The Blue Touch Paper Page 5

  For any young person, the words ‘Bexhill’ and ‘boredom’ were joined at the hip. That was what older people liked about it. I slowly became aware that adults were recovering from a traumatic event. It was called the Second World War. Whatever psychological damage it might have done was never referred to. The only available therapy was silence. The whole nation agreed that what was needed now was a bit of peace – something which Bexhill was in prime position to provide. The words ‘nice’ and ‘quiet’ were tautologous. When Marty Wilde, an insipid rocker of the mid-fifties, was scheduled to appear in a leather jacket and singing ‘Teenager in Love’ at the De La Warr Pavilion for one night only, the protests to the local paper briefly sprang the whole town from its deckchair. The sharp-elbowed old ladies who muscled their way to the front of the queues in Sainsbury’s were in uproar against his swaying hips. But far more dangerous than Marty’s moral turpitude was the fact that he dared to make a loud noise.

  In Newlands Avenue, time moved achingly slowly, whole summers seeming to last a decade, no house ever changing its appearance, no inhabitant ever changing their characteristics. Everyone in the street – Sparrowhawks, Botwrights, Hares, Yearwoods or Richfords – simply continued like characters controlled by the mechanical story-book of a soap opera. They clucked with disapproval at any element of change. So it was paradoxical that, by some unlikely affinity, only the game of cricket could joyfully speed things up. Simply by walking onto a cricket field I was able to stop looking at my watch. Time used to deliquesce in the most sensual way, so that sun, grass and linseed oil would become a druggy concoction in which whole afternoons passed without noticing. I may not have been very good as either batsman or bowler, but that was not the point. Better just to linger on the boundary, and wake when it was evening. Even now, as a playwright, there is no compliment I treasure more than when an audience member remarks, ‘The two hours flew by.’

  In April 1956 my mother had taken me to Glyndebourne, not to the opera but to the off-season East Sussex Youth Drama competition. Among the entries was a supposedly hilarious play in which Shakespeare hid in a trunk. It was received in arctic silence. In spite of this chilling initiation into the unmistakeable sound of a flop, I had begun to have ambitions for my gallery of Pelham puppets. They were wooden-blocked characters with eight strings leading to a starfish-shaped hand control. At the suggestion of Michael Yearwood next door I helped form my first theatre company, which was called PHY, after the initials of the three puppeteers, Porch, Hare and Yearwood. Michael Yearwood’s advanced tastes spurred us to attempt dramas we scarcely understood, just as he had inveigled me into the hopeless venture of trying to make pinball machines out of cardboard. Now we built a puppet theatre and painted little sets to present in our living room a version of Dorothy L. Sayers’ snobbish thriller Busman’s Honeymoon, with Lord Peter Wimsey, Harriet Vane and their devoted valet Sergeant Mervyn Bunter, who had seen his master through the horrors of shell-shock at the end of the First World War. Unfortunately, there was some complicated and unreliable string-work in the climactic murder which involved dropping a miniature flowerpot and cactus on the back of an unsuspecting puppet block-head. This rarely worked. But the ambition of staging wooden Sayers was as nothing to our next project, full-scale wooden Wilde. The Importance of Being Earnest was presented at the Thalia School theatre. Because we performed it at numbing length for charity, our initiative and altruism were praised in a glowing editorial in the Bexhill Observer. P, H and Y were, apparently, exactly the kind of young citizens Bexhill needed more of. The hopeless tangle of strings caused by trying to hand over the cucumber sandwiches in the first act was generously overlooked.

  Up till then, my taste in reading had been largely for Richmal Crompton and Agatha Christie. They both cleverly appealed to a child’s desire for a world more solid, more substantial than the one the child knows. But aged twelve I had taken to Oscar Wilde big-time, no doubt because of his witty outsiderism. One of the first features of the school magazine which I started with my friend Christopher Hudson was a serialisation, painfully transcribed from the original, of The Canterville Ghost. But our publication hit the buffers with the third issue. We had begun to go round Harewood with clipboards, doing an opinion poll to discover who was the most popular master, though most of us suspected it was the ageing and arthritic Colonel Doughty, whose idea of teaching history was to sit on the edge of his desk and recount the strategic details of various twentieth- century battles he had taken part in. News of this plan to award rankings to our teachers reached the headmaster, who reacted badly, as he did to almost everything except mass executions of trade unionists. He knew perfectly well that he was personally unlikely to excel in any such exercise.

  By this time, I disliked Mr Phillips with a passion. His temper had not been improved by the events around the Suez canal, and even less by the petrol shortages that followed. A man who had divided his school into houses named after three historic British military victories, Trafalgar, Blenheim and Waterloo, was unlikely to take kindly to our government being thoroughly outwitted by socialist Egyptians. Phillips had been revealed to all his pupils as the worst kind of bully and boor, who liked to put a smiling face on for parents, while behind their backs hitting their children as often as he could. Somewhere Philip Roth argues that ‘a writer has to be driven crazy to help him to see’. Well, Harewood was the experience which first drove me towards the edge. One evening, while we were all in silent ranks doing homework downstairs, we heard on the ceiling the sound of struggle from his study above us. A boy called Larkin, rather than accept some arbitrary punishment, had had the courage to take on the thirty-year-old Mr Phillips in a knock-down physical fight, man to man. After some time, Larkin, a burly lad, appeared bleeding from the nose, his shirt torn to the waist, and with blood running from scratches all the way down his chest. He moved back silently to his place and resumed his work. I have always had too easy an access to anger, but generally my aim is good, and my feeling for justice as deep on another’s behalf as on my own. Larkin became not just my hero but the hero of the whole school. Mr Phillips, presumably marked from the fist-fight as Larkin was, did not appear for a day or two. Nothing further was said.

  Ever the bright kid, I was taking all my learning in my stride and was untroubled by the prospect of sitting for a scholarship for Winchester. Everyone promised me that it was regarded as the most academic of Britain’s private schools. Winchester did not offer its examination until the very end of the scholarship season, implicitly daring only those who thought they might succeed to pass over their chance of going to easier schools. Only one school in the country, Lancing College, was so keen to attract brains that it would hold a scholarship for a boy while he went off to sit the later exam for Winchester. So for no other reason, I was put down to try first for a school of which neither I nor my parents had ever heard. We certainly had no notion of its High Anglican traditions. Nor indeed did we know that the famous character of Lady Bracknell had originally been named Lady Lancing, and that, auspiciously, our puppet play had been redrafted many times under that title until it was eventually immortalised as The Importance of Being Earnest.

  The night before the written exam, my mother was dangerously ill. From the room next door, I could hear the most terrible groaning and wailing, followed by her screaming, ‘Don’t come in, don’t come in.’ My sister finally disobeyed, and found her distraught. Mum had lost all balance in her inner ear, and thereby control of her bowels. A doctor was called, who was mercifully quick to diagnose, but the memory of that awful night henceforth added to her generally fraught nerves. I was supplied with a letter of explanation which was slipped in with my exam papers and sent on to Lancing. It said, ‘This boy may not have done as well as expected. That’s because he spent the night cleaning up his mother’s bed.’ Such a message might have caused suspicion among more cynical souls, but at Lancing it aroused compassion. Although I was myself biliously, rackingly sick in a ditch outside Polegate on the way to
my interview, I was awarded a major scholarship.

  In my last term at Harewood I was required to become a weekly boarder, in order to get into practice for leaving home. One afternoon, I malingered, faking an illness I only faintly sensed, when in fact I wanted to skip football. I was sent home, where I woke up next morning with scarlet fever. It was a satisfyingly dramatic illness, which involved high temperatures, projectile vomiting, peeling skin, complete isolation and the need, for some reason, to burn my sheets, my books and indeed anything with which I came into contact. The attempt to send me to Winchester was at once abandoned, on the grounds that I could not be expected to emerge from my fastness. The suggestion of putting Winchester exam papers under the bedroom door was vetoed on the grounds that they would be returned contagious.

  So there it was. Providence.

  There were two immediate effects of my being sent away thirty miles along the coast to somewhere I had no intention of going. First, it aroused in me a feeling of sustained excitement at being out in the world. This has stayed with me for the rest of my life. Although I have spent much of my time depressed, i.e. dissatisfied with myself, I have almost never been bored, i.e. dissatisfied with the world. I have never lost the feeling that my surroundings are exciting and interesting because they are part of a long journey from Bexhill’s cold pebbled shore. A psychologist may feel that I went on to become a writer of fiction because my resentment of my father’s absence had so strong an influence on my growing up. To me, it’s likelier that my imagination was wildly overstimulated by the exceptional dullness of my early environment. In a classic provincial childhood, the writer dreams because he or she has to. There was nothing to do in Bexhill except fantasise about getting away. While I was growing up, I spent so much time longing for a place, any place, which was not where I was. But second, I was also, to my sorrow, at the age of thirteen, exiled from a life principally shaped by women. I moved out of the life I was used to, sharing everything with my mother, my sister and our Siamese cat, Susie, and into a life with 420 other boys.

  For my preference for putting women’s lives at the centre of my writing, I would later receive an amount of attention which often embarrassed me – attention, after all, for doing what came naturally. My first full-length play had an all-female cast, and most of the best-known leading roles I have written have been for women. For years, my name has been deployed, particularly by actresses, as a stick with which to beat other male playwrights. But in writing as I did I was merely reflecting my own temperament and upbringing. Women have remained far more present to me than men throughout my life. They shaped me. But I was also well aware, right from the 1970s, that the moment was long overdue to begin to correct a ridiculous imbalance. From the beginning I wanted to give women the play or film’s point of view and not simply to imprison them as objects of manly love. How could a dramatist not want to give half their stage time to half the human race? The regular testosterone-fuelled stage revolutions of the last fifty years have left me indifferent.

  I would eventually take part in a number of appropriate and timely political movements – against the American presence in Vietnam, for universal nuclear disarmament, and against the allied invasion of Iraq – even if, to my shame, I failed in the mid-1980s to recognise the historic importance of the miners’ strike against the Thatcher government. With Howard Brenton, writing our newspaper satire Pravda in 1985, I was able to add to the gaiety of nations by warning just how completely British public life would be soiled by the lethal nihilism of Rupert Murdoch, some twenty-five years before such a view became conventional wisdom. And yet wherever I turned, I was aware that many of contemporary history’s most important changes were being wrought by feminism. From the start, that feminism would inform my writing. How will we remember the late twentieth century? As a time when the role of women in the developed world, at home and at work, changed decisively. Not to reflect that would have been unthinkable.

  3

  Lear on the Cliff

  No military plan survives first contact with the enemy. I was dropped off by my parents at Lancing in the expectation that a change in my fortunes would also bring about a change in my personality. How wrong can you be? The reason that Simon Sparrow had made such a deep impression on me in Doctor in the House was that he was always busy. Yes, he was humorously busy, the victim of all sorts of stumbles and mishaps. But did he ever stop to think how lucky he was to live a life which offered a steady stream of events?

  At that level, things were indeed livelier at Lancing. There was more to do. A religious school was succumbing to the infection of humanism. Harold Macmillan had woken up, looked around and responded to the moral authority of independence movements in large parts of a world hitherto coloured pink. As a result, all institutions which had been founded for one purpose – the manning of the empire – were beginning to creak and groan as they adapted to a mission much less clearly defined. Christianity in England had allowed itself to be used as the ethical clothing for imperialism – we weren’t abroad to conquer, oh no, we were there to convert – and it had disgraced itself by providing moral gloss to justify the slaughter of the First World War. The Second World War had postponed the crisis but not averted it.

  Now, as harder questions were being asked about the character and purpose of the British Establishment, ‘Service to the Community’ was replacing ‘Service to the Empire’ as the ingratiating banner under which the public school sought to march. Anglicanism was paying the price. Culture, which had long been seen by public schools as only a tributary of religion, was, for an increasing number of boys and staff alike, coming to represent value in its own right. People of ideas were beginning to prevail over people of beliefs. The resident clergy were appropriately threatened. Although the school still had all the Tom Brown trappings – beatings, bullying, fagging and prefects, all the stuff of empire/religion – the newer teachers, fresh from post-war universities, were no longer recruited from the shires or the deeper recesses of Debrett’s. So struggles of adaptation made Lancing interesting in a way that my bull-headed preparatory school had never been. The school debating society would take on subjects which were much more far-reaching than anything in today’s insipid discourse. ‘Should advertising be banned?’, ‘Should private schools be abolished?’ and ‘Should the church be disestablished?’ were all argued with a passion that suggested that, were the motions carried, there might be a sporting chance of action. Everything, rightly or wrongly, felt as though things were in play. But unfortunately I was not, on contact with a far more stimulating prospect, turned at once into the popular chap that I had hoped. Nurture was to be no more successful at making me easy-going than nature had been.

  The school was approached from a rickety toll bridge over the charmless River Adur and up a long drive. Behind lay the mud-flats of Shoreham with its perspective of massive brown-brick power stations. The flat fields were criss-crossed with freezing ditches into which you had to plunge when doing three- and five-mile runs. Looking west, the landscape was thrown out of proportion by the scale of Lancing Chapel. The Centre Point of the South Downs, it had been flung up to a ridiculous height in fourteenth-century Gothic style by the Victorian founder, Nathaniel Woodard, who had created both school and chapel to do something about what he saw as ‘the ignorance and ungodliness of the middle classes’. He made sure from the off that even if the building were incomplete in his lifetime no sensible compromise would ever be possible. The chapel was going up and no one could take it down. Howard Roark could scarcely have done better. The chapel is still three million pounds short of being finished a hundred years later, the subject of endless reconsecrations, financial appeals and changes of architectural plan. Even in its present state, without the projected 325-foot tower at its end, it is the largest school chapel in the world. Attendance for all pupils was compulsory: a service every evening at six, and on Sundays a full Sung Eucharist in the morning, followed by Evensong at night. A lone Jewish pupil was excused kneeling and
praying, and allowed to sit at the back, but never excused one minute of the endless offices.

  The first thing that struck you about British public schools in the 1960s was how cold and dirty they were. Nowadays education has become a commodity like any other, a place you flog rather than a place where you’re flogged. Lavish brochures are mailed to prosperous addresses at home and overseas to suggest to ambitious Russians and Chinese the Sheraton-like luxury in which your child may acquire the practical knowledge to smooth his or her path to future advancement. Websites gleam with images of happy harmony. Like everything else, education is offered as a consumer deal, idealised through advertising. Come here, do well, move on. But fifty years ago schooling was neither utilitarian nor comfortable. Lancing’s conditions were as austere as its purpose. A wartime ethic, both of economy and of dedication, prevailed. Detachable collars were the school’s crafty way of ensuring they didn’t have the expense of washing our shirts too often. There was a thick ring of grime on the fold as we threw them, three times a week, into the basket. Electric waxing machines embedded filth into the extensive parquet but rarely removed it. Any kind of snivel, wart, growth or adolescent eruption was treated by matrons with their stinking cure-all: the sloshy application of a purple antiseptic called ‘gentian violet’. The overall impression was of dirty fingernails and dirty laundry. Little wonder that many of the boys were, in that evocative Australian phrase, ‘on the nose’.