Moab is my Washpot

Breaking Out
1

THE REPLACEMENT FOR Uppingham that my parents chose was The Paston School in the Norfolk market town of North Walsham. A direct grant grammar school (there had been some point to that Eleven Plus after all, it seemed) its greatest claim to fame was its old boy, the ‘Norfolk Hero’ as he is known around these parts, Horatio Nelson.

Having been expelled from Uppingham (‘asked to leave’ is the proper expression) in November 1972 I naturally had to start at Paston in the Spring Term of 1973. The school, which was not accustomed to fifteen-year-olds in the Sixth Form, suggested that I retake all my O levels in the summer of 1974, when I would be sixteen, only then might it be appropriate to think about A levels.

Well I mean, what? The blow to my pride was immense; never had a pride been that so deserved a great blow, but that was not how I looked at it. On hearing this news, I instantly, before I had so much as crossed its threshold, detested and despised all things Pastoman.

By this time I think my parents were beginning to worry about any influence I might have on my sister, Jo. She turned eight years old about the time of my expulsion and had remained entirely devoted to me. Being a girl, it was not considered so necessary, according to the curious logic of these things, for her to board, so she attended Norwich High School for Girls, a private school which involved the snazziest green uniform you can imagine. Now that I was starting at The Paston, a day school too, Jo and I would breakfast together and spend evenings together every single day. My bus went from Cawston to North Walsham, Jo was enmeshed in a complex network of school runs with the parents of other girls around the Booton area, but essentially we were in the same boat now. Roger naturally stayed at Fircroft, where he was to go on to become a House Polly and then School Polly and Captain of House and I would see him only in the holidays.

Paston School lived up to all my prejudices, as things always will to the prejudiced. I did not take to the place one bit. I can remember barely anything about it, except that it was there that I started to smoke and there that I learned to play pinball: not within the school grounds, but within the town of North Walsham. For within a very short space of time I started to cut the school dead. I would get on the Cawston bus and dismount at either Aylsham or North Walsham and then head straight for a café and spend the day pinballing, listening to records by Slade, the Sweet, Wizzard and Suzi Quattro and smoking interminable Carlton Premiums, Number Sixes and Embassy Regals.

The Paston took this insolence for about a term and a half before suggesting to my parents that maybe I might be happier somewhere else.

I wish I could write more about the place, but I simply do not remember a thing. I drive through North Walsham sometimes, on my way to visit friends in the old wool town of Worsted, and I see the school but I wouldn’t be able to tell you what any of the buildings were used for. I suppose there were assembly halls, sports fields and all the rest of it, but the entire establishment is a vacuum in my mind. My whole being was concentrating entirely on Matthew Osborne and nothing else in the world existed.

I thought of writing to him, but could not begin to express my thoughts, or if I did, I did not dare to communicate them. So I did the next best thing and wrote poetry.

Once The Paston had dislodged me, my ever patient parents thought that perhaps what I needed was the more mature atmosphere of a Sixth Form College, a place where pupils were called students, lessons were called lectures, where smoking was not against the rules, where independence of mind and eccentricity were tolerated. The place available to me, which could take me on as a weekly boarder, was the Norfolk College of Arts and Technology in King’s Lynn, known as Norcat. I remember visiting the vice-principal, and my mother enquiring about Oxbridge entrance. The VP gave a kind of derisive snort and said that, looking at my record he really didn’t think that this was an option we need consider. I shall never forget the indignant flush that suffused my mother’s face, the closest to fury I had seen her come for a very long time.

I had the summer of 1973 to fill then, before starting on a two-year A level course of English, French and History of Art. I took a job at the Cawston Winery, a little plant that produced kits for home brewing and home wine-making. My job involved making cardboard boxes, millions of the bastards. The rest of the time however, was spent writing poems and starting novels. Always the same subject. The subject of most of The Liar and the subject of this book.

There was always a Me and there was always a Matthew. If I were to quote now extensively from any of these (I have just spent a very bloody seven hours going though them) it would hurt you, dear reader, and me, too much.

Most of the shorter poems have angry, pompous teenage titles like ‘Song of Dissonance and Expedience’ and ‘Open Order: A Redress’, a punning title this, which will only make sense if you’ve ever drilled in the CCF or armed services.

This was too the summer in which I wrote these words.

To Myself: Not To Be Read Until I Am

Twenty-Five

I know what you will think when you read this. You will be embarrassed. You will scoff and sneer. Well I tell you now that everything I feel now, everything I am now is truer and better than anything I shall ever be. Ever. This is me now, the real me. Every day that I grow away from the me that is writing this now is a betrayal and a defeat. I expect you will screw this up into a ball with sophisticated disgust, or at best with tolerant amusement but deep down you will know, you will know that you are smothering what you really, really were. This is the age when I truly am. From now on my life will be behind me. I tell you now, THIS IS TRUE – truer than anything else I will ever write, feel or know. WHAT I AM NOW

IS ME, WHAT I WILL BE IS A LIE.

I can dimly, just dimly, recall writing it. A whole condition of mind swims back into me every time I look at it, and swam back all the more strongly when I typed it out for you just now. I won’t go so far as to call it a Proustian petite madeleine, one of those epiphanic memory revivifiers, for the memory has always been there, but it still has the power to create a feeling like hot lead leaking into my stomach, a feel-good pain that was both the dreaded demon and the welcome companion of my adolescence. It was a strange piece of writing to happen upon as I did recently, going through all my old papers, writings, poems and scrapbooks, and it’s a strange thing to look at now. What would you think if you read such a message to yourself?

The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there. The Go-Between, the novel whose celebrated opening words those are, has long been a favourite of mine. Actually, they were filming Harold Pinter’s adaptation of it in Norfolk round about the time I wrote that letter to myself. I had read the book and bicycled off to Melton Constable to see if they needed extras. They didn’t, of course.

I knew that the past was a foreign country, and knew too that it followed logically that the future must be abroad; in other words I knew that it was my destiny to become a foreigner, a stranger to myself. I was passionately patriotic about my own age, a fierce believer in the rightness and justness of adolescence, the clarity of its vision, the unfathomable depths and insurmountable heights of its despair and its joy. The colours that shone and vibrated so strongly though its eyes were the true colours of life, this I knew. Because I had read a great deal I knew as well that one day I would see things in different colours, take up citizenship in a different country, the country of the adult, and I hated my future self because of it. I wanted to stay behind in adolescence and fight for its rights and I knew that the moment I left it I would care only for the rights of my new age, my adulthood with all its falsities and failures.

In those days loyalty to youth usually meant loyalty to ideas, political ideas chiefly. Ageing was seen as compromise and hypocrisy because it seemed inevitably to entail a selling out of ideals, environmental ideals now, but political then. For me, however, all this meant nothing. I was not even remotely interested in politics, the environment, the bomb or the poverty of the Third World. Only one thing counted for me then, Matthew, Matthew, Matthew, and I suspected, quite rightly, that one day love would count for less. I did not suspect, however, that one further, finer day far, far forward, love would come round to counting for everything again. A lot of salt water was to flow down the bridge, the bent bridge of my nose, before that day would come.

I had fully determined, you see, to Do My Best at Norcat, and I believed that this would involve a number of fundamental alterations to my nature. I believed it meant I must subdue my sexuality and become heterosexual. I believed it meant I must bury all thoughts of Matthew and convince myself they were part of ‘a phase’ one of those ‘intense schoolboy friendships’ that you ‘grow out of’ and I believed it meant that I would get my head down and work.

My writings then, were an attempt at expulsion, catharsis, exorcism, call it what you will. They were a farewell. I knew, or thought I knew, that I was about to betray my former self and plunge into a world of good behaviour, of diligently completed homework, punctual attendance and female dating. A tangle of briar might as well persuade itself that tomorrow it will become a neat line of tulips, but I had thought it was my destiny. At the same time I knew, absolutely knew that there was some quality in me, foul, ungovernable, unmanageable and unendurable as I was, that was right. The perception of nature, the depth of emotion, the brightness and intensity of every moment, I knew these faded with age and I hated myself in advance for that. I wanted to live on the same quick Keatsian pulse for all time. Perhaps Pope was right to suggest that a little learning is a dangerous thing, for it may be that had I read much, but I had not read all: I had read enough to connect my experience with that of others, but I had not read enough to trust the experience of others. So when, for example, Robin Maugham in his autobiography Escape From the Shadows wrote of his schoolboy loves and passions and his hatred for his father and his relationship with his famous uncle and his desperation to find a role for himself in an alien world, I connected with that, but when Maugham reached his twenties, became a writer of sorts, fought in tanks in the desert war, and then looked back at the ‘Shadows’ from which he had gratefully escaped, I thought him a traitor. He should have stayed and fought, not just in England, but in the republic of adolescence. He should not have committed the crime of growing up. I prefigured in my mind my future self being just so treacherous and it appalled me and angered me.

The only ‘work’ and I use the word ill-advisedly, which I can give you a few lines from is an epic poem I began that summer, an epic in which I grandly decided to ape the structure and ironic style of Byron’s masterpiece Don Juan, which involved grappling with the complexities of ottava nina which, as you shall see, is a verse form which I did not do any justice at all. It suited Byron well, but then Byron was Byron; Auden excelled at it, but then Auden mastered all verse forms. I… well, I floundered.

The Untitled Epic (that, I grieve to confess, is its title) which I have just reread completely for the first time since writing it, much to my great embarrassment, seems to be much more directly autobiographical than I had remembered it to be. The scene I will inflict on you is the poetic version I attempted of that red-headed Derwent’s ravishing of me. I call him Richard Jones in this instance and make him House-captain. As Isherwood was to do in Christ op her And His Kind I refer to myself in this epic as ‘Fry’, ‘Stephen’ and occasionally, like Byron, ‘our hero.

We are at verse fifty something by now, I had planned twelve Cantos, each of a hundred verses. Richard Jones has sent Fry down to his study ostensibly to punish him for being in bed late. Fry waits outside the door in his dressing-gown and pyjamas, hoping he isn’t going to be beaten too badly. I apologise for the completely show-offy and senseless semi-quotations from everything from Anthony and Cleopatra to The Burial Of Sir John Moore at Corunna. The painful polysyllabalism of some line-endings was in deference to Byron’s much more successful comic use of hudibrastic rhyming. I was fifteen, it’s my only excuse.

But Richard Jones, it appears, is not going to inflict punishment. He tells our hero to calm down. This is going to be a brotherly chat.

There follows a bit of coffee spilling business which means they have to share the same chair. Richard gives Stephen a cigarette, which makes him choke and splutter and go dizzy…

I will excuse you the pain of the actual scene, but there follows what we might call an Act of Carnal Violation, ruthlessly enacted by Jones on Fry, who is deeply hurt by the experience.

I have to confess that it upsets me that extract (literary shame aside): upsets me because it seems to indicate that I had been more devastated by my deflowering at the hands (hands? – hardly the right word) of Derwent than I had supposed. There again, reading further on, I think it possible that dramatic and poetic licence were laying the ground for more tender, lyrical scenes that follow with the arrival of the Matthew of the poem. The Don Juan form and tone, although unrealised and clumsily done was probably the right choice, for Byron depends hugely on undercutting emotion and lyricism with bathos, polysyllabic rhyming and ironic juxtapositions of the grandiose with the banal. Since for me Matthew was a literal and living ideal, this comic style stopped me from descending into too much self-pity and idealising what was to my mind already ideal, lyricising what was already lyrical and poeticising what was already poetic: it allowed me some kind of objectivity. The odd thing, and I suppose I ought to be ashamed to admit it, is that I am not sure that I could now write anything close to those verses, doggerel as they are. I wouldn’t try, of course, my embarrassment glands would explode. Which is precisely what my fifteen-year-old self dreaded and predicted would become of me.

Whatever the literary defects of the poem it serves now to remind me just how completely my mind, soul and being had stayed behind at Uppingham, not just during that summer following my expulsion from Fircroft and then from The Paston School, but later on too. For I retyped and amended this poem a year afterwards (changing Stephen to David throughout) and continued to work on it until I was eighteen.

My only contact with Uppingham was with Jo Wood, who proved an amusing correspondent. I had, at one point towards the end, blurted out to him my passion for Matthew. I think I had been desperate to show someone, anyone, a section of a team photograph I had managed to steal, cutting Matthew’s face into an oval and clamping it into my wallet like a schoolgirl’s pressed flower. Jo had grunted sympathetically, he had never been attracted in a boyward direction, but he was good-hearted and perceptive enough to glimpse the sincerity of my passion behind the loose, self-indulgent wank of my rhetoric. Jo’s return to Uppingham had gone serenely and he was heading towards A levels and Cambridge, continuing, as always to read and read and read. Occasionally in his letters he would slip Matthew’s name into some piece of news, carefully and without emphasis: I wonder if he knew that just the sight of the name written out still made my heart leap within me?

My first year at Norcat was spent in digs, with an elderly couple called (you’ll have to take my word for it) Croote. Mr and Mrs Croote ‘took in’ students once a year. There was one bedroom with two beds. I shared with a boy called Ian from Kelling, near Holt, whose passion was motorcycles. Just as I was drifting off to sleep he would awaken me with an excited cry of ‘Kawa 750!’ as a distant engine note drifted through the night.

Mrs Croote had three passions: the strings of Mantovani, her Chihuahua, Pepe, and natural history programmes. Each night that Mantovani’s orchestra appeared (they had a regular BBCZ slot at this time) she would tell me solemnly that every member of his orchestra was good enough to be a concert soloist in his own right and I would say, ‘Gosh,’ and nudge Ian, who would say ‘Golly!’ and I would add, ‘Goes to show,’ and Ian would say, ‘It does, doesn’t it?’ and Mrs Croote would be satisfied. When a wildlife programme was on we would wait with baited breath until the moment Mrs Croote would turn to us and say, at the sight of a dung beetle rolling dung up-hill, a lemur feeding its young or an orchid attracting a fly, ‘Isn’t nature wonderful, though?’ We would nod vigorously and she would say, ‘No, but isn’t it, though?’

I never quite understood the ‘though’. It is hard to parse. I suppose it serves the office of what the Germans call a flick word. It does something to the sentence, but it is hard to tell precisely what. I do know that Mrs Croote could no more say, ‘Isn’t nature wonderful?’ without adding a ‘though’ on the end than Tony Blair, bless him, could reply to a journalistic question without prefacing his answer with the word ‘Look’.

Mr Croote’s twin passions were a bright red Robin Reliant and the King’s Lynn Speedway team, which allowed him and Ian to talk about motorcycles a great deal, while I made appreciative noises about Mrs Croote’s cooking, which was unspeakable.

Norcat itself hovered between the status of school and university very successfully. They had good teaching staff in the English, French and History of Art departments, but as well as A level courses they offered a large number of ‘sandwich courses’ and ‘day release’ courses for those learning trades in catering and engineering and so forth. The social mix was something I had never encountered before. I found there to be no difficulty with the differences of background, I was accepted by everyone there without any of the inverted snobbery I had dreaded.

The place was also, it must be pointed out, full of girls. Two girls, Judith and Gillian, I made friends with very quickly. Judith adored Gilbert O’Sullivan and wanted to be a novelist: she had already created a Danielle Steele, Jackie Collins type heroine called Castella, and would give us excerpts of work in progress. Together we pooled resources to buy Terry Jacks’s ‘Seasons in the Sun’ which one-off single smote us both deeply. I think Judith might have suspected my sexuality, for she was the kind of naturally simpatica, thickly red-haired girl who makes a natural confidante for gay men. Gillian, on the other hand, for a short time became a girlfriend of mine, and there were disco moments of ensnogglement and bra-fumbling which came to very little.

It was in King’s Lynn that I swam into the orbit of a most extraordinary circle of intellectuals who met regularly in the bar of a small hotel and discussed avidly the works of Frederick Rolfe, the infamous Baron Corvo. The very fact that I had heard of him made me welcome in the circle. These men and women, who were led by a bespectacled fellow called Chris and a glamorously half-French Baron called Paul, held regular Paradox Parties. Instead of a password or a bottle, the only way to gain entry to such a party was to offer at the door a completely original paradox. Paul, whose father was the French honorary consul (for King’s Lynn is a port), could play the piano excellently, specialising in outré composers like Alkan and Sorabji, although he was also capable of delighting me with Wolf and Schubert Lieder. He was planning, like Corvo, to become a Roman priest. Also like Corvo, he failed in his attempt, unlike Corvo however he did not descend into bitterness and resentment but became finally an Anglican priest, which suited him better, despite his ancestry. He died unpleasantly many years later in his London parish. This group regularly produced a magazine called The Failiure Press (the spelling is deliberate) to which I contributed a regular crossword. A deal of The Failiure Press was written in the New Model Alphabet, which would take up far too much space for me to explain, but which nearly always looked like this ‘phaij phajboo ajbo jjjbo’ and took a great deal of deciphering to the initiated. The rest was filled with Corvine material (relating to the works of Corvo) and latterly, after I had long since moved on, it plunged into a weird libertarian frenzy of polemical anti-Semitism, gall and bitterness: the title had ever been a hostage to fortune or self-fulfilling prophecy. In its early days it was light-hearted, occasionally amusing, and always self-consciously intellectual. In a town like King’s Lynn, such spirits were rare and it was amongst this group that I found my temporary best friend, and indeed first and only real girlfriend, whom I will call Kathleen Waters, to spare blushes all round.

Kathleen was in many of the same lecture sets as I, and she had the advantage of having her parents’ house just across the road from college. We would spend a lot of time there, playing records and talking. She had entered the phase of smoking Sobranie cigarettes, using green and black nail polish, wearing fringey silks and delighting in that strange mixture of the Bloomsbury and the pre-Raphaelite which characterises a certain kind of girl with artistic temperament and nowhere to put it. For my sixteenth birthday she gave me a beautiful green and gold 1945 edition of Oscar Wilde’s Intentions, which I have to this day, and a damned good fuck, the memory of which is also with me still.

We were up in her room, listening to Don Maclean’s American Pie, as one did in those days, marvelling at the poetry of ‘Vincent’ and how it spoke us, when she remarked that it was odd that we had never screwed. I had told her early on that I was probably homosexual, but she did not see this as any kind of impediment at all.

It was a perfectly satisfactory experience. It was not as I had imagined from that horribly misogynistic scene in Ken Russell’s The Music Lovers which seemed to suggest that because Tchaikovsky was attracted to men he must also have vomited at the touch of women. I could not, afterwards, deny that the design features of the vagina, so far as texture and enclosing elasticity were concerned, seemed absolutely made for the job – ideally suited in fact. We remained friends and tried it again once or twice, in a field and in a car. My heart was never in it, but my loins were very grateful indeed for the outing and the exercise.

The summer after my first year at Lynn I earned enough as a barman at the Castle Hotel (sixteen years old, but what the hell, they didn’t ask questions in those days) to buy a Raleigh Ultramatic Moped, which I now used to shuttle me the weekly thirty-something miles between Booton and King’s Lynn. For my second year I bade farewell to the Crootes, Pepe and Mantovani and took up accommodation in a hostel in college. I had two very good friends there, Philip Sutton and Dale Martin, both highly entertaining, charming, funny and resourceful. I must confess too that Dale was almost my first betrayal of Matthew for I found him terrifically cute. He looked like a seventeen-year-old Brad Pitt, which surely no one will deny is a wholly acceptable appearance to present. Matthew still burned a hole in my heart, but Dale was most comely to look upon. We lived on the top floor of the hostel which had a kitchenette, and Phil and Dale patiently taught me over many weeks how to fry eggs and heat up baked beans, a skill I retain to this day to the sick envy and admiration of my friends.

Both Phil and Dale were Norfolk down to their socks, but again they forgave me my background and treated me as one of them. Our idea of a really, really, really good time was to spend hour upon hour in a back parlour of The Woolpack, the pub next door to the college, playing three-card brag for money. Not huge sums, but enough to annoy us if we kept losing. I wasn’t in the least interested in alcohol and usually drank long pints of bitter lemon and orange juice, a St Clements I think the drink is called. I discovered that I absolutely loved the company of completely heterosexual men, where the conversation ranged endlessly between sport, jokes, pop-music and the card game. There was a reluctance to talk openly of women, not out of shyness but I think out of the same graceful good manners that is more stuffily enshrined amongst the smarter classes in all those College sconcing rules and admonitions never to ‘bandy a woman’s name’. Phil and Dale got me a job at Christmas as a waiter at the Hotel de Paris in Cromer. In a week I earned a hundred pounds, and by Christ I earned it. I think I must have walked two hundred miles between kitchen and restaurant, silver-serving from breakfast to late, late, dinner. The money was spent on cannabis, cigarettes and still (I blush to confess) sweets.

I had been elected in my second year at Norcat on to the committee of the Student’s Union. I came upon this clipping the other day which I had proudly cut from the pages of the Lynn News amp; Advertiser.

" West Norfolk not to ban ‘Exorcist’

Members of the environmental health committee of West Norfolk District Council exercised their powers as film censors for the first time on Wednesday.

They watched the controversial film “The Exorcist,” and then approved it.

The committee members attended a private showing of the two-hour film at the Majestic Cinema, King’s Lynn, to decide whether they were prepared to accept the recommended certification of the British Board of Film Censors.

COMPLAINTS

At a committee meeting afterwards the committee agreed that the film which has an X certificate, could be shown in West Norfolk.

Since April the committee has had the power to prevent cinema licensees from showing a film. “The Exorcist” was the first film they had viewed and they did so after receiving three complaints about it.

Three co-opted members of the committee also saw the film – Canon Denis Rutt, vicar of St Margaret’s Church, Dr M. D. O’Brien, a Consultant Psychiatrist at Lynn Hospital, and Stephen Fry, representing the Student’s Union.

Canon Rutt said he saw no reason why the film should be banned on ethical grounds.

Dr O’Brien said: “It is a film which would worry susceptible people – but you cannot protect the susceptible. A proportion of hysterical girls will faint and be carried out but it will not kill them. Presumably they want the thrill of being frightened and I would not regard this as serious.

Mr Fry said: “Far from being disturbing, it made me more appreciative of goodness, I am not in favour of even considering banning it.”

But committee chairman Mr H. K. Rose who did not vote, disagreed with their views. “I would have thought it was very offensive to the good taste of many people, I was horrified, but I am obviously in the minority.

CRITERIA

“If we approve of a film like this I see no point in having any censorship at all. If people are titillated it makes them go and see something to see if we are right or wrong,” Mr Rose said.

Canon Rutt commented: “This whole operation is giving the film the wrong sort of publicity.”

The committee’s decision is based on the question of whether the film is offensive, is against good taste and decency and whether it could lead to crime or disorder.

With its X certificate the film can only be seen by adults."

Still a self-righteous little prig. I must have been jeeyust seventeen when I was co-opted on to this committee. Why they felt a seventeen-year-old would make a good judge of a film which was legally available only to those aged eighteen and upwards, I have no idea. My role on the Students’ Union was Officer in charge of Films. This was in the days before video cassettes and it was my job to order reels of film from Rank and show them in the assembly hall of the college. I suppose that’s why I was chosen to represent the students for the Great Exorcist Debate. I remember the screening well. I had already managed to see the film twice before in London, so it hardly came as a surprise. The expression on Councillor H. K. Rose’s face when the possessed child played by Linda Blair growled to the priest in a voice like a cappuccino machine running dry, ‘Your mother sucks cocks in hell, Karras,’ was wonderful to behold. His hand was still shaking as he dunked ginger nuts into his coffee in the committee room for the discussion afterwards, poor old buster. What he would have made of Crash or Reservoir Dogs one can only guess at…

At this time at King’s Lynn I began to dress, in accordance with the latest vogue, in suits with very baggy trousers, their cut inspired by the Robert Redford version of The Great Gatsby which had just been released. I wore stiff detachable collars and silk ties, well-polished shoes and, occasionally, a hat of some description. I must have looked like a cross between James Caan in The Godfather and a poovey Chelsea sipper of crème de menthe and snapper up of unconsidered rent.

Drama was taken care of at Norcat by a talented enthusiast called Robert Pols. He cast me as Lysander in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Creon m a double bill of Sophocles’ Oedipus and Antigone. Somewhere inside of me, I was still certain that I was going to be an actor. My mother used to explain to me that really I wanted to be a barrister, which, as she pointed out, is much the same thing and I had played along with this idea. In my heart of hearts however, and in hers too I suspect, it was acting that mattered. My writing I considered infinitely more important, but so private as to be impossible to show or publish. I thought that acting was simple showing off and that writing was a private basin in which one could wash one’s sins away.

It is strange that although I spent two whole academic years at Norcat my memories of it are so much more vague than my memories of Uppingham at which I spent only a month or so longer.

By that second year at King’s Lynn I reached a terrible low. I was seventeen now, no longer anything like the youngest in my class, no longer the fast stream clever boy, no longer the complex but amusing rogue, no longer the sly yet fascinating villain, no longer in some people’s eyes excusable through adolescence. Seventeen is as good as grown up.

Everything and everyone I cared about was growing away from me. Jo Wood was bound for Cambridge, Matthew would be trying for there the following year. Richard Fawcett was going up to St Andrews, my brother was going to an officer's training course in the Army. I was a failure and I knew it.

Some argument with my father in the holidays between the fifth and sixth and final terms at Norcat resulted in an attempt at suicide. I cannot recall the reason for the argument, but I determined absolutely that it was the end of everything. I had nothing to get up for in the morning, nothing at all. Besides, what pleasure, what exquisite, shivering delight, to picture my father’s devastation when my body was discovered and he and everyone would know that it was his fault.

I took a huge selection of pills, principally Paracetamol but also Intal. Intal was an encapsulated powder that was supposed to be ‘spinhaled’ into the lungs to help prevent asthma. I reckoned the devastating admixture of those two, with a little aspirin and codeine thrown in, would do the job. I can’t remember if I wrote a note or not, knowing me I must have done, a note filled with hatred and blame and self-righteous misery.

If ever I have been a total prick, a loveless, unlovable prick in my life, this was the time. I was horrid to look upon, to listen to, to know. I didn’t wash, I didn’t take interest in others, I was argumentative with the two people who were most unconditionally prepared to show me their love – my mother and my sister, crushing their every enthusiasm with cynicism, arrogance and pride; I was rude and insulting to my brother, to everyone around me. I was the cunt of the world, filled with self-loathing and world-loathing.

I missed Matthew, I wanted him and I knew he had gone. He had literally gone, that was the Pelion on Ossa, madness on madness that tipped me over the edge. My Matthew had disappeared, Matteo was no more.

I saw a photograph of him in a school magazine in Roger’s bedroom. Matthew’s face in a cricket photograph, a hockey photograph and a photograph taken from the school play. Three pieces of evidence to prove irrefutably that he had gone. The features had coarsened, he had grown in height and build and stockiness. He was now descending from the peak which, while I had known him he had always still miraculously been making towards. Maybe that late afternoon in the field outside the Middle, in his cricket whites, rolling and panting and fiercely jerking with me. Maybe that had been the summit. For us both.

Now the only Matthew who really existed, existed in my mind. Which left me nothing, nothing but a burst wound of bitterness, disappointment and hatred and a deep, deep sickness with myself and the world.

Any argument on any subject with my father, therefore, could have caused me to make this geste fou. Anything from a refusal on my part to pump up the water when it was my turn, to a solemn talk about ‘attitude’.

Choking with dry tears and raging, raging, raging at the absolute indifference of nature and the world to the death of love, the death of hope and the death of beauty, I remember sitting on the end of my bed, collecting these pills and capsules together and wondering why, why when I felt I had so much to offer, so much love, such outpourings of love and energy to spend on the world, I was incapable of being offered love, giving it or summoning the energy with which I knew I could transform myself and everything around me.

‘If they only knew!’ I screamed inside. ‘If they only knew what I have within me. How much I can pour out, how much I have to say, how much I have inside. If they only knew!’

I used many times to touch my own chest and feel, under its asthmatic quiver, the engine of the heart and lungs and blood and feel amazed at what I sensed was the enormity of the power I possessed. Not magical power, not all that Carrie teenage telekinetic wank, but real power. The power simply to go on, the power to endure, that is power enough, but I felt I had also the power to create, to add, to delight, to amaze and to transform. Yet I was unwanted, rejected and unthought of. My mother, yes, she believed in me, but everybody’s mother believes in them. No one else believed in me.

Principally of course – oh how one sees that now -myself. Principally, I did not believe in me. I believed m ghosts more than I believed in me, and take my word for it, I never believed in ghosts, I’m far too spiritual and emotional and passionate to believe in the supernatural.

I did have a friend. One friend. He was the local rector: he looked, oddly enough, exactly like Karras in The Exorcist, but his own life was so emotionally difficult and his own struggles with faith, family and identity so intense that it was, in his case, a question of Physician, heal thyself. He did me good by asking me to teach his daughters maths, which was psychologically smart and very touching. He knew maths had come hard for me and he knew too that there was a teacher in me raging to get out. He nearly tipped me (certainly not by trying to, he was no evangelist) into religion and I had made a quiet visit to the Bishop of Lynn, God’s representative in Norfolk of a mysterious body called ACM, the church’s vocational testing instrument, which accepted or declined applicants for ordination. We talked awhile, this Bishop, Aubrey Aitken, and I and he had given it as his booming opinion that I should wait awhile until God’s Grace became clearer to me. He boomed because he had no larynx and spoke by means of one of those boxes that Jack Hawkins was forced to use towards the end of his life. The ceremony of ‘switching the Bishop on’ when Aitken came to preach was an accepted addition to local services within the diocese.

The Bishop was right of course, I had no vocation at all, merely the kind of vanity of a Henry Crawford in Mansfield Park, the vanity that made me think I would make a better preacher, a more stylish preacher than the kind of soggy, incoherent priest that was beginning to proliferate all over England. I knew I couldn’t believe in God because I was fundamentally Hellenic in my outlook. That is the grand way of putting it, I was also absolutely convinced, if I want to put it more petulantly, that if there was a God his caprice, malice, arbitrariness and sheer lack of taste made him repulsive to me. There was a time when he had on his team people like Bach, Mozart, Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael, Laud, Donne, Herbert, Swift and Wren: now he had awful, drippy wet smacks with no style, no wit, no articulacy and no majesty. There was as much glory in the average Anglican priest as you would find in a British Home Stores cardigan. Of course what I didn’t know was that – looked at in the right way – there is as much glory in a British Homes Stores cardigan as can be found in St Peter’s, Rome, the Grand Canyon and the whole galaxy itself, but that is because I looked at nothing in the right way. When I had first caught sight of Matthew I saw the beauty in everything. Now I saw only ugliness and decay. All beauty was in the past.

Again and again I wrote in poems, in notes, on scraps of paper.

My whole life stretched out gloriously behind me.

If I wrote that sick phrase once, I wrote it fifty times. And believed it too. In a phase from Dirty Harry, I had been flopped lower than whaleshit. I was at the bottom with no way up. If Ronnie Rutter saw me now, what would he think? His school reports had been generous, but there had been a kernel of truth in that word, whatever my woes at Uppingham, that word he used, ‘exuberant’. Exuberance now was something gone from me for ever, something I could never recapture.

Which brings us back to the heap of pills and capsules and the glass of water. With one last vile and violent curse against the world, the world that had turned back into a rotting mole, an uncaring cycle of meaningless, wearisome repetition and decay, I swallowed them all, turned out the light and fell asleep.

I awoke in a flickering strip-lit world of whiteness and to a grotesque pain in my throat and cheeks. A tube was being forced down me, while a nurse slapped my cheeks and repeated and repeated and repeated:

‘Stephen! Stephen! Come on, Stephen! Come on. Stephen, Stephen! Stephen! Stephen! Come on now. Try! Come on. Come on. Stephen!’

It seems that at about midnight my brother had been awoken by the noise of my vomiting. When he entered the room he saw me arc a huge spray that he swears reached the ceiling. The ceiling in my bedroom was very high. I remember nothing of this, no ambulance rides, nothing. Nothing between switching out the bedside lamp and the sudden indignity of rebirth: the slaps, the brightness, the tubing, the speed, the urgent insistence that I be choked back into breathing life. I have felt so sorry for babies ever since.

It seems that the very mixture that I had thought would truly put an end to me was what saved me. I have given up puzzling over whether I subconsciously knew that or not. I am just grateful to the luck, the subliminal judgement (if there was any), the care of the gods, the sharp ears of my dear brother and the skill and ceaseless implacability of the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital nurses and doctors.

Little was said about it all at home. There was little to say. One of the men who worked for my father, who had worked for him since Chesham days, stopped me two days later and gave me the most vicious ticking off I had ever been given in my life. He was a frighteningly strong man called Tyler, who looked like a weather-beaten Malayan planter and whom I suspected of extreme right-wing politics (probably on account of his Mosley moustache): whether he thought he was doing psychologically the right thing or not I have no idea. The burden of his tirade was the worry that I caused my poor mother and my poor father. Had I any idea?

‘Did I make them unhappy?’ I asked.

‘Of course you did, you young bastard,’ he snapped.

‘Unhappy enough to end their own lives?’

‘No,’ he called after me as I fled, ‘because they’ve got more guts.’

I think my father may have guessed that love was at the root of this, for I remember him coming up to my room (for almost the first time in his life) and telling me some complicated story about how he had consulted a tarot reader who had said that I was unhappy in love. I believe this was his way of indirectly indicating that he was ready to listen to anything I had to say. I had nothing to say of course. Maybe I’ve made this memory up. Tarot and my father don’t seem to go together.

I can’t think what all the stampings and yellings and sobbings must have done for my poor sister Jo. We don’t talk often about this time, except with rueful smiles and raised eyebrows. How grateful my parents must have been when it was time for me to go back to Lynn for my last term, my A level term. Grateful that I was out of the way, for all that they knew it was a pointless exercise, my returning. They knew, they knew that I was all played out.

Between the three-card brag at The Woolpack, life and more pinball in the Students’ Union, the Paradox Parties, Kathleen and my own misery, I had given up any pretence of academic work. Towards the end of my second year it had become apparent to me and to everyone else that I would fail everything. I cannot recall my mental state, by ‘recall’ I mean just that, I cannot summon it up into me, the way I can so exactly feel again the earlier emotions that led up to the pitiful suicide attempt. I have memories of Kathleen and the Corvo set, I have memories of Phil and Dale and cards, I have memories of organising films to show for the Film Society. I have memories of trying to dance to Slade and Elton John at Union discos. I remember the unknown band Judas Priest coming to give a concert. I remember the little acting I did.

The greatest educational stimulation at this time, oddly, seemed to come from History of Art. I became obsessed in particular with architecture, the Greek orders, the Gothic orders, Michelangelo, and then the English House, the Gothic revival and the Victorians. My bible was Bannister Fletcher and my God was Inigo Jones. I am ashamed to say I cannot even remember what texts were set for English or for French. Hold up… for French it was Anouilh’s Antigone again. That’s it, I fear, that’s the sum of my memories of King’s Lynn in my second year there.

I sat the A levels – most of them, ducking out of the final papers of French and English. Fear of failure again:

‘Of course I failed! I didn’t even bloody turn up!’

And then, in the phoney period of awaiting results that we all knew would be disastrous, the stealing began again in greater earnest. My mother had been used to the raids on her handbag, God knows how she could bring herself to look at me sometimes, and I felt sick myself then, not as sick as I feel now, but sick all the same.

I was still stuck at home, knowing that by the end of August, my eighteenth birthday, I would be without A levels, without friends, without purpose, without anything but the prospect of a winding down into permanent failure and lost opportunity. I had started, in King’s Lynn, occasionally visiting the public lavatories, cottages as they are known in the gay world, and I saw a future for myself, at best, as an assistant librarian in a mouldy town somewhere, occasionally getting a blow job in a public bog. Arrested once or twice every four or five years and ending up with my head in an oven. Not so uncommon a fate in those days, or today. Life, that can shower you with so much splendour, is unremittingly cruel to those who have given up. Thank the gods there is such a thing as redemption, the redemption that comes in the form of other people the moment you are prepared to believe that they exist.

I remember an episode of Star Trek that ends with Jim turning to McCoy and saying, ‘Out there, Bones, someone is saying the three most beautiful words in the galaxy.’ I fully expected the nauseous obviousness of ‘I love you’. But Kirk turned to the screen, gazed at the stars and whispered:

‘Please, help me.’

Strange, the potency of cheap television.

I had no concept of such a thing as seeking help. I had successfully signed up on the dole, to the distressed resignation of my parents, and I headed, that July, with my Giro cheque to King’s Lynn. for one last Paradox Party, which would be followed by my meeting up with Jo Wood for a camping holiday in Devon.

When I next returned to Booton, it would be as a convicted felon.