Semi-Detached

by Griff Rhys Jones

  Perhaps he was worried about the fees. He told me he thought there were too many girls at Conifers. I got out the school photograph to check. What was he on about? There were plenty of boys. There was Charles Hume and Graham Stott and my best friend, Jimmy Summers, who lost an eye in an accident after I left. (I was deeply upset by the news and went up to the back of the garden to cry.)

  Perhaps Conifers was a bit girly … I rather liked it. There was a ‘Wendy house’ in the grounds of the tiny school, where only girls played during the break. Once we managed in a moment of heightened excitement, deafened by squealing and blushing, to ‘penetrate’ this forbidden bastion of femininity, and I remember, as we rushed through, that, to our surprise, behind the clapboard walls and the dirty curtained windows there was just a bare, planked room and nothing to see at all, the conclusion of most sexual curiosity at that age.

  Otherwise, we boys did everything that the girls did. We played rounders rather than football, so I never matured into blokeyness. (I still loathe the beautiful game.) We did an awful lot of skipping and we learned to sew (excellently useful, though I’ve forgotten how to do the chain-stitch). I made a scarlet swimming-costume bag with a bright white rope pull in one of the sunny upstairs classrooms in what was, after all, little more than a suburban house near the outskirts of Midhurst.

  I can bang away at the doors of memory here, but nothing really comes out. Images, perhaps: the new gym built round the back, with the beautiful, varnished, yellow wood climbing frames and the clean, new smell of the suede-covered vaulting horses (not sensations commonly associated with school gyms). I presented a current affairs project on the independence of Sierra Leone there. And rows of Wellington boots under the awning on the veranda. But I only know that because they were still there when I drove past a few years ago; as was the conifer tree that gave the place its name, with a big bowed branch where we used to sit at breaks. All other lessons, personalities, friends, teachers, pottery classes, infant school food and serious application have gone, except for Hiawatha and the Little White Bull.

  The school presented an elaborate pageant every year. Hiawatha was memorable, not because of the Itchigumi and of the fur he made him slippers of, but because it involved dressing up as Indians. We wore sacks, chopped with ragged fringes at the bottom and tied with coloured belts. We wore head bands. Our faces were daubed, gratifyingly, with war-paint, made from those great jars of children’s pure floury colour.

  The next year Longfellow was supplanted by Tommy Steele. Tommy must have already abandoned his good-rocking persona and adopted the cheeky nudge-nudge narrative style which was to become his forte for the rest of the twentieth century. He ‘sang’ the story of the ‘li’l why bawl!’ (Chorus, loudly and with a note of mania: ‘Little White Bull!!’) And the bull, which was deficient, in some ugly-duckling way, scored a comical triumph in the bull ring (before being slaughtered, I assume).

  It is the first pop song I remember, because we had to listen to it hundreds of times. I was the back legs, my first major part. The bull itself was made out of chicken wire and that infant-school staple, papier-mâché. We legs wore big white trousers, and it was an early experience of the unexpected trails of theatre as spectacle. Naturally, my brother, who was older, was the front. After weeks of rehearsal, of clutching his waist and gaily tripping hither and thither in time to the music, the dress rehearsal was a fearful shock. No Mexican penitent, shouldering a painted Madonna, could have been less prepared for the actuality of the performance than I was. My brother seemed to have all the advantages. It was preposterously unfair. He could at least see. He could actually breathe. He was upright. His big bull’s head gave him relative freedom of action. He was not continually pronged and lacerated by the razor-wire edges of the inexpertly trimmed chicken-wire carapace. He could also assess the inevitable discrepancy between the routine as devised over months in the tiny gym and the routine as performed on the expansive prairie of the school playing-field across the road. So he romped away with frisky white bullish spirit. Admittedly, this was to keep up with the toreadors, matadors and picadors who were skipping spiritedly away ahead of him, energized, as is often the case, by a rush of adrenalin.

  ‘Shut up you,’ and ‘Keep up you idiot!’ were of limited assistance, and a Chinese burn and dead-leg didn’t help much afterwards. The utter misery of the experience was only matched by the three-day tech-run for The Wind in the Willows at the National Theatre thirty-five years later, when I realized for the first time that most of Toad’s dialogue would have to be shouted over hordes of violin-playing rabbits bounding across the stage and a full-sized gypsy caravan trundling into view.

  My father could just about be persuaded to turn up to these occasions. He made a point of avoiding speech days most of my life. By then he was already engaged in the great do-it-yourself project of the Midhurst years.

  His closest friend on the staff of the hospital was a man who went under the slightly alarming nickname (from a patient’s perspective anyway) of ‘Jab’. J. A. Boulton wasn’t a doctor. He was some sort of administrator. These were still the days when doctors ran the show All ranks of hospital staff, and most certainly the general public, were subordinate, expected to bob in the wake of ‘Doctor’, a super-powered dreadnought, cruising through ward and sitting room alike, one hand permanently extended for motes.

  They got hold of a loft, above a shed with a green door, just across the road from the piggery and its hooter-chimney, and down the lane from the hay barn fortress. Below housed the sanatorium fire engine. Up above, they began a marathon of wood-working.

  We were sometimes taken there by an exasperated mother trying to shoo her biggest charge back to dinner. I can recall the two men, at men’s work, with black slicked hair just fallen forward in a dishevelled lick, in their braces and shirt sleeves, which were white under a single naked light bulb. There was a low roof, and the red curls of mahogany on the floor gave off a strong acid smell. Gradually, am Enterprise sailing dinghy filled the entire space. It seemed huge to us. It would have seemed pretty huge to Uffa Fox, the designer. Jab’s navy connections meant they got their wood from an MTB company in Portsmouth who provided everything with an extra quarter of an inch allowance all round, to allow for later honing and planing. On hundred-foot ships, the margin was negligible. On a twelve-foot dinghy the margin was a liability. The racing dinghy became, like my father, a little heavier than was strictly necessary.

  Heaving this solid lump across the ‘hard’ at Bosham in Chichester Harbour became the first of many minor tribulations of the yachting experience that my parents failed to rise above.

  Quite why my father, not naturally inclined to react to minor set-backs with equanimity, and, indeed, slightly neurotic about heath and safety factors (such as the ease of death by drowning, significant injury from flying tackle or disease from polluted waters), decided to take to the high seas is still a bit of a mystery. I suspect it was the woodworking that lured him initially. By the time that Jab had discovered that the cumbersome hulk was bound to lose races, my father had realized that his new hobby could set him adrift from polite society. In fact, apart from bumping into other boats (only necessitating the tersest of exchanges) he need never have anything to do with anybody else at all, ever, except his family So from the earliest days we were roped in. (Literally, to begin with.)

  The dark blue Enterprise didn’t really last very long. They must have lugged it up and down the hard at Bosham and into the Itchenor river a few times, and we must have got in the way, because little children always do. So I can remember being plumped down in the centre of the boat next to the centreboard casing and being able to reach out and tweak the swollen mandarin oblongs of plastic buoyancy bags lodged under the thwarts. They were tied in place with bright white webbing strands that smelled new and later, when sucked, were salty to taste. Or we played with the sheet ropes and pretended they were snakes.

  Normal rebellious infant behaviour just evaporated. We knew this was
a different state of existence. Not just because of the racket, but because the parents had become other beings. My mother, dressed in rather too tight slacks and a short-sleeved shirt, had the urgent look of a determined Cossack on a Russian propaganda poster. She was attentive to my father’s every wish. It showed in her expression. And he had taken on a fervent watchfulness, his eyes darting around in a lively imitation of a startled squirrel, gripping on to the tiller, suddenly turning and looking behind him, reaching forward to whip off a rope while issuing curt instructions to Mummy, who responded with impressive speed. ‘Pull her up now! … let go the rope. Get back.’

  It was probably from those earliest moments of sailing, with three tiny children crammed in the bilges, with my poor mother steadfastly accepting that it was not her place to fully understand what was going on, that my father adopted his lifetime habit of Jonah-like exaggeration and hyperbole in order to rule his ship of doom. ‘Keep your hands in. You’ll have them off. Don’t rock the boat! You’ll have us over!’ All designed to frighten children into wide-eyed submissiveness, until such time as we were safely past the few moored boats and we could be allowed to sit up with the adults. ‘Hold on! Sit still! Get ready to go about!’

  It was captaincy by paranoia. And having effectively dragooned us as scugs, he never abandoned the habit as we grew older. ‘Mind the gybe! The boom will have your head off! Keep your fingers well clear of the anchor chain, now! Don’t go too near that boat, we’ll hit her!’ And though the wind was slight and the gybe would have been well signalled, although only a village idiot would stick his hands in the chain box and the said boat was two or three hundred yards away, we grew to accept that this was the modus operandi. He saw potential accidents and disaster everywhere. Later, in motorcycles, ladders, pints of beer and long hair; for the time being in boating, swings, roads, bicycles and staircases. He was a doctor. They were all lethal. But this was more than wariness. This was control. Daddy saw the consequences and Daddy needed to point them out. We never capsized. I remember once he banged a finger and I recall the misery of a small child seeing his father-hero in pain, borne bravely I may add. But otherwise we sailed through it all, as a slightly less hysterical man might have expected to do all along, given that we were, after all, in a sailing boat.

  It was interminable stuff. Sitting on the floor lasted several years at a time. Sailing down the river, keeping still and out of the way, took a couple of decades. But eventually we reached our paradise: West Wittening.

  Wittering was little more than a spit of dunes at the mouth of an estuary. You could walk to it, if you were dogged (and to begin with my mother was ordered to do so, ‘pushing that bloody pushchair’), but it was largely the playground of the water-borne. There was a steep shelving beach of sand (‘Be careful now! I don’t want anyone drowning themselves’). On sunny weekends the curve of the bay filled up with boats, until it became a complicated, not to say fraught, business to anchor there. Ashore, we would huddle under the shelter of the dunes attending to what united the Rhys Jones family most: lunch. Tupperware boxes of sandwiches, gala pie, sweet and slightly gooey liver sausage, home-made Scotch eggs and a faux-wicker-patterned tubular thermos of asparagus soup. This was one of those treats of industrialized grub that tasted better than any fresh original (sardines, canned tuna, tinned peaches and baked beans being the others). To the children the picnic fulfilled the requirements of being sweet and mushy ‘food’ — not gristly parts of a sheep’s anatomy, or those ‘cabbages on stalks’ with the wet, slightly sulphurous taste (Brussels sprouts) that we got at home. I utterly refused to eat cabbage until I was past ten.

  Then after lunch there was a visit to the red ice-cream boat. Luckily, my father’s interest in ice cream was a match for any four-year-old’s. He seemed not to care that the belching ‘Mr Whippy’ machine excreted a fluffed-up spew of aerated lard that could have greased a Russian half-track. The more synthetic the confection, the more it reminded him of his childhood and Glengranogg on the Cardigan coast, where his family had a holiday cottage and where the ‘ice-cream’ was made of powdered milk and baking soda. When, as a teenager, I went to Florence and raced back to England with the news that ice-cream could be made of real cream, with proper chocolate and hardly any salt, I never really felt that my enthusiasm paid off. He wasn’t seeking the ultimate ice-cream heaven, he was looking for the nursery.

  I got lost once in the dunes. It was a great place to play, somewhere that adults could hardly be bothered to go. I would wander off. The sand creamed up between the toes and crumbled around the ankles, silver and hot on top, cooler and darker underneath. Sometimes the dips were disconcertingly deep. Once, far up the seaward end, I crested a dune and came upon a grown-up lying totally ‘bare’ in the spiky grass. He was arched on his back and my eyes were drawn to the massive pink flushedness of his jutting erection. It was quite a surprise. Did I, at six, feel anything sexual about it? I think I did. Was he lying there waiting to present himself to a passing little boy? Possibly He didn’t seem to want to cover himself up or roll feverishly over on his front, as any self-respecting, embarrassed wanker might. So I suppose he was showing it to me. I never reported the event to anyone. I was complicit in it, just in passing by, just in looking, just in being there. It was certainly not something I would want to explain to a grown-up.

  After all, we all liked to look. We had a maid or au pair at one time. She was blonde and had a round face and wore full-bottomed fifties skirts. She fell asleep on the lawn one day, in hot sunshine, and I distinctly remember the huge excitement brought on when Jimmy Summers and I tried to peer up her skirt. What were we doing? We had no idea. My first sex education was years ahead. Even the rudimentary details were years ahead. She woke up and chased us away.

  The argument over ‘the rudest word’ that took place between my brother and myself must have happened much later. It was overheard by my sister, who threatened to tell my mother. We persuaded her that ‘c**t’ was indeed the rudest word you could say, but only meant ‘Wellington boot’, not a particularly inspired improvisation, and she inevitably told my mother she was putting on her c**ts in the rain.

  Had we had any grasp of any reality, I would never have lied so badly in the affair of the man on the bus. Every day after school, we took a big green bus into the centre of Midhurst and then waited, opposite a handy sweet shop, for the coach that took us the few miles up the hill to the sanatorium.

  Sometimes we bought sweets at the sweet shop while waiting for the second stage. But on this particular day I had half a crown. It was a huge sum of money — twelve and half pence, in decimal currency.

  So we bought stuff. Half-penny chews were big, but penny chews were enormous blocks of ridged edible plastic. There were probably sherbet dips, a yellow paper-wrapped drum of sherbet with a stick of liquorice that you dipped in the stuff and licked. Gobstoppers changed colour as you sucked them, and had to be taken out all wet and sticky to look, until you finally got the aniseed taste when you crunched up the little bit right in the middle. We bought all these and crossed the road to the bus stop with full blazer pockets.

  While we were waiting my father rolled up in the car.

  This was highly unusual. He must have had an afternoon off or gone to visit some patient in another hospital. He was very pleased to see us, as fathers always are when they are doing nothing and can drive their children with no trouble to themselves. We all jumped into the back of the car, where my brother and sister blithely carried on munching and chewing.

  ‘What have you got there?’

  ‘CHEW, SUCK, ummm … sweets! CHEW, STUFF, RUSTLE.’

  My father tried to glance back over his shoulder. Fathers, especially fathers of a medical persuasion, have a low opinion of sweets and generally make comments about fillings, and making sure that you clean your teeth, except, of course, when they are eating them themselves and handing them round, which anyway they only do as an afterthought.

  I had already tried to stuff my sweet
s out of sight.

  ‘Ha ha. So where did the money come for all these sweets, then?’

  There were more chomping and thwacking sounds from my brother as he tried to loosen his overladen mouthful of goo, but my sister managed to find enough of a gap in her maw to articulate her innocent evidence.

  ‘CHEW, SCRUNCH, CHOMP … Griff had … CHEW, SWALLOW … half a crown.’

  Even though I had no idea what to call it then, I could feel the nemesis approaching.

  ‘Half a crown? Where did that come from?’

  The answer was simple. It came from Charles Hume’s money box. We had been playing up in his well-appointed bedroom filled with envy-inducing toys and he had shown me his frog, which had a slot in the top and a screw plug in the bottom and was full of half crowns. When he took them out they fell on the shelf. He had piled them up in at least three towers. Then his mother had called him downstairs and I had simply, in a dreadful impulse, taken one of them and put it in my pocket.

  I felt it unwise to tell my father this. Despite all his frequent protestations that it was always better to tell the truth, and that no harm could come to you if you did, I sort of knew that this was utter hogwash. I had stolen the money.

  Charles was most unlikely to raise the alarm. He had no idea how many half crowns he had. Charles was a Fotherington-Thomas sort of playmate who rocked back and forth humming at his desk in school. He clearly had no idea what he was worth. If it had been me I would have counted my half crowns every day and calculated what exact proportion of a super-death-ray-blaster I could afford. But Charles seemed manifestly otherworldly, hardly a fit custodian of a frog full of dosh, so I had taken one of the half crowns. The opportunity had come to me on the crest of a rip curl of envy. No little demon had appeared in a puff of smoke at my left shoulder. I had simply taken it, very swiftly and almost without thinking. But the half crown almost instantly became a liability: a massive, unheralded amount of money. Buying sweets for everybody, including my older brother, was far from being an act of generosity. It was an attempt to dispose of the incriminating evidence as quickly as possible and, woe, oh fatal happenstance, my father had borne down upon me in the bottle-green Morris Traveller, just when I least expected him.