Back Story

by David Mitchell

  But, for all his masculinity, he wasn’t unflamboyant: he drove an MG and wore immaculate pinstripe suits, brightly coloured socks and overpowering aftershave. This last could be a lifesaver, as it was often the only clue you’d get that he was lurking round the next corner with an outstretched fist. Don’t misunderstand me, he didn’t hit the boys. But you weren’t supposed to run in the corridors, so he would provide a fist for those disobeying that rule to scamper into. At the time I considered this policy very fair – and basically I still do. What I particularly liked about it was that Butch, having allowed you to smack your face against his hand, would not then rebuke you for running. The discovery of the crime, its punishment and forgiveness were simultaneous.

  And, of course, when I say he didn’t hit the boys what I mean is that he occasionally hit the boys. I specifically remember his picking up Rawlinson-Winder by his hair for failing to grasp a point of Latin grammar. I hope you get a sense from that last fact not just that the man had a fiery temper but also that he was extremely comfortable with self-caricature.

  He also administered the school’s official corporal punishment – known as ‘The Whacks’ – which, I was told (I was far too much of a conformist to be sentenced to it myself), involved being hit with a gym shoe made heftier by a kitchen weight wedged in the toe. The gym shoe’s name was Charlie. It is surely one of the world’s great sadnesses that billions of shoes go about their benevolent business in aid of mankind, day after day, protecting feet, providing warmth and support, unselfishly getting ducked in puddles and smeared with dog shit, and yet remain unnamed. Whereas this nasty little cunt of a shoe got lavished with affection like a pet.

  Butch was as entertaining as he was intimidating and had a way of making you listen to him in school assemblies which I took for granted at the time but have realised in adult life is a gift possessed by few. His most memorable assembly, however, was entertaining in a way he wasn’t in control of.

  He was obsessed with litter. It maddened him. He considered it, and I’m inclined to agree with him, as the thin end of some sort of anarchist wedge. He couldn’t understand why there was ever litter in the school playground when it was well supplied with both bins and teachers authorised to eviscerate you if you were caught dropping so much as the ‘tear here’ corner of some peanuts. So why, Butch furiously pondered, was there always a small amount of litter in evidence? Who were the anarchists among us – the apparently law-abiding middle-class nine-year-olds with a hidden desire to smash and smash and smash?

  It’s a good question. I really don’t think any of us dropped litter – it was so easy not to. And yet there were always two or three bits of crap floating around the corners of the playground, usually empty crisp packets. This led to a new Butterworth theory: the crisp packets were blowing out of the bins, in a way that a Kit Kat wrapper, for example, would not. The boys were trying to obey the rules but were being beaten, not by him on this occasion, but by physics.

  His solution was simple: when you put a crisp packet into a bin, it was vital that you scrunched it up first. Otherwise you were obeying only the letter and not the spirit of the anti-littering rule. I cannot over-emphasise how often the importance of scrunching was stated to us. (Certainly more often than we were told about autumn, another subject seriously over-covered by schools in my experience and of very little use in adult life. If I had stepped into the world as an 18-year-old unaware of the distinction between deciduous and evergreen trees and the hibernation or migration habits of various vertebrates, I think it would have taken a college friend about two minutes to get me up to speed – in the unlikely event that the ignorance ever became apparent. I mean, take the word ‘deciduous’ – I was taught it, I think, at the age of six, taught it again at the age of seven, ditto when eight and nine – and I’ve only used it twice since. And that’s in this paragraph, where it’s actually been very useful. Thanks, Miss Boon!)

  But scrunching trumped even autumn. ‘Why oh why,’ Alan Butterworth would scream, ‘will you boys not learn the simple technique of scrunching up a crisp packet as you throw it away!? If you don’t get it soon, I shall have to ban crisps from the school premises,’ he threatened. He was saying this because the stray, apparently unscrunched packets were continuing to blow around in the small wind eddies in the playground’s corners, alongside the dead leaves of the more littering sort of tree; he was assuming, not unreasonably, that we were all too stupid to obey this simple instruction, that the dense, untrained, anarchic schoolboys were always too light-headed from their crisp-induced mid-morning carb and salt rush to remember about the scrunching after they’d poured the last delicious potatoey shards down their young throats. In his view, it was a level of idiocy unequalled in his long career of working with unformed brains.

  So, one day, he decided to do a practical demonstration. He brought a crisp packet into assembly. It was quite incongruous to see it in his signet-ringed hand, like watching the Queen brandishing a ketchup bottle. The packet was empty – he never told us who had eaten the crisps. He held the packet aloft before vigorously scrunching it between both hands and placing the neat and unaerodynamic ball on the table in front of him. We then stood to sing a hymn.

  If you’ve eaten crisps in the last few decades, you’ll know what happened next. During the hymn, the plastic packet gradually but determinedly unscrunched itself until it lay flat on the table. It stayed there for a few moments before drifting gently onto the floor. The problem with his scrunching instructions was humiliatingly laid bare – as was the towering arrogance of a man who had been banging on for years about this apparently simple solution to the littering problem without once trying it out himself. He was so sure of himself that the first time he ever attempted to scrunch up a crisp packet was in front of the whole school.

  Now, there’s confidence for you. And foolishness. It’s like a metaphor for the First World War: the folly and the leadership rolled into one. He didn’t mention the flattened-out packet after the hymn. The official line was that the simplicity of the plan had been brilliantly demonstrated by the headmaster. But that’s not what the other teachers’ faces were saying.

  He ran a terrific school, though – and it was terrific largely as a result of his labours. He’d been headmaster for over 25 years when I arrived, and his techniques clearly worked – the school’s academic reputation was excellent and, more importantly, it was an institution with high self-esteem.

  That’s quite a trick to pull off for a small provincial prep school which was neither big enough nor rich enough to win at games. Somehow the boys at New College School were made to feel clever and significant. The staff seemed to have a swagger about them too which, when I think about it, was remarkable. It’s not a brilliant job, teaching in a small prep school. We do not, sadly, live in a society that values teaching very highly as a profession. We live in a society that pretends to, but gives the big money to footballers and bankers (and more to comedians and actors than they are probably worth, I’m very happy to admit, but personally I’m in it for the disproportionate praise).

  But, even where teaching is valued as it should be, teachers from small independent prep schools are probably the least revered. Those little seats of learning have neither the sense of sacrifice of the state sector nor the glamour of the major public schools. But most of the staff at New College School seemed bright, interesting, fun, well-motivated and had been there years. Butch was clearly doing something right, even if it was mainly spotting clever and engaging people who weren’t very ambitious.

  Whenever I think about the odd alchemy – the combination of planning, tradition, flexibility, inflexibility and luck – that it takes to make a functional institution, I think of New College School. And I worry that institutions like that are less likely to exist in Britain now. We don’t seem to live in a society where excellence in small but achievable aims is respected – where a man like Alan Butterworth, a very bright and charismatic Oxford graduate, would be willing to devote his
entire career to making one small school as good as it could be.

  Don’t get me wrong, I know being a prep school headmaster isn’t the same as founding an anti-malaria charity. But that’s sort of the point: it wasn’t saintly, neither was it glory-seeking. It was a modest, realistic goal. He didn’t want to run a bigger school or to make the school that he did run bigger. He just wanted consistency, and from that he derived contentment – or at least I hope he did. He certainly did some good, albeit only to the male children of fee-paying parents.

  - 10 -

  The Smell of the Crowd

  I cross Finchley Road at the Swiss Cottage roundabout (there’s a pub there which looks like a giant Swiss cottage, which is how the area got its name; why such a giant chalet-shaped boozer was built is a mystery to me) and wiggle left into the top of Eton Avenue. There are two theatres here now – Hampstead Theatre, which is newly rebuilt, having existed in a glorified portacabin fifty yards further south until a few years ago, and the Embassy Theatre, which belongs to the Central School of Speech and Drama.

  Some students are sitting on the steps outside the theatre and I squint at them jealously. I don’t want to be them – they’re wearing loose, sensible clothing in order to facilitate the sort of balletic moves by which no production in theatrical history has ever been improved, and I’m including ballets; plus they all seem to be agreeing about something, and I’ve got a hunch that they’re all wrong – I’m just remembering what it was like to put on plays as a student, surrounded by friends, all beer and low stakes.

  But perhaps it’s not like that if you’re a drama school student. At university, it all just felt like fun. Maybe these students feel like they’ve started work already. I’m not sorry I didn’t go to drama school. I’ve heard they make you do mime and try to ‘take you apart and put you back together again’ which, even if they mean it metaphorically, isn’t really my cup of tea. They want to ‘take you out of your comfort zone’, and I think that might mean they actually confiscate your cup of tea.

  My first proper theatrical performances were at New College School. I have a vague recollection of one occasion at Napier House when I was made to pretend I was a stalk of wheat, but that was just a sort of Harvest Festival show, which involved us bringing in various foods for redistribution to the bemused and needy, then some kind of activity which I’m not going to dignify with the word ‘performance’, on a platform which I’m not going to dignify with the word ‘stage’. I remember being part of a line of children, in front of an audience of parents, and we were all pretending to grow from a seed by starting in a crouched position and slowly standing up and finally stretching out our arms. Like soldiers in a Soviet propaganda film, we were under instructions to smile. I suppose it was physical theatre really and, like a lot of physical theatre, it received a rapturous response from an unquestioning audience at pains to indulge the performers.

  But my real performing career started at New College School, with an appearance as a clown. One Friday afternoon in my first year at the school, it was suddenly announced that instead of ‘Field’, which was what we called sport because you went to the college playing field to do it, we were going to be taught some circus skills.

  It is a sign of how baffling so much of life is when you’re seven that we took this news in our stride. I’ve often wondered since what was actually going on, and I’ve come to the conclusion that a bunch of out-of-work performers were making some cash on the side by doing circus skills workshops at independent schools and that one of the NCS staff either knew one of the performers or had been born yesterday.

  The first piece of news about the circus skills afternoon was that, sadly, not everyone would get to have his face painted like a clown. ‘Ohhhh noooo!’ the class moaned – and I assume I joined in, just like I’d have joined in at Nuremberg. What I was thinking, of course, was: ‘Thank God for that, I don’t want my face made up like a clown’s by someone I don’t know. That would be awful! And what if the make-up wouldn’t come off?!’

  ‘I’m sorry but two is the absolute maximum for face painting,’ lamented Miss Brown, ‘and as you all obviously want to have your faces painted like clowns …’

  ‘Oh yes, madly – please pick me, Miss Brown!’ we all interjected.

  ‘… I’m just going to have to put your names in a hat and pick out the two lucky ones who will get to spend the afternoon looking like clowns.’

  I was already familiar enough with sod’s law to have a sinking feeling at this news. There seemed no way of volunteering to be left out of the hat. It was just assumed that we’d all want make-up all over our faces. Where, I thought, did that idea come from? Why is there this weird consensus about this weird thing – this bizarre concept that everyone else seems to think is a lovely treat? And why am I being swept along in it?

  And yet I knew any attempt I made to opt out pre-hat would be dicing with pariah status. I was facing another, and quite unexpected, challenge in my quest to be normal: I was going to have to make it seem as if I wanted to look like a clown. I really hadn’t seen that coming. But still, I reasoned, it probably won’t be me.

  Of course it was me. First out of the hat. I forced a smile onto my soon-to-be-vandalised features. Oh God, life is awful, I thought. And I distinctly remember thinking that this was doubly unjust because, not only was I going to have to endure something terrifying, but one of the many among my classmates who, it had recently become clear, had always been obsessed with greasepaint would be denied the smearing of their dreams.

  And it was fine, obviously. It didn’t hurt – I walked around with everyone saying ‘You look like a clown!’, they cleaned it all off before I went home, and I had that buzz you get from having endured something you were dreading and found it, while not actually pleasant, less alarming than you’d feared.

  Other than sitting still while a stranger daubs your face, the other ‘circus skills’ which the out-of-work actors were teaching turned out to be balancing a hockey stick on one finger – which takes a bit of practice but isn’t that difficult, or at all impressive, or a circus skill – and lying on a bed of nails. This involves just lying on a bed of nails. If the nails aren’t that sharp – they weren’t – the fact that there are such a lot of them means that it’s basically painless – your weight is comfortably distributed among the hundreds of nails. It’s supposed to sound brave or impressive because you’re lying on so many nails, so people (idiots) think it must be many times the pain of lying on the point of one nail, which is agonising. But of course it isn’t. I hated Field, but there’s no doubt that afternoon would have been better spent if I’d been outdoors running away from a football as usual.

  You may be wondering why, as the sort of freak who wandered around inexpertly disguised as Louis XIV all weekend, I wasn’t more enthusiastic about spending an afternoon disguised as a clown. I think my horror largely came from the novelty of the activity and the people inflicting it on me. I’m not really attracted by novelty, as you will almost certainly already have guessed. (If not, wait until I start talking about Chinese food.)

  That selection process for the clown make-up is the earliest recollection I have of my knee-jerk hatred of consensus. I just don’t like it, particularly when it relates to fun or fashion. Not only did I dread the thought of having to wear make-up, I hated the feeling that I was supposed to think it would be great. I hated that pressure to join in and be like everyone else. I hated it, but I did it anyway.

  Who are these morons who want stuff putting on their faces, I thought. And why does their opinion prevail? I get the same shiver of contempt when I hear inane radio DJs talk to listeners about their weekend plans to ‘just chill’, ‘have a large one’ or ‘party with my mates’. These people are welcome to such pleasures, but I balk at the implication that that’s what everyone’s doing or what everyone should be doing; that these are the lives that the uncool are so often exhorted to get. I’d love to hear a caller to XFM or similar announce that they’ll be sp
ending all weekend at a steam fair, seeing a relative with dementia, decorating eggs, desperately looking for a vital but lost bit of paperwork or just frantically masturbating to the Eroica symphony.

  This is a world where people no longer indicate their enthusiasm for a TV series, actor, celebrity, band or snack bar by saying ‘Oh, I love it’ but with ‘I’m loving it’ – you know ‘I’m loving this season of Strictly’, ‘I’m loving Heston’s mini fish burgers’, ‘We’re loving Alan Carr’s new glasses’. That’s the fickle present continuous. There’s a silent ‘at the moment’ after it which there isn’t with ‘I love’. These consumers are just passing through, waiting to get their head turned by something sparkly which, once tarnished by their gaze, they’ll turn away from. They like what’s cool because it’s cool and for no other reason, and I hate them for it.

  Another example of their hatefulness while my dander’s up: in order to get themselves off the hook of sometimes liking uncool things, they refer to them as ‘guilty pleasures’, which is a ridiculous expression. What? So you like Abba, or Roger Moore as James Bond, but have been led to believe that this taste is somehow infra dig, so you style it a ‘guilty pleasure’, thus demonstrating you’re sufficiently relaxed and self-deprecating to own up to it – when in fact the way you have chosen to express it lays bare your bland and inane obsession with the worthless trappings of the zeitgeist.

  Doing those list-interviews which newspapers print nowadays because they lack the resources to fill their pages with proper articles – the Guardian Q&A, that sort of thing – I’ve been asked dozens of times: ‘What’s your guilty pleasure?’ I usually reply ‘A fry-up’ or ‘Watching Bargain Hunt’ or ‘Eating toast in bed’. On one occasion, bored, I replied: ‘Well, I must say, I do like to fuck a prostitute.’

  I’m proud of that (saying it, not doing it – I’ve never actually fucked a prostitute) but now unfortunately the pride I’ve confessed to will have made it less funny. Sorry.