Semi-Detached

by Griff Rhys Jones

  It was up in lights again.

  ‘You’re still in the same line of business, then?’

  We talked for a bit about mutual friends that neither of us had seen, and after a while he got up to leave. ‘Oh, by the way,’ he said in the doorway, ‘I tracked down old Rennie. He was in Penrith. Rather lovely cottage. I went to his door and knocked. He was perfectly nice, but …’ his brow darkened. I had never seen this before, but it was quite a neat trick. ‘… but … he didn’t remember me.’ Jeffers looked depressed.

  ‘Well, I suppose he must have had hundreds of pupils in his time.’

  ‘That’s what he said, but I said to him, you know, I was in your set for two years. Two years, five times a week. He must have remembered me.’

  Nothing I said convinced Jeffers that Jim Rennie wasn’t engaging in some schoolmasterly subterfuge. He shook his head and went off into the night and for all I know to Zanzibar. I suppose I will meet him again in another ten years, backstage at the Oldham Coliseum when I’m touring The Odd Couple.

  On the last day of school ever, some of us went for a lunchtime drink with Roger Perrin, who taught medieval history. He was another great teacher, who deported himself like a big-game hunter loping around after some comical prey. We were his first set. His lips would twitch with amusement at the experiments of Frederick II or the Chronicles of Geoffrey of Monmouth. It was rare at that stage to allow any intimacy. It was rare for teachers to even admit that they drank beer. But this was the end of the seventh form. We were leaving with Oxbridge success. Just those few pints of beer in the back room of a pub seemed the culmination of a steady progression towards the outside world, like one of those scenes from a madhouse movie where the inmate is taken to a restaurant and shown a menu. ‘Go on, you can have anything you want.’

  I kept in touch with Roger. He seemed an exception —able to free himself from the conspiracy of ‘them and us’, perhaps because he had been young himself when he taught me. He laughed about Mr Gilbert. He told me that the headmaster, Sale, a man Roger admired, had tried repeatedly to sack Bilge but he had been thwarted by the teacher’s unions. It was a telling moment, like being allowed a glimpse behind the scenes.

  Spud Baron sort of remembered me too. I had hoped he would. Again, I was in a show, with my name up in hardboard. The stage-door keeper rang me. ‘Do you know a Major Baron?’

  I cringed slightly. This was too dad-like. I remembered that he sometimes adopted his military rank at ticket offices and in theatres.

  But I braced myself for affection. We were off duty. I assumed that he would greet me and reminisce fondly, that he would drop his pretensions, have a laugh and we would talk as veterans. I was making Jeffers’ mistake. He never even took his hat off. He sat with his coat on his lap and hit the chair with commentary, analysing my performance in perfectly complimentary tones, but remote and smiling, no different in his manner from the classroom ten or so years before. Can you believe that I wanted to take this short, aged, pompous bachelor in my arms, acknowledge him on behalf of us all as the figure that he had been to me and so many of my friends in those years? I wanted, somehow, to repay the affection that he seemed to have squandered on us.

  I wish I had. As it was, I sat there with a helpless smile on my face, utterly unable to get a word in edgeways, shook his hand when he finished and let him bustle off. He’s dead now.

  That last day. though, had also been my last trip on the 339. There was a girl who had split up with her long-term boy friend some weeks before. She was gorgeous. She was intelligent. She was highly experienced. I had arranged to take her out in London. This was irresponsibly mature. I would have to talk to her all evening without other boys as props. But whatever happened I had to get back to Epping, get changed into my loon pants and tie-dye vest, back-comb my hair and then take the tube to meet her in Piccadilly. It was a three-hour commitment. I needed to be on the two-fifteen bus. So I had to swig down a last half pint and run for the damned 339, though even as I climbed aboard, I noticed that I wanted to pee.

  By the time we got to North Weald on that trip — the last journey I was to take on this route before I sat on it now — I was the colour of a five-week-old corpse. Sweat was pouring down my brow Alone on the top of the bus, I writhed in agony. By the time I got to Ongar, I had been in excruciating pain, my bladder begging for release. As we crept through the bare countryside I nearly fainted away. North Weald was as long as it is now; an endless parade of rubbishy villas and nondescript airforce houses. The bus had never lumbered so laboriously. It stopped at least four times. There was no way I could urinate out of the window I couldn’t surreptitiously piss down the central aisle. As the 339 swayed ponderously past the Battle of Britain airfield and approached the edge of Epping Forest I could stand it no longer. I was within ten minutes of home. I had waited for two years, pining after Helen. Here at last was a legitimate toehold on her favours. I was within shouting distance of a hand up her bra. But it was no good. I was going to die. I rang the request stop bell, leaped past the startled bus conductor and charged across the road into the forest of ancient oaks. I stood there swathed in clouds of steamy relief. I had had to go. That last journey had defeated me.

  8. Weekend Hippy

  My relief in Epping Forest left me in a state of ecstatic bliss. I was close enough to town to hitch in and get the Central Line to meet the lovely Helen too. But it didn’t work out. It may have been my stream of offbeat chatter which became a fire hydrant and drowned her. It may have been the entertainment. Leafing through Time Out, I chose the most pretentious film I could find. (She was after all doing history and English A levels just like me.) Time Out failed to mention that WR: The Mysteries of the Organism was borderline pornography. As the lights went down, some respite from my jabber was provided by six naked people breaking eggs over their thighs in an Orgasmatron. She was mature enough to cope with it. I wasn’t. What if she thought I had taken her to this deliberately? I started whispering my anguish from about five minutes in. (She may have wanted to continue the relationship. Who knows? I never gave her a chance to get a word in edgeways.)

  Passion had surfaced with astonishing virulence around the age of fifteen. Girls, who had been avoided, swept into the schoolboy consciousness much like Airfix kits five years previously. One minute we had been happily indifferent to their existence and the next minute they were an all-consuming obsession.

  At the beginning of the sixth form, newly kitted out in blazers and flannels to differentiate ourselves from the hairy-suited lower forms, divided into sets instead of classes and tentatively discovering each other’s Christian name, a group gathered in ‘six thirty-two’ every lunchtime and break. The headmaster directly referred to the ‘unpleasant sound of cliquish laughter emanating from one of the classrooms in the new block’. There were other sixth-form gangs: better-heeled smoothies who seemed to have money and the demeanour of a junior sales team, or geeky chaps who hung around the library to do crosswords, but we were the ones who felt most pleased with our own company. ‘The Clique’ — Gotley, Macey, Tompsett, Squire, Roberts, Holloway, Jimpson, Jaques and the rest — shared a considerable passion for ‘progressive music’, animated discussion about the existence of God (a number discovered Christ along with deodorants) and meeting girls. Tantalizingly there were two girls’ schools within a condom’s throw of our school. And in the very earliest days of the term it was announced that there were going to be ballroom dancing classes.

  The first lesson had an explosive erotic charge heightened by a strong smell of floor polish. A veritable rack of girls, in dark uniform short skirts, knees together, trembling with anticipation, were lined up in front of us in the Memorial Hall. The portraits of a dozen ex-headmasters looked on helplessly as ‘madame’ flounced down the centre of the Memorial Hall, clapped her hands and announced, ‘Now, boys, step forward and choose a partner.’

  There was an undignified scuttle towards Louise, who had the shortest skirt. ‘Come on. Come on!’ She
clapped again. I offered a hand to my sixth-form feminine ideal. Janet was blonde, with a fringe and a snub nose. She was also an identical twin.

  In the 1980s, when I directed a production of Twelfth Night, itself about identical twins, I felt I needed to get the cast to search out their memories of infatuated love. ‘It’s what this play is about,’ I explained. ‘You remember: sitting in class, unable to concentrate, mooning after that girl you took to the disco.’

  Orsino, Viola and Olivia stared blankly at me.

  ‘You know, you do … you must have done this: when you couldn’t bring yourself to telephone; when you wrote her name in your exercise book. When you got like Donne, and you just glued eyes together.’

  They exchanged looks. ‘No,’ said Viola. ‘No, I’ve never felt anything like that.’

  The others shrugged in agreement. (In the end, it wasn’t a hugely successful production.) But I was mystified. I fell in love all over the shop in the lower sixth. We all did: silly schoolboy love, with yearning and sleepless nights and that fluttering feeling in the thorax when you’re thinking about her in class.

  ‘Are you with us, Rhys Jones?’

  ‘Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.’

  After the first few dances, treading on her toes enough to get. myself noticed, and after a bit of pairing off with a few others, just to check them out, Janet and I became regular dance-partners. It was a particularly clammy-handed moment when the tables were turned. (‘Now, girls! You choose.’) But Janet walked across the parquet and asked me for the first foxtrot.

  My friend Fischl took up with Janet’s identical twin sister, Clare, which was handy. because I reckoned I might need someone to talk to. Clare looked startlingly similar to Janet. (They were both in school uniform, but even in the little details that girls fiddled with, such as the length of their skirts and the way they tied their ties, they were of a piece.)

  I found myself wondering, was Clare perhaps the better-looking of the two? No, no, impossible. They both had rather, well, square faces and strong jaws, but Janet was divine. I was intoxicated. Not that we talked much. We weren’t encouraged to talk. We had complicated steps to learn. Janet looked demurely down, and I loved that, though she was probably just keeping her feet out of my way. She was quite practically minded. I was full of admiration. Admiration and infatuation; this was perfect.

  The waltz encouraged us to hold on tight because, as we gained confidence, we could sort of pull the girl, I mean Janet, up close and spin around to the twirly bits of music. This required us to be deliciously firm, though I suspect neither Fischl nor I was as strong as Janet and Clare. They were both stars of the high-school hockey team. Gotley said they looked a little stocky with it, but then what did he know?

  I invited Janet to a party at Jaques’ on a Saturday night. It was near by. After a day moping around I got into my pink shirt and blue hipster brushed denims and drank a half pint, hiding from schoolmasters in a local pub. I waited to ring the doorbell in Shenfield Road as close to the agreed time as I dared.

  I stood breathing heavily, waiting in the yellow light from the pebbled hall window by the rose beds. There was bumping inside and the door opened. And there she was: my passion.

  Or was it?

  Was it her sister Clare? I quickly switched off the engine of ecstasy.

  But no, hang on, it was Janet after all. She was dressed up and looked and smelled different. I switched it all back on. This was harder work than I had imagined.

  We escorted Janet and Clare to the school disco in the pavilion. The school stage crew had hired in a lorryload of late-sixties disco lights. I found it swooningly hedonistic. I still associate colour-wheels, swirling psychedelic gloop, drifting around the walls in splodges of specimen-tray glamour with the promise of unparalleled decadence. Everything became fluidly groovy. Even the girl’s short, polypropylene dresses seemed to pulsate with organic promise. But it was so dark and mysterious and loud that we had even more difficulty than usual telling our partners apart.

  The music was stomach-wobbling. During ‘Je t’aime’, the panting Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg hit, I took the opportunity to clasp Janet even tighter than in the waltz. I tried a kiss. There was a hiatus when our teeth clashed, but after that we rammed our mouths together until our lips grew sore. Over the next few weeks, I stayed hot, but Janet cooled. Was it because, away from the dance floor, we had nothing in common at all? Or was it because both Janet and Clare were determined to stick to kissing and used those strong hockey-player’s arms to pinion wandering hands? Or was it because I still couldn’t work out which one I was yearning for? They were quite serious really, like so many girls. We wanted to wag our tails and lick them and then run off back to the rest of the boys.

  So then I was out of love. It was a bit of a relief really. Never mind the ballroom dancing, there was still the mixed folk club, and the joint historical society. We trotted off to those and met less sporty girls with glasses and funny hairdos — more like ourselves in fact. And if the historical society seemed a bit heavy. then we organized a medieval banquet to lighten it up. Despite rather too many apples and a surfeit of cold chicken, the chair-girl from the high school wore such a low-cut gown that we elected to have another feast. Only this time it would be a Roman orgy. The girls thought this was a fantastic idea. Good girls. It was chicken in togas instead.

  I liked being with girls, but I probably liked being with blokes a bit more. Blokes were funnier and grubby for a laugh. ‘Did you get a hand up her skirt? Cor.’ We may have joined the film club and the debating society and talked about apartheid and Jean-Luc Godard, but we preferred Gotley enthusing about one-handed wrestling with a bra-hook.

  Clearly, a steady relationship got in the way of real fun, and every Saturday night there was now a party in some blank bit of Essex hinterland. Romford had its brewery. Ilford its camera film. But Upminster was the quintessential suburban playground where all the parties happened. Somebody who knew somebody called John had definitely been invited. So we would gather in the late afternoon at a friend of a friend’s to listen to most of ‘Albatross’ played badly on a cheap electric guitar and would then lope off into the indistinguishable streets to negotiate entry. That was the plan. Often the friend of a friend would have forgotten the exact number, or even the exact street, so we would cover Upminster, trudging up mock-Tudor avenues, keeping a careful look out for a tell-tale red light or a glimpse of pyramid hair or a reefer jacket in a porch.

  ‘Martin!’

  ‘That you, Graham?’

  ‘Yeah. Is this the party?’

  ‘Yes. Can you get us in? Have you got an invite?’

  ‘Yeah, but I’ve got this lot with me already.’

  I was a long way from home, a hanger-on. And Graham was undoubtedly only a peripheral member of the ‘Upminster Fun Gang’ anyway. If it all went to plan, then Martin saw Alison whose party it was and we pushed on in, past the blokes leaning with one foot up on the wall in the hallway who were knocking ornaments on to the floor with the back of their coats, on into the living room, where it would be dark except for a single lamp with a shawl thrown over it which was threatening to ignite. The smell of singeing was hidden by the joss-sticks, there to provide a whiff of Kathmandu. The radiogram was turned up so high that the plywood sides were rattling. Some girls had put on Tamla Motown and were dancing together. Later, some boys would put on Deep Purple and dance together too, fingers in belts, arms akimbo, swinging down towards each other’s crotch in a way that might have impressed a Zulu but was steadfastly ignored by Upminster girls, who didn’t really like heavy music anyway.

  At some point there would be an argument, because Bez wanted to play some ‘real music’. After Mike’s precious Deep Purple had been scratched, they would reach a compromise and put on Pink Floyd and lie there in a drunken stupor on the floor until the room had emptied, apart from the two girls who had been sitting on the sofa against the wall all night waiting to go home. It was bliss.

  I usually
stayed in the kitchen. It was the only place you could see. It was the place where all the drink was deposited. The cheapest party-ticket, brandished at the door, was a bottle of Hirondelle, which cost under a quid — reputedly a mixture of Corsican wine and sulphuric acid — and it knocked you out.

  We made occasional forays into squats, or parties in huge houses, like Wendy’s at the end of the road in Epping, where the upper levels would be full of young men vaguely wobbling back-combed billows of hair to freaky music. I loved to go into these dark rooms, in search of the inner sanctum of hipness. It was quite possible in the late sixties and early seventies to grow a large head of hair, wear excessively wide flares and aspire to be more moody than any one else as a lifestyle option. ‘Don’t hassle me, man,’ could be applied equally to domestic chores, moving one’s legs out of the way or engaging in any form of discourse at all.

  I remember one squalid homestead, where everybody was huddled in a corner of the basement room. What were we doing there? It was just another party. We went to sit ourselves down and do a bit of head-waggling of our own, but someone spoke up from the haze on the other side. ‘Hey. man, careful over there. The water bed exploded.’ We stepped gingerly over an enormous damp patch..

  Or what about the visit to my brother in Colchester, where he was at the hippest of all universities — Essex, so freaky that Mrs Thatcher specifically singled it out for verbal assault. Here indeed was the epicentre of unstraightness. Imagine my excitement. The whole place was en fête. It was an enormous party of huge darkened rooms. In one, severely dressed, bearded men were dropping big pipes, just to hear the sound they made. It was a ‘happening’. On the whole, little actually seemed to happen at the happenings I went to. They all demanded reserves of patience. There was an initial buzz. Gosh. This really is ‘other’, but when you got used to it, it became just a bit too extenuated and unimaginative, like a Hawkwind concert.