Noisy At
The Wrong
Times
Battles with myself
MICHAEL VOLPE
Copyright © 2015 Michael Volpe
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.
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For all those who were ever told not to bother
This book is dedicated to all of those teachers who ever suffered (and tolerated me) and who made Woolverstone Hall the place it was. In particular, I thank those who recognised what talent I had and tried to nurture it, rather than doing the understandable thing and kicking me out. Perhaps the most profound thanks go to the many post-Woolverstone “teachers” who, from the rubble of a fractured personality, cobbled together an approximation of a useful human being.
I would also like to thank Helen Hawkins for editing the book, for guiding my self-effacement so that it retained a point, and for reining in the worst excesses of someone who never paid quite enough attention in English lessons.
There are countless friends and colleagues who are owed thanks for being part of the protective wall that has surrounded me and allowed me a career in the opera business, in particular James Clutton, Mick Goggin (for kicking it all off) and those colleagues who do so much to make us all look good. All deserve more praise than I can give here.
Above all, this book is dedicated, with love, to my remarkable and indomitable mother, Lidia, my talented and tolerant children Leanora, Gianluca and Fiora and my patient, understanding wife Sally.
CONTENTS
PREFACE
WHERE WE CAME IN…
DISCOVERING WHERE IT BEGAN…
FIGHT
GETTING READY
RULES, RULES, RULES
PRESSURE COOKER
TOP OF THE SLOPE
SHOCK AND AWE
COLTS AND KANGAROOS
DRAMA QUEEN
BRINGING THE HOUSE DOWN
THROWING IT ALL AWAY
IDIOT
OPERA HOLLAND PARK
AND THE POINT WAS?
WHATEVER HAPPENED TO…?
AFTERWORD
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PREFACE
“Michael has made a good start and will do well here. He may be a bit noisy at the wrong times but I am sure he will put this right next term.”
In his contribution to my first report, Woolverstone’s headmaster, Patrick ‘Paddy’ Richardson, quickly identified the first of many weaknesses in a boy who neither cared, nor was aware, that a correct moment to be noisy existed.
Paddy knew trouble when he saw it, and he certainly saw it when he looked at me, a boy whose inherent goodness was shrouded in razor wire. But then, Paddy had already encountered many similar boys before I sauntered over his horizon, so he had the tools to negotiate the perils. Perhaps, blessed as he was with abundant empathy and forgiveness, ‘noisy’ was his euphemism for the furious haemorrhage of nonsense that I all too frequently unleashed on his school.
I’m not sure when ‘stupidity’ decided I was a good host, but it made itself very much at home whilst I was at Woolverstone. Garrulous to a fault, I mistook precocity for substance, and arrogance for confidence. Of course, it has taken children of my own and the passage of decades for me to realise all of this, but I can offer the reader this heartfelt guarantee: nothing whatsoever softens the ache of enlightenment.
I can see reports for every year I spent at the school, gathered in one document, and reading it today, decades after Paddy’s comment, I flinch. Using the crumbs of wisdom I have since collected from beneath the tables of those I admire, I can see the erratic, but inexorably downward trajectory of a wayward youngster; but as inevitable as the calamity appeared to be, there would be many who tried very hard to prevent it. I insisted, obstinately, that there would be only one direction, not because I wanted to, but because something short-circuited the commonsense proprioceptors that tell of your whereabouts in space.
In 1976, I strode into Woolverstone Hall school for boys – a miracle of educational courage and foresight – on the tails of an elder brother, thinking I would own the place. About a dozen of my contemporaries were busy striding in with precisely the same thought at roughly the same time. I was never one for submission to superior numbers since to do so would have required me to acknowledge others existed, but we spent the first few months trying to work out who would get the pie; and after that we just enjoyed eating it together in big, greedy mouthfuls. From one end of my life at Woolverstone to the other, the self-destruct button remained lit, and only occasionally did I resist the temptation to press it. If I had stayed at Woolverstone long enough, a possibility existed that I would have become a scholar but unfortunately I had only five years.
This book also appears to have become something of a commentary on what it was like to grow up in an Italian family in London, a family whose dysfunction seemed entirely normal to me at the time, but whose fate has begun to resolve during the course of this book’s creation. At the time of writing, the maudlin beast of melancholia has me in its grasp, and what writing there was on the wall is revealing itself, line by line, month by month. Brothers die or separate, fathers shuffle off the mortal coil too, without ever redeeming themselves and a mother knew nothing of her child’s death because fate robbed her of a memory, meaning that at her own passing, it was a blessing that she had remained unaware. Who knows where the roots of the poisoned tree were first set down? You, the reader, may draw your own conclusions.
Much of what I recollect may be wrong or embellished, but much of it is precisely as it happened. And I suppose I ought to be tactful, which is why so many names are omitted or are inventions. This is a memoir of a fashion, but a regurgitation is more apt a description. I am not a celebrity (major or minor) so there is no particular reason why anybody should be interested in what took place over five years in rural Suffolk. If I happen across a point, you’ll be the first to know, but if you need a signpost then I suppose this is also a confession. Goodness knows I have a lot to confess (my memories don’t haunt as much as mock), but it would be more my style to sit with a guitar and strum an epic testimony to my life at school and beyond. Even better would be a histrionic opera in three acts, but since I can’t play guitar and Mascagni is dead, this bundle of words will have to suffice.
A friend once told me that “if one doesn’t blow one’s own trumpet, someone else will use it as a spittoon”. I took her at her exquisitely enunciated word and have been blowing feverishly ever since. It’s perfectly acceptable to indulge that urge with short, funky horn stabs, but I’ve been playing the Prince of Denmark’s March. In the world of the lyric arts, where, startlingly, I ended up twenty-five years ago, enough people recognise the tune for me to get aw
ay with it.
I don’t think I am exaggerating when I say that I am as in the dark with respect to the outcome of these ramblings as you may be, but as becoming aware of oneself, warts and all, is a continuing process there might never be much of a conclusion. I do intend it to honour Woolverstone and those who made the school what it was: a place where boys and young men of my background had an opportunity that, like the school itself, exists no more. But I can’t promise how the story will all turn out, which is just like me, really.
WHERE WE CAME IN ...
Sophocles, whose achievements included shortening the play in order to make it more memorable, said that old age and the passage of time teach everything. Inconveniently, he forgot to say that you don’t remember any of it. The specific moment at which Woolverstone first entered my consciousness is hard to pinpoint and I’m attempting to retrace steps I trod long ago, even though at the time I was rarely aware of what I was doing. Throughout my childhood, I didn’t absorb much of what was around me as we lurched from one crisis to another because that obstructed the process of absorbing myself.
I can make out the rough edge of my younger self; and while parts of the world through which I crashed are vivid, others are as if shrouded by an impenetrable London fog of the late sixties, so thick that when walking us to school, my mother could only discern which of her children was on her left or right by the thickness of the bones within their grasping hands. She needed no clear line of sight to tell that my robust hand was the one pulling away from her, its owner furious at having to wear a thick, scratchy balaclava, damp with moist smog and cursing breath. Sergio, my brother of two years senior, was on the other side, slighter and just as petulant. Such journeys to the place of her work, a nursery in whose care we also spent the day, are among my earliest memories. To Mum, just another day in our troubled lives had begun, refereeing our quarrels and threatening us under her breath so that we didn’t shame her. To us, though, it was a bus journey through Fulham in west London and a friendly chat with the American rockabilly conductor, who wore black silk gloves that matched in lustre his dyed, shiny quiff. He and his driver were the same each day, a familiar and friendly element in our lives, one of the many simple, seemingly unimportant and small constants that live long in the memory of children. Like, too, the woman who would scare me at the bus stop by popping out her false teeth so that she looked like a bulldog and who acted as our savings bank, marking in her little red book the pocket money we gave her as we saved for Mum’s Christmas present.
The Dolls Hospital in Dawes Road was another. So were the barbershop, Patrick’s toyshop in Lillie Road and the ABC cinema, now a Waitrose. After it closed as a cinema, the rock band Emerson, Lake and Palmer bought the ABC as a rehearsal space, and, right about where the vegetable aisle is now, we would hide and peek under the curtain to watch them play, having forced entry through the fire doors. The disappearance of each and every one of these places marked more than the march of progress. The non-descript bar that replaced the Doll’s Hospital was not ‘World Famous’. The Doll’s Hospital was ‘World Famous’. It had those very words written on the sign above its shop front, and people would send their dolls from all corners of the globe to be mended, primped and restored there. And I walked past it every day, waving at the two old gentlemen who sat inside behind their workbenches, lovingly returning pink plastic to former glories.
The cards that my mother kept being dealt left the pack with so wicked a flourish, one might wonder if they were tampered with because her hand was frequently an impossible one, but she always did the best she could with it. Mum was the kind of person for whom the welfare state was invented; we had bus passes and free school dinners and sundry other benefits were bestowed on us. Working as many hours as God sent was keeping her side of the bargain, and the state recognised that there were people whose labour was no less valuable or dignified because it did not attract a five – or six – figure salary. Mum went out to work at dawn, came home in the late afternoon, cooked a meal and then went out to do an evening job: and whilst there, she would hope all of her children got home alive. Opportunity for misbehaviour was plentiful and readily taken: roof climbing, knockdown ginger, bike stealing, fighting and generally being irritants. Dealing with the aftermath and worry of it all took its toll on her. I suppose it was a life of ‘poverty’, although eventually our lives would feature a colour television (rented and on an early version of cable), hot water, heating, carpets and an indoor bathroom, but money was a commodity whose presence – or lack thereof – dominated proceedings.
Lidia Perillo and Francesco Volpe came to England from Italy in the mid-fifties. Romantically, there was an elopement of sorts, but they were actually invited to the UK along with thousands of others from around Europe and the Commonwealth. They took their opportunity, I suppose, but my mother wasn’t to know that embarking on such an adventure with a man of my father’s disposition was like trusting a blind archer to split the apple on your head; most of his efforts might fly harmlessly by, but one might be catastrophic. I never asked her if she ever wished Cupid’s arrow of destiny had missed.
Post-war Britain was in desperate need of the skill and toil immigrants could provide but no less suspicious of their motives for being here in the first place, and that schizophrenic approach remains today. My parents were issued with Register of Alien cards and told to report to the local police station of wherever it was they were living. Foreigners, at a time when the second war was still fresh and raw in the memory, were largely viewed with disdain and mistrust by Londoners. Well into the seventies I recall shopping with Mum in the North End Road, where barrow boys, irked at her desire to pick up fruit and check its freshness, would snarl at her.
“In ENGLAND,” they would bark, speaking slowly, “we don’t touch until we buy, understand?” A stern look from Mum and a “FUGGOFF!” would do the trick. It was a theme that I too would encounter right through to adulthood.
My parents took up residence in various large houses, Mum as the cook and my father as the butler. Early fifties London still had about it the last remnants of the Edwardian age – although few would admit it – but it wasn’t exactly Upstairs Downstairs. Foreign domestic personnel were no doubt cheaper and easier to dismiss, but Mum learned to cook roast beef and Yorkshire pudding because there was little desire for gnocchi and pesto. The idea of Dad as a house servant is unimaginable. This is the man who, when taking his London bus driving test, stopped the vehicle in the middle of the road, told the examiner (who he judged was asking too many questions and giving too many instructions) to “fuck off”, terminated the test and left the bus in the middle of Uxbridge Road. This impetuous, compulsive streak is a feature of the Volpe clan, and Dad’s ability to stay in one place was forever being tested (he always failed, coming and going like malaria). Their careers as domestic staff ended, Mum and Dad took various jobs wherever they could find them, their family growing at the rate of one child every two years.
With three children, they were living in a basement flat in Woodstock Grove in Shepherd’s Bush. Dad, using the organ that did most of the thinking for him, left Mum to take up with another Italian woman, who had come to London and had been living with them whilst finding a place of her own. A trusting and good heart such as Mum’s is often abused; she used to confide tearfully to this woman that she was convinced Dad was having an affair, unaware that her confidant was in fact planning to trust her own life to him, as Mum had herself once done. It would be no consolation to Mum that the woman was actually about to begin the long purgatory of life with Dad, but she eventually believed for certain that she had dodged the most toxic of bullets. Whilst away, Dad and his new girlfriend had a son, but Dad eventually came back again, stopping long enough to get my mother pregnant with me and I was born in May 1965.
On Christmas Day of that year, seven months after my birth, Dad departed for one final time, leaving Mum to fend for herself, which wasn’t easy, even without the complication of four children,
three of them under five. My uncle, who had himself come to England to pursue a better life and who had engineered their reconciliation, came to our home for Christmas lunch to find my distraught mother, alone with her children. Mum demanded to be taken to the house where she knew Dad would be and on arrival began to scream abuse at the window above, behaviour that brought my father to the street in truculent, righteously punitive mood. My uncle ensured, with equal aggression, that he didn’t get the chance to express himself and thereafter remained, for nearly fifty years, virtually entirely estranged from his brother.
One can only imagine the emotional turmoil of recurring rejection and loss she must have suffered during this early period, before her mind and heart were cleared and she saw what she had escaped. In a strange country, her family all back in Italy, living in a two-roomed slum with very little to sustain her financially, Mum’s is a story of stoicism and a relentless battle for survival. If you had seen the conditions she had to contend with, that statement wouldn’t appear as melodramatic as it sounds. But soon, fortune smiled on her when she got a job as a cook in the local day nursery in Brook Green. They had a baby room, and, at a tender, still-pink and crinkled age, I was cared for as she cooked in the adjacent kitchen. My brother Serge was also given a place, and our early childhood was full of the pleasures of a well-run council establishment. Council nurseries had lots of staff in uniforms and obeyed strict rules. For the entire five years I spent there, after every lunch, we were force-fed a spoonful of cod liver oil, without fail, no exceptions. We all slept in the afternoon on put-down camp beds, there was a proper pre-school curriculum and the food, on account of our mother cooking it, was the best in the borough – nobody else had the variety we enjoyed. The staff loved the lunches, too, with Mum delivering the full spectrum of southern Italian cuisine. Later, her kitchen assistant, Miriam, who had come to England from the Caribbean, taught Mum how to cook salt fish and patties and gave her the recipe for a spicy crispy batter. Mum’s culinary world trip didn’t stop there: soon, lunch and tea featured samosas, exotic curries and Jamaican fried chicken to go along with the lasagnes, cannelloni, baccala and bresaola.
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