by Julian Clary
A bit like the bowl-of-soup incident.
KRC’s arch rivals were Molesey Rowing Club, and once a year the two clubs would compete for a day and then have a grand, if tense, dinner, which would take place at the clubhouse of the alternate hosts. Legend has it that I wasn’t happy with the soup at Molesey’s club one year, so I carried my bowl to the top table where their leader, Captain Croucher, sat resplendent in black jacket and club tie, and poured it over his head. Apparently it was piping hot and didn’t result in the hearty back-slapping from my fellow Kingstonians that I’d expected.
Although the rowing world was one of dedication, tough and exhausting, it had a unique social structure. No one lost sight of the fact that it was primarily a recreation for all involved. The homoeroticism of such an environment passed me by at the time, but who is to say that my subconscious wasn’t taking notes? Maybe fate was preparing me for the life that lay ahead. I certainly got a rush from being in charge. Eight men in peak physical condition jumping to my every command: to get that kind of thrill nowadays I’d have to go to some underground club in New York I suspect.
‘You were very assertive for a twelve-year-old,’ recalled Richard Nelson, my ‘stroke’ – the oarsman at the front of the boat who sat directly opposite me and generally set the pace.
He was 25 in 1972 and looked after me like I was a younger brother. It was his sweaty face in the forefront of my vision during a race, his agony I witnessed closest, his sweat I smelt and his sofa I would sleep on when we all staggered out of the Berni Inn and they were all too pissed to deliver me home to St Mark’s Road.
At the opposite end of the boat from Richard, in the bow position, was Grant Watkins, or Grantley, as he was known. Originally from Australia and only 18, he was the youngest member of the crew. Like most Aussies he was forever cheerful and adventurous, given to uttering meaningless phrases like ‘wacko-the-diddle-o’. For him a penny was a ‘brass ra-zoo’. Always being silly and jumping around or falling down to make people laugh, he was never without his camera. He had his own darkroom and would develop the pictures himself, sometimes superimposing someone’s head onto another body. One December he made a short comedy film starring me and him and showed it at the Christmas party. Indeed, he went on to become a talented TV and film editor.
He drove a battered old Mini and he once took me out to the countryside and then let me take over the driving. I hadn’t quite mastered the difference between brake and accelerator and we crashed into a farm gate. We were both cut and bruised and the Mini more battered than before, but we decided not to tell anyone about the incident. (It was my father, an expert and advanced driver, who taught each of us three children to drive when we were old enough. We all passed our tests on our seventeenth birthday. He was a strict and unforgiving teacher, and as an irritable teenager my emergency stops became a means of self-expression, the brakes sometimes being applied in anticipation of the command. Even now if he’s in the car with me he says, ‘Mirror, signal, brake!’ or ‘Where’s the fire?’ if I exceed the speed limit.)
Twenty-odd years after I crashed his Mini, Grantley was working in New York as a film editor in a large open-plan office. He stood up from his workstation and fell to the ground. Thinking it was one of his pranks, people watched and waited to see how long he’d lie there. In fact, he was dead.
HAVING MASTERED THE art of reading, I devoured books. I started with children’s classics, such as Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome, disdainfully skimmed a few Enid Blyton offerings, but by the time I was twelve I was chomping my way through Thomas Hardy, George Orwell, D.H. Lawrence and George Eliot.
My mother took us to the theatre and the ballet as often as she could afford it. We saw The Marriage of Figaro, There Goes the Bride (starring Peggy Mount, Bernard Cribbins and Bill Pertwee at Wimbledon Theatre), Giselle (with Anthony Dowell and Marguerite Porter) at the Royal Opera House, and Rock Hudson and Juliet Prowse in I Do! I Do! at the Phoenix Theatre. A highlight was Rudolph Nureyev in Romeo and Juliet, The Sleeping Beauty and Don Quixote at the London Coliseum. We once sat on the front row and when he did a pirouette his sweat splattered across our faces. ‘We must never wash again!’ my mother whispered.
She also took me to the proms at the Royal Albert Hall to hear Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, but omitted to tell me about the cannons going off towards the end. This being the 1970s, when the IRA’s bombing campaign was in full throttle, I hid under my seat until it was explained to me that this was all part of the show.
On Saturday evenings we had ‘tea on our laps’: sandwiches, sometimes muffins, sometimes fresh prawns. We watched the Generation Game and Bilko. On other days we ate at the dining-room table. We were cautioned never to turn our forks over.
‘You might have tea with the Queen one day.’
In fact, my mother had a bit of a thing about the Queen, maybe because they are of similar age. She’d often say out of the blue, ‘I wonder what the Queen is doing now?’
She also taught us how to eat our food so that the final mouthful had a morsel of each component. Three peas, maybe, the last bit of broccoli and the last of the shepherd’s pie. This was considered proper.
When we’d finished, if we wanted to do something or go somewhere we’d ask, ‘Can I get down now please?’
If it was a special occasion, such as a birthday, we might go to the Happy Garden Chinese restaurant in Hampton Hill and make each other laugh with our attempts at chopsticks.
We played cards, too, if there was a family gathering, for a penny a game and three pence for the winner. Kaluki was the favoured game, or Chase the Lady if we were feeling daring.
It wasn’t so much the game that mattered as the banter that went with it.
‘Gawd Blimey,’ my grandfather would declare when he looked at the hand dealt him.
‘“Gawd Blimey,” said the duchess as she waved her wooden leg.’
‘You ought to be poleaxed.’
‘Flick it!’
‘Strewth!’
‘Lawks-a-mercy!’
‘Brown bread by the river’s brim.’
A frequent visitor was Auntie Wyn, spinster sister to my grandfather, and my godmother Auntie Tess.
Auntie Wyn lived in Brentford, at 32 Adelaide Terrace, the very house my grandfather had grown up in. In those days it had been a gravel road with a sister terrace facing it, but that had long been demolished to make way for the A4, and then as a final insult the M4 flyover was built above it, so the terrace stood now, defiant but dusty, vibrating with the double helping of thundering traffic.
Brentford was not far from Ealing where I went to school, so it became the tradition that each Wednesday I would hop off the bus on my way home and stop for tea. My mother by this time had qualified as a probation officer and was working at the Brentford office. On Wednesdays she worked late, then picked me up from Adelaide Terrace at about 7.30 p.m.
In her seventies by then, Wyn had been engaged several times in her youth but never married. The most serious betrothal had faltered when he refused to convert to Catholicism, a prerequisite of a ‘mixed’ marriage in those days. As the prospect of a married life receded, Wyn simply never left home. Nor did her brother Gordon. He lived with her at number 32, but was of scant value as a companion. They had fallen out many years ago – it was rumoured over a game of cards – and now lived separate lives under the one roof, refusing even to meet at mealtimes.
Thus it was Auntie Wyn and I had our tea together (always a ham salad featuring a boiled egg) at five o’clock each Wednesday in the kitchen. The wallpaper I remember was of blue tits sitting on the branches of a tree. We would then clear the plates away and set the table again for one. As it got near to six o’clock she would start glancing up frequently at the clock above the doorway, and at one minute to six she would stand up determinedly and leave the room. Wyn and Gordon passed each other in the passageway without a word in this way every day for the remainder of their lives. I’d stay put in the kitchen for a little
while and say hello to Uncle Gordon before joining Auntie Wyn in the lounge to watch Crossroads, although she could never quite grasp the plot.
‘What on earth is going on?’ she would ask me, totally flummoxed if there was any variation on real time, such as, God forbid, a flashback sequence. A while later we’d hear the front door slam, which meant Uncle Gordon had gone to the pub, and I could return to the kitchen to do my homework, although I spent most of my time studying the blue tits and listening to the clock tick.
The acrimony between them continued beyond the grave. Wyn had been plagued with a weak heart for many years and when I was 16 she collapsed and died while on her way to see the doctor. As next of kin, we needed Gordon’s permission to erect a gravestone, and this he refused to give. We had to bide our time for several years until he expired too. The final irony was that he was then buried in the same grave as her.
Auntie Wyn was a frequent visitor to St Mark’s Road. She loved coming along to the regattas, where the family would have a picnic on the riverbank and cheer me on. Then we’d go home and play Kaluki. She had cataracts, though, and couldn’t really see the cards, let alone the boat races. When she finally had them operated on she could see even less for a few weeks and had to wear thick dark glasses while she recovered. We took her to see the rhododendron and azalea display at Isabella Plantation in Richmond Park and her head swivelled in amazement at the pink and purple flowers.
AS WE GREW older and no longer suffered from carsickness (I once vomited in my father’s jacket pocket on the way to Norfolk), our summer holidays became more adventurous. We borrowed a tent and after a trial weekend in a forest near Guildford, where my father and Frances mastered the art of erecting the aluminium tent frame and hammering in the tent pegs, we loaded up the trusty Zephyr and set off for the Costa Brava, heading for a resort called El Delfín Verde.
We caught the cross-channel ferry to Dieppe and travelled through France, eyes peeled for the GB sign on passing cars. ‘There’s one!’ we’d cry, and all wave happily, reassured that we weren’t the only intrepid adventurers in what seemed like a far-off foreign land. Beverley was horrified by the French hole-in-the-ground toilets and refused to use them, graciously agreeing to ‘go’ behind a haystack in the countryside instead while we all waited in the car. As she primly emerged, scurrying back towards us, two days’ worth of effluence finally ejected, a plume of steam was seen curling skywards from behind the haystack, rather giving the game away.
The fortnight’s vacation was done on a strict budget (‘About 50 quid,’ my father recalls) so there were no overnight stops in hotels. After a long day of driving and waving at fellow Brits, we’d find the nearest campsite and erect the tent and the beds, and lay out the sleeping bags. The stove, utensils and food would be next and then my mother would attempt something imaginative with a tin of frankfurters.
We awoke one morning to the steady hum of a torrential downpour, a common feature of our holidays, wherever we were. We hadn’t bargained for this on our training weekend, and while my father and sisters slid around in the mud in their flip-flops, folding and rolling up the sodden tent as best they could, my mother and I took refuge in the car, occasionally winding down the window to tell them to hurry up.
Our conspiracy to amuse ourselves by annoying my father was not very kind, but it was fairly relentless. Generally he’d go along with it, shaking his head in mock disbelief at these two Queens of Sheba who declined to do any of the hard labour involved in a camping trip for five in foreign climes.
Boiling eggs for our tea that night she handed him a seriously fractured one.
‘I’m afraid yours cracked, Peter. And your toast burnt, too. Most unfortunate.’
‘Thank you!’ he’d say, laughing gamely. ‘Dear oh dear . . .’
But we arrived at our Spanish resort in the end, found a delightful spot under some pine trees and began the holiday proper. We baked in the sun, swam in the sea and chortled at our northern English neighbours who cooked chips on a camping stove every night while we had sophisticated rice dishes. I was bought a snorkel and thought I was the next Jacques Cousteau. I made friends with a boy of my age (twelve) who was horribly lobster-red from the Spanish rays but that didn’t stop him encouraging me to touch him where the sun don’t shine when we investigated the local caves.
We were sad when the time came for us to leave, but we shook the sand out from our sleeping bags, and once my father and sisters had loaded everything up, our new friends, including the lobster boy, gathered round to wave us off.
There was an awful gurgling noise when the engine was turned on. We’d been parked on a slope and oil had seeped into the clutch, or something technical like that. My father got out and fiddled under the bonnet, sweating and wiping his hands and then his forehead with an oily rag. The leaving party began to mutter, lost interest and wandered away.
We eventually crawled out of the campsite way behind schedule and started our journey, unable, it seemed, to progress beyond second gear. Halfway across the Pyrenees a thunderstorm added to our troubles and we pulled into the nearest campsite. Once again my mother and I watched from the comfort of the car as the others struggled in the wind and the rain to erect the tent, assisted by several community-minded fellow campers.
By the time they had finished, lightning, a great fear of my mother’s, was ripping across the sky. (If a lightning storm occurred while we were at home she removed all her jewellery, rushed round turning off lights and unplugging anything electrical, and made us huddle in the middle of the room well away from the windows until the danger had passed.)
‘Get in the car, quickly!’ she shrieked, thinking we’d be safest in there with the rubber wheels. She wouldn’t let anyone get out, and we sat huddled in the steamed-up car all night, peered at with curiosity by the drenched helpers from nearby tents.
In the morning the rain abated, the unused tent was sheepishly dismantled and packed away and off we went. That day the car broke down completely in a small dusty Spanish town. The local garage had to send to Barcelona for a suitable gearbox and we hung around in a lay-by for a couple of days, out of food and out of patience. I added to my father’s woes by sticking my foot through the dashboard and snapping the Zephyr logo in two.
‘You great steaming idiot!’ he said.
We got home eventually, of course, and I looked forward to returning to school and writing the obligatory essay: ‘What I did during my summer holiday’ – deeming it wise to omit the business in the cave with the sunburnt boy.
THREE
For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds;
Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.
SONNET 94, WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
DESPITE THE BEATINGS I had endured in the middle school at St Benedict’s, it was a relatively cosy environment.
You could get lost in the upper school, consisting as it did of a great modern concrete-and-glass assembly hall attached to the less ostentatious block of airy classrooms, which in turn was connected to the original ‘house’, dark, ornate staircases and levels you never ventured onto unless summoned to where the monks, masters and prefects had their offices and suites.
There were corridors and staircases all over the shop and strange, unexpected burrows where monks would appear or disappear from like something out of Alice in Wonderland. There was a grand oak-panelled reading room and library, with mice carved into the chair legs. You could go there to study, and silence was ensured by the presence of a monk or master on a raised pulpit-like desk, who threw a threatening glance at anyone who so much as cleared their throat.
There were various smells pervading the various parts of the school, a rich menu of sweat, urine, cigarettes, chalk dust or floor polish, depending on where you found yourself.
And looming over us all was the abbey itself, quite cheery with its sandstone colouring and surrounding trees. Huge and unfussy with the obligatory spires and stained-glass windows, it is both modern and gothic, functional a
nd mysterious.
Each class had a form master who would remain with you until you reached the sixth form, and each year had a division master, a less intimate, more fearful figure to whom you would be sent if you did anything wrong, and who had the authority to beat you and the weapon to do it with.
The form master for upper 4(2) was Mr Klepacz, a youngish man who wore flares and had frizzy hair like Marc Bolan and a moustache. He was quite down-to-earth and rather shocked me once when I asked if I could be excused to go to the toilet by saying, ‘Go on then, go for a piss.’
Division master for the upper fourth year was Father Kasimir: short and stout, in his late fifties or early sixties. He didn’t seem to wash much or change his cassock, the same stains and sprinkling of dandruff from his silver head of hair apparent on his shoulders and beyond week in and week out. He walked with a strange, purposeful strut, as if he just knew he was about to discover some wrongdoing round the next corner. He always seemed to be cross, possibly because his dog collar was worn far too tight round his thick token of a neck. I was scared of him, which I’m sure was the general idea.
As it turned out I had good reason to be.
ALTHOUGH NOW IN different classes, Barry Jones and I were still friends, travelling home together on the bus, and meeting up at Kingston Rowing Club where he was now a cox too, even if not blessed with such a glamorous, successful crew.
On the first day of the new term in the upper school, in the autumn of 1972, we met up at break time and he introduced me to a new boy called Nicholas Reader. Nick, who was dark haired with full lips and perfect white teeth, had been sat next to him over in upper 4(1) and Barry had been given the responsibility of looking after him and showing him the ropes, as it were.