Semi-Detached

by Griff Rhys Jones

  ‘I was walking with you once,’ my mother recalled, ‘and you suddenly disappeared. I couldn’t work out what had happened to you. And then we met the headmaster coming the other way.’

  It was decent of my mother to walk with me at all.

  It was, I submit, a flamboyant era. We none of us had any money. People would take desperate measures: inserting bright-red satin patches into the bottom of old jeans to make flares, wearing spotted handkerchiefs with gipsy rings around their necks, tie-dyeing elderly relatives’ underwear.

  Personally I loved flower-power from the very beginning. I thought I looked pretty good in my first flower-power shirt, which had a dotty, splodgy, very small, very bright petal pattern, as if a horse had been sick in a meadow. It came with a matching square-bottomed tie made of identical material and looked fantastic with a pair of black crushed-velvet hipster trousers with patch pockets and a four-inch-wide plastic belt. Not bad for a thirteen-year-old.

  By 1970 Mary Quaint had been overthrown in favour of ersatz personal invention. The Beatles, quite probably the richest self-made twenty-somethings in the world, took to wearing what looked suspiciously like second-hand clothes. Double-breasted jackets smelling vaguely of urine, which frightened mothers and outraged fathers, could be sourced in Oxfam shops. Collarless shirts with acres of material dangling somewhere around the ankles were found in jumble sales. Muslin shirts with round collars had to be bought in Mr Byrite. Rather better, I thought, though few seemed to agree with me, if hand-dyed a lurid pink.

  The small ads in the Melody Maker, and a few pages at the back in the Exchange and Mart, began to set new standards. They advertised trousers with increasingly huge flared bottoms. ‘Twenty-six-inch flares!’ the ad boasted, and showed pictures of just the trousers, in ghostly isolation, stick-like to the knees and then ballooning to impossible fantasies of flariness. (A flare war might have broken out. ‘Twenty-eight-inch flares!’ ‘Have we reached the forty-inch flare?’ ‘Is Britain ready for the wigwam bell bottom?’ I would have happily stepped forward as a guinea pig.) Obscure small ads seemed to be the best way to get a cheap navy reefer jacket too, or what became vital to every alternative gentleman’s casual wardrobe, the army-surplus winter-warm great coat.

  RSM Mason, in his tin Nissen hut at the end of the Chase, happily provided ordinary khaki ones to any member of the Brentwood School Cadet Corps. He might have been surprised how many ended up on parade at the Isle of Wight Rock Festival. But mine was distinctive: a very long, darkish-grey-blue and double-breasted Russian number. Even Tompsett admired it. Honoured, I lent it to him, and he wore it to a rock festival somewhere.

  Later that week I was parading about in it in the dining room in front of my cousin Jane and one of my mother’s fearsome friends. Attempting to borrow some money, I idly put my hand in the pocket and pulled out a condom. It wasn’t used, but I think the ladies were impressed. I blushed. ‘I lent it … to Tompsett … the coat, I mean.’

  I was probably on my way to spend half an hour leafing through album covers in a record shop. We were quite content to flip exhaustively through the stacks, hardly ever buying, just admiring the majesty of Uncle’ Meat, the Frank Zappa double gatefold, or the mysterious, semi-surrealist splendours of Tales From Topographic Oceans. Alas, it was a time when the objects of our worship were hardly ever content to stick out a single album any more. So fecund was their genius that double or even treble albums were clogging up the bins, and since we were rather keen on anything wilfully obscure, these were severe tests of a limited budget.

  It was a major investment to get hold of Trout Mask Replica. My copy was, pleasingly, an American import, which meant that it came in a distinguished heavy cardboard, like a washing machine package, as opposed to thin and wibbly card, like a milk carton. But it was a lot of money for a record which was distinctly difficult to listen to more than once. Gotley topped it. He suddenly appeared with a copy of Wildman Fisher, a protégé of Frank Zappa, discovered on a pavement offering songs for a dollar. It was a treble album of utterly tuneless hollering. Its only function was to supplant Deep Purple at a party and initiate a row.

  More than anything we wanted long hair. As the seventies ground on, even newsreaders got bangs. Ted Heath grew side-boards. John Prescott must have had a magnificent hairdo to maintain such a silly pudding-basin funerary memorial to it today. But at the end of the sixties the size of your cock was as nothing to the size of your barnet. Even Tiny Tim’s waist-length tresses were envied by us schoolboys, who felt silly at rock festivals. Beads and kaftans, with short back and sides? No, no, no. When we went to watch Arthur Brown set fire to his head in Victoria Park, we would have willingly swapped our snakeskin cowboy boots for five-foot-wide Marsha Hunt sprouting-broccoli hairdos or lank Dave Gilmour waist-long hirsute tents, just to allow us to pass unnoticed in the queue at the Jamaican pattie counter.

  We battled the forces of conformity. But, sadly, searching out long hair was the second master’s favourite pastime (after spotting coloured socks). He would stand at an upper window, bored with teaching, and pick on a passing lower-sixth-former below ‘You, Bell, see me, nine o’clock tomorrow with a proper hair cut,’ Bell might invest in liberal platings of VO5 Extra-Hold. He could fold his tresses up using hair pins. He could arrive sporting a masterpiece of the perruquier’s art with the consistency of a crash helmet, but the school prevailed.

  By the time I got to university even the porters had long hair. Bah. I shaved my head.

  As we lay and listened to Atom Heart Mother in the dark, on our new stereos (mine was made up by adding a separate speaker box to the Dansette), or decided to wake up the house with a blistering burst of Chicken Shack, or despaired when Marc Bolan went ‘commercial’, or went all fey with Principal Edward’s Magic Theatre; as we back-combed our hair and put on fur coats, to make little pilgrimages to the ‘Third Ear Café’ by the World’s End Pub in the King’s Road, and ate tasteless brown rice and horrible beans; as we sat under a plastic sheet in Hyde Park listening to Canned Heat and puffed on our first joint, we firmly believed we were part of the alternative society. We went off to a little wood at the bottom of the school, tootled on pipes and banged tablas, made a disjointed film and thought we were at least as good as the Incredible String Band. But it wasn’t a new age. It was sixth-form age. Who could have imagined as we grooved to ‘Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun’ (‘no, no, listen to the stereo effects’) that what we were actually listening to was the beginning of Arts A-level Culture World.

  The Wake Arms was where I first saw Ozzie Osbourne. We rather rated Black Sabbath. Uriah Heep not so much. I remember the lead singer leaning in after three cacophonous numbers and urging us to ‘listen to the lyrics of the next one’ and then crashing into another hugely pompous and deafening prog-rock anthem, within which any distinction of individual words would have been quite impossible. There were huge stacks of speakers for such a tiny place. We got as close as we could to them, and wobbled our heads to Argent or the Pink Fairies. We were particularly keen to catch the Edgar Broughton Band. They managed to combine two popular themes of the era, black magic and revolution, into one song: ‘Out Demons Out’ (which, as far as I can recall, consisted of that one phrase, repeated to the same riff for several hours).

  But if the homework was relatively light and I had the bus fare, I would get along to almost anything, and leave two hours later, partially deafened, with my ears buzzing into the next morning. It was beyond comprehension why some of these pub rockers were to become international stars and others simply faded away. They all seemed astonishingly loud and equally basic.

  One Saturday afternoon my father sat in his usual chair and read the Daily Telegraph. ‘Look here,’ he said, poking at the bottom of one of the grey pages of endless print. ‘This article here is quite right.’ There was a picture of various hair styles. ‘It has been scientifically proven that various types of long hair have become a badge of degeneracy amongst teenagers.’

 
; ‘Well, that’s just nonsense,’ I retorted, shaking my delicately coiffeured curls.

  ‘No, look.’ His voice was rising. ‘Look, from the teddy boy through to greaser, you simply cannot deny that the link is obvious. I’m not accusing you,’ he continued, though, by now, I had decided that he clearly was. ‘It is merely a matter of association. It matters what people think. You are in danger of being naturally associated with the criminal class.’

  ‘That’s what you think of me. I’m a criminal, am I?’

  Three minutes later I had grabbed my fur coat, flounced out of the house and was heading down Station Road towards Epping Underground. I simply wasn’t going to stand for this sort of ignorant behaviour based on some rubbish in the Daily Telegraph. If I wasn’t free to live and dress exactly as I pleased then OK, I would go my own way. I was old enough to live on my own. I was working hard, doing perfectly well at my exams. It was all just so they could show off to their friends anyway. Did they really think it made any difference to me? Well, sod that. I was quite capable of looking after myself.

  As I reached the bottom of the. hill he drove alongside in his car, begging me to return. Silly man, did he really think I had anywhere to go? He was an innocent. If it had been me, I’d have let me get on the tube. Where on earth did I think I was going, dressed like that? Not that it made any difference. I was far too much of a conformist anyway. Rebellion, hah! I was on my way to Cambridge.

  11. Reunion

  On a late afternoon in October, I drove myself out to Brentwood. The route was utterly familiar. I take it most weekends to get to Suffolk — down through Clerkenwell, where I once lived, through Hoxton, and up under Banksy’s smiley-faced riot police mural up on the railway bridge. The car could almost drive itself. I was wearing a suit. I was on my own in the car. I felt slim and purposeful, because this wasn’t routine or part of the loose fabric of my life. I was deliberately breaking out, going home for a while. I felt excited. I felt like I was in a film. I decided it could be a film. There was one already, with John Cusack. He went back to the school reunion and he was a serial killer and he killed some people. I felt like a serial killer. It was the dream of escape. I was momentarily sloughing off my present. ‘Bring your wife or partner,’ the yellow slip had invited, but I didn’t want that. Nor did anyone else. There were to be very few wives or partners at the ‘Forty Years On’ reunion dinner.

  The school was as one might expect a school to be at seven in the evening, deserted and too dark. I parked by the pavilion, where we had had the discos upstairs and where the fencing champions had trained. There we are. I’d never been in those lower changing rooms at all. They were reserved for the sporting stars, and the balcony above them for the headmaster and the visiting headmaster and the visiting headmaster’s satraps.

  Right across the way was the sacred piece of grass that boys were not allowed to cross, between the undistinguished Queens Building for science and the back of the staff common room. But I crossed it now, for devilment, and walked towards the front of the building. Was it ever this deserted? There was no sign of anything happening. At the front the school entrance was solidly shut. It always was. There was a porch with stained glass windows, but they only ever opened that for public days. (We weren’t a public day then.) The Memorial Hall was dark. I had thought we would be in there, fêted, at dinner in the heart of the school, in the smelly assembly hall with the portraits of headmasters looking down, but there were only piles of music stands in the gloom. To my surprise, the corridors were carpeted. The place had lost its stinking soul.

  I walked blindly on. Everywhere the lights were off. Beyond the chapel the concrete floors had gone and the empty corridors became like the corridors of a hospital, with fuzzy carpet and fire doors and unfamiliar offices and nobody around at all. The old Big School, the original schoolroom, was lit but deserted. Stuck to the door was a list of names. I assumed they had already met for drinks and then gone on to the dinner.

  I stared at the printed page. It included Horth, Tompsett, Smith, Bagnall, Thorogood, Woollard. There were other names, some that I didn’t remember at all. I took it down. It might come in handy.

  I walked on, past where Mr Ricketts lived. He saved me from ignominy in Latin, because he could teach the subject. How? Who knows? Enthusiasm, perhaps. He spoke his Latin with a strong Italian accent and expressive hands like a proper Mediterranean, and he got me to hurdle the ablative. We liked him for it, as we always admired those straightforward, determined teachers who seemed to have set themselves a target and went straight for it. And he had lived in that little cottage on the other side of a beech hedge in the middle of the school.

  ‘Are you lost?’ A bald man was advancing on me out of the glare of some floodlit practice pitches. He was smiling. He must be a teacher. Not one of mine, I decided, though it took a moment to accept that my teachers, looking much the same as this one did with his fringe of white hair and sensible clothes, were all probably dead now.

  He was there to hurry me along, past the new floodlit tennis courts and into a noisy company of forty or so men holding wine glasses.

  And now I was stuck. Who were these blokes? I started talking to the headmaster, for safety, I think. But for the most part I just stared around with an expression that I would rather not have worn. I couldn’t recognize the majority of them. They seemed to be of all ages. We were unaware of it then, but I can see having watched my own son grow up, that boys at fourteen, fifteen, sixteen have no universal age. There are big, deep-chested ones who shave twice a day and tiny, fresh-faced, girly ones and boys with explosions of acne and others who attain ethereal beauty which as soon deserts them, none of which meant anything to us, then.

  But that was then. This was now. Some of my former school friends looked like old men. Others were youthful, gangly and spiky-haired. I recognized Smith first. Having been the conservative and blushing giant of South, he had now become cool, with long yellow hair. But he was still the tallest.

  ‘Is that Smith?’ I asked crudely. I needed some sort of order. I needed some questions answered. I wanted a register read, or a formal presentation made. I could hardly ask Smith himself. ‘So, Smith, you were always a very straightforward sort of bloke and here you are now with long blond hair, dressed in velvet. How so, old fellow?’

  ‘Yes, Smith,’ the person standing next to me said, ‘and that’s Horth. He looks just like he did when we were here, doesn’t he? Remember him?’

  Of course I did. I’d met him quite recently. It was the person talking to me that I couldn’t place. They would slot in, wouldn’t they, if I stared hard enough? But I mustn’t stare. So I wandered Horthwards, to my own gang.

  The bloke with the short hair was Graham Jimpson, my best friend. He was relaxed and laughing. They must have managed to throw off all this gawping puzzlement earlier. Perhaps they had had their shared moment before I arrived, like wakers from a frozen state, feeling their way back to life, sharing the experience of letting the mainframe boot up at the canapé stage.

  Graham Jimpson saw my confusion. He welcomed me like the junior relative of a senile politician. ‘You remember Fabian?’ Of course I did. But Fabian was different in some way. He was stocky and plump, yes, but we were all stocky and plump. I knew it was him. I had guessed it was Fabian when I saw him across the room from the doorway, but something was different about him, and I stalled. I could hardly say, ‘I didn’t recognize you with your hair long and pulled back and in these casual clothes and oh …’ I realized what it was. He had done something to his teeth.

  ‘You remember Chislett,’ said Graham, and I did, but not before that precise moment. It was like retrieving a file. I could even recall his house. I could see the stripes of his tie. He had every right to be remembered as well as anybody else. I knew that. He had been part of the gang. We had joked, played football, probably even had a fight, but I had wiped him from my memory bank. I had got along happily without ever needing any stored information about my good friend Ch
islett. But it was there. Over the course of the confusing evening I rebuilt a photo album. After the pudding he came over, and I suddenly saw him in the Corps uniform with his hair gathered up into his beret. The essence of Chislett returned.

  ‘I see Paul Morris,’ Graham Jimpson was saying. ‘He was my best friend really over the last thirty years. Him and Paul Callick. You remember him. He used to play at the folk club.’

  I didn’t. I could see the folk club in a room in the high school and the girl with the wool-ball hair who used to pluck a Spanish guitar and that other bloke who wrote very complicated songs which were extremely difficult to play but seemed entirely tuneless, as if simple tunes with three chords were the most difficult things of all to construct, as indeed they may well be. Was that Callick? ‘Veness?’ I asked.

  ‘He’s in the City somewhere.’

  ‘And Bean is second in command at the Bank of England.’

  ‘Yes. And Martin Thomas I keep in touch with: Martin the bright, Martin who won all the prizes.

  ‘He’s trying to take up an academic post in Mexico.’

  ‘He’s an academic?’ I liked the idea that people I had known at school were now distinguished.

  ‘Yes. A professor, but he’s giving all that up.’ Martin was in love with a twenty-eight-year-old Mexican.

  It was as if all of us had reached this point and suddenly needed to take stock. Perhaps they were all writing books.

  ‘But Graham, what happened?’ I needed to know ‘I just want to know the details. What happened to the people who went to Oxbridge to rule this country? Don’t they rule the country?’

  ‘No. Only you and Anthony Blear.’

  I paused. Not something else that had slipped. I don’t remember him.

  ‘You do,’ Bagnall told me. ‘He’s the Prime Minister.’