Bigot Hall

STAGE

I’m all for education but not when it entails being glared at by a pair of eyes behind which there is no brain. There are few lessons to be learned under a moron’s tutelage and foremost among them are degradation and fantasies of homicide — skills I consider unworthy even of a chef.

Mother once suggested that a school curriculum would slow my learning to a manageable rate and the next morning Father took me reluctantly to school. Whenever one of us entered the village, women swept children from the street, bicycles were abandoned, windows were slammed shut and ineffectual shopkeepers stood armed and apprehensive in doorways. But today this was raised to the tenth power — I felt like the previously unseen mutant child of a newly-defiant workman. One villager lobbed a lump of garlic, which I caught in my mouth. On arriving at the school I was asked to chalk my name on the blackboard for all to see and I struck up BEELZEBUB in elaborate gothic script, making some of the more timid children scream. Later I was hauled up for writing when I was meant to be guzzling milk and was told to read my scribbles to the rest of the class:

TED HUGHES’ SCHOOLDAYS

A crocodile died for my satchel –

tearful ears of sedative

pierced a carapace

to leave a leering dead weight

and a hateful, glossy case

The mauve-faced teacher snatched it away before I could continue. Only Billy Verlag was snorting with laughter. My first and last day at primary school smashed to an end when I begged the headmistress to beat me as hard as I knew she wanted to. It was decided that I should be educated at home by Professor Leap.

Leap was a fiercely complex personality. If his innards were removed, unravelled and stretched taut, I’d be the last to assign blame. A man of incoherent views and boundless energy, he had fled the medley of assassination attempts which are among the distressing hazards of academic life. Presented with myself snaffling in a cage, Leap launched a three-pronged assault, each prong as dreary as the next. By the light of a single candle he would moon around in a cloak and sing mournful dirges while strumming a lute:

I mime amid the crows and fog,

Concluding with a groan –

The only watcher was a dog

Whose snout was dripping foam.

During these dismal interludes I was a sleeping volcano, waiting to blast forth a flood of indifference. ‘What images does the music bring to mind?’ he asked, and I described a vision I had experienced of Leap creaking from a rope and undergoing his final, boring spasm.

The second prong was history and propaganda. ‘What was it,’ he asked, ‘that enabled the English to travel the world, taking control of every land they encountered?’

‘Bad manners.’

‘I was thinking not of a guiding principle but a skill. For what was England celebrated?’

‘Farce?’

I meant that it was a nation made from farce’s ingredients but at that age I could not express myself with such clarity. Leap made allowances and switched to the third prong of his programme — philosophy. ‘If everyone else in the world leapt off a cliff, what would you do?’

‘Celebrate.’

‘Progress is a bit thorny,’ I heard Leap telling Father under my window one evening. ‘I don’t suppose we can drown the bugger?’

‘Your guess is as good as mine.’

And so it went on, sustained by my assertion that Spinoza made his living as a professional clown and Leap’s frustration at being unable to find any evidence to the contrary. Then one day Leap had a blinder of an idea — we would attend the opera. I was all for it, and Leap was soon driving Adrienne and me through the countryside and insisting that he could spy ‘something beginning with T’.

‘Trudging mourners?’

‘No.’

‘Telepathically spooky youngsters?’

‘No.’

‘Twitching centipedes?’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘What, then.’

‘Trees. Trees, that’s all!’

At the theatre we witnessed a display which I daresay civilised cultures disallow by law. Otter-eyed, snivelling opera singers wailed nonsensical laments which, upon subsequent translation, I discovered to be a tissue of lies. One had been moaning about a dragon. The entire affair had been a waste of time.

But on the night I was not to know this — all I could do was stare in disbelief as a squad of bloated louts tried to make enough noise to convince us something was happening. Within minutes I was prepared to gnaw off a leg to escape. The audience seemed to be in a state of keen amazement or bitter concentration. On one side of me Professor Leap sat still as a pillar of salt. I turned to Adrienne — she looked at me sideways like a turbot, and I knew we were undergoing similar torture.

On stage it seemed that for half an hour a man with a beard had been deciding what to order in a restaurant, and was yelling every twang of prevarication at the top of his lungs. I was twitching like a convict in the hotseat — all my restraint turned to fog. ‘The steak, you bastard,’ I yelled, ‘have the steak and get on with it!’ Professor Leap parped like a punctured gas-line, trembling with pressurised rage as all eyes turned our way. I suppose the bearded man was used to this sort of outburst as he barely reacted, and perhaps welcomed any distraction from his embarrassing exhibition. He was now sat at the table sobbing at his weakness and lack of will. I rolled something from the corner of my eye which resembled a fragment of toast. ‘What about this?’ I bellowed, standing, and hurled it so that it bounced across the table. ‘Eat this if you can! It’s better than you deserve for boring the shit out of every bastard here!’ In a genuine attempt to contain laughter, Adrienne pursed her lips tight and let out what sounded like a florid raspberry. The bearded man was stood looking up at us in anger, fists balled on hips. The audience, which had previously glared as though holding my doom in reserve, now regarded me with a farmer’s loathing, and began to rise. ‘Go ahead, you spoon-fed idiots!’ I roared. ‘Cluttering the world with your inanities!’

‘The boy doesn’t mean it,’ squeaked Leap, standing in fright to assure them. ‘He’s just very, very bored.’

It was a full four months before our bandages were removed, and for a full year Professor Leap shrieked when he saw me, which was many times a day. He began going around belligerently untrousered and was discovered one night crouching naked on the porch roof, torn by rain.

God help those who sit through the whole of the Ring. When I desire a spectacle I look to my own conscience. Glancing back I see that my reaction to opera was reserved, considering what it has cost me in trauma and grief. We have truth in order not to die of art.