Two weeks later three doctors and a nurse gathered around me as if in an operating theatre, with an array of alarming utensils arranged neatly on a steel trolley, and proceeded to pop each of the blisters one by one. Some were huge, and collectively they looked like the cobbles on a street. I remember the warm water running as each was gently sliced at its edge and I recall the stench of the ointment they bathed me in. It was a tough time being alone in that room, but my brothers walked past my window on the way to school and they, along with their friends, shouted and greeted me through the glass. That was something I always looked forward to.
Now of course, this second stint in hospital with a mystery leg ailment meant further difficulties for Mum. Fitting in visiting me was taxing since she had to be in her kitchen at the nursery by 7am and then had a job to go to after feeding the rest of my brothers. Mum would sit by my bed at five thirty in the morning whilst I slept and would then go to work – I rarely knew she was there in the silent, sleeping ward in semi-darkness but she sat there anyway. One morning I did emerge from my deep, medically assisted slumbers and saw her crying. Her tears were not of sadness, though; the traction they had put me into the previous day seemed to have done the trick.
I vividly (and with no little upset) recall the day they resorted to traction. They were baffled by my ailment and the extent of my pain. Standing around my bed in a huddle one morning, the doctors discussed many possible options and treatments, but one thing I latched onto was traction – strapping my leg and tying a weight to my foot in order to extend and stretch it. To me it seemed like the most concrete idea they‘d had because it was practical, obvious and tangible. They wandered off to make some decisions, and I began to wail at the nurses that I wanted, must have, just had to go into traction. I cried and cried with the pain, and a poor cleaner, a gentle Jamaican woman, tried to comfort and reassure me, eventually dissolving into tears alongside me as she did so. We were quite a sight, and when she could take no more of my pleading, bawling and snivelling she marched off to the nurse’s station on my behalf to demand that I be put into traction.
A little later, two nurses, armed with a roll of sticky plaster, some weights and a pulley, performed the duty that in my mind had been demanded and achieved by that lovely cleaning woman. She had got it done, nobody else. And she remains a clear memory for me, that soft compassionate lady whose name I never knew; another of those small but hugely significant people or moments in the lives of certain children that pass by in a fleeting second, yet are burned into their consciousness. Many years later, at the birth of my daughter, that cleaner sprang straight back into my mind as the Jamaican midwife handed the baby to her weeping father with the words, “Here you go bwoy wonder!”
It was the morning after the installation of the pulley and weights that Mum had come into the ward to find me lying, blissfully asleep, on my side, the side of the leg that had been so excruciatingly painful to the merest touch the day before. The mystery had been solved. It had only been a trapped nerve, and so she wept; relieved that from that day forward her mind would no longer be suffused with the worry of what might be wrong with me.
Putting me into traction solved the leg problem, and antibiotics cleared up the chest infection but the sunstroke had struck me quite hard. They wanted to keep me in so that my leg could strengthen and to check there would be no reccurrence. I was out of traction after a few days, but I would spend a further fortnight in the ward. Two weeks in hospital turned out to be quite a bit of fun and needing a wheelchair introduced a unique opportunity for mischief. I took the chance with relish and crashed my way around the hospital with a boy whose entire bottom half was encased in plaster of Paris. He was on his belly on a little trolley, and together we caused chaos. His affliction, which made mine look like no more than a verucca, did nothing to prevent his mobility or potential for bedlam. In fact, his arms could propel him down the long corridors at giddy speed; with his legs protruding dead straight behind him and his arms waving furiously beside him, he looked like a lobster on amphetamine. He’d cry at night when his legs were aching, but he was full of beans during the daytime and even cheekier to the nurses than I was.
By the time I left the ward to go home, I was walking normally. I went to the bedside of my new friend who had fallen quiet as Mum helped me pack up my things for the discharge. He lay there exhausted from the effort of getting up and under his covers, which he always insisted on doing without help. I felt strangely guilty for being able to walk again. We had shared the same inability to use our legs for a short while, but he had been living with it for most of his life. I don’t think he minded that I had elevated my own minor ailment to the level of his, but I think he enjoyed the company for that couple of weeks. As I said my farewells tearfully, he smiled.
“Have a good time at that school, wontcha?” he urged.
“Yeah, I will. I’ll come and see you before I go,” I lied.
I wish I could remember his name.
The end of summer 1976 arrived. The heat wave, which in those pre-global warming days had become a legend, subsided, and Serge was at the end of the remarkably long summer holidays that Woolverstone provided. My confidence about going there was starting to fray at the edges, and I would lie in bed, badgering Serge about the school. What would it be like? Would I enjoy it? Would I be homesick? Occupying me more than anything else was the fear that I wouldn’t be the toughest boy in the year – a status I thought I enjoyed at primary school. Because I had visited the school many times previously, I had not been required to attend the open day for new boys, but Serge had been one of those showing people around and he sought to reassure me.
“I saw all of the boys coming in your year, you look harder than all of them,” he said.
It is, I suppose, an indication of what was important to me at the time that I had become concerned about such things. I was obviously sanguine about the academic challenges of Woolverstone, but that could well have been because I never truly realised there were any. It is also possible that of all the obstacles Woolverstone would place before me, the one I feared most was being a young boy who had to compete with other young boys of equal or, heaven forfend, greater potential. Serge took some time to explain the protocols and rules of the school, the regulations forbidding me to walk on the grass, rules insisting I use particular doors to enter and exit buildings and rotas for menial tasks around the house. He pointed out with desperate pleading in his eyes that things would be better for me if I developed an understanding of why these seemingly petty demands had a purpose. Naturally, none of this was making much sense or difference to me, and my brother was transparently alarmed by my imminent arrival; I would surely become a responsibility he could do without and he was aware of the explosive consequences once I was required to conform.
I don’t remember being upset at the prospect of leaving Mum, my other brothers or home, but that may have been because I had a sibling to keep an eye on me. That sibling was developing quite a fear of the impending union between his little brother and his school. I was only eleven, after all, a child in all ways, but I suffered from the affliction that many eleven-year-old boys fall prey to, which is the unshakeable belief that they are twice as old. Serge was astute enough to realise that the strength of my conviction in this regard presented him, let alone the school, with complications of an acute nature.
* * *
September 1976.
Wearing a uniform only added to the disquiet that was growing in me as we headed to Waterloo to take the coaches to Woolverstone for the start of term; regulation grey trousers, light blue shirt and navy blue crew neck jumper was the casual symphony of colour of the day. Apparently, it had been far more formal in years past, when boys were permanently required to wear ties, shirts and jackets. Now we only had to don blazers for Sunday assembly.
In that preceding summer, I had enjoyed the process of equipping myself for the school by going to the designated uniform suppliers and being issued with rugby kits, s
hirts, jumpers with the school crest, blazers, trousers et al. I especially loved the fact that Mum had to order lots of name tags with my name embroidered onto them in red, silky thread in a classical typeface. To me those name tags demonstrated why Woolverstone was a school of a different hue from any other I could have gone to. Name tags were so incredibly posh in my mind. These items of regulation clothing with graceful little name tags sewn into them were the first sign of Woolverstone’s boundaries and expectations. Like all ‘public’ schools, it was essentially based on the military model and, although over time it had softened a little, there was still a curious and exciting anticipation of this regime. If I had my way now, all schools would insist that their pupils wore the most exquisite morning suits with brutally strict rules about how to wear them. Today I understand the value of such protocols, like those at Eton, for example. It is not about conformity, this insistence on ultraformality, it is quite the opposite and encourages the boy to feel proud and to walk tall. Behind the outward appearance of ‘uniformity’ is the facility for each boy to believe fully in his value within the ranks of his contemporaries. From the point of view of social value and boundaries, a boy’s appearance is hugely significant. I think of it as looking after the pennies and the pounds looking after themselves; if the first thing a young man has to concern himself with in the morning is how well his shirt is ironed and his tie formed, his energy for less desirable behaviour might be curbed or diverted. Woolverstone was in no way like Eton from the sartorial point of view, but I wish it had been. In fact, I would probably have babies in nurseries wearing firmly starched nappies. Back at Waterloo on my first day, I think I was at least unconsciously aware of the point.
Anyway, a trunk full of this clothing, shoes and other accoutrements had been sent ahead by road freight, but we still had to struggle with suitcases through the concourse and out onto a small road that ran along the perimeter of the station. All about us was a growing number of Woolverstone boys in the same uniform. I could make out the first formers, who were small, pale and terrified. Some were small, black and terrified but there was no mistaking the fear in their eyes as other groups of older boys gathered together, smoked and made fun of each other. Serge was now in the third form and had done this many times, so as we reached the coaches, he began to greet friends, and it became clear he was at least popular in his year, but he was now less my brother and more someone who had been tasked to keep an eye on me, like a chaperone. He had a coterie of friends to whom he could clearly better relate, their shared experience being as obvious as was the lack of it with us new kids. For the first time, I came to realise the distinct worlds he inhabited – home and school. Knowing some of the people for whom he was now so keen to desert me on the pavement was strangely comforting, and I was able to work out for myself that it was only the unfamiliarity of others that was daunting; even Serge’s friends would have seemed threatening had I never met them before. I also noticed that some of the kids spoke well, looked clean, very tidy and had smartly dressed parents. Crucially, they had two parents. Later I would discover that these boys were fairly rare and were often Forces children.
I’d had wealthy friends in London, and some of them had two parents as well, but they weren’t posh. Addison Gardens was peculiarly placed in west London, between Hammersmith, Shepherd’s Bush and the affluent, graceful enclave of Holland Park. Wealthy parents sent their children to Addison because it was a good primary school, and so we all mixed happily together, our respective financial positions being largely irrelevant. My best friend for a while was Manus Egan, who lived in a mansion flat in Holland Park that was so luxurious and of such vast proportion that his mother had to gently coax mine through the front door when she came to collect me after a play date. The white pile carpet in the hallway that brushed your ankles as you walked through it had the same effect on Mum that trying to jump off the top board at Putney baths had on me: she would stand at the threshold of the flat and rock backwards and forwards, always just about to take the leap only to lose her courage at the last second. Eventually she would be encouraged to plunge her feet into the shag pile but she insisted on taking her shoes off first.
The most amazing thing about the Egan’s home was not the kilometre long passageway, nor the entrance hall that was larger than my bedroom, or even the kitchen that was big enough to have a large oak table at the heart of it. No, what really astounded me was the fact that their living room was so big that the sofas did not have to be lined up against the wall. I’d heard the old fable that Doctor Who would get kids hiding behind the sofa, and I never understood that. My sofa was against the wall in our lounge, so how could one possibly hide behind it? The opening at the back was paper thin, dark and full of things that had been lost for months. It was a genuine curiosity to me – until I got friendly with Manus and we really did hide behind the sofa. And if we felt the need to run screaming from the room, we still had ten yards of Persian carpet to cover before we hit the door to the lounge. The Egans had money, but they weren’t posh. They were Irish and very nice people, too.
At Waterloo, I have to confess that despite my friendship with the Egans, I found many of my new schoolmates very odd creatures indeed, and I chuckled quietly to myself at some of them. Nevertheless, it still remained a little intimidating to be around so many people I didn’t know, and I can only imagine the anxiety of those new boys who knew nobody at all. I soon became aware of the sixth formers, who all seemed to have whiskers and in fact looked like fully-grown men. Serge’s stories about them had rendered some of these aloof, trendy bigwigs as legends, normally of the rugby field. I knew of some who were regularly mentioned as bullies. Some were Good Blokes. Being labelled a Good Bloke was to be welcomed, and Good Blokes in the sixth form were a class above because they did not have to be Good Blokes; as seniors, they could have been unexpurgated bastards if they wanted. When you are at primary school, even the older kids still seem like kids, but now I was at school with adults, so knowing that among their number were some nice people offered reassurance. But Good Bloke or not, there was a hierarchy. These sixth formers would tell others what to do, talk to younger boys with dismissive rudeness (except for the Good Blokes, who just didn’t notice them, which I suspect is all it took to be labelled a Good Bloke) and everyone seemed to defer to them.
I was largely unaware of what this all meant in real terms, and so it was no surprise that I would fail to take my place when the hierarchy swept me up. Today, I am fully behind the notion of a hierarchy in the workplace because on the whole I think it works as long as you apply scrutiny and equilibrium to what those further up the line are asking you to do. But at eleven years of age, if I had ever been compliant in a hierarchy, it was because I had conceived it, designed it and put it into practice: marbles hierarchies, penny-up-the-wall hierarchies, football-in-the park hierarchies, stunt bicycle hierarchies etc. The common factor was my position at the top of each of them because I had probably initiated the game or pasttime. Either you fell into line or you didn’t play. Playing alone for lots of the time didn’t dissuade me from my stubbornness. At Woolverstone, first formers were at roughly the point on the totem pole where the tufts of grass are growing at the base, but for me, that was a mere inconvenience to be overcome. When I felt a shove in the back, it was to instinct that I resorted.
“Get out of the way pleb.”
What on earth is a pleb? I thought.
The shove shocked me since I hadn’t been looking.
“Fuck off you c**t”, I snarled in a high pitched voice.
* * *
It continues to be a trait of mine that I don’t really know when to take a low profile. If there is a parapet, I will perch my head atop it, and if I am in a room full of people whose acquaintance I have never before made, I will still feel the need to point out which of them is an idiot. I do this not in a wantonly rude fashion but by simply persisting in exposing the error of their argument or the obnoxiousness of the way in which they propose it. That my o
wn behaviour is loathsome is not in the least bit relevant since I will have deduced that I’m not the stupid one. In 1976 I also had a notion of indestructibility, despite excruciatingly disproportionate amounts of evidence to the contrary, which consisted mainly of physical or emotional injury mixed with a dash of humiliation.
Exhibit One would have to be Marcia Jones. Marcia was a girl in my class at primary school who also lived close by in Fulham Court. She was bigger than me, but using the logic of a small boy, which is hardly logic at all, I deduced that size, strength and violent tendencies were neutralised by her gender. My mother’s physicality was somehow excluded from whatever fur-brained theory I expounded on the threat carried by the opposite sex. When, on a warm summer’s day, Marcia wanted to drink from the playground water tap, I refused to let her until I had finished myself. In fact, I just pursed my lips on the small upward spout of water and pretended to drink, despite having already had my fill. After a while, during which time Marcia showed commendable restraint, the game was up. Without speaking, she grabbed me by the collar and swung me away from the tap in a move of such breathtakingly effortless speed that my lips were still pursed when I realised my feet were off the ground and my body parallel to it. As I picked myself up, I was still unsure of what had actually happened to me. Before I had a chance to gather my thoughts on the matter, Marcia lunged at me and proceeded to slap me about the face and head, cursing me all the while.
The shock and embarrassment of being beaten up by a girl was cataclysmic, and I blurted something about her being lucky she was female. She and everyone else knew my reluctance to retaliate had more to do with my need to visit the school nurse, who applied iodine to my wounds. It would have needed a vat of the stuff to restore my battered and scarred ego. True to form, I resolved to take nothing of use from the experience, and some while later (a period that had clearly seen me hang on as doggedly to my obstinacy as Marcia had to her irascibility) she asked me to leave a phone box I was mucking around in. I said no.
Noisy at the Wrong Times Page 6