Hymn singing I always remember as being full-blooded and actually very accomplished. All the old favourites were there’ but in common with almost all schools, it seems, Jerusalem was the big stirring number. Bread of Heaven was a favourite too, the “Feed me ‘til I want no more” chorus being fully rendered in harmony and voice section. It was terribly showy. Sunday assemblies were more formal, and we had to wear blazers and ties for these. Guest speakers would appear, or musical guests, most notably Cantabile, a vocal group featuring an old Woolverstonian that had found some fame and success, who would give a short concert. Our speakers could be fantastically interesting, apparently, and sometimes they were announced with the sort of fanfare that suggested we were in the presence of greatness, but I cannot remember a single one of them by name, or of what they spoke. On particular festivals such as Easter and Christmas, Sunday assembly was in St Michael’s Church, and I was frequently asked to do a reading. I’m not sure why at that stage they had decided I was a performer of some fashion, but it always seemed to be me. A few verses from the Bible were the normal way of things and I loved seeing my name printed in the Order of Service:
Reading
by Michael Volpe, Halls House
15:7 Benevolence
The power of print began there for me, the reading I would scarcely acknowledge, meaning and reason flying over my head. As I took my place at the dais to read the selected verses, I was only relishing my fame, smug and trussed up in blazer and tie.
If there is a poor man among your brothers in any of the towns of the land that the LORD your God is giving you, do not be hardhearted or tightfisted toward your poor brother.
I might not have been paying attention to the sentiments of the New Testament, but I was able to bring nuance and emphasis to the moments that required it. Or at least the moments I thought needed it. I understood emphasis. I was always insufferably, voluminously emphatic.
A day of lessons was long, to be sure, longer than we would ever have expected at an ordinary London school, which we knew finished at about 3pm, but academic activity was most attentively observed during prep. For prep, all boys in the school were either closeted together in their house dining room or in their small dorms and rooms for the older boys. It was two hours every night for us first formers, and we would sit with twenty others from the second and third forms doing our homework. A sixth former would supervise the prep, and talking or any kind of communication was forbidden. Most sixth formers had their own work to do and would look up occasionally when some misdemeanour was committed, in which case, the miscreant was put into prefect’s detention. The head boy would read out the names at Friday assembly, and we would always hold our breath, hoping that the senior who had threatened us with PD had forgotten to put our name down. Usually, the bugger remembered. There was no email or mobile phones back then, so a prefect had to make a bit of an effort to lodge your name with the head boy.
Prep was among the greatest cultural shocks Woolverstone presented. At home, after school, I would normally have been straight out into the estate to muck about or get up to no good. It was my time, and I recall no homework being given to me at primary school. A long day in lessons followed by hours doing prep was something of an outrageous new development for most of us.
Some of the sixth formers who supervised prep saw it as a wonderful opportunity to torment us because they simply had nothing better to do. Ask to go to the toilet and you would be made to sit in front of the senior as he poured water from one jug to another. If you looked away, you would get a “head dot”, which was when the knuckles of the clenched fist would be brought down sharply onto your skull. For really serious fuckups, you would get a “bowler”. This was when you got a head dot, but only after the sixth former had run the length of the dining room and performed a bowling action as you stood, head bowed, waiting for the crack.
When prep was peaceful, I managed to get lots of work done, but I was choosy about what I paid most attention to, lavishing loving care on biology, for example, underlining headings in red and taking ages over technical drawings of cells and pictures of stamens. For this purpose, I had a full case with tools and coloured pencils. I loved exercise books – still do – fat and crisp and clean at the start of term and becoming more ruffled and grimy as the weeks progressed. My writing was quite neat, but my hand was heavy and would put a thousand tiny creases in the paper, making each page dimpled and crunchy. But there were boys whose elegant hand flowed across the page delicately and cleanly, and their books were filled with even, fluid text, punctuated by neat, forensically accurate and monotone diagrams. Not a superfluous underlining or piece of colour would be found anywhere, and the pages of their books never became crinkled or crusty. I envied their effortless precision and intelligence – I still do.
I treated English prep with a certain reverence, but maths and most other subjects got short shrift. We were studying interesting books in first-year English, most memorably for me, The Catcher in the Rye, a book I suspect many of us identified with closely. Holden Caulfield’s rage and angst was a challenging subject for eleven-year-olds, but I recall agreeing with lots of what he said, despite thinking him a bit of a whinger. Indeed, assigning the book to eleven-year-olds is an indicator of Woolverstone’s ambition for us, and I doubt the school thought any of us would go on to assassinate a pop star. I greatly enjoyed essays and reviews since I had a chance to vent spleen or offer an opinion that I had probably already presented loudly in class. Essays would begin well, my hand would be scrupulously tidy, my analysis thorough. By the second or third page, both calligraphy and scrutiny were going south.
Maintaining a patient approach to argument, contemplation, vocabulary or writing style had always been difficult for me. Often it was because my thoughts would race ahead and I’d be trying to articulate them from their slipstream, as they disappeared off into the distance. Invariably and inevitably, I would struggle to make out their full form as they drifted away, but no matter, some new ones would be along in a minute and maybe I would keep up with them. It is why my work was always only two thirds finished. If I was lucky, what I managed to get down on paper would roughly approximate the point I had set out to make (as long as you could read the handwriting, of course). Usually, the relevant master would be able to mark me well enough to convince me it had not all been a total waste of time and if astute enough, he would decipher for himself the point I was trying to make. Brilliant teachers can do that, and I was fortunate to have many of those.
So, I was doing OK.
If that sounds a little underwhelming, it shouldn’t, because, even by Woolverstone’s standards, a boy like me doing ‘OK’ should be viewed with unconfined admiration, if not for the boy, then most definitely for the school.
It was at this point that the headmaster, Paddy, started to pay more attention to my development. Throughout my school life, there was always at least one teacher who has seen through me and found a way to control my temperamental unpredictability. At Addison primary, it was Rhiannon Morris. I met with her after many years, and she recalled how she could be sitting drinking tea in the staff room when a fellow teacher would put their head around the door and demand her attendance at an incident involving me. She would rush to the playground, to find me ranting and raving at all and sundry, the result of some insult or injustice. She would just have to bark my name at me, and I would be subdued, whereas countless other teachers trying the same thing had failed abjectly.
Paddy Richardson had the same effect on me. He sometimes called me into his office in his house and would ask how I was getting on which I never really understood. It was very benign and low key, but he might then fling me a nugget of advice or wisdom.
“I hear you have had some problems with maths, Michael?” he would enquire gently.
“Well, the teacher doesn’t like me, Sir,” I would reply. This is how I always replied.
“Do you think he might just be tired of your being disruptive in class?” Blaming me
was a risky tactic, but he managed it without sounding as though he knew the answer.
“No, Sir, I don’t think it’s that, because I only become disruptive when he has been horrible to me or blamed me for something I didn’t do.” I would be careful to affect a wounded tone because after all, I actually believed what I was saying.
“Well,” Paddy would sigh, leaning back in his chair, “I think you may have a point when you say he doesn’t like you very much, but it’s not his job to like you. It is his job to teach you maths, which you won’t let him do. Why not try to let him? Maybe he’ll like you more, hmm?”
It was hard to argue with Paddy for long. I never wanted to get into disputes with him anyway, because I had obviously afforded him the status of “adult who understands me”. Added to that, agreeing that I was right about the teacher’s allergy to me was an exceedingly good tactic, and he did it in a way that still left the onus on me to do something about it. As long as I could tell myself I was right, perhaps I could find the good grace to give the teacher a chance. Paddy was no fool.
In the matter of people not liking me, I am an expert. A young boy is rarely aware of the spikes of his personality that hollow out the flesh of those around him. If those close to me complained, I would more often than not do whatever possible to confirm every negative thought they had. Today, it is still the same inasmuch as people are inclined to instinctively recoil from me, but now there is a difference: I know precisely what is causing discomfort. Moreover, I have come to realise that when a thorn does penetrate, it is usually because a weak, tender spot exists, and I don’t think it is too malignant an idea that I should exploit that from time to time. Woolverstone didn’t want to knock those spikes off me: it just wanted to teach me to be more careful when brushing up against others. I find that the world is full of people who love to brandish their personality like weapons in the pursuit of dominance but who are at the same time totally unprotected from retaliation. Not only that, they are frequently surprised that a riposte should come at all, so it does them no harm to feel a sharp jab in the ribs from time to time. At school, you are not really supposed to probe the emotional or moral weaknesses of your teachers, but I tried my best.
Paddy obviously knew all of this about me before I did (self-awareness was a late-blossoming friend of mine), but getting me educated was not compatible with allowing me to experiment on the psychology of teachers whose default position, after all, was one of dominance. I just had to get on with it and play the game. It was his experience that allowed him to negotiate the minefield that he had almost certainly mapped out immediately after he’d met me for the first time. I quite relished being sent to him by other masters; I knew he would indulge me, and even when he wore a stern look he never let me down in that respect, always doing and saying the right thing and never turning on me. He was fair and understanding in a manner that the Daily Mail would ridicule today (you know, enlightened management of difficult adolescents). This is a skill that I am convinced only a few have. The subtle difference between command and encouragement – but encouragement laced with expectation – is what set people like Paddy Richardson apart. Too often, I would detect too little expectation and too much command. Emotionally complex boys are manageable in a way that is not as difficult as it at first seems, and I think that people look more deeply into the problem than is necessary.
Paddy wasn’t alone in making a connection of sorts with me. My year card shows that very early on the school had assessed me as “a very opinionated, emotional boy who is prone to be argumentative”. There was no real secret to dealing with me, and several masters managed to grab my attention whilst delicately tiptoeing around my personality traits. But the school could not afford to be soft, and few masters were.
Paddy certainly wasn’t the sort to mollycoddle his charges. One afternoon whilst walking around the circle of lawn between the two wings of the main building, I got into a kicking match with a friend. We swung kicks and lobbed abuse at each other for no particular reason, but I was at a disadvantage since my opponent, the euphoniously named Adebola Adelano, was wearing violently tapered winkle pickers. As I carelessly drew back my crepe soled beetle crusher, I left myself open to counter-attack, and, while my stance resembled a runner caught on camera, Ade snapped out his foot in a heartbeat. I saw it coming and knew the extent of my error almost the instant my foot left the ground, but I was frozen mid-kick as I thought, “Oh no!” With perfect accuracy and deceptively terrifying velocity, the honed tip of his shoe connected with the underside of my scrotum, sending each testicle in opposite directions. If I’d had my hands in my pockets, I would have been able to catch them. Readers who have a scrotum will know immediately what happened next. During the time it took for my balls to settle back into their natural position, I stood in stunned, silent expectation of the exquisite pain that would inevitably visit me. I bent at the waist with hands on knees, suppressing the urge to vomit until I softly keeled over onto the floor, where I lay motionless and dribbling. Testicular trauma, along with childbirth, is probably the most profound pain from which survivors emerge, and Paddy, being a man, must have known this. Ten yards away, from his study window, he noticed me prone on the floor in what he must have thought was a most unexpected place. He came out and walked over to me.
“What’s wrong with you, Volpe?” Paddy enquired.
I took a while to answer and when I did it was with something like, “Ki.. Ade.. balls.. Sir”.
“You’ve been kicked in the balls? Volpe? Is that what you said? You were kicked in the balls?”
“Ye... (long pause) Sir”.
He laughed and walked back to his house.
I liked my headmaster a great deal. It isn’t easy to explain this relationship – or my view of it at least. I don’t know about other boys from a similar background to mine, and I don’t want to be overly emotive about it, but I used to single people out as mentors and then proceed to put them to the test; to challenge them, to see if they would stick with me or just give up on me. Of course, it would often be a self-fulfilling prophecy. With Paddy, I had a conditional relationship that I would have set aflame and destroyed had he taken the wrong turn, but I went out of my way not to let him down, and if he praised me after a rugby match or some other minor achievement, it would be the praise I valued most. His was a guiding hand, and whenever Mum came to school for open day, Paddy would reserve some special words for whatever I had done that year. He never made a big deal of my misdemeanours, even though I was sent to him several times for such, and the sullenness that I liberally deployed in dealings with other masters, would evaporate on entering Paddy’s large study.
I realised later that he was not singling me out and that he did this for many boys. I suppose that is what made him such a good headmaster. If anybody performed the role of father figure in the absence of the real one, it was Paddy Richardson. To my mind, the lack of a father was never too great a burden for me; mine had made a run for the high road early so there is no significant moment of his departure. Nevertheless, our family’s subsequent belief that his contribution to our lives would likely have been minimal and destructive doesn’t detract from the reality that there was nobody to set me straight, set an example or provide a security framework for life’s vicissitudes. When he did pay attention to us, Dad was never very good at it; had he taken a similar approach to me that he chose for Matteo, the outcome would have been catastrophic, I suspect. Responding to a call from Mum, who was becoming desperate about my brother’s delinquency, Dad’s benighted answer was to give him a kicking in the Fulham Road. Such a course of action may have worked with someone else, but Matteo’s nefarious ways were never to be diverted by a thrashing. I can just picture Dad’s face as he delivered each corrective blow, and I can well imagine what was going through his head too: the boorish self-satisfaction of a man who hadn’t a clue who his son was or what he needed.
How Dad’s absence was affecting me I cannot, even now, say. I think it may be too ea
sy to blame my father for the recklessness and unruliness we all showed at one time or another. Fatherless I may have been, yet my reparative approach towards key individuals suggests that I knew the value of a surrogate. There was nothing new in all this for Paddy, who was in charge of many boys like me and who, I later discovered, experienced the divorce of his parents at the age of twelve. I know it’s dot-to-dot behaviourism to suppose that the roots of Paddy’s simpatico reached back to his own family’s fracture, but I think a life of fatherless existence allows me such romantic, rosy-tinted speculation.
* * *
The summer of ’77 arrived and with it cricket, late evenings and ever more mischief. Rob and I had become firm friends and we spent much of the school holidays together too. Rob lived in a large flat in Battersea with his Mum and two sisters, and there were frequent parties and get-togethers. All of us salivated over the blonde bombshells who were his older siblings. Actually, come to think of it, Rob’s world was a couple of times removed from my own, although he too had grown up without a father’s regular presence. Compared to me he was well spoken, and his Mum’s flat, which overlooked Battersea Park, was enormous. I’m not fully aware of what made us so compatible as friends, but we had got over the early pecking order stuff and were getting on with the business of sitting at the top of it together. As a part of that process, we had also developed into an enforcement squad, encouraged by our housemaster to sort out those kids who took bullying too far. Transferring to us the responsibility for protection was part of Morris’s clever plan to keep our minds off persecution. Our hearts were unequivocally in it, too, because by that stage, we had grown conscious of the effect our darker behaviour could have. When we realised that being bullied in a place like Woolverstone was hellish, we soon developed empathy for our fellow boarders. It might have made us feel warm all over to reprimand the bully, but it also gave us the opportunity to bully him officially. It is no laughing matter, of course.
Noisy at the Wrong Times Page 13