I had to press myself back against the wall, in case either saw me there: a voyeur, witnessing something that I certainly didn’t want to see. I didn’t want to experience it either. Somewhere in this school there were canes, and boys were severely beaten. The theory was that once you’d had it, you could take it again, but I never wanted to have it. Most of all I was scared that I would be like the crying boy, unable to face the ordeal itself.
Moving back, back down the stairs, there would have been that room where we sat for a year in Upper Three, quite a small class. Mr Rance (with his red face and hunched body) taught us history in that lower room. We liked him because he had been a wing commander in the war and at least he could be diverted off any subject with astounding ease. ‘Please sir, please sir, are these Huguenots a bit like German pilots, sir?’
‘What do you mean, Phillips?’
‘Well, sir, didn’t they defend themselves with cunning and guile too?’
‘Yes, yes, I suppose …
‘What was it like, though, sir, when the Germans attacked?’
‘They came with very little warning. One minute it was a blue sky up ahead and the next you saw them … ah, Phillips, are you trying to distract me from the lesson?’
‘No, sir, but did you fire straight away?’
‘No. You see, we only had a limited amount of ammunition …
If I walk out of the back of the building and turn left there was a metal door down there in the back of the swimming pool which we only penetrated later because it led to the rifle range. When I was in the Corps I had a go at shooting two-twos and I like the fact that when I am caught in a log cabin and the red Indians are rushing round outside and the women are loading rifles over on the table I can be at the loophole with my jacket off, the ineffectual schoolteacher figure in glasses, but nonetheless a pretty decent shot.
And beyond that there were some corrugated iron huts, weren’t there, edging down the side of the lawn in front of Otway under the beech trees?
The junior library was over that way too, in one of the corrugated huts where we flipped though Amateur Photographer and sometimes, amongst the studies of birch trees on a hillside and northern streetscapes with big shadows, we found a gloomily lit nude. One little spiv, a dealer in smut and poker dice and American comics, who often managed to find dirty books or pornographic playing cards (he must have had older brothers), once proudly showed us a hugely blown-up photograph of a crotch — I assume from one of these Amateur Photographers. It was utterly unfathomable — a few darker smudges on a dark smudge. Even after his lurid explanations, there was almost nothing to decipher, but we were happy to peer and to speculate.
But that’s what boys did. They offered up things in the playground: a card trick, or a joke, or a look at some magazine, or a pair of shoes with a compass in the heel and the tracks of various animals in the sole. It was a way of doing business. We had little else to offer each other but we were shamelessly open. We wanted to play.
Walking on into Brentwood High Street in 2005 I passed a poster advertising the return of ‘Allo ‘Allo. The town was struggling to adapt to the twenty-first century as much I was. And when the bus finally came I was disappointed. The top deck had gone. We school kids used to push up the Routemaster spiral staircase to get to the six good seats: two at the back, immediately behind the top of the stairs, and slightly raised up, and four across the front with the winders on the windows and the extra leg room. Housewives and OAPs wisely stayed below.
Now, I got as high as I could by sitting on the seat above the wheel arch. There weren’t any children going home today, but the bus followed the same pattern, nosing its way painfully slowly along the A128, out of the town, past a sign for ‘Heritage of Brentwood’ (it was a used-car lot) and on through retail pun country: ‘Crafty Arty’ and ‘Rosie’s Posies’ and ‘Time 4 Pets’ and, just like the 4.15 I used to take, the bus virtually emptied before it reached Bentley and the beginning of the countryside.
Jimpson and I and a couple of others were the only ones who stayed the distance, probably doing our homework by the time we reached Blackmore. (‘What is this supposed to be?’ ‘Sorry sir, I wrote the essay on the bus.’) Or I would have to listen to Jimpson recite the entire First Division league tables and the name of each player on every team from memory. He made me test him. God, I hated football, and we were a football school. I had never played football properly before I arrived at Brentwood and my mother, stunned by the cost of the plastic-studded slinky black plimsolls that I craved in the school shop, provided me instead with my father’s old rugby boots, and huge lengths of laces that had to go right around the back and twice under the instep. The boots curved upwards, like canal-fished boots, and had great bulbous toe caps. Once we had all got over the initial worry of abandoning our pants under our shorts (something the gym masters seemed obsessively concerned about) I was singled out as a collective object of derision thanks to my bloody boots. My rounded toe caps were routinely blamed for sky-ing the ball. Jimpson called them my Dixie Deans, after some pre-war ‘centre forward. Dean became my nickname until Stub or Stub-man or Stubbers or the Stub or the Stub Person or other variations on the theme of my supposed resemblance to the end of a pencil took over.
In 2005 the countryside was still surprisingly undeveloped this close to London, with long vistas across undulating autumn-jaundiced fields. A series of huge brown signs ironically advertised the location of a secret nuclear bunker. They annoyed me with their pointless intrusion (at least the bunker had been purposefully hidden) but otherwise I felt calm, perfectly content to be jolting through this unconsidered Essex countryside. It was a sentimental journey, and, as such, quietly joyous.
It was a lasting friendship with Jimpson. We were bracketed together for most of the middle school, sat opposite each other at lunch and got picked out to be servers at the master’s table. I went to visit his house sometimes in the holidays, which showed a dangerous intimacy in boy’s school terms. He wore glasses held together with Sellotape and adopted an air of geekish defeatism, wearily accepting his painful lot as the butt of imagined tragic occurrences, but it stood us in little stead in the sandpit up behind his house when we met two Ongar boys who wanted to play fighting. We didn’t want to play. As we inwardly predicted, they really wanted to fight properly. Graham was suddenly thrashing around in the sand, beating off this bloke, while the other one held me back. They drew blood, smashed his glasses and taunted us. But we were grammar school boys. All the fighting in our playgrounds was mock wrestling matches, ‘no fists’. The only injuries were to the precious school suits and someone’s pride. The groping, grappling, gouging earnestness of Graham Jimpson’s struggle with a complete stranger, who wanted a proper fight for fun, was scary. We didn’t have the guts to try to hurt someone by any means other than verbal assault, even then, at the age of twelve.
Early school itself was a bit like a bus ride. We moved further up the deck, played games, and worked as it rattled along but I don’t think we ever looked up to examine the scenery or think where it was going. We hardly marked off years except as a progression of term beginnings and endings. There were occasional bus stops: like birthdays, or the fifth of November, which rose out of a flat landscape, but were themselves utterly routine, even if invested with a manic anticipation.
I kept my fireworks in a box in the cupboard in the back cloakroom. Somewhere around the middle of October I used to go to the newsagent at the far end of Epping High Street. It had the biggest selection in town, in a glass-fronted counter; down a couple of steps, as I remember. Up one end of the vitrine were the hat-box sized mines of serpents, or triple roman candles on wooden spatulas, linked by gunpowder tubes and sealed together with different-coloured tape. They were generally far beyond my means; I sometimes pooled everything, or badgered my mother, and got one, just one, and it became the star of the collection, to be minutely examined on a nightly basis. I collected nothing else quite as mysteriously fragile as fireworks. The bes
t ones rattled. The really big rockets had a tube and then a bulging bit. They were straight where it ran alongside the squared-off stick, but they jutted out and widened towards the top. You could even see where they had been glued together. Sometimes the cone was stuck on slightly wonkily. It added to their individual character. I quite liked just the sticks themselves. As soon as I got in from school I would get down the box and pore over the reds and blues of the wrappers, covered with magic signs of stars or Romany zig-zags, the instructions that promised a rain of fire or a golden fountain of flames and the indigo blue slightly transparent touch paper which emerged so delicately from the tubular cover. Even today I would happily paper a room with some of the Brock’s glamorous firework paper designs. The smell of the cordite was the essence, like something powerful, strong and heady. I would arrange them in ranks, imagining their power, sniffing each one and organizing them around a particularly potent long, thin candle with the little cardboard indent at the bottom and the twist at the top. It would have blown a Freudian analyst’s head off.
It was hardly surprising that the actual day was always a bit of a let-down. My father took control. People were burned, maimed and disfigured for life by playing with fireworks. They were not toys! As soon as it was dark enough we would get him outside, usually in company with friends who had brought their boxes too, and the dads would wobble to and fro in the dark, lining them up and setting them off on the walls of the rose beds while we huddled by the kitchen door and I tried to identify which disappointing squib corresponded to which luridly packaged fetish object from my collection. ‘Was that the Cracker Pot?’ That one piff and fizz can’t have been the huge one with the special red plastic spike in which I had invested so much hope. I spent more time peering in the box trying to orchestrate the display than I did watching them go off. I always saved the biggest for a finale, like the really huge Catherine Wheel, arranged like three bombs on a wooden hub cap, with its own six-inch nail Sellotaped across the centre. It usually failed to go. My father would scurry away. There was a tiny glow worm in the dark. ‘It’s gone out.’
‘No, just wait.’ And then, after waiting for ever, he would take a lot of persuading to go back, shine the torch on it and try again, until when it finally did cough out a lot of sparks he sometimes broke all his own rules and bravely stuck his hand in to give it a push. Usually it shot off for a disappointing thirty seconds of whizzing light. But the aggrandisement of the collection was the main thing. Even ponderously setting them off one by one my mighty box burned up in half an hour flat.
The following day we would search around in the wet, collecting the flaky, charred remains, the stubs of cardboard and sodden rocket sticks, as if trying to rescue some of the their former true magnificence. But they only made our fingers black.
Jimpson used to slump off the bus in Ongar. I would watch him trail off across the road, lugging a briefcase full of books, his head bowed, a finger habitually poking at the bridge of his glasses while he blinked myopically at the pavement. He was the last of the school commuters to alight, just opposite the tube station, except for me. By then I was only half-way home and had the top deck to myself.
The adult me was happy to be on the bus again, but I would have been nervous to breach the school itself. For years I had avoided all the ‘Old Brentwoodian’ stuff and finally only gone back in the early nineties to give out some prizes.
I was greeted in the headmaster’s sitting room. I had only ever been there once before, for a reading of Tennessee Williams, so I was unprepared for the shock. They walked me across to the new sports hall where I was going to pretend to be a retired colonel, and as we banged through the swing doors, I tottered. ‘Stop. Stop,’ I said.
It was uncanny. I had expected the classrooms to be vaguely the same, but they were precisely the same. There was the tiling half-way up the walls. There were the boards, the parquet floor, the room divider in Upper Four through which we used to listen to the Remove baiting ‘Zip’, the physics master. The desks must have been replacements, but they were battered just like ours. But there was more than that. It was the smell. I had completely erased the stench of floor polish mixed with sweat, and now it hit me like a chloroform gas attack. The teachers, the new teachers, stood looking bemused. They wanted to hurry me on. But I wanted to just sit there, in the classrooms, even though the entire junior school and their parents were already rustling their order papers somewhere in some distant hall. This was like a youth drug. It was acutely, painfully evanescent, because it was nothing more tangible than an atmosphere, and I wanted to absorb it before it evaporated.
Everything else about school life has proved almost too fragile to retrieve. You can easily contact old friends, but standing under the oak trees by the science block listening to Gotley tell a dirty joke, or shouting above the noise of the dining hall, or sheltering in the junior library reading old Punches when it rained was a small proportion of school life. Most of the time was spent in a one-way relationship with a series of adult males; men like Mr Gilbert, Mr Baron, Mr Cluer and Mr Best. Nothing can get that back, certainly not meeting them ‘in real life’. As they stood there, wittering on, to thirty or so boys for a year at a time, did they have any appreciation of the effect they had on us? Mr Ricketts, for example, was an intelligent teacher. We admired him. We were impressed that he went off to some American school for some reputedly huge salary, but what I remember most about him is that his trouser zip never did up at the top. We knew the three hairs on the mole on Mr Cluer’s face far better than we knew the declension of any transitive verb. In the sixth form, we even encountered our teachers as independent adults. We were cloistered with them for longer and we assumed we got to understand them as men. But I wonder. Did we really just meet their theatrical, public selves?
Mr Baron we cruelly took to be absurdly childish, with his boasting of supposed wealth from his ‘connections to the Pilkington family’, his sudden absences ‘to visit the headmaster’ when he was probably popping out for a fag, even his claims to have worked for British Intelligence. But we also encountered an inspired teacher: hanging from the blackboard, waving with one hand to imitate the wind, bellowing lines to illustrate onomatopoeia: now … as the loud … winds howl … in my ear …’ or teaching us to unpick a poem’s internal structure with forensic glee. I learned more about the nature of practical criticism from Baron than my university lecturers, principally because it seemed to matter so fiercely to him. And if he was ineffably silly, then that meant we developed an attitude, perhaps even the strongest of affections. He became a surrogate daft uncle: unshameable, quite as happy to warn us against sitting on the radiators — ‘because you’ll get piles’ — as he was to read Chaucer ‘with the original Middle English pronunciation’. At the beginning of the sixth form he played us his ‘readings’ of Paradise Lost. He set up a little reel-to-reel tape recorder and announced that he had originally performed them for the Third Programme. Cruel observers pointed out that these broadcast recordings had coughs and rustlings in the background. But I still found that, after one playing, I could recite most of the opening of Book Six from memory.
But would it be possible to meet them off duty? Ten years after I left the school, I appeared in a play in the West End. A stage doorman rang down to tell me that Jeffers, a school friend, had ‘come round’. Jeffers came in and explained that he had been away, worked in the Far East and now, after some sort of failed marriage, had come back to England. He had been walking down Shaftesbury Avenue and seen my name up in lights. This was eerily ‘Somerset Maugham’. We had hardly been close. And I behaved like most busy people in a short story confronted with a school chum. I fobbed him off by smiling weakly. He seemed content but, as he was leaving, told me he was thinking of looking up Jim Rennie, our economic history teacher.
Rennie had been an enigma. In our early years at the school he was best avoided, striding into assembly at speed and handing out punishments to anybody who caught his eye. (‘Proverbs, chapter one,
by tomorrow morning.’)
Then he took me for history. I told Jeffers how I remembered I had been late for the first day of his first sixth-form set. When I apologized frantically Rennie laughed at me. ‘We’re in the sixth form now,’ he said. ‘We can behave like gentlemen, I think.’ He explained that when he had first worked at the school some time in the 1920s, he couldn’t keep discipline, so he had decided to spare no one below the age of fifteen, but for us, now we were in the sixth form we would be adults together.
Jeffers agreed. He had been tolerant, wise and funny. He made us write a list of useful sayings in the front of our folders. ‘Life is real, life is earnest and the goal is not the grave,’ and ‘Me and my dog got lost in a fog.’
‘Do you know where he lives?’ I asked Jeffers. I began to see that he was a lot more interested in tracking down this surrogate father figure than he was in meeting me.
‘No, but it must be up near Penrith. I can ask at the school.’
Rennie had come from Cumbria. He had dressed in what I now realize were rather beautiful tweed suits, like a Penrith solicitor. Penrith had been the source of all wisdom, and it made sense that he would have gone back there. I wished Jeffers luck, told him to call again if he wanted to get back together.
I didn’t see Jeffers for another ten years. I was appearing at the Apollo in Oxford. The stage-door keeper called down again. In a few moments Jeffers was sitting in my dressing room. ‘You remember when I saw you last,’ he began. I nodded. I did. ‘Well, I didn’t get back in touch because I decided to go to France.’ He paused and looked distant. ‘But … well, things haven’t worked out over there and I’ve just come back and I was in Oxford and I saw your name …’
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