The bottom-stream course was something called Smile French. I discovered, from looking through the book, that it was all about terrorists who lived in somewhere called the Basque Country. As far as I could tell, these people spent their time either asking for directions to the Information Centre or talking about bananas as they went around on bicycles collecting machine guns off fishing boats. When I did the French oral exam, the only phrase I could remember was, ‘Je préfère une banane’, which I wasn’t sure would ever come in useful and certainly didn’t impress the examiner. He kept asking me, ‘Où sont les armes?’, and all I could do was shrug my shoulders and smile.
Soon enough our day of reckoning arrived, and the exams started. Every day for three weeks we sat in one of the school’s big gymnasiums as we took one exam after another. As I ticked the exams off and counted them down to the finish, they soon became a blur. I realised that Mum’s theory about how I should have listened to my teachers and not my father was looking more obvious than ever. Even if I did know the answer to a question, I often thought I had a better one which was likely to be a jumble of confused bits of information Dad had told me or that I’d got from a very serious and wordy book he’d forced on me. There were several examples of this, like a question that asked: ‘Explain the importance of the swim bladder in a fish.’ I knew the answer, but that didn’t matter as I had a cleverer one that Dad had told me. But as the information had gone in one ear and half out the other and then got mashed up en route, my answer was a long and confused load of gibberish about how the evolution of fish began 530 million years ago. I wrote about something called the Cambrian Explosions and then went on to describe how fish had developed a skull and spinal column. It wasn’t the answer they were looking for, and the person marking the paper must have thought I had brought a back issue of Scientific American into the exam with me.
After three weeks of spouting off all the half-baked facts I’d got from Dad, the pain of exams was over. I had no idea how I’d done, but the relief of no longer having to sit in a hot and airless gymnasium and perhaps never having to set foot inside Pimlico School again was enormous. I didn’t have to turn up at school for what was left of the term, and for the first time in ages I had no revising to do. I could relax, go outside and breathe in the warm summer air and do nothing other than hope and pray. I would now have to wait six weeks to find out if my exams had been a disaster and my dream of going to Bedales was over. In a moment of panic one morning I admitted to Mum and Dad that we should all prepare ourselves for the worst. If that happened, I wouldn’t be going to Bedales, but I also told them there was no way I would go back to Pimlico. For now, no one had a plan, other than to wait it out and try to enjoy the long holiday ahead.
I spent a restless summer worrying about my results. I lost count of the times I’d woken up in the middle of the night after dreaming about opening the brown envelope from the examination board. On some nights, the results were better than good and everyone was proud of me. On other nights, it was a story of complete failure. Many of my dreams were filled with the shame of letting everyone down, the look of disappointment on my father’s face and my mother crying as she blamed him for everything. In every one of these dreams I found myself trying to comfort him. There was also a recurring dream about turning up at Bedales with my trunk in the back of the car. The headmaster was standing at the entrance and telling me to leave. Behind him was a crowd of Bedales pupils shouting, ‘Go home!’
We went to France for the first two weeks of the summer holidays. I tried to relax, and Mum did everything she could to help make up for the sleepless nights I was having. She had rented a house in a village near Clermont-l’Hérault. In the mornings we wandered through the village to fetch warm baguettes and croissants from the local boulangerie, and for the rest of the day we’d drive to Lac du Salagou, where we’d picnic on the shore and sail in a small dinghy. I even met a nice French girl, whose family took the same spot on the beach near us every day. We might have got together had I known more French than just ‘Je préfère une banane’. We returned to London and then travelled on to the Old Manse, where the usual stream of visitors came and went for the rest of the holiday.
Conrad came to stay during the week our results were due to arrive. When the day finally came, we sat in the kitchen doing our best to eat breakfast as we tried to work out what time the postman would arrive 500 miles away in Gloucester Crescent. I’d lost my appetite, whereas Conrad, who’d pretty much cruised through his exams, was feeling quietly confident and was managing to finish off a bowl of porridge and several slices of toast. I sat in silence, playing through my mind the scenario from my dreams.
For what seemed like hours we waited for our old Bakelite telephone in the sitting room to ring. When someone calls, it starts with a single loud ping that echoes throughout the house and makes everyone jump. Then there’s a pause before the phone breaks into a continuous and deafening ring, which can be heard in every part of the house. As the predicted time got closer, Conrad and I sat at the kitchen table like coiled springs waiting for that initial ping. When it came, we burst into action and raced across the hall and into the sitting room, throwing ourselves at the phone before the ringing started. As we dived across the furniture, we both grabbed the receiver and pulled it between our heads. I could hear Conrad’s mother on the other end, and I let go. Settling down on the sofa, I followed the expression on Conrad’s face for clues as to what he was being told. As he put the phone down he grinned and punched the air. He had passed everything with A’s and B’s. Dad, who’d wandered into the room, looked thrilled and started clapping and patting him on the back saying, ‘Well done, Conrad, that’s brilliant. Your family must be so proud of you.’
Within minutes the ping sounded again. This time it was Jeanie calling to say she’d found the brown envelope on the doormat at Gloucester Crescent. I asked her to open it and read it out. She was so calm and nice as she tried to explain what each grade meant. Rather than talking about the ones I’d failed, she focused on what I’d passed. As I put the phone down, I tried to be like Jeanie and talk about the good bits. Unlike Jeanie, all Dad wanted to know was which subjects I’d failed. I had taken a total of eight and had scraped through with five grade Cs. In so many ways this was a terrible result, but as far as I was concerned a C is a pass and a pass gave me the five O-levels I needed for Bedales. I didn’t need the other three, which I failed so badly it wasn’t worth mentioning. Dad had gone back to congratulating Conrad as I pushed my way past him and out the front door. I didn’t know why he was so pleased for Conrad and not for me. The fact that I had managed to get the five O-levels I needed to go to Bedales didn’t seem to have crossed his mind. But I knew it didn’t matter what he thought any more.
I left the house and got on my bike and with one shove let it freewheel down the square, picking up speed as I headed out of the village and onto the Green Road. As the wind blew through my hair I started to smile and then laugh. The waiting was really over and I had done it. Everything was now going to change in ways I could hardly imagine. The sun had come out and the purple heather on the distant hills was glowing in the morning light. I wanted to be alone outside in the fresh air to celebrate my victory on my own terms. My life was about to change for ever, and if I could, I would keep pedalling until I got to Bedales.
PART THREE
September 1982 (Age 18)
Conrad and me (second and third from left), Michael White’s son Sasha and Peter Hall’s son Edward (bottom row right)
25
BEDALES, SEPTEMBER 1980
From occasional visits to the attic of our house in Gloucester Crescent I remembered that somewhere in the furthest corner was a large leather trunk that hadn’t been moved or opened in years. It was exactly what I had in mind when I thought about turning up at boarding school on my first day. Clutching a torch, I ventured deep into the attic, making my way around cardboard boxes, broken furniture and long-forgotten toys. Covered in a thick layer
of dust and cobwebs, the trunk was full of old magazines, film scripts sent to Dad but never read, and a collection of real human bones left over from when he was a medical student. The spinal column (held together with a length of rope), a hip bone and the left hand were now on display on a table in the middle of the sitting room. I’d once taken a couple of these bones to Primrose Hill Primary for a show-and-tell, which made the girls scream and won me valuable brownie points with the boys.
I’d got it into my head that going to boarding school required a proper trunk. I felt it made a statement, if only to myself, that I was leaving home and everything was about to change. Having a proper trunk was like a trophy of the battle I’d fought and won with my parents over leaving Pimlico and going to boarding school. The old trunk was perfect – thick black leather with wooden straps wrapped around its body to give it strength. The fact that Dad had completely forgotten it existed meant I could stake my claim. I emptied its contents into cardboard boxes and hauled it downstairs to the bathroom, where I washed it down. After polishing the leather, I wrote my name and address and that of Bedales in neat bold letters on the top with a silver marker pen. I packed everything into it that I would need for school, and then hid the things I valued most in my bedroom cupboard – I knew Tom would steal them, so I fixed a large bolt and padlock on the door.
When the day finally came to leave for Bedales, I dragged the trunk down to the ground floor and across the front garden to the street. There I was joined by Conrad, and we loaded our trunks into the back of the car, grinning at each other as if to acknowledge the symbolism of the moment. We knew how long it had taken to win our parents over to the idea, and now here we were, packing up the car and heading off to a new life at boarding school. We’d got what we wanted and it felt exhilarating, but we knew it was a bitter pill for our parents to swallow. After so many years of hoping they could make a difference, they’d finally had to agree that the route they had chosen had been something of a failure for their children who had ended up paying the price for their choices.
With Conrad’s mother sitting next to her, Mum drove us out of London and down the motorway to Hampshire. The journey couldn’t have been more different from the one we’d taken five years earlier, when they drove us to our first day at Pimlico. Once off the motorway we drove through a number of small towns and villages, past the home of Jane Austen at Chawton, then into the hills north of Petersfield. I couldn’t believe how beautiful Hampshire was and wound down the window to breathe in the fresh air and feel the warmth of the late summer sun on my face. We carried on along narrow lanes bordered by steep embankments and impenetrable hedges and past woodlands that looked mysterious and ancient. When we reached the crest of the hill above Bedales, you could see for miles across an open plain towards the South Downs. Dropping down the hill, we drove along a winding lane which soon entered a dark tunnel of trees that canopied the road before bursting back into the sunlight as we approached the entrance to the school.
As we drove through the gates we were directed towards a large building where the dining hall and the boys’ house were located. We got out of the car to be greeted by a laid-back man in his forties who looked like Bob Dylan and turned out to be my housemaster. As Conrad and I shook his hand, he made a point of reminding us that at Bedales you refer to all the teachers by their first names, and his was Harry. He announced this all-important school rule with an air of casual authority only to turn to our mums and shrug it off as if to demonstrate how cool it all was. He’d clearly won them over with the impression that we were being handed over to the spiritual leader of an ashram. Clearly comfortable with this idea, our mums wished us luck, gave us a reassuring hug and with that got back in the car and left. Harry then introduced us to two boys, who offered to help carry our trunks and show us to our dormitories. We stopped first at Conrad’s, which was spacious, carpeted and had built-in beds and wardrobes, and three large windows that looked out over playing fields.
We continued down a maze of corridors until we found mine – which couldn’t have been more different. It had six white-painted cast-iron beds, a cold linoleum floor and a single window that looked out over a kitchen yard with a collection of large rubbish bins filled with pigswill. Whereas Conrad’s dorm felt like you were in the countryside, mine could have been over a takeaway off Camden High Street. My trunk-carrying assistant assured me that getting the worst possible dorm this term meant there was a good chance I’d get a good one the next.
Having deposited my trunk and reconciled myself to the idea that my bleak dormitory might only be for one term, I headed downstairs in search of the dining hall, where we were gathering for tea. By the time I found it, a number of small groups had formed and people were sharing news of their summer holidays. I was struck by the way friendships seemed to be so effortlessly picked up from where they’d been left off at the end of the previous term. Everyone was relaxed and affectionate with each other, with many hugging or holding hands as they talked. There wasn’t any of the vicious gossip and frantic dissing I had become used to at Pimlico, with everyone talking over each other about who’d been beaten up or expelled from school, or who had slept with who over the holidays or might have got pregnant.
At Bedales, as we sipped tea and ate fruitcake, there was an easy-going air to the discussions as each group swapped stories about their holidays and caught up on news. As I looked around the dining hall, I tried to listen in on the conversations, keen to get a better feel for the new friends I might make. Next to me was a group discussing the many plays they’d seen over the summer. In another, three boys were holding court as they recounted their shared experience of travelling across France on an overnight train together. I could just make out a heated debate on the other side of the room about the political situation: unemployment having hit two million and the more surprising news that a Hollywood actor had been selected to run for President in America and, worst of all, he might be going to win. Although these conversations were so different from the ones I’d been part of when sitting around on the radiators at Pimlico, they were strangely familiar, similar to the ones my parents and their friends might have around the kitchen table or at parties in the Crescent.
I felt excited to be around people my own age who could have conversations of this kind, and with so much ease and confidence, and to think that I might get to participate in similar conversations myself. I did feel a twinge of embarrassment as I listened in on some of the other conversations in the room. These had an altogether different air to them: there was a girl boasting to her friends about being seduced on a beach in Mustique by an ageing rock star while somewhere else a loud, shouty boy was complaining about overcrowded beaches in Italy. Another was complaining that his first week of school would be a write-off because of his jet-lag. As those around him shook their heads in sympathy I felt a surge of guilt for having sold out and deserted my friends at Pimlico. It dawned on me that some of those old friends would have had a terrible summer by comparison, having gone nowhere more glamorous than a local park or a holiday camp in Kent. For a moment I thought about Jimi and Simon and what they might be doing back at Pimlico at that very moment. I wondered how I would have felt if things had gone differently for me, if I’d failed to get that all important fifth O-level and then had to return to Pimlico for the sixth form.
26
ANGRY YOUNG MEN
Conrad and I turned out to be part of a small group of newcomers in the Bedales sixth form and, with that, the only two to have come from a comprehensive school. We also discovered that our having come from one had created a certain mystique around us that led some to believe we were streetwise and not to be messed with. After all our years at Pimlico, where our status had been the complete opposite, we found this rather perplexing. Fortunately, there was an upside: people were keen to get to know us. This gave us the confidence we needed to feel accepted and helped us settle quickly into school life, although I had a constant worry that we’d be exposed for not being q
uite the tough guys they thought we were.
I soon discovered an important fact about all schools: no matter where you are, there will always be a group of boys who think they’re tougher than you. This gets them the undivided attention of the prettiest and coolest girls in the school, but with it comes the need to be a bully and show who’s in charge. Dad describes boys like this as ‘the ones who drag their knuckles along the ground when they walk’, and sure enough there was a small group of them at Bedales. The only difference being that these Bedales bullies could recite poetry and passages from Shakespeare, but they were still ‘knuckle-draggers’. Pretty soon Conrad and I came to the attention of these boys, and they were looking for an excuse to show us who was in charge, in case we had ideas of taking over their patch.
It came after the school dance at the end of our first week. As we drifted out of the hall, I was still spinning with the excitement of my first school dance. Intoxicated with the idea that everyone at Bedales loved each other in equal measure, I made the error of introducing myself in a matey way to a boy called Billy. He was walking with two girls I’d got to know a few days before and had been friendly with since. This had obviously come to Billy’s attention, and he wasn’t happy about it. I’d clocked him from afar and was aware that he was the dominant male in a pride of lions that roamed the school – he was the ringleader of a group of cool but relatively harmless boys who thought they were the 1980s’ answer to the Angry Young Men. Billy had evidently taken on the role of a young Harold Pinter, all dark and brooding in his long trench coat, and the only one who looked like he was suppressing some form of untamed anger towards everyone around him, which probably started with his parents. In Billy’s eyes, my over-familiarity with ‘his girls’ meant that I’d already crossed an invisible line, and my ham-fisted introduction was all he needed to set things straight.
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