In a pause between the furious scrape of a match and its flame going out, I heard an adult-sized someone coming through the undergrowth, and in a burst of immortality struck the box again. Who cared? Dead, expelled, it was all the same.
The man bending through the trees towards me wasn’t a teacher but a stranger – what every mother warns their children against. A local man in his twenties. He sat down and rummaged through his pockets for a hip flask and a lighter, as if I had been expecting him, and he me. Now I can only remember the brown of his jacket, and the warmth of his liquor in my throat. Leaning over he cupped the flame round the end of my battered ciggy. Then he lit his own.
I was fearful he would judge me for my acquired English accent. I wasn’t sure I’d survive the humiliation of his disdain, for I already hated myself enough. Instead we talked, finishing his whisky and all the cigarettes.
The light had dimmed between the trees when I checked his watch for the time.
‘It’ll be tea soon,’ I told him, suicide quite forgotten. ‘I suppose I’d better be getting back.’
I turned to wave as I ducked between the fence lines, crossing over the road, my books piled in my arms. He saluted me once, disappearing back between the trees. Hope had arrived without my looking and stayed a whole afternoon.
Lie 44: It won’t happen to my child
Charles Eisenstein, a radical economist, argues that corporate deceit, through advertising and branding, is destroying language. We are so used to the culture of ubiquitous lying, where America’s navy is branded ‘A Global Force for Good’ and ‘Freedom’ is no longer something to strive for but a brand of shoe, that we no longer hear what it is that Donald Trump is saying. The tragedy is that even though journalists itemised every single lie during the campaign (which, by election week, according to Politifact, was a whopping 70 per cent of all statements made) we heard he was deceiving us, but no longer cared.
There is the institutional massaging of the truth that took us into war with Iraq, the lies that bankers used to fix Libor, the accounting fraud at Enron, or the silence that covered up the child abuse perpetrated by priests in the Catholic Church. But the institutional lies I’m most familiar with are those told about and by public schools.
Boarding as far as some psychotherapists are concerned is as harmful as being put into care. Almost all children who have boarded have at some point been abused, most often by those they were living with. Because as soon as a child arrives adaptation to the new regime must be swift. Some of us would have done absolutely anything to avoid the humiliation of being singled out.
Many of the boys owned weapons; air rifles, knives, catapults. Small boys were tormented by their seniors most evenings and weekends. The student-to-staff ratio at these times was sixty-five to one. Boredom is dangerous.
My diary narrates broken bras, ripped shirts. I can still remember trying to hold my skirt down while two boys tried to strip me. There was a kind of hate in it all – a frustrated fury with their own weakness. Stamped on, shot or tortured themselves, they would channel their hate at those smaller or frailer than they were. Invited out for a cigarette one evening I found myself on my knees, a boy’s penis in my mouth. It wasn’t rape. Merely submission. Everyone knew their place.
Some nights I would crouch beneath my desk with a copy of William Boyd’s School Ties, reading the introduction over and over by torchlight. He describes his time at Gordonstoun with a comedic candour, and to my sixteen-year-old self it was rescue. Finally someone was telling the truth.
Yet even with this evidence of what was wrong in front of me I had no courage. Boyd’s was a truth that felt too frail to share. I did not reach out to those more vulnerable than myself, or intervene as they were humiliated. It leaves me with a self-loathing that may never shift.
Our in loco parentis adults rarely interceded either. Public schools are their own country. In extremis some children were committing crimes so vile we didn’t even hear they had been expelled. Nothing at all could be learned by their example. With an eye to the press, these children just disappeared.
The detail of what happened is immaterial. The more important question is, were we safe?
When I raise safety with Ed, he reminds me that although there were many air rifle incidents at Gordonstoun, the only time he was actually shot was at home.
By the time Sean fired on Ed, Sean had been boarding a year, at a school on a dead-end road, which led deep into Rannoch moor. A grisly Alcatraz, Rannoch School, facing rising debts, was finally closed down in 2002 after sex attacks among students began to be reported in the press. One ex-pupil told me that the only way to survive was by making himself sexually available to older boys.
Sixty-two leading independent schools have employed men who have been convicted of abusing children. Eton and Marlborough are amongst thirty where members of staff have been prosecuted for possessing child pornography. Gordonstoun as recently as 2010 sacked its maths teacher for downloading child abuse images, and is currently facing historical child sexual abuse allegations. One twelve-year-old girl was allegedly raped on a camping expedition by a member of staff at Aberlour, and a boy seriously sexually assaulted by another.
Surprisingly, convictions and allegations of this kind do not seem to have done any harm to school waiting lists, says Tom Buchanan, media consultant to a number of independent schools. ‘I can’t think of any school I’ve advised that has had a drop in numbers. This speaks to a generalised acceptance of there being a risk that goes with the territory. And of course parents always think it won’t happen to their child.’
Lie 45: I am frigid
The Sunday afternoon I met Liza, I was interviewing to share a room in Drayton Green, London, W13. It was a room that had borne the brunt of a party the previous night. Liza picked her way through the party debris, wearing a pale blue kimono, and curled up on the sofa like a cat. She was beautiful and frail, wearing delicate Chinese slippers. Long fingers held the silk together at her throat, her hangover so acute I don’t remember her speaking a word.
When I moved in a couple of days later the smell of party lingered, driven into the carpet, which was a curious pinky beige. The room was cut in half by the sofa. It and my bed acted as the seating area around a fireplace packed with empty Martini bottles, and the sturdy television set, balanced on a kitchen chair.
Liza and my new roommate, Samantha, were not like any of the girls I had left in Scotland. They could cook. Quietly appalled by what I ate, often they would urge me to try a new recipe or feed me sometimes themselves.
Perhaps it was their mothering that helped me shed the weight. Or simply that I grew lighter the farther from Gordonstoun that I fled. For years I had been wearing a first-class luggage allowance of misery. Now each morning that I woke in my seedy rented room it was with the enormous relief that I had survived. Without my trying, whatever it was that was bad about me dwindled slowly away.
Apart from dietary instruction Liza and Samantha introduced me to London, to marital alternatives, like having a profession, and to sex.
I had left school with the impression that I should not expect too much from it. It had never even crossed my mind to masturbate. In a dormitory touching yourself was unthinkable, the link to lesbianism clear. As far as I knew only one other girl ever had, and she was christened after a roll-on deodorant (‘Mum’) for her trouble. Bringing boys off was the priority, and any girl who wasn’t interested was frigid. It’s a word that Dad used against Mum, and a word that boys at school used against me. Being frigid felt far worse than any of the other things I had been bullied for – ginger; stupid; heavy. Gratefully, I speculated that in London frigidity would be something I could fix.
Samantha shared her bed with a boyfriend. The room she shared with me. Completely unembarrassed by the intimacy of this arrangement she expected me to be unembarrassed too.
Although I’d never had to share a room where sex happened, I had shared a room where there was crying, which is worse.
<
br /> This lack of privacy was as familiar as no. 36’s bulky payphone, which hung high on the wall at the top of the stairs. Like the one at school, the curly cord stretched and stretched, so you could sit on the floor outside the bathroom door with your feet pressed up against the banister railings, the whole flat able to hear every word. I still remember our number, because one of Liza’s boyfriends, Kevin, always raced to pick up first.
‘Sixteen forty-five,’ he would shout in his midwestern American accent, ‘and who may I say is calling?’
Kevin had arrived one Sunday afternoon, much as I had, but instead of interviewing, he came with his suitcase ready to move in. By Monday Liza, in her habitual kimono, looked as though someone had trodden dog shit into her carpet. Prior to Kevin the visitors to her room were nameless. She preferred to have two or three men on the go at any one time.
Kevin had shoulder-length, layered blond hair and ate ‘Mac Cheese’ cold and straight from the tin. One Saturday afternoon, with Liza and Samantha at work, he sat on the sofa, a creased Coke can in one hand, a crumb of Black balanced on his palm. Holding a match to the resin he hauled smoke through the metal into his mouth.
‘So do you have a boyfriend?’ he coughed, struggling to hold his breath.
‘No. Not at the moment.’
‘Do you want a boyfriend?’
I shrugged.
‘Liza doesn’t get me,’ he exhaled. ‘I don’t know what’s going on with her; what she wants.’
Though we had never discussed it I felt sure of what Liza wanted. For some time I had had an inkling that whatever was happening in the room next to ours, it was unsatisfactory. Right from my first evening at the flat, sitting in front of EastEnders, a Martini in one hand and a ciggy in the other, I had heard the shrill descant of Liza’s sexual congress through the wall. Her cries followed a monotonous rhythm, each high-pitched mewl equidistant from the one before, and the one before that.
Samantha would get up from the sofa to raise the volume on the television, then sit down again without comment. But I could never concentrate. Every evening I waited for Liza to come. Always though, without crescendo, perfunctorily she stopped.
Innocently I lay on my bed later, mulling over her dissatisfaction. At least, I reflected, she would never have the ignominy of being called frigid.
Lie 46: Jesus knows best
We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live is the title for one of Joan Didion’s collections of non-fiction. We create our identity through the memories we store, rehearse and narrate. Our self-story is what defines us, but when we recount our stories we are often less interested in what is truthful than in what is tellable.
One of my stories was Liza. In fact the tales of Drayton Green have been told in pubs and at dinner parties countless times. Liza was a favourite. It served as an alternative When Harry Met Sally faked-orgasm-in-the-diner tale. Liza proved it didn’t matter whether you faked it or not. Men did not notice.
Stories, like memories, solidify in the retelling, honed over years. They drift from fact into fiction. It is not so different a process for the novelist. Taking what is real and sculpting it so another kind of truth is written. Novels are liberated from reality to create worlds where the prose is clear and clean enough for us to see ourselves and our flawed humanity. We’re only able to enjoy fiction, on the screen and between book covers, when we enter into the contract of falsehood knowingly. A story becomes deceit when we are not honest as we begin to tell. So the tales we share with one another, at home, at work and at school, are never untrue. We would be hounded out of the pub, the coffee morning and the playground if we made our stories up. Exaggeration is forgivable. But never an outright lie.
The philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett argues that if we’re searching for the self in the brain, we are misguided. The self is a story that is drafted and redrafted until it becomes a single narrative, one in which we are the ‘chief fictional character’. We retroactively organise our lives through story, and we also tell stories that look into the future, the tales we force ourselves to live by.
My mother must have left finishing school with a particular version of her future in mind. Built on Christian mores, and held together with pins, her story struggled to accommodate the reality of her marriage. It wasn’t a lack of financial independence that kept her trapped – she had enough cash to escape. What kept her cornered was her wretched story: the institution of marriage is more important than its individual participants and Jesus knows best.
I have no idea what her retroactive version of things would have been as she grew close enough to see how her own story would finish, but to live with it she needed, like so many of us, to have few regrets. Regret is about accepting fault. We are at most risk of regret when we have the most choices. Her story did not give her many. All choice had to be negotiated within the limited parameters she had given herself.
It is clear Mum’s choices and the imagination she had to dream her story were stunted by gender and by class. The story I tell myself about my marriage and staying together happily ever after is a tidy one too. Infuriatingly it probably follows hers by rote. It is a tale that risked a deep structural edit in the hairy months of Mum’s truth-telling. Dismantling Dad’s story felt like trashing my own. It was clear I had shown terrible judgement, wasted years thinking my father was someone he was not. My credulity was painful. Whatever story I was telling lost its foundation. What was the point in throwing myself at some bogus tale about loyalty and mutual respect over a lifetime, when no one else was doing that? I had poured all my savings into Volkswagen shares.
What I didn’t see was that loyalty and mutual respect had nothing to do with it. In their marriage something else was going on. Mum’s conviction. My own. Dad’s truth was one he was never allowed to own up to. Even if he had it was a version we would not have wanted to hear. We needed him to stick to the story. Our story. There was no place for running off to circuses or ditching marriages there. Compelled to keep up his side of things, there was nothing else for it but to lie.
Lie 47: This is the toughest letter I’ve ever had to write
When Dad cuts me off in a letter, he writes, as if it’s never occurred to him: ‘your mother keeps pointing out that your heart has not been in the course for some time.’
Which is true. I have spent a year on a BA in Library and Information Studies at Ealing’s Higher Education College, which my father signed me up for in the week before the first semester started. It was one of the five courses he’d underlined with a red felt-tip in The Times’s Clearing List, speaking with the Admissions office himself. My A-level results had been disappointing. As soon as I found the college bar the slow slide into failure was secured.
Library and Information Studies was, as far as I was concerned, beyond tedium and full of diligent people who were not clever enough to be anywhere else. It was a course, bar the diligence, I was perfectly suited to. My diary depicts a conspicuously tedious eighteen-year-old. As I wade through the pages for clues about her personality and motivation all I can think is: this diary needs burning.
I and a Goth from Swansea spent many hours casing our fellow students and many hours in the bar. One night a boy named Jacob staggered over. It was the red hair that drew him, and soon I was bent across his sofa, bewitched by the idea that I had a boyfriend who had both a motorbike and a drug habit.
Unfortunately it would be years before I realised that promiscuous is not the opposite of frigid. The opposite of frigid is aroused, and I did not find arousal here. Apart from missing almost every lecture, when Easter came I also missed the train home. I called Mum from bed, Jacob pretending to do a station announcement as he rolled the next spliff.
‘Sorry,’ I squeaked, ‘there was a problem on the tube.’
It’s a lie I remember because Jacob pushed me into it. Some years earlier I had given up trying to deceive my mother. Perhaps I hoped she’d come to a different conclusion about me than I had come to about myself.<
br />
However, the evidence was against me. Seven years of eye-wateringly expensive education had produced only one A-level pass – a C in Classical Civilisation. Neither had mixing with ‘decent people’ secured the prospect of a relationship with one. My mother had flushed her own prospects down the marital latrine, while I seemed to be casting myself into a toilet.
There is nothing whatever I remember about that year, other than the waste of it. While Jacob two-timed me with another redhead the entire twelve months, I failed the first-year exams and then I failed the retakes. The letter Dad sent was, in his own words, ‘the toughest I’ve ever had to write’. He’s cancelled the banker’s order, and anticipates the Department of Education will be in touch for repayment. He tells me that I’m being cut off because he doesn’t like to show favouritism. It has only been a couple of years since Adrian received the same missive.
Neither does he think there is any excuse for me refusing to live up to the Gordonstoun motto – ‘showing that you can do it even if you hate it’. Which, although he has massively misquoted, is what school was like.
Then he gilds the ‘cut’ with the stories he likes to tell himself. The only reason that he stayed on in Saudi Arabia, he writes, was because we said we liked boarding. So my lies had convinced someone.
He acknowledges that the years apart have made it very difficult for us to live together. Apparently I’m at everyone’s throats. Though of course I remember it as everyone else being at mine. Still he would like me to come ‘home’ and settle down to a ‘sensible’ way of life. Naïvely and movingly he writes: ‘We could get to know each other a bit better and maybe become friends instead of all this fighting.’
A Book of Untruths Page 12