Semi-Detached

by Griff Rhys Jones

  For Spud, it was acting that was paramount — his acting, mainly. He never indulged in such frippery as improvisation, he simply showed us how to do it. The rehearsal was an opportunity for him to perform the entire play himself. In order to demonstrate how Ariel might attend on Prospero, Mr Baron would kick off his shoes and pirouette on points across the Memorial Hall stage. We sniggered at his claims that he had ‘trained as an actor, my dear’ but he was quite shameless, delivering speeches in floods of tears, or charging across the stage with startling shouts, or draping his jacket over his head and mincing about as Miranda. Given that he was so small and so round and so bald and so potentially foolish, what he really taught us was fearlessness.

  Once the production was up, once the huge wicker baskets of period costumes had arrived from Bermans, and been plundered by us, he was everywhere: in the classroom, dressing rooms, skittishly arranging a veil, or bellowing about jock straps from the back of the hall, or supervising make-up, which he applied freely, with outlandish streaks of carmine greasepaint. During an electrical blackout, he sat in the dark at the piano and tried to calm us all by playing Rachmaninov.

  As for me, I started as one of the little boys playing women. My first role was Ceres, goddess of plenty. I had to emerge from a back-lit cardboard cavern dressed in diaphanous robes, hung about with plastic autumnal leaves and sporting a full length wig. I got a big laugh. This was not what was expected, but I liked it. One of the older boys stood in front of me while I applied my slap, looked me up and down and pronounced, ‘God, Rhys Jones, you make a very ugly woman.’

  And then the next year I was third witch. It was a serious demotion, after I had originally been asked to give my Lady Macbeth and I took it badly but probably had a better time. Fischl, Gotley and I danced and hooted, cackling and gurning, around a proper black witch’s cauldron (a typical Baron literal prop this) with a hidden electric kettle steaming inside it.

  Gotley was a close friend and a bad influence. He never seemed to take what he did entirely seriously. He and Fischl whispered obscenities under their breath during anybody else’s lines.

  By the fifth form, too ugly for women altogether, I had become part of the crowd in Julius Caesar, shouting ‘Aye, aye’ at Douglas Adams, the future author of The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, as he strutted about with a double bedsheet over his shoulder and his huge conk in the air. I was Rosencrantz in Hamlet and in my last year managed no better than the pitiful Aumerle in Richard II.

  Backstage visitors, even as a boy, could be difficult, though.

  The plays were one of the few occasions when the hierarchies of the school broke down.

  In one junior production we fell under the spell of Skinner. He was crop-headed and foul-mouthed and a year older than us. He was probably playing a fairy too. He already had collections of IT and Private Eye and could tell an endless succession of filthy jokes. So we worshipped him. Then on the last night, the Saturday. my parents came to see the play. And, foolishly. they wandered back to the classrooms to pick me up. Why did they do that? They were just being parents, thinking they could go anywhere, barge into any room. Why the hell couldn’t they wait in the car, or somewhere in the dark outside, like a sensible relative?

  My father was wearing a flat cap and his buttoned-up mac, my mother was fussing behind him. I was up at the back of the room, getting make-up off, standing by Skinner. He began shaking and tears appeared in his eyes. He raised a quivering digit, pointed and collapsed in howls of laughter. Look at that! What the hell were they? How did they get loose? And all the others laughed too. They held each other up. They gasped for breath. They sniggered and guffawed. And then my father spotted me. ‘Griffith!’ he called.

  ‘Griffith!’ This was too much for Skinner. He was poleaxed. He brought his cream-covered face right up to mine, almost unable to speak. ‘They … they … they’re your parents!’

  I nodded helplessly.

  ‘Har har har har har.’

  Skinner collapsed on the floor and crawled away under the desks. And I was left alone to greet my mummy and daddy (at least I hadn’t called them that in public). To their puzzlement, I hurried them out of the room, foully betrayed, hating them and hating Skinner and hating myself for not knowing what to do or who to blame.

  7. The Three Three Nine

  I rather fancied taking the 339 bus from Brentwood back to Epping. Half my adolescent life had been lost lurching around upstairs in that double-decker bus. And I was astounded to discover that, after forty years, the thing still ran. It followed the same route. It still went all the way from Brentwood to Harlow, passing through Epping — just as it had when it wallowed me homewards every afternoon. Disappointingly it had changed its number. It was now the 501. Worse, it didn’t come from Warley any more. It began its trans-Essex marathon from some other meaningless suburban outpost. These were small changes, perhaps, but of arcane regret. The number 39 and the name of the village of Warley had had a cabalistic significance when I was twelve.

  We were initiated into all this at the beginning of our first English lesson by a bald, fervently twitchy house master known as Daddy Brooks. He swept in, threw his gown into his seat, flung his books on the desk with a frightening bang and told us that he had some serious matters to establish. He leaned forward and spoke emphatically. First, there were to be no sniggers at the mention of the number thirty-nine. Any foolishness of this kind would be severely punished. Nobody was to stroke his chin, thus, or mention Warley. Nobody was to say ‘aww ginn’, or speak of Percy. ‘Now, I will never mention this again. Open your Ridout on page seven.

  Crikey. What was he talking about? We found out quickly enough. The name Warley and the number thirty-nine were both associated with one master: ‘Bilge’, otherwise known as Mr Gilbert, otherwise identified by the number thirty-nine in the ‘Blue Book’.

  Mr Gilbert was a master of staggeringly sadistical demeanour, who taught science with astonishing incompetence. He was what only a schoolteacher can be — at once terrifying and ludicrous.

  ‘Bilge’ had a length of pink rubber Bunsen-burner piping in his pocket. With no apparent irony. he called it ‘Percy’. If not close enough to hit a boy with the palm of his hand around the ear, or tear the hair upwards on the temple, he would happily beat him with Percy. Or he would wait, smelly, blubbering spittle over you, leaning against your desk and rubbing himself against it, so close that you could smell his beery breath and see the underpants sticking up beyond his waistband with his shirt stuffed inside them. After three weeks he would come in and begin the first lesson all over again. It was a brave pupil who raised his hand and said, ‘Sir, I think we’ve done this already.’

  ‘Aww ginn’ was the noise that Mr Gilbert made when ‘thinking’. It could be reduced to a simple ‘awwww’, delivered under the breath, faintly, imperceptibly, to begin with, but growing in intensity with repetition. Any mention of any of the key words might start a sudden rustle. Should the ignorant teacher taking morning assembly be unlucky enough to have to use the number thirty-nine, or mention an Earl of England called Percy, or have to refer in some way to the nearby suburb of Warley (where it was widely bruited Mr Gilbert had been incarcerated in a mental hospital for some of his adult life), a noise like unto a gathering wind would pass through the inmates of Mr Dotheboy’s prison camp.

  ‘Awwwww …’ it would start, very softly. Nobody could be fingered. It was impossible to apportion blame. ‘Awwwwww …’ the sound would get louder. The schoolmaster would adjust his spectacles. His myrmidons, the house praeposters, over from the senior school, some of whom could already be seen smirking, would start pacing the butts, trying to identify the offenders, but with straight faces, the noise would continue rising in volume, a nasal, flat Essex drawl, ‘awwwwwwww …’

  ‘Silence! I will have quiet! I promise you, you will all be facing detention if you do not stop this instantly …’

  And it would fade, as if by secret signal. Though a bolder boy might just pret
end to sneeze ‘gin!’, and the hall would erupt.

  ‘Silence!’

  It was the great divide. Like a Spanish tyrant in Sicily, the governance of the school refused to even acknowledge the injustices of one of its satraps. It pretended that everything about Mr Gilbert was normal. It was we who were mad, and so two hundred little boys registered their protest through acts of dangerous absurdity. They must have cursed the number thirty-nine.

  Every boy, on his arrival at Brentwood School, had to learn the details of the ‘Blue Book’. It was a natty, bound volume, similar to Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book though without the plastic cover. (Actually, Tompsett once wrote to the Chinese Embassy and claimed to have converted a factory to Communism. ‘Would it be possible,’ he inquired, ‘to supply us with a number of Little Red Books for our revolutionary studies?’ The Chinese Embassy provided eight books and a poster. We were impressed. The rest of us sent letters too. Eventually the embassy ran out of books, or perhaps they worked out that all this Maoist fervour was really sixth-form Cultural Revolutionary kitsch.)

  They never ran out of the Blue Book. It was a detailed repository of all the rituals and laws of our school. The prefects were called ‘praeposters’ . Their ranks and powers were listed in the Blue Book. Where boys were allowed or not allowed to walk, the size and names of the boarding houses, the whereabouts of the Chase, the Old Big School and Houghs were all laid down in the Blue Book, as were all twelve verses of the school song, a doggerel guide to the origins of the institution.

  They bound a lad to a green elm tree,

  And they burned him there for the folks to see.

  And in shame for his brothers and sisters all,

  They built them a school with a new red wall.

  There weren’t in fact any shameful sisters at Brentwood while I was there. There are now I came back to sign television spin-off books at Burgess’s book shop in the eighties and found it full of girls in uniform — military uniform. The boys had turned their back on the Army Corps when it became voluntary, but the girls had keenly adapted to it and become a rather distracting presence.

  The school army play-acting never drove me to anguished despair like some of the more morally acute members of my sixth form set. Public-school ritual is a perfectly rational way of running any institution: regiment, fire service or prisoner-of-war camp. The gang mentality works particularly on little boys, who would happily choose cruel temporary leaders, curious nicknames and colourful uniforms if left to their own devices. It could even provide a lump in the throat if you let it, and there are few things more enjoyable than a lump in the throat.

  House loyalties worked for me. We used to have a house music competition. The bigger boys were left to train the trebles and, for once in this world of thick-headed junior pomposity, the fey musical types were put in charge. I can still sing bits of ‘The Ash Tree’ or ‘They Told Me Heraclitus’. Each house had to massacre the same part song, but they were left free to work up a ‘unison song’. (I can also get through the ‘Pirates’ Chorus’ from HMS Pinafore.) But East House’s musical leader was the son of an ambassador, so he taught us ‘The East Is Red’ in the original Chinese.

  ‘Dong fang hung, chai yang sen, chung qui choo liaou ke Mao Tse Tung.’ It was a belter.

  Did we win? I don’t recall. But I can remember that first verse of the song, and I can remember at the age of thirteen the excitement of the night — the school hall crammed, the deafening cheers, the bright-eyed commitment and the rivalry. It was the sort of occasion that P G. Wodehouse yearned for all through his adult life. We only got a taste of it from time to time. Perhaps any school which was largely a day school had difficulty working up that sort of thing on a regular basis.

  For our part, as absolute beginners, we were glad that some of the traditions were falling away. The year before I arrived they had finally abandoned summer boaters, so we stood a little less chance of getting beaten up. But we stuck out like sore and slightly furry thumbs anyway because until the sixth form we wore grey flannel suits — quite enough, we felt, to make us conspicuous on the bus.

  ‘We may ride by land, we may ride by sea’, but there are few places more deserted than the outskirts of a suburban town in the middle of the day In Brentwood in 2005, I stepped out into another empty dreamscape, with a solitary window cleaner walking by carrying a ladder and whistling, like a fake extra. We used to get on my bus here, by the station. Originally, we waited in the middle of the town, but it got too busy. so we walked the extra distance down the hill, often following a couple of hairy blokes in the year above us who wore exceptionally pointed Chelsea boots with the heels worn down so that they loped like Mexican cowboys.

  The stop was till there, in front of that deserted parade of shops, opposite the Essex Arms. Five minutes, ten minutes a day, ten thousand minutes — a hundred and sixty-seven hours of my life spent waiting for a daily bus, and the only specific incident I recall was the day that Jimi Hendrix died.

  It was on the front of a copy of the Evening Standard. We leaned down to peer up at the headlines, until, irritated, the man in front of us in the queue lent us the front page.

  Hendrix dead! And we had never even seen him ‘live . Jimpson was particularly upset. He had adapted like the rest of us into a cool sixth-former schoolboy, with dog-fringe hair, but, like the rest of us, hung on to his fourteen-year-old obsessive collecting habits. In the sixth form it was live performances. It was why rock festivals were so popular. You could knock off nine or ten international guitar heroes on one ticket. It would have always been Graham Jimpson and me at the bus stop. We took the 339 home together every day for six years.

  My old bus no longer ran from the station, so I walked up the hill through the quiet town towards the school, past the Ursuline Convent, presumably still a hotbed of what we thought of as the naughtier gels, and stood finally in front of the main red-brick block and clock tower. There was not much visibly stirring at my school either. The front — the imposing main entrance under the tower — was never used by anyone except passing members of Royalty. It was half past ten. I felt like a voyeur on my own life. The dense red brick walls revived only a slight anxiety: the trepidation of dreams about abandonment and inadequacy.

  I didn’t have to go in. I could easily revisit the place as if in one of those dreams. I can trace the topography like a half-complete computer-game. Drifting in by the side gate, past the crumbling Essex red-brick walls, facing straight on to the fat, flat end of the old junior gym (the one run by Mr Odell, the trim and moderately sane old boy instructor, who wore a pair of tightly drawn up white trousers and a singlet), I can easily walk down that alley in my imagination, leaving the bicycle shed to my right, cross the playground asphalt and enter the junior school, Lawrence House.

  It had a flecked concrete floor. There were steps up into an assembly hall. Nothing ever seemed to happen in that room except morning assemblies, presided over by Mr Taylor, a French teacher and the head of the junior school, who had a demeanour of weary concentration. I can clearly remember his fishy eye and his seeming lack of direct contact, a good protective amphibious skin. You never cheeked mystery in the junior school.

  I could slow down now for a few seconds. There were two scuffed and battered double doors on either side of this assembly hall. The left-hand side was my staircase. I spent the first year at the top of it in Middle Two, at a desk half-way back in the middle of the second row away from the window.

  I had a briefcase. That was important for some reason. It might have been bought to calm my nerves about the frightening, new, big school, because I remember the ritual of it and the slight foreboding I associated with these new plasticky, smelly things: the tubular pencil case with a zip around the top and the Perspex protractor and the silver metal pencil sharpener fitted under an elastic retaining strap.

  We did the ‘new maths’, so soon I had a slide-rule too, in a grey plastic slotted case — nice but never quite the best. Some boys had very swish ones. B
ut I feared slide-rules anyway because they were to do with maths and I found maths — new, old or ancient — perplexing and time-consuming.

  I recall that even the blackboards in my new classroom were different from St John’s Junior. They seemed to be a deep, deep green, not black at all, and they slid sideways. The masters wrote on them furiously, urging us to ‘get this down’, with lumps of chalk breaking off and flying across the room in their haste to impart all the necessary instruction. The mummying had gone. I wasn’t the top of the form at this school. I was struggling to keep up.

  It was here, on this first floor, that I wandered up one lunchtime when I should properly have been outside and heard a painful, breathy sobbing. I glimpsed, in the further classroom, a boy darting about. I can’t recall his name, but I knew that he was soppy and a pain, not a friend of mine, but one of those boys who gradually and effectively alienate the masters, because they never do exactly what they’re told, or look wrong or talk funny or just fail.

  He was running around the desks that lunchtime, refusing to do what he was told again, with a master, one of the younger, tougher, geography teachers, in pursuit, holding a gym shoe in his hand, trying to get him to stay still long enough to be beaten. Both were pleading, the one with the other. The master with the boy, to try and make him accept the inevitable, and the boy with the master, refusing, crying and running around the room, pushing desks in front of him.