It would have been uncharacteristic of me to positively exploit such a gifted teacher. So I didn’t. I just took the piss. And on the recurring theme of looking gift horses in the mouth, I did whatever I could to be thrown out of his class. Clayton was swift to give vent to his feelings about me as I skulked from the library, and although it was often unspeakably rude, it was nevertheless accurate. However, it was not unknown for such a contretemps to occur and for us to be getting along like a house on fire a few hours later in rehearsal. Whether Neil found this relationship bizarre and uncomfortable I don’t really know, but I never gave it a second thought. To me, it was perfectly natural since I wanted to be doing drama and I wasn’t overly keen on English Lit. If the irony of that strikes you as you read this, it is nothing compared to how hard it is hitting me as I write it.
It is impossible to draw a picture of the benign way in which I took to the theatrical arts. The contrast with the boy I have described in this memoir and the boy who showed enormous maturity on the stage could not be wider. I cannot truly explain it. For once, my showing off had a purpose and drew others towards me, as opposed to having the normally repellent effect. Clayton persevered with me in English Lit because he had no choice, but he confidently dragged performances out of me in the play. I wonder at the exasperation he must have felt when trying to get me to pay attention to him in the classroom and just hours later I would be held rapt by his every word. If there was a perversity to it that Neil found hard to account for or tolerate, he hid it well. On reflection, I was not even aware of the dichotomy these two personas represented, and I can easily imagine a scenario where Clayton felt nauseated by what must have appeared wilful at times. I can assure him that it wasn’t.
The first term of fourth year had been pretty good, and the second had been crowned by the school play. The report book shows that things were starting to slip somewhat although I was still hoping to take the English GCSE in the summer (a year early), which was pretty high academic attainment as far as I was concerned. I had already decided that English was one of the subjects I would get an ‘O’level in – the rest, I hadn’t decided on yet. The tone of most masters in the book is benevolent and encouraging, so I can only think I was, on the whole, being pleasant around the school. The weeks working on the play had been a soothing factor on my behaviour, and I was still singing in the rugby choir under Derek “Doc” Thornbery, which I always enjoyed.
Doc Thornbery was a legend. He was the first rugby coach any of us had, and he had taught hundreds of boys at Under Twelves. In fact Doc wasn’t much bigger than the eleven-year-olds he taught to play rugby. Doc also taught English and it would be fair to say he was one of the most radiant and inspirational teachers I ever had. He was unorthodox, too, leaping up onto the desks and walking from table to table as he elucidated some book, text or poem. He was transfixing, speaking at volume, then a whisper, eyes wide open, hands pressed into gesticulating action, but if your attention wandered, Doc would spring leopard-like across the desks, grab you by the hair and shake you senseless as he continued to recite Shakespeare or Keats. He wore Doc Marten shoes (hence the nickname) and these helped his balance, the cushioned soles offering rudimentary suspension as he bounced across four desks to his target. In the seventies, we all had long hair, but Adebola didn’t. He wasn’t interested in Afros so kept his hair cropped short to his head. When Doc leapt across to his desk one day, he scratched away at Adebola’s head trying to get purchase on the hair that wasn’t really there. After a short while of trying, he took hold of his ear instead and shook him by that. I often think of that little vignette as a metaphor for my school life – when shaking me one way didn’t work, somebody tried something different.
Doc was just as inspirational as a choirmaster, but I never saw him shake anyone by the hair in rehearsals. I don’t recall how I came to be in the choir – I must have auditioned – but I was a member of the junior choir in the first form so I was singing throughout my school career. I was only marginally less attentive and dedicated to music than theatre, enjoyed singing immensely and in my senior years, I recall performing in various sections of the choir, ranging from second tenor to second bass, so my range was acceptably wide. Our programme was challenging and varied, too, and we gave concerts not just to the school but also to the community at large. Doc had a remarkable ear for voices and could spot a flat note from a thousand paces when he would suddenly crouch low and stare, pointing accusingly at one section of the choir.
“Everyone stop, stop! First basses, on your own, quick!”
Having narrowed down the section, he would set about singling out the culprit until one poor soul would be singing solo, sounding just like the drain Doc had heard above the din of forty other voices. Being that person was unpleasant because a flat note sorely tested Doc’s patience, and he would make you sing the part repeatedly until he was satisfied you had mastered it. I’m bound to say that the choir could sound magnificent, and its peak for me was the performance of Handel’s Messiah when a local girls’ school and other choirs joined us to provide the full range of voices required for the piece. We really let them have it with that one.
Despite the choirs at Woolverstone, the school had become musically less ambitious than its earlier years. Weber’s masterpiece Der Frieschütz is a complex, beautiful opera but requires considerable vocal and orchestral forces, not to mention complicated staging since magic and all sorts of nonsense is involved. It provides a huge challenge for any professional company, but I was astonished to discover, on looking through some Woolverstone archives, that the school had produced the opera in the early sixties. Along with it, they had also performed some Britten (the composer actually visiting the school to see the production), Mozart’s Magic Flute, Verdi’s Requiem, Menotti’s Amahl and the Night Visitors, The Mikado and even Smetana’s The Bartered Bride. These are hugely ambitious pieces, but the rugby choir was a remnant of what had been a glorious musical and theatrical history. In 1962 alone, the school mounted productions of Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage, the aforementioned Smetana opera and finally George Bernard Shaw’s play of Androcles and the Lion. Other years were equally challenging and remarkable. Perhaps the swinging sixties brought about the demise of such high classical endeavour, but the school certainly continued to produce, with seriousness, classical music and theatre. It must have required huge dedication and commitment on the part of masters too, in particular the music teacher Barry Salmon, although having the pupils in school twenty-four hours a day must have helped a bit. To bring young boys like us to the doorway leading to such high classical art is almost unimaginable today I suspect. It is likely the boys involved never realised that when they took on Frieschütz, they were producing one of the great German operas of all time, but they would come to appreciate their enlightenment later in life. That was Woolverstone: anything and everything was possible, and I can imagine the masters sitting down to devise the latest theatrical or musical wheeze, nobody wasting time wallowing in their cleverness.
Except for me.
On stage, I could indulge all sorts of haughty, high stepping self-glorification and nobody would criticise me for it. Theatre and everything attached to it was my academic high point, and it was where the dull, hard, battleship grey of my educational prospects took on a patina in which you could see the bright lights reflected
* * *
The fourth year was punctuated by a skiing trip to Italy. Mum couldn’t afford it, so I would have to earn the fare by taking various holiday jobs. Skiing was impossibly exotic to me. I longed to do it and loved the Alps, having passed through them by train whenever we travelled to see the family in Italy. Most of all, it was another opportunity to show off since I had deduced that being a decent ice skater would stand me in good stead.
Bardonecchia in the Italian Alps was full of other schoolchildren from England. It was late in the season, which meant it was cheap. Adebola experienced hair tugging again when a chattering group of Italian school kids, ne
ver having seen a black boy before, encountered him at the mountain café and proceeded to play with his hair.
Naturally, within minutes of arriving on the slopes, we had attracted the attention of a group of public school boys who proffered their school boxing champion “Johnny” as upholder of their school honour. I don’t recall why this happened but it was just like the rugby: they thought we were beneath them. We were in most respects but it wasn’t their place to remind us, we thought. If Johnny and his pals were expecting a conflict under the rules of the Marquis of Queensberry, the rain of skis, sticks, blocks of ice and fists quickly disabused them of the notion. Having asserted our dominance of the mountain, we set about hitting it as often as possible.
I first hit it as soon as my second boot had locked the binding shut. Without a pause, I was on my back. Ice-skating was clearly no apprenticeship. True to form, lessons were nothing but a trial, preventing us flying off the side of cliffs as we tried to emulate whatever Austrian or Swiss nutter was star of Ski Sunday at the time. We paid no attention.
I was determined to master the parallel stop, which I had seen the locals execute with effortless ease. I particularly wanted to be able to do the version where snow sprayed in an arc into the air as you looked nonchalantly back up the mountain holding both sticks in one hand. I was nothing if not determined, and I tried and tried, crossing my skis so that I crumpled head first into the snow, or, more painfully, when trying to bring them together, sending my skis further apart. I only finally managed to achieve the parallel stop under duress. Heading for what looked like a terrifying precipice at breakneck speed, I had no option: fail to produce a shuddering stop and I’d be a goner. So I did. And it was a brilliant one. So brilliant, in fact, that my skis were immediately stationery, but unfortunately, I chose to stay upright rather than lean up the slope so the rest of me carried on and I went over the edge of the precipice anyway. It was my lucky day because what had looked lethal was merely an injurious ten-foot drop. I landed with a clatter, broke a stick and damaged my hand. But I had done it, and I was ecstatic.
Now that I had mastered the parallel stop, I practised the looking up the mountain bit. For a while I would rotate to look back and continue to revolve until I did a pirouette and landed on my arse. But I got to the point where I could look like I was gazing up the mountain, but really, under cover of my dark glasses, I kept a beady eye on the tips of my skis. Charging down the mountain at high velocity could now be achieved since I knew how to stop. What I did not bargain for was the imperfections in a ski piste, which would make the stylish halt redundant because I had already used the better part of my face to slow down. A kindly ski instructor gave me a nugget of advice that essentially said: you could only truly ski when you could descend a mountain as slowly as you wanted.
The skiing trip was also an opportunity to find girls. Italian girls, I had warned my friends, were not like your average English strumpets who gave out at the first opportunity. Italian girls usually had backup in the shape of their father’s shotgun, so best to avoid them at all costs. This was easily done since there were plenty of English girls ready to give out at the first opportunity. I vaguely remember one occasion when Rob was snogging two girls at once but I don’t recall how he managed it. In any case, I was too busy perfecting my parallel turns to worry about such things, and when not on the slopes trying them out, I would work on my theories of trigonometry and physics to accomplish the perfect turn.
I also saved someone’s life.
The fact that it was I who had jeopardised his life in the first place was of little consequence to me then, but it was of critical importance to him. It happened on the chairlift one afternoon as we descended the mountain. Being late in the season, there was no snow below the ski station to enable us to ski back to town and so we had to take the main chairlift back to the valley floor. It was a two-man chair lift and to mount it required a simple but crucially important technique.
We were lined up in pairs ready to go down, and I was with a random sixth former who, in my memory, had a flashy one-piece ski suit. We would hand our skis to the attendant, who would put them in the holders on the back of the chair, and we were to hold our ski poles in our hands. The idea was to stand side-by-side, wait for the next chair to begin to swing round the large wheel and then step across to be in line with it. When it got to you, you just sat down and let it carry you away as you swung the safety bar down and locked it into place. I was on the left so I had to take two steps to my left to be in line with the far side of the chair, and my partner on the right needed to take two steps to be in line with the right side of the chair. Simple.
Except as the chair swooped around towards us, I took only one step to my left which meant he had to set off running to get around me in order to sit on the other side. Ski boots are not especially good for quick manoeuvring so he had his work cut out. He began his charge for the other side of the seat with an “Oh fuck!” and managed to incorporate a small spin in the middle. He reached the other side just as I sat, oblivious to his suffering, onto the wrong side of the chair. Unfortunately, his arse never connected, but the small of his back did, and he was hanging by his elbows as the chair continued towards the edge of the platform. At the edge was a large cargo net, designed, one supposes to catch dropped skis, poles or people riding a chair lift with me. By now I had awoken to the struggle for life to my left and had grabbed the collar of his ski suit.
“Jump into the net!” I advised with unfairness since the net was mounted over a void of frightening proportion.
“OK, OK. No, I can’t!” he wailed.
“Oh for fuck’s sake!” I moaned.
As this episode unfolded, we could hear the gales of laughter from our friends at the chair lift. Or at least I could. My partner was already frozen in terror and could probably only hear the pounding of his own heart. However, when we sailed over the net and my partner’s legs were hanging free below the chair lift, the laughter stopped and we could hear the eerie swirl of the wind across the mountain, even above the screams and pleadings of my partner.
I gripped his collar with my left hand whilst holding my poles in the right. At this point, I too was in some danger since he could have dragged me off the chair. By now, we had traversed the flat run below the lift’s first fifty metres and had passed over the ridge that dropped to at least 100 feet below. If I let go now, he would die. I considered letting go so that I wouldn’t die with him. His elbows were on the edge of the seat behind him, and he was craning his head as far back as he could to provide some counterbalance to the enormously heavy ski boots that were fighting hard to drag him in the opposite direction.
“Don’t let go of me,” he pleaded with an intensity I still recall vividly.
“Of course I won’t let go, you stupid idiot! Just get yourself back up on the seat because I can’t hold you much longer!”
Fear was the reason for my lack of sympathy, but he was starting to annoy me.
“Look, let’s wait till we get to a low bit, you can jump down and maybe you will only break a leg,” I suggested.
“I don’t want to break a leg!!” he replied.
“Well it’s better than fucking dying you stupid fucking idiot! I’m trying to save your fucking life here!”
Even at such a moment, the words struck him as somewhat perverse.
“It’s your fault! Just pull me up, pull me up!!”
“I can’t!”
And so it went on for an eternity, but somehow, and I honestly do not remember how, I got him back onto the chair, and we dropped the safety bar. My heart was pounding and I couldn’t shake the visions of him falling to his death. He sat staring ahead for a moment, his breathing rapid and shallow. Neither of us spoke for a while until he broke the silence.
“Jesus Christ, Volps. You got a fag?”
It is a fitting footnote to report that he went on to be a ski racer and instructor for the army.
The spring term had ended with our customary triumph
in the Suffolk Sevens tournament. I loved Sevens because it gave me a chance to run with the ball. We had a superb team, to be perfectly modest. We trounced everybody, which is a testament to the coaches at Woolverstone, because everybody was bigger than us. Mum actually attended this tournament, which lasted the entire day at some school in Ipswich. She wasn’t able to visit frequently because having no car meant a tiresome journey on the train, but she would arrange to come down in the car of other boys’ parents when it was convenient.
She’d watched me play very little rugby – in fact, I think this was the first time – and her reaction to it was predictably hysterical. Standing on the touchline with absolutely no clue of what was going on, she merely cheered and clapped when everybody else did. On a run along the line, an opposition winger leapt onto my back and tried to bring me down.
“FUCKY LEEVIMALON!”
My mother was foaming at the mouth with bag in hand, ready to strike.
“Bastardo!” she screamed.
The poor boy who tackled me ran off in the opposite direction as I tried to assure Mum that it was OK and people were allowed to jump on me. I forgot to mention that this was, in fact, the final, so there were lots of people watching. Mum’s interventions wiped away some of the gloss from the victory since Seven’s tournaments gathered together in one place all of our vanquished opponents. For a star player on the winning team to have his mother squeal obscenities at anyone who dared touch him was not the stuff of strutting champions. It was the only time I hated getting a laugh.
Noisy at the Wrong Times Page 19