Moab is my Washpot

2

I believe Stouts Hill wanted me to leave them as early as possible. I had sat for the Uppingham scholarship examination aged twelve and failed to receive an award. I came close enough to an exhibition for Uppingham to recommend me to try for the exam again at a later date. I suspect, however, that Stouts Hill had Had Enough: the idea of me hanging around for another year did not please Cromie at all and it was agreed that I should leave as soon as possible, retaking the scholarship examination internally once installed in Uppingham. I bade goodbye to Stouts Hill then, aged twelve, without ever having been made a prefect, selected for a single athletic team, or achieving any distinction whatsoever save a record number of canings and a handful of academic prizes.

What am I saying? I won Third Prize (a grand certificate and a two pound book token) in the Independent Association of Preparatory Schools’ National Art Competition for my portrait entitled An Unforgettable Character. I had misread a pot in the art room which I had thought announced itself to be ‘Vanishing Fluid’ and, in attempting to correct a defect around the eyes of my Unforgettable Character, varnished his features so thoroughly that the work more than lived up to its title. Indeed it is probable that the judges even to this day are unable to forget the lustrous, glittering eyes and glossily menacing brows, beard and spectacles of my subject and that he gleams still in their nightmares like a lacquered Rolf Harris.

Now I come to think of it, there was such a thing as a ‘sub-prefect’ at Stouts Hill whose duties were unclear and privileges non-existent. It sounds splendidly Casablanca - ‘An exit visa may be obtained from the office of the sub-prefect for the usual fee’ -but the position I believe came into being merely to offer an opportunity for hopeless cases like myself to put something down on their entrance forms for later life. I think I was also entitled to claim myself to have been 3rd XI Scorer, a role I filled once or twice, but only for Home Matches – Stouts Hill wasn’t going to let me loose on other schools for a minute.

Not quite expelled then, I lived out the summer holidays, turned thirteen halfway through them, and arrived at Uppingham in the September of 1970. Roger had already had a year at Uppingham and was bracing himself with his usual good humour for the arrival, yet again, of his troublesome younger bro.

In those summer holidays he and I were inseparable, at school we did not expect to be. We had arguments, of course, as brothers will (I remember throwing a dart at him on one occasion: the image-memory of it sticking out of his knee sickens me still) but it is extraordinary, looking back, how creatively we managed to fill the holidays in a place so far distant from urban excitements. We were in the same predicament as the Reverend Sydney Smith who, finding himself stuck in the country, wrote to a friend that he could best describe his situation as being ‘simply miles from the nearest lemon’. Sydney Smith, in case you don’t know him, is well worth discovering, he had a unique brand of at once sophisticated, surreal and good-natured wit: he said, for example, of meeting Daniel Webster that he struck him as ‘much like a steam engine in trousers’ and was overheard telling a woman at a dinner party ‘Madam, I have been looking for a person who disliked gravy all my life; let us swear eternal friendship’. Well, Roger and I were not only simply miles from the nearest lemon, we were simply miles too from the nearest café, the nearest cinema, the nearest toyshop, the nearest bowling-alley and the nearest friend. So we had each other. By this time too, we had our sister Jo, who was six that summer of 1970 and who adored and trusted me implicitly. I told her gravely that I knew how to fly and that when she was seven I would teach her the trick of it. Shortly after her seventh birthday, returned from my first term at Uppingham, she reminded me of this promise. I took her upstairs, sat her high on a window-ledge and told her that all she had to do was jump and that my magic would do the rest. After a little thought, she decided not to take me up on the offer. I am glad to say that she never gave the slightest outward show of disappointment or disillusionment in her brother.

To thirteen- and fifteen-year-old boys however, six-year-old girls are not very much more than toys and Jo spent most of her time in the company of the great Nanny Riseborough who had served in our house, for the previous owners, since she was a small girl.

Lest the reader run away with too Bridesheady a picture of my childhood, I had better describe life in Norfolk just a little. The house where I grew up, and where my parents live to this day is big certainly, but then it had to be big for my father had needed somewhere with space ever since he had settled against an academic career, discovered that life in mainstream industry did not suit him and decided to set up on his own. While we had lived in Chesham we had spent many days meandering around England looking for suitable properties with plenty of outhousery. I recall endless drives to huge, unsaleable houses with overgrown gardens. My mother would gulp at the kitchens and public rooms, my father frown and shake his head at the inadequacy of the outhouses. Roger and I would romp about in the unweeded kitchen gardens, bored to distraction.

One of my grandfather’s employees, a sugar worker, happened one day upon a house for sale in the tiny Norfolk village of Booton. It was an imposing Victorian mansion, with an enormous stable-block and an absurd quantity of other outhouses, as well as an attached cottage the size of a substantial townhouse. It boasted, inexplicably, five outside lavatories as well as a splendid kitchen garden that offered asparagus beds, an apple orchard, a tennis court, a badminton lawn, a pigsty, a paddock, hen-coops, sinister rhubarb patches and a summer house. It was the size and condition of the stable-block that clinched the deal. This could be Father’s laboratory. There was room for as many lathes, oscilloscopes and things that go beep, tweet, whoop and boing as the maddest boffin could hope for.

In those days it was well serviced too. Mrs Riseborough cooked and nannied Jo. She had sisters-in-law and friends from the village of Cawston who scrubbed and cleaned and lit the fires in winter. The Tubby brothers gardened, but they eventually left to be replaced by Mr Godfrey who ran the garden for many years and who delighted my brother and me by talking to himself a great deal in an endless stream of complaint about how the soil was ‘a bitch’ whenever it was cold. Given that he was an old man who consumed a large quantity of roll-ups every day, no doubt the frosty earth was indeed a bitch and I hate the picture of us giggling at him. It was quite a garden to run, fully Victorian and designed to provide a large household with fruit and vegetables the year round. The outhouses could store apples, pears and potatoes throughout the winter and Mrs Riseborough made jams, pickles and jellies from the plums, cherries, strawberries, raspberries, damsons, gooseberries, blackberries, redcurrants and blackcurrants that the garden bore. Always providing my mother didn’t get to them first, that is. My mother has an absolute passion for sour fruit and can strip a gooseberry bush quicker than a priest can strip a choirboy.

I am not so very old you know, but this does seem another life: a life that moved with the rhythm of the seasons, a life that had essentially remained unaltered for decades. Everything was delivered: fish came on Wednesdays (not being Catholics we had no interest in reserving it for Fridays), delivered by horse and cart. It is ridiculous but true, I am really not that old, but to the house the fishman came, every week, his horse clopping along like Steptoe’s Hercules. Bread was delivered too, three times a week I think. On Wednesday mornings my mother would call up Riches of Reepham and order the groceries which were delivered in a van by Mr Neale, who greeted me, as all Norfolk people greet young boys, with a ‘Hello there, young man!’ and a squeeze to the cheeks. Milk came from a local dairy in waxed cartons which, after use, made good fire kindling that hissed, spat and crackled. The yellowest sweatingest butter we had too, neatly patterned on all sides with the marks left by the patting paddles. Meat came by van from Tuddenhams’s of Cawston, it being understood somehow in the community that the Cawston butcher was superior to the Reepham. The coal merchant came every month or so and a mobile library stopped by the house once a week.

Fruit and vegetables (oranges, lemons and bananas excepted) came from the garden.

‘Never eat asparagus after Ascot,’ was one of my mother’s rules.

An asparagus bed needs to go to seed in late June, so this seems a sensible idea. Somewhat inconsistently however, my mother was forever raiding the beds for their exquisite ferns which look very well in flower arrangements. I remember that asparagus also needed huge quantities of salt in the autumn. Mr Godfrey (helped by me sometimes) would empty sack after sack of ICI salt on each raised bed until they twinkled and glittered as if struck by an early rime frost.

The kitchen garden itself had been divided up by its Victorian makers using row upon row of little gravel pathways, lined with box hedging, ‘a bitch to keep tidy’ as poor Mr Godfrey liked to remind me, my brother or any rabbits or jackdaws that might be listening.

Mr Godfrey lodged with a certain Mrs Blake and from time to time he would ask permission to take excess vegetables from our garden for their supper table. One day he startled Cawston by making an honest woman of her, but even after their marriage he continued to refer to her as Mrs Blake. Norfolk people are slow to change. I remember an old couple who used to live in a small cottage with an outside lavatory. They moved, many years ago, to a smart new council house in which all modern conveniences were installed. Even today however, if you visit them and one of them wants to go to the loo they will startle onlookers by saying, as they climb the stairs, ‘I’m just going down the garden…’

At the back of our garden was a red wooden pigsty, sadly unused in our day, and behind that a paddock where for a time we kept a huge flock of geese, which were insupportably bad-tempered, loud and greedy, eating everything but stinging nettles, which gave the paddock a rather scrappy and tattered look.

Mrs Riseborough cooked lunch every day and cooked in a way that few people are capable of now. I don’t suppose she had ever seen or looked at a cookery book, a food-mixer or a freezer cabinet in her life. She made egg custards, apple pies, rhubarb crumbles, steak and kidney puddings, marrow stuffed with mincemeat, cauliflower and macaroni cheeses and all manner of good English pies, tarts and flans. Roger liked treacle tart with cornflakes on top, I liked them without, so each Thursday we would alternate. Mrs Riseborough taught me how to make a rose for the centre of a pie by taking a layer of pastry and laying it on my thumb and then adding another layer at forty-five degrees to the first and so on, and then cutting them over the thumb gently with a knife. In August or September she made her mincemeat and the Christmas puddings, five or six of them in huge bowls. The pudding mixture included carrots and Mackeson Cream Stout. The mincemeat would then be steeped in brandy and stored for the mince-pies which were made later.

Mrs Riseborough’s idea of a salad would be laughed at now, with its English kitchen garden produce of beetroot, radishes, Tom Thumb and butterheart lettuce, tomatoes and cucumber, topped with hardboiled egg and a sprig of parsley, not a rocket, radiccio, frisée lettuce or coriander leaf in sight: I could never get enough of it, so long as there was enough Heinz Salad to go around.

She did have some strange ideas, however. She was firmly convinced that the addition of a lump of coal to a bowlful of lettuce in water would keep the lettuce crisp, and from time to time she believed that she had too much blood and needed a nosebleed. Again, who knows? I understand leeches have made a comeback in some hospitals, maybe cupping will return too.

She worked in the kitchen, which had no sink and one very low tap, hardly a foot from floor level. We were not on the water mains in Booton, each day the procedure of ‘pumping up’ had to be gone through. There were two wells, one with hard drinking water from the water table, the other a rainwater collection cistern providing water for washing and bathing. The low tap in the kitchen was the only drinking water tap in the house. Guests, especially Londoners, always commented on the beautiful softness of the water when they bathed – it lathered beautifully and never left the scumline that lime-loaded London water does – but most of them wondered how we could go through the nonsense of daily pumping every day and why, in winter it was always colder inside the house than outside.

The pump house had been fitted with an electrically driven motor, I wouldn’t want you to picture Roger and me labouring away like medieval parishioners on the village green. The motor drove enormous wheels which were connected by great belts that slapped away as the pump worked. When we had first arrived at Booton a health inspector had taken a sample of water for analysis (the bottom of the holding tank had been alive with bright red nematodes). Some months later a report came back saying that the-water could be consumed, but not by infants under a year old. Since Jo had been drinking nothing else for months, it was decided to ignore such nonsense.

As the house had been untouched since it was built, its offices and amenities were (and still are) Victorian, a series of larders, game larders, sculleries, outer sculleries and something called a china pantry surrounded the kitchen. The lavatories were gigantic wooden affairs with chains that said ‘pull’ on them and wash-basins that you tipped on a swivel to empty. The ironing was done by a gigantic electric linen press, all levers topped with bakelite knobs. A great box made by Mann Egerton’s of Norwich, before they decided there was more money in selling Rolls Royce’s I suppose, high on a wall in the back passage shook a tin star to indicate in which room a bell had been rung, and next to it hung the thickened blue and red sally of a bell-rope, to be pulled to summon us children from the garden for lunch or tea, or for a ticking off.

In the afternoons, after the silent lunch (Father frowning at my inability to hold a fork properly or at the inanity of some Guinness Record I had solemnly announced), Nanny Riseborough would take Jo for a walk, first in her pram, then by pushchair, until finally they went on foot together. Sometimes Jemina the Siamese cat and I would accompany; according to season we would return with punnet upon punnet of blackberries or trug upon trug of daffodils, to which it transpired, after one afternoon’s heavy picking, I was allergic. I had to be rushed to the nearby town of Aylsham (nearby being seven miles away) to receive an adrenalin shot from the doctor. Only champagne and a beer brewed by Trappist monks in Belgium have ever given me worse attacks.

The stable-block, where my father worked, was called Over The Way. ‘Is Daddy over the way?’ became the most urgent question of the day. If he was, then it meant we could muck about inside, slide down banisters, play games, relax and even, if we were daring, watch television.

If Daddy was not over the way, it meant he was in his study, in which case we trod gingerly about the house as though on eggshells. The most terrible thing was to believe he was over the way and then discover that you had not heard him returning. In the middle of some game we would hear the tell-tale sound of his pipe being banged down into an ashtray to dislodge the plug and dottle and realise that, horror of horrors, Daddy was In. Instantly, fun, freedom and relaxation turned into terrified silence. The best answer was to steal from the house and find something to do in the garden.

Sometimes there were magical days when he had to leave Booton entirely and drive to Norwich or even as far away as Yorkshire. If it was a weekday, this meant we could visit the Men over the way, the men who worked for Father in the stable-block. They would look up from their soldering irons, wink and give a cheerful, ‘Hello there, young man’ when we came in and we would twiddle with the knobs on the oscilloscopes and press the inviting green buttons on the machines.

At various times my father manufactured a whole range of different items. He had invented an object called an Arc Rule which was actually demonstrated to my enormous excitement on Tom-Tom, the BBC’s predecessor to Tomorrow’s World. At one stage most of the stable-block was given over to the manufacture of electric Sellotape dispensers, cheerfully assembled by women from the surrounding villages who listened to Radio 2 when the Boss wasn’t about. On another occasion Father helped the Ford motor company with electronic governing systems for their automatic transmissions and the place was littered with bits of Capri. There were objects made throughout the 19705 called ‘thyristor controls’ and I have no idea what they did, but they were cleverly sealed in Araldite so that no one who bought them could find out how they worked without smashing them to pieces.

Later, Father designed and built the most entertaining contraption the world has ever seen, a machine for chugging out Tack-Strip, something the furniture industry liked to have about the place. The machinery resembled the mongrel love-child of a cinema projector, a steam-hammer and a Toblerone production line, all put together on a day when Heath Robinson had thought it might be fun to try hallucinogenic mushrooms for breakfast. I could watch Tacky going for hours and hours; I would follow, in a trance, the thousands and thousands of little metallic blue tacks as they shuffled around in a great vibrating bowl and then scuttled like soldier ants down a chute that blasted them with an air-compressed hammer at a rate of six or seven a second into a moving strip of thick cardboard that then folded itself over and continued its journey towards the packing box. The boxes were stacked on to pallets and a small electric fork-lift truck hummed about tidying up. The fights between my brother and me, when Father was away, to be the one to drive the forklift truck were harrowing to behold.

My father was inevitably thought of in terms of awe by some local people who referred to him as the Mad Inventor. When strange noises came from the stable-block at three in the morning, I half expected to see a stolid posse of villagers surround the house, flaming torches in hand, demanding to know with what strange forces he be meddling. Years would pass without the villagers ever seeing him, which only added to his mystique. If my mother was not around to order the last detail of his life, as a result of a bout of flu for example, my father might be forced to drive two miles into the village of Reepham to stock up on tins of pipe tobacco. The sight of him helplessly proffering a palmful of coins to the tobacconist like a frightened foreigner was most extraordinary. I don’t suppose to this day he could describe a twenty-pence piece or tell you which British heroes were on the back of which currency notes. I mustn’t exaggerate: he managed to attend British Legion and Conservative Party meetings (in the 1960s and 1970s before the Conservative Party went mad), sail every now and then across the North Sea to Holland with a nautical friend and more recently he served as an exceptionally committed and hard-working governor of Reepham High School. He was never entirely Professor Caractacus Potts, but then he was never the beaming fellow from the Daddy’s Sauce label either.

The most pleasing objects by far to emerge from his stable-block laboratories were a line of objects known as Things. Thing was a vast steel cabinet covered with more knobs and switches than you can imagine. It took weeks and weeks for Father and the men to make a single Thing, which was usually destined for a subsidiary of ICI in Mexico, Israel or Turkey where it sat there, Thing-like and Controlled. What it controlled and how it controlled, I have no idea, but Project Thing had taken Father months in the study with slide rules and paper to dream up and then even more months in the drawing office, designing the scores of circuit boards which slotted into Thing like honeycomb frames into a hive.

While Thing was being made it was all guts: wrapped in miles and miles of cabling and bulging with power supply objects tightly coiled in copper wire that looked like solenoids, Thing had a very vulnerable and naked look to it. When all the wiring was done and the circuit boards had been soldered and inserted down to the last one, Thing’s metal cowling was stove-enamelled a wonderful 1930s green and the switches, dials and knobs were added. The last thing to go on was the plate which had Alan Fry Controls Ltd., Booton, Norfolk, England printed upon it and the company logo, which took the form of the letters f-r-y, designed by my father to resemble the trace of some pulse of power as shown up on an oscilloscope.

Meanwhile my mother would have been typing and telephoning away to arrange all the bills-of-lading, export documents and God knows what other administrative and bureaucratic nightmares that the despatch of a Thing entailed. Sheets and sheets of documentation seemed to be entailed and the sweetest-tempered woman in the world would become, for a week or so, a tiny bit of an old snapdragon. Only the packing of the trunk for school occasioned more drama and crossness from a woman otherwise more cheerful than Pickwick, Pollyanna and Mrs Tiggywinkle on a sunny day in Happyville.

Finally, Thing, which was far too heavy to carry and which had been assembled in the largest room in the stable-block, which was upstairs, had to be lowered down into the stable yard through a. giant trap-door by a system of chains and pulleys, what I suppose is called block and tackle, a principle I have never understood. The family would gather in pride as Thing descended, green, gleaming, perfect and entirely like something out of Doctor Who. We all wanted to pay our respects and to enjoy the atmosphere of a Clydeside ship launch, but most of all I wanted to watch the most amusing part of the whole operation, the part that preceded the loading on to the lorry and the final farewell. Thing, being nearly always destined for hot countries, had to be protected against the changes in temperature that it would inevitably undergo in transit. In other words, to inhibit condensation, Thing was wrapped in a huge sheet of transparent plastic, which was then heat-sealed until only a tiny hole remained. My father would then solemnly insert into this tiny hole the nozzle of a vacuum cleaner and proceed to suck out all the air.

The sight of the plastic sheet sucking in its cheeks as it were and snugly pressing itself against Thing’s every declivity and protuberance was greatly impressive, comic and delicious, exactly the reverse of the pleasure you get from watching the stirring, twitching and swelling as a hot-air balloon or an airship is inflated. That naturally abhorrent phenomenon, the perfect vacuum, could naturally never be achieved by this method, but when the Hoover nozzle was removed and the tiny hole instantly sealed up, Thing looked like the most impressive object in the world and my pride in my father knew no bounds.

He was and is a simply remarkable man. Many sons are proud of their fathers, and no doubt have reason to be – for there are many remarkable men in the world. For sheer brain-power, will, capability and analytical power however, I have to say, all family loyalty aside, that I have never met anyone who came close to him. I have met men and women who had known more and achieved more, but none with so adaptive and completely powerful a brain. His ability to solve problems – mechanical, mathematical, engineering problems – is boundless, which is to say bounded only by the limits of the universal laws he holds so dear, the laws of Newton and the laws of thermodynamics. The clarity of his mind, the perfectionism and elegance of his abstract mathematical and intellectual modelling and practical design and his capacity for sustained concentration, thought and work stagger me, simply stagger me.

To grow up under the brooding, saturnine shadow (for in his thirties and forties he brooded greatly) of a man so fiercely endowed with mind power was immensely difficult for all of us. He worked every day, Christmas Day and bank holidays included, for years and years and years. No holidays, no breaks for television, nothing but work. Just occasionally one might hear the sounds of Beethoven, Brahms, Bach or occasionally Scarlatti or Chopin coming from the Broadwood grand piano he had taken apart and rebuilt in the drawing room, but that did not mean relaxation. Music too was something for analysis, deeply emotional analysis often, but analysis founded on a deep knowledge of theory and form.

A schoolfriend on first catching sight of him exclaimed, ‘My God – it’s Sherlock Holmes!’

My heart sank on hearing this, for Sherlock Holmes had long been a passion. I was a member of the Sherlock Holmes Society of London (a membership that was directly to connect with my expulsion from Uppingham) and knew most of the stories almost by heart. I had never realised, or admitted to myself before, that whenever I thought of Holmes, or heard his voice, it was really my father whose voice and image came into my head. The descriptions Watson gives of that infuriatingly, cold, precise ratiocinating engine of a brain fuelled by a wholly egocentric passion and fire exactly tallied with my view of my father. Like Holmes, my father would never think of food, creature comforts or society when the working fit was upon him. Like Holmes he had a great musical gift; like Holmes he could be abominably rude to those close to him and charm itself to total strangers; like Holmes he delighted in piquancy and problem-solving for their own sakes, never for gain or fame; like Holmes he combined dreamy abstraction with ruthless logic and an infinite capacity for taking pains; like Holmes he was exceptionally tall, strong and gaunt. Damn it, my father even smoked pipes – for years he virtually lived inside a cloud of thick smoke.

Unlike Holmes my father never went out; unlike Holmes my father never solved life problems for others; unlike Holmes my father never achieved household fame and the respect of Popes, Princes and Prime Ministers. Unlike Holmes my father was real. He was my father.

I have rarely met a man so pig-headedly uninterested in the world of affairs. I was ever a greedy soul and have always loved the creature comforts and symbols of success. It frustrated me to see someone who could have made a massive fortune many times over, whether by designing top-end hi-fl, computer software, commercial gadgetry or industrial plant, stubbornly refuse to sell himself. I admire such a reluctance of course, and am proud of it: huckstering, boastfulness and noisy advertisement are not appealing, but there is an egotism in excess modesty too, and I thought I detected a misanthropy and arrogance in him that drove me to distraction, partly, of course, because it contrasted with my own worship of success, fame, money and status.

I used my mother as an excuse for resenting my father. I felt she deserved better than to have her life revolve entirely around the demands and dictates of a wilfully unworldly husband. I thought she deserved holidays in the sun, warmth in the winter, the right to accept a few more invitations and the chance to go on shopping trips to London. I have no doubt I was jealous too, jealous of the adoration she had for him and the energy she put into making his life as easy as possible.

I cannot remember my parents arguing ever. I only recall one occasion when I heard my parents voices raised against each other and it terrified the life out of me.

It was night and I had been in bed for about an hour, when, through three floors of the house, there came to my ears the sound of my father shouting and my mother wailing. I padded fearfully into my brother’s room and shook him awake.

‘Listen!’ I hissed.

We stared at each other in fear and astonishment. This was entirely unprecedented. Simply unheard of. Our parents never argued, never shouted at each other. At us, yes. Occasionally. But never at each other. Never, never, never.

We crept down the back stairs, my brother and I, and listened quakingly for perhaps ten minutes to the sounds that were emerging from my father’s study. He was raging, simply raging while my mother howled and screeched unbearably. There was nothing we could do but tremble and wonder. We edged back up the stairs and talked to each other for a while about what it might mean and then went to our separate rooms to try and sleep.

The next morning I came fearfully into the kitchen, half-expecting to see my mother hunched over the table in tears.

‘Morning, darling!’ she said cheerfully, grinning as usual like a tree-frog who is having its toes tickled.

I waited until Mrs Riseborough was out of the room before tentatively asking whether everything was all right.

‘All right? What do you mean?’

‘Well, last night. Roger and I… we couldn’t help overhearing.’

‘Overhearing?’ She looked genuinely puzzled.

‘You were crying and Daddy was shouting…’

‘Crying…?‘A look of complete bewilderment crossed her face and then suddenly she brightened and began to giggle. ‘Crying? I was laughing!’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, it was the funniest thing…’

It turned out that the previous night in the study my father had started to hunt about on his desk for a file that he needed.

‘Bloody hell, you put something down for a second and it completely disappears… I mean what is going on?’

My mother could see from her position on the sofa that he was actually sitting on this file, and for ten minutes my father continued to sit on it, all unaware, throwing papers around, pulling open drawers and getting more and more Basil Fawlty in his ungovernable fury at the thing’s disappearance while my mother became more and more overcome by greater and greater transports of laughter.

That was what we had heard.

Not the greatest story in the world I know, but its point lies in the extreme oddity (as I now know it to be) of a married couple who never shouted at each other or had any kind of row – at least never within the hearing of their children. They adore one another, worship and value one another entirely. I’m sure they have been frustrated by each other sometimes, it would only be natural, and I know it upset my mother that for years my relationship with my father was a mess. She would have to bear my sulking adolescent grunts of ‘I hate Father. I hate him,’ just as she would have to hear him telling me how arrogant, shiftless and incapable of thought or application I was.

When I first heard other children’s parents shouting at each other I wanted to die with embarrassment. I just did not believe such things could be, or that if they were, that they could be tolerated. I still find any sort of confrontation, shouting or facing off unbearable.

It is possible that the closeness, interdependence and unconditional love each bears for the other may have contributed to whatever fear it was that kept me from partnering anyone for so many years. It always seemed impossible to me that I would ever find anyone with whom I could have a relationship that would live up to that of my parents.

They fell in love at first sight and knew instantly when they met that they would marry. They had both been students at London University, my mother a history scholar at Westfield College, my father reading physics and running the music society at Imperial. My father was pleased with my mother’s jewishness, her father adored this brilliant young man and was, I think, especially delighted that my father could speak German, which he had learned in order to read papers on physics, so many of which were published in that language. My grandfather himself was ridiculously multilingual, speaking Hungarian, German, Yiddish, Czech, Slovak, Rumanian and English. I have a picture of him as a young man, splendid in his Austro-Hungarian cavalry officer’s uniform, taken just before he went off to face the Serbian guns at the very start of the First World War. He came to England in the 1930s to teach British farmers how to grow sugarbeet, so my mother, the youngest of three girls, was born in London and grew up in Bury St Edmunds and Salisbury, attending Malvern Girl’s College from a very young age, to all intents and purposes a very English little girl – for the Nazis were about to arrive in Britain at any moment, and my grandfather knew something of what Nazis did to Jews. His name was Neumann, which he changed in England to Newman. His father, my great-grandfather, a Hungarian Jew also of course, had lived for a time in Vienna, and it was always said of him that he was the kind of man to give you the coat off his back. You can imagine how my blood ran cold when I read this in Alan Bullock’s Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, while reading about the early life of Hitler for my last novel, Making History:

After their quarrel Hanisch lost sight of Hitler, but he gives a description of Hitler as he knew him in 1910 at the age of twenty-one. He wore an ancient black overcoat, which had been given him by an old-clothes dealer in the hostel, a Hungarian Jew named Neumann, and which reached down to his knees… Neumann… who had befriended him, was offended by the violence of his anti-Semitism.

I suppose there were many Hungarian Jews in Vienna in 1910, and I suppose many of them were called Neumann, but one can’t help wondering if it really might be true that one’s great-grandfather might have befriended and kept warm a man who would later decimate a large part of his family and some six millions of his people.

My parents wed secretly: my mother’s scholarship would, for some odd reason, have been forfeit had it been known that she was married while still an undergraduate. Now, after forty-two years together, it still warms my heart when I hear them in another room, this remarkable couple, chattering away as if they’ve just met.

The house has hardly changed at all. The pumping up process for water is now simpler than it was, but the kitchen still has only one low tap – all the washing up goes out to a scullery. The Aga has to be riddled every night to shake the ash down and there is still no central heating. People who visit it show wonder at its time-capsule dignity and might even express envy at my good fortune in growing up in such a place.

I used to think I hated living there, but throughout all my years of rebellion, ostracism and madness I always carried a photograph of the house with me: I have it still, tattered and torn, but the only copy left in the world of an aerial picture taken, I think, around the very time of my life between prep and public school. Maybe I had just started my first term at Uppingham, maybe it was taken just before I left Stouts Hill for the last time, for my brother and I are nowhere to be seen in the picture, unless we were cantering about on the badminton lawn which is hidden from view. I wouldn’t have kept this picture all those years if the house didn’t mean something to me, and I wouldn’t be gulping down tears now, looking at it, if the memories it invoked were impotent and sterile and incapable of touching me deeply.

It was the house where I grew up.

It contains my brother’s bedroom, with its peeling William Morris wallpaper; it contains the bedroom I spent most of my life in, lying awake for hours and hours and hours with the self-induced insomnia of adolescence, peeing out of the window into the night air and killing the honeysuckle below because I was too lazy, slobby and sluttish to go downstairs to the lavatory; it contains the bedroom of my sister, with posters of the cricketer Derek Randall still hanging on the wall. It contains the study on whose carpet I stood so many times, facing my father over some new school report, some new disaster, some new affront to authority, some new outrage that might send my mother from the room clutching a handkerchief to her mouth in grief and upset. It contains the same objects and the same memories, and it contains the same two parents who made me from their flesh and whom I adore so much. It is home.

In the book of Uppingham school rules the first rule is this:-

A boy’s study is his castle

The only other fortress of privacy afforded a boy at Uppingham came in the shape of the tish, a dormitory cubicle that housed his bed, a small table and such private items as might be fitted into the table or under the bed and vice versa. A curtain could be pulled across and then a tish, too, became a boy’s castle. One assumes that the word tish descends, not from the German for table, but from a contraction of the word ‘partition’, but applying logic to English slang is never a sound idea. I think we can be fairly sure however, that ‘ekker’ the word used at Uppingham for games, derived from ‘exercise’. ‘Wagger’, or ‘wagger-paggerbagger’, which was used to denote ‘waste-paper basket’, is an example of that strange argot prevalent in the 1920s and 1930S that caused the Prince of Wales to be known as the Pragger-Wagger. Even today, in the giddy world of High Anglicanism in such temples of bells, smells and cotters as St Mary’s, Bourne Street, 5W3, I have heard with my own two ears Holy Communion referred to by pert, campy priests as ‘haggers-commaggers’ and my mother still describes the agony and torture of anything from toothache to an annoying traffic jam as ‘aggers and torters’.

The only other jargon to offload at this stage is the name for the prefects, who at Uppingham, as at some other public schools, were called ‘praepostors’, which happily preposterous name is, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, a ‘Syncopated form of præpositor’. The OED then cites the following as an example of the word’s usage:

1887 Athenœum 29 Oct. 569/3 He [Rev. E. Thring] strongly encouraged self-government among the boys, and threw great responsibilities upon the præpostors.

It is good to know that Thring of the enormous side-whiskers, or Dundreary Weepers (buggers’ grips my mother calls them) was a master of the modern art of delegation.

Eighty-three years after that Athenzum article, a great deal of responsibility was still being thrown upon the præpostors, who were known universally as pollies. There were the House Pollies, who had authority only within their Houses, and the School Pollies, who had authority everywhere. A School Polly could carry an umbrella and wear a boater. With that embarrassingly faux anger that middle-class rebels have made a speciality, pollies were called, out of their hearing, ‘pigs’, as in: ‘He’s only a House pig, he can’t tell you what to do,’ or ‘Did you hear that Barrington has been made a School Pig? Tchuh!’ This sort of remark was usually made with the kind of muttered Worker’s Revolutionary Party snarl that public-school boys are very good at reproducing, but which ill-suits their minor grievances.

But there again, whose grievances are ever minor? I am fully aware that my grievances, such as they are, are minor. The story of a sensitive young weed struggling to grow up in the robust thicket of an English public school is not likely to arouse sympathy in the breasts of every reader. It was a subject done to death in the earlier part of this century in novels, memoirs and autobiographies. I am a cliché and I know it. I was not kidnapped by slave traders, forced to shine shoes at the age of three in Rio or sent up chimneys by a sadistic sweep. I grew up neither in circumstances of abject poverty, nor in surroundings of fantastic wealth. I was not abused, neglected or exploited. Middle class at a middle-class school in middle England, well nourished, well taught and well-cared for, I have nothing of which to complain and my story, such as it is, is as much one of good fortune as of anything else. But it is my story and worth no more and no less than yours or anyone else’s. It is, in my reading at least, a kind of pathetic love story. I would prefer to call it pathétique or even appassionata, but pathetic will do, in all its senses.

The first problem to dominate me at Uppingham was that of the fag test. Every new boy had to pass this blend of initiation rite and familiarisation exam in his first fortnight. He was instructed in this by a Fag Teacher, a second year boy, in my case an athletic fellow called Peter Pattrick.

The fagging system was in the process of winding down when I arrived. Personal fags, of the kind found in public school fiction, had become more or less extinct. Fags still had to run errands for pollies, but there was none of the toast-making, shoe-shining, study-tidying, bog-seat-warming, head-patting, thigh-stroking, buttock-fondling drudgery, slavery or abuse that I had dreaded. Fagging consisted essentially of communal chores, the most notable roles in which were to be Morning Fag, who had to wake the House (more on this later) and the unpleasantly named Lay Fag who only had to sweep the corridors, and so far as I can remember, had nothing to do with lavatories at all. The Paper Fag was obliged to go into town early in the morning, before breakfast, pick up the House’s order of newspapers and deliver them to the studies. Another job was to go down twice a day and clear the school pigeonholes for senior boys, bringing up their messages to the House, that sort of thing. I can’t remember what this duty was called – Pigeonhole Fag, I suppose, but again it is madness to expect logic, he might well have been called Kitten Fag, Balloon Fag or Ethics Fag for all I know.

When I use the word ‘House’, it must be understood that I am referring to the boarding-houses into which the school was divided, miniature versions of an Oxbridge college I suppose, in as much as one lived, ate and slept in the House, and went into the school itself for lessons, much as an Oxbridge undergraduate lives, eats and sleeps in college and goes to university faculty buildings for lectures. There again, the collegiate system is not very easy to explain either, so it seems rather pointless my attempting to explain one mysterious system by reference to another equally baffling.

Essentially, Uppingham was six hundred boys strong, and had twelve Houses of fifty boys each, give or take. Each House had a housemaster, who was most directly responsible for one’s discipline, direction and well-being, he was the man ultimately in loco parentis. Each House had a matron too, and a small number of staff. When I began at my House, Fircroft, there was a female kitchen staff, referred to by the boys, I am sorry to say, as skivvies. All I can offer in our defence is that we did not mean the word in any derogatory sense, it was simply the word used, we knew no other. The skivvies waited on the boys: if one wanted more water in one’s jug or more tea in one s cup, one would, talking to one’s neighbour all the while, simply hold up the hand containing the empty jug or mug and wave it about a bit. If service did not come quickly, one would shout ‘Water!’ or ‘Tea here!’ and eventually the jug or cup would be taken away, filled and returned. Now of course, everything is organised along cafeteria lines and involves serving-hatches and, probably, wide ranges of camomile tea, isotonic NRG drinks and vegetarian falafel. What I can’t understand is why there wasn’t bloody revolution in the town of Uppingham in my day. I suppose waiting hand and foot on loud public-school boys is marginally better than being unemployed, but I shouldn’t wonder if some of the ruder, less considerate boys didn’t get a fair amount of spittle in their teacups and bogeys in their baked beans.

Fircroft had a garden, a croquet lawn, a copse with a hammock, disused outside lavatories (the ‘House rears’ in local argot, later to prove the unromantic scene of my deflowering) and, being one of the Houses furthest from the school, two fives courts. Fives is a game much like squash, except that the ball is struck with a gloved hand instead of a racket. It comes in two flavours, Eton and Rugby. We played Eton Fives, a better game, all snobbery aside, because it involved a buttress projecting from one side of the court, presumably deriving from the buttresses of Eton College’s great Perpendicular Gothic chapel, against which boys once sacrilegiously bounced balls. Fives was still played enthusiastically by some, but Eton’s rival Harrow had its own old game which was rapidly becoming fashionable, not just in schools, but in the world of sweaty businessmen and newly emerging health clubs. Squash was already more popular than Fives at Uppingham by the time I arrived and the Fives Courts were really just places where bikes were parked and behind which one smoked, masturbated or sipped cider with, or without, companions.

My housemaster was a man called Geoffrey Frowde, an old friend of my parents. He had been up at Merton, Oxford, as an undergraduate, but his wife Elizabeth had been at Westfield with my mother. The Frowdes and my parents had camped out in the Mall together that rainy, rainy night before Queen Elizabeth’s Coronation and waved together at Queen Salote of Tonga as she rode by with her famous lunch sitting beside her. These experiences no doubt form a bond and it was on account of Geoffrey Frowde being at Uppingham that Roger and I had been marked down for it from an early age. All this made my subsequent impossibility as a pupil all the more embarrassing of course. To be endlessly frustrated by the uncontrollable wickedness of the son of friends must put a man in a very difficult position.

Back to the fag test. This took the form of a written exam and required of its candidates a full knowledge of all the school Houses (in alphabetical order), their housemasters, their House-captains and their locations. One had to know too all the form masters by their names and initials and where in the school their form-rooms lay. Being an ancient establishment that had prospered in Victorian England, Uppingham, like a good English town, like the English language itself indeed, had rambled and swollen and bulged itself out in a higgledy-piggledy manner that demonstrated no logic, plan or rationale. The new boy had to know where each games field was, the layout of the music school and the art school and the carpentry and metalwork shops and all manner of other places. These were the compulsory and predictable elements of the fag test and held no terrors for me. I have always been able to rely on that excellent memory of mine; the unknown factor in the test lay in the right of the House-captain, whose job it was to mark the results, to top off all of this factual quizzing with school slang tests and unpredictable questions about nicknames, customs and traditions. A cobbled pathway that led past the library through to the central colonnade, for example, was known as the Magic Carpet and an alley whose flooring was made of small square raised tiles sometimes went under the name of the Chocolate Block. There were dozens and dozens of similar nicknames for people, places and regions of the school that one naturally absorbed over a period of months and years, but to find them all out in a week and a half was difficult.

The price of failure in the fag test was high: a flogging from the House-captain. I had a dread conviction that boys beat much more mercilessly than prep school headmasters. The captain of the House, whose name was Peck, sported splendid sideburns, nothing to Edward Thring’s Dundreary Weepers of course, but impressive none the less and an indicator, to my mind, of huge reserves of strength. There was something horrible too about the very word ‘flogging’ which conjured images of naval punishment at the mast, the victim biting on wads of leather as the lash was laid on.

Peter Pattrick my fag teacher set about his task with vigour, for if I failed, he too would be punished. If I passed, and passed well, there was a reward: Pattrick would have to stand me a tea at the buttery. The school had three butteries, sort of cafés-cum-tearooms-cum-tuck-shops-cum-ice-cream-parlours. There was the Upper Buttery, the Lower and the Middle. The one I came to love and cherish was, as befits my nature, the Lower Buttery, a cash only, high cholesterol joint run by a couple called Mr and Mrs Lanchberry, or possibly Launchberry. Mrs Lanchberry (we will settle on that, I have only a limited number of ‘u’s at my disposal) had a way of dropping two eggs into a lake of boiling lard that I have yet to see rivalled. To this day, double-eggs on toast with baked beans, a glass of sparkling dandelion and burdock and I’m simply anybody’s. The Upper Buttery was run by a Mrs Alibone and was really more of a shop, selling sweets, coffee, biscuits, bread, cheeses, ices and other consumables on tick. There was some system of order-forms involved and she always knew exactly when one was bust, which I found irritating and in rather poor taste. The Middle Buttery was hidden somewhere in the Middle, one of the largest playing fields in England, on which dozens (literally) of cricket matches could be played simultaneously, as well as games of tennis, hockey, rugger and Christ knows what else besides.

For the fag test then, they dangled a carrot and they brandished a stick. Like most small boys at new schools I was far more driven by the stick than I was drawn by the carrot. To tell the truth, the prospect of being bought a huge tea by Peter Pattrick frightened me almost as much as being flogged by Peck.

Pattrick – I think I mentioned that he was athletic? Especially good at tennis – decided that the way to teach me was to take me to the House library, find the largest book he could, Liddell and Scott’s Greek Lexicon probably, and hold it over my head while he tested me. A mistake or hesitation from me and -bang! - down would crash the book on to my skull. This was of no help and only served to confuse me. I remembered everything perfectly well almost the first time I was told it, the sight of that huge eau de nil jacketed dictionary looming above me simply mesmerised me into stupidity. At one point, while the book was hovering and I was havering, the door to the library opened and my brother came in. He took in the situation at a glance, I rolled a pleading eye towards him and then he spoke:

‘That’s it, Peter,’ he said. ‘If he gives any trouble, knock some sense into him.’

I hate myself for telling that story, for it gives quite the wrong impression of Roger who is just about the kindest man I know, with less malice in him than you would find in a bushbaby’s favourite aunt. He will squirm with embarrassment and shame at reading this, which is undeserved. Facts must out, however, and I must record that I was a little hurt by his failing to come to my aid or defence. No grudge of course, for I thought it must be my fault and that this was how things were done at big schools. Prep school is, it goes without saying, no kind of preparation at all for public school, any more than school is a preparation for life. The alteration in scale, the sudden descent from seniority to absolute insignificance, these make any social lessons learnt worse than useless. Those whose early days at public school were least happy were those who had won most prizes, rank and power at their preps. Worth noting here the oddity too of my brother calling Pattrick by his Christian name. It was considered rather cool and adult amongst second, third and fourth years to be on first name terms.

‘Hi, Mark,’

‘Guy! How’s it going?’

When Mark and Guy subsequently leave school and find each other again in their twenties, after university, working in the same merchant bank it becomes cool, of course, to revert back to surnames.

‘Bloody hell! It’s Taylor!’

‘Hallett, you old bastard!’

All very puzzling and absurd.

In the event, whether Liddell and Scott had anything to do with it or not, I scored 97 per cent in the fag test, a House record. I remember the thrill of seeing the word ‘Excellent!’ scrawled next to my result in Peck’s hand. Peck wore the striped trousers and black waistcoat of the sixth-former as well as the boater of the School Polly, but I seem to remember that he also (unless I have gone stark mad) affected a sort of cream-coloured silk stock of the kind huntsmen wear. I thought him little short of a god -even more so when I watched him playing Volpone in the school play and saw that he was a magnificent actor. I think he was the only boy older than me that I ever had a thing for, if you’ll forgive the prissy phrase. I can’t call it a crush exactly, or a ‘pash’ as they were sometimes odiously called, a ‘thing for’ about sums it up.

I can still remember the twelve Houses in alphabetical order, I suppose every Old Uppinghamian can – I’ll recite them for you.

Brooklands

Constables

Farleigh

Fircroft

The Hall

Highfield

The Lodge

Lorne House

Meadhurst

School House

West Bank

West Dean

I do that to show the pleasingly bourgeois nature of the names of most of the Houses. ‘Meadhurst’, ‘Farleigh’ and my own House, ‘Fircroft’ – they sound as if they belong in Carshalton or Roehampton, peeping through laurel bushes and shaded by monkey-puzzle trees. These Houses were necessarily larger than the average suburban villa however, despite their names, because they had to fit in dormitory and washing facilities for fifty boys, study accommodation, shower rooms, a dining hall and kitchens, as well as boot rooms, storage space and what estate agents once called ‘the usual offices’. There had to be too the housemaster’s area, the ‘private side’ as it was called, where he could live some sort of life with his wife and family. The Frowdes had two children and a golden labrador called Jester. I don’t suppose an active dog could have a better life than in the boarding-house of a school. No matter how pissed off a boy might be with existence, authority or himself, there was always room to share food and affection with a dog. A dog allowed an adolescent, struggling to be manly, cynical and cool, to romp and giggle and tickle and tumble like a child.

Each House had its own character, its own nature, its own flavour and atmosphere. Some were known for having more than the average number of the academically able, others provided a disproportionate number of athletes. One House might have a reputation for being messy and ill-disciplined, another for being a hotbed of queering and tarting. Fircroft lay somewhere in the middle. Frowde was not a martinet and did not beat or terrify the boys. The housemaster of West Bank (you don’t need much imagination to guess the nickname of that House) was as fearsome a man as I have ever met and was rumoured to thrash like an engine… he taught me Latin and his contribution to my school report one term read:

Feckless, fickle, flamboyant and evasive. A disappointment.

Which about summed me up. I rather admired and liked him, he was at least more or less consistent. Masters who inspired complete, abject terror were rather a relief to me. Had this man, Abbot, been my housemaster however, I think I should have run away by the end of my first week. He once, in the middle of a Latin lesson, fell silent in the middle of some talk about Horace. We all looked up from our slumbers and saw that he was staring at a pigeon that had landed on an open window-sill. For three minutes he stared at the pigeon, saying nothing. We began to look at each other and wonder what was up. At last the pigeon flapped its wings and flew away. Abbott turned to the form.

‘I am not paid,’ he said, ‘to teach pigeons.’

School House was the province of the headmaster, a most extraordinary man called John Royds, one time Indian Army colonel and ADC to Orde Wingate in Burma. He was physically short but had powerful presence and possessed all the techniques for inspiring awe that one looks for in a headmaster, the ability to swish a gown in an especially menacing way, for example, and a telegraphic, donnishly tart and lapidary way with words. His noticeboard in the colonnade fluttered with memos, smartly typed by an IBM golf ball:

Re: The wearing of lapel badges

I think not.

JCR

or

Re: The birthday of

Her Majesty the Queen

The occasion falls today. Hurrah etc. Let joy be unconfined.

JCR

or

Re: Litter in the Old School Room

We begin to weary of this nuisance. Be aware: our vigilance is ceaseless.

JCR

That sort of thing. Every morning he would step out of his House, walk with a firm tread and upright gait that concealed the most painful arthritis and snip a red rosebud from a bush in the garden which he would attach to the buttonhole of his charcoal grey suit. At one stage he developed shingles, causing him to wear the blackest and most impenetrable dark glasses at all times and in all situations, including the pulpit which, coupled with the sub fusc of his clothing, gave him the sinister look of Alan Badel in Arabesque or the menacing cool of a Tarantino hitman avant la lettre.

The application form to Uppingham required a recent photograph of the candidate to be affixed to it. By the first day of term Royds would have studied these and knew every single new boy in the school by sight.

All these things I would get to know later of course. For the time being I had passed my fag test and could find my way around. That was what mattered.

Peter Pattrick was pleased as punch, and punched me pleasedly and proudly on the arm to prove it. Being very well off (he was one of those boys I envied, who seemed endlessly to be in receipt of jaw-droppingly large cheques through the post connected with mysterious trust funds and shares, as if life for him were a continually successful game of Monopoly and the Community Chest eternally benign – I have a dim memory of getting myself, years later; hopelessly into debt with him) Pattrick could afford to stand me just about the biggest blow-out the Lower Buttery had ever seen. Unfortunately he ordered for me, amongst the eggs, bacon and sausages, a huge quantity of chips. Unlike almost everyone else I have ever known, I am not drawn by the appeal of chips and my heart sank as I saw that he was going to watch me eat my way through this heaping plateful down to the last greasy atom.

It is on occasions like this where years of dorkily studying books on magic come in really useful. From the earliest days of Booton’s visiting mobile library I had fallen hungrily on any magic book I could find on its shelves. My ‘chops’ as magicians call technique, are not of the first order, it takes the kind of practice a concert musician is prepared to put into his music to perform just the standard pass with a pack of cards, but I can misdirect very well. Every now and then, without his knowing it, I would get Pattrick to look in a particular direction, gesturing with my fork towards a boy who had come in and asking his name for example, while with my other hand I would secretly grab a handful of chips and drop them on to a napkin in my lap.

Magic, in the form of close up sleight of hand in particular, is an art-form I venerate, but it must be confessed that almost every technique in it was invented primarily for some venal purpose. Almost all of the palms, passes, jogs, steals, glides, culls, crimps, undercuts and fakes that form the repertory basis of playing-card magic, for example, were devised by riverboat gamblers in the nineteenth century in order, to put it baldly, to cheat, swindle and steal. These techniques can be found in the masterwork on the subject, Expert Card Technique, by Jean Hugard and Frederick Braue, published still, I hope, by Faber and Faber. I suppose those who do not like or approve of magic sense firstly that magicians are the kind of disreputable or vengefully nebbish outsiders who relish putting one over on others and secondly that they themselves, as the victims of a trick, are not quite confident enough in themselves to take it laughingly. They are the kind who tug violently at the magician s sleeves halfway though a performance or say, with snorting contempt, that it is, after all, only a bloody trick.

I suppose, and it grieves me to say it, that there was a connection between my love of magic and my stealing. I wouldn’t want you to argue backwards from that and say that any amateur of magic, from Orson Welles to David Mamet, is necessarily a potential thief, but in my case I fear it was true. The techniques of magic made me an excellent thief, I could sell a theft, I could patter a theft. Fortunately -in the last resort fortunately – the showman in me, as far as theft was concerned, always worked against the sly in me and I was usually found out, aces of spades raining from my grasped sleeve…

Pattrick, anyway, hadn’t the least clue what I was up to. I got though every forkful of my gigantic feast, having transferred the napkinfuls of chips to another table at an opportune moment.

I was in. I had passed the test and was now an entity.