The Blue Touch Paper Read online

  Such public visibility clearly violated our family ethic. It was at the very centre of my mother’s beliefs that you should under no circumstances do anything to draw attention to yourself. Scottish, she had a stubborn faith in education – a faith to which I owe a large part of my subsequent prosperity – but for her the purpose of education was to burrow your way more successfully to a place of absolute security. Meaning, privacy. The front page of the Daily Sketch was no such place, even if, luckily, fellow members of the Highwoods Golf Club and Mum’s bridge partners were unlikely to take that particular paper. When I chose to become a playwright, it seemed to Mum like a tempting of the gods. It could only end badly. Why would any member of a family dedicated to survival choose to do anything so conspicuous? Life was dangerous enough even if you kept your head down. Why on earth would you stick it up? ‘I see Bernard Levin’s attacking you again,’ she would say to me over and over in later life, as though it were my fault. ‘He really doesn’t like you, does he?’ ‘No, Mum, he doesn’t.’ ‘What did you do to him?’

  My father was continuing to visit for at least four weeks a year, unloading whole frozen New Zealand lambs and small plastic pots of papaya, lychees and pineapple which he had acquired as some sort of kickback for his huge shipboard purchases. While in the UK, he traded frequently with a chain-smoking woman called Grace who lived in the Dorchester, dealing in fruit and vegetables from Covent Garden. She wore black sequinned numbers cut low across the powdered bosom, and croaked out suspiciously hearty laughter at all Dad’s jokes. He also brought crackerballs, little exploding fireworks from Hong Kong which made me briefly popular at school. Occasionally one of my family would wind up the clockwork ballerina who danced inside a bottle of gold glitter-filled Bols gin, placed on the sideboard to remind us of the donor’s existence. But Dad was actually on one of his rare visits home, and quite as surprised as my mother, when the headmaster called them in to the school. Naturally, they were apprehensive. Instead Mr Phillips asked them whether they realised that they had an unusually clever son. One day, he said, I might gain a scholarship to a public school. Since they themselves, one out of indifference, the other out of nervousness, had never dared to detect any particular aptitude in me, they were taken aback. They had rather tended to credit my grandmother’s view that I was soft in the head. Meanwhile, my sister was sent off to Bexhill Grammar, where the syllabus included compulsory home economics, i.e. cooking. Margaret was dispatched there in spite of my mother’s misgivings that the local school might have an unfortunate effect on her accent. In their view, Margaret could only reasonably aspire to be a secretary, or, at a pinch, a teacher. It was part of the ethos of Bexhill that you might get away with having one clever child, but to claim to have two would have been classed as showing off. Margaret would go on to collect a postgraduate science degree from London University and make her life as a patent lawyer. But for now, the far more important priority, to a certain amount of resentment from the daughter, was to smooth the passage of the son.

  I cannot say I felt any crushing pressure of expectation. I was that lucky kind of boy who enjoys learning. I particularly enjoyed being taught by John G____, a charismatic musician who had recently come out of the army in Egypt in his early twenties. He had spent his National Service playing in a military band. He had an unusual approach to his job, often beginning French lessons by reading out that day’s editorial from the Daily Telegraph on the grounds that it was a model of how we might one day wish to write English. My best friend was a boy of my own age, Keith Lamdin, who was to provide the first of my many friendships with the kind of cheerful, capable people who find life easy – among my favourite companions at all times. Mr G____ was assumed by the whole class to be in love with Keith. We took it for granted. The signs were unmistakeable. He returned Keith’s homework with tousled, blushing violence, often throwing the deep-hued book through the air in his direction while telling him he was lazy and a disgrace, but in such a way that the whole class knew it was an act.

  Many of the teachers at all my schools had chosen their profession for a reason. They wanted to pass the whole day in the company of young boys. While most of the prep-school masters, untrained and washed up from the war, wished us no harm, there was nevertheless in the very intensity of psychological game-playing between boys and masters the possibility that their sexual gaskets would one day blow. One popular teacher at Harewood did indeed find the pressure intolerable, stepping dramatically forward and pulling the towel off some tiny boy after a shower. For this he was quickly dismissed. To call such tortured and impossibly unhappy souls paedophiles is to make them sound predatory. At the time, they just felt like landmines you must step around.

  John G____ was everything schoolboys most enjoy – wild, unpredictable and easy to imitate. His shockingly bad teeth were stained deep brown by the constant cigarettes which left strands of tobacco on his lips. He loved telling our class, presumably following Jean Brodie, that Form 2A were special, and that he expected us therefore to behave as if we knew it. He drove up each morning in a green pre-war Austin 7 with ill-fitting plastic windows, and then, thick shock of curly hair to the fore, he swept past the eager young art mistress, Yvonne Soundy, and the sweet young matron, Miss Homer, who both coloured at his very presence, before he presented himself to us in a force field of unprompted quotations from Dylan Thomas. It was therefore an astonishment to me, when, out of the blue, one of my regular French essays was returned with a single word written at the bottom next to the mark, nine out of ten. The word – in red ink, I can see it clearly – was ‘Mignon’. It had then been crossed out, but lightly, so that it was still visible. Since I had no idea what this judgement meant, I had to go home to consult a dictionary. I remember when I first saw the translation I thought there had been some mistake. But no, there it was. I looked several times. ‘Mignon’. ‘Darling’.

  I had a feeling akin to stepping into a lift shaft. I felt myself travelling to the heart of childhood. Looking at the word ‘Mignon’ and at the scratching-out confirmed what I had always suspected. Irrational, adults were in the grip of strong and uncontrollable feelings which, under impossible pressure, might occasionally erupt and which mere children could not hope either to foresee or to understand. Me? He thought me ‘Mignon’? Or was it just my French? I had been at Harewood for a couple of years, I was probably eleven. I did not mention the exercise book and nor did he. But soon after, Mr G____ was ill, with nothing more serious than bronchitis. The message came that he would like a sickbed visit. His younger brother led me up to his bedroom, in a large Victorian house in Bexhill Old Town. John was lying in pyjamas in the bed, reading the paper, and with a big circular tin of fifty Players untipped cigarettes within easy reach. He hugged me at once, drawing me to him. He hugged me harder than anyone had hugged me in my life. He told me how much it meant to him that I had come to see him. But, at some deeper level, I felt completely safe. This man needed me. He had profound emotional needs which were very important to him. But even then I felt a flood of relief when I sensed that these needs were not going to be overtly sexual.

  We began a programme of cultural education. I had already acquired a strong taste for the cinema, lapping up with delight all the mythologising films which insisted the British had fought the Second World War with unfailing grit and courage. There was a great deal of bobbing about in small boats full of actors with boot black on their faces and woollen hats pulled over their brows. The murky tanks at Shepperton were built for heroes. I identified more strongly with the impossibly glamorous Dirk Bogarde as the medical student Simon Sparrow in the Doctor . . . films, sweeping round the wards of grateful patients and getting to kiss nurses. But Mr G____ started taking me, after school, to a far more diverse programme of concerts, films and plays.

  At the time there was a repertory company permanently resident at the De La Warr Pavilion, a badly maintained modernist building designed in 1935 by Serge Chermayeff and Erich Mendelsohn, the latter a Jewish refugee fro
m Nazism who had been taken up by the English aristocracy. A second company played Devonshire Gardens during the summer season. In 1957, the company presented a total of forty-seven plays – over twice as many as now offered annually by our National Theatre. From time to time their undemanding repertory of thrillers, light comedies and farces was stretched to include work by Anouilh, Sheridan, Wilde, Maugham, J. B. Priestley, Arthur Miller, Ugo Betti and Graham Greene. Both theatres had ashtrays on every seat so any children attending could complete a full day’s passive smoking. The Penguin Players were run by a married couple, Richard Burnett and Peggy Paige, while their juvenile leads, Vilma Hollingbery and Michael Napier Brown, also shared a bed. Even Donald Wolfit and his wife Rosalind Iden came visiting with a Shakespearian programme which ended ominously with the ham actor threatening to reward our response by doing the whole thing again. ‘But Time, the great master, calls,’ he added, to the relief of all. For music, we could go to concerts in the White Rock Pavilion in Hastings. For films, there was a choice of three cinemas in Bexhill, and a further five within a few miles.

  John had a deeply romantic view of art. It was about access to massive, mysterious forces, it was about greatness. But he also had a faiblesse, which I shared, for all the hick little black-and-white comedies, a lot of them starring Peter Sellers, which presented adult Britons as petty, posturing and ridiculous. The only response any halfway sensitive person could have to British life in the 1950s was to laugh at it. Meanwhile, a lot of the stuff we saw from the Penguins, he told me, was not very good. This was a weekly rep, after all. Rehearsals were just line-learning. The actors provided their own costumes from a travelling trunk which had to include dinner dress and a police uniform. But Mr G_____ also told me that you could sometimes learn as much from bad theatre as from good. I had no intimation that this was a proposition I would test to destruction in the coming years.

  This period of my life probably lasted a few months, and made me uneasy. It was clear to other boys at school that Mr G____ had moved his attentions to me, and the response was a mixture of mockery and jealousy. Keith Lamdin, on the other hand, was glowing with relief that the spotlight was no longer on him. But again, as so often in later life when I appeared in other people’s eyes to be receiving more than my fair share of favours, I had no reason to be disloyal. Far from it. This man was opening my eyes and ears to all the things which were most interesting to me. Why on earth would I object to that? Each time we went out – a man in his mid-twenties accompanied by a boy aged eleven – I had to ask permission from my mother, which at all times she automatically gave. The plan one Saturday afternoon was that we should drive in Mr G____’s car to Hastings to see Our Man in Havana, a Carol Reed picture with Alec Guinness and Noël Coward. We were both looking forward to it. But this time, when I asked her, Mum unexpectedly refused. She was standing at the sink, and I was in the kitchen behind her, when she went on to say that it was wrong for me to take so much from Mr G____. I said that there was nothing wrong in our friendship. He was simply being kind. My mother replied, in a tone which brooked no argument, ‘Mr G____ has been kind enough.’

  It was, you may say, a perfectly pitched Bexhill remark. It was loaded with insinuation but at the same time free of it. To this day, I can’t tell whether Mum truly disapproved of my teacher’s generosity – nobody should be unusually kind – or, more likely, suspected the motive for it. All I knew was that there was no way past it. It was, I think, one of only two or three times I ever heard my mother say anything which was completely final. People who rarely lay down the law have a special authority when they do. After that one sentence, there would never be any question of my going anywhere with Mr G____ again. Feelings of guilt had already consumed me when the elderly gentleman had exposed himself a couple of years earlier to me and Michael Richford. The more people reassured me that the incident was in no way my fault, the more disturbingly certain I became that it was. When a police car drew up in Newlands Avenue outside our house, and I was summoned down from my bed in my dressing gown to answer exhaustive questions, when I was given a special mug of hot chocolate and a plate of digestive biscuits, I felt, in the very lowering of everyone’s voices and the elaborateness of their concern, that I was judged complicit and judged bad.

  Is this why I became a Christian? I don’t know. Something inside me was susceptible when I started reading the Old Testament and believed it to be true. Maybe I just inherited my mother’s Presbyterian guilt about daring to exist at all. I remember weeping on my knees beside my bed in terror at some of God’s bloodier threats, and believing that I fell clearly in the group singled out for eternal damnation. Fifty years later, an incumbent Archbishop of Canterbury would make me happy by praising the perceptiveness of my writing about the Church of England, but the original reason for my six adolescent years as a believer had not been at all high-minded. Simply, I was impressionable. I was vulnerable not to Christ, but to His Father. The prospect of hell seemed real.

  Religion was one of the many things my mother approved of in principle, but did little about in practice. So it was at my own initiative that I started attending Sunday School at St Stephen’s Church up the road, and then, more enthusiastically, Crusader class in the afternoons. There I enjoyed weekly evangelical uplift. Under Crusader auspices I could also go off to annual summer camp – white cloth tents pitched in fields twice outside Aviemore, and twice at Studland Bay in Dorset, both bracing locations well suited to lung-filling open-air hymns and frying sausages. I even once stepped forward, in a moment of miserable foolishness, at the end of a Baptist service to declare myself for Christ, à la Billy Graham. Walking home, even I apprehended that this had been an embarrassing thing to do, and I avoided the follow-up meetings which were scheduled to make sure that I would stay born again. When I was pilloried at school by a boy who claimed to have seen me coming forward, I lied and denied it had ever happened.

  The onset of religion made me sanctimonious. My insecurity, my own deep certainty that I was unlikeable, was now lacquered with a glossy layer of stupid ideology. My sister and I had a fight on the stairs at home over ownership of a Bible and I screamed at her, ‘It’s the word of God.’ She laughed and said it wasn’t one word, it was many. Religion to me was an alternative, a second life which might vitiate the pain of the first. I liked being in a relationship with Our Lord because it meant I had something which nobody else could touch. It didn’t give me immunity, but it did mean that what I regarded as the dismal story of my life wasn’t the only story. But piety also offered me a shield against the discomforts of class. To a group of rough boys who assaulted me on the way home from school for no other crime but going to a private establishment and wearing its distinctive blazer, I shouted again, ‘Christ would be ashamed of you.’ Looking back, it’s hard to say who Our Lord would disown quickest in that encounter, but I would be the leading candidate. Christ would certainly have had something to say about my mother’s fear of being thought common. To be fair, it grew not out of a dislike of the working class but out of a heartfelt fear of them, fuelled by so many nights as a young woman in Paisley scurrying past drunks. But considering how little money we had, and how insecure was our own social status, it’s amazing that so much effort went into dissociating ourselves from manual workers. Margaret was forced to go to visit the Botwrights at No. 36 twice weekly to watch Emergency Ward Ten, since we were not allowed to have ITV in the house. It was vulgar. Only the BBC for us. And we were particularly forbidden to pick up penny chews and Wagon Wheels from the Cosy Café in Sea Road, a place of abundant runny egg sandwiches and steamed-up windows, which filled my mother with a horror which was all the more real for being ridiculous.

  The shortage of money in our family meant that it would be essential for me to get a scholarship in order to continue in private education. As I moved past the age of ten, I began to become affected, trying out attitudes I thought fitting for advanced and superior people. My grandmother Euphemia had described football as ‘eleven g
rown men chasing a wee bit of leather’, and I reported her description to the referee one day, who looked back at me as if he had heard it all before. This contempt provided me with convenient cover for my own uselessness. I did have a brief, unlikely interest in boxing, which turned out to be one of the most practical elements of my education. The blinding shock you suffer when hit full on the nose by a boxing glove is electric. Since I possessed neither strength nor agility to avoid pain, I had instead to learn how to manage it. I found this priceless in later life. But even more useful than learning how to sustain blows was learning how to dodge them. Even today, I am expert at swerving. As the years went by, I was able to see the aggressor coming from an ever greater distance, thanks to the radar I acquired in the boxing ring. At some enduring level of consciousness, I also know that I can take the blow and survive.