Being stuck on the Aldrich farm in Connecticut meant there was no one I could talk to about what had happened. Unlike Nonny, I certainly wasn’t going to talk to Doreen, who had apparently been filled in on all the details and was now smiling at me like Mum did when I only got a pass in my oboe exam. I would just have to wait until I got to New York, where I could talk to Keith. In the past, he was always the one I turned to for advice about girls, and I knew he would be thrilled, if not a little proud, to hear my news. I knew, if I was honest with him about what had happened, he wouldn’t judge me in the way my friends at home would.
As soon as we were back in New York I went to see him. Of course, Keith was thrilled for me, but it was in a way that made me wish I’d kept my news to myself. I knew it had been a disaster, but he was treating it like I’d scored the winning goal at an FA Cup Final, and had done it with skill. Even as I heard the words coming out of my mouth I felt like a fraud. I got carried away with his excitement and I never got to tell him how terrible the whole thing had been and or ask for his advice. He told me everything was going to change for me and, to kick it off, he was going treat me to a complete makeover so I could show the world I was no longer a child.
Our first stop was a trendy hairdresser’s in the East Village for what had to be the most expensive haircut I’ve ever had. Then to a clothes shop, where he bought me black jeans and a pair of white Converse boots. Keith now seemed satisfied that I was ready to return to London and announce to everyone that the old William Miller was no more. The new one was now a real New Yorker who went to bed with girls. I looked good, but there was no getting away from it – I still felt like a fraud.
Keith was now the manager of a successful restaurant on Fifth Avenue called One Fifth. He suggested, to complete the transformation, that on my last night in New York I should take Nonny out to dinner at the restaurant. I’d never taken anyone out to dinner, let alone a girl. Nonny was impressed that I could get a reservation at one of the best restaurants in her city. For our last evening together I managed to put aside any feelings that I might have let her down. Everything about our date was cool and sophisticated. Standing on the corner of Broadway and 94th Street on a warm summer evening and hailing a cab felt so glamorous, as if I was starring in my own film, and then walking through the doors of the restaurant with a girl on my arm made me feel like a man of the world.
Me on my return from America, August 1979
As we sat down at our table the waiter offered us drinks, and then asked straight out, ‘Are you the Shit from Camden Town?’ I didn’t know what to say, but Nonny thought it was the funniest thing anyone could have asked. It gave her English boyfriend a punk rock status that no New York or LA boy could ever dream of. It was a title that put me up there with some of Britain’s finest: ‘The Shit from Camden Town’ would for me be what ‘Sid Vicious’ was to John Simon Ritchie or ‘Johnny Rotten’ to John Lydon. I had made it and was no longer just the kid who had arrived to stay for the summer – I was The Shit from Camden Town who she could tell everybody she’d lost her virginity to. The next day, to celebrate my new status, Nonny presented me with a gift before I left for the airport – a purple T-shirt with ‘USA’ printed across the back and on the front the words ‘The Shit from Camden Town’.
24
JE PRÉFÈRE UNE BANANE
When I got back to London, I managed to push all the embarrassing parts of losing my virginity to the back of my mind.
At some point I knew I would have to tell my close friends, if only to set the record straight. The Roeber triplets were a good start. They are as close as brothers, and part of me wanted to tell them so they could make a fuss and celebrate with me. But that strategy came with the risk that they would ask questions that would need answers. In the end I told them while sitting around their kitchen table having tea. I waited for the right moment to bring it up. We hadn’t seen each other for the whole summer, so there was the usual chatter as everyone caught up with their news. My opening came as one of the them mentioned a girl he’d met in France, and there was a lot of talk about what had happened. In an attempt to compare notes, I slipped my bit of news casually into the conversation. There was a pause as everyone turned to look at me. It was followed by a chorus of ‘Really?’ And that was it! Without having to explain a thing, I was in the club and could move on.
By the time school started again, I’d told a handful of friends, which turned out to be plenty. I had already started to feel quite different about myself – I had grown up over the summer, closed one door and I now had a mission and wanted to go back to school and start looking to the future. For that, I needed to come up with something of a life plan. The first steps in this plan were to finish my O-levels and get the grades I needed to move to another school. By now I hated everything about Pimlico and knew I wouldn’t have it in me to make it through the sixth form there. It was no longer about the bullying or the meaningless threats, which had more or less stopped; the whole school had become a war zone and the bullies had bigger battles to fight elsewhere.
When it came to the moving schools part of my plan, I was way ahead of Mum and Dad. They had probably forgotten all about it, hoping my urgent need to leave Pimlico had gone away. It hadn’t, and Conrad and I were out there searching for alternatives and doing all we could to make plans for our escape. It was Conrad who first mentioned Westminster School, when he said that he’d looked into it and was thinking of applying for the sixth form. We had passed it hundreds of times on the bus but hadn’t realised it was there, tucked away behind Westminster Abbey. In the mornings we’d seen confident-looking uniformed boys disappearing down an alleyway off Parliament Square, but we didn’t know where they were going.
Conrad’s mother called the school for a brochure, which we looked through together, and I then borrowed it to show Mum. When I thought about going to a private school, this was what I’d imagined it would be like – and from what I could tell it was exactly like the schools our parents had been to. Westminster was the kind of school I wanted to go to. There was a problem, though – on the first page in the brochure was the bit of information I most dreaded finding: ‘Every potential candidate will be required to sit Westminster’s entrance exam before being considered for a place.’ There was a time when I’d been good at exams and would always get results above 70 or even 80 per cent. But as one Pimlico year became another, my results got worse, until I was getting below 40 per cent. I knew the Westminster exam would be the stumbling block for me. Even though I knew it, and so did Mum and Dad, this fact was brushed under the carpet and never discussed. No one tried to find out what the exam would involve or how to prepare for it. No one suggested I sit practice papers or find a tutor to get me up to speed. We’d winged most things when it came to school, so why not the Westminster exam and my chance of getting away from Pimlico and into a better school?
For Mum, Dad and their friends, an entrance exam for a school is a ‘competition’, and that means there will be winners and losers, which, in their world, was unfair. They want everything to be equal and for everyone to have access to the same opportunities. Of course I want the same thing, but at Pimlico the idea of a fairer world wasn’t working. If our parents had spent a day there and got to experience some of the classes I’d been in, they would have been shocked. They would have been horrified to see really good teachers who were unable to teach because they couldn’t control a couple of psychotic kids who were ruining it for everyone else. They might also have got to experience what it was like to be thought of as different because they were ‘posh’ and then beaten up for it. If they’d spent a day at Pimlico, they would have realised it was going to be pretty hard to live up to any of the expectations they had for us.
As far as Conrad and I were concerned, we’d finally had enough. What we wanted now was to go to the sort of school our parents had been to, to enjoy what was left of our time at school and not to feel frightened any more. Maybe even pass our exams. We’d come to the concl
usion that, if there was any chance of this happening, we were going to have to take control of the situation and make it happen ourselves. And that’s why we went to the trouble of applying for Westminster. Even if we weren’t prepared for the exam, we lived in hope.
One Saturday morning in January, Conrad and I were driven by our mums to the front door of Westminster School. Just like they’d done at Pimlico, nearly five years earlier, they pushed us out of the car with a kiss and a wave and left us to fend for ourselves. We walked through a low stone arch and, like Alice in Through the Looking-Glass, found ourselves on the other side, in a world we had never known existed. We were met by a serious-looking man in a black gown who led us across a paved courtyard and past ancient school buildings. Unlike the feelings of fear and hopelessness I’ve had when walking along the huge concourse at Pimlico School, I could feel all around me the centuries of confident boys who came here to learn and to be made ready for a life doing exciting and interesting things.
As I walked along the oak-panelled corridors, past the portraits and trophies, I knew this was the unfair world of privilege that Dad and his friends talked about and thought was wrong. But if coming to a school like this was what it was going to take to stop me feeling like my life was going nowhere, then I knew I was ready to be part of it. If this was the very same world our parents had enjoyed, then maybe with it we could be a little more like them when we were older. It had crossed my mind that with their knowledge and my experiences I might, one day, be able to find a way to help change things for the better.
Our final destination was a large hall with high windows and walls covered in fancy crests. We were each given a desk, where a thick exam paper lay waiting for us. As I stared down at the words on the cover, ‘Westminster School Entrance Exam’, the sense of history I’d originally felt had now turned to panic. As I looked around the hall, it was obvious who this exam was for. If I was overwhelmed by the school before, I was now feeling stupid and an impostor for being there. I opened the first page, and a cold sweat broke out across my forehead as I tried to focus on the questions. My mind had gone blank. The words on the page might as well have been in Greek, or Martian for that matter. I knew before I’d even started that I had failed and I was angry with myself, angry with Mum and Dad and angry with what the school represented and the fact that I would never be part of it, even if my parents did have the money.
As the sun shone through the high windows, I remembered it was a Saturday morning. Beyond the walls of this exclusive world was a city getting on with its weekend, without a care for the suffering and humiliation I was going through in this hall. Nick Ayer would be at home stoned and watching Tiswas, while Simon would be out shopping with his girlfriend of the moment and the Roeber triplets probably out on Primrose Hill riding their bikes. I’d taken the day off from my Saturday job at the local garden centre to do this exam and could have been earning money and stuffing it in an old suitcase like Keith had. Instead, I was here kidding myself that I stood a chance of getting into this school. My first thoughts were why was I putting myself through this, and why, if I’d really wanted it so badly, had I not pushed my parents to make an effort to get me ready for it?
When the letter finally arrived from Westminster, it was hardly a surprise to find I’d been turned down for a place, as had Conrad. It was short and to the point, but kind enough not to drag up how badly I had done in the exam. It wouldn’t have mattered anyway, as my dream of escaping Pimlico was in ruins. Mum knew how furious I was with both myself and her and Dad for their total lack of support. She waited for a moment when the two of us were alone before explaining that she had a plan of her own. In her usual gentle way, she sat me down and took me through it. She understood why I’d wanted to go to Westminster, but she had felt from the start that it was the wrong school for me. Her reason for this was one I had never considered – my father. She’d watched me try too many times to please him, and it broke her heart to see how much it upset me when I failed. Like everyone else who wanted to impress him with things they’d learned or heard, he always came back with something he thought was bigger, more complex or significant and that just made everyone feel stupid.
Even if the teaching at Pimlico had been as good as Westminster’s, Dad would have found a way of telling me that what I was being taught was far too simple or just not the bit that was most interesting. It wasn’t because he wanted to put me or anyone else down or prove my teachers wrong, and it didn’t matter what it was: why a fish didn’t sink to the bottom of the river or why Brutus murdered Julius Caesar. If I’d been excited by these things at school, his response was to get carried away by telling me something he thought to be more interesting, even if it was likely to fly over my head and confuse everything. Mum pointed out that I was putting more effort into making Dad happy than into focusing on what I was being taught by my teachers, and that that was leaving me not knowing what to think or who to follow.
Mum’s solution was very honest and straightforward: I needed to get away from Dad. I needed to find a school where I would be happy, get a better education than at Pimlico and eventually get into university – and do it for myself and not him. She explained that none of this meant that Dad and I didn’t love each other. What Mum wanted was for me to find a way of being my own person, and that would be better for my relationship with him.
She had it all worked out, which surprised me. I knew that before she went to ballet school and then St Paul’s she had been at a school in the countryside called Bedales. Her father had been a pupil and a music teacher there. Mum, her sisters, her mother, aunts, uncles and all her cousins had been to Bedales. Before the war it was one of the few co-educational liberal public schools in England to accept Jews. This was one of the reasons why nearly thirty members of her family had gone there.
Bedales stands at the bottom of a line of wooded hills just north of Petersfield, in Hampshire. Unlike Westminster, the school isn’t particularly beautiful or old, but the surrounding countryside makes up for it and that was good enough for me. There are 350 boys and girls, and they all call their teachers by their first names, no one wears a uniform and the parents of these children are pretty much like mine, so it would be an easy adjustment for me.
Mum and I were shown around by a sixth-form boy called Oli, who had unbrushed shoulder-length hair and wore torn jeans and a trench coat. But what I noticed first was the healthy glow on his face, his easy-going manner and that every person we passed, pupil or teacher, said hello and smiled. There were no security guards at the gate, no bullies or knife attacks, and everyone liked each other. It made me think that if Gloucester Crescent had been a school it would be Bedales. It was obvious that this was a place I would fit into easily and that I would be better off without the pressures of a school like Westminster or St Paul’s, where I would have struggled to keep up. And there didn’t seem to be any question of having to sit an exam. When Oli had finished the tour, I was handed over to the headmaster for an interview. He offered me a place there and then, although it came with a condition: I had to pass at least five of my eight O-levels. It was a challenge that I wasn’t entirely sure I was going to be able to meet, but it was something to aim for.
The Bedales plan was put into action so quickly that Conrad wasn’t initially a part of it. As soon as I got home I told him about Oli, the tour, how friendly everyone had been and how they’d made me an offer. Within days his mother took him to look around the school for himself. Just as they had with me, they offered him a place straight away. If he got the grades, he would be joining me in September. The whole plan was starting to come together, and Conrad getting an offer was exactly what I’d hoped for. At last it looked like our days at Pimlico were numbered, even if it did all hang on passing our O-levels.
Although I was feeling good about the future, I also felt guilty about leaving close friends, like Simon and Jimi. They’d made the last five years survivable and, at times, bearable. I knew that if, like them, you were able to sta
nd up to the bullies, then Pimlico wasn’t a bad school to be at. There were plenty of pupils getting the grades they needed to go to university, and if anyone could survive and make the most of the sixth form it was Simon and Jimi. I had come to appreciate that a lot of the teachers could have been really good if they’d had the time or resources to teach properly and didn’t have to deal with the difficult kids. You could see the frustration and sadness in the faces of these teachers the moment you stepped into their classrooms and there seemed to be nothing they could do about it.
My French teacher was one of them. She was a really good teacher and was actually French, but we were the bottom-stream class, which I’d ended up in after failing a simple test at the end of the third year. Once I was in that class there was nothing I could do to claw my way out of it and into the top-stream class. Conrad was in that class, and he said the teacher had it under control and they actually learned to speak French. The problem in my class was that the teacher didn’t know how to control the small gang of violent boys who sat at the back and made everyone’s life a misery. From where they sat they would throw anything that wasn’t fixed to the floor. Our teacher spent every lesson trying to get them under control and avoid being hit by flying furniture. I didn’t get to speak a single word of French in two years, but at her suggestion I got my eyes tested after she noticed I was squinting from the back of the room. ‘William,’ she said in her lovely French accent, ‘get ze glasses or sit in ze front.’ Knowing that the front of the classroom was the most dangerous place to sit, I got the glasses and stayed safely at the back, where I wouldn’t be hit on the head with a chair.
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