I felt very temporary as a child. I may always have felt that way, but Ampleforth had a way of making one feel more fixed in the world, more indelible overall. Part of that feeling must have been Yorkshire—one never forgot that the school lay in a valley bordered by moorland and drystone dykes, and, further afield, mining pits and lime kilns—but it must also have been the soft hum of reliability that came at all times from the Benedictines, who seemed to know the world, and not only this world. Every boy at the school, whatever his attainments, whatever his plans and whoever his parents, came to be marked by a certain unobtrusive quality. A good joke was more impressive than a powerful idea. The plains of indecision were more attractive than the wilds of passion. Ampleforth wasn't like other English public schools: we hated ruthlessness, we liked ease, and we followed the monks in feeling that being a little absent was infinitely better than being too present.
I wrote only once from school for money. I was preparing for Gormire Day, 5 June, the day when everyone in the school went up to the Gormire Lake for picnics and games. It was traditional to make your way by whatever conveyance you could manage: a great many went by bike or by bus; Fletcher and Leishman, my best friends at Ampleforth, once went by milk float; legend said that a group of Durham boys had once gone by pony-and-trap. It was the greatest single event of my schooldays, Gormire Day 1959. I imagined I was carving a perfect day out of marble. I begged my mother for money, and she was good enough to consider it an excellent investment. Billy Smart's circus was in York, with its herd of fifteen elephants. The beast I chose was an old, tolerant-eyed animal named Birma. I wrote letters and my mother wrote letters; it came to seem to me a production out of Genesis, and a truck was hired, special feed was arranged, permissions were sought and hastily denied and then warily granted.
'How clever of you to think of it,' my mother said. It must have cost a fortune, yet it was the sort of expense my mother could approve of. Her gift has always been to avoid the conventional view, especially when it stands in the way of the grand or ridiculous act. My mother wanted to repay me for the originality of my impulse, and we spoke the same language. I think she enjoyed knowing my father would have called it outrageous, and, on the appointed Friday, she came to York so that we could go and see the man about the elephants, which were marched that day from York station to the field where the circus took place. I remember the handler asking my mother if Birma was to be hired for educational purposes. 'In a way,' she said, 'that is very much the case. But also for romantic purposes.'
'Is it a wedding?' he said.
'Again, in a way,' she said. 'Not a wedding, but certainly a marriage. My son is being married to the joys of the modern imagination.'
'Right you are,' said the man, though he must have thought we were lunatics. 'I'll be there to lead him off and look after his feed.'
'Thank you,' she said. 'There's a bonus for good cheer.'
'Right you are.'
He told us Birma was the star of the fleet. We watched him at the railway station, his giant feet on the road, people gazing up and jostling one another for a better view. I liked his eyes. I liked his silence. The handler spoke of the animal as if it were a friend that nobody understood. 'When the guvnor brought him over,' he said, 'he had to spend a year in quarantine in Edinburgh Zoo.'
'In Edinburgh?' my mother said. 'What a nice thought. That must have cheered up his chops somewhat.' She laughed towards me. 'You're practically cousins, you and Birma,' she said.
'Thank you for this, Mother. You are a sport.'
'Any time,' she said. 'Any time, for the collective beasts of Edinburgh. You know how patriotic I am.'
All in all, our researches proved equal to the exquisite thrill on Gormire Day, the wonder of Birma waiting at the top of the hill festooned in feathers and satin armour. It seemed so right to mount an elephant and rise in my white shirt above the dry Yorkshire road, my long-lashed vehicle all tassels and bells in a glorious rapture of unacceptable pomp, the gypsy smoking his cigarette and leading us all the way to the Gormire Bank. People left their bicycles by the roadside and cheered. The sun cracked through the trees in flashes and points of light. Birma the elephant raised her trunk and hooted into the Hambleton Hills and the monks surrendered their vote at last to the sheer madness of it all.
'I m-must say,' said Brother Joseph, 'm-m-most singular.'
Brother Joseph was master of the day. He'd known of my plans and said it was probably the greatest wheeze since 1857, when Thomas Hodgson, the schoolmaster at Kilburn, got his boys to cut out a giant horse on the side of a hill and paint the ground white: the White Horse of Kilburn. During those five slow miles on the back of Birma, I saw the locals' faces looking up and shining with delight. The working class was another thing back then. They had a culture. They didn't have their gold chains or their cable television; they had their work, their interests, their families and no very obvious sense of spite or entitlement. The monks had a long history of going into those villages with pastoral zeal, and the people admired the Benedictine style of balance—order, prayer, discipline, self-denial, or self-indulgence as it's sometimes known—but here was a new style of balance altogether, David Anderton as imperial traveller, passing the good people of North Yorkshire on the back of an elephant, mill workers and bottle-factory operatives stopping to wave from the roadsides of Oswaldkirk and Oldstead, sending me off in a rain of makeshift confetti on the road to the Gormire Bank.
Mark McNulty was no friend to the flammable: he loved fires, and I never saw him without a box of matches on him. I suppose he took them from the garage where he worked, along with the occasional inch or two of petrol for making bombs to throw into the trees. I could imagine the trees on fire and see his warm face glowing with pleasure.
'Maybe you should become a fireman,' I once said.
'No way,' he said. 'My job is to keep them in work.'
One night in May, I saw him playing records at the Dalgarnock Youth Club. He was with that sinister friend of his, Chubb, the one with the pimples and the sharpened teeth, both boys wearing hooded jerseys. I had gone along that night at the request of a social worker, Miss Path, to give lessons in backgammon, but before going off to the classroom set aside for board games I drifted over to the turntables.
'Whiddye 'hink?' said the Chubb fellow.
'Sorry?'
'The decks. Whiddye 'hink?'
I looked at Mark. The noise was too much but it wasn't the noise so much as the boy's impenetrable speech. Mark leaned over the turntables.
'He's saying: "What do you think of the decks?" We got the club to buy in a proper set of decks to play the records on.'
'Oh, excellent,' I said.
'Aw. Massive choon. Totally gallus, man.'
I smiled and shook my head at Mark. 'What did he say?'
'He said the record he's just put on is very good.' Mark let out a little barked laugh and we both stared at his friend. He was holding one headphone to his ear and rocking his head from side to side, pushing a record with two fingers on the turntable, baring his insane teeth. 'He's gone,' said Mark. 'Just mad for it.'
'Thus us totally bangin',' said Chubb.
As he bent over, I could see a length of rubber tube hanging out of the pocket of Chubb's jersey. I think Mark saw me looking at it and he stuffed it out of sight as he leaned over to lift a record sleeve.
In the games room, later on, Mark and Chubb arrived with red faces, snapping their fingers and scanning the room with busy, alert eyes. I was playing a very slow game of backgammon with two giggling girls, but I saw the boys going over to a table by the window where a quiet boy was playing Monopoly with a handicapped girl. Chubb kept leaning down and saying things to the girl. She shrugged him off but he kept at it, and every time she turned, Mark would drop another small piece from the board into her cup of orange squash.
'You can play each other now,' I said to the girls, and I ushered Mark and Chubb out of the room.
'I didnae dae any'hin',' said Chubb.<
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'He didn't do anything,' said Mark.
'Enough,' I said. 'Yes, you did. You were tormenting that poor girl in there and I won't stand by and watch that.'
'Naw I didnae!'
'No, I didn't,' said Mark, smiling.
'Stop it,' I said.
I took them down the corridor and we found a room where they were showing videos of old football matches. 'Ya beauty,' said Mark. I stood at the back of the room while the two boys commandeered the television and the pile of tapes, finding Celtic ones to put on. 'Fast forward. Watch this goal,' said Mark. Chubb seemed to dance under the TV light.
The roar of football fans filled the room. I suppose it must have been for music lessons in the daytime. There were instruments standing in the corners and a trolley of percussion things. After the second goal Mark was leaping up to kiss the screen—'Come on, the Celts!'—and his friend was shaking a tambourine and beating it with his elbow. At one point they stood face to face in front of the flickering game. They clasped one another's hands and moved in a circle, each with his own touch of menace, scuttling round like two scorpions in love.
'That's mental,' said Chubb.
I walked them to the pizza shop along the road, or I walked and they rolled on their skateboards, occasionally grazing the kerb with the edge of the boards or flipping the boards into their hands and walking for a while. Mark said he wanted Lucozade, and Chubb wanted a bag of chips.
'Have you got any money?' said Mark.
'I wish you'd spend it on something healthier,' I said, handing him some coins and turning away. They smelled of petrol.
'Let's hang out together one night,' he said. 'Just me and you, without all these dweebs.'
'These what?'
'Dweebs, jerks, idiots, tubes. Call them what you like. I'll show you Mark McNulty's Dalgarnock. Just you and me.'
'We'll see,' I said.
'I'll text you.' He said this walking backwards into a pool of yellow light falling from the pizza shop.
They seemed to belong to the brilliant colours of the shop. The rows of sweets and cigarettes looked down on them, and Mark pointed at his shoe and did an imitation kick beside the silver fryer. Yet as I walked away, I looked from the corner of my eye and saw that everything in the shop looked suddenly white, as if a polaroid were being consumed from within by its own unaccountable fire. The shop was unchanged, but my mind was filled with potential dramas involving those youths: the smell of petrol, the length of tubing, their love of matches, and the flashing lights of the television set a half hour before, burning over the boys' heads, making haloes around them, before reaching my face at the back of the class.
Brother Joseph ran the Wednesday film at Ampleforth. There were no videos back then, so a blue van would come to the gates of the school midweek with canisters from the lending library in York. Brother Joseph's great passion was film noir. He liked all those American movies starring Richard Widmark, stories told in shadows and Chicago accents, always involving guns and poverty, loose women and redemption, and I still see Joseph's youthful face shining as he stood at the edge of the long passage, the light from the projector picking out his oiled hair, his pale cheeks, the look in his eyes the very picture of intentness. One Wednesday night, it must have been around 1961 or '62, we sat in rows watching a film with Marilyn Monroe and Clark Gable, The Misfits, and Joseph was saying it wasn't what he expected. 'It's a John Hu-Huston film,' he said.
'What does that mean?' I said.
'It usually means b-bad guys. Guns. The M-M-Maltese Falcon.'
We walked out into the quadrangle after the film. Brother Joseph's subject was meant to be geography, but he preferred to speak about books and films. He didn't bother that much with physical reality, except to remind me, that night, lifting his long hand with its bitten fingernails, that the ridge behind the school was called the Beacon and up there one would find the Monk's Wood, the graves of the Ampleforth monks. Joseph bent down and lifted something from the grass. 'Look,' he said. 'R-r-radishes. This area was p-p-ploughed until about t-ten years ago.'
'Why?'
'The war effort, young f-fellow,' he said. He handed me the radish and I immediately took a bite. 'You're very brave,' he said. 'These things can be p-poisonous.' He smiled.
'No,' I said. 'It's good. Tastes nothingy. Well, it tastes of nothing with a touch of pepper.'
'Good, Anderton,' he said. 'You have d-d-d-discernment.'
Joseph's superstitions had colour and fear in them. He thought blackberries could poison babies after a certain time in the season. He thought lilac was an unlucky flower to bring indoors. He hated daffodils, and he thought nettles and dock leaves told a story about uncertain minds, quoting Chaucer on the subject, Troilus and Criseyde: 'Nettle in, dok out, now this, now that?' Brother Joseph was the first person I knew, the first who wasn't my mother, who used the miracles of art to help one to live one's life. He did it naturally. I came to think that all those movies of his, all those stories and superstitions, only aided his religious feelings, somehow enlarging the scope of his belief. He told me that night in the quadrangle that his father had flown in the war and that it made him feel sick to imagine it. My tongue was thick in my mouth and viscid with liquorice.
'Sir,' I said, 'I want to ask you. What is more important to the world, ethics or taste?'
'What a g-grand question, Anderton. Have you b-b-been hovering under the clock-tower staircase again, in the library? I mean, are you de-de-devoting your afternoons to the F-French novel?'
'It came up the other day.'
'Yes indeed,' he said. 'It will come up every day. Well, I th-th-think you ask the question because you know the answer.'
'Ethics,' I said.
'Good boy for saying so, b-but that is n-not what you think. That is what you f-f-fear.'
'It is what I believe.'
'Very g-good. You will go far. And yet, I am not asking what you be-believe, but what you feel.' I knew in that moment there was something fine and wasted about Brother Joseph. The hills were dark blue and ignorant against the sky. 'Young Anderton,' he said, 'don't worry about the answer. The question is the b-better part. You have your own answer. I believe a minute ago you detected p-p-p-pepper in that radish.' He walked away for a moment and sniffed the fields.
'Sir,' I said, 'why aren't you out in the world?'
'Sorry?'
'You like films and things. Why are you here? Why not out in the world making films or being an actor?'
'I am an actor,' he said, very quietly. He stroked his head with an open hand and walked onto the grass. 'Being a person of faith,' he said, 'is just like being a m-m-movie actor. Friend of the dark.'
'It's nice out here, isn't it?' I said. 'Cold, though.'
I fell asleep that night thinking about Brother Joseph and his father who flew in the war. I thought of the movie and wild horses in the Nevada desert, and I dreamed of radishes that made one invisible to the naked eye. Several years later, Brother Joseph fell in love with a boy at the school and was removed. They say now he should have been removed long before. He's one of the names now mentioned in the annals of the unspeakable. All I know is the Wednesday film was never the same after he disappeared, and I always looked out for his believing face, right at the edge of the film projector's long and flickering beam.
Sometimes I curve my hand round a candle, or reach for a book, and I see the Amplefordian who exists in that simple action. The school may have given me a defective sense of my own merits, but it also gave us a style, and I never saw that style so clearly until I moved among the young people of Dalgarnock, those youngsters who lived, each one of them, as if community were only a club for resentment or a background against which to measure and prove their superior powers. My school's mysterious sense of unity may have been a romantic conceit, but it worked to make us want to know an existence larger than ourselves, to see a manner of living and thinking and speaking to which we all might subscribe. We would have denied these values, but they live in
the heart. And one day we wake in a strange place and find we know those values most intimately by their absence from every scene except the scene in our own heads.
It was Father Victor's job to come and direct the boys from the railway station after the summer holidays. York Station: a long poem of steam, late arrivals and violet evenings, where advertising hoardings spoke of other people's choices, Bird's Custard and Capstan Full Strength, the tracks down there like blades set to cut open the future and bring us forward to meet it. Years later, I heard Father Victor recall that we boys came back from our summer holidays and found once again our natural unity. 'The Irish boys came into York Station speaking with Irish accents,' he said. 'The Scots came from the north speaking Scottish. The West Country boys arrived speaking just like that, and the London ones came out of the station talking like East-End Charlie. But you know what? The boys were like plants whose stalks bend involuntarily towards the sun, and by the middle of the following day they all spoke more or less the same way. That is what the school was like, and that's what young people were like back then if you didn't trample them.'
CHAPTER SIX
The Nights
THE WEEKS OF JUNE had been especially busy with weddings and funerals and school visits. The church hall was barely empty a single evening that season. My garden was rather outstanding, the work of Mrs Poole and myself during our more green-fingered moments. We had left the work a little late, though Mrs Poole, once we started, got down to cutting the blooms with her usual surfeit of devotion. I'm sure it was on one of the garden days that I first noticed her wincing as she bent down among the stems; from the landing window I saw her standing with a pained look on her face and a gloved hand held to the middle of her chest. Mrs Poole's privacies seemed so severe at times that I chose not to ask her about it then, but all the hours we worked on the roses I weighed up the state of her health.
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