Noisy at the Wrong Times

by Michael Volpe

  “Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned”.

  “Yes, my son, what is it?”

  “Errrm... I told George Williams to fuck off in the playground.”

  “Is that it?”

  “Isn’t that bad, then?”

  “No, no. Have you done anything else, I mean?”

  “Umm. I looked up Danielle Pike’s skirt?”

  I really did look up Danielle’s skirt. We were something of an item at Addison Gardens Primary School, but I was still a little sheepish about displaying any affection for her. We would all play kiss-chase in the playground and Danielle would lead a posse of her friends in pursuit of me. When they cornered me – and some of them were quite aggressive about it – I would fall to the floor and curl up in a ball to protect myself from the kisses that would rain in. Whilst on the floor, though, I could sneak a peek up the skirts of the chasers, and Danielle’s was always a treat because she was the one I loved. And her knickers were always pure white, not grey and rumpled like some of the other girls’. I was heartbroken when she was taken to live in the country somewhere and left me stranded, to be chased by the remnants of her posse, none of whom I peeked up the skirt with as much relish as I did with Danielle. I knew looking up a girl’s skirt was bad, naughty, and probably sinful, but I was unworried by the price I might have to pay for it in the everlasting, so I offered it in the confessional.

  I never said the Hail Marys I was frequently ordered to recite. Our inability to grasp the tenets of the religion was almost exclusively down to the zealous way in which the nuns sought to inculcate us with the principles of Holiness, Goodness, Righteousness Or Else. As with all fundamentalists, they had neither the wit nor the will to present the benign face of their religion for fear it would lack impact. Controlling and turning us into mini-zealots, afraid of our own shadows was their over-riding aim. Given the opportunity to be washed of all sin for another week, we were more prepared to allow it to build up ceaselessly and hope we could cut a deal with Him when the time came. I would hate you to think me ‘anti-religion’; I’m not really, but whenever I hear a serious debate on one issue or another, the introduction of a religious viewpoint has the effect of reducing the matter to silliness, like farting at a funeral. Apparently sane individuals, with obvious intellect, will apply the teachings of Jesus to the travails of single mothers. It leaves me wondering why they even bothered with an education. Anyway, there you are.

  Our seemingly endless capacity for misbehaviour, and the resultant trials and worries, distressed Mum. It just wore her down, and there were evenings when it all got too much and she would march out of the house, vowing never to return. It would take my brothers several minutes to convince me that she had only gone next door to the neighbour to cry and get a break. I’d be crying too, convinced she had left us.

  Woolverstone must have arrived like a beacon of light, a lifeboat in the storm, a big, whopping helping hand. As boys at risk of taking several unseemly paths in life, Serge and I certainly needed it – but Mum needed it more. For two years after Serge went away to school, she had the relative luxury of just my two older brothers and me to worry about. One of those – Matt – was providing plenty of anxiety on his own and would continue to do so for decades, but the thought that her two youngest would soon be established, safe and sound, at one of the best schools in the country must have been a balm for her over-worked, on-the-edge life. Of course, I had to actually get into the school and I sat the eleven-plus to that end. I wasn’t aware I was sitting the test, nor that it was being used to judge my suitability for Woolverstone, but I did well enough to be invited to meet the headmaster in a room at County Hall. I wasn’t daunted by the interview, but I was always wary of being called into offices where stern men would speak to me. Paddy wasn’t stern at all, and I liked him immediately. The narrow office had a window that looked out onto the Thames and when I wasn’t gazing over his shoulder at the Houses of Parliament, I was telling him I wanted to be an astronaut, or failing that, I would be a carpenter. What must have seemed flippant answers to his questions didn’t prevent me getting the nod: I was off to Woolverstone in the following September.

  It was an easy afternoon, my first encounter with Paddy, an adult I felt I could immediately trust. His good nature and my self-centred approval of him aside, it was his assurance that I would be given a place at Woolverstone that meant the most. So on the warm thermals of Mum’s enormous sigh of relief we drifted out of County Hall and back to Fulham where I set about telling everybody I knew that I was going to Woolvo. I told Serge on the phone when he rang soon after; he sounded less than ecstatic, I must confess, but as with everything, I wore my achievement as a badge of honour, something to set me apart. I must have been insufferable.

  It is almost impossible to articulate the scale of Woolverstone’s otherworldliness. I wasn’t just going to the good school up the road when everyone else was attending the shit comp around the corner. It was so much more than that. I would be ‘moving away’, I would vanish from the estate for weeks, months on end and would be entering a world that we couldn’t even imagine, save for the old films we had seen, like “Goodbye Mr Chips’. This was interplanetary, by contrast, and if you were going to such a place there was a form of celebrity to be had. It was a distinction that to my mind merely confirmed that I was something indisputably unique. At Addison Primary, my achievement was announced in assembly; the staff clapped, but the rest of the kids looked terrified, as if I had been sentenced to death. In class, the teacher would say things like, ‘For a boy who is going to Woolverstone, this handwriting is dreadful, Michael’, or in games I would be told that ‘Woolverstone will expect a little more effort than that young man’, and so it went on, endlessly. I became aware that great things were expected of me. It was water off a duck’s back, of course.

  GETTING READY

  Despite having a posse of friends in Fulham Court, I wasn’t overly bothered by the prospect of leaving town for five years, returning only during school holidays. There was certainly a feeling of pride in being chosen to go to Woolverstone, despite the sense of expectation that was mounting around me, and I was looking forward to my departure as an adventure. Probably because boarding school seemed to them a horror of unimaginable scale, or more likely because I was bragging so much that they would be pleased to see the back of me, I am not convinced that my friends were too fussed about my departure, either. We carried on playing together on the estate, but when they talked about going to secondary school, it was a conversation to which I could not contribute – or was never really allowed to. I could tell them the things I knew about Woolverstone from visiting Serge, but they were more interested in life at St Clement Dane’s or St Edmund’s or, for the brighter ones, the London Oratory. These were the schools where everyone but me would spend their formative years. However, the gentle casting out that I experienced was, in my eyes, a confirmation of superiority.

  The final months before I left for Suffolk were, then, a period of time when I began to separate myself emotionally from my friends. I stayed indoors a bit more than usual and fewer mates came to call for me. On the other hand, I knew they would miss the free ice-creams I could bag for them when my father turned up outside the estate in his Mr Whippy van a couple of times a week.

  Dad’s departure saw him decamp to Wandsworth, so he was still in the vicinity. He had become an oil lorry driver, and sometimes he’d even take one or two of us out on his rounds delivering heating oil to offices and schools. I always found such days exciting, if only for sitting high in the cab of a lorry. Dad was not very committed to his work, but he did the minimum he had to, and, of course, taking us in the cab of his truck was not particularly legal. The daily drudge was never going to exert much control over him for long; only the odds at Ladbrokes and his overwhelming aversion to responsibility could do that (not to mention the contents of his trousers), so he decided to do something that required less work and, more importantly, did not impose on him a boss to who
m he had to defer. However, this repugnance towards any kind of work was in direct and knotty conflict with his love of gambling, so, using an admirably entrepreneurial logic, he bought himself an ice cream van.

  Ice cream had universal appeal. It was cheap to produce (he just bought vats of a ready mixed liquid that he poured into the top of a machine), and the demand for a little luxury on the council estates was high. He would only have to work for a few hours a day and could still earn enough in cash to spend a few hours throwing it away again in the betting shop.

  The predictability of coming from an Italian family with an ice-cream man for a father was obvious even to me. For a civilisation of the richest history imaginable, Italy does have some unspeakably naff cultural icons. I blame the Cornetto ads for much of that. My Uncle Matteo, who also now lived in London, spent a great deal of time and evangelical zeal trumpeting the delights of Italian art, music, fashion and architecture, and I merely repeated to my friends everything he said. This was when I first began to hear opera and Italian music; my uncle would preach to me about Mario Lanza and play his records. A strange Welsh chap who lived next door to him used to come into the flat and drink whisky; like many Welshmen, he thought he could sing and wailed along to the records in a creaky tenor voice. Mantovani got an airing too, but curiously, so did Bob Marley, who my uncle was very fond of (what the neighbours made of the musical cocktail emanating from his front-room window I dread to think.) Frankly, the leap from the reverberated strings of The Greatest Gift is Love to Kinky Reggae is one no man should reasonably attempt to make. Marley and Lanza I thought were cool; Mantovani I placed alongside Cornettos, the circus owner in Pinocchio and arse pinchers in Rome – all of them made me cringe. I continued to regale everybody with outlandish stories of summers in Montecorvino and to advocate the wonders of Da Vinci a la Zio Matteo, but the advertising industry was busy dismantling the reputation I was working so very hard to establish for Italian cultural superiority. It was a rearguard action on my part – one I think may have eventually succeeded – but since Michelangelo, Caravaggio or Verdi rarely drifted through the collective consciousness of Fulham Court’s youth, gelato would have to suffice as a cultural reference. Simply put, my personal status came before that of the Motherland.

  Dad’s van generally arrived in the early evenings. Suddenly, from every balcony, mothers would emerge from their doors behind wet dangling washing and scream the names of their children, beckoning them to attend immediately. Usually, the children had already been alerted and were sprinting to the forecourts below their flats to await orders. Coins and notes would rain down from on high as parents babbled instructions to their children who would then rush off to Dad’s van. I am not sure why there was such urgency – as with life, I suppose, they thought they might miss out if they didn’t get in quick enough.

  For me, the arrival of my father was a moment to be relished. Of course, I would have preferred him to turn up accompanied by the roar of a Ferrari engine, not the wobbly chimes of his clapped out Mr Whippy van, but those bells were the starter gun for all the kids whose parents had not anointed them from on high with silver coins. Like bees to a honey pot, from every direction they would gather about me in swarms. It mattered not one bit where I was on the estate because I would be hunted down and found. You could hear the relay of shouted enquiry across the forecourts and playgrounds: “Where’s Mike? Find Mike!” I would wait smugly for my coterie to arrive, puffing and panting, eager to impress. If I were indoors, Mum would send me out, if nothing else to consume some time in the company of my father, with an order for a block of ice cream.

  “And tella you fadda I’m no gotta ma mentenence dissa week,” she would call as I slammed the door behind me. “AND NO SLAMMA DA FUCKY DOOR!”

  If they had not yet knocked on my door, having fruitlessly searched for me in the Court, my friends would be waiting at the foot of the stairs, fervent, excited and hugely pleased to see me. They would take it in turns to put their arms around my shoulders as we skipped hurriedly towards the chimes, and fights would erupt as kids argued over which of them was my best friend. By the time we reached Dad’s van at the Shottendane Road entrance of the estate, we must have looked like the Bash Street Kids, approaching in a comic-book cloud of dust from which arms and legs would occasionally protrude. Peace would return the moment we arrived at the van and I began to bark out orders to Dad, although nothing that my friends asked for was given. You could have a cone, a cone and if you were really lucky, you could have a cone. They came in three sizes, all of them small. Anyone who had the temerity to request red sauce would get short shrift and very likely no cone either. And even I couldn’t get a chocolate flake. Tutting and rolling his eyes heaven-wards at the demands of us children, Dad was never outwardly pleased to see me. Eventually, I would relay Mum’s order and he would grudgingly hand me a small block of ice cream to take home. If his tip for the 2.30 at Plumpton had come in, it would be raspberry ripple. Ice cream was just about the only thing my father ever gave us, but sometimes even that felt like treasure. As we were about to trot off to enjoy the delights of frozen vanilla flavoured fat, I would remember Mum’s other instruction.

  “Mum says she wants her money this week.” Often I would have to shout it again, but louder, so he could hear over the large crowd of customers who had gathered.

  * * *

  The scorching summer of 1976 also saw me spend two weeks in hospital with an ailment that left the doctors baffled. An agonising pain in my hip and groin left me unable to move during school sports day, and immobility in the fierce sun had led to sunstroke. I ended up in hospital with acute fever and lots of hurting. Putting two and two together and getting five, the doctors suspected rheumatic fever. They took what felt like several pints of blood and, when that proved inconclusive, they took several more, then stuck me on an ECG monitor, X-rayed me, poked me, prodded me and generally acted as if they hadn’t a clue. My consultant was the bow-tie-wearing Mr Jolly, apparently one of the world’s leading paediatricians of his day. I always treat people who wear bow ties with suspicion and it’s common in the classical music industry, but back then it set Mr Jolly apart and I was chuffed when a year or so later I saw him on the television.

  “That was my doctor,” I would proudly announce to anybody who was listening, which was everybody if I had my way.

  I ought to point out that this was my second stint in hospital; two years previously, I had spent a fortnight in a private room in the maternity unit. I was there because my injury was burns and they had to isolate me as a sterile measure, and the only private room they had was in the maternity ward. I am almost reluctant to relay the cause of my misfortune since it can paint a picture of foolhardy negligence on the part of Mum – but it wasn’t really. I was nine years old when it happened, and it was the same hospital, New Charing Cross (as it was then known) in Hammersmith, that picked up the pieces.

  Every morning I had a cup of tea. I liked tea. Lou, my eldest brother loved it, so I would too. Mum called us down in the morning, and I stumbled into the lounge in my vest and underpants, half asleep. I came to my senses a bit when Mum brought me the mug of tea, which I took from her, but ten seconds later promptly fell asleep again. The scalding tea was quite an eye-opener, and I sprinted, screaming, up the stairs, sure Mum would wallop me for spilling tea on the sofa. Serge and Lou came charging after me, I thought, either to help deliver the walloping or to protect me from it, but it was in fact to assess the seriousness of my injuries, which they assumed would be bad. They were. The pain was ugly, all consuming and frighteningly angry. Blisters began to form immediately, and by now most of the neighbours were in the house wondering what the commotion was. I wasn’t happy about that because in my desperation to escape the hot fluid, I had whipped off my pants and vest as I charged up the stairs and was now stark naked, embarrassed that my wedding tackle was involved in the injury. Whilst an ambulance was called, Mum tried to set about me with a tub of butter, which back in the old country
she had always thought best for the treatment of burns. Thankfully, Lou was wiser; he stopped her basting me and put me in a cold bath instead.

  I was delivered by ambulance and hospital trolley to the room in the maternity unit and isolated immediately. I don’t remember going to A&E first. Everybody who visited or came to treat me had to don full gowns, masks and gloves. The first person I recall standing at the end of my bed as I sobbed was a social worker – no doubt alerted by the hospital. She was crying too (more than me, to which I took offence, actually). I didn’t know why she was crying. Was I such a pitiable sight? I didn’t recognise her so I can’t imagine she was weeping on account of my being familiar to her, that I was somebody about whom she cared a great deal. But she was blubbing like a bloody baby, and one can now conclude that she was probably more familiar with me than I was with her. Someone was clearly paying attention to us.

  My lap and upper legs were smothered in blisters and a cold burns sheet had been placed on my injured nether regions. I peeked fearfully beneath it (for even at nine, thanks to kisschase and visits to Fulham baths I had become aware of the value of my equipment) and noticed that a blister had formed at the tip of my old chap. Thankfully it was the only one, but it did have a deforming effect that made my willy look like an unpeeled prawn.