Semi-Detached

by Griff Rhys Jones

  Then I used my accumulated Christmas money to buy a whole Beatles LP: Help.

  It caused consternation. I can remember my mother trying to talk me out of it. I would only listen to it once. Next week there would be other pop records. It was an utter waste of money. Wouldn’t I prefer to buy a telescope? But I prevailed. And I still have my copy. It didn’t really fit on the record player, though. The huge disc overhung the edges of the tiny turntable.

  It must have been some time around then that I fancied being a pop star and took up guitar lessons. I never practised. My guitar had particularly poor ‘action’, the strings seemed a long way from the fret board, and it took all my strength to play a single note. I am afraid that my favourite bit was walking through the town carrying the thing: I imagined everybody thinking, ‘there goes Griff “Guitar” Rhys Jones, the good-rocking eleven-year-old,’ but I didn’t want to learn to play ‘My Bonny Lies Over The Ocean’ anyway.

  Later, my brother came home from his boarding school under the influence of traditional jazz. (This is why I know of Coleman Hawkins.) He belonged to a club in Midhurst and wore a duffel coat, but Chris Barber was gradually being pushed out by the blues, and the blues were going electric Alexis Corner and John Mayall were twanging along in the wings.

  My sister and I used to go to a youth club in Epping up near the Catholic church. It had started as a Saturday-morning cinema, showing black-and-white cowboy serials to a noisy full house. It was presumably a Jesuitical plot, but I don’t remember that the Lone Ranger ever converted anyone to Catholicism. Later in the long summer holidays we just hung around there. I remember the hall with its tall windows and stacking tables. The sun was shining and making glaring yellow hot spots on the parquet. There was a bigger record player there, with more powerful speakers, and we played records during the summer afternoons, but we began to play one record over and over again. When it finished we rushed to stick it back on. Suddenly, with the big noise, bigger than the radio or the piddly little gramophone in the corner, what had seemed messy began to sound glorious, what had seemed disordered began to take on a visceral excitement. ‘I can see for miles and miles,’ the Who sang.

  At school, these discoveries got to be carefully passed along. The whole point of the group ethos of the gang era was these shared enthusiasms, determined by group loyalty. Upper Five was on the first floor of the main block. It was right at the end of a long corridor. It was 0-level year. We were coming under increasing pressure ‘to succeed’. The form master, Mr Best, told us, rather ominously to enjoy the summer vacation. It was the last one free of work before the end of our finals, six years hence. This was utter nonsense, but it lodged, and I blame my entire lazy existence on it. With the prospect of nothing but work ahead, I determined to take every opportunity to enjoy myself while things were a little slack.

  When the exams finished we weren’t allowed to go home.

  We had to take part in a series of improving activities organized to ‘prevent our minds atrophying’ (and to justify the huge fees charged for the boarders) . There were lectures by distinguished parents, including, excitingly, George G. Ale, out of Private Eye (an Express journalist and father of a ginger-haired twerp in a boarding house). He turned up and growled at us from a podium. Someone who worked in the BBC made us pretend to be a news room, and a plainly crazed big-game hunter banged away with his walking stick to change slides of ‘the six killer animals’ (the water buffalo being the most dangerous). But the most vivid was made by a doctor enthusiastically documenting the physical effects of a variety of venereal diseases. It was an extensive, timely and wide-ranging dissertation, accompanied by highly coloured slides of venereal warts, and the regular chair-scraping thump as another boy fainted in the dark.

  In between times, hanging about in Upper Five, no longer playing football, Holloway, Horth and I were perfecting our impression of Joe Cocker doing ‘A Little Help From My Friends’.

  ‘Eeeeee, eeeee, eee.’ It was particularly enjoyable to froth and go all twitchy in imitation of the convulsive Nottinghamshire groaner. And to do the high-pitched guitar with the scratchy distorted ending. Gotley came in from his own classroom next door and, inter alia, gave us his own educative lecture. It wasn’t pop we were interested in. It was ‘underground’. He and Tompsett had a collection of Pink Floyd albums, Jefferson Airplane albums, the Fugs and Quicksilver Messenger Service. He and Gotley were already into Zappa and Beefheart. We gazed in admiration at the inner-sleeve pictures of men wearing fish masks, top hats and fur coats.

  Gotley pointed out the complicated psychedelic graphics of the titles of the Grateful Dead offerings. If you squinted at them, you could see they said ‘take acid’. Tompsett turned the photograph of Bob Dylan on the cover of New Morning upside down. If you looked very carefully you could see a man with a trumpet up his nose.

  A teacher suddenly came in. ‘What are you all doing skulking in here?’

  ‘Nothing, sir.’

  ‘It’s a lovely day. Get out and be in the fresh air.’ But it was too late for that. That was all finished.

  We were outside the science labs when I was first introduced to the Melody Maker. The back pages had thick and inky lists of gigs. The names were arranged like wrestling posters. You could go and see bands by rote: Blodwyn Pig, the Edgar Broughton Band, the Third Ear Band, Quintessence. They were appearing at somewhere called the Roundhouse in Chalk Farm, in central London, but there were also venues in Ilford (The Red Lion), or (blimey) Epping, where I lived, at somewhere called the Wake Arms. They weren’t famous groups, but we liked the names: ‘Black Sabbath’, ‘Uriah Heep’, ‘Family’. It wasn’t pop. It was music. And Tompsett had been going to these places since he was thirteen.

  Tompsett had bog-brush hair and buck teeth, one of which was slightly discoloured. Adam Hennicker Gotley was short and never fitted his clothes. They were both the sort of humans that authority figures tend to distrust on sight. (Adam is a probation officer now) They were physically unsuited to conformity. I believe that Tompsett managed to annoy the headmaster simply by existing. His Christian name was Fabian. Mr Sale would have found such a gesture unusually suspect.

  There were plenty of genuine rebels in the school. There were boys like Morris, who adamantly refused to conform. He led his third-eleven team in dancing through a cricket match, and then at the termly event called ‘trials’, where we each had to be assessed in a sequence of athletic events, he skipped his way around the compulsory mile, while the playboy spiv of a senior gym master, Mr Shortland, looked on and went red. (Even skipping, rather an exhausting show of mettle, to be honest, got him well within the specified pass rate.) When the Corps was inspected by a general (who flew down in a helicopter) and he finally got to the field service unit — a special division, seemingly invented for those of us who were considered incapable of charging and marching — it was Morris who stepped forward and presented him with a Peace Pledge Association leaflet and a daffodil.

  There were naughty and dangerous boys, who asked disruptive questions, smoked under the stage and were suspected of being on drugs, like Martin (everybody was called Paul or Martin) . Above us there were serious offenders who were occasionally threatened with expulsion. But they were often protected by a magic halo of achievement. In the end, it was poor, hopeless, misguided Peters who got the sack. Boastful Peters, ever eager to please the gym masters; willing Peters, who became some sort of staff sergeant in the Corps, and paraded around with bits of coloured rope around his armpit; silly Peters, who stupidly boasted about trying a joint within hearing of a science master and was summarily kicked out.

  This was meant, no doubt, as a warning, but only reassured us that the authorities knew nothing. They could only lash out in ignorance. Clever boys fielded threats.

  But not me; I was perfectly content to bend either way. While Morris, Gotley, Jimpson and Tompsett looked a shower in their new Corps uniforms, I turned out quite smartly.

  Mine fitted. I secretly enjoyed shootin
g at targets and marched quite briskly. When the time came, I was happy to become a praeposter and then a school praeposter and then a head of house, happy to join the debating society and the film club and the history society, edit the Brentwoodian and direct the cars on Speech Day. I was happy to keep my feet in all camps and my options open, and be enthusiastic for any old rot, as long as I didn’t have to commit.

  By the sixth form we were no longer expected to turn out in the sports fields. Brentwood was a football school. Even today when I meet beefy blokes in blazers at city dinners they speak in hushed tones. ‘Yes, we used to play Brentwood. They were quite a good team, weren’t they?’ Who knows? I sort of recall the headmaster announcing successes against his rivals at assemblies. My house, East, provided a lot of the stars, but I never knew them. They were an arrogant presence at house meetings. But their prowess directly affected my sporting life. In the autumn term the whole school played football. Naturally, these talents came to the fore and led the house to victories. For people like me, it meant playing football in the third team, every Wednesday and Saturday afternoon, out on the furthest reaches of the school fields with the fat boys and the geeks, where the pitches had severe slopes down one end, and the junior master, wearing the house scarf around his neck, only finally appeared to shout at us at the very end of the afternoon.

  Then, in the spring term, the goal posts were removed, the rugger ‘Hs’ stuck up instead, and the ‘rugby term’ began. In East House, however, the properly athletic stepped to one side and bowed out of taking part altogether. Half of the stars were still playing football. The school wanted to have it both ways and to pretend to be a public school for a term, but the pampered race horses of the school football squad had no intention of flopping about in the mud, so the house master excused his prima donna footballers and assembled a scratch rugby team out of the weedy stragglers remaining. That included me.

  ‘Well, Rhys Jones, with a name like that, you’ll be ideal for the rugby team.’

  ‘Yes, sir. You said that about the choir, and look what happened there.’

  ‘Never mind that. You know how to play, don’t you?’

  I didn’t, but foolishly assumed that blood would out.

  The rugby term became a miserable catalogue of defeat and injury. In retrospect, the sloping, rubbish football pitches were havens. The first-fifteen rugby pitches became plains of mud to rival the Somme.

  Fielding a couple of fat boys from the fifth form, a weedy praeposter or two (not given to sporting prowess but gormlessly keeping the house spirit up), a few wets who had been winkled out of their usual bolt hole in the library and an extremely keen captain of rugby (who had failed to make the grade in football and now intended to lick his unit into shape by being cross with them and shouting a lot), we stumbled out, shivering and disorganized, to do battle with serious opposition.

  I had probably been the youngest player in the entire first division, apart from Smith, one of those boys who shot to a height of six foot and a width of four foot at the first tickling of the hormones. Smith was in South. South had a team comprised of oafish giants, and a house master with a small moustache, who took rugby very seriously indeed. We seemed to be there to provide them with practice at throwing human beings head first into frozen swamps while they waited to get to grips with their real rivals, North.

  When it was our turn to get to grips with North, naturally enough North decided to take their defeat at the hands, knees and fists of South out on us. Every week the footballing jerks would lounge on the windowsills and smirk at the sorry results we carried back to the house meeting.

  It was almost a relief to get to the summer term, when I was sent back to the sloping pitches to play cricket for the third eleven. I hate and abhor cricket. I loathe cricket. I abominate cricket. There is only one thing more boring than the abysmal English habit of watching a game of cricket and that is an afternoon playing the wretched game. It is sport for the indolently paralysed. Only three people out of twenty-two are engaged in any proper activity. The rest simply sit and wait their turn.

  The excruciating tedium of ‘fielding’ — standing about, like a man in a queue with nothing to read, in case a sequence of repetitive events, ponderously unfolding in front of you, should suddenly require your direct intervention (at which point every other listless ‘player’ suddenly, aggressively, demands your instant involvement in their pathetic ritual —’catch it!’) — is only matched by the absurdity of allowing the rest of the ‘players’ to lounge about doing nothing at all, until it is their turn to ‘play’. Play! The skill is all opportunism. Cricket requires hours of pointless ‘service’ instead of direct involvement. It seems to have been inspired to advance the values of sentry duty and directly favours ‘star players’ above team involvement.

  At my school nobody even bothered to teach you how to play the sodding game. Our first afternoon in the summer we were taken off to the nets, and a red-faced, fat and wheezy ex-county player who taught Latin badly, drank too much and was alleged to be addicted to rent boys bowled three balls at us. I had never picked up a cricket bat before, coming from a state school, and hit none of them. As a result, I had to spend five years of school summer afternoons hanging around, waiting. Waiting for a ball to come my way as ‘long stop’ when the wicket keeper failed to get the badly bowled ball first time, waiting to be asked to bowl, which I seldom was, because I couldn’t, and nobody showed me how, and then waiting and waiting and waiting for the rest of our team to get bowled out so that we could go home.

  Most of my team mates wanted to go home too. We desperately longed to be bowled out as quickly as possible, but the standard of bowling was so abysmal that even holding the bat above your head and standing to one side of the wicket seldom resulted in a clean hit on the stumps.

  Horribly, some time during ‘the match’, the urge to win the dreadful contest would overtake the third-eleven captain. After an interminable ‘game’, which meant we had all already missed our bus home, we would seem to be close to winning. Just another few runs and victory was ours. So, as ninth or tenth main in (that’s me), I could save the game.

  ‘But, Captain, the trouble is that I only get to practise this farrago called batting for three minutes twice a week. So naturally I am a sitting target.’

  After three wide balls and two no-balls I could usually get out for a duck.

  These days, I sometimes get invited to take part in celebrity cricket matches. (It’s my own fault. I have organized two myself.) Once I turned up at Fenners in Cambridge, on the strict understanding that I would sign autographs, pull the raffle, dance the dance of the seven veils, but not play. Naturally, when I swanned in, several unhealthy-looking men of limited imagination and unlimited lack of sensitivity surrounded me and bullied me into going out to the stump. (‘You can’t come all this way and not go out there …’) I went through the familiar horror of strapping on pads and fitting protection. I pulled on the crippling gloves and the silly hat and walked out to the middle of the enormous lawn. ‘Now, don’t worry,’ said the captain, a man who, astoundingly, made a living playing cricket, ‘we’ve arranged for you to be bowled an easy lob on the first ball.’ The bowler threw the ball, I missed it and it hit the middle wicket.

  ‘Oh dear, out for a duck,’ said the commentator, over the tannoy (so that everybody in Cambridgeshire could hear it). I turned and headed back to the hut. As I reached the edge of the grass, the tannoy barked again. ‘I say … that’s a bit unfair. He’s come all this way. Let’s give him another go.’

  Unable to communicate my own reaction to this sporting gesture, I paused for a second or two, turned and walked back to the wicket. The cricketers smirked at me. Then I was bowled out for a duck, the second time.

  Football is a game. Tiddly-winks is a game. A sack race involves energy and fun. Cricket is like a cucumber sandwich: indulged in for reasons of tradition, despite being totally eclipsed by every other alternative on offer.

  By the sixth form
, we had drifted out of these obligations. There must have come a moment when it was felt too humiliating to make us play sport at all, so we bunked off. We still went to the school changing rooms on a Saturday, though. While eleven-year-olds got into their blue flannel shorts and striped football shirts, we pulled off our blazers and flannels and pulled on our weekend hippy outfits.

  I want this bit to appear in small writing. Perhaps as one of those extensive footnotes that runs discreetly over the page. Almost nothing I did in my youth — even the abrupt abandonment of trusting young women — fills me full of such cold, sweaty embarrassment as my off-duty clothes.

  I can’t blame Tompsett or Gotley. Now that I think about it, they went to some lengths to look as if they had stolen their gear from a peasant farmer while on the ruin from a prisoner-of-war camp. Gotley had a sort of dirty whitish pullover and a stinking pair of black trousers that could have stood up and walked down the high street on their own. Tompsett could be a little more flamboyant and had a frightening yellow shirt. But I looked as if I was about to follow Roy Wood of Wizzard into a battle of the bands.

  I had a pair of poisonous green needlecord flares that would have attracted insects in the jungle. They weren’t just bright green or lime green, they were radioactive-sludge-that-ate-Leytonstone green. Only a painter in the secure wing in Broadmoor would have been crazy enough to combine them with a purple tie-dye grandfather’s vest and a red scarf. I did. And he would have drawn the line at the Indian belt made of mirrored glass, and the grey astrakhan fur coat on top. I didn’t. Did I wear this all the time? It was enough that I wore it once.

  I emerged from the tube at Chalk Farm for a Quintessence concert one Sunday lunchtime and the others wouldn’t stand in the queue with me. I probably modified it after that. Perhaps I restricted myself to the canary-yellow jumper and the bright-blue t-shirt with the Mickey Mouse motif.

  Having back-combed our hair, squeezed into our leggings, primped some flowing neck wear and donned our baseball boots, we stuffed our blazers into duffel bags and strutted away down Brentwood High Street.