980s we welcomed Bill Wyman to cosy up with us on the breakfast TV sofa. In 1983 the 47-year-old Rolling Stones bass guitarist had begun a relationship with a thirteen-year-old girl called Mandy Smith. He said, by way of justification, ‘She was a woman at thirteen.’ When I met Mandy, she told me that she was fourteen when her sexual relationship with Wyman began. He was forty-eight. But we went along for the ride: he was a Rolling Stone, after all, and she was his Lolita. They were married eventually. (In 1989. They divorced in 1991.)

  And speaking of Lolita, in 1962, in my first year at Bedales, when I was fourteen, I attempted to read Vladimir Nabokov’s celebrated novel. I don’t remember much beyond the opening paragraph: ‘Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.’

  You get the idea. At the start of the story Lolita is twelve and the narrator, Humbert Humbert, is in his late thirties and obsessed with the child, with whom he begins a sexual relationship after he becomes her stepfather. Stanley Kubrick’s film version was released in 1962, which is what prompted my interest. James Mason, aged fifty-two, played Humbert Humbert. Sue Lyon, aged fourteen, played Lolita. The film was X-rated so I could not see it at the time; nor, I suppose, could Sue Lyon. You needed to be over eighteen.

  We do not approve of child abuse, but depictions of child abuse we seem to tolerate – if they are well enough done. Not long ago Time magazine included Lolita in its list of the best 100 novels written in English between 1923 and 2005. Nabokov, in an afterword to the book, said, ‘There is no moral to the story’, echoing Oscar Wilde’s line when he was cross-examined about The Picture of Dorian Gray: ‘There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.’

  We are certainly ‘conflicted’ when it comes to Oscar Wilde – whose eldest son, incidentally, was a pupil at Bedales in the 1890s. I am writing this on Sunday morning, having just driven my friend Merlin Holland to St Pancras station to catch the Eurostar. Merlin, Oscar Wilde’s only grandson, lives in France, but he was over for a couple of days giving a remarkable talk at the St James’s Theatre about the notorious trials of 1895 and his grandfather’s tragic downfall. I chaired the Q&A afterwards and I asked Merlin – considering the current press interest in paedophilia in high places and given the age of some of the witnesses produced by the prosecution at the Old Bailey in 1895 – if Oscar Wilde was being tried today might he not end up in prison now, just as he did then? ‘Yes,’ said Merlin, ‘quite possibly, though the boys were sixteen – over the age of consent.’

  Could they have been fifteen at the time the offences took place? Did Oscar ask them how old they were? I don’t think the detail of their dates of birth was troubling him. By his own admission it was their youth that drew him to them. He was a gentleman, twenty to twenty-five years their senior, hugely famous and successful. They were working-class lads who could barely read nor write. Was Wilde using his position, authority and comparative wealth to exploit their youth, beauty and comparative poverty? Yes. They gave him companionship, an audience and occasional sexual favours. He gave them champagne, cash and an occasional engraved cigarette case. Do we approve? Not really, but that does not stop us from finding his flawed and complex character utterly fascinating and for admiring the charm of his personality and the genius of his works. Next week I am going to yet another production of The Importance of Being Earnest. Next month I start writing the seventh in my series of murder mysteries featuring Oscar as my detective. When he was imprisoned, Wilde’s very name became taboo and his plays were taken off the stage. Now he is an icon and his plays are box office gold. I wonder: will the day ever come when Rolf Harris singing ‘Two Little Boys’ is heard again on Radio 2 and his portrait of the Queen is brought up from the basement and put on show once more? (I doubt it, but I suppose Rolf’s recordings and paintings don’t really rival Oscar’s poetry and plays.)

  Extraordinary. I have just been down to the kitchen to get a coffee, I was flicking through the Mail on Sunday and I have come across a two-page spread by Chris Bryant (Labour MP for Rhondda) featuring Oscar and his boyfriend, Lord Alfred Douglas, and Douglas’s brother, Viscount Drumlanrig and his rumoured relationship with the Earl of Rosebery, Foreign Secretary and Prime Minister. ‘The Cabinet minister who made passes at Etonians, the MP who paid fourteen-year-olds for floggings – the astonishing story of how paedophiles and MPs with bizarre peccadilloes are hardly anything new in the corridors of power…’ It’s a timely reheating of what the paper likes to call ‘the Scandals of Sexminster’. But in the case of young Drumlanrig, sometime secretary to Lord Roseb
ery, what do we actually know? Rumour was rife, but there is no hard evidence of an unnatural relationship between the two. Drumlanrig was discovered slumped in a ditch at the edge of a turnip field in Somerset on a cold, crisp Thursday in October 1894, his twelve-bore shotgun at his side. Was it murder or suicide or, as the inquest concluded five days later, simply a tragic accident? We will never know.

  And will we ever know the truth about Sir Peter Morrison, my predecessor as Member of Parliament for the City of Chester?

  When I first met Peter Morrison in 1991 I sensed that he was gay and I could see that he was a heavy drinker. He was stepping down as an MP, aged forty-seven, after eighteen years in Parliament. He was a Privy Counsellor, he was a knight, he had been a minister of state and Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Prime Minister. He told me he knew he wouldn’t make it to the Cabinet, so he was giving up politics for business. ‘I’m going now while I’ve got time to start another career,’ he told me. ‘I want to make some money.’ I believed him. But Michèle, whose instinct is always good, said she thought he was jumping before he was pushed.

  Was he?

  When we arrived in Chester in 1991, the word on the street was that Peter was ‘a disgusting pervert’. Out canvassing, knocking on doors in one or other of the large council estates, we were told, in no uncertain terms, that Morrison was a monster who interfered with children. At the time, I don’t think I believed it. People do say terrible things without justification. Beyond the fact that his drinking made Morrison appear unprepossessing – Central Casting’s idea of what a toff paedophile might look like – no one was offering anything to substantiate their slurs. At the time I never heard anything untoward about Peter from the police or from the local journalists – and I gossiped a good deal with them.