Moab is my Washpot

6

The next day was a bad day. They really don’t come much worse. Like all bad days it started well and full of promise. The world was wedding-cake white, there would be no games. What is more I had no PE on Tuesdays, so it looked like a day of gentle trotting about from lesson to lesson, followed perhaps by a nice fat pigout at the Lower Buttery.

For which, it goes without saying, money would be required. My Post Office account book showed that I had five new pence in credit, not enough even in those far-off days for much more than a slice of bread, a glass of water and a Trebor Refresher. I had recently happened upon a new source of money however:

Matron’s handbag.

After lunch, Matron had coffee with the Frowdes and their guests, and this, I discovered, provided me with a marvellous opportunity to sneak into her flat, which was just off an upstairs corridor, dive into her handbag and snaffle what could be snaffled.

So that lunchtime I was back at the House, after a morning’s Latin, English and horrid, horrid Maths, looking forward to the joys of a splendid afternoon.

How was I to find out what Matthew might be doing? That was the only question that really concerned me. His match would be cancelled. There was talk of tobogganing down the slope that ran down from the Middle – Redwood’s was the nearest House to that area, maybe I would take the path a long way round and see if Matthew was to be found there.

I was still high on my breakthrough in the bath too. For a moment I had wondered if maybe I wasn’t whole. There is some absurd steroid that floats about inside the male and makes him feel ten foot tall just because he’s been able to come. It is founded no doubt on the soundest evolutionary principles, but it is ridiculous none the less. Since I was already close to being ten foot tall without the help of the steroid anyway, its effect may have been weaker on me than on many others, but there was still a great spring in my stride as I climbed the stairs after lunch and headed for Matron’s flat. I should have known better, it was a Tuesday in February. Many of my life’s most awful moments have taken place on Tuesdays, and what is February if not the Tuesday of the year?

I walked casually up and down the corridor a few times to make certain that it was as deserted as usual and then opened the door and went down the little passageway that led to her flat.

There, on her bed was the handbag. I opened it, reached for the purse and then, with terrible swift suddenness, a cupboard swung open and Matron stepped out.

There was nothing I could do or say.

‘Sorry’ I think was the only word I managed. I said it perhaps a dozen times, rising in trembling tones.

‘Go to your tish and wait there.’

It seems Matron had noticed the continual disappearance of money and had worked out when it was going. She had set a trap and I had walked straight into it.

There was no possibility of escape nor any suggestion of an excuse. It was plain that I was the Thief. No hand was ever caught redder, no cash register drawer ever slammed shut on more palpably guilty fingers.

By this time Fircroft knew there was a House Thief and most people guessed it was me, which is why, I suppose, I had diverted my attention away from the House changing rooms and confined my thieving to Matron’s handbag or the Sports Hall and swimming-pool changing rooms down in the school.

Rudder the Captain of House himself came to escort me down to Frowde’s office. The dear man was simultaneously distraught and furious.

‘Damn you, Fry!’ he cried, slamming the table. ‘Blast you!’

The decision had already been made. Rustication until the end of term. Rustication meant temporary banishment home, only expulsion was worse. The camel’s back was beginning to bend and creak.

My father was already on his way. In the meantime I was to go upstairs and wait once more in my tish.

The drive home was monumentally quiet, but I knew that words would come. My father’s analytical mind would not be content to know that I had erred and strayed from my ways like a lost sheep, nor would he simply forgive, forget, judge, punish or exhort. It would be far worse than that. He would need to understand. I did not want him to understand, no adolescent ever wants to be understood, which is why they complain about being misunderstood all the time, and most passionately of all I did not want him to know about Matthew.

I am not sure that I thought then that Matthew was the root of the thieving. I am not sure that I know it now. I am sure, however, that he was at the root of the recklessness. He was at the root of all my emotions and I was not going to share them with anyone, least of all my parents, lest they somehow lead back to the truth.

There was the inevitable analysis in the study, like the scenes that came on the mornings of the school report’s arrival, but more intense. Father at the desk in a dense fog of tobacco smoke, Mother on a sofa, alternately hopeful and tearful. I would become transfixed by the amount of smoke Father could inhale: after puffing and puffing at the pipe and ejecting the clouds from the side of his mouth, each cloud thicker than its predecessor, he would finally give one enormous puff and in one huge inhalation the thickest cloud of all would disappear, fractions of it emerging from his mouth and nostrils over the next minutes as he spoke. Sometimes a full ten minutes after this one massive inhalation he might laugh or snort, bringing up from the very bottom of the lungs one last wisp of smoke that had lingered there all that while.

How he coped with the sullen ‘Don’t know’, ‘Don’t know’ that answered every question asked I cannot guess.

He had perception enough to see that there was something there lodged deep within me that he could not reach with reason, cajolement or threat. He continued to analyse and theorise like. Holmes, of course, but like Holmes he knew that it was a cardinal error to theorise without sufficient data.

One of his hypotheses was that he and I were very alike, an idea which I rejected as monstrous, nonsensical, absurd, unthinkable, insane and intolerable. I see the similarities now. His brain is better, his standards are higher and his capacity for work is far greater: he is, as a John Buchan hero might say, in almost all respects, the better man, but we do share characteristics. A particular colour of pride, a particular need to analyse. From my mother I have inherited qualities he lacks: an optimism, a desire to please, to cheer up and to gratify others, to make them feel good, and an ability to glide superficially, both where superficial gliding is actually a more efficient means of going forward than thrashing through murky waters and where superficial gliding is a kind of moral cowardice. I lack my mother’s goodness and ability to subsume her ego and I lack too her capacity to make everyone feel warmed by the radiancy of good nature. I think with my parents the old irony obtains: my mother is the practical one, my father the sentimentalist. I can far more easily imagine my mother coping with life on her own than my father. I don’t ever underestimate my father’s capacity to surprise and to solve problems, but nor do I forget that his very capacity to solve problems has burdened him with the propensity to find problems where none exists. We all know the ancient story of the Gordian knot, a tangle so complex that it was said he who could untie it would rule the known world: Alexander simply slashed it open with his sword. My father could never, never cut a Gordian knot – he might complicate it further and eventually solve it, but by the time he did so the known world would have moved on. Michael Ramsay, Archbishop of Canterbury during my childhood and during my religious phase a hero and profound influence, was once accused by an interviewer of being wise.

‘Am I?’ he asked. ‘I don’t think so really. I think it is probably just the impression given by the absurd fecundity of my eyebrows.’

‘Well, your Grace,’ the interviewer persisted, ‘how would you define wisdom?’

‘Wisdom?’ Ramsay chewed the word around in his mouth. ‘Oh, I should say that wisdom is the ability to cope.’

On that definition, one with which I wholeheartedly concur, I should say my mother is the wiser of my parents.

One inherits or absorbs just so much: my sneakiness, slyness and my wit, in its senses of funniness and of native wit, are all my own. My parents have wit in both those senses too, but it is not the same wit as mine, and best of all for them, each fits the other like teeth into a cog-wheel. From an early age I would watch them do The Times crossword each night. There was and is a type of clue that my father would always get and a type that my mother would always get, and between them they would, as it were, lick the platter clean. Occasionally they can complete a puzzle on their own, but I think they get infinitely more pleasure from doing it together. I could finish it by myself from a fairly early age and hated sharing it with anyone else, stiffening into cardboard if someone looked over my shoulder or asked for a clue. This is indicative of my need for independence, I suppose, proof that I didn’t need anyone in the way my parents needed each other, more than that, proof that I positively needed not to need, proof in other words, of fear.

My father also feared the kind of mind I possessed. He knew I was a clever clogs. A smart-arse. He saw a Look amp; Learn kind of a mind, eagerly competitive with a pastichey, short-cutting brain and a frantic desire to see its name in print, its knowledge praised. It won’t surprise you to learn that I had once begged my parents to apply to be on Robert Robinson’s television quiz programme, Ask the Family. Yes, I really was that dreadful, that insupportably, toweringly, imponderably, unpardonably naff. By good fortune and sense my father would rather have sawn off his legs with the sharp edge of a piece of paper than gone anywhere near such a repulsive proceeding and he made that clear from the outset with a great snorting cloud of pipesmoke. My mother, God love her, may well have been prepared to bite the bullet on my behalf and go through with the horrid thing, but I suspect that even she, loyal to me ever, cheerfully relied on the blank certainty of my father’s absolute and categorical refusal.

We know the type, and he knew the type, that’s the point. Blue Peter, Look amp; Learn, The Guinness Book of Records: facts, facts, facts. I exploded with facts much as contemporaries exploded with blackheads and Black Sabbath. Dates, capitals, inventors, authors, rivers, lakes and composers. I begged to be asked questions, begged to show off how much I knew, begged, like that little robot in the Short Circuit films, for Input… Input… Input…

There’s nothing so desperately strange about this. It was perhaps rather more suburban a style than one might expect from a boy of my upbringing: my brother preferred to dream of farming and flying and other pursuits more usual amongst the country-bred, but none the less I was one of the millions and millions of fact-collecting, did-you-know-ing, apparently-ing, it-is-a-little-known-f act-ing little shits that the world has put up with since Gutenberg first carved a moveable letter ‘a’, which, as every schoolboy tick like me knows, he did in Strasbourg round about 1436.

Such a brain was not consonant with my father’s idea of intellect, work and the mind. The first and most urgent problem to be tackled however, was this incessant thieving.

It was decided that I should see a psychiatrist and the man chosen was Gerard Vaughan, later to become a Government Health Minister, and already I think a Conservative Member of Parliament by this time. I believe he had been recommended by a parental friend, Tommy Stuttaford, then.a doctor and MP himself, but now the man hired by The Times to add footnotes to every news story that carries the slightest medical implication: Private Eye makes merciless fun of him in their ‘A Doctor Writes…‘ column. The Stouts Hill School Magazine would have described him as an “Expert” in as many double inverted commas as their printer could spare.

Vaughan had his surgery at Guy’s Hospital in London and thither my father and I repaired.

I completed some Bender Gestalt tests, interpreted a Rorschach blot or two and chatted. The thieving was a little puzzling to Vaughan, who felt that I should really be the offspring of a diplomat or a soldier. Teenagers who stole often did so, it appeared, because they came from families who were constantly uprooting. It peeved Vaughan that I should come from such a stable background.

Nevertheless, my problem was diagnosed as ‘developmental delay’ – academic maturity combined with emotional immaturity: a sixteen-year-old’s brain and a ten-year-old’s mind warring with each other inside a confused fourteen-year-old boy, resulting in an inability to concentrate, conform or settle. Nowadays a lot of what was wrong with me would no doubt be ascribed to Attention Deficit Disorder, tartrazine food colouring, dairy produce and air pollution. A few hundred years earlier it would have been demons, still the best analogy I think, but not much help when it comes to a cure.

Vaughan’s cure came in the shape of an attractive yellow capsule called, if I remember rightly, Lentizol. The only effects, so far as I can remember, were a very dry mouth and terrible constipation. Perhaps this was part of the pill’s clinical function: they can’t steal if they’re on the bog kneading their stomach all day.

Meanwhile, there was the problem of my academic work. If I was rusticated, it meant that I was at home for the rest of term. The following term, the Summer, was my 0 level term and my father was not about to let the grass grow under my feet, especially when it came to Maths, a subject I was absolutely certain to fail. Failure in Maths O level was disastrous because you couldn’t go on to do any A levels without it. I had passed English Language, the other essential, in November: why one sat an exam such as that so early I’ve no idea – simply to get it out of the way I suppose.

Unfortunately for me, as I thought at the time, my father was as proficient in French, German, Latin and English Literature as he was at Physics, Chemistry and Mathematics.

It was maths that he concentrated on however. He was to become my private tutor.

This was the deepest hell imaginable. The man I most feared and dreaded in the world, in whose presence all intelligence, coherence and articulacy deserted me, teaching me mano a mano, tête à tête the subject I most feared and dreaded in the world.

How could he possibly understand how difficult maths was for me, he for whom mathematics was a language he spoke as a Norwegian speaks Norwegian, a Spaniard Spanish and a musician music?

Worse was to come. He looked at the GCE Oxford and Cambridge Board O level maths syllabus and found it wanting. It was, in his judgement, weak, cheap, and Fundamentally Unsound. Mathematics was beautiful, he believed. It should be part of the arts and humanities side of a school, not the science side, he believed. Unlike a science, you did not have to know anything to engage in mathematics, merely how to count, he believed. Even that could be discovered from first principles, he believed. Calculus could be taught to a six-year-old, he believed.

There were some French lessons too: he would take down an old copy of a favourite book of his, Daudet’s Lettres de Mon Moulin and we would go through it together after a day’s mathematics. Yes, a day’s mathematics, day after day after day.

When he grasped the completeness of my ignorance and my incompetence he did not gulp or gasp, I’ll give him that. He stuck by his own beliefs and went right back to the beginning. He taught me something that I did not understand: the equals sign.

I knew what 2+2=4 meant. I did not understand however even the rudimentary possibilities that flowed from that. The very thought of an equals sign approximating a pair of scales had never penetrated my skull. That you could do anything to an equation, so long as you did the same to each side, was a revelation to me. My father, never once flinching at such staggering ignorance, moved on.

There came the second revelation, even more beautiful than the first.

Algebra.

Algebra, I suddenly saw, is what Shakespeare did. It is metonym and metaphor, substitution, transferral, analogy, allegory: it is poetry. I had thought its a’s and b’s were nothing more than fruitless (if you’ll forgive me) apples and bananas.

Suddenly I could do simultaneous equations.

Quadratic equations I pounced on because there was a formula you could remember for solving them. My father was not interested in my remembering formulas. Any fool can remember a formula. He wanted me to see why. So we went back to the Greeks, to Pythagoras and Euclid.

Oh shit. Geometry. I hated geometry.

He decided that we would set out together, as if we knew nothing,. to prove the suggestion that, so far as right-angled triangles were concerned, the square on the hypotenuse might well turn out to be equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides.

Proof?

How could you prove such a thing? The whole idea was completely alien to me. I suggested spending an entire day drawing right-angled triangles of different sizes and checking. If they all conformed to this theorem then that would suit me.

Ho-no.

I don’t remember the proof, I remember it took in circles and segments and sectors and angles which were temporarily designated the value Theta. But I remember that we got there and that I had followed it all the way and I remember too that when the final, triumphant QED! was written on the bottom of the page I felt a thrill of genuine joy.

We moved on to trigonometry and some very baffling propositions concerning, sin A equalling something and cos A equalling something else, a pair of propositions that were on the A level pure maths syllabus and nothing to do with basic 0 level mathematics at all.

I can’t claim my father made a mathematician out of me. I still speak only stumbling, schoolboy maths with an atrocious English accent. I never quite got the hang of vectors. I have damned Descartes eternally for the foul things. My father can vectorise anything from Dutch Elm Disease, to a sunrise, to the act of opening a tin of beans. Plotting things against things, writing 4x = (x2 – y2) on a graph line, that sort of runic weirdness – absolute mystery to me.

It was a breakthrough, a breakthrough that enabled me to pass Maths 0 level and a breakthrough in my relationship with my father. It was a permanent breakthrough in that I never hated him again (feared and dreaded, never hated) but temporary in as much as it altered nothing once I was back at school for the summer. Matthew Osborne still walked the planet, still inhabited almost every waking moment of my life, still gazed at me from every tree, every dawn, every brick in every wall. Indeed so brilliant a teacher was my father that he awoke a fire in me which was extrinsic to mathematics and which, amongst other things, I used to fuel my greatest love, poetry. Novels meant less to me (unless they were stories about my kind of love) and rightly too, for while the novel is an adult invention, the poem is universal but often most especially charged in the mind of the adolescent. The most common betrayal the literary-minded make as they grow up is to abandon their love of poetry and to chase the novel instead. To find oneself believing, as I did when in my twenties, that John Keats for example was strictly for moonstruck adolescents is as stupid and ignorant as to think that grown-ups shouldn’t ride bicycles. More stupid, more stupid by far. John Keats may not seem as sophisticated a paperback for the hip pocket of a self-conscious student as Beckett, Bellow or Musil, for example, but his greatness is not something that can be diminished by the stupidity of the newly adult. You can’t outgrow Keats any more than you can outgrow nitrogen.

That isn’t what I was trying to say, however you’ve got me off the point again. The very act of my father’s teaching inspired in me a love of the act of teaching in and of itself, that’s the point. I don’t suppose he had ever taught anyone anything before, but he taught me how to teach far more than he taught me how to ‘do maths’. I was so fascinated by my own progress that I became more excited by that than by what I was progressing in. Part of it may have been connected again (of course it was) to Matthew. I fantasised awakening his mind to something in the same way. Not in order to be admired, not in order to win affection, but for the sheer pleasure of the thing, the sheer love of Matthew and the sheer love, the gardener’s love, of watching an idea germinate and blossom. I must suppose that my father, for all his apparently cold, Holmesian practicality, was motivated by love too, love of ideas and love of me. Self-love too, but self-love is fundamental to any other kind. Amour propre can also mean proper love, after all.

My father had believed that I did not know how to think and he had tried to show me how. Showing, again, not telling, had proved efficacious. He knew that I was a natural mimic, intellectually as well as vocally and comically, but he knew that Mimesis is not the same as Reason.

I had had good teachers. At prep school an English master called Chris Coley had awoken my first love of poetry with lessons on Ted Hughes, Thom Gunn, Charles Causley and Seamus Heaney. His predecessor, Burchall, was more a Kipling-and-none-of-this-damned-poofery sort of chap, indeed he actually straight-facedly taught U and Non-U pronunciation and usage as part of lessons: ‘A gentleman does not pronounce Monday as Monday, but as Mundy. Yesterday is yesterdi. The first ‘e’ of interesting is not sounded,’ and so on.

I remember boys would get terrible tongue lashings if he ever overheard them using words like ‘toilet’ or ‘serviette’. Even ‘radio’ and ‘mirror’ were not to be borne. It had to be ‘wireless’ and ‘glass’ or ‘looking-glass’. Similarly we learned to say formidable, not formidable, primarily not primarily and circumstance not circumstance and never, for a second would such horrors as cirumstahntial or substahntial be countenanced. I remember the monumentally amusing games that would go on when a temporary matron called Mrs Amos kept trying to tell boys to say ‘pardon’ or ‘pardon me’ after they had burped.

The same spin upper-middle-class families get into to this very day when Nanny teaches the children words that Mummy doesn’t think are quite the thing.

‘Manners! Say “pardon me

‘But we’re not allowed to, Matron.’

‘Stuff and nonsense!’

It came to a head one breakfast. Naturally it was I who engineered the moment. Burchall was sitting at the head of our table, Mrs Amos just happened to be passing.

‘Bre-e-eughk!’ I belched.

‘Say “pardon me", Fry.’

‘You dare to use that disgusting phrase, Fry and I’ll thrash you to within an inch of your life,’ said Burchall, not even looking up from his Telegraph -pronounced, naturally, Tellygraff.

‘I beg your pardon, Mr Burchall?’

‘You can beg what you like, woman.’

‘I am trying to instil,’ said Mrs Amos, (and if you’re an Archers listener you will be able to use Linda Snell’s voice here for the proper effect, it saves me having to write ‘A am traying to instil’ and all that), ‘some manners into these boys. Manners maketh man, you know.’

Burchall, who looked just like the 30s and 40s actor Roland Young – same moustache, same eyes – put down his Tellygraff, glared at Mrs Amos and then addressed the room in a booming voice. ‘If any boy here is ever told to say “Pardon me”, “I beg your pardon”, or heaven forfend, “I beg pardon”, they are to say to the idiot who told them to say it, “I refuse to lower myself to such depths, madam.” Is that understood?’

We nodded vigorously. Matron flounced out with a ‘Well, reelly!’ and Burchall resumed his study of the racing column.

I can’t call such a teacher an inspiration, but there was certainly something of him in the mad general I played in Blackadder, and any teaching that drew attention to diversity in language, even the most absurd snobbish elements of it, was a delight to me.

At Uppingham Stokes inspired in me a love of Jonathan Swift, William Morris, George Orwell and those two great Victorians, Tennyson and Browning. In fact my mother had already given me a great reverence for Browning. She, like my father and myself, has a prodigious memory. Hers is especially remarkable when it comes to people and to poetry. She used to reel off a lot of Browning when I was small. No one, sadly, has ever inculcated in me the slightest admiration for the novels of Thomas Hardy or D. H. Lawrence, although I adore the poetry of both, the first being quite magisterially great, the second being charming and often very funny.

So although, as I say, I have been lucky enough to have had some good teachers at the various schools I’ve inflicted myself upon, none of them came close to my parents. Someone once said that all autobiography is a form of revenge. It can also be a form of thank-you letter.

I returned to Uppingham for the summer term of 1972, better at sums, more fired up by ideas and the idea of ideas, but not fundamentally chastened. I was chastened by the shame and disgrace of having been found and proved a thief, but boys, as Frowde had told me they would be, are limitlessly generous, and they were inclined to treat the subject with immense tact, as if I had been the victim of an unfortunate illness, just as the citizens of Samuel Butler’s Erewhon treated their criminals. I was probably in my greatest period of physical growth too, shooting up an inch a fortnight it seemed to me. Pubescence was kicking in strong, making up for lost time. I never, thank God, was prey to spots, as acne was called, but my hair became a little lank, and my eyes took on that strange adolescent brightness that lives under a film of sullenness. They were eyes that looked out, but never want to be looked into.

Summer term was Matthew’s term because it was cricket term. I had always disliked summer, a hot, sticky, asthma-inducing time. It looked pretty, but it bit and it stung. I had a terror of insects, moths in particular, horrible scaly moths which flew through open bedroom windows and fluttered about the light bulb as I tried to read. I could not rest or relax in any room which contained a moth. Butterflies were fine during the day, but moths disgusted and terrified me.

For Matthew’s sake, I tried to become good at cricket. Just so that I might occasionally find myself in the same nets as him, or be able to talk about Brian Close or Hampshire’s prospects for the Gillette Cup and other such crickety arcana.

It is impossible for me to separate Matthew and cricket, so my current passion for the game must have much to do with him. As I write, it looks as if Australia will at least retain the Ashes at Trent Bridge (today is the Saturday of the _5th Test) and you have no idea what it is costing me to keep away from the television and radio – wireless I do beg Mr Burchall’s pardon.

There is only one story to tell of this summer term and it is the story of the small act of physical consummation that took place between me and Matthew. Consummation is perhaps not the right word: it did not endorse or set the seal on our relationship, it did not fructify or sanctify it. It was a quick and sweet sexual act between two (from Matthew’s point of view) friends. At least I can say that it did not ruin the relationship or change my feelings for Matthew. It did not fortify them, for sex was never, as I have said, the point. Come to think of it I don’t know that love has a point, which is what makes it so glorious. Sex has a point, in terms of relief and, sometimes procreation, but love, like all art, as Oscar said, is quite useless. It is the useless things that make life worth living and that make life dangerous too: wine, love, art, beauty. Without them life is safe, but not worth bothering with.

It was after a late ‘net’, as we cricketers call practice. Matthew had asked if he might bowl at me for a while. His chief glory was his batting, but he bowled too. He was left-handed for both batting and bowling and had just taken an interest in wrist spin, which meant that he was experimenting with that peculiar ball, the chinaman. I was by no means a good enough batsman to deal with any kind of spinning ball: anything bowled on a good length at any pace, in fact, had me in trouble, but I was- pleased to be asked (indeed had hung around casually all afternoon talking to others, his brother principally, occasionally to Matthew, being amusing and charming, simply in the hope that there might be such an outcome) and did my best.

After a while we stopped and looked around. We were almost the only two on the Middle by this time, the whole wide sward was deserted. Two or three late games of tennis were going on at the Fircroft end, otherwise we had the place to ourselves. Tennis was despised by Garth Wheatley, the master in charge of cricket and by the professional, an ex-Leicestershire player whose name, I am ashamed to say I have forgotten. They both called it, disdainfully, ‘woolly-balls’.

‘Too many promising cricketers are being lured away from the game by the effeminate glamour of woolly-balls,’ I heard Wheatley say once, with a disparaging sniff.

Matthew closed his cricket-bag and picked up his blazer. ‘Oh, I love summer,’ he sighed, looking around.

‘Me too,’ I said. ‘Hang on, what am I talking about? I hate it.

‘What do you mean?’

We started to walk, aimlessly it seemed, in a direction that took us away from both our Houses, away from the school, towards nothing but fields.

I explained my hatred of insects, my asthma and my inability to cope with heat. ‘Let’s face it,’ I said. ‘I’m made for the winter. The more clothes I keep on the better I look. In shorts I’m a mess. And unlike you, I don’t look glamorous in cricket whites.’

‘Oh, that’s rubbish,’ he said and then after the briefest of pauses. ‘I quite fancy you, for a start.’

‘Oh yeah?’ I said, and gave him a push. ‘Trying to seduce me are you?’

‘Yeah!’ he said, pushing back and knocking me over.

It was all that quick and that silly. Nothing more than rolling and tickling in the long grass that turned into rubbing and sliding and finally angrily rapid mutual masturbation. No kissing, but at least plenty of giggling and smiling. Sex without smiling is as sickly and base as vodka and tonic without ice.

He left me there, lying in the grass. I leaned up on one elbow and watched him go, until his shape, cricket cream-coloured against the grass, disappeared from view. He never once turned back.

I lay back, stared at the sky and fell asleep.

I passed Maths Q level, not with distinction, but I passed. The only exam I failed was Physics, a determined cock snooked at my father to remind him that I was still myself. He had not made me his creature, his good science boy. For physics, above all, was what father was about.

I did not just fail Physics, I ploughed it spectacularly. Such was my pride that I could not bear to be seen to fail anything unless it was quite deliberate.

There had been a question in the examination paper which asked about something called EMF. To many of you reading this, EMF probably means that Forest of Dean combo whose excellent single ‘Unbelievable’ had us all foot-tapping five or six years ago, to Mr Pattinson the poor sod whose job it was to try and get some physics into my head, EMF meant ElectroMagnetic Force, or Field or something vaguely similar, please don’t ask me to elaborate.

The question read:

Describe the EMF of a bicycle torch battery.

Well, I hadn’t the faintest idea what they were on about, so I spent the entire physics exam drawing a bicycle. I wasn’t bad at this, Object Drawing was the part of the Art ‘O’ level that I was best at, my painting had never again reached the heights of the IAPS award-winning Unforgettable Character, but copying, I could always copy.

The bicycle I drew had a crossbar, saddle bags (an open cross-section of which revealed the presence of a Tupperware box containing an apple, a Mars bar and some cheese and chutney sandwiches) and, naturally, torches front and rear.

My last act, at the end of the exam was to rule a line towards the front torch and write at the other end:

‘This is the torch that contains the battery that contains the EMF that the questioner seems so desperate to know about.’

O levels in those days came in Grades 1 to 6, which were passes, and then 7, 8 and which were fails. I achieved none of these. I achieved something far more magnificent. I was awarded an Unclassified, which included a letter to the school.

I don’t think my father was hugely surprised when the results came through in the summer holidays. At least I had passed Maths, that was the great thing.

I decided, as my third year began, my Sixth Form year, that I would do English, French and Ancient History for A level. My father tried, with half-hearted idealism to suggest that there would be more of a challenge to me intellectually if I chose Maths, but my choice prevailed.

Some two or three weeks after my fifteenth birthday, therefore, I was a member of Lower VIA. I was far too young to be a sixth former. Too young literally, and much too young if one believed Gerard Vaughan’s diagnosis of ‘developmental delay’.

I had the joy of Rory Stuart, a remarkable teacher. Actually a Cambridge classicist of distinction, his enthusiasm (and he was the living embodiment of that divine Greek quality) had turned to English Literature. He went on to become head of English at Westminster and then, on the death of a plantswoman aunt whose cottage and grounds he inherited, he altered direction once more, this time reinventing himself as a landscape gardener. He calls himself, with splendid impudence, RHS Gardens (using his genuine initials but infuriating the pompous arses of the Royal Horticultural Society in Wisley) and does a little teaching still at the nearby Cheltenham Ladies’ College. He co-wrote a book about making a garden with the novelist Susan Hill, a book I thoroughly recommend. His pupils are spread wide around the world and feel themselves to be part of a special club. Sometimes I will bump into someone in the street who’ll say, ‘Excuse me, weren’t you taught by Rory Stuart?’ and we will stand there together swapping stories about him and what he did for us. Like me, there was something immensely distant and aloof about him in private, he was very unknowable there, but once his metaphorical teaching cap was on, he was energetic, charged and boundlessly creative. Anything that was said he could open like a flower, examine as a geologist might examine a stone or a squirrel a nut: a stupid and flippant remark could be as excitedly chased down as serious. Every remark or thought from any boy came to him as if it was utterly new and vibrating with possibility.

Given what I have already said about my parents, Stuart was the teacher that some are lucky enough to have in their lives. Others will always blame the lack of such a being on their failure to progress. Maybe they are right to do so, but I have always disbelieved that Sicilian saying about revenge being a dish best served cold. I feel that – don’t you? – when I see blinking, quivering octogenarian Nazi war criminals being led away in chains. Why not then? It’s too late now. I want to see them taken back in time and punished then. There were pictures of Pol Pot last week, tremblingly enchained: again, too late one feels, too late. Blame, certainly, is a dish only edible when served fresh and warm. Old blames, grudges and scores congeal and curdle and cause the most terrible indigestion. There were those who might have been able to save me from myself. It is possible that somewhere in the chain of events from Chesham Prep to prison I could look back and say, ‘He failed, she failed, they never tried,’ but where would that get me now? Off the hook? I don’t feel that I’m on one. ‘If my devils are to leave me, I am afraid my angels will take flight as well,’ said Rilke in sharp defiance of the future industry of TV and self-help-book exorcism.

Maybe it’s my mother’s side in me that makes me one who would rather look to people to thank and praise than people to blame and damn. Don’t get me wrong, unlike my mother, I’ve a wicked tongue in my head and when it comes, for example, to that pallid, fraudulent, dangerous twentieth-century version of true mysticism, the charlatanism of runes, tarot, horoscopy, telepathy, rootless opinion, stale second-hand ‘open-mindedness’ and all that shite, I get blisteringly unforgiving and furious. I am capable of being horribly polemic and culpatory in many arenas, but in the arena of the past I see no point. Had I been palpably abused in any senses of that much (ha!) abused word, then maybe I would think differently -as it is and as I have never tired of restating, I am the one who did most of the abusing: I abused trust, love, kindness and myself.

As a sixth-former life was, technically, more relaxed. As a fifteen-year-old it was, naturally, growing more complex every day. My feeling for Matthew had not altered. We never repeated the allegro rapture of our one sexual experiment, and we never referred to it. I still don’t know why it happened. Maybe he had guessed the depth of my feeling for him and had thought it was founded in lust and had as a result wanted to get all that out of the way because he valued my friendship. Maybe he was being kind. Maybe he was just a healthy fourteen-year-old who fancied a quick bit of nookie. Maybe he felt for me what I felt for him. I’ll never know and that is as it should be. I’ll always have that memory at least… the heat of him, the heat of him from his day’s exercise, the heat that radiated from the base of his throat, the heat under his arms, the heat-of-the-moment heat of that moment. Oh dear, will these memories never lose their heat?

I acted in a play in Trog Richardson’s brand new Uppingham Theatre, being amongst the first three to step on its stage. Patrick Kinmonth, Adrian Corbin and I were the weird sisters (none weirder, believe me) in the theatre’s baptismal production of Macbeth. I had read David Magarshak’s translation of Stanislavsky’s Art of the Theatre and had decided that acting was my destiny.

The director, Gordon Braddy, wanted the witches to design their own costumes, a decision he came to regret, since I announced that I wanted my costume to hang with fresh livers, lungs, kidneys, hearts, spleens and other innards, all bound by intestines. And why not, I argued, produce real eyes of frog and genuine tongues of newt from the cauldron? This was considered too much, but my offal-trimmed costume was permitted. The costume itself was constructed of strips of PVC. Kinmonth, who is now a highly respected painter anyway so it wasn’t fair, designed something excellent. Corbin too managed to snip something out of plastic that was at least wearable. The Christine-Keeler-meets-the-little-red-murdererfrom-Don’t-Look-Now nightmare that I threw together haunts me still and, I swear to you, for I have returned many times, the smell of rotten guts still informs the under-stage dressing-rooms.

I returned to that Uppingham Theatre for the first time, as it happens, in 1981, just after leaving Cambridge, with Hugh Laurie, Emma Thompson, Tony Slattery and the rest of our Footlights troupe, to perform prior to Edinburgh. Uppingham had become, because of Chris Richardson, a common stop-off place for comedians. It had started with Richardson designing the set for Rowan Atkinson’s original one-man-show. Rowan always tried out his new material at Uppingham and the Footlights followed.

I have since been back to give little talks and readings and so forth, Old Boy on the Telly, Sleb Speaker, all that, but every time I stand on that stage I see Richard Fawcett as Seyton and Third Murderer, Tim Montagnon as Banquo, David Game laying on as Macduff and above all Rory Stuart as Macbeth. Like most actors I forget the lines of any play a week or so after the run is over, but I have forgotten hardly a single word of Macbeth, from ‘When’ to ‘Scone’. It is too far distant to recall Rory’s performance in any detail, but I was thrilled, simply entranced, by the way he delivered the climax to the great ‘If it were done when ‘tis done’ soliloquy -

Hoo-werr… I still shudder at it. I may have felt guilt and fear of punishment in my day, but it was never quite that bad. A few people whispering in corners, the soul of my dead grandfather, the sad-eyed Christ, those things have bothered and shamed me, but I never imagined heaven’s cherubim blowing the horrid deed in every eye or Pity, like a naked new-born babe, striding the blast. God where did he get it from, that man, that Shakespeare?

None the less, nemesis was drawing up her skirts ready to charge, and as always with that fell dame, I wasn’t looking for her in the right places.

My parents, with as much realism, I fear, as generosity, had made it plain that if ever I was short of money, I was to go to Mr Frowde and he would advance me enough to buy as many of Mrs Lanchberry’s lard-fried eggs and her husband’s cream slices as I could eat. It must have been something more than slightly sickening and slightly frightening for them to know that the most efficient way to stop me stealing was to let me have as much money as I wanted. It’s like proving Pythagoras by drawing and measuring as many different right-angled triangles as you can.

I had more or less stayed out of trouble for the first month or so of that sixth-form term. The work was fun: I liked Anouilh’s Antigone, the first French set text we had reached, and I liked Ancient History too, which was actually a cop-out: I should have chosen Latin and Greek, but I saw Ancient History as a good dossy compromise.

I developed around this time a mania for climbing around the roofs of the school buildings. Any psychologist who can interpret this convincingly for me will earn my thanks. The School Hall, a great Victorian building with onion domes at each corner and the Chapel itself, both yielded wonderful runs of leaded channels and strange platforms from which one could survey the school beneath. I knew where Biffo Bailey, the school porter kept the keys to everything and had become a master at the art of this particular form of non-theftual cat-burglary.

(‘Did he just say non-theftual?’

‘He did, you know.’

‘I thought so. Shall I, or will you?’

‘Best let it pass I think.’ ‘Really?’

‘Mm. Only encourage him otherwise.’

‘Well, if you say so. Personally I’ve half a mind to call the police.’)

Both the Chapel and the Hall also contained two enormous Walker organs, with gigantic thirty-two foot wood diapasons. If you stuck a piece of paper over the vent of one (I’m sure there’s a better name for it than ‘vent’, but I’ve lost Howard Goodall’s telephone number) a single one-second blast on a bottom A would break the paper in two. Best of all, the lectern could be raised to reveal a huge array of presets. Between each of the three keyboards, you see, were buttons numbered one to, I think, eight. The organist, instead of having to grab at and pull out a clutch of different stops while in mid-Toccata, could just press Button 3 say, which would automatically push out a preset combination of, for example, viol, tromba and clarion. I discovered, one Saturday afternoon while the rest of the school was thrilling to the excitements of the Oundle match or whatever frantic tourney was being enacted on the field of battle, that I could alter these presets, and I did so. All you needed, with the lectern lifted and balanced on your head, was to use the tip of a biro to flick a series of dip-switches, as I believe they’re called. I changed every preset which was loud and thunderous to a preset that used one feeble oboey wail and every preset which was dulcet and faint to a great combinatory blast of the very loudest, most thundering pipes.

The following morning, Sunday, as we walked down to the Chapel I explained to Richard Fawcett, Jo Wood and a few others what I had done.

‘You wait,’ I said. ‘You just wait.’

The organ on Sundays was usually played by one of the music staff rather than a boy. It would either be Dr Peschek, whose son Dickson was at the school and a friend, or by Mr Holman who had wild dark curly hair and looked like Professor Calculus from the Tintin books.

As we reached the Magic Carpet, I saw Holman hurrying along with sheaves of music under his arms. Splendid, I thought. Splendid.

The result was indeed splendid.

The moment for the entry of the choir arrived and Holman, as he improvised the quiet preludey music that organists favour while congregations settle, was beginning to look a little rattled already. A huge blasting fart had emerged in the middle of one of his gentle, meandering doodles and blown back the hair of the first two rows of School House who were sitting in front of the diapason array and had directed at him the most indignant looks. This had unnerved him and we could see, between peeping fingers, that he was beginning to lose faith in his beloved presets. But there was no time for him to do anything about it, the chaplain and servers were there at the back with the choir and candle-bearers, it was time for action and the procession. Holman raised his two hands, a tiny knuckle crack was heard as he bent his fingers and -‘Neeeeeeeeee…’

Handel’s stirring anthem ‘Thine Be The Glory’, instead of roaring the faithful to their feet, peeped like a shy mouse from the wainscoting. Headman at the back of the procession, shot a look up at the organ loft, and Holman’s wild face, reflected in the mirror for us all to see, turned a bright shade of scarlet. The fingers of one hand flew around the stops, pulling frantically, while the other hand vamped ineffectually and the feet trod up and down the pedals which gave out tiny squeaking thirds and fifths, the kind of waily wheeze someone produces when they pick up a mouth-organ for the first time.

The school rose uncertainly to its feet, all save Jo Wood, Richard Fawcett and I, who were under the pew, biting hassocks and weeping with joy.

Further stabs of delight assailed us when we saw, during sermons and lessons, Holman furtively lifting the lectern and trying to make adjustments, looking for all the world like the form’s bad boy peeping at a porn-mag in his desk.

A few weeks later the school had the excitement to look forward to of a Day Off. The kingdom was to celebrate the excitements of the Silver Wedding of the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh and had declared a Monday Bank Holiday in its patriotic fervour. Jo Wood and I had even more to look forward to, for Geoff Frowde had given us permission to go to London.

I had a meeting of the Sherlock Holmes Society to attend, and had invited Jo to come along as my guest.

For many years now I had been a member of this harmlessly dotty sodality. I had been the youngest member for a long while, though by now some snot-nosed little creep had limbo-danced under me to that distinction. The organisation was run by eccentric men like Lord Gore-Booth, the President, who dressed up as Holmes every year when the Society went to Switzerland to re-enact that final, fateful tussle between Moriarty and Holmes by the Reichenbach Falls. Gore-Booth’s wonderful daughter Celia who died way before her time, (I think she was his daughter, not niece) I got to know many years later when she was one of the many remarkable actors in the troupe known, slightly embarrassingly, as Théâtre de Complicité.

Another leading light was the editor of the Journal, the Marquess, or possibly Marquis (I have no Debrett’s to hand, I fear) of Donegal. The Journal ran fierce articles on hot Holmesian topics and ran a correspondence page calling itself ‘The Egg Spoon’, in honour of the item of cutlery that Watson wagged petulantly at Holmes one breakfast very early in their relationship, Watson using the splendid phrase, if I remember rightly, ‘Ineffable twaddle!’ to describe an article he was reading, which turned out of course, to have been written by Holmes himself.

The usual meeting room was the old Royal Commonwealth Club in Villiers Street, off the Strand (deemed propitious I suppose, since Holmes made his first appearance in The Strand Magazine).

Anyhoo, as Ned Ryerson likes to say in Groundhog Day, Frowde had consented to our attendance of a Saturday evening meeting of the Society. We had booked hotel rooms for ourselves in Russell Square and were due to return on Monday afternoon, which gave us almost three days of London.

Only it didn’t, because we had rushes of blood to the head and went to the cinema and watched A Clockwork Orange, The Godfather and Cabaret, over and over and over and over and over again for four days in a row. Hell of a year for cinema, 1972. All the films were X-certificate of course, but both Jo and I looked as if we just might pass as eighteen.

I don’t know what it was that possessed us. It was as if we were gripped by some uncontrollable force. We simply could not move away from those films. I think we took in Fritz the Cat four or five times as well, but it was that trio that slammed us amidships like three gigantic icebergs. We could hardly have chosen better, I will say that for ourselves.

I don’t know if our respective parents thought the other child was to blame, or constituted a Bad Influence on the other (I’m not sure my parents ever quite got the point of Jo) but I think we would both agree that it was a simple case of compulsion. If either had left to go back to school, the other would probably have stayed. We were completely mesmerised by an utterly new world and all its possibilities. Art had gripped me, poetry, music, comedy, cricket and love had gripped me and have me in their grip still, but cinema. Films have a peculiar power all their own. Maybe we had found a rock and roll for ourselves, something that was neither solipsistic, tragic and sublime like music, nor egocentrically bullying like comedy. I can’t explain. Until that moment, I had been content and perfectly delighted to watch The Guns of Navarone and You Only Live Twice; now films suddenly seemed to have reached a puberty like mine and were the Real Thing. It was me, of course, not films that had really changed, though there is no doubt that it was a good crop and that there was something new about their style and their treatment of subject matter. As every scene of The Godfather unwound in front of my disbelieving eyes, from the wedding to the final famous closing of the door and the shot of the leather chair, Uppingham School looked smaller and smaller and smaller.

I think I even forgot about Matthew.

I remember feeling the desire to see the films with him, the need to show them to him, but while I was watching them, neck up, front row, over and over and over again, I forgot everything except the world of each film.

When we returned to Uppingham, still blinking at the light and at the dawning realisation of our madness, all was up. In my case the camel’s back had been snapped completely in two by this final straw and I was instantly expelled, not even given the chance to say goodbye to a single friend.

In Jo’s case, punishment came in the form of rustication until the end of term.

I shall never forget my father’s only words in the car as he, yet again, drove his infuriating, ungrateful, monstrous middle child home.

‘We will discuss this sorry business later.’

We did discuss it later, this sorry business, of course we did. One aspect, however that we never discussed, oddly enough, was the films. To my father, and I can see why, this was disobedience, rebellion, wildness, attention-seeking… all kinds of things. He saw the urge to self-destruct, but he did not choose to examine the weapon I had selected. I think that is a fair and a reasonable thing for anyone, but it is strange that we never spoke about the films.

One could argue that there was something in each of them that spoke directly to me.

In Cabaret there was homosexuality in the form both of divine decadence and of guilty, smothered English shame; there was guilty, smothered Jewish shame too; there was the tension and love between a stuffy Englishman unable to scream or express himself and the fantasising, romantic Sally Bowles, each equally doomed and equally in pain, each one half of me.

In A Clockwork Orange there was the bad, uncontrollable, rebellious, intolerable and intolerant adolescent, with his mad romping love of Beethoven (even Rossini got a look in too) and society’s need to constrain and emasculate him, to drive away both his devils and his angels and stop him from being himself.

In The Godfather there was… hell, this is pointless, there is everything in The Godfather.

Didn’t Woody Allen say that all literature was a footnote to Faust? Perhaps all adolescence is a dialogue between Faust and Christ. We tremble on the brink of selling that part of ourselves that is real, unique, angry, defiant and whole for the rewards of attainment, achievement, success and the golden prizes of integration and acceptance; but we also in our great creating imagination, rehearse the sacrifice we will make: the pain and terror we will take from others’ shoulders; our penetration into the lives and souls of our fellows; our submission and willingness to be rejected and despised for the sake of truth and love and, in the wilderness, our angry rebuttals of the hypocrisy, deception and compromise of a world which we see to be so false.

There is nothing so self-righteous nor so right as an adolescent imagination.