Noisy at the Wrong Times

by Michael Volpe

  For hour upon hour, we would play tournaments and epic matches, usually topped out by a game of Round the Table. Round the Table involved lots of boys starting at each end, hitting a ball across the table and then running up to the other end for the next turn. Round the Table was funny and dangerous after a while but what we loved, adored – were fanatical about – was a one -on-one match. We all spent money on quality bats with dimples, padding and rubber sheets of varying thickness. We learned how to spin the ball, swerve it, smash it from below the table top itself, and some boys developed a serve that sent the ball gyrating over the net in a supernatural arc so unpredictable that sometimes it was almost impossible to return the ball as it pinged wildly off your bat in every direction. Our epic competitions could last hours. Sometimes, seniors would come into the room and demand the right to use the table, which in the middle of a tournament could be soul-destroying. Off we would trudge, our delirious fun ruined by a couple of seniors who couldn’t have cared less. From time to time, a rebellion would erupt, usually when someone only a year or so older than us would try it on. As we grew bigger and more confident, the worm would turn. Des launched himself at one such bully who crashed through the table, with Des beating him senseless, but the table was knackered and we couldn’t play anyway.

  In the anteroom, I first began to read newspapers and heard about Thatcher and her rise to power. I remembered Thatcher from her days as education minister and the time she stopped primary children getting daily milk. My political opinions began to take form in that anteroom, and I even wrote a letter to Thatcher, telling her what I thought of her. The soft chairs would become tattered and torn from the lack of care we gave them, and many a long argument would evolve, especially on freezing winter days, when we stayed in the warm, waiting for tea time to come. Some of us loved to argue for the sheer hell of it and Woolverstone gave us what ordinary day schools couldn’t: time.

  Time together, just being growing young men. Today, when on holiday, I love, more than anything, the pointless but hugely entertaining sit-down, drinks in hand, blathering about nothing in particular. We get so little chance for such pleasures these days. I can smell that common room and I can see its walls, the low radiator that ran around the edge of the room, the table tennis table and the chairs. I can hear the laughter of my friends as though they sit at my side now. I learned as much in that room as in any classroom.

  Music was a passion but, oddly, our group had rejected entirely the growing punk movement and was obsessed with the likes of George Duke, Narada Michael Walden and many other jazz-funk pioneers. Black music, groove and soul were the heartbeat of our generation, or so we thought, not the gobbing, ugly, scruffy dirge of the Sex Pistols. My own tastes were eclectic, to say the least, for not only did I love the jingly funk grooves of Herbie Hancock, but I also adored the pompous rock of Genesis, Yes, Emerson, Lake and Palmer, Steely Dan and many others. I was in love with the Music of John Martyn, too. Later, he and another of my favourites because of his drumming prowess – Phil Collins, would collaborate on one of the greatest albums of all time, Martyn’s “Grace and Danger”. I loved to listen through headphones at the live grandiosity of Genesis and Phil Collins drum solos. I dreamed of playing them and adored the extravagant scope of the music – almost operatic, I suppose. It was ostentatious bollocks, of course, like much of opera, but neither is diminished for being so. Hours could be occupied listening to and arguing about albums. Our quarrelling was a constant but never malignant feature and was another aspect of a life at Woolverstone that could provide so much more in the way of time to indulge our pleasures. Friendships grew and flourished and sometimes died in those hours spent doing nothing but hanging out, listening to music and mocking each other. The love of a good ruckus has never left me, and I find dispute necessary and entertaining; not many people agree with me on this, which means I can have a good argument with them.

  I have recently finished reading Stephen Fry’s excellent autobiography Moab Is My washpot. The trials and tribulations of his school life are rendered in language that only he could hope to get away with, but I was struck by the similarities between our respective schools – his and Woolverstone. They had the same rules and regulations, systems, hierarchies; and the boys seemed to have the same concerns with it all. Fry, of course, came from a healthily middle class background with a high-achieving father. The problems he encountered in his life are well documented in both the book itself and elsewhere, but his fairly privileged background did nothing to prevent his thieving tendencies or generally bad behaviour. He talks of his home life in his large Norfolk mansion, and it seems a million miles from my own experience. When, however, he talks of his school life, he could easily be talking about Woolverstone, and it illustrates to me quite what a gift Woolverstone was to most of us, since it was not something our sort was commonly offered. Fry’s book proved something else too, which is that boys will be boys, whatever their background.

  Being exposed to your peers for twenty-four hours of every day, whilst challenging at times, did teach us other things, and I don’t just mean how to make a bed or sweep floors. I believe I learned about empathy at Woolverstone and how to discern the hurt behind bravado. A boy’s emotions would vary through the course of a full day, after which there is no going home to Mum. That immersive experience is profoundly affecting, whether the mood is a good or bad one and I recall occasionally feeling very alone at times, despite Serge, despite my new friends and the hubbub of house life. What you do at such times is, I suppose, the key to how you turn out in the end because it forms you, equips you. None of this is evident at the time, of course, but my tactic was sometimes to slope off for a bit to be on my own, though more usually I would just bounce into the dorm and annoy someone. I think it was Woolverstone that gave me the ability to assume the pose of engagement with those around me, to be the loud one, the entertaining one, the gregarious one. At school, it felt as though one had to be so to compete and to survive, but even now, after decades in the working world, including jobs that require me to be at the centre of a room full of people, I often feel like a performing seal who would so much rather just disappear, slink off elsewhere and be alone. After a long evening of company, when the party is still going strong, I get a powerful urge to vanish from the throng and frequently do, without fanfare or even a “goodbye” sometimes.

  There were rewards at Woolverstone, some carrot and not all stick. On Saturday evenings, there were film shows in the school hall, either junior films or more violent or racy senior films. Usually it was some war movie or other, like The Eagle has Landed. Richard Harris was always in them. I do remember once seeing the first reel of an Indian porn movie that had been sent in error by whichever organisation supplied them. It was called “Arabian Nights” and I think the master showing it expected an oriental fantasy of a different kind. We howled our protest at his desperate lunge for the off switch, but he only succeeded in stopping the reel, not turning off the hot lamp, and the still phallus in the frame quickly burned away on screen.

  You could be deprived of these evenings by a prefect, who might sometimes be deeply annoying and bar you from the event, but the booty offered for scoring well in ‘Standards’ was most important. I call these ‘Standards’ because I cannot precisely remember the real name, but that might be the right one. I think we also knew them as ‘pluses and minuses’. Whatever, it was an end of term exercise in which masters from each of your subjects would award a plus for good work and effort or a minus for less than satisfactory endeavour. I think you could get ‘nothing’, i.e., just satisfactory. About a week before the end of term, a great big matrix of names and boxes would be posted on the house noticeboard, and we would eagerly gather around to see the results. Three pluses and you got a reward, which was either a day in Felixstowe at the old funfair there or a trip to Ipswich to see a movie. In the first year at Woolverstone, I could get three, four, five and even, once, six pluses. Later, six minuses were more common.

  F
elixstowe is most famous as a shipping port, and whatever you can imagine about a port on the east coast facing the North Sea is nothing compared to the reality. The wind blew, the sun hardly ever shone and people were rare. Grey was the prevailing colour; of the sky, of the sea, the pallor of the locals. Well, actually, that is my memory of it, but I fear I do it an injustice because I recently had reason to visit the town again and there is a pretty parade of colourful homes and establishments on the sea front. But the memory is the vital thing, I suggest.

  Crowds never overwhelmed the old funfair, even in summer, but there was the immeasurable excitement of a go-kart racing track and we tended to spend all of our money there in the first hour of the day. Irrespective of the grimness of the surroundings, it was, above all, a group day out, a release from school and its routines. However, the very first time I scored enough pluses was when the movie Rocky had just been released and the prize was a trip into Ipswich to see it. People often forget that the very first low budget Rocky film was actually an Oscar winner, and we were knocked out by it, if you will forgive the pun. When we left the cinema to walk back to the school bus, we all jogged and jabbed our way along the pavement, exhilarated by Sly’s magnificent success in the ring. I had a sneaky Italian pride thing going on, too, but I never articulated it. Boys en masse shadow-boxing their way back to the car park and the old LCC School Bus must have appeared threatening to the locals in Ipswich but we were only being silly. I also recall being energised by the notion of exclusive reward; twenty boys seeing Rocky meant that forty others in the house hadn’t, and all this just because I did my work in lessons. Clearly, I quickly got bored with movies.

  Sport was a huge part of Woolverstone life, as was practising to play it. Cross country runs, circuits and two hours of training twice a week on the pitch and then a match on Saturday. We also had the chance to partake of other sports such as fencing, badminton, squash, orienteering, canoeing, archery, sailing on the marina at Woolverstone and a seemingly endless number of physical activities. Physical expression is appealing to most young men, and to young men whose academic dedication was questionable it offered a route to success. Boys who were simply not physically inclined were never excused participation, but they were never drilled excessively. Woolverstone would seek other outlets for these kids. I enrolled in the gym club in the second term and discovered that, despite my stocky frame, I was good at it, being able to walk the length of the gym on my hands and perform a double somersault off a springboard, although I rarely landed on my feet.

  It was about this time that we all began to discover the nooks and crannies of the seventy acres of land upon which the school sat. Every night and weekend was spent playing in the woods, wrecking the lawns by sliding down the hilly ones on our arses when the rain fell; or we ventured down to the foreshore, trudging through the thick mud or leaping into it from the apex of a rope’s swing. British Bulldog was, however, the great craze of the day, and scores of us would hone our rugby skills on the terraced lawns below the main house of the school. But in that second term, my sporting ways were to cease for a period after a miscalculation at gym club.

  Executing a straddle vault over the long box, I calculated that not taking my hand off it before swinging my legs through behind me would be fine. I miscalculated and broke my arm. Not that this was immediately apparent, not even from the howling and screaming I was engaged in. Indeed, it was my thumb that hurt the most, but my bawling was not going to spoil the humour in the moment for my gymnastic colleagues, who all laughed like drains. I actually consider it to be to my credit that, despite my condition, I still tried to punch one or two of them before Kev Young, one of the sports masters, grabbed me and sent me the short distance to sickbay.

  Sickbay was a small house behind the gym and music blocks. It had an examining room and several small dorms upstairs that acted as wards. Sister Allen was in charge, and she looked pretty concerned when I arrived clutching my arm. She examined it quickly in her jolly-hockey sticks manner, which is to say that, unless the limb was hanging by a thread and pumping blood she took a very pragmatic and unfussy approach to things. In the absence of exposed sinew and spurting claret, she wrapped my arm in bandages and sent me up to one of the rooms to lie on a bed ‘to calm down”.

  Sickbay was Sister Allen’s domain and it was like a tiny cottage hospital over which she held complete sovereignty. Although obsessed with cleanliness she still kept a dog in the building, and Jasper, a huge standard poodle, followed me up to the small dorm. I was whining and whimpering when Jasper lifted his huge bulk up onto the bed and spread himself across the lower part of my legs. He was as heavy as ten sandbags, but he began to lick my swollen, damaged arm. It must have cut quite a scene, like something from a dreary Swedish drama, that empathetic dog and the snivelling boy. I suppose it was the sort of thing weird people who obsess about the paranormal drone on about in late night satellite TV programmes; the intuition of animals or whatever. Personally, I think Jasper liked the taste of bandages. I would love to say it soothed the pain away but in truth his committed, rough slurping hurt like hell; yet it was a touching gesture from a dumb animal and I appreciated it. It was melodramatic and I liked that. After an hour, Sister Allen sent me back to Halls, telling me to return on Thursday afternoon when the doctor came for surgery. This was Monday night so I had to last almost three whole days and nights.

  This wasn’t easy.

  Sleepless, unable to eat, I quickly became sickly and exhausted, the pain throbbing relentlessly in my arm. When my sprained thumb had halved in size, the pain in my wrist and arm doubled. There were no painkillers, I still had lessons to manage and it was at one of those that my first real loathing was born. It was for a maths teacher, former rugby legend at the school and a cussed, cantankerous bugger. He taught in one of the Nissen huts that were first built at the school when it played an important part in the RAF’s communications system during the Second World War. Sitting at the front of his class was a pre-requisite for me because I had been disruptive in my first lesson. My arm and lack of sleep were taking their toll on me; I felt nauseous and wretched, and so I was resting my head on my good arm when he saw me. Suddenly he had snatched my geometry set from the table and flung it through the window he always kept open, even in winter. Such was his rage at my inattentiveness, he then landed a kick on the front of my table that in turn knocked me off my chair, causing me to land heavily on my injured arm.

  Even though we had become used to the concept of physical admonishment from masters, this, even to us, seemed to have crossed the line. It was not the controlled punishment of the plimsoll, a situation where a sort of deal is struck between punisher and punished. I was prepared to succumb to the system to the extent that I would play my part in that agreement, but this was just vicious and spiteful and I never forgave the teacher for it. Several boys, including Rob, voiced their disapproval but focused more on preventing me from lunging at him.

  Thursday and the doctor’s surgery took an age to arrive, and when I walked in and showed him my deformed and heavily bruised arm, he ordered I be taken to hospital immediately. Our matron at Halls House was responsible for taking me by bus to Ipswich, and she wasn’t pleased about it, marching as quickly as she could, chiding me for falling behind. She never realised that the more she displayed her annoyance, the more I sought to add to her irritation. I dragged my feet, winced at every step and generally played silly buggers. I was very put out by what seemed a total lack of sympathy, and if I could prevent her finding time to pop into her favourite shop, I would.

  Matrons at Woolverstone were as varied as were the masters. Their role in the house was to arrange the laundry, take care of personal needs, injuries and minor illnesses and generally ‘mother’ the younger boys when they needed it. Our matron was not unpleasant but she was a Scot, a pragmatic, Presbyterian type of Scot at that, which meant there was little natural sympathy about her. If you know the sort of formal Scottish woman I am talking about, you will understa
nd. She was prim, proper, neatly turned out and solved everything with a matter-of-factness that meant, for example, that any injury or ailment could be solved by soaking it in hot, then cold water. She was a mixture of Miss Jean Brodie and Mr Mackay from Porridge, just not as benevolent as either. I never thought she liked boys much, and although she was generally kind, warmth was never the first thing to emanate from her. The last-minute demand on her personal time went down like cold sick, but I was acutely aware of her discomfort and resolved to make the day as difficult as possible, though the extent of the unease I would cause her came as something as a surprise to me too.

  At the hospital, a pipe-smoking doctor nearly had his block knocked off when he insisted on twisting my arm during his examination. Why do doctors do that to injured limbs? He was gently holding my arm and feeling the limb softly with his fingertips. I was twitching and jerking with every press and palpation, but he suddenly took hold of my hand and turned it quickly. The world came to a stop, the light became blinding and the room turned as four hundred knives were thrust through my bone. I took a swipe at him with my good hand as the pain seared through me in a sudden, sickening shock. Indeed, he was lucky that the shock didn’t make me sick all over him. I was unable to scream or utter a single sound.

  “Oh,” he said, “that would appear to be a bit painful young man”. He hadn’t yet bothered to look up at me to see the bulging eyes and distress etched on my face. You had to get up early to catch this fellow out, I could tell. As the wave of pain hit the summit and then subsided, I was able to muster the breath to give my opinion of his diagnosis.

  “Of course it’s fucking painful! Why the fucking hell did you fucking twist it, you fucking bastard!?”

  To be fair to him, he hardly flinched at the tirade, but Matron was almost choking, and she staggered backwards a little, buffeted by the force of my fulmination, as if an unseen sniper had shot her.