Noisy at the Wrong Times

by Michael Volpe

  The booty paid for trips to Ipswich, tobacco and any number of illicit pastimes, including on one occasion a home brewing kit with which we produced some dreadful beer, to be consumed after the Christmas dinner. We had set up the brewing barrel in the bushes on Orwell side. It was terribly cloudy and bitter, but we drank it anyway and it kept the chill from our bones in the dark, wet and windswept shrubs. It would have kept angels from heaven, such was its sinful dreadfulness.

  My mood around the school seems to have been pleasant, if master’s reports are anything to go by, but by the spring term I had begun to believe my own publicity, becoming “loud, arrogant and difficult” or “critical, slapdash, lazy and disruptive”. You may take your pick.

  Paddy, as ever, took a positive view, although even he had to recognise what was becoming a pattern. In his report he says, “Michael is a great mixture of energy and enthusiasm on the one hand, and carping criticism on the other. He must not allow this abrasive side to dominate his pleasant nature.” I am not able to explain why there was a sudden change of such perplexity, but it was as clear as day. Confidence might have something to do with it. Rather than clash with every rule and oddity I encountered, as I did in the first form, I had developed a system whereby I could circumvent some of the rules, adapt to others and work out strategies to render the rest easier. General familiarity with my surroundings played a part too. As a result, I think my mind began to wander towards other things, and not just how to survive. Those alternatives obviously included a process of reverting to type.

  My legal extracurricular activities were multifarious, and drama was beginning to be a theme in the reports. It seems we had done a house play that year, probably up in the village hall, and I was still doing puppet club. Morris accused me of ‘yapping’ too much during the house rugby matches. By the end of the summer term, things had not really improved, and there was a wild inconsistency in my approach to subjects. In chemistry I took “absolutely no trouble with written work”, but in art I showed “very good work and effort”. Encapsulating my entire character set with perspicacity, my cricket master Kev Young said I was “an aggressive batsman, a hostile bowler but lacks direction in both”. Despite my Damascene conversion from the ways of physical discrimination against my weaker housemates, I was nevertheless a bit of a handful.

  Something was clearly amiss: everybody could see it and for the first time there was concern. It was my erratic nature that drew most alarm, with great swings in attitude and behaviour from term to term. I tend to the view that I was just a growing adolescent with an outlook that mirrored the wild ups and downs of hormonal growth and development. On the other hand, I was turning into a conceited, careless and self-destructive shit. I had begun to make distinctions between what I wanted to do and what I didn’t, and I would resist and display my displeasure at subjects I felt less inclined towards. I simply considered myself to be too good for them. From time to time, Paddy would call me aside and give me a few corrective words, and I would fall back into line for a short time, but I was an incorrigible attention seeker, and spasmodic effort punctuated long periods of reactionary, petulant laziness. If I had any saving qualities it was that I threw myself wholeheartedly at whatever I decided I liked: rugby, drama and being jack the lad.

  I think I wanted to succeed but was sliding back into the habit of mistrusting anyone, with the exception of Paddy, who suggested I could be a success. My second year at Woolverstone drew just about satisfactorily to a close. I was relatively applied, not beyond redemption at all when it came to my behaviour, and I had started to enjoy the school. Still to arrive was the persistent suspicion on the part of masters that their efforts were fruitless, but a few had their eye on me, that’s for sure. With his blessed patience, Paddy said I was “all over the place, but he has been quieter recently so perhaps a good year is just around the corner”.

  The year ended, we went on summer holiday and I began to grow some whiskers and pubic hair. I didn’t need the added complication of my endocrinal rampage and neither did the school.

  * * *

  It was spring term 1979. I was thirteen years old, not far off fourteen. The first term of my third year at Woolverstone had again been blighted by a lack of control and academic inconsistency. Teenage intensity had crept into my dealings with teachers, and it was becoming harder to forgive my indiscretions. Although I’d had a great term in rugby, I had been sent off in a match towards the end of the season. We had returned back to school after the Christmas holidays, and I was a tiresome, unpleasant bore.

  Things were to take a turn for the worse.

  With rumours spinning through the school, David Hudson, the deputy headmaster, walked onto the stage at assembly one morning during that spring term in 1979 and, with a shaking voice, spoke a sentence that I recall verbatim: “Patrick Richardson was involved in a car accident last night in London. He was killed instantly”.

  And we laughed. Well, I and a few others did. I remember it.

  I think we laughed out of shock. The stunning effect of that announcement was horribly palpable, the sharp gasp in the hall sucked the oxygen from the room and my ears began to ring with the awful silence that descended. But a few of us laughed. A short, snorting snigger would better describe it. I think a few announcements were made by other masters, and the head boy said something about it being a difficult time and that we had to all pull together, but it was academic, really. I was horrified and devastated, and I think I even felt angry with Paddy. The effect of the sudden, shocking death of someone prominent in the lives of so many young people is profound. Being there as the jolt blasted through over three hundred boys is to experience something I have never since encountered. Each of us who heard the announcement had their own experiences of Paddy, their own feelings and memories, and was suffering their own sense of loss, but it remained a collective understanding. Our disbelief and upset lifted into the air above our heads and formed into a black cloud that hung ominously over all of us. How could this be true? How could Paddy, who to many of us epitomised Woolverstone, be gone? Dead? He was Woolverstone.

  It would take us some while to adjust, although I am almost certain I never really did.

  Immediately after assembly, a few of us crept through the gardens behind the old chemistry laboratories and picked a small bunch of flowers, took them to the back door of Paddy’s house and knocked. Jill, his widow, opened the door, and Rob handed the flowers to her, which she graciously took. I can still hear his children in the kitchen, wailing with grief. Remarkably, more than thirty years later, Jill Richardson would come across my name in a publication whilst she visited Opera Holland Park as a patron. She left me a note, and I called her, telling her that I was amazed that she should remember me after nearly three decades.

  “I remember how you came to the door with flowers, Michael,” she said, “how could I forget that?”

  Since we spoke, I have taken the view that even the smallest gestures make their mark at such times, and any urge to resist making them should be overcome. One other thing struck me about our conversation: quite how moved I was to be talking to her, to be recalling those days. As I spoke down the telephone to her, I was choking on the fresh memory of that day, now revived and intoxicating. I was trying not to let it show in my voice. She said it was half a lifetime ago, that she had enjoyed a wonderful life since and that she had fully recovered from it.

  Perhaps I hadn’t. In the years since his death, Jill and her children had moved on, made other, new lives. We, though, had that screeching halt, the shock – as nothing to his family’s – remaining as a pungent memory. I suppose we thought their lives would stop at that point too. We were children after all.

  The appalling atmosphere caused by Paddy’s death hung around the school for months. His legacy was to be found in the individual remembrance of each of us. There may have been longer-serving, even better headmasters than Paddy, but he was the only one I knew, and he was one of the few adults in the world for whom I had
an instinctive respect and affection. I understood deference, but I never proffered it without design or consideration, rarely did I find a natural urge to be respectful, but I knew the value of affecting it, and Paddy attracted my natural regard for all the reasons I have elaborated upon elsewhere. The lasting effects of his death would either become evident or they would remain hidden among all the other reasons for my personality traits, but his passing certainly sounded the starting gun for the demise of Woolverstone. I would not be aware of this until years later, but it was the first blow against the survival of the school. Soon, a new headmaster would replace Paddy, and his was an entirely different outlook. Some said he was a Trojan horse, sent in by the powers that be in London, who disapproved of the privileged funding Woolverstone received. The school had already been turned into a comprehensive – our year was the last of the grammar intake – and eventually Woolverstone would die a slow, painful death, the victim of political doctrine and the sort of educational theory that these days sends too many sixteen-year-olds out into the world armed with little more than rudimentary skills and a flick knife.

  Paddy’s loss also signalled a material change in the attitudes of some of the masters, as well as in many of us pupils; some of them left and new masters, palpably from a different brand of thinking and dedication, joined. For my part, I think the shock of it all calmed me down and subdued my wayward nature for a period, and my report book is good for that term when Paddy’s hand is suddenly absent from the page, now replaced by the equally fluid pen of David Hudson. There is talk of me ‘turning a corner”, and Morris pointed out that I had become “determined to do what is right”. Halls won the house rugby championship, and along with playing well in the final, I “encouraged others to play well too”.

  Paddy had fruitlessly attended to my pastoral wellbeing for three years, had watched and worried over me, pushed and pulled me in the directions he thought would be of greatest benefit. All of it was seemingly worthless, negated by my own boneheaded intransigence, yet all it appears he had to do was die for me to take heed.

  Individuals like Paddy and those teachers who had been with him were the glue that held together the entire edifice of a place like Woolverstone. It is clear now that they were fighting a rearguard action against politicians whose cruelly pursued doctrines, based on a perverse, inverted snobbery, were slowly making inroads into the school’s chances of survival. They had already succeeded in turning the place comprehensive and had designs on closing the school altogether. What often seems to outsiders like anachronistic traditions and principles, often unspoken ones, were carried in the hearts and minds of such people as Paddy and then passed onto us. Of course, we resisted them to begin with and if I were being generous, those at County Hall who hated the style of the school more than we might have done were probably of a view that they were protecting us. But those people were wrong. This is not a debate, to my mind, about comprehensives versus grammar: those two principles now exist in our system when perhaps they shouldn’t, and another book is probably required for that. But nobody was protecting me when they took cold and malicious advantage of Paddy’s death to further their own aims.

  At Woolverstone there was a through-line of expectation, achievement and spirit that new teachers who came and went would either pick up or not, but it was people like Paddy who laid it all out for them. With the arrival of a new regime, there was a slow and unmistakable re-positioning of the school’s ethos, and lots of us began to give up on it all. But that was some way into the future. For now, we tried as best we could to adjust to the change that had been brutally and suddenly imposed upon us, and the term went on in as normal a fashion as possible. We won the Suffolk Under 14s Sevens Cup, and I worked stage crew for the Rock Prom where Rob and a boy called Holloway sang a passable version of “She Loves Me” by The Beatles.

  Spring term 1979 was potentially the fulcrum of my entire school career. It may well have been the point at which my life could have taken a different direction had I allowed myself to follow it. Everything was still in the balance but I appear to have had a sort of epiphany, and the optimism of masters who had hitherto been depressingly pessimistic about me began to shine through. I had every reason to feel good about myself. But I didn’t.

  * * *

  Rage.

  Rage arrived back at school with me in late April 1979 for the summer term. It was a new feeling that differed from the bad temper that had always been my trademark. This was something altogether more malignant. I don’t think that I differed from many boys of that age, yet at times I felt like an alien. When rage took over, I paid no mind whatsoever to consequences, and once I had decided on a course of action precipitated by rage, I would proceed with gusto. Walking out of classrooms, refusing to do what I was asked, total insouciance towards prep and not even half-hearted effort during the end of year exams became the order of the day. I was a disaster in the making. In fact, I was already a fully-fledged catastrophe. I found time to do archery, Cadets and Halls won the house cricket, too, but the word on the street was “relapse”. I find it almost impossible to remember what was happening at home between terms. I imagine Matt was as dedicated a recidivist as ever, the police probably kicked our front door in once or twice and girls were definitely a focus, an obsession even. During holidays, I fell in and out of love on a weekly basis, which was emotionally exhausting.

  Nevertheless, I had developed a nasty habit of meeting fire with conflagration. My violence towards others was still responsive inasmuch as I did not go around punching people for the entertainment, but any affront was met with overwhelming force. I was hit around the ear by a sixth former wearing a plaster cast because he thought I had made a remark behind his back. I was walking with Rob when, out of the blue, my ear was walloped and, looking up to see the perpetrator, I punched him so hard on the chin that he fell flat on his back. Later that night, one of his cohorts came to the house to warn me against hitting sixth formers and I told him to eff off too. I suspect he did not pursue the matter further because he saw Rage. One senior boy took a golf club to one of our number who was a tough, resilient cookie, but even his bones succumbed to the wooden driver and he ended up with multiple bruises and a broken arm. So we went to the senior’s room to warn him that any repeat would result in a certain visit to hospital. By now we were strapping fourteen-year-olds and five or six of us were a force to be reckoned with. I say all this because none of what I have just imparted was normally permitted at Woolverstone. You did not hit or threaten sixth formers, and you did not disobey masters. But I didn’t care. Rage made sure of that.

  In that third year there was a flu epidemic, which really meant only three boys actually got flu and 150 pretended to have it. We developed techniques for duping Matron and most popular was quickly putting the bulb of the thermometer against the hot metal radiator in her laundry room when her back was turned. Sometimes, boys held it a fraction too long, which meant the thermometer reported temperatures similar to those found on the surface of the sun. Matron was inattentive and trusting, but she wasn’t stupid, and such mistakes meant you would be sitting in English lessons with only four others whilst your friends enjoyed all day in bed.

  Soon after the bogus flu epidemic I actually did contract viral meningitis. As with my broken arm, it went unattended for three days, during which I lay delirious in bed with a headache registering 5.8 on the Richter scale, unable to open my eyes to the light that sent them into spasms. As it was viral and not bacterial meningitis, I was presumably at less risk, but it wasn’t as if anyone was paying attention to know whether that was the case. Dragging myself to sickbay and the doctor again, I was given tablets that I later discovered were soon banned. I have avoided finding out why.

  The Butt and Oyster at Pin Mill became a frequent destination. The landlord was a curmudgeonly old goat with a huge handlebar moustache and it will be of no surprise to learn that his nickname was “Handlebars”. He was also about one hundred and three years of age and hated
Woolvo boys with a vengeance, but for some reason he allowed us to sit in the smoke room, giggling and guzzling the Butt cider that was brewed on the premises. We were fourteen, but we had begun to look a lot older, and in rural Suffolk I don’t suppose they worried too much about under-age drinkers. Butt cider was syrupy, golden and lethal. Obviously, it was an opportunity to drool over “Jugs”, the voluptuous and sweetly brainless barmaid, who never failed to fall prey to our japes, like phoning the bar from the nearby phone box and asking to speak to Mike Hunt. “Mike Hunt? Is Mike Hunt here?” she would call through the pub.

  One or two pints of Butt cider left us struggling to put on our Wellington boots in the lobby of the pub, falling about the place and shouting, and it was in this state that we had to trudge through the darkness and mud along the foreshore back to school, hoping to get back into the grounds, into the house and under the covers without being caught. Sometimes, a master would spot something going on out of the corner of his eye from the study or whilst on a patrol around the house, and we would have to charge up the stairs and dive into bed. Through the door would crash the master, switching on the lights. If you were lucky, he would go into the wrong dorm first, giving us a few seconds to disrobe. If he chose well, then you were under covers fully clothed with shoes on and I was more than once trapped by the telltale mud on the blankets.