by Mark Colvin
Caspar had the full collection of Bond books, of course, claimed to have given his dad the inspiration for one of the paperback covers, and would lend copies to anyone who asked. A storyteller himself, who would spin terrifying yarns about ghosts and banshees in the dormitory after lights out, Caspar was a strange, unhappy creature, pale with a shock of black hair. His parents were much older than mine, his mother in her late forties and his father in his fifties. Both of them were hard-drinking, heavy-smoking socialites with little time to spare for their son. He told extravagant stories about his famous father, but even then I had the sense that at least some of them were fantasies.
Caspar also claimed to own an enormous collection of guns, swords, crossbows and hunting knives, a claim which may have been true: he was taken to Juvenile Court a few years later when a number of pistols and a quantity of ammunition were found in his study at Eton.
I lost touch with Caspar at thirteen when we both left Summer Fields, but chanced upon him again at a Kensington antiques market five years later. He had a stall selling Nazi memorabilia. He remembered me and we talked briefly, but he avoided all eye contact, staring at the floor or at his shoes most of the time. He looked like the acid casualties I’d encountered, an increasingly common phenomenon in 1970. Whether because of drugs or not, he was, it transpired later, deeply depressive. I was saddened but not surprised in 1975 when I pulled an item off the Reuters wire reporting that, despite a series of hospital treatments including electro-convulsive therapy, he had killed himself. He was twenty-three.
In my last few years at Summer Fields, life eased a little. School was still a prison: even now I can instantly summon up dread and misery by humming the first line of the hymn ‘The day thou gavest, Lord, has ended’, which began Sunday Evensong after your parent or relative dropped you off at the end of one of the carefully rationed days out. But I had begun to conform to the system, or rather, I had worked out a method of locking my feelings of fear and entrapment and hatred away, creating a separate, socialised self. It worked in that the beatings, at least, grew fewer. And I continued to try to free my mind from its physical confines by reading constantly, beginning a lifelong addiction to PG Wodehouse and Charles Dickens, both discovered somewhere around my eleventh birthday. For a little while at least, you could be on the road with Mr Pickwick or with Lord Emsworth at Blandings Castle, and somehow no longer at school.
The other escape was through music. Transistor radios were forbidden, but they were tiny and easily smuggled, so most boys had one: mine was a birthday present in 1963, around the time of The Beatles’ first LP. Especially at night, under the pillow, the transistor gave you the illusion of freedom: the illicit sounds of Fabulous 208, Radio Luxembourg, so different from the staid tones of the BBC Home Service and the Light Programme. On early Sunday evening, though, everyone listened to the BBC’s Pick of the Pops, with the transplanted Australian disc jockey Alan Freeman counting down the top twenty. The charts in the early 1960s were a constant battle between the listening tastes of the young and the middle-aged, so our favourites kept being pushed out of the top spot by yodelling expatriate Australian Frank Ifield with ‘I Remember You’, or The Bachelors with ‘I Believe’, or Ken Dodd’s soupy ‘Tears for Souvenirs’.
It’s hard now, when you can stream any sort of music at will, to explain what pop meant in the early 1960s. It had been lurking for a while, but something massive was changing. I remember listening to the radio in the summer holidays of 1962, when everyone seemed to be called Bobby: Bobby Vee, Bobby Rydell, Bobby Vinton, Bobby Darin. The Bobbies all seemed to have near-identical neat pompadours and near-identical shiny white teeth, and crooned near-identical high-school love songs of near-identical blandness. The wild boys of 1950s rock’n’roll were roaming free no more: Elvis was drafted into the army, then into schlock Hollywood movies; Little Richard got religion in Australia, threw his diamond rings into the Hunter River, and became a gospel singer; Jerry Lee Lewis was sidelined after marrying his thirteen-year-old cousin; and Chuck Berry was jailed for ‘transporting a fourteen-year-old girl across a State line’. The bad boys were out of the picture, and the record industry, keen to woo Middle America, was back in control.
Then, just when complacency was setting in, came the British invasion, inspired by exactly the artists the record industry and the radio stations had tried to tame. Kids like John Lennon in Liverpool, Keith Richards south of London and Eric Burdon in Newcastle-on-Tyne had been buying American record imports, from Muddy Waters to Elvis and beyond, and soaking them up. What they’d heard was the roots of rock in rhythm and blues, all the way back to Chicago and the Mississippi Delta, and that raw power was what they were determined to make their own.
Imprisoned at school, I didn’t just want rock’n’roll, I needed it. The Beatles and The Rolling Stones were proof that it didn’t have to be like this: that the virtual jail I lived in, a world of short-back-and-sides haircuts and being punished for talking back, was subject to challenge. Look back at their early press conferences. The Beatles respond with snappy backchat and surreal gags to questions from middle-aged reporters. ‘What do you call that haircut?’ asks one journalist. ‘Arthur,’ Ringo replies. The Stones, for their part, were all sneer. Either way, both groups were made up of people only a few years older than me who were prepared to challenge the retired majors and wing-commanders for whom the War had never really ended, and who had held sway almost unchallenged since 1945.
From track one of the first Beatles album, ‘I Saw Her Standing There’, there was no crooning, no orchestral strings, no ‘teen angels’, no messing around. Paul McCartney had the vocal power turned up to max as he began to yell, ‘Well, she was just seventeen; you know what I mean’, and even if you were a pre-pubertal eleven-year-old, with no certainty about what he meant, you could have a damn good guess.
Besides, in those sheltered years, eleven was the age that I first remember finding out anything about sex. In a piece I wrote on the ABC website a few years ago, I put it this way:
I owe my sex education to Christine Keeler.
Not directly of course: I was eleven years old at the time the Profumo scandal convulsed Britain in 1963. I was on a fishing holiday with my father, in a big house in the north of Scotland shared with two other families, including several teenage boys and girls. In between tying flies and tramping across the heather, everyone—the adults and the teenagers—seemed to have only one topic of conversation, and Christine Keeler was it. My seven-year-old sister and I were the only ones unable to keep up.
I remember chiefly the frustration of hearing jokes and not being able to understand the punchlines. But over the course of a week, and especially later when we got back to London and I was able to sneak a look at the newspapers, I started to get the gist.
Keeler was a call-girl. Once I’d worked out what that meant, I could start to piece together the rest. She’d been sleeping with a man called John Profumo. He was the Secretary of State for War in the Conservative Government of Harold Macmillan. But Christine had also been sleeping with the Soviet military attaché in London, Yevgeny Ivanov.
Was he using her to prise Britain’s nuclear secrets out of the Minister as pillow-talk? The possibility was high in the minds of Britain’s security agency MI5. The affair led to the suicide of Christine Keeler’s friend, and society pimp, Stephen Ward. He died in St Stephen’s Hospital in London’s Fulham Road: it was at the end of our street, and I remember seeing the pack of Fleet Street reporters and photographers gathered outside.
Sex sounded interesting. If rather dangerous.
It wasn’t just the Profumo affair that started to open my eleven-year-old mind to the outside world in 1963. On 22 November, I was doing ‘prep’ (the English boarding school term for compulsory group homework) in the main hall, on a wooden bench scored with the initials of boys long gone, when I heard that US President Kennedy had been shot. Someone with an illicit pocket transistor radio had been listening on an earphone when the newsf
lash broke in, and he couldn’t keep it to himself. The whisper went round the school within minutes.
For all the grubby details we’ve discovered about JFK since, at the time he seemed to represent a chance for youth, and hope under the shadow of The Bomb. The fear of atomic warfare, even for the young, was then pervasive. If you hadn’t heard Bob Dylan’s ‘Talking World War III Blues’, ‘Masters of War’ or ‘Hard Rain’, you’d certainly heard Peter, Paul and Mary’s cover of ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’. Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament marchers carrying ‘Ban The Bomb’ placards were on television, led by Canon John Collins, a gentle man who stayed with his family in the same hotel as mine one holiday in Cornwall. The nuclear shadow seemed to loom inescapably over everything. So the killing of Kennedy seemed not just the death of a president, but also the removal of someone whose steady hand had staved off possible Armageddon during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Even at eleven, I read a paper every day and I had some inkling of that.
That year brought me other big changes. For the first couple of years at Summer Fields, I spent the longer school holidays back in Malaysia. It meant solo journeys on BOAC Comets, adding air miles to my logbook as a member of the BOAC Junior Jet Club, whose privileges included being asked up to the cockpit to sit behind the captain and watch him fly the plane. By eleven, I had a lot of air miles. But now my mother was back in England, while my father stayed on in Kuala Lumpur.
Professor Richard Aldrich of Warwick University, who knew my father, wrote to me that ‘he ran the MI6 secret war against Indonesia in 1963’. This refers to the first year of Konfrontasi, President Sukarno’s attempt to destroy the Federation of Malaysia, in which Malaysian, British and Australian forces ran guerrilla and propaganda operations in Borneo, including across Indonesian borders. Later, when Dad was back in the London station, the secret war would eventually succeed in blocking Sukarno’s strategy, leading to his ousting, and indirectly freeing the military who led the coup against him to massacre as many as half a million communists.
My father never told me of his role in Konfrontasi in Borneo, though he did send me letters and postcards from Irian Jaya/West Papua, which was briefly under UN control in 1962–63, after being ceded by the Dutch. He told me later in life that he was not proud of the role he and the SIS had played in the handover of West Papua to Indonesia, but he died before telling me exactly why.
Apart from his letters and postcards, however, and that summer holiday in Scotland, we saw little of Dad at the time, and almost nothing of him and my mother together as parents. Although we were not yet aware of it, his job was one factor in the disintegration of my parents’ marriage. It didn’t help that he had also become infatuated with a married woman in Kuala Lumpur. My mother, understandably, had had enough, but did an admirable job of keeping the news from us. Whether in London or at school, I had no inkling of anything being wrong: soon, I thought, my parents would be back together at home, and all would return to normal.
I can’t remember exactly when my parents broke the news to me and my sister Zoë that they were going to get a divorce, but they did it as gently as they could. We would stay with Mum in the same house, and Dad was going to move to a flat around the corner. My sister’s memory of that day is clearer. In a letter to me, she writes:
It was a Saturday afternoon. Dad had already taken you round to see the flat and then you came home and I was told. It was already dark and someone said, ‘Oh look the circus is on the television’ and I looked and saw a miserable elephant plodding around the ring and sensed that I should pretend to be thrilled and to have already forgotten what I’d been told. My chief concern was Daddy’s flat—the only flats I knew of nearby were grimy Peabody [London Housing Association] ones & I thought he’d be unhappy there.
Our parents were very determined to do as little as possible that would embroil us in their troubles. While staying with Mum, we could visit Dad whenever we wanted, and they remained on friendly terms: I never remember them arguing in front of us. It was a shock, though, and hit me harder than I let on. My school reports for the time showed me suddenly dropping from near the top of the class in most subjects to the lower middle. I just felt the need to endure.
* * *
Whatever he’d been doing in Borneo, Dad was back in London at the end of 1963. I know because you don’t forget seeing The Beatles. Dad and my godfather John Villiers took me and John’s daughter Ann to see the group’s Christmas concert at the Finsbury Park Astoria.
I often tell people that I saw The Beatles in concert twice. I have to be careful never to say that I really heard them. The Christmas concerts were more variety events than rock concerts as we know them today. The bill before the second half when The Beatles came on included a whole line-up of Brian Epstein’s other managerial protégés, from Billy J Kramer and the Dakotas to Cilla Black, and you could mostly hear them, even though a substantial part of the audience was already in a state of screaming excitement. But this was before the invention of the Marshall Stack, the amplifier combination which made it possible for rock groups to be heard over even the loudest yelling. That meant that when The Beatles came on, you could hardly distinguish one song from another. I’m pretty sure they did ‘Roll over Beethoven’, ‘Money’ and ‘Twist and Shout’, because those were belters. But ‘All My Loving’? ‘Till There Was You’? History says they played them, but no-one in that audience would have known. It was wall-to-wall white noise from the dress circle to the stalls, and I give my father full credit, not only for taking me that year, but for braving the whole experience again the following Christmas.
A peculiar postscript: the 1963 Beatles-led bill was compered by Rolf Harris, the 1964 one by Jimmy Savile. The group that changed the 1960s, introduced by two of the twentieth century’s most notorious British paedophiles.
Back at Summer Fields, some relief was in sight. The school got a new, young English and Latin teacher named Nick Aldridge. Tall and skinny, with a quiff, he was quite different from all the other masters, with their leather-elbowed tweed jackets, snuffboxes and pipes. Most of them had ‘done something in the war’. Mr Aldridge was too young for that, still in his mid-twenties. And he was a livewire. He liked the same music we liked, introduced us to Buddy Holly, started a school pop group, unearthed a dusty old printing machine and taught interested boys (including me) how to set lead type and even print a magazine, talked to us almost as equals, and—most miraculously of all—as far as I know, never hit anyone.
And the end was at least in view. In 1965, I knew, would come the exams that would decide my next destination. When not lost in reading, I buried myself in intensive Latin and Greek study and memorised swathes of poetry which I regurgitated in school verse-reading competitions. That included a massive chunk of Oscar Wilde’s The Ballad of Reading Gaol: ‘He did not wear his scarlet cloak/For blood and wine are red’. My rendering caused the school chaplain, Reverend White, to take me aside and tell me that Wilde had been a Very Bad Man. No amount of questioning, however, would make him tell me how or why.
Summer Fields prided itself on cramming boys with the elements required to get into some of the most prestigious schools in Britain—Eton, Harrow, and Winchester in particular—and there was huge pressure from the school to do well in the Common Entrance Examination, taken at thirteen. I was good at Latin, fair at Greek, excelled in English, was passable at French and not good at maths. History I could manage by memorising, but mostly because it was taught by rote as a succession of dates: there being no context, it took me years before I could really see the point.
I also took the separate Westminster School Entrance Examination, and on being taken there for an interview, was almost sick with anticipation: at last, a school in the middle of a city, a place where I’d be able to walk outside and get on a bus or stroll up the street to a coffee bar. Freedom.
I was accepted at Eton, which I hadn’t liked on my one visit, and then the acceptance from Westminster came through. My five years of durance vile were soon
to end. Summer Fields, you not-so-Elysian Fields, goodbye.
Chapter 12
The First Turn of the Screw
MY PARENTS HANDLED the end of their marriage well, especially by the standards of that era, before no-fault divorce. The way divorce law was then framed had created a sordid little industry of ‘private detectives’ hired to take a staged photograph of the ‘guilty’ party in a Brighton hotel room with someone procured for the occasion to provide the necessary evidence to produce in court. Mum and Dad simply told us that sometimes parents just couldn’t get on with each other anymore, but in their case, they could still be friends and it would make no difference to the way they loved us.
And it was true. The fact is that the three years after the divorce, from 1964 to 1966, may have been the ones when Dad was less of an ‘absent father’ to me than at any other time. He was based in London, with few trips away that I remember, and the promises our parents had made, including that we’d have free access to Dad in his flat around the corner, were kept. My mother had made new friends, like the Halls, with whom we often stayed at their big house in Oxfordshire, and even their ski chalet in France, and later the Bryants, in whose grounds in the hills near Oxford we actually rented a cottage for a while, where we went for weekends and holidays.
And during the holidays from Summer Fields, I had free rein to an extent that might shock modern ‘helicopter parents’. I was allowed to take Zoë with me, unsupervised, on the bus to various destinations. We were strictly forbidden to put sixpence in the Pepsi machine outside the no. 31 bus depot at the end of the road, but it was an interdiction we routinely defied. As Zoë says, ‘I’ve always been amused by the way we were fearful of Mum smelling it on our breath, as if we were drunks rolling home from the pub.’