Noisy at the Wrong Times

by Michael Volpe

  * * *

  “Despite Michael’s attempts to blame everybody else for his troubles, it must now be clear to him, as it has been to the rest of us for some time, that at present he is on a disaster course. He has done almost no work this year; he has upset a lot of people by his rudeness and behaviour. Fortunately, it is still not too late. I hope he can get his attitudes sorted out quickly next term – if he can, I wish him well for the future. JM”

  I reproduce, in full, John Morris’s end of year entry in my report book. Soon after, he left to join another school. It is a salient entry because not only does it chronicle my slide, it also demonstrates, yet again, the way in which masters at Woolverstone never seemed to give up on me. His encouraging note at the end was surely given in the full knowledge that indeed, it was too late, but he gave it anyway because I don’t think he felt able to write me off. If I am honest, I could scream when I read it. I could slap the boy he is talking about. There was one bright side to it all: I did take my English ‘O’Level a year early and would later find out that I’d passed, but that only makes my refusal to tackle other subjects with any real effort all the more unforgivable. I managed to prove my then English language teacher, Mr Taylor, wrong when he predicted in the report that although the exam was easily within my reach, I had probably blown it. The infuriatingly erratic self-destruction continued unabated.

  Neil Clayton who was, in that fourth summer term, my cricket coach, brought the curtain down on the year:

  “Cricket – He was a nuisance because he could not keep his mouth shut. The promise he has, which is considerable, will never develop unless he can control himself.”

  He could have been talking about almost any subject.

  BRINGING THE HOUSE DOWN

  Ridiculously self-centred. He should stop clowning and start working”

  J M Hyde, Geography.

  “Alas, he hasn’t bothered. Does he care? I doubt it”

  Neil Clayton, English Literature

  “School play. Absolutely first class. Utterly reliable, co-operative, sensible and a good actor. Well done!”

  Neil Clayton, drama.

  Entering what should not have been, but which I had determined would be, my final year at Woolverstone, the promise and potential I had shown at primary school had less than 10 months to produce the goods. Not that it stood much of a chance while my rampant adolescence was in charge of my behaviour. As the above extracts from the autumn term report show, the signs for the end of year exams were not good, and I wasn’t placing academic effort high up my list of priorities. Roughly in order, my priorities were me, myself and I. John Morris had left Woolverstone, and the new housemaster was Dave Morgan, the metalwork teacher. I got on well with Morgan and on the whole I wasn’t behaving particularly badly, I just had the most remarkable impudence and, if I am honest, the foulest, most explosive temperament. It showed itself moderately infrequently, but when it did I could send a ripple through the school. I got into an almighty battle of wills with my physics teacher, whose loathing of me he did not even bother to disguise. Once he had found a reason to exclude me from the classroom, he decided I was never to return, which even I knew wasn’t allowed. I approached the headmaster for advice.

  “Return to the classroom, Michael, I will talk to him”, he said.

  The next day I entered the room and was instantly challenged.

  “I thought I told you never to come into my classroom again Volpe?”

  Knowing I had cleared things with the headmaster, I was not in the mood to show any form of contrition for past misdemeanours: politely, but with undisguised self-righteousness, I told him I had seen the head and that he should speak with him if he had a problem. And then I sat down with my back to the blackboard and began to do the mock exam that sat on the table as the master stormed out of the room. Ten minutes later he stormed back in and halfway through a question on refraction I found myself looking at the ceiling as the master, now livid after what had obviously been a fruitless discussion with the head, dragged me bodily along the floor and flung me into the corridor. He slammed the door behind him as he leapt back into the room. He leapt because I was halfway onto my feet and coming towards him. Rage had returned but this time he bought his pals Fury and Murderous Psychosis with him.

  I charged for the closed door with wild abandon, screaming like a banshee, but the door had a strong lock and reinforcement on account of it being a physics lab. I took off, feet first, with the intention of kicking the door down, thinking that nothing would withstand my weight and power. Except, as it turned out, the reinforced door of a physics lab. The soles of my shoes connected with it, and the rest of my body carried on, crumpling up behind my feet until my arse was the next thing to hit the door. Without drawing breath between volleys of invective, essentially because it had all been knocked out of me, I dragged myself to my feet and continued to gasp obscenities through the small head-height window whilst banging my fists furiously. I think I stood there, puce of face, for about ten minutes shouting and hollering and banging the door until I got hoarse and my hands hurt. My arse and feet were already painful. Something else was niggling me: my shoulders were bruised and scratched, so violently did he grip them when dragging me along the floor.

  He had crossed the line, in my eyes. It was unquestioned that I was not the world’s greatest student, but, paradoxically, I was respectful towards teachers in the normal course of things. It was part of my internal code of conduct: you treat me with respect and I will return the gesture. I could get exceedingly haughty about it too, and, on the whole, teachers were clever enough to patronise me. This particular master had reduced himself to my level, his challenge was physical: in the mind of a truculent, hormonal fifteen year old boy, he had forfeited his right to respect. This was a view I would express most graphically as he returned to his classroom after break.

  I had waited for him, and as he walked with Coulter, the art master, I offered him the chance to upbraid me physically once more, only this time whilst I faced him and had the help of a garden spade. Coulter – bravely, I would say – challenged me, telling me to stop it and to put the shovel down. I continued to hurl righteous indignation at the physics master over Coulter’s head, until the proximity of his pleading drew my attention and I shouted at him too. I threw the shovel to the ground and walked away.

  The disgraceful nature of this episode will have come as no shock to some, but as I travelled home on the train to begin my one-week suspension, I knew in my heart that something, somewhere had gone seriously awry. I cannot recall spending more than a few minutes trying to wonder what it was, but nevertheless, it nagged at me as I pondered the pleasures of an unexpected return to London. Waiting for me at the door, Mum glared, although she didn’t throw anything at me or wallop me in the corridor. She had complained officially about the master’s behaviour, but the disappointment with me was evident. My brother Matteo, fresh home from his latest stint as a guest of Her Majesty, sought to lecture me about throwing away opportunities. After a period of resistance, I burst into tears. Perhaps for the first time I became aware of the people I was letting down: I don’t think, at that stage, that I was aware I was only truly letting myself down, but I hated being the way I had become. My brother’s lecture was probably the first that anybody had given me since Paddy died. For two years since that day, I think I had been waiting for someone to show an interest in me beyond remarking on my failures. As ridiculously self-centred as teenage boys can be – and I was certainly that – it is often that their behaviour is merely a ploy to grab as much attention as they can. The pub-psychology of that statement does nothing to render it less true.

  “You are at that place because we don’t want you turning out like me,” Matt said, proving that at least his self-awareness had developed during incarceration. Serge, who had left the school by now and was working, was disgusted with me. He had always got along with the master at the centre of the row and couldn’t understand the animosity towards me
that I had reported.

  “You are never in the wrong, are you, Mike?” he said.

  There’s no mistaking the sound made by a breaking wave of shame.

  * * *

  I had the school play to look forward to in the second half of autumn term. It would be my last, and Clayton had made me the star. Knowing that nobody else had stood even the faintest chance of usurping me in the lead returned me to my full, strutting pomp. With perhaps a little irony, I was cast as the eponymous hero in “Jack Sheppard” a play about the infamous 18th century London thief; it was a wonderful version by the British actor Ken Campbell, full of characters with names like Dribbling Wilf. The production was elaborate, too, with a twolevel set, and would involve me climbing from the ceiling onto the stage. With great relish and my usual enthusiasm, I would attack the part; I would even work on the stage crew after rehearsals had finished. This was to be my crowning glory.

  I was given the script and immediately set about underlining in red all of my dialogue, along with the few lines before mine, which I underlined in blue. The almost frenzied way in which I learned my lines was of course another huge contradiction in my general approach to study. By the time rehearsals started, I wanted to be ready and prepared: struggling with my lines would only hinder my showing off, and I had both my part and much of everybody else’s entirely committed to memory within a week. I didn’t have a particular technique for learning a script but began by reading it several times through so that I fully understood every scene and plot turn. Should I ever get into trouble on stage, I could at least make something up that loosely followed the tenet of the scene. Forward planning on such a scale is uncommon in teenage boys, but impossible to imagine in me, and there was seriousness about my approach. It was a big cast, and my character was on stage virtually the entire time, which meant rehearsing with almost everybody in the play at one point or another. Abilities would vary, yet I would find myself encouraging and working with those whose acting tended towards the stiff and actually discovered that gentle cajoling worked so much better than impatience and irritation. One boy was struggling to deliver just two lines of dialogue in a convincing manner, but Clayton and I worked with him for what seemed like ages until, suddenly, he unleashed a cod northern accent of such accuracy and timing, I found it hard to rehearse with him from then on, so funny was his new character. Corpsing was a bit of a weakness of mine (it still is), and I would often hold up rehearsals so that I could compose myself. It was behaviour that in other circumstances would have resulted in admonishment, but onstage, Clayton seemed happy to go along with it, only intervening and calling us to order once it began to seriously affect the work that needed to be done.

  Jack Sheppard’s claim to fame was that he could escape from prisons. In the play I went from carpenter’s apprentice to common thief. Suffice to say, I find it hard to remember the entire plot, but the end of the play saw me executed. The opening scene was a monologue that required me to walk alone to the front of the stage and introduce myself. There were many such moments in the play, when I delivered narration between scenes, then other characters would appear and the drama would be played out. This first moment was the most critical. I would walk into a spotlight, the audience silent.

  Jack: My old man died when I was very young. Don’t remember him at all really. Me mother looked after me and me brother, and me sister. Until she died, me sister that is. Then me Mum got ill and I was bunged in the Bishopsgate Workhouse... Then I was bound over to this Wood geezer. He was alright, but Mrs Wood had religion pretty badly, which is inclined to wreck a home worse than the drink ‘n’ it?

  Mrs Wood: You know Jack, when I think of God sending down his only son...

  Jack: Yeah, it certainly was a pretty amazing gesture

  Mrs Wood: And we must love him back with all our hearts, all our souls

  Jack: Our souls

  It was sweet nectar to deliver those first lines, and as the play proceeded, the laughs would grow louder and more frequent. The script was my insurance, but my delivery was the thing in my mind. If these were my own words, they would be even funnier, I thought, but I invested every ounce of emotion I could muster into that prose. This was my best incarnation. I knew it, the audience knew it and most of the school’s masters knew it. Woolverstone could smile to itself when it saw me on stage. It had made something of Michael Volpe.

  My hamming and mugging during each performance was ceaseless, but despite not being satisfied that the script already made me the centre of attention, I was still a generous performer. I added several new things to the play every night, and watching me must have given Clayton some worrying moments. The desire to elicit laughs led me into all manner of over-acting. I relished every single moment of stage time and cursed every curtain call.

  School plays at Woolverstone were very professionally produced, and calamity was largely kept at bay, but it would be unlike me to fail to seed a success with the potential for disaster. At the beginning of the second half came the moment where I climb from the ceiling of the hall above the lights, down onto the stage. I was escaping from a prison, and a rope made from blankets and sheets was dropped into the spotlight; from the darkness I would appear, delivering another narrative solo. I had tied the sheets and blankets together myself, reinforcing the knots with string and testing the rope all through the rehearsal period. Rob was stage manager, and it was his job to escort me up the ladder and onto the ledge that ran around the high windows. The rope was tied to the ceiling rafters, and I was to begin my descent once Rob ensured I got onto the rope safely. On the first night, after the interval, the cue came and Rob dropped the rope. The audience were silent, and I heard a ripple of laughter as the line appeared suddenly in the spotlight. With hardly a pause, I then appeared, at terminal velocity, landing on my arse and making a sound like an elephant landing in a skip. The roar of laughter washed onto the stage like a tsunami as I rose to my feet, ad-libbed a bit and continued my speech.

  On my descent, a few feet from the top, I had seen the knot in front of my face begin to slip apart. I had frozen and watched it, rather than having the presence of mind to climb quickly to the bottom before it finally separated. I had looked up at Rob, who even in the darkness I could see sniggering hard; he too had seen the knot begin to slip. Time had stood still. And then the sudden, sickening partition of sheet and blanket had sent me hurtling to the stage. In my mind, I had made the whole thing look deliberate, like a well-worked stunt, but I was kidding myself because everybody knew what had happened. I still lapped up the laughter.

  Jack Sheppard was a great success, and I was lauded and applauded from all quarters. But my end of term report made scant mention of it, except when it was used it to illustrate how badly I had performed in everything else. There was no doubting that the contrast between my attitude to drama and everything else had become more stark and inexplicable. Rugby was another area where I had let myself down, having abused a fellow player in the first training session. I was kicked out of group and deprived of what would have been the inevitable hooker position in the First XV. After a couple of weeks I was asked to return, presumably because it was considered I had learned my lesson, but I refused out of indignation at having been banned in the first place. If I could be bothered, I turned out for other lesser teams, only to end up fighting in virtually every match. It was a grotesque waste, and it is among several aspects of my school life that fill me with regret and shame. Swallowing my pride was all it would have taken to be returned to the Firsts, but whatever it was that turned me into a righteous bore saw to it that the humble pie being offered to me in only small pieces would remain uneaten. The truth is that my success in Jack Sheppard had essentially convinced me that I had triumphed, that the play and my part in it had gloriously topped out almost five years at school and little else was necessary.

  By now, I had reached the firm conclusion that I wasn’t too keen to achieve many exam passes. I had passed English ‘O’Level a year early, and art wa
s the other exam I wanted to pass. The others were going to have to fall by the wayside. I didn’t tell anyone this, of course, and masters just continued to implore me to work harder and fulfil the potential they said I had. My behaviour in the house was good, according to Dave Morgan, although he delivered a stinging rebuke for my academic listlessness. After the school play, it appeared that my Woolverstone career would peter out with a whimper.

  THROWING IT ALL AWAY?

  Once I had made my decision to forgo the exam process that was looming in the summer, Woolverstone life would really only consist of fun and games. Going to Ipswich for club nights, listening to music, playing football and visiting the pub were my principal activities for the spring term. Home life during holidays was girls and working to raise money for clothes and other entertainment. I still had about me the lofty air of a Woolverstone boy: my pride at being at the school never left me. But I was unforthcoming about the secret resolution to throw five years of academic endeavour, such as it was, down the drain. I knew well enough the stupidity of such a decision to keep it to myself.

  The thinking behind such a choice was fairly simple. There was no doubt in my mind that achieving good grades was well within my gift, and despite the reports of lack of effort, there were many subjects I did enjoy, and I absorbed much of what was put before me in a lesson. However, I had become convinced that examination passes were just pieces of paper; back then there was still talk of achieving your aims in life without grades or university. I was full of self-confidence and bravado, so I would leave Woolverstone and still become a millionaire. Now, of course, I can look back and think of all the possibilities I had laid out before me. Indeed, Clayton had arranged for me to have an audition at RADA, such was my ability as an actor considered to be. No surprises that I thought the concept of three years of further study bordered on the hilariously impossible. To be perfectly frank, that particular faux pas doesn’t haunt me at all since I continue to meet out-of-work actors.