Semi-Detached

by Griff Rhys Jones

  ‘Tony Blair!’ I had misheard. Of course — Graham had been at Oxford.

  ‘I threw a bowl of rhubarb fool over his head at a dinner party, I was so annoyed by what he was saying. He was just someone in this band then.’

  We were happier talking about the little things we remembered, like the league ladders. ‘With the perforated slots … Each team on a separate cardboard tag so that you could move them up and down … a sort of chocolate brown.’

  When Graham imitated little me, he’d do me posh, using long words. ‘Let us find accommodation on the upper deck of the omnibus.’ But that was Essex talking. I was surprised to find how joined at the hip we were. He knew the boat, my sister, my friends in Epping.

  ‘You were a good drawer of studied anatomical drawings of ladies.’

  Hm. This was an accomplishment, then.

  ‘Really big on the blackboard in Upper 5. It was a bit Encyclopedia Britannica anatomy section, but the idea was that you threw the board rubber and scored points — called “the Olymptits”. A big thing, until Mr Cluer came in and found us.

  And then in the sixth form the two little boys drifted apart. ‘You became a hot gospeller, didn’t you?’ I said.

  Graham buried his head in his hands. ‘At one party in the sixth form I went off with Martin Hope, and we made a sort of pact that we would become celibate.’

  And Graham had taken on the selfless moral imperative for the rest of his life. While I went off on a cruise he went to Tanzania. In Oxford he opened a fair-trade shop called Uhuru, still operating today, and he became a revolutionary socialist, heavily involved in student politics. He left to work in Oxford sink estates, as a youth worker, which is where I’d last brushed into him, twenty years ago.

  Some there, like John Squire, watched us through narrowed eyes, standing to one side, as if suspicious of the event. Perhaps he carried too much baggage. I certainly did, but mine was a suitcase of self—consciousness. He had packed his closely around him — slipped it into his dark suit pockets. Nobody was really helping very much. I wanted some order. What was the headmaster there for if not to organize this? Get all of us, one by one, to give an account of ourselves why don’t you? Forty years was a colossal time. They had lived a life which could be measured out against the patterns of the twentieth century. I had skipped off the tracks by accident and rumbled about in the fields like a railway accident: a public opportunist. I wanted to know what they had done.

  Over the meal, small connections clicked into place. We were surprisingly benign. Why this warm feeling? We pitied those who had decided not to resurrect their past. We laughed when one of the masters said that one old boy had sent his wife to answer the phone and to tell the school never to bother their household again. Not us. We were here and we seemed happy.

  It wasn’t the school itself. Bagnall and Thorogood openly regretted the place. They felt that the academy had left us quite unprepared for the reality of civilian life. So what was it? For one evening we embraced what? Not the bland security that old boys seek in the old boys club, surely? Not even the rebellion that Fabian found there, nor the identity that the ritual offered. It was the vigour. We had allowed ourselves to taste being seventeen again.

  After dinner we reverted. We gathered round the headmaster, a younger man than any of us, and told tales out of school. We jabbered at him about Bilge and the corporal punishment he dispensed so casually. We told him stories of outrageous teacher behaviour, how we saw through the headmaster’s act, how one teacher was a pederast and another lusted after rent boys, and he looked on, fielding all this with a slight, bemused smile.

  I was sorry that it came to an end. Most people were keen on doing it again. ‘Let’s not leave it another forty years.’ But I sensed that we would. Perhaps we didn’t really want to confront the reality of our school friends’ actual lives.

  I went back to my car, drove back towards the barrier and found that, while we had been eating, it had locked me in. The sports centre was deserted. Chislett and some of the others walked past and cackled at me through the side window. They had parked sensibly in the available car park, not swanned into the centre of the school like a would-be visiting dignitary. I scurried back to find the headmaster. He was perplexed. He didn’t have any keys. It was a separate security operation. Eventually he found a cleaner, who traced a night watchman, and they buzzed me out, the last to leave.

  And I left confused. Perhaps it was because we had returned to take the place at night, when it was just a black shell and lacked the constituents that made it today’s working school. There were no inquiring grubby faces, or lines of girls in badly fitting skirts, or clamouring noise, which meant that we had been able to reoccupy it.

  But the visit had also laid a ghost. We had been told we were part of a progression, a force for betterment, the embodiment of a particular education. I had used it as a prop myself. ‘Brentwood was up there with Manchester Grammar, you know. Do you know how many of my year went to Cambridge?’ I was still on the honours board. I had been able to see it over Bagnall’s shoulder as we ate our lamb noisettes — three of us with Exhibitions to one college. Gosh. But it was just a school. We weren’t some golden, blessed generation sitting in that canteen. We were just some blokes from Essex hankering after irresponsibility.

  12. Ugandan Affairs

  At one time or another I had possessed a box full of torrid letters from my late teens, hadn’t I? My mother had dumped it on me some time in the eighties. Was I fantasizing? I could vaguely remember that I had been fascinated enough to open the box but not quite fascinated enough to read them. What had I done with all this flaming, passionate adolescent birowork?

  I found it in an old oak bureau (disappointing some future grandchild, no longer able to say, ‘I wonder what’s in this old oak bureau?’). The letters were in a shoebox.

  This is what a ‘musty’ smell smells bike — a flimsy airmail letter left for thirty-five years to absorb damp and rot slightly. Some of these letters were written by myself on my first trip away from home, but most of them were messages from the massed girl-correspondents of 1972. I have no idea how my mother came to collect them all together (although one of those girl-correspondents had been my mother herself). Did I really leave them lying about White Lodge so cavalierly? But I was trembling. Quite honestly I had completely forgotten that I had had so many massed girl-correspondents.

  Jill, Wendy and Jane had written to me in the sixth form from their respective boarding schools. ‘I’m just writing this in the dorm before lights out. Don’t forget, please, please, please send me another funny letter.’ Wow. But Jill, for whom I pined, was just teasing me. She may have been intimate in her letters from Felixstowe after prep, but she was icily remote in the flesh during the holidays in Epping. Obviously I could present myself as a loopily entertaining, wild and crazy guy to a trapped and lonely girl, as long as it was in writing. Could I follow through? It was worth persevering.

  The other letters were from Beth, Dale, Karen, Bev and another, quite different, Jill. They were about walking the dog, the extreme cold, French exams and how funny I was with my crazy letters again. (Listen, they were seventeen and easily impressed, and they all came from distant Canada.) I turned over one of the flimsy airmail envelopes, and a photo of Karen dropped out. In blue and green tartan trousers and a tight sweater she was seventeen and pretty, sitting on the porch in front of her house in Nova Scotia, and smiling at me. Oh, Karen. I must have, found this all heart-stopping then. I am pretty jealous of my former self now There was a picture of Bev too: with red hair, a coy smirk and a purring invitation to Ontario. I must have been a letter-writing machine. I had forgotten the names, but I remembered the general idea. All these Canadians had been part of a mammoth, group, ship-board romance which had lasted no more than a week but was followed by months of diligent pensmanship all through my ‘gap year’.

  It wasn’t a whole year. In 1970 I had sat the scholarship exams for Cambridge. The sixth form was dis
persed. A levels were over. But a select few came back in the autumn to take ‘Oxbridge Entrance’. For a term we did little except try to appear remote from the concerns of ordinary schoolboys and take desultory instruction in ‘thinking’ from the deputy headmaster. The exams were taken in the ‘Old Big School’, somewhere I had rarely ventured before. Amongst the black beams, carefully preserved ancient graffiti, and on a wonky floor I was invited to write speculatively on utterly generalized subjects. Luckily, I had spent every Saturday night for the last two years in a kitchen in Upminster arguing the existence of God with Jimpson.

  A telegram arrived at White Lodge. I had got an Exhibition at Emmanuel. I wrote to Felixstowe Pam to tell her. She wrote back her congratulations. ‘I didn’t even know you were artistic.’ My father seemed pleased that this meant money and hardly disappointed at all that it was no more thirty pounds a year. What it really meant was that the palpable result of all that homework could be left on the sideboard to be picked up, smoothed off and re-read with decreasing incredulity. But it was Christmas. I was eighteen. Cambridge started in October. ‘Oh that magic feeling, nowhere to go. Did we call them ‘gap years’ then? It was nearly a whole year off as far as I was concerned.

  I had to earn some money. If in a very good mood I sometimes try to get friends’ children temporary work in television. Wielding her more limited influence, my mother found me work counting lamp posts. If their street lights went phut, the residents of Epping complained. They were told to make a proper report and furnish the council with the number of the malfunctioning lamp. It was stencilled in black on the side of the pole. Unfortunately, the council had no record of which number corresponded to which lamp post. So to prevent council bulb-replacement operatives, who only worked in daylight, aimlessly meandering down mock-Tudor avenues, they hired me to make a definitive survey.

  Luckily every man-hole, every fence, every fire hydrant and every unenumerated lamp post’ in Epping was marked in voyeuristic detail on huge maps in an office near the library. I needed my own version of this Big Brother document to take on the road, before I biked out into the streets in that cold Essex January, so I grappled with a bath of viscous liquid and rollers which clanked and whirred and produced sinister-looking blueprints in a suspicious purple colour. Nobody would have thought of trying to copy their arse on the roller and acid machine in the Epping surveyor’s office.

  Gap years provide an education. I learned that the wearying fiddliness of pre-photocopier seventies office infrastructure was ripe for Japanese intervention (and indeed that was to come). I also learned that there were some mind-numbingly boring work-environments that I never wanted to share again. I was quite keen, though, and still innocent enough to be surprised that nobody wants you to be keen in dull work places. But I was just visiting. That month I walked every street and cul-de-sac, every close, avenue, crescent, lane and terrace of my home town. Then I left for the Mediterranean to take up another temporary job.

  This looked a more cushy number. In the autumn of the previous year I had been interviewed by a charming codger in a grey suit in my first open-plan office. In early March, after working in a petrol station, trying to Christmas-wrap lamp stands in a design shop in the high street, taking babysitting jobs (where I thumbed through my mother’s younger friends’ sex manuals secreted on the upper shelves of their cherry-wood G-Plan units) and sorting the Epping illumination, of course, I flew out to Malta to join a school educational cruise ship as a school office assistant.

  It was a significant departure for me. As a family, we didn’t ‘do’ abroad. I had been with the school to Denmark, where we learned to row and had an accident with the hanging light. I had been on a trip to Wuppertal to stay with Doris, the former au pair, to ‘improve’ my German. But the Rhys Joneses had never gone to the beaches of the south. We had certainly never taken package holidays, but neither had we ever jumped in the car and taken the ferry to wander off through France and eat pâté. Never. It seems an extraordinary admission now I am thinking, ‘Well, we must have gone. There must have been some foreign adventure. We were a perfectly ordinary middle-class family. Didn’t we ever get as far as Calais? No. Not by ferry anyway. Until my father decided to captain his own boat across the Channel we ignored Europe completely. But then I don’t suppose this was particularly rare. Miller, who had ginger hair and a languid manner, was considered slightly exotic at school because he went to France every summer. We were aware that he did because we thought it gave him an unfair advantage in French lessons. Rhys Jones never went anywhere because his father had that boat. It was the holiday of choice. We never had any choice. We just went on holiday on the boat.

  I wrote home, excitedly detailing the circumstance of the flight, the food served on the aeroplane and the fact that I had met some of my colleagues on the way. I was delivered to sandstone Valletta, the capital of Malta, and thence to a white boat, towering above a wharf in the docks. (‘This is not a boat. It is a ship!’) It was the SS Uganda.

  We were four ‘school office assistants’, two of whom I liked immensely and one of whom was called Adrian. We were effectively junior pursers, charged with mundane jobs like making meal announcements and handing out torches, setting up lecture equipment and printing the daily news, but we didn’t wear a uniform and were considered to be under the authority of the headmaster as opposed to the captain. We were also paid four pounds a week, which we spent on bonded whisky at eight pence a shot. The ship was a floating embodiment of 1950s values.

  It was divided into two classes. At one end (the smaller and the back) there were dormitories, classrooms and dining halls, painted a battleship grey, floored with limo, smelling of hot diesel and patrolled by sergeants at arms. Here they shoved about six hundred schoolchildren. Up the other end (the larger and the bow) there were individual cabins, lounges, a library, a decent restaurant and a ballroom, where an Indian band played jazz standards every evening. Here a small number of fee-paying passengers stretched themselves out. They were joined in this paradise of inlaid wood and starched napery by the teachers.

  It was an ingenious scam. The teachers worked hard all year. It was their task to persuade reluctant parents that their children deserved to enjoy the privileges that other children would be enjoying as soon as they had persuaded their equally reluctant parents to take part. As a reward for press-ganging the kids, the company gave them a luxury cruise. The teachers had to take the occasional lesson. They would be responsible (sometimes) for showing their charges a pyramid or two. For the most part, however, the pupils attended lectures given by the intelligent, plump ship’s headmaster, ate fattening food and went to the disco under our tutelage.

  My first letter home, out of an envelope with a red Britannia crest on the back, was to my mother. I was confined to an empty ship, picked on at work and not really homesick at all. The ship’s officers had glowered at us when we tried to visit their bar. The Maltese security guard had ordered us back to quarters. And she would be relieved to know I had not managed to spend any money yet. I assume my letters to my future girlfriend correspondents were a little racier. (But only they can tell me. Perhaps they have them somewhere in their own shoebox.)

  Our work station and the hub of shipboard existence was the school office, a metal turret at the meeting point of various corridors on the lower decks. In the morning, we opened for business by rattling up shutters on three sides and facing out to meet inquiries. It was run by Michael —tall, languid and practised in queenly disdain, particularly, so it seemed, for us.

  ‘You can sit over there and keep out of the way,’ he started. We had a few things to get straight. This wasn’t ‘school’ at all. Not our school, not the pupils’ school and not the head-master’s school. It was ‘shipboard’ and on shipboard sailors like him (he was a junior purser) were in charge. He was equally dismissive of orders from above (‘Oh Lord, what are they trying to do now?’), keen to put us in our places and determinedly lazy.

  Before we left, waiting in t
he empty ship for our complement of pupils, Michael was expected to provide some sort of an inventory of equipment. Lounging back in the only chair in the office, he summoned two of us over ‘What have we got in that cupboard over there?’ he asked.

  It was filled with boxes of Monopoly and Scrabble.

  ‘There are supposed to be fifteen, aren’t there? Give them here.’ He started idly picking through the contents as if intending to count the houses, silver top hats and hotels but quickly grew bored. He scooped all the games up into a cardboard box and handed it to us. ‘Go and throw that over the side,’ he said. Then he picked up his clipboard and pen. ‘Fifteen replacements needed, I think.’

  Michael’s deputy Nigel was short and ginger. Both of them bad the comic assurance of the minimally experienced. They busied themselves with organizing visas and stamps for passports and trying to pass their duties on to us, while I prepared my own inventory of their shortcomings in my letters home. ‘He hit the roof last week because I played a record at reveille that he didn’t like.’ (Hm. King Crimson not so popular then?)

  ‘He has produced a rota whereby one person is on duty all the time and then complains because we are not all present when he wants us,’ I huffed peevishly.

  Four weeks later, things improved. ‘The School Office Purser has finally bought us a drink.’ (And at eight pence a shot too.) I must have played ‘Bye, Bye Miss American Pie’ at reveille.

  On the morning of our first day the four of us hovered in the margins, newly oppressed by petty rituals. The pursers ignored us. They were leafing through the passenger manifest. ‘They’re all from Canada,’ Michael snorted and threw it to one side.

  Given a break, we clumped up to the open-air decks. The crew were at their perpetual task of chipping rust and painting. We leaned over a rail and watched the passenger coaches arrive. Way below us they drove in a great curve around the dock, as if in long shot, and stopped next to the companionway. We stopped singing Beach Boys hits and leaned forward as six hundred Canadian schoolgirls aged fifteen to eighteen were ordered off the buses and marshalled aboard. Well, that’s a slight exaggeration. There were only five hundred teenage girls and about a hundred boys, but I don’t think we noticed the boys particularly.