The Blue Touch Paper Read online

  In 1952 we made our move out of the flat in St Leonards and into the leafy semi-detached in Bexhill, a town which was later improbably used by Alfonso Cuarón as the last location for those surviving Armageddon in a film called Children of Men. My sister has always suspected our parents went there in order to cement their marriage, to make sure there was an investment which together they would have an interest in protecting. They chose a street which backed onto the Downs, and in which everyone lived in houses all constructed by the same local builder. It was almost a parody of suburbia, and, like new suburbanites seeking to pass a national examination, we bought a television set in time for numbers of neighbours to come round to see the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in black and white on a tiny screen in the corner of what seems also, in retrospect, to have been a tiny living room. Our house was packed with people staring at a snowy blizzard of imperial imagery, cooked up by Victorians and clothed in music and drapery to suggest a seamlessness in history which the real thing lacks. Peanuts were passed round all day, alongside the filter-tipped cigarettes which my mother favoured but never inhaled. These cigarettes were retrieved from individual pipe-shaped containers within a revolving silver globe, representing the shape of the world. When, in the 1980s, well-born intellectuals deployed the word ‘suburban’ as a term of abuse against Margaret Thatcher, I always bridled. I thought there were a thousand reasons to oppose our most self-admiring prime minister, but not for her background. That background was not so different from my own.

  How do I begin to explain the level of repression obtaining in Newlands Avenue, where to hang your washing out on a Sunday or to fail to polish your car on a Saturday invited – well, what? The opprobrium of your neighbours? Or maybe just the imagined opprobrium, which could well, in the latent hysteria of the silent street, be twice as bad? What exactly was everyone frightened of? As an adult, reading Kenneth Tynan’s diaries, I came across his characterisation of the craven drama critic of the Sunday Telegraph, John Gross, whom he described as seeming ‘to be in fear of being blackballed from some nameless club of which all aspired to be members’. That phrase ‘nameless club’ shocked me to my roots, because it so described the threat hanging over the life we had known in Bexhill-on-Sea. James Agate had once summed Bexhill up as ‘bleak and purse-proud’. That’s how it was. It was not a particularly Masonic town, and it had no dominant institutions. The churches and the golf club did not seem powerful, nor did the Rotarians and Past Rotarians hold the town in an iron grip. You couldn’t even say there was a strong social hier­archy or clique, a group of favoured names who held sway. If there were aristocrats, we never met them. But nevertheless somehow everyone in the town of twenty- four thousand white people and one black knew full well by messages which came only through the air that you might be damned if you broke the rules. Worse, you might be doubly damned because you never knew the rules in the first place.

  So much, clearly, was to do with sex. How could it not be? The popular injunction ‘Be Yourself’ which was to take hold so completely in the next fifty years would have been meaningless to a majority of the British population in the 1950s. Be what exactly? On the other side of our semi-detached, 32 Newlands Avenue beside our 34, lived the Yearwood family, Tim, Sheila and their son Michael, almost my sister’s age, who in their impeccable integration into the morals and manners of the town seemed to offer some sort of implicit rebuke to all around, and to us in particular. Sheila, younger than Mum, had been her petty officer in the WRNS, and it was Sheila who had alerted the Hares to the vacancy next door. Tim was a snifty solicitor, at the heart of the town’s life, a Freemason and a member of what in another age was called the Quality. Barbados-born, Tim had fenced for his university and landed in France with the Royal Artillery just after D-Day. His well-creased cavalry twills and weekly game off the back tee with other professional worthies – ‘Straight down the middle, Tim!’ – suggested a level of acceptability to which we could only aspire. Sheila, pearls in place round her cashmere sweater, was the daughter of cockneys, and, like my own parents, in a marriage which had only happened because of the war. Sheila ran family life so that the breakfast table was set immediately after the evening meal, in order that everything might be there, waiting, when the family woke punctually at seven. The marmalade, even, had its own lacy cloth with beads, a sort of yarmulke of gentility. Michael himself, pale-skinned and geeky, was for the next fifteen years presented to me and my sister as the exemplar of all we failed to be: studious, hard-working, polite and serious in his dedication to scholarship and discreet advancement. Sheila unfailingly took to her bed every afternoon for a few hours in order to recover from goodness knows what.

  Two sides of a semi-detached invite comparison – both sides are hyper-conscious of the other – and it would be fair to say that for many years the Hares defined ourselves by our proximity to the Yearwoods. They became the standard, and we became the satirical failures. Try as we might, we could not live in the orderly manner of our neighbours. Though to their face my mother showed nothing but friendship and respect, though in her heart she craved for nothing but to be accepted by Tim and Sheila, it was to her credit that, when confiding in Margaret and me, she seemed to take a certain kind of raffish pleasure in our supposed social shortcomings. We were not as posh as the Yearwoods – you could tell that as much from our rickety furniture and from our kitsch oriental paintings as from our naked marmalade tops – and that was fine. But we were clearly posher than the Richfords who lived two doors down in – horror! – a bungalow.

  The gradations of class grip early and they grip absolutely. You could not exist in this order without knowing your place in it. I was best friends with Michael Richford – it was he who was with me when together we encountered our first paedophile – but the details of our schooling were different. Private education was Bexhill’s principal industry. In the twentieth century there were four hundred schools in the town at one time or another, some up for a few years, some longer. Every rambling red-brick mansion with grounds was turned into a preparatory school, and staffed by ex-military personnel whose wars had not gone entirely to plan. First I was sent off to be one of the very few boys allowed at St Francis, a hitherto all-girls’ school in West Down Road which boasted an entrance through a mock-medieval castle keep. It was known informally as Fanny’s Fortress, in honour of the headmistress, Fanny Fulford. My sister was there, much more senior, and the young Julie Christie, having been dumped by her parents in India on the south coast, was already attracting, in her teens, a certain amount of attention. But soon enough I was moved out of kindergarten and on to Pendragon, a wacky operation down Cantelupe Road, a pleasant residential avenue somewhere between the promenade and the railway station. Pendragon was run by a teacher called Alec Everett who, graffiti in my Kennedy’s Latin Primer informed me when I turned the flyleaf on my first day in the building, was known to be the owner of ‘a great fat steaming cock’.

  Mr Everett, in his thirties, in fact lived with a young American friend in the residential part of the school, in a forbidden flat into which we never saw at the end of a classroom corridor. The headmaster went out to get Smarties or jelly babies for his protégé most afternoons, some time after lunch. The blond lounged around doing nothing in canary-yellow crew-neck pullovers, like a useless young man in a Terence Rattigan play. But because Mr Everett wore a blue blazer and flannels and spoke with an impeccably cultured accent, and because he drilled learning into the boys with ruthless efficiency, he was held to be respectable by all the parents, who, to a man and woman, admired him beyond suspicion. The best place to hide is in plain view. Mr Everett was, like most of his class and generation, a disciplinarian, insisting that every boy in school sit on his hands for a whole afternoon until an individual owned up to having left chewing gum under a seat. I learned that the only collective thing people in Bexhill admired was collective punishment. But Mr Everett also drew to him exceptional teachers, so that at the age of seven I was being taught piano by Ph
ilip Ledger, a myopic, gentle soul who tried not to wince as I played. ‘Try again,’ he would say, taking his glasses off, as if cleaning them might somehow polish up my appalling technique. ‘Try and play better.’ He had already established the connections with Benjamin Britten and with Peter Pears which would one day see him become Director of the Aldeburgh Festival.

  My mother was meanwhile gravitating to what would today be called the Scottish community, but which was then thought of as a few stubborn and strongly accented expatriates who happened to have migrated south to Bexhill, and who still wore tartan scarves and waistcoats. On Monday they all received the previous day’s copies of the Sunday Post. This Scottish newspaper celebrated the home country in sugar-overloaded tones which suited the toffee fudge, tablet and peanut brittle they all liked to eat. They would gather annually for a haggis dinner, and to recite Burns. Weekly, they would meet to dance Highland reels. My mother’s most prized records were by Jimmy Shand and his Band, and she had once met Kenneth McKellar, who, she told me, was a very nice man. I was dragged along to take part in the classes from an early age but unfortunately the white-haired enthusiast in charge of putting the gramophone records on suffered from Parkinson’s, which meant that a jumping needle got each dance off to an uncertain start. But if Mum’s Scottish identity remained important to her – it defined her, it made her feel she belonged somewhere – so too was her continuing interest in the stage. Mum soon found herself helping out, teaching Scottish accents, sometimes to professionals, at the Thalia School of Drama, a parking spot for tots and aspirants in London Road, ruled over by the formidable Christine Porch, and by Isobel Overton, a markedly intellectual young woman in billowing skirts and gold glasses, who would later publish a book of letters entitled A Canadian in Love, and after whom the theatre on the campus of the University of Toronto is now named. Mum went on to appear as a footman, dressed in what looked like a pair of red velvet curtains, saggy round the knee, in amateur Molière. She held one side of the double doors open for Julie Christie to burst through as the soubrette.

  I was two years at Pendragon before Mr Everett left. He fled town in the manner of schoolmasters at that time, without notice and for no given reason. My mother did not take to the new owner of the premises, a diminutive man with a thin moustache. She told me there was something ‘not right’ about him. In that at least, she was correct. There is today a lively internet thread dedicated to his abuses from fifty years ago. And so the decision was made, probably at the Yearwoods’ suggestion, to send me instead to what was said to be a more reputable institution on the smarter side of town. Its most famous old boy was Reginald Maudling, a gruesome sort of Conservative arche-type, who was to fail as Chancellor of the Exchequer – it was he who left his Labour successor a note about the economy reading ‘Good luck old cock, sorry to leave it in such a mess’ – before being bought off by the fraudster John Poulson and dying of alcoholic poisoning in 1979.

  Harewood was also, by chance, the school which had originally spawned Pendragon. In the early 1950s the Reverend Woodruff had been dismissed as headmaster of Harewood for gross indecency. In the wake of the scandal, Mr Everett had left his teaching job at Harewood in order to tempt angry parents to put their boys in a completely new school, Pendragon. Now, in a backward twist of fortune, I was to return to the mother ship.

  2

  Mignon

  Harewood was set in fabulous grounds in Collington Avenue with its own cricket and football pitches, and only shamed by its immediate proximity to Normandale, an even better endowed building whose bronzed headmaster, Mr Palmer, spent most of the day and a good part of his nights, pipe clamped between teeth, driving his state-of-the-art petrol lawn mower over his velvet turf. His Christmas card portrayed him on his machine. By contrast, our own red-haired head, Michael Phillips, spent his day in a torment of self-feeding ill temper, clawing compulsively at his crotch and driven mad, it seemed, by his pupils, his staff, his wife, his children, the workers, General Gamal Abdel Nasser, and the general state of disrespect towards entrepreneurs and educators like himself. I remember him standing in the school corridor, dealing with some ungovernable itch deep inside his trousers, while at the same time brandishing a Beaverbrook newspaper and fulminating to a sympathetic Mr Mulvihill and Mr Morgan about how Frank Cousins and the trade unions ran the country unopposed. Fifty years later, he was to send me for my professional advice his film script drawing an analogy between the EU bureaucrats in Brussels who had de-manned our native isle and the conquest of Britain by William and the Normans in 1066. Would I be willing, he asked, to help him get it made?

  My new school, it turned out, was savage, a place where teacher-on-pupil violence was as common as pupil-on-pupil. From the perspective of the twenty-first century, Harewood, with masters twisting ears and whacking skulls, feels far closer to Dickens than to how we live now. Most of us were day boys, but the ethic, like the luridly striped green and red blazer, was that of a traditional boarding school. After tea, as we returned to our classrooms, there was an ominous silence each day. Some small boy was put on lookout in the corridor while inside the classroom, on the dusty wooden floor, one of the new boys was laid out, his trousers pulled down and his forked nakedness exposed to the screams and derisive laughter of forty or fifty older pupils. You could choose to fight back or not. The purpose for each newcomer was not simply to humiliate you, not simply to introduce you to the idea of visceral male force, but also to classify you into one of two teams, in which you remained for the rest of your days at the school. A foreskin or the absence of it marked you out as a Cavalier or as a Roundhead. At that time I did not even know there had been a civil war in England, let alone what its political intricacies might have been, so the terms meant nothing to me. Nor had I thought to begin the unhappy business of dividing my peers into friends and enemies. That came later. A couple of weeks after my own initiation rite – my trousers and underpants had been round my knees, my thighs scratched from the nails in the floor – an older boy called Hugh Bishop gravely informed me that in life it was better to be a Cavalier. They were carefree and happy-go-lucky, whereas Roundheads were dour and humourless. But at Harewood, Hugh said, it was better to be a Roundhead. They were more powerful, and larger in numbers.

  Even this slight migration from chaotic Pendragon to regimented Harewood – from outside to inside, as it were – brought out in me, no doubt inevitably, a repellent consciousness of class status. Meeting my friend Michael Richford on the Downs one evening on my way home from Harewood, I remarked that my father had recently bought a Vauxhall Cresta, a car whose chrome bumpers and giant tailfins were the justifiable envy of all. On his rare visits home Dad was taking us motoring on Sunday afternoons for teas with meringues, sandwiches and éclairs down what Mum called ‘leafy lanes’ to far-flung Sussex villages. That was the kind of life we lived. Whereas, I said, everyone knew that the Richfords did not have a car because they could not afford one.

  I went home like an animal that has swallowed another, sated by this rodomontade but expecting no consequences. At seven the Richfords rang. I was in my dressing gown when they appeared at the door in person at eight. Mr and Mrs Richford came into our living room and sat down – a full entry not lightly undertaken in Newlands Avenue. They wanted to make clear in person, they said, that their decision not to have a car was a choice. It was most definitely not, they said, because of any economic problem, but simply, they said, a question of how they preferred to live. The idea that they did not have enough money to buy a car was pure slander. In the circumstances, it was impossible, they said, that Michael and I could continue to be friends. I had, they insisted, unintentionally revealed my true feelings towards the whole Richford family. From now on, they said, no Hare or Richford was ever to speak to one another.

  Unpleasant incidents like these were, in a sense, red days in Bexhill’s calendar. They were the moments at which the gears of class crashed and the engine jerked to a halt. The unspoken finally became spoken. The
re were such feuds and long, unreasoning silences all over town. I say this not to excuse my loathsome behaviour. Nothing could do that. Among other things, I was a nasty little boy. But it was also odd to live in an atmosphere where nobody really could speak about anything very much. My uncle Alan, who as a young man and shining rugby player had been Aunt Peggy’s perfect Glasgow University groom, turned up around this same time in Newlands Avenue with two Paris prostitutes whom he had just smuggled across the Channel in the boot of his car. He had fallen from being a prosperous doctor to recently being struck off the medical register for supplying drugs to whores. Between Dover and Bexhill he had moved both the girls into the back seat, and at this point he unloaded them, unlikely arrivals on a hitherto entirely respectable pavement. Margaret and I watched from upstairs windows as Alan led them, chattering happily, down the short pathway to our front door. The six of us ate a cheerful lunch, in which conversation flowed freely in two languages, without any of us making the slightest reference to the oddness of the situation, in spite of the added fact that my uncle was incapably drunk. When he staggered back into the car to resume what would presumably be a terrifying journey back to London, nothing was said. I do remember asking who on earth my uncle’s friends were, and, as usual, receiving no answer.

  The 1950s began as a period of political stasis, at least as experienced by the young. If, as Doris Lessing was later to claim, Earls Court was jumping, Bexhill, like large swathes of the country, seemed to be in a sort of dormitory coma, as though John Wyndham’s triffids had just passed through and stunned the population. No sound was heard, except the tomatoes liquefying on the vine or the chickens adjusting their snooze-position in the straw. Even the cawing seagulls seemed stunned into silence after lunch. Down by the English Channel you could still go shrimping in the rock pools and come home with small fry admittedly, but fry nevertheless. Mum regularly bought Sussex dabs, a delicious kind of diminutive lemon sole, from the fisherman who sold them each morning on the beach. She made sure to clean the house first before the cleaning lady came, lest we be thought dirty. In our house we read the Daily Express, and it presented, in particular through its cartoons, a continuing view of white England in which nothing much was allowed to change. A featureless strip on the back page called The Gambols portrayed an archetypally uninteresting family which, I felt, resembled my own more closely than the characters created by the anarchic Giles. But then in 1956 the Suez crisis impinged even on a nine-year-old. There was in adults’ conversation the turbulence of a real event, and one briefly disastrous for the Hares. The SS Mooltan was once more called into service by the Royal Navy to ferry troops down towards Aden. In the wake of the self-inflicted humiliation caused by a trumped-up invasion of the canal, the popular press was in a posturing bad temper, looking for scapegoats, and in particular for anyone who did wrong by ‘our boys’. There had been some terrible failure of hygiene in the ship’s fabled kitchen which had precipitated a mass outbreak of food poisoning among the ranks. Forewarned, my mother returned ashen from the paper shop. On the front page of the Daily Sketch was a characteristically enigmatic picture of my father, in uniform, apparently at ease in his floral armchair. A screaming headline provided the exact charge: ‘The Man Who Served Our Troops Soapy Potatoes’.