It’s very possible that, had Sam not spoken to him in this affected, aggressive manner but had instead proposed – or even agreed to – meeting up that day or the next, Pete would have got off his chest his intended High Flyers special subject, and this whole history would be totally, unimaginably different. As it was, he was sufficiently hurt and annoyed to feel entitled to write to Bob Thurlow within the hour. And did so conscious he was dealing Sam Price some kind of blow. He popped the stamped addressed envelope that the quizmaster had sent him into the nearest pillar box within three minutes of finishing his letter.
Monday, January 7, one day before the school term started, was Pete’s eighteenth birthday. At breakfast-time Dad announced he had opened a bank account for him, with £200 in it, a complete surprise (two hundred pounds from Dad the Skinflint). Julian and Robin had clubbed together to buy him a metal-framed Genesis poster (one, as it happened, matching Sam’s in The Tall House) while, in the early afternoon, Sam himself dropped by, in the VW Beetle. He had remembered the significant date and, it turned out, had driven all the way to Hereford to buy Pete a present at its biggest bookshop: a Penguin Classics edition of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Inside he’d written ‘Happy majority, dude, January 7 1974. Your good friend, Sam.’ Pete felt ashamed of his own meanness of mind.
His majority. Yes, now he could drive, though buying a cheap second-hand car would all but clean out his new account. He could buy alcohol and consume it openly in pubs and bars, though alas, the government hadn’t legalised pot, which was better – and he could marry, though first, as the saying went, he should prove himself a man, and who with, for Christ’s sake? Melanie? Hardly likely! And he kept away from those parties – some hosted by his own friends in this very neighbourhood –
where casual sex was an accepted alternative to finishing a dance. Also he could vote, as eighteen-year-olds had been able to do since 1970 in the United Kingdom, the first European country to give them this privilege. But who for? Pete was weary of all the interminable debates about Heath and the (well-handled? mis-handled? insoluble?) crisis, of the divisions inside the Conservative Party, the equivocations of Wilson’s Opposition, the possible strength of Thorpe’s Liberals, the anger of the Internationalist Left, including student bodies, the pronounce-ments (not always consistent) of the pundits. But, if the more contentious of these were right, the PM might well call a general election sooner rather than later to extricate the country from its knotted condition. So… the vote bit at least might happen fairly soon.
Before he left Woodgarth by its front-garden gate, Sam said to Pete in that low, sexy whisper only he could command: ‘Like I said, you can ride into Hereford with me of a morning – though my term doesn’t start till Thursday. Say yes, Pete, there’s a good guy. I need the company, and to be honest, I’m pretty much dreading the crammer’s. Better than being cooped up at Darnton, I know, but still not my cup of tea.’
‘Okay!’ said Pete. He could feel again, after its temporary absence, his desire to accommodate his unpredictable friend whenever possible. Had Sam not used the word ‘need’ himself?
Supper that night was a birthday celebration. Mum served up his favourite shepherd’s pie, with a treacle sponge to follow, and Dad opened a bottle of Liebfraumilch, because, needless to say, Ol, the saintly, ultimately unfathomable Oliver (apparent batsman for the ‘other side’), was at the table too – and indeed, as god-parent, presented him with a cheque for another £100 to add to what Dad had already put into his account. And after the excellent food Julian played a Hungarian folk-tune on his fiddle, collected by the composer Zoltan Kodály in a remote country village. It was beautiful in a plaintive way, and Pete told Julian he liked it very much.
Sam driving Pete into Hereford, far from requiring more subterfuge, even lies, turned out to be an arrangement others respected and even envied. For on January 10, to the consterna-tion of all Heath-watchers and the indignant satisfaction of his growing opponents, the train drivers went out on strike. Peter Kempsey was the only one of his friends who didn’t have to bother about the bus companies: he had his own lift to school. Sam actually dropped him off there, before proceeding to the city centre, where his crammer’s had its premises in a tall eighteenth-century town house (a bit like Ol’s in Leominster) with a view of the Cathedral. Their afternoon hours coincided too.
How peaceful it was travelling with Sam those mornings of strife throughout Britain – from the valleys of South Wales to Lanarkshire, from Kent to the Pennines – through the gradually lightening pearly greyness, sometimes undercut by translucent envelopes of green and buttermilk pushing through the horizon, three or four mornings lightly filtered by snow scurries. Every morning they reached the city in time for sunrise so that its features – suburban roads, football stadium, Bulmers’ great cider-factory, red sandstone cathedral, the spires of All Saints’ and St Peter’s, the banks of the river Wye in swirling spate as a result of snows on Plynlimon – were all recipients of a fresh-minted light. This lent each the patina of a daily discovery, a daily benediction which improved Pete’s spirits – and even his school work. (He wrote a good essay on Wordsworth’s Michael.)
Sam himself, as Pete by now anticipated, was unpredictable in mood, sometimes wanting to talk, sometimes wanting to listen to the radio, sometimes showing a careless masculine pleasure at having company, other times implying he was doing Pete one hell of a big favour just by taking him as a passenger. On the homeward journeys he was particularly apt to be edgy; he found classes at the crammer’s a strain, and smoked ferociously in the breaks between them.
Some things about Sam became clear to Pete now (like the Black Mountains, white in the morning after a night’s snow). Pete had assumed Sam’s unhappiness at Darnton, to which he made countless bitter references as they travelled, had made him a strong opponent of public schools and their apartness from local, ‘ordinary’ life. Not a bit. When he remarked of his crammer’s (properly a tutorial college), ‘The guys there – both staff and student – are simply not out of the top drawer, just not the sort I’ve been used to associating with at Darnton,’ Pete realised reluctantly that Sam largely shared the values of the school from which he had (but why? how?) engineered his own removal. It was only particularities and individuals he’d resented.
Pete’s growing understanding of this led to him surprising himself. Every news the boys listened to on the radio intensified the generally accepted picture of a country nearer and nearer disintegration, chaos. Oil prices rising would mean petrol rationing (and, bizarrely, ration books had already been printed). Already there was the 50 mph limit. The train strike had caused disruption to many other services, at who knew what cost; for instance the post was now irregular in the extreme. (And here was Pete waiting for another letter from Bob Thurlow. And yes! when he had confirmation of his choice of special subject, then he would of course tell Sam all about it!) ‘Our country can’t go on in this fucking stupid way, can it?’ said Sam after some news bulletin of further anarchy, ‘why don’t they call the army in to deal with the miners, for fuck’s sake? Even the Old Man – who’s as keen on profit-making as they come – goes a bit soft if you propose that. Remembers he has miner forebears down in the valleys, and all that crap. Well, sod the ancestors, say I. We can’t be dictated to by a mob of oiks.’
‘A mob of oiks!’ Pete couldn’t afterwards remember whether he really gave the disgusting words back to Sam or not. But definitely he spoke his next sentence aloud: ‘I don’t agree with you there, Sam. There was this bloke from the Miners’ Union, the NUM, on the radio who said something like: “Why are you willing to pay the Middle East such fabulous prices for their oil and yet begrudge money to fellow-Britons working their arses off to get you your fuel?” And I think he was right.’
Sam jerked his head in quick astonishment to his left, then jerking it back to face the road ahead said: ‘Well, I don’t think we should be kowtowing to those Arab pillocks either. But that’s another matter. What bothers
me is – well, at Darnton I got to see some pretty big guys on parents’ day: Sir Gilman Brand, for example, one of the men who really matters at Barclays, and Professor Maurice Weaver, the famous historian of the British Raj. (His son, Danny, was quite a one for a spliff, I can tell you, and his father knew and didn’t mind.) And I fucking well don’t see why all the sterling work men like that do should be put in jeopardy by the kind of shit we’re getting now…’
The logic of this was not immediately apparent to Pete, but this was not the only reason he made no direct answer. Such a speech was wholly unsympathetic to him, and none of his school friends would have made it. But the fact remained – and oddly it was a fact – that Sam’s company exercised a magic over him, theirs did not.
As if aware that harping on the distinguished parents of Darnton boys might have been a shade tactless, Sam, after switching off the radio and letting the stillness of the countryside prevail over roadway and car, said: ‘Can’t wait for a chance to drive over to those Berwyns and visit Don in Llanrhaeadr-ym-Mochnant. He’s quite a character, you know, a real card.’ (Were there no other ways of describing this mysterious guy?) ‘He’s as much a mine of information as your good self, but it isn’t just facts, as it mostly is with you. Old Don’s bristling with theories about – what you might call the seen and the unseen, the visible and the invisible.’
Pete was pretty sure that the dreaded term ‘UFO’ was imminent, but at that moment an Aston Martin did a nasty, and positively dangerous bit of overtaking, and after Sam’s justifiably obscenity-laden outburst on its driver’s recklessness, Pete was able to change the subject easily enough. And presently here was Hereford awash with sunrise.
That day, Friday, January 18, Pete returned from Hereford at half-past four to find his parents waiting for him in the hall. They must have heard his oncoming footsteps and positioned themselves. The fury in their faces would have been apparent to the most innocent eye, which Pete’s was not. Behind them loitered the Brats both visibly trembling with excitement at the explosion they were soon to witness (which, needless to say, was none of their fucking business).
Mum waved an envelope at him, waved it so vigorously that a little breeze blew inside the close-carpeted, draught-proof hall. Before he could read anything printed on it, Pete knew its prove-nance: The BBC, Broadcasting House etc, etc. And now Dad was waggling his index finger fiercely above the typed address: Mr Peter Kempsey c/o Price, The Tall House, Bargates, Leominster…
Dad said: ‘This is the most deceitful conduct, Peter, that I’ve come across since the sad case of Laurence Giles.’
It was good to have some obvious gibberish to seize on while preparing his defence. ‘Laurence Giles!!’ Pete repeated aghast – and talk about melodrama, he splendidly outdid his mother hamming it in that Lugg Players’ Victorian offering, ‘and who might he be when he’s out?’
It was an unwise rejoinder. ‘I’m not at all sure he is out,’ Dad said in a grim, quiet voice, ‘Laurence Giles was the young clerk who appropriated funds from our firm, and got sent down – we were all surprised at the ferocity of the sentence – for eighteen months.’
Julian looked positively cock-a-hoop at this speedy verbal defeat of his elder brother. This moved Pete to say: ‘If we are going to have to talk about this…’ he gave an injured nod at the offending envelope, ‘I’d prefer it if Jules and Robs were not around. It’s nothing whatsoever to do with them.’
‘That’s for us to decide, I’d have thought,’ said Mum sharply, and Dad backed her up by saying in a loud voice that wouldn’t have disgraced a courtroom, ‘It’s everything to do with them. I want Julian and Robin here for every single minute of what your mother and I have to say to you. And to hear the pathetic kind of case you’re doubtless going to make for yourself – in your habitual way.’
That ‘habitual’ was both below the belt, and inaccurate. Pete exclaimed: ‘Habitual! I like that! What precedents have you in mind, Dad?’ His father chose (wisely) not to answer. His mother’s eyes were stony. ‘Can we not at least sit down?’ Pete went on, attempting nonchalance. But ‘No!’ said his father, and ‘No!’ said his mother, and the Brats were pleased to add their own negatives (in unison of course).
Well, it didn’t take a Wellerman-Kreutz big scorer to work out what had happened, and Pete could have kicked himself for not having foreseen it. Because of the chaos in public services, the postman hadn’t called at The Tall House, Bargates until ten minutes to ten, whereas he usually called at half-past seven, had called indeed just as Trevor Price was leaving for Price’s Menswear. So it was he who received in person the letter from the BBC addressed to Pete. He then recollected the garbled story Sam had spun him before Christmas, to which, little interested,he hadn’t paid close attention – about the Kempsey lad preferring to keep quiet about some competition he’d entered for and using the Prices’ house as a PO Box. ‘Well, I thought in these strange times we’re living in, I should just bring the letter round to Woodgarth.’ And when he did, he found Mum in, as bad luck would have it, the electricity situation having involved radical reorganisation of her cookery classes at the Comp. ‘And I felt humiliated, I don’t mind telling you, Peter!’ she informed her son, ‘because, I’m sorry to say, before I had so much as opened the letter, I understood what had been happening all this while, and behind our backs!’
‘All this while? It’s been barely a fortnight! And why sorry?’ asked Pete, ‘I’d have thought it’d feel good to have such accurate powers of deduction.’
‘Sorry, because it meant that I had an eldest son who’s perfectly prepared not just to fly in the face of decisions taken on his own behalf, for his own good, but to secure what he wants by underhand measures, involving lies to his own family as well as co-opting others to carry out his deceptions.’ She could hardly have expressed herself more forcibly; her eyes were not stony, Pete saw, but ablaze with moral passion.
‘Sam himself proposed that I used The Tall House!’ said Pete, ‘I never had to co-opt, as you put it, anybody. He was really indignant on my behalf at the lack of recognition I get from my own family.’
‘Was he now!’ said Mum, ‘ was he now? And what form of recognition do you propose we should give you? That we chant a little grace before each meal about how lucky we are to have a champion in our midst? Don’t make me laugh!’ She appeared alarmingly far from doing this. ‘As for Sam Price and his sympathy, the more I hear of that lad, the less happy I am that he’s become such a regular companion of yours. Oliver was saying only the other day that he finds him watchful, supercilious and sneery.’ (Pete, surprised by the asperity of the usually kind-tongued Oliver Merchant, thought, ‘I wish that man would keep his moral reflections to himself’.) ‘I know it’s been very convenient, given the strike, your riding into Hereford and back with Sam, but I have noted a real deterioration in your general demeanour recently, and so have Julian and Robin.’ The Brats nodded their assent enthusiastically. ‘Heaven knows why he’s so stuck up. So I for one wish you weren’t having a lift in with that self-opinionated dandy. And please don’t tell me that you don’t enjoy the odd cigarette on your ride out, and I’d probably give a huge sigh of relief to find out that that cigarette contained tobacco…’
Pete’s deep blush told her all she needed to know.
Dad did not seem much bothered about Pete’s friendship with Sam; perhaps he needed Trevor Price’s support, as that of a local bigwig, for some manoeuvres towards the Town Council. ‘And there I thought we’d made such a good beginning to the year, Peter,’ he said piteously, ‘me putting that two hundred quid into an account for you…’
This was hard to bear, and Pete was afraid he might cry like a kid. Far easier to deal with Mum’s schoolmistressy crossness. ‘Dad, we did make a good beginning. You know how pleased I was by the new account and your kindness. I said so enough times, and I meant it… aren’t we in danger of getting all this a bit out of proportion? And anyway what are you proposing to do? They expect me to turn up, the
BBC; I’ve even chosen my special subject.’
‘Yes,’ said Mum, ‘UFOs. Such a useful topic in today’s fraught world! Typical!’
Before he could retort, Dad was saying, ‘Well, obviously we can’t now stop you appearing on the programme, and we’ll see you go up to London and back all right. But you cannot expect us, after how you have treated us, to take any interest in it at all. Whether you do well or disappointingly is no concern of ours. We shan’t even listen. Instead we shall do something we’d in point of fact been intending to do one day that week, take Julian and Robin into Bristol to see the production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream that’s had such good write-ups.’
Now Pete felt tears in his eyes, and no mistake: ‘That sums up the relationship between me and my family perfectly,’ he said, ‘you infantilise me’. He had not been travelling into Hereford with an admirer of Jung for nothing. ‘What you have just proposed is the sort of punishment you’d mete out to a small child. I know you don’t think much of my intelligence, I know you think those two conceited little jackasses grinning away in front of me now are cleverer. Well, I don’t care any more, do you hear; I simply don’t care. I shall do my own thing in the world, in my own way, and it will be beautiful.’
Three
Unidentified…
Ping! That was the fifth or sixth pebble to hit Pete’s bedroom window in the last couple of minutes. Was a freak wind blowing up those little stones Dad and he had laid last week on the pathway connecting front and back gardens? Very freak it’d have to be, for, though cold and cloudy, this evening of Wednesday, January 23 1974, it was also very still. As this was an electricity day by government permission, Pete’s bedroom was warm and well-lit enough for him to persevere with Reform and Renewal: Thomas Cromwell and the Common Weal by G.R. Elton. ‘If you show familiarity with it,’ Mr Taylor at school had said, ‘you’ll impress any A Level examiner.’ Pete had immediately envisaged this man, sweating out the July evening (when marking would be done) in some stuffy study, a pale-faced, prematurely ageing wreck, with a half-drunk mug of Maxwell House at his elbow, and an almost-empty packet of fags. Just as despair at his thankless task was becoming unbearable, his eye fell on a phrase: ‘As the great contemporary British historian, G.R. Elton has written…’ Whereupon the poor bloke would leap up and exclaim: ‘Elton, my sainted aunt! Reform and Renewal. Nothing but a straight A for this candidate!’
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