Pubescent, fit and arrogant: our third year at Woolverstone was possibly the most entertaining and carefree of our time there, despite my frequent angry clashes with authority. Work was substantial and, whilst I took a lesser amount of care over it than I might have, I was getting on with it more or less. We were growing up fast and few of us were coping with it as well as we thought, yet Woolverstone was home, even though it was struggling to make us conform entirely. Quite how quickly we were growing up was evidenced by the work we undertook in the school holidays – money, or the pursuit of it, occupied us greatly. Fashion was becoming a factor in our lives and it needed to be paid for. So did football.
Chelsea FC was the abiding passion of Rob and me. School holidays meant trips to Stamford Bridge where I had been torturing myself for several years. The ground was a toilet in the seventies, a large bowl, a swirling wind and a distance between pitch and terrace so vast that it later provided land for hotels and a couple of hundred flats. The “Shed” is where we squeezed ourselves in, by the white wall, two young kids screaming obscenities. We just screamed when a couple of hundred West Ham fans once announced their presence among us. As we leapt the wall at the front of the terrace, a policeman tried to get us to jump back in.
“Fuck off! You go in and sort it out,” I said.
“If you think I’m going up there, you must be mad!” he replied. The battle that raged involved horses, dogs and the kind of territorial madness that football in the seventies was famed for. I shall never forget the Chelsea fan who sat on the crush barrier imploring everybody not to run and then being engulfed by scores of attacking fans, the scarves tied to his wrists whipping and flowing like flags as, still sitting on the barrier, he threw punches in his defence. Stamford Bridge in those days could be terrifying and exciting in equal measure; in and around the ground there was a tactical war every Saturday, with a malignant atmosphere you could almost smell, especially when other London clubs came west.
Thinking about it, I am surprised that football violence never appealed to me more. Perhaps my desire for tribal aggression was sated by rugby, when we indulged in a class war against those who thought themselves better than us. Football violence was a serious thing in those days, but it was more a spectator sport as far as we were concerned. Chelsea’s ‘firm’ was a significant player in the world of hooliganism, and there was more than a simple male aggression thing going on; it had a fashion, music and a lifestyle all its own. Hooliganism was a social problem inasmuch as it caused a lot of trouble on the streets, but it was never, as far as I could discern, the result of social deprivation, because these people had jobs and normal lives and just liked fighting. We knew all the faces and learned the ebb and flow of a vicious conflict, egging on the participants, whose waves of attacks across the sloped terraces would create undulating, pulsating patterns like those on a medieval battlefield as retreat and clash were acted out. It could be beautiful, in a grotesque and brutal way. We were too young to be of any real use in all this ferocity, but that never stopped us getting swept up in the whole thing. A police horse even bit me once. Anyway, we cheered on the tribe because cheering the team got us nowhere. The awfulness of the later seventies Chelsea was only occasionally punctuated by great highs; wins against Liverpool in the cup spring to mind. Otherwise, a win was always a surprise. Fuelled by Guinness, we enjoyed the camaraderie and the testosterone, but again, it had to be provided for.
The father of one boy was the chief of a London fire station, and his men frequently took alternative work on their four days off. He had contacts with various agencies and was able to find jobs for us in the holidays. At fourteen, I was able to pass for a lot older so spent many holidays working in warehouses, packing goods or heaving boxes. I worked in a distributor of toiletries for a period, on the strap-bander that tightened a metal strip around a box of heavy items. If I wasn’t mistiming it and causing the bander to wrap thin air, I was getting my hand caught between the strip and the box, thus binding myself to a carton of Eau Savage.
These manual labours were good for me, and I enjoyed the money they brought, which meant I could visit Petticoat Lane on a Sunday morning and purchase knocked-off Levi Red Tag garments and Pod shoes. The work was usually easy and paid more money than I would ever get on a paper round. But one job was extraordinarily hard and demonstrated my precocity and self-belief: I got a job as a security guard at the Earl’s Court Boat Show. This was no night watchman role but fully-fledged security personnel work, manning the entrance foyer and controlling crowds. Dressed in my full uniform, with a matching anorak and a peaked hat, I looked fresh faced but passed muster.
My first job at this most popular of exhibitions was as a bag searcher in the lobby. The IRA was still very active in London at the time and exhibitions at Earl’s Court had been bombed before. Standing at one of several tables laid out in the large foyer, my job was to call people forward, look through their bags and check any small electrical devices. As we were still pre-mobile phone or Tablet days, this tended to be tape recorders, cassette Walkmans or calculators. If a visitor showed displeasure or impatience at being searched by a suspiciously young-looking security guard, I would insist that they emptied the entire contents of their bag onto the table and would ask in as officious a voice as I could what each item was.
“Could you tell me what this is, sir?”
“It’s a calculator.”
“Could you switch it on, please.”
With a huff or a sigh, they would switch it on, and I would take it, check the display was active and then hand it back to them.
“Do a calculation for me, please, Sir.”
“What? This is ridiculous,” he would reply, now almost on his knees with exasperation.
“I can always ask the police officer over there to help you, Sir. Just do a sum, anything, so I can see it works properly. Two plus two is fine”.
When not being the security guard from hell, I was put on crowd control duty, which essentially entailed holding back the flow of people coming up the passageway from the tube station below. The tube access opened into the foyer of the exhibition centre, but numbers needed to be controlled so that officious shits like me could do the bag searching.
Positioned in a tiled narrow section just before the stairway into the hall, I would order the surge of people to halt as those already in the lobby filed in. When I got the nod, I would let another couple of hundred through. Getting them to stop was difficult since they all seemed wild-eyed with anticipation at the prospect of a hangar full of white, shiny boats. They would gush from the platform below, ten abreast, only to be met by me in a coat that was too long and a hat that was too big, arms spread wide and barring their way. Some would try to push past, and one or two actually made it. I wasn’t averse to a bit of roughhousing if I thought the escapee was pushing his luck. After a short while, I would drop my arms, at which point there was a stampede past me. Within a few seconds I would try again to stem the flow, by now shouting and growling at those who tried to slink past me unnoticed. By the end I was almost charging escapees against the wall like an ice hockey player. It was exhausting and stressful work that on one occasion I had to do for ten hours straight. But it paid well. I can’t deny that it was formative, too, because I got a first taste of effort that had a tangible result: cash. Failure to do the work carried a real consequence, which of course meant I had to do it, whether I liked it or not. It was a good lesson, and one I kept in my locker until after Woolverstone.
COLTS AND KANGAROOS
Retracing the steps of this memoir, it strikes me that it would be perfectly reasonable for a reader to deduce that Woolverstone was doing little for me. Less gracious readers might also observe that I wasn’t doing much for the school, either. They could well be right.
It is hard to express just how unusual an opportunity Woolverstone was for most of us. It wasn’t necessary for us to realise the effect it was having at the time and you can be certain we were as unappreciative as one migh
t expect young men to be. But growing up is never easy, especially when you have to do it in close proximity to 359 others. As I entered the fourth form, I was planting distinctive fences around what I would allow Woolverstone to do for me, and the rest I would leave at the gate. For whatever reason, under the influence of something or other, I returned to Woolverstone in September 1979, to begin what was a crucial year with purpose and not a little maturity. Inevitably, it wouldn’t last, and the predictable pattern of decline was beginning to look like a habitual sprint to the edge of the abyss. Was I just looking for someone to stop me? Did I feel let down by the rewards for a good term, which amounted to little more than a good report, a pat on the back? What did I expect from a few weeks of hard work and endeavour? Who was I doing it for? These and a hundred other questions still occupy me. But I just could not keep it going.
The school had all of the accoutrements you might expect of a well funded, highly motivated public school, including gyms, a swimming pool, lots of land, old buildings and an outward elegance, mostly afforded by the main house. But Woolverstone had to face a greater challenge than other such establishments. It was often called ‘the poor man’s Eton’, which is plainly absurd on many accounts, but there was one crucial difference: it’s raw material.
Children who attend a school like Eton are aware that they are going to do so almost from the moment their ability to speak arrives and from early on in their lives, they are familiar with the notion of educational achievement. Their parents, their brothers, their aunts and uncles will most likely all have received strong educations and been expected to go on to university and a career and to continue the line of wealth and success. The key point is expectation. My acquaintance with educational achievement was only slight, and part of the test for the school was not only to give me that prized education but also to teach me, before anything else, that it was a prize at all. This was a dual role that places like Eton never, except in a few well-known, pharmaceutically assisted cases, have to perform.
Woolverstone Hall School for Boys sounded terribly grand, and I loved telling people I went there. “It’s a boarding school near Ipswich in Suffolk,” I would say. “Really? What did you do?” would often be the reply. So not only did the school have to instruct me that there was a point, we ourselves were constantly suspected of being resident in a place of which Her Majesty Approved. Mud sticks, but it sticks even harder and more resolutely to scum. I should stress that most of the boys who attended Woolverstone from the fifties onwards were aware of academic propriety and many of them went on to lead successful, even illustrious lives, but a good number of us still needed to understand, and then succumb to, the idea that our life at the school was principally intended to furnish us with knowledge. It was a challenge that the school rose to magnificently over the course of its life, but as it related to me it was a job much like the painting of the Forth Bridge: never-ending and inescapable. Had Woolverstone been a school that required its parents to pay fees and took only the finest from society, perhaps it would have felt the urge to dispense with my presence there. I don’t think I was that bad, but who knows?
I don’t believe, despite my painfully awful report book, that Woolverstone let me down. How pernicious might my early life have been without it? I think my self-aggrandisement at school became self-awareness by the time I was 20, and it could well be the greatest asset Woolvo gave me. If I wouldn’t allow it to send me out into the world with a catalogue of academic grades, it would have to tattoo a record of my truculence onto my conscience and hope I looked in the mirror.
* * *
In the fourth form, you became, in rugby terms, a member of the Colts. The Colts even played in a different strip, which had a yellow bar across the chest of the blue jersey. We were on the cusp of the First Fifteen and were capable of playing swift, powerful rugby to a very high standard. Now we could improvise, design special moves, do tricks. It was the team in which you came of age in rugby terms, and our egos were expanding as quickly as our shirts and shorts.
Tony “Boney” Watkins was the coach. He was the biology master too, but he was a terrific rugby coach who emphasised fitness and fast, running rugby and he had us believing anything was possible on the pitch. Anything was possible when we played, and some of it was legal. I was by now playing hooker, having moved from prop in the second form and could be relied upon for a good number of tries per season and just as many unseen fights in scrums and mauls. I dare say the victims deserved it.
The style of rugby we played was based very much on the Australian model of medium- sized, mobile packs and quick, deft handling. We even stole a couple of their set-piece moves, too, the most prominent of which was the blandly titled “Kangaroo”. The move was the epitome of Woolverstone rugby: the opposition rarely saw what was coming before it had steamrollered them. It involved three members of the pack standing with their back to the opposition for a tap penalty and several players would line up downfield of them, preparing to run at angles past this “wall”. The scrum-half would play the ball to the first man in the wall, and the ball would then be manoeuvred, unseen by the opposition, to the central player or the far man in the barrier. We had a set of codes to denote who was to receive the ball – decoy runs would be made, all sorts of obfuscation devised. I was the man who would burst through the middle of the line, the members of the wall parting suddenly at the very last second.
My running style was best described as abrasive. Ever since we had joined the school and played the game, it had been drilled into us that defeat really wasn’t an option, and looming over us was thirty years of high achievement on the rugby pitch. We also had the added incentive of playing, almost exclusively, wealthy private schools whose view of us urban oiks was less than tolerant. I invested every ounce of inferiority complex, every shred of that fear of failure and every fibre of my considerable arrogance into my running. I was thick-set, heavy and quick over twenty-five yards, after which my speed would settle at around that of a gun-dog trotting to pick up a pheasant, but for those first few yards I was like a darted rhinoceros. Give me the ball ten yards from the line, and I was a cert to score, scattering boys like ten pins. I had a sidestep too, which tended to work because the opponent was so flabbergasted that I should try it. He might know which way I was going to move off my planted foot, but he was too stunned to move in the same direction: it was more Gordon Bennett! than Phil Bennett. Indeed, that famous Barbarians try against the Kiwis, when Bennett began the move by leaving three flailing New Zealanders grasping at thin air, was very much our touchstone try. We all wanted to emulate that style of rugby.
Thus, in the Kangaroo move, as I burst through that wall, I posed quite a challenge for any defender. Without fail there would be one from the other side who would trot towards the wall once the ball had been tapped, always with a slightly bemused look on his face as he wondered what was going to happen next. If the call had been “seventy eight” when the penalty had been awarded, then I was what happened next. The defender would have approximately one tenth of a second to either position himself for a tackle or take cover, but rarely were there foxholes or bunkers nearby. I imagine, rather like my observations with respect to the on-rushing Thommo fist, the first thing to go through his head was a wonder at the size and nature of what was coming towards him.
“What’s that rhino doing on the...”
No doubt a short life flashed through his paralysed mind, too, but what eventually went through it, with cruel inevitability, was concussion.
Scraping yet another brave but essentially moronic opposition player from my studs produced as much of a sense of pride in me as academic excellence did in others. There were many maddening individuals whose academic excellence was surpassed only by their sporting prowess, but it is of perverse consolation to note that if real academic distinction had been within me, then I would no doubt have found sustaining both too great a challenge. Still, being good at one of the things that made Woolverstone famous in the educati
onal community was about as good as it gets. Despite the long line of academic and cultural achievement the school could boast, there is little doubt that rugby was the shining tower from which most of us wanted to be able to sing. If I required it, rugby would bestow dignity as quickly as persistent misbehaviour divested me of it. Rugby was meant to channel natural aggression, teach us teamwork, strategy and fitness, but I clearly saw it as a means to further express my aggression and to hone my arrogant individuality, which was starting to flourish as profusely as the foreshore ferns in summer.
And I hated losing.
It had happened to us only once, when the opposition ran out of the dressing rooms looking twice as old as us. We were sure they were ringers, so desperate were schools to beat us; and despite Tunji Obasa breaking one opposition leg and damaging another’s ankle, we lost by four points. Tunji was one of the smaller players on our team, but, as a full back, his tackling was peerlessly efficient. He had compact square shoulders that he would apply to the lower anatomy of oncoming runners with the precision of a surgeon’s blade, and his tackling was a violation of the laws of physics. So abrupt and violent was the deceleration of anything below his shoulder that, anything above it, on account of it continuing at normal speed, was in danger of leveraging bone and sinew to breaking point. And it frequently did. Nevertheless, even with the appearance of stretchers on the field of play, we lost by four points. And it hurt. Badly. We felt hugely hard done by and I am pleased to report that in the return fixture we beat that same team by fifty points.
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