Noisy at the Wrong Times

by Michael Volpe

  I went on to be slippered by Morris many times and for what one might consider greater crimes. None, however, came close to that first occasion for sheer intensity. Morris’s strength was never so provoked as it was by a c-word. Climbing roofs, disobeying teachers, leaving school without permission, strangling his wife, kidnapping his children, disembowelling his dog, beating up a smaller boy: none of them could ever have summoned forth fury like a ‘fucking bastard’ did.

  PRESSURE COOKER

  The pressure of life at Woolverstone continued to build with every one of those first days. There was layer upon layer of expectation, duty, responsibility and rule. It felt relentless at times and our individual personalities were being moulded and crafted, if not extinguished, by every single one of those regulations. I’d love to have heard the view of some of my primary school teachers had they been observing this remarkable transformation. It was not so much a change in me, but in what I was apparently prepared to countenance. Every event, from assembly to detention to prep and breakfast, was sacred; we had to be in the right place at the right time and be wearing the correct clothes. The rules felt trivial, pernickety – hysterical even – and we had noticed how certain individuals enforced the hierarchy with particular zeal.

  The whole process of integrating into the life of the school was made more arduous by these endless regulations and some of the frightful people who revelled in enforcing them. Yet all of these pressures, palpable even in the first week, were as nothing compared to the looming reality of the sport that Woolverstone excelled at and which would expect more of us than almost anything else: rugby.

  None of us had ever played rugby at primary school. All of us were football mad, and some had played cricket, but I was again at some advantage having had Serge give me two years of reports on the game and how important it was to the school, yet I had never held a rugby ball in my hands. I remember being told repeatedly that Woolverstone was ‘one of the top three rugby schools in the country’ and woe betide the intake that broke the sequence of achievement. Our first sporting test was looming over us like a great shadow; all the talk was of the impending event, from which no first former could escape, one for which the whole school turned out and for which we would wear our new rugby kit and steel-toed boots for the first time. It was an event of magnificent conception, the most popular match in the school rugby year, and it was called Stonehenge.

  Stonehenge was brutally simple. Sixty boys split into two teams with one team in blue and the other in white. Something in the order of five balls would be thrown onto the pitch, and each team was told to touch balls down behind the try-line at the end of the pitch they were facing. They should try to pass to a colleague in the same coloured shirt and ‘tackle’ anybody they saw with the ball, and the team that scored the most ‘tries’ would win. That was it. No structure, no rules, no referee. It was carnage, but there was a point. As boys flailed and charged at each other, chasing bobbling balls around as if they were pursuing chickens in a farmyard, several masters and a couple of members of the first fifteen stood on the touchlines with clipboards, noting the naturally talented and determined players. From this sixty would come two groups of 30, divided into A and B group. And A group would produce the school under 12s team. Even at that young, tender age we would be playing competitive matches with the same level of expectation as any other year group.

  Knowing this fact was quite a spur to those of us with egos that had followed us to Woolverstone, and I had the added incentive of knowing that Serge would kill me were I to fail to be a half-decent rugby player. If there was a miracle at work at Woolverstone, it was its knack of finding boys of ferocious competitiveness (or injecting it into them), and I have often wondered how it did this. I doubt many of us had glittering academic careers mapped out for us by our parents, who in most cases hoped for a trouble free adolescence, a successful arrival in the lounge marked adulthood and then perhaps a decent, sustainable job. Woolverstone didn’t comply with such a lowly ambition, and there was a belief that all could achieve great things. That, after all was the point of the school surely? Stonehenge was the first opportunity to show some mettle – with the entire school watching.

  Preparing on the pitch, surrounded by bewildered and frightened kids, I was aware of the gathered throng’s collective mirth at the appearance of several of the participants. The thought that went through my mind at that moment is forever etched in my consciousness and, if my mind had, teeth it would have gritted them as it thought, those fuckers ain’t laughing at me. And then the balls were kicked into play and pandemonium took over. So did the ferocious competitiveness I mentioned, and I firmly believe that the first five minutes of that game would have thrown up those who would make it in rugby and those who wouldn’t. Indeed, several were very soon just throwing up.

  From my house, I knew that Rob, Seaton and one or two others would be in the thick of things, but I simply had no time to look about admiring the skill of others. A ball spilled from a boy’s hands close to me, and I picked it up. I was near the touchline and there was a roar, “Run you silly bugger,” or words to that effect, probably shouted by an individual but to me it seemed as if the whole of Suffolk had screamed it into my ear. So I ran. In fact, I ran over a small boy in my way. I seemed to know that putting my hand into the face of someone trying to stop me would help in getting past him, and I managed to resist the temptation to close it. I heard the boy whelp like a small dog, and everyone on the touchline laughed. I approached another boy, squatting before me, arms out wide as if to bar my way. No chance. I slapped him too, which this time brought gales of merriment from the crowd.

  I was beginning to enjoy myself just as a large mass landed on my back and began choking me. Even I knew that this wasn’t allowed – was it? I began to object violently, but with a half- closed windpipe and crushed vocal cords, this was difficult, and “Get off me you fucking cheat” came out like “Geghh fme yaow fuurghi sheet”, at which point I landed face down in the dirt. I swung around with my arm to hit him, but he had run off to throttle someone else. Now I had a taste for running with the ball, but when I next gathered one under my arm, I ran with one eye glancing behind. And I scored. I scored many times, in fact. I realised something else: I was stocky and quick and people had trouble stopping me. By the end, most were scared, and when they saw me chugging towards them with a grimace, they just waved a cursory hand in my direction and let me by. I had also taken to adding vocal effects since I remembered reading how the Vikings did this to instil greater fear into their opponent.

  “Aaaaarrrgh!”

  “Grrraaarggh!”

  And even, once or twice,

  “Chaaaaarrge!”

  It took me a while to lose the habit actually, and right up to my last playing days, when I ran with a rugby ball I would emit a low growl that rose in volume when I crashed into someone.

  “GrrrrrrRAH!”

  Then it happened. It wasn’t cataclysmic or particularly unusual or a rare thing, but it was unfamiliar, exciting and confusing; after a while, the laughter and mirth on the touchline turned into what can only be described as admiration. When a try was scored in a particularly exciting or impressive way, the crowd would applaud and shout “Well done”. To have this come from older boys whose reputations, at least, I had already started to admire carried more weight than any praise I’d had in the past from teachers. I was genuinely excited by the idea of being good at this rugby lark. Naturally, you will have deduced by now, I would never really learn to keep my pride in check, but Stonehenge felt like the moment I believed I might just be in the right place.

  By the end of the match I was knackered. The nervous tension of the first fifteen minutes or so had taken its toll on us, but my chest remained puffed out. I was in love with the game already because, right there and then, I was good at it, or so I thought. There were boys who had skills, speed, courage and strength, but as long as I convinced myself I had some of those qualities too, I realised I would at l
east be one of the fifteen to represent the school. The day was wet, the ground was muddy and I remember the cutting edge of the wind that blew in from the North Sea a few miles away. But I was hot under the collar, flushed with the effort of slapping and bouncing past people, running with three kilos of mud stuck to my boots. I was exhilarated by the entire experience.

  Stonehenge was a crowning glory. I had never before been so totally immersed in a visceral battle on a sports field, and the collective approval of a crowd, albeit one of boys of varying ages, was an entirely new experience. At primary school I had always been a performer, a show-off, had always been in school plays and choirs. This, too, felt like a performance, and immediately it became clear what being good at rugby meant at Woolverstone. It gave you a starting point in the hierarchy, a gloriously physical form of showing off, and it signified that you could survive the first year among your peers. I think Serge breathed a sigh of relief as he saw me repeatedly cross the try-line.

  My exertions in Stonehenge would duly reward me with a spot in A Group as was the case for several of my new pals in Halls House. That first hurdle was negotiated, and you could tell how relieved we were as we traipsed back to the house, tired and sore with the autumn mist descending and the light dimming. We had risen to Woolverstone’s first challenge. Fish out of water we may still have been, but we had started the process of conversion. Maybe we would never make fully-fledged middle-class public schoolboys, but we would be rugby players. Round One to us, then. Since Round One was rugby, the most credible thing to be decent at, there was respite in knowing that if we only stumbled clumsily over the other hurdles the school would put before us, rugby would offer a salvation of sorts. We couldn’t wait for the real training to begin, and our self-esteem had inflated two-fold. The outcome for the boys I had been trampling on was less clear, but at that moment, I could not have cared less.

  * * *

  As that first term wore on, for some of us it began to feel normal. The slipperings, which continued with close frequency, felt normal. So did not walking across a patch of grass, the use of specific doors to enter the same hallway, lining our shoes up with heels out and all the other regulations we had not so long previously been exasperated by. We settled into the system. That’s what happened, we just accepted things.

  Normality, I regret to convey, began to include punching any boy who upset me, for soon I began to throw my weight around a bit. It was bullying, but I convinced myself that it wasn’t and that I only responded to provocation. Furthermore, I had figured out that at Woolverstone you were either the type of boy who got punched, or the type who did the punching, and I was inclined most fervently to the latter. I am happy to report that I curbed this behaviour pretty quickly because I loathed causing other kids to be upset. I can honestly confess to this because when I took a decision to land a blow, I did so fully expecting retaliation. Once I’d punched them, I usually realised that there was little chance of their doing the same in return. I didn’t much like the way it made me feel and I often apologised, (how big of me, huh?)

  It is easy to condemn myself for being so inclined, but if I have a defence, it was merely the way in which I was brought up; or more accurately, the way in which I had to grow up. Hit first, hit hard. Goodness knows how silly and loutish I feel as I write that, but it was nevertheless true and necessary. At six years of age, I recall, vividly, being in a pushing match with a boy I was supposed to be playing football with. One of my brothers emerged from the doorway of a flat we were visiting and said, “Just hit him, Mike!” And I did. His collapse to the ground, blood leaking from his nose, surprised me, as did the whack he got for fighting when his Mum came out to investigate his howling. I merely continued with the policy as I grew up, and it felt perfectly natural to bring it to Woolverstone with me. Other boys did not have such a feral approach to confrontation, so it would naturally appear as though I were the aggressor or, indeed, bully. This all sounds like an excuse doesn’t it? Oh well, so be it.

  It would be ridiculous to suppose that there was no ritual bullying, particularly from those in the older age groups, but it never felt particularly malignant in most cases. It was standard stuff that those in the year above us felt they had earned, and we in turn looked forward to when we would be able to do it ourselves. But quite soon our year and that above us began to merge and become closer friends. There were few whose hearts were fully in it, and so this “rite of passage”, for which they had waited a whole year, was temporary.

  Although spikes of genuine cruelty would occur, the whole edifice of power and control over younger boys was pretty well self-regulated, with distinct boundaries and rules. It could be intensive, persistent and unpleasant, and for some it was unbearable. It was that hierarchy thing again, lots of eleven and twelve-year-old boys, struggling with an alien environment, hormones that were starting to flow and a fear of falling behind their peers. Rogue – and rare – bullies visited a fair degree of violence on younger boys, but they would generally get their comeuppance, whilst physical assaults by seniors on the first years were exceptional. Suffice to say, I ensured my experience would be of the atypical sort.

  I only recall ever being hit once in those early days, and it was by a pupil so much older than I that I almost considered it an honour. Sitting in the dining room watching Grandstand one Saturday afternoon, a few of us from the first form had just finished delivering a pounding on the rugby pitch to a poor bedraggled group of public schoolboys from Norfolk somewhere. Grandstand and World of Sport with Frank Bough and Dickey Davies were a treat on a wet Saturday afternoon, getting the scores of our respective football teams or watching the ludicrous wrestling with Mick McManus, Big Daddy et al. We would all gather with chairs beneath the television in the dining room and joke and laugh, revelling in the moving white streak of Dickey’s coiffure. They were wonderful, comfy, warm-as-toast afternoons, all of us fresh from the showers after the match, aching slightly but glowing with the healthy exertions of the day. I recall them with huge fondness and can remember how it felt; winners again, feeling strong, achievers watching the winter gloom gather outside and looking forward to the Saturday evening teatime. Later that night, we might be allowed to stay up to watch Match of The Day, so best behaviour and no mistakes.

  It was into this happy world that Thompson barged and switched the TV channel. A sixth former entering a room like that would have a monstrously demoralising effect on the younger boys gathered there. He intruded, did what he wanted, put us in our place – and we never liked being put in our place. Doubtless full of the bravado that adolescent testosterone creates and stung by a strong tweak of indignation, I challenged Thompson. It was one of the few occasions we got to be ourselves, free and relaxed, among others of our age, and Thommo’s arrival was, to quote Billy Connolly, about as welcome as a fart in a spacesuit.

  Thommo’s friends called him “Sabot”, but I don’t know why. I hope I am not revealing ignorance in saying that but since he was black, I suspect I very well could be. In any case, the emphasis is on ‘his friends called him Sabot’ and certainly not eleven-year-old big shots.

  “Oh, fucking hell, Sabot, don’t turn it over!”

  If you have never seen a square fist, I can tell you it is a remarkable thing. I mean a square block of flesh and bone the size of a bag of sugar. It doesn’t narrow from the large fingers down to the little finger; it remains constant, with a flat front surface, and is, in point of fact, frighteningly square. The really astonishing thing is that the knuckled plane of the clenched fist is almost three times the width of the wrist it is attached to. Thompson had square fists. He also had wide wrists, which gives you an impression of the clubs he wielded at the ends of his arms. Before he popped me on the chin, knocking me backwards off my chair, he gave me a quizzical, half-smiling look that seemed to ask, “Did you just call me Sabot?” Similar to the way a batsman of quality meets an over-pitched ball with a gentle swish of the willow, Thommo didn’t put much effort into it but, rather, time
d the strike to perfection. He didn’t even get off the seat he had taken in front of the TV: I was directly behind him so he needed only to turn on his chair. The punch appeared to me to be in slow motion, and although his lazy, unruffled style meant that I saw the fist coming, I was mesmerised by its size as the light began to dim in its shadow. It was so large, I think I was caught in its gravitational pull for I can think of no other reason why I remained stock still in its path.

  “Crikey, that’s a big...”.

  The thought was pinched from my mind as stars erupted into my peripheral vision and continued to rotate as I gently keeled over. Looking up at the ceiling for a moment seemed to bring me round and I would like to report that I sprang to my feet and took an eight count, but I fear I more likely just emerged slowly and in instalments from the lino. I righted my chair and asked, quite as if nothing had occurred, “So, Thommo, what we watching then?” Anyone would have learned a valuable lesson about his limitations. I, on the other hand, resolved to pay no attention to it whatsoever.

  The centre of house life was, for the entire time I was at Woolverstone, the common room. A large open space on the ground floor, with an anteroom for reading newspapers or books, the common room had a table tennis table in it. All of us would gather there in the evenings after prep, on afternoons after rugby and at weekends. It was the hub of our social life, where we argued, took the piss out of one another, bullied or got bullied, had fights and, best of all, learned to play table tennis.