Moab is my Washpot

2

One of the most shameful of many shameful acts that were to follow was the theft of pension money from the handbag of the grandmother of the young man who was hosting the Paradox Party. There are few crimes lower and nothing I write in this paragraph will mitigate, deaden or palliate the pain and fury it must have caused that family.

I caught a train to Devon, arranged some humiliating business to do with Giro cheque forwarding by telephone with my mother and wandered with Jo Wood around Chagford and other beauty spots until it was time for Jo to go home to Sutton Coldfield.

I accompanied him there. The next two months were to see me moving around the country searching for some element of my past that might give me a clue as to my future.

That is a very strange way to describe what happened.

A very strange way to describe it indeed.

But it is true, for over the next two months I found myself making my way towards Chesham, desperate to see a town again that I barely remembered, a town that I had not seen since I was seven years old, but which pulled me like a magnet. I went to Yorkshire and stayed with Richard Fawcett’s family. I went to Uley and saw Sister Pinder and the Angus girls and Cloud the pony, still alive, her grey milky belly now all but brushing the ground. I made my way to the Reading rock festival because I had heard a rumour that Matthew might be there. I knew Matthew wasn’t the same Matthew, the real Matthew, but I wanted to search for the traces and I wanted perhaps at last to tell him, to let it all go.

A less strange way to describe what happened is to report that I went about Britain stealing, stealing, stealing and stealing until the police caught up with me.

Jo’s place was in Sutton Coldfield where he lived with his mother, sister and two brothers. I stole some money from the hosts of a drinks party I had been invited along to and headed to Sheffield, where I stayed a while with Richard Fawcett and his parents. They were kind to me: Richard and I chatted and caught up with each other, but my feet were itching, the desire to return had gripped me, I wanted to go right back, right back to the beginning. I don’t believe that I stole from the Fawcetts, but maybe I did.

My next destination was Chesham and the Brookes and Popplewells. Amanda Brooke, Florence Nightingale yellow, lambswool V-neck and straight brunette cut had been my girlfriend when we were five and six. The Popplewells were a family of four boys, all of whom were horrifyingly good at cricket and everything else. At Christmas the Popplewells traditionally sent, instead of cards, general letters that delineated their sons’ enviable records of shining academic and athletic distinction – ‘Alexander has won a scholarship to Charterhouse, Andrew achieved Grade 7 in the viola, Nigel had a successful trial for Hampshire Seconds, Eddie-Jim’s prep-school composition “What I Did In The Holidays” has been short listed for the Booker Prize…‘ that kind of thing. Our family, in moments of rare collective ‘humour would wryly compose the equivalents that the Fry family might send: ‘Stephen has been expelled from his third school and continues to lie and steal. Jo has defiantly smeared mascara all over her ten-year old eyelashes and looks a mess, Roger’s CO describes him as too considerate and pleasant to make a successful career officer. The house temperature has now plummeted below anything an Eskimo would tolerate.’ We knew that the Popplewell Christmas Letter was never designed to crow or gloat, but its effect on us was none the less that of lemon on a paper-cut.

Margaret, to whom I owe an eternal debt of gratitude for presenting me with my first Wodehouse book, had been at school with my mother. Her husband Oliver, a team-member along with Peter May and Jim Prior of the Charterhouse XI immortalised by Simon Raven, won his Blue at Cambridge and then turned to the law. He kept in touch with the cricket establishment however and only last year completed a two-year term as President of the MCC: he now judges away full-time in the law courts. One of the greatest regrets of my life was to turn down his offer to put me up for MCC membership. I don’t know why I declined, a kind of embarrassment I suppose. Two years later I changed my mind but by then the waiting list had gone supernova and the opportunity was lost. Whether coaching me in cricket as a tiny tot along with his sons, or later as a skipper trying to teach me the rudiments of sailing, he always presented the image of a bluff, Hawk’s Club, won’t-put-up-with-any-of-this-intellectual-nonsense hearty, which belied a deep intelligence and very real sensitivity – as we shall see. The oldest son Nigel, closest in age to me, was also to become a Cambridge Blue, double Blue in fact, and went on to play for Somerset, in the cup-winning side that included Ian Botham, Joel Garner and Viv Richards. He too is now a lawyer.

My mother tells me that, aged five, I once returned from an afternoon in the Popplewell garden, bowling and batting and fielding and said to her, ‘Mummy, are you allowed to choose your husband?’

‘Why of course, darling.’

‘Do you mean you picked Daddy when you could have chosen Mr Popplewell!’ I exclaimed in outrage and disgust. For years the Popplewells symbolised to me everything that was successful, integrated and marked down by the gods for effortless achievement. What is more, they were impossible to dislike: they proved to me that it was feasible to conform and to excel without losing integrity, honour, charm or modesty. I had always believed that my father, with his irksomely onerous integrity and pathologically intense distaste for worldly rewards could have been like them if only he hadn’t escaped to the remote defensive fastness of rural Norfolk.

Maybe I believed that the failures I associated with Booton and with Uppingham could be wiped out by this return to Chesham. If I had not been taken from Chesham to Norfolk in the first place, I could have been a glowing success like the Brookes and the Popplewells, I would automatically have joined in. I would have grown up healthy, sensible, talented, law-abiding and decent, instead of being transformed into the mess of madnesses that I had become. I don’t know if that is what I thought, but the Brookes and Popplewells were immensely kind and welcoming, either swallowing the story that I was just holidaying around England before A level results and university or tactfully choosing not to probe. The Popplewells had two of the Australian test side staying with them, Ross Edwards and Ashley Mallet, whom I met in a lather of dripping excitement: cricket by now had entered my soul for keeps. Ashley Mallett told me something that I did not want to believe, something that troubled me deeply. He told me that professional cricket was ultimately hell, because the pain of losing a match was more intense than the joy of winning one. Edwards disagreed with him, but Mallett stuck fast to his belief. It was, I see now, simply a personal difference of outlook between the two of them, but to me it was fundamental. One of them must be right and the other must be wrong. Was the pain of failing a deeper feeling than the joy of success? If so, Robert Browning and Andrea del Sarto were wrong: a man’s reach exceeding his grasp did not justify heaven, it vindicated hell.

After a week or so of cheerful, tumbling, merriness in the Brooke household I left, brimming with charm and gratitude.

I took with me Patrick Brooke’s Diner’s Club card and the insanity really took hold.

In those days any credit card purchase under the value of fifty pounds was a simple matter of signature and a roller machine. There was no swiping and instant computer connection. I took some self-justifying comfort in the thought that as soon as the loss of the card was reported Mr Brooke’s account would not be debited, only that of Diner’s Club Inc. But what does that mean? I had stolen from a pensioner s handbag and from anyone who had money, I can’t claim that the smallest scrap of decency, altruism or respect lay behind any of my actions.

The next few weeks passed in a kind of cacophoric, if there is such a word, buzz – which is to say a state of joylessly euphoric wildness, what a psychiatrist would call the upswing of manic depression or bipolar cyclothymia or however they choose to designate it now. The functional opposite, in other words, of the listless misery that had caused me to scoop up a suicidal bowlful of pills a few months earlier. I know that I went to London and transferred my possessions, such as they were (books mostly) from my rolled up sleeping bag to a brand-new suitcase. I stayed for a while in the Imperial Hotel in Russell Square, applied for a job as a reader of talking books for the blind and made regular visits to the American Bar of the Ritz Hotel where I had become friends with the barman, Ron, whose passion was renaissance painting. He could remember P. G. Wodehouse sipping a cocktail in the corner, and F. Scott Fitzgerald leaping over the bar, drunk as a skunk, snatching up a bottle of whisky that he brandished like a woodman’s axe, all kinds of juicy and wondrous moments. But these were as nothing to Ron when compared to a Duccio or a Donatello. He would show me slides of Mantegnas and Correggios and of Masaccio and Giotto fresco cycles that he kept under the bar, light-box and all, and speak to me of the great book in his life, the greatest book about art ever written he told me, Reitlinger’s The Economics of Taste. He fed me free peanuts, olives and cornichons as he talked, enthused and displayed and I listened. I drank glasses of tomato juice and smoked Edward VII cigars in my new blue suit and felt for awhile, that this is where I belonged. The American Bar of the Ritz is now a casino club to which, strangely enough, I do belong. Sometimes Hugh Laurie and I will go in there and lose fifty pounds at the minimum stake blackjack table. I once went in with Peter Cook who was solemnly handed a pair of shoes to replace the white trainers he was wearing.

‘What,’ said Cook, ‘take off my lucky Reeboks! Are you mad?’ and we had gone to Crockford’s instead.

London palled however. A rather unsavoury man of fifty with a perpetual giggle had tried very hard to pick me up in a pinball arcade in Piccadilly and I had hated the experience, hated, that is, how close I had come to accepting his offer of accompanying him home. We had walked together towards a taxi rank in Regent Street and I suddenly ran off, streaking up Sherwood Street and deep into unknown Soho, convinced he was following me all the way and that every sex-shop owner was a friend who would lay hands on me and return me to him. He probably, poor soul, rattled home in the taxi in a fever of terror, quite as convinced that I had marched straight into West End Central and was even at that moment furnishing the police with a detailed description.

I decided that really my destiny lay in a visit to Uley. Maybe that is where I would find some kind of something, any kind of anything. A clue. An opportunity to lay an unknown ghost.

What I believed I was looking for I cannot say. I can only assert that, as in a novel, the locations with which this story climaxes are the same as the locations with which it begins. Life is sometimes novel-shaped, mocking the efforts of those authors who, in an effort to make their novels life-shaped, spurn the easy symmetry and cheap resonance of reality.

So I arrived in Uley and saw those members of staff who chose to remain there during the summer holidays, staying a few nights with Sister Pinder in her little cottage and drinking pints of beer in the pub with Paddy and Ian Scott-Clarke. There was nothing for me in Uley of course. They must have known that

I had been expelled from Uppingham and they must have wondered what I thought I was up to now. The crushing humiliation engendered by such unquestioningly, such unconditionally kind treatment sent me on the move again, this time towards the Cotswold villages of Bourton-on-the-Water and Moreton-in-the-Marsh.

It was in a Bed and Breakfast hotel in Moreton-in-the-Marsh that I happened upon my second piece of plastic; it lay snugly in the inside pocket of a casually hung jacket in the hallway, just sitting there for anyone, anyone like me, to steal. It was an Access card this time, much simpler to use, and with a signature that I could more easily reproduce than that of Patrick Brooke.

I had a suitcase, a suit I had bought in London, a few other clothes, some books and unlimited spending power. It was time now to head for the Reading Festival and the thrillingly shocking possibility of a meeting with Matthew.

My journey to Reading was broken in a town whose name I cannot even remember. I stayed overnight in as dreary a Post House Hotel as you have ever seen, even in your worst nightmare. Your worst nightmare, of course, is the precise inspiration for designers of this species of hotel. They steal your sleeping fears like a succubus and drop them down beside the ring-roads of dying towns.

It was only as I was finishing my dinner of steak and salad and beer in the dining room of this soulless assembly of melamine and artex that I realised that the date that day was the twenty-fourth of August 1975. My eighteenth birthday.

It was my eighteenth birthday. I had come of age here, in this place. I was eighteen years old. Not a fifteen-year-old discovering poetry, the beauty of algebra and the treachery and terror of growing up. Not a tormented fourteen-year-old whose life has exploded into love. Not a naughty twelve-year-old who broke school bounds to visit sweet shops. Not a grown up eight-year-old who put a new boy at his ease on a train. Not a funny little boy who cried when his mole was upstaged by a donkey and didn’t dare go into the Headmaster’s classroom because he was frightened of the big boys. Not a wicked little imp who pulled down his trousers and played rudies with a boy called Tim. An eighteen-year-old youth on the run. A somewhat less than juvenile delinquent. A petty thief who ruined people’s lives with theft, betrayal, cowardice and contempt. A man. A man wholly responsible for all his actions.

Alone in my room, I ordered a half bottle of whisky from room service and for the first time in my life I made myself completely drunk. Drunk in the most dismal, appalling and lonely conditions conceivable. A concrete and smoked glass travelling salesman’s shake-down, an apocalypse of orange cushions, brown curtains and elastic-cornered nylon sheets. Hardly had the whisky gone down my throat in heavily watered gulps than I added to the bathroom sink heave after heave of sour sick.

My sister told me later that this was the worst day, the very worst day of all at Booton, this day of my eighteenth birthday. My first ever birthday away from home and, at that, my eighteenth. My parents had no idea where I was or what I was doing. Since I had left the Brookes’ house they had had no news of me from anybody. I had been filed as a missing person, but they knew in this England of Johnny Go Home and fresh waves of missing teenagers reported every hour, they knew that they may as well not have bothered. When August the twenty-fourth came round however, when it was my birthday, my eighteenth birthday, so Jo tells me, my mother was inconsolable all day, weeping and sobbing like a lost child, which is, I am afraid, howl am weeping as I type this. I am weeping for the shame, for the loss, the cruelty, the madness and again the shame and the shame and the shame. Weeping too for mothers everywhere, yesterday, today and tomorrow, who sit alone on the day of their child’s birth not knowing where their beloved boy or their darling girl might be, who might be with them or what they might be doing. I am weeping too for grown-up children so lost to themselves and to hope that they squat in doorways, lie on beds, stare in stupors high or wired, or sit alone all eaten up with self-hate on their eighteenth birthday. I am weeping too for the death of adolescence, the death of childhood and the death of hope: there are never enough tears to mourn their passing.

The whisky had done its work with me, as whisky will. It blanked my mind enough to stop it wandering to the raspberry canes at Booton, banned it from conjuring a picture of Jo and Mother stripping clean the gooseberry bushes and denied me the image of the raw red hands of Mrs Riseborough rolling dough, stewing pears and shredding suet. Scenes from a childhood that I loathed and which sent me mad with longing, as did the tattered photograph of the loathed familial prison that still I carried with me everywhere I went – the oval loveliness of Matthew pasted on the obverse side. Without the numb wall of whisky between my head and my heart, all these would have buffeted me with such howling waves of grief that I and all the concrete foulness about me would split apart.

The following day this eighteen-year-old arose and took his headache and his suitcase and his credit cards to Reading. The Festival was too vast and frightening to penetrate, but there was a rumour of something happening on Salisbury Plain later, a rumour that Steeleye Span might be performing in the shadows of Stonehenge. If Matthew went anywhere he would go where Steeleye Span and Maddy Prior were.

I see from irrefutable documentary evidence that it was a full two weeks later before I arrived in Swindon on my way to Salisbury. It seems in my memory to have been only a day or so later, perhaps those two weeks were whiskied into one long stupor.

There was a grand looking hotel in Swindon, calling itself, I think, The Wiltshire, or the Wiltshire County. Four stars I counted on its marquee: four stars was no more than I expected as my due from life.

I checked in, that sunny morning of the ninth of September, well used to the procedure by now.

‘Edward Bridges,’ I said to the receptionist, ‘would you have a room for the night?’ Edward Bridges was, let us imagine, the name of the man whose Access card I had stolen: the real Edward Bridges, innocent victim as he was, does not need to have his name dragged into this sordid tale.

The usual procedure was gone through: the signing in, the flexible friend slapping into the bracket beneath the roller, the keys handed over with a beaming smile.

‘Charming,’ I said to the porter who came up with my suitcase, as I surveyed the room. ‘Quite charming.’ I slipped him fifty pence and laid down on the bed.

Tomorrow Stonehenge. Somehow I knew, because the god of love is capricious and insolent, that this time I would bump into Matthew there. A Matthew with sideburns no doubt, a Matthew thick with muscles, but Matthew none the less. I would probably get stoned with him and, at some propitiously giggling moment, let him know, in a bubble of hilarity that I had mooned after him this four years or more.

‘Crazy man, or what?’ I would drawl, and we would laugh and joke and laugh again.

Yes, that is how I would play it tomorrow.

I frowned as I crossed and uncrossed my feet.

Those shoes. Really, those shoes! The one little luxury I had not been able to obtain with all my stolen money and all my stolen credit was a decent pair of shoes. Being size twelve and half it had never been easy. Perhaps Swindon might provide where others had denied. One never knew. I hauled myself up to my feet, straightened my smart blue suit, winked to myself in the mirror and left the room.

‘There you go!’ I said in that silly, cheerful, English way as I dropped my key on the reception desk.

And would you believe it, the first thing I come across is a damned good shoe shop where they have, as if awaiting my arrival, a pair of thunderingly sound black semi-brogues in a perfect twelve and half? Excellent. Capital.

I walked up and down and inspected them in the angled mirror.

‘Do you know,’ I said, handing over my Access card, and casting a rueful glance at the cracked old pair that lay on the carpet looking for all the world as if they were waiting for Godot, ‘these fit so well I think I’ll wear them home!’

I passed a little jeweller’s shop next and the idea struck me that the wristwatch I wore was commonplace and ill-favoured.

The assistant was most helpful and showed me first a smart young Ingersoll, charming in its way but worth less than ten pounds.

‘Maybe you have something a little more stylish?’ I ventured. The little man dipped down below the counter to find a tray and I ran from the shop with the Ingersoll clutched to me.

A very satisfactory morning’s shopping, I thought to myself as I flew from the shopping centre, but trying on the nerves. Time now, I think, to return to the hotel for a spot of television and a plate of club sandwiches.

I picked up my key from the reception desk and bounced cheerfully up the stairs. I may be eighteen, I conceded, but that did not mean I was in need of electric lifts. There was spring in me yet.

I unlatched the door and was surprised to see that there was a man in my room.

‘It’s all right,’ I said as I entered. ‘If you can come back and clean later? I’ll leave the room free for you in about an hour.’

Another man appeared, stepping sideways out of the bathroom. Two men in my room. Both wearing grey suits.

‘Mr Bridges?’ said the first.

‘Yes.’

‘Mr Edward Bridges?’

‘That’s right…

God how stupid can a man be? It never for a minute crossed my mind, until they revealed themselves, that they were anything other than strangely dressed and gendered chambermaids.

‘We are police officers, sir. We have reason to believe that you may be using a stolen credit card, the property of a Mr Edward Bridges of Solihull.’

‘Ah,’ I said and smiled.

All at once a hundred thousand gallons of acid poison poured out of me and a hundred thousand pounds of lead fell from my shoulders.

‘Yes. Yes,’ I said. ‘I’m afraid that you are absolutely right.’

‘If you wouldn’t mind coming with us, sir? I am arresting you now and will shortly make a formal charge at the station.’

I was so happy, so blissfully, radiantly, wildly happy that if I could have sung I would have sung. If I could have danced I would have danced. I was free. At last I was free. I was going on a journey now where every decision would be taken for me, every thought would be thought for me and every day planned for me. I was going back to school.

I almost giggled at the excitement and televisual glamour of the handcuffs, one for my right wrist the other for the policeman’s left.

‘If you’ll just put your hand in my jacket pocket, sir, like so..

Of course, the hotel. The sight of a criminal youth being led away in handcuffs was no kind of happy advertisement for the Wiltshire Hotel, Swindon. Cuffed together then, each of us with a hand in his left pocket, the two of us, followed by the silent other who carried my suitcase, descended the stairs.

The two receptionists stood on tiptoe to watch me go. I gave them a small, sad, sweet smile as I left. And do you know what? One of them, the elder of the two, perhaps a mother herself, smiled back. One of warmest smiles I have ever been given.

I expected to be pushed into a waiting police car, but no, we walked on and soon I saw the reason why. Directly opposite the hotel doors, not thirty yards away, was a huge building with a blue sign.

WILTSHIRE CONSTABULARY

‘I hope I get special consideration,’ I said, ‘for being easy on the legwork.’

The policeman not attached to me smiled. I was smiling, everyone was smiling. It was a glorious day.

‘Special consideration for being such a prannett as to commit a crime within sight of a police station?’ said the policeman. ‘Special extra sentencing more like. We do like a challenge, you know.’

The most important consideration, the only consideration so far as I was concerned, was to keep my identity a secret. They could charge me as a John Doe, or whatever the British equivalent might be – not Fred Bloggs surely? – and I would be happy. But they must never find out my real name. There was no reason that they should, I argued. I had been travelling for some weeks now as Edward Bridges. How could they connect this non-person to Stephen Fry of Booton, Norfolk?

I sat in my little police cell and hummed a hum to myself. I imagined that once they had totted up all the depredations made on the Access card I would serve at least two years in prison. Two years in which I could do some serious writing, perhaps even apply to retake my A levels. I would emerge, newly qualified, write a postcard to my parents to let them know that everything was all right, and then start life again. Properly.

In the interview room, the same two officers, a detective constable and a detective sergeant, played that fiendish role game in which each of them adopts a different stance towards the accused. The version they played was Nice Cop and Even Nicer Cop, each competing with the other for the part of Even Nicer Cop. It is hard not to crumble under such a cunningly vicious approach.

‘I mean you’re a young lad, you’re well spoken,’ said Nice Cop.

Ah, that wonderful English euphemism, ‘well spoken’. I was well spoken, certainly, but not well spoken of.

‘You could only be the son of very understanding parents,’ said Even Nicer Cop. ‘They’ll be so worried.’

‘Maybe you’re on the missing child register,’ said Nice. ‘It would take us a bit of time, but we’d find out in the end.’

‘Try one of these,’ said Even Nicer, offering up a pack of Benson and Hedges. ‘Not quite so rough on the throat as those Embassys, I think you’ll find.’

‘It’s just that I’ve given my parents enough grief already,’ I said. ‘I’m eighteen now and I’d like to take responsibility for this on my own.

‘Now that,’ said Nice, ‘is very commendable. But let’s think it through for a moment. I reckon if you want to stop giving your parents grief, you’ll let us call them up straight away. That’s the way I see it.’

‘But you don’t know them!’ I said. ‘They’ll descend in a swoop with lawyers and things and I… I just couldn’t face it.’

‘Hey up, I reckon it’s time for a cup of tea,’ said Even Nicer. ‘Let me guess… white, two sugars? Am I right?’

‘Spot on. Thank you.’

Nice and I chewed the fat awhile.

‘See,’ said Nice. ‘If we don’t know your name it’s very hard for us to charge you. We know that you have dishonestly obtained a pecuniary advantage for yourself by using a stolen credit card, but for all we know, you are wanted for murder in Bedfordshire or rape in Yorkshire.’

‘Oh but I’m not!’

‘Technically,’ said Nice, ‘you have also been guilty of forgery. Every time you sign one of those credit card vouchers you forge a signature, isn’t that right?’

I nodded.

‘Well now you see, it’s more or less up to us. If we charge you for forgery, you’ll go to prison for at least five years.’

‘Five years!’

‘Woah, woah, woah… I said if. If, mind.’

I chewed my lower lip and pondered. There was a question that had been bugging me since my arrest. ‘I wonder if you mind me asking you something?’ I said.

‘Ask away, son.

‘Well, it’s just this. How did you find me?’

‘How did we find you?’

‘Yes. I mean, there you were in my hotel room. Was it the wristwatch, had you followed me from the jewellers?’

‘Wristwatch?’ Nice frowned and made a note.

Oops. They had known nothing about the Ingersoll.

‘What then?’

‘It was your shoes, son.

‘My shoes?’

‘When you checked into the hotel, the girl at reception, she noticed how your shoes were very tatty, see? “A tramp’s shoes” she called them. After you’d gone up to the room, she thinks to herself. “A young man like that, nice suit, but tatty shoes. Something not right, there.” So she calls up the credit card company and they tell her that the card you gave her when you checked in, that was a stolen card. So she rings us up, see? Simple really.’

‘And what was the first thing I went out and bought?’ I moaned, looking up at the ceiling like a rabbi at prayer. ‘A nice new pair of shoes.’

‘Smart girl. Always look at the shoes first,’ Nice said approvingly. ‘Didn’t Sherlock Holmes say that very thing once?’

The door opened and Even Nicer popped his head round, ‘Oh, Stephen, one thing I forgot to ask…’

‘Yes?’

‘Ah,’ said Even Nicer. ‘Aha! so it is Stephen, then? Stephen Fry.’

What a pratt, I mean, what a gibbon. Not since Gordon Jackson replied to the German guard’s English ‘Good luck’ with an instant ‘Thank you!’ as he and Dickie Attenborough climbed aboard the bus to freedom in The Great Escape has anyone been so irretrievably, unforgivably, slappably, dumb.

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘That was a bit silly of me, wasn’t it?’

‘Well frankly, Stephen, yes it was,’ said Even Nicer.

‘Stephen Fry was the name on three of the books in your suitcase, see.

‘But,’ said Nice, ‘knowing your name does make our lives easier and when our lives are easier, your life is easier.

I was on the register of missing children, having been placed there weeks before my eighteenth birthday so within minutes my parents had been telephoned. Within minutes of that I had myself a brief, as we lags call them. My godmother and her husband lived near Abingdon, and he was a lawyer. My parents acted swiftly.

The first night was spent in the police cells. I was in a fever of worry about seeing my parents in the magistrate’s court the next morning. I didn’t want to break down, I wanted to show them that I, and no one else, was taking responsibility for all this. I thought that if they heard through the police that I had refused all thought of bail, it might send them the signal that I was prepared to face my music alone. Nice and Even Nicer, once they began to get some picture of the full extent of my travels, told me that it might take a long time for my case to come to trial, for there was a great deal of paperwork to be gone through from several English counties. These things always took time.

The morning passed in such a rush that I barely remember anything about it, except that I was marched up from the cells, placed in a dock, a policeman beside me, and asked my name and age.

‘The question of bail?’ the magistrate asked.

‘Your honour, bail is not requested in this case,’ said my lawyer.

A look towards me from the magistrate as of a camel inspecting a blow-fly and a note was made.

There was muttering talk from the police solicitor concerning the collation of paperwork at which the magistrate grunted and placed me on remand to reappear in another two weeks, by which time the police solicitor should have framed a complete set of charges to which it would be possible for me to plead. Straight from the police court I was led, daring to look up just once to see if I could spot my parents in the gallery, into a van and towards prison.

They had been there. I had seen my mother’s anxious face, desperate to catch my eye and give me a warm smile. I had tried to smile back, but I had not known how. That old curse again. How to smile. If I smiled too broadly it might look like triumphalism; if I smiled too weakly it might look like a feeble bid for sympathy. If I smiled somewhere in between it would, I knew, look, as always, like plain smugness. Somehow I managed to bare my teeth in a manner that expressed, I hope, sorrow, gratitude, determination, shame, remorse and resolve.

There again, why should I have to design a smile or an expression? If I felt all those things, which I did, why should I have to act them? Did normal people question their smiles and looks, did they go into lathers of insecurity about the impressions they gave, the figures they cut? If I truly cared about what people thought, surely I would alter not my reactions, but my actions. I would change my behaviour, not the nuance of my smiles. Or did I think that style was parent, not the child of substance? And was I right, deep down, ultimately right, to think so?

The van, in which I was the only prisoner, sped along the motorway until we crossed the border into the brand-new county of Avon, passing by the Chippings – Chipping Norton, Chipping Hamden and Chipping Sodbury. Hadn’t there been a boy called Meade at Stouts Hill who lived at Chipping Sodbury? A dim memory returned to me of us all once crowding round Meade and teasing him about his buck-teeth and of him fighting back with the gloriously pre-war riposte, ‘You’re rotters, all of you. Nothing but utter rotters!’ I had immediately taken his side because ‘utter rotter’ was a phrase my mother used – still uses to this day on those rare occasions when she is moved to disapproval – and this made me feel that Meade must be a good thing. Strange the ways in which loyalty to one’s parents can show itself: never when they are there and when they would cut off a finger to see the tiniest scrap of evidence of filial devotion, but always when they are miles away. I visited a boy’s parents one Sunday for tea when I was eight or nine and saw that they used Domestos in their lavatory, not Harpic which we used at home and I remember thinking poorly of these people because of it. We were Vim, Persil Fairy Liquid and RAG, other families were Ajax, Omo, Sqweezee and AA and one pitied them and felt slightly repelled: didn’t they realise they had got it all wrong? Fierce pride in one s parents’ choice of bathroom scourers, withering contempt for their opinions on anything concerning life, the world and oneself.

The van stopped at a large set of gates.

'What’s this place called?’ I asked the policeman cuffed to me.

‘Didn’t they tell you, son? It’s called Pucklechurch.’

‘Pucklechurch?’ I said.

‘Ah. Pucklechurch.’

‘But that’s so friendly! It sounds so sweet.’

‘Well, lad,’ said the policeman, getting to his feet. ‘I don’t think that’s precisely the idea.’

Pucklechurch was a prison for young offenders on remand. I think all the inmates were between sixteen and twenty-five, and either awaiting sentencing or allocation to major prisons.

You will find that there are two states of being when you are placed on remand. Con and Non Con. A non con is technically innocent of any crime: he is confined because bail has been denied him or because he cannot afford it. He has either pleaded not guilty or else, as in my case, he has not yet had a chance to plead: either way, the law regards him as guiltless until proven otherwise. The cons, however, the cons have pleaded guilty and await their trial and sentencing.

Non cons wore brown uniforms, could receive as many visitors a day as they pleased, have as much food brought in as they could eat and were not obliged to work. They could spend their own money, watch television and enjoy themselves.

For the first two weeks, that then, is more or less what I did. I settled down in B wing, very happily, with a cell to myself. The only moment of pity and terror came when my parents visited on the third day.

I pictured them trying to decide which day might be best for a visit. Not the very first day because I would still be finding my feet. The second day too, that might still look too quick and swoopy. The fourth day would perhaps give the impression of indifference. They wanted to show that they cared and that they loved me: the third day was the best day.

You have all seen prison visiting rooms on television or in the cinema. You can picture the distress of parents, sitting on one side of a glass cage and watching their son being led forwards in prison uniform. We did our best. They smiled, they gave straight-lipped nods of firm encouragement. There was no questioning, no recrimination, no overflow of emotion.

The moment that tried me the most sorely came when, as the interview drew to a close, my mother took from her handbag a fat wadge of crosswords neatly clipped from the back page of The Times. She had saved the crossword every day since I had been away, removing the answers from the previous day’s puzzle with completely straight, careful scissor strokes. When she pushed them under the window and I saw what they were I made a choking noise and closed my eyes. I tried to smile and I tried not to breathe in, because I knew that if I breathed in the choke would turn into a series of huge heaving sobs that might never end.

There was more love in every straightly snipped cut than one might think was contained in the whole race of man.

I watched them go and lurched dumbly towards the prison officer who turned me round and led me back to my cell.

Prison officers, known of course as screws, found themselves at this point at an embarrassing sartorial mid-point. The older guard still wore the black of Mr McKay in Porridge, their proud chests glistening with a whistle chain that led from a silver tunic button into a pleated breast pocket, while the newer officers had to bear the indignity of a sort of light blue suiting that made them look something between Postman Pat and a mimsy Lufthansa steward. They felt it keenly, you could tell.

The prison currency then was tobacco, called ‘burn’. I dare say drugs are now the gold standard, but in my day I never heard of any drugs proliferating at Pucklechurch. My parents had given me enough money to buy cigarettes, so all was fine for that first two weeks, which passed in a blur of letter-writing and crossword solving. I was left very much to myself, as were all non cons.

The day came however, when I had to ride back in a police van to Swindon to make my plea. The police solicitor had decided, in the light of the dozens and dozens of uses I had made of the credit cards, that four specimen charges would be presented. You can see a photocopy of the Memorandum of the Court Order in the picture section of this book.

I pleaded guilty to all four charges, one of the straight theft of a watch, contrary to Section of the Theft Act of 1968 (which raises the question, what on earth could be the offences covered by sections 1-6?), the other three charges being that I did, by deception, obtain a pecuniary advantage for myself contrary to that same Theft Act, Section 15. The Clerk of the Court in Swindon, you will notice, has rather sweetly typed ‘pecunairy’ in each instance.

The moment the fourth ‘guilty’ had mumbled from my lips I was instantly a con, convicted not by the court, but out of my own mouth and my status at Pucklechurch was to change.

For this second appearance in Swindon was by no means my trial. A probation officer was appointed by the court to look into my case, my history and my future. The trial was set for November the first, a whole month and a half away. I still stoutly refused bail and, returning in the van, resigned myself to the prospect of seven weeks of ‘real bird’.

The first thing to change was the colour of my uniform. Next, my accommodation. I was marched to A wing, shouted at nose to nose every time I slowed down or looked from left to right, and told that I had better get used, pretty fucking quick, to being treated like the shitty little villain that I was.

The only burn to be got now was from work. If you worked every day you might get just enough to buy a half ounce of Old Holborn tobacco to last you the week and two packs of cigarette papers, these were standard Rizla+ rolling-papers, but presented in buff coloured packaging with HM PRISONS ONLY printed at an angle across the flap.

Work was assigned: you either mopped and polished the floor (a great treat because you got to use the electric floor polisher) or you worked in the ‘shop’, painting toy soldiers. I sometimes tried to imagine the children who received for Christmas a set of Napoleonic plastic soldiers, hand-painted by prisoners and how they would react if they knew the provenance. Now, of course, one knows that most children’s toys, from Barbie dolls to the latest Disney fashion imperatives have been constructed under conditions often a great deal worse than those of Pucklechurch, in which young men sat, tongues out, happily plying the Humbrol in a well-heated room, like enthusiastic members of the Stouts Hill Model Club, with Simon Bates and Radio 1 blaring out good fun pop. After four weeks spent in this dozily lulling routine work, I was promoted to floor mopping, what we used to call at Uppingham ‘lay fag’.

That’s the key to my contentment at Pucklechurch. I’ve said it before in interviews and it’s been taken as a witty joke, but life in prison was a breeze for me, because at that point I had spent most of life at boarding school. I didn’t mean to suggest by that, as was supposed, that boarding schools are like prisons, I meant that prisons are like boarding schools. I knew how to tease authority enough to be popular with the inmates and tolerated by the screws; I knew how to stay cheerful and think up diversions, scams and pranks. I knew, ironically, given my inability to do so in real boarding schools, how to survive. Some of the sixteen-year-olds at Pucklechurch had never left home before. Nearly all of them were inside for TDA or TOC-ing, which is to say ‘Taking and Driving Away’ or ‘Taking w/out Owner’s Consent’ – there must be some difference between the two offences, but I’m dashed if I know what it is. Also, the vast majority of them were from South Wales and the West Country. I found something immensely endearing about that. I had been trained by television to believe that all lags are either Scottish, Liverpudlian, or, most especially, Londoners. I had expected Sweeney accents and Glaswegian brogues, not Devonian burrs and Chepstow hilts.

There was little free time. Up at six, fold up all the bedding material, pick up one’s potty and slop out in the lavatories.

‘It is not a potty! It is a slop-pail!’

‘Well, I prefer to think of it as a potty, sir.’

‘You can fucking think of it what you fucking like. You will not call that cunt a fucking potty, you will call that cunt a fucking slop-pail, got it?’

‘Very good, sir. It shall be as you wish.’

After slopping out (a practice that Oscar Wilde, a hundred years ago had written to the newspapers to protest about and which the Howard League for Penal Reform has finally, I believe, managed to push into desuetude) one would be handed a safety razor (in my case a fruitless offering, since I was still so testosterone light that I had not even the faintest traces of down on my cheeks or upper-lip) and the ablution ceremonies would be performed, just as at school only conducted in complete silence, save for the rhythmical brushing of teeth and scraping of stubble. Next, we were marched down to breakfast for a completely familiar (to me) prep-school tea of tinned tomatoes and grey scrambled egg on fried bread. Then we were led to work.

In the evenings there came Association. Association was the prison’s major carrot and stick.

‘Right! You, off Association for a week.’

‘First one to clear up this fucking mess gets an extra ten minutes’ Association.’

Association took place in a large room, where there was a television, a dartboard and a ping-pong table. To me it resembled exactly the games room of a French youth hostel, only without the appalling smell. It was on my second night’s Association that a large con put his hand on my knee and told me that I was cute.

‘Ere, why don’t you fuck off and leave ‘im alone,’ a Bristolian car-thief next to me said.

There was no fight. That was it. No terrible moment later in the showers when I was told to bend down and pick up the soap. Just a hand on the thigh, a squeeze and a shy withdrawal.

Later that evening someone came up to me and said, ‘Two’s up then!’

‘Sorry?’ I said.

‘Two’s up with you!’

I agreed with him pleasantly and wandered off. As I was finishing my cigarette another con approached and said, ‘I’ll take that off you, mate.’

‘Fine, help yourself,’ I said, handing him the weedy little butt of my roll-up.

He gave me a thump on my back. ‘You said you’d go two’s up with me!’

‘I’m terribly sorry,’ I said. ‘But I had absolutely no idea what “two’s up” meant.’

Those who had run out of their supplies of burn lived on the fag-ends of others, going two’s up with the smallest, thinnest butts, collecting dozens together to make new roll-ups or burning their fingers and lips by smoking each one down to a millimetric strip.

My accent and vocabulary endeared me to everyone. Again, I had expected nothing but jeering cries of ‘Oh I say! How absolutely topping, don’t you know?’ and similar inaccurate mockeries, but I think the inmates enjoyed the confusion I caused to the screws who found it difficult to talk to me without thinking of me as Officer Class or suspecting me to be some Home Office official’s son, planted to keep an eye on things.

‘Don’t think me some awful antinomian anarch, sir,’ I might say to one of the screws, ‘but is the rule about drinking hot cocoa in precisely forty seconds not perhaps dispensable? The ensuing scalding of the soft tissues about the uvula is most aggravating.’

Pathetic, I suppose, pathetic, vain and silly, but in circumstances where survival is the key any human characteristic or quality you can dredge up must be used. If you are strong physically, you use your strength, if you have charisma and inner dignity, you use them, if you have charm, you use charm. The smallest sign of servility, subservience, flattery, sycophancy or sneakiness is loathed by screws and cons alike. The screws will act on ‘information received’ but they won’t thank the grass or protect him when he is duly punished by his victim.

The only unpleasant moment within my eye- or earshot came when a sixteen-year-old who was ungovernable in his stupidity, insubordination and insolence (I thought he was suffering from some sort of mental illness, for he would giggle and became so manic that it sent shivers down my spine) was, after pushing things too far, taken into the bathroom along from my cell by three of the screws. There was the sound of much pummelling and exceptionally dull thumping and I realised, with a shock, that he was being expertly beaten up. He came out alternately giggling and weeping. As he was led down the corridor, in great physical pain as he was, he tried to kick one of the screws. This was not a Jimmy Boyle refusal to be broken, this was not Shawshank resilience, this was illness.

I wanted immediately to write to the Home Secretary and talked to Barry, a witty Welshman whose cell was opposite to me, about doing so.

‘They reads your letters, see. Won’t do no good. And when you’re out of yurr you’ll forget allabout it.’

He was right of course. When I left, I made no representation to anyone.

Barry, as it happens, couldn’t read at all, so I set about teaching him. He it was who dubbed me ‘The Professor’, which was to become my prison nickname. Most people are ‘that cunt’ but the possession of a nickname puts you a little higher up the ladder than the others. I was lucky enough to have a whole cell to myself, back in those days of disgraceful prison undercrowding, and would alternately sleep on the top and the bottom bunk to help demarcate the days.

We had the treat to look forward to every Sunday of a visit from the prison chaplain, who, bizarrely, went by the name of the Reverend Chaplin and, more bizzarrely still, looked exactly like Charlie Chaplin: exceptionally thin, with tight black hair and a toothbrush moustache. With the usual inmate irony he was referred to as Ollie, as in Hardy. He let me play the piano for the Sunday service, attendance at which was optional, but which became, on account of the eccentricity of my playing, the hottest event of the prison week. I was allowed six hours off work a week without loss of pay so that I could practise the hymns. I entertained hugely by performing, not accurately (‘Anyone can play accurately, but I play with wonderful expression. As far as the piano is concerned, sentiment is my forte’) but with massively self-important arpeggios and symphonic style endings.

Thus, after ‘The church’s one foundation’ for example I would end with a Daaaaaah-dum! Dadum-da-dum-da-um-da-dum-daaaaa-aaaaah DUUUMMMMM! And just as everyone was sitting down, I would add a high Dum-di-dum-di-dum. Dum DUM! Dum. (Pause) Dum (Pause) Dum (bigger pause, followed by a tiny) Dim … That surely must be the end, but no… a sudden quick bass Tara-tara-DOM. And finally it was over.

The Bishop of Malmesbury came to visit one Wednesday. A group of us was selected to sit round him m a circle while he asked us to speak frankly about prison conditions and how we were being treated and what we thought of ourselves. There were screws standing against the walls, eyeing the ceiling and we all knew better than to complain. All except Fry, of course.

‘I would like to draw your lordship’s attention to one thing that has been bothering me,’ I said. ‘It is, I fear, a very grave matter and the source of aggravation and discomfort to many of us here.’

There was a hissing in of breath from the others and a meaningful clearing of the throat from one of the senior screws.

‘Please,’ said the Bishop, ‘please feel free.’

‘I am sure,’ I said, ‘that Her Majesty has many calls on her time and cannot be expected to know everything that goes on in her name within the walls of institutions such as this.’

‘No indeed,’ agreed the Bishop, blinking slightly.

‘However, I must urge you to draw her attention to the quality of the soap available in our bathrooms.’

‘The soap?’

‘The soap, my lord Bishop. ‘It lathers not, neither does it float it doesn’t smell nice, it doesn’t even clean you. The best that can be said for it, I am afraid, is that it keeps you company in the bath.’

This was from an old Morecambe and Wise book I had bought years ago at Uppingham.

The Bishop burst out laughing and the screws dutifully joined in with smiles, shaking their heads at the jollity of it all.

‘If your lordship will undertake to make urgent representation in the right quarters?’

‘Certainly, certainly! Um, may I ask you, young man, I know this is not good prison form and you really don’t have to answer, but may I ask you none the less,… what, ah, are you in for?’

‘Oh the usual,’ I said carelessly. ‘Churchmen.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘The senseless slaughter of clerics. I murdered four minor canons, two archdeacons, a curate and a suffragan bishop in a trail of bloody carnage that raged from Norwich to Hexham last year. Surely you read about it in the Church Times, my lord? I think it made the third page of the late racing extra.’

‘All right, now. That’s enough of that, Fry.’

‘Yes, sir. I’m sorry, Bishop, you must forgive my freakish humours. In here we laugh that we may not weep. It was theft I’m afraid, my lord. Plain old credit-card fraud.’

‘Oh. Oh, I see.’

I continued to teach Barry to read, while I practised the piano, zoomed along the corridors with my silver electric polisher and wrote letters to Jo Wood and other friends.

Barry had, when I had collected my wage packet at the end of my first week as a con, told me that the best way to make your burn go further is to pre-roll the cigarettes and lay them out to dry on the radiator pipe of your cell. I had dutifully done this and returned from Association to find every single one of my beautifully rolled cigarettes gone.

‘Lesson number one, matey,’ he said. ‘You can’t trust no one on the inside.’

What an arse. The cell door is left open during Association, it is only closed when the occupant is ‘banged up’ inside. The idea that in a building full of thieves I could cheerfully have left tobacco lying around and expected it to be there on my return was absurd. Barry enjoyed my cigarettes and every now and then would let me have half of one as that first pitiful burnless week dragged by.

We were walking towards Association one evening the following week when Barry and I thought it would be amusing to drag our heels on the floor, which always left a black rubber mark. I stopped doing it as I heard approaching footsteps and Barry was caught mid-streak.

‘Hughes! Off Association two days.’

‘But, sir!’ said Barry.

‘Don’t whine, you miserable cunt. Three days.’

‘Sir, I feel I should confess that I am just as guilty,’ I said. ‘I was doing exactly the same thing before you came round the corner. In fact I made the worst marks.’

‘Is that right, lad? I didn’t see you, though did I? I didn’t see it, you didn’t do it. Extra hour’s Association for honesty.’

‘Lesson One, matey,’ I said to Barry as the screw passed by. ‘Baffle them.’

Every two or three days or so I would receive a visit from my court appointed probation officer. The great question facing me was the nature of the sentence likely to be passed down from the bench. Most of the experienced cons told me to expect DC, Detention Centre – the ‘short sharp shock’ that Home Secretary Roy Jenkins had proudly added to the judiciary’s roster of available sentences. DC came in three-month packages, from a three months’ minimum to a maximum, I think, of nine months or possibly a year. It sounded foul. Up at five, run everywhere, gym and physical jerks at all times, running to dining halls, ten minutes to eat while standing up, more physical jerks and weight training, and what would now be called zero tolerance of all offences. The DC inmate emerged physically powerful, immensely fit and utterly zomboid in manner. An ideal candidate in fact for a job on the outside such as the bouncer at a seedy night-club, which would usually get him back on the inside for aggravated assault within a matter of weeks. This time he would be in Big Nick and a full-blown member of the criminal classes.

Borstal was the other option, an indeterminate sentence, which was completed by the inmate rising up the ranks, winning a series of different coloured ties, until such time as the governor thought him fit to be freed. That sounded ghastly too.

‘Or of course, there’s just good old Nick. Six months, prolly,’ some of them reckoned.

Mr White the court-appointed probation officer, who generously left me a pack of B amp;H at the end of every visit, was less pessimistic. He believed that it was essentially down to his report and he saw no reason so far not to recommend two years’ probation. These were first offences, I had solid upright parents, I had learned my lesson.

I had learned my lesson, hadn’t I?

I nodded seriously. I had learned my lesson, all right.

I cannot claim that prison politicised me in any way. It was not until years later, starting with those inevitable late-night student conversations at university, that I began to look seriously at the world through political eyes, but I do remember shivering with embarrassment at something that was said to me. Embarrassment is not a political emotion, it may be the British national emotion, but it is not political: rage is political, hatred can be political and so too can love, but not, I think, embarrassment.

What was said to me and I can’t remember who said it (one of the Londoners I think, for Pucklechurch, in spite of that preponderance of West Country and Welsh inmates was also used as an overspill prison for Wormwood Scrubs, taking moderate and non-dangerous offenders, usually those who were serving sentences for the non-payment of fines) but it was said none the less, just as it had been said to Oscar Wilde.

‘Person like you shouldn’t be in a place like this,’ the con said to me.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, you’ve got an education.’

‘Not really. I’ve got some 0 levels, but that’s it.’

‘You know what I mean. These places aren’t for the likes of you.’

I wish I could pretend he hadn’t used that phrase ‘for the likes of you’, but he really did. This is how Oscar Wilde relates a similar experience in De Profundis.

– the poor thief who, recognising me as we tramped round the yard at Wandsworth, whispered to me in the hoarse prison-voice men get from long and compulsory silence: "I feel sorry for you: it is harder for the likes of you than it is for the likes of us.”

A hundred years on and still Britain is Britain. I tried to reply with the obvious, but none the less deeply felt by me, reply that I thought I deserved prison if anything more than he did. I had had every opportunity, every love, every care lavished on me. He heard me out in that non-listening way that convicts have and said:

‘Yeah, but still, eh? I mean, it’s not right, is it? Not really.’

The day for my court appearance drew near. I had received advance notice by letter from my mother that their old friend Oliver Popplewell, at that time not yet a judge, but a Queen’s Counsel none the less, would be speaking for me in court.

It was immensely kind of him to do so, but how I wished he would not: the idea made me writhe with embarrassment. A West Country magistrate’s court was not his milieu. He was not even a criminal barrister, he specialised in commercial and insurance law. It must have been embarrassing for him too, knowing (for he was no fool) that the Swindon bench would go out of their way not to be impressed by this smart London silk, brought in by middle-class parents to keep their son out of the hands of the penal system. Maybe they might think that they had paid for him, paid the staggering sums that QCs cost. How alienating and infuriating that would be…

I arrived feeling very nervous and deeply pessimistic. Popplewell did a magnificent job however, no forensic rhetoric, no Latin, no appeals to law or precedent, merely straight, slightly nervous (real or cunningly assumed I cannot tell) representation. He had done this out of friendship for my parents and he performed the task with great humility: whether they asked him or he offered, to this day I do not know. He spoke to the bench as one who had known me from my birth and one who knew my parents as friends. He was aware that their worships would take the probation officer’s report into consideration and hoped that they would take into consideration too the remorse and foolishness felt by an intelligent child who had gone off the rails, more as an act of teenage rebellion than as a threat to society. That the stability and unreserved love of his parents would also be taken into account, he was sure, as would be the very real promise that a young man of such intelligence showed the very real good he might do, at this turning point in his life, to the society he had scorned in this temporary fit of adolescent mutiny.

Oliver sat down in a swirl of black gown. The three members of the bench nodded to each other and asked for the probation officer, Mr White, whose report they had now read, to ask what sentence he thought proper.

White came through like a good ‘un and said that he saw no reason, especially in view of the long custodial remand period I had served, for any sentence to be handed down other than an order for two years probation.

‘He has somewhere to live?’

Popplewell rose. ‘With his parents, your worships, who will undertake to see that he obeys any order the court sees fit to make.’

More head-knocking and babbling before the beak in the middle cleared his throat and glared at me.

‘Stand up, please. You have led a very privileged life, young man. You have been expensively educated and you have repaid the patience and devotion of all those around you with dishonesty and deceit. Let us be clear, the crimes you have committed have not been schoolboy japes. They have been very serious offences indeed. In the light of the probation officer’s report, however, and various other representations it is the sentence of this court that you be placed on probation for a period of two years, during which time you are to reside…’

I don’t remember the rest. It wasn’t Big Nick, Detention Centre or Borstal, that was all that mattered to me, I was to all intents and purposes, a free man.

I turned slightly in the dock and caught my mother’s eyes which were bright with tears. What was I going to do now, I wondered?

And for how long was I going to ask myself what I was going to do, as if I were someone else, a stranger observing myself with curiosity and puzzlement.

The long drive back to Norfolk was friendly and unstrained. I don’t know what either of my parents thought would happen next. I think they only knew for certain that there was nothing that they could make happen. My mother, always more optimistic, believed, I am certain, that things could only get better.

I fell into my sister’s arms. She had been furious with me, furious for the grief I had caused Mother and furious for the atmosphere that had dwelt at Booton while I was away, but she hugged me and forgave me and wept. Roger, crisply short-back-and-sided shook his head with a smile and said that I was a clot.

The first thing I had to do was await the visit of the local probation officer appointed to take over my case. His name was Boyce and he had a snowy white beard. I had to visit him initially once a week, I think, and chat. He encouraged me to write while I was thinking what to do, so I wrote a strange updating of the old Greek myth of Theseus and Procrustes. I will not even begin to lower my hands into the steaming pile of psychological implications lying there, but just leave it at that. I gave it to Boyce to read and he passed it back professing himself completely unable to make head or tail of it. Reading it now, nor can I.

More urgently, I had discovered that Norwich City College was having its final enrolment day. They offered a one year course of A levels in most of the major subjects. I rushed to join the queue and found myself in the office of a twinkly little man who was head of arts admissions.

‘I would like to apply to do English, French and History of Art A levels,’ I said.

He shook his head sorrowfully as he read my application form. Next to the question, Attainments? I had written ‘Prep-school sub-prefect and 3rd XI scorer’.

‘I’m afraid,’ he said, ‘that English and History of Art are both full up. If you had come on the first day of enrolment…’

The first day of enrolment had been the day of my sentencing.

‘I must tell you this,’ I said, more urgency and concentration and power in my voice than had ever been there before. ‘If you admit me on to those courses I will get A grades in each subject. I will take S levels in all subjects and get Grade Ones. I will take Cambridge Entrance…'

‘We don’t do Cambridge Entrance here…’

‘Nevertheless,’ I said. ‘I will go to the library, take out past papers and, if I have to, take a job in the evening to be able to pay one of your staff to invigilate while I sit the Cambridge Entrance. I will be given a place to read English at Queens’ College. If you take me on, this is what will happen.’

He looked at me with his blue twinkly eyes.

I looked back. My entire destiny was in the hands of this man. What had he had for breakfast? What were his views on failed public school boys screaming for the assistance of state-funded City Colleges? Did he have children? Were they difficult or good? Had he been to Cambridge or did he loathe Oxbridge and everything it stood for?

His blue unreadable eyes just twinkled back, as inscrutable and potent as a Siamese cat’s.

‘I must be mad,’ he said, scribbling his signature on my form with a sigh. ‘Take that to the office next door. Term starts on Monday. I’ll be taking you for Chaucer.’