The Blue Touch Paper Read online

  Lancing had its share of famous old boys and the best known was Evelyn Waugh, a devastating English stylist, who had arrived in 1917, discontent not to be somewhere more elevated. He noted that ‘wind, rain and darkness possessed the place’. Waugh also observed that ‘the food in Hall would have provoked mutiny in a mid-Victorian poor-house’. By 1960, little had changed. Most offensive, a sock was used nightly as a kind of primitive teabag and lowered, full of leaves, into a steaming urn. We ate a great many curried eggs, slimy fish roes, soggy toast with margarine, cold sardines and twisted slabs of rank haddock. Everything came with a crust, a skin. The weather was as filthy as the food. In particular, towards the end of 1962, a brutal winter took hold. The snow never left the ground for eight weeks. Your face ached, rigid in the icy wind, as you braced yourself turning a cloister corner. Wrapped in scarves, gloves and extra pullovers you rushed back at break to your house – mine was called Field’s – in order to clamber as best you could onto the hissing radiators, or to hold white sliced bread on a toasting fork against the dimpled white elements of the communal gas fire. An industrial tin of Nescafe stood close. To this day I can judge twenty minutes perfectly in my head to within a few seconds, thanks to the memory of that daily break.

  In his letters, Graham Greene has fun with the convention that whenever he wants to make a character in one of his books dishonest or unpleasant, he makes him a graduate of Lancing College. For Greene it was a private joke, a piece of mischievous biography intended to amuse his best friend Waugh. There was, Greene claimed, a particular sort of aspiring public school which produced a young man full of facile sociability and doubtful morals. He loved stressing the word ‘minor’ in that resonant term ‘minor public school’. Certainly at Lancing there was a definite sense of pretence, a feeling that we were in some way being asked to ape an unseen original. We had all been cast as walk-ons in a seaside repertory version of Goodbye Mr Chips. The bigger, more famous schools all had their eccentricities. It was therefore essential that we must have ours, including special names and conventions which made no sense outside the walls. Teachers had to be known as Tiger, Monkey or Dozy. Fags were known as underschools and lavatories were groves. Everything was in code, and the code had to be learnt. Some of the rules seemed to defy explanation. Maybe that was the point.

  For me, the place was a challenge from the start. Inside the classroom, I was fine. In lessons, even with the more self-consciously eccentric teachers – teachers who loved playing up to the quirky characters long service had assigned them – there was a sort of order, a world I understood and in which I had always prospered. But outside the classroom, in the big farty dormitories of ranked beds and wanked-in handkerchiefs, I was lost. The other boys, a lot of them from Surrey, seemed to have a social ease, a basic understanding of how the world worked which I entirely lacked. The children of clergy who made up a third of the school’s intake may have lagged behind in material prosperity, but they all had a sense of belonging which I could only envy. They gave the impression, false of course, that they had arrived at the school knowing each other already.

  Within the first term, after a certain amount of half-arsed ridicule, I adjusted my accent. Tones which had been regarded as highfalutin in Bexhill were mocked as plebeian when aired at Lancing. My first few weeks were rough, as I struggled to smooth my own corners rather than to have them knocked off by others. I knew enough never to mention that my family lived in a semi-detached, but I also knew that the reasons for my disorientation were more than social. I didn’t know what attitude to take. Did I like this place or didn’t I? Harewood had been easy to deal with – a brutal and stupid school against which all self-respecting pupils rebelled. It was that simple. But Lancing was not simple.

  Halfway through my first term, I realised that I would be less unhappy if I had the right friends. My motive was not snobbery but understanding. I needed sympathetic companions who might help me get some insight into how this foreign culture – part Stanley Matthews, part Benjamin Britten – worked, and where I might fit in it. The problem was, I had no idea how to acquire friends, and failing made me unhappier still. I couldn’t get in with the right people, because, self-ignorant, I had no idea who the right people for me might be. This feeling persisted throughout my adolescence. In the 1980s, I would feel a strong identification with the work of John Hughes. Films like The Breakfast Club and Pretty in Pink, released for teen enjoyment, fascinated me because they detailed the agonies of social exclusion. The films were usually about girls, but my own dilemmas resonated closely enough with those of Molly Ringwald or Ally Sheedy. Everywhere at Lancing were enviable cliques of cheerful and self-confident young men, laddish in grey flannels and herringbone jackets, hands in pockets, ties casual at half-mast. I would see them lounging together, laughing in the school tuck shop, eating Flat Harrys and drinking Coke. They didn’t even bother to look up before dismissing the idea of my anguished and unconvincing company out of hand. My first friend, inevitably, was the lone Jewish boy, Peter Konig, because he too was contemplating Lancing in bewilderment. At least in Konig’s case there was a simple explanation – religious upbringing. In mine, what? Rank stupidity?

  My housemaster was Patrick Halsey, a humane and decent man. Then in his fifties, he had been a central pillar of the school’s hierarchy since before the war, when Lancing had been forced to migrate deep into the patrician country wildness of Shropshire to avoid the bombs. If Michael Phillips was the worst kind of Tory, Patrick was the best. A celibate bachelor, often come upon unexpectedly in corridors with a pipe in one hand and a glass of whisky and a copy of the Spectator in the other, he was married to his vocation. His quarters were immediately above his charges. He lived and slept school, leaving only occasionally between terms to visit his ageing mother in Berkhamsted. Religiously devout, he wore his love of teaching with an infectious light-heartedness which, we were told, dismayed his more pompous colleagues, especially the churchy ones, but which delighted boys. He had a weakness for practical jokes, the most obscure of which involved one night putting the whole house on alert because, he said, someone had stolen the amphetamines of a visiting monk. Since, innocents, we had no idea even what uppers were, the joke was lost on us.

  Patrick was proud of having been at Eton with a fellow pupil called Lord Remnant. It seemed to him a symbolic name for a world he believed was unlikely to survive much longer. Similarly, he admired another Etonian, the future prime minister Alec Douglas-Home, for daring to admit to doing his economics with matchsticks. Patrick himself taught matchstick history. He worked within an unashamedly amateur tradition. Goaded on by a willing audience, his classes were peppered with well-loved Adolf Hitler imitations, screamed at full pitch and accompanied by elaborate foot-stamping and arm-raising. He could reel off whole speeches, often ending with his dentures becoming unfixed. The memory of them has sustained me subsequently in the darkest moments of play- and film-making. How often, in the stalls, have I muttered to myself what became in Patrick’s impersonation Hitler’s catchphrase, ‘Meine Geduld ist zu Ende.’ My patience is at an end.

  It was Patrick’s personal kindness to which I clung during some desperate days of adjustment. The main highlight of my early time at the school was the obligation to write a weekly letter home. For me it was not a burden but an opportunity. I continued corresponding well into my thirties, partly because Mum was so conscious of the cost of the telephone that conversation with her was rushed and unsatisfactory, but more seriously because it was good for me to bring order to chaos. Writing to my mother offered a lifeline, a welcome chance to process my experiences and present them, not perhaps exactly as they had really happened, but in a way which might take some of the sting out. Everything was safer once it was set down. From pride, I never gave any intimation of the anguish or the loneliness. Enemies of literature will say that this is what professional writers do for a living. They seize hold of the complex reality of the world and reorder it the way they might wish it to be, rather tha
n the way it is. My letters were not particularly interesting, nor were they well written. There was no sign of any early aptitude. It would be another ten years before, for the first time in my life, I stumbled on a gift for writing dialogue. The discovery of that gift would change my whole life. But discovery it was.

  My problem for now was that at Lancing I hadn’t found a role. I needed a mask to hide behind. I began to find it through my cultural journeys to London in the holidays when I would stay with my aunt Peggy, who had fallen on rough times. Before her marriage to the promising young doctor had ended unhappily, they had moved from a large house in Bath to a cramped flat above the surgery in the heart of Brixton, in which Peggy was now bringing up four children alone. My mother had been deeply unsettled when she was forced to testify as a witness to the physical damage done to Peggy by domestic violence. On more than one occasion Alan had thrown her down the stairs. But although she had so little money, Peggy treated me with extraordinary hospitality, cooking up beautiful meals of roast chicken, stuffing, gravy, peas and roast potatoes – meals on occasions more lavish than anything she was offering to her own children. ‘We’re having sausages.’ She and they, my cousins Ann, Lindsay, Lesley and Graham, were cheerful and welcoming, a sort of second family, knocked around by ill fortune and finding good grace to survive the kind of unforeseen hardship my branch of the family had never known. Life had kicked the gentility out of them, and they seemed more robust and warmer for it.

  Going warily down Landor Road after such a feast, I would catch the tube from Clapham North to the West End. I was thirteen when, alone, I saw Harold Pinter’s play The Caretaker in its first production at the Duchess Theatre. I have a strong memory of sitting in the Upper Circle as the curtain went up and Alan Bates stood, feral, alluring, in a leather jacket, waiting to pounce, as sharp in mind as in dress. Bates was my first sighting of those dangerous young men – James Fox, David Hemmings, Terence Stamp – who by paying a British debt to Brando were, alongside their gleaming counterparts – Julie Christie, Vanessa Redgrave, Charlotte Rampling – to give the best sixties cinema its glittering edge. In the interval I looked down amazed as full afternoon tea in good china was served on trays in the stalls to patrons remaining in their seats. Had they been watching the same play as me? But at that age it made little difference what I saw. Just being in London was enough.

  The mask I was reaching for, inevitably, was that of an intellectual. And I was helped in this ambition by my first real friendship with a boy from another house at school. Nigel Andrews, though from a far more confident family, spent his holidays as I did, buying cheap day returns and trailing round theatres and cinemas. Pretty quickly, we decided we might as well do it together. Often we would meet at 10 a.m. to take in an early film, then go to two plays before heading off from Victoria or Waterloo to our separate homes. If there were any spare time at all on the concourse, we would also dip into the news theatres which offered newsreels, cartoons and, best of all, Edgar Lustgarten reconstructions of famous murders, gloatingly recounted, and always ending with the resonant words, ‘And then he was hanged by the neck . . . until he was dead.’ For me at least, film and theatre were never fantasy. They were welcome relief from fantasy.

  Although our enthusiasm was equal, our tastes were widely divergent. Nigel’s passion for the 1960 film of The Fall of the House of Usher with Vincent Price meant that he rushed me at the first opportunity to a morning showing of Price’s The Pit and the Pendulum a year later, every moment of which he relished like fine wine. At fourteen, he could already discourse on the superiority of Roger Corman films to Hammer. In the evenings, he took special pleasure in watching plays with actors like Margaret Lockwood and Nigel Patrick, whose Palaeolithic creakiness held him spellbound. In between he liked to re-fuel in Wimpy Bars, where his favoured dessert was a Banana Pretty, a pastry loaded up with baby mash and synthetic cream. I, in contrast, was trying to get us, underage, into Never on Sunday and La Dolce Vita. From my standpoint, Nigel’s preference for the garish over the good was perverse, but I could already feel something spontaneous and touching in his pleasure. Susan Sontag had not yet written her ‘Notes on “Camp”’ – ‘No. 56: Camp is a tender feeling . . . No. 58: The ultimate camp statement: it’s good because it’s awful’ – but if, for any reason, she had chosen to do her early research among Sussex schoolboys, Nigel, a pathfinder by genuine instinct not by imitation, would have been on hand to help. It would have been impossible for any of us to guess that Nigel’s willingness to go into raptures about trash would later gain him sustained tenure as the chief film critic of the Financial Times. In those earnest times, how could anyone have imagined that it would one day be thought unexceptional for someone as clever as Nigel to spend their time writing hagiography on the films of Arnold Schwarzenegger? The post-modern revolution which would fashionably advantage the unknowing over the intentional lay a long way ahead. As a repentant Pauline Kael admitted at the end of her life, ‘When we championed trash culture, we had no idea it would become the only culture.’

  Following Nigel, I had the equipment and a little of the knowledge to act out a part. I was the kind of boy who woke up in the morning feeling fine. But because I had resolved to be an intellectual, I knew that the first qualification was to behave as if mornings were difficult. I would stagger out of bed as though life were a burden, in what I imagined to be the approved egghead manner. If I had been allowed to wear dark glasses to the first lessons of the day, I would have done it like a shot. Other pupils started calling me a pseud, but being a pseud bothered me far less than being a nothing. Rather than be an individual idiot, I could be a generic idiot. It was progress. I was encouraged in this decision by the example of a new French teacher. In a school full of masters in grey turn-up flannels, leather patched jackets and panama hats, Harry Guest materialised, not long out of Cambridge. He had published Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes in an undergraduate magazine, and was himself a practising poet in drainpipe trousers, chic button-down shirts and slim knitted ties.

  With his loping walk, Harry didn’t look like his colleagues and his eloquent enthusiasm for all things continental meant that he most certainly didn’t sound like them either. The names coming from his lips – Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Mallarmé – were not at that time common currency in West Sussex. Nor had Lancing ever before had a master offering to host evenings of poetry and bebop with the Inigo Kilborn Quintet. Harry was also responsible for the maintenance of an Art Film Society which allowed sixth-formers to meet in the chemistry labs four times a term for the projection of films by Buñuel and D. W. Griffith. At the end of each term, I would ask Harry for a reading list, which he would set down in his immaculate handwriting. Back at home, I would lie on my bed, working my way through Forster, Balzac, Koestler, Wells, Camus and Ford Madox Ford, without understanding much of what I was reading, but aware that, come the new term, Harry would want to know what I thought of them. When, towards the end of my time at Lancing, Cyril Connolly published a list of the ‘100 Greatest Books of the Century’ in the Sunday Times, I had read sixty-two. Entirely thanks to Harry.

  I never felt that Harry was as keen on me as I was on him – he had favourites among boys and I was not one of them – but it never bothered me. What he was giving me was far too important for me to worry about whether my feelings were hurt in the process of getting it. A defining moment came some years on when I was in the sixth form and Harry decided with his glamorous American fiancée Lynn to give a dinner party for some pupils in his flat above a shop in Shoreham. At a certain point, Harry pulled down a book from a shelf. It was a paperback copy of The Death of Tragedy by George Steiner, a volume of literary criticism which was enjoying a distinct vogue. Its egregious badness seemed to consume him. ‘How can anyone take this seriously?’ he kept asking. I had noticed as he opened it that Harry’s copy was already ominously disfigured, both with scrawling in the margin and with thick black lines through whole paragraphs of Steiner’s prose. But by the time pudding cam
e, and perhaps a certain amount of red wine had gone down, Harry was becoming more and more agitated. ‘This book’, Harry said, ‘is taken seriously. It’s taken seriously. And it’s full of schoolboy howlers. Referring to Shakespeare’s King Lear, Steiner writes of the blinded Lear standing on what he believes to be the cliffs of Dover, and falling. And yet everyone knows’ – Harry climaxed with tremendous emphasis – ‘everyone knows it was not King Lear who was blinded, it was Gloucester. How can anyone take seriously a book which confuses King Lear with the Duke of Gloucester?’ At this, Harry took the book and threw it into the wastepaper basket. At the same moment, he burst into tears.

  I had seen enough to grow used to the idea that adults’ passions tended to erupt unexpectedly, but never had I seen anyone driven to such lengths by a mere book. The lesson I learned that night was that, for good or ill, there were people who thought literature enormously important, as important, it seemed, as life or love. Since school I have witnessed a good few pieces of violent behaviour brought on by real or imaginary deficiencies in works of art, but I have never seen a reaction so pure and purely devoid of self-consciousness. Harry could not endure a book he thought bad.

  Back at home, my parents had long realised that I had grown into a bookish adolescent, but also one who was becoming mysterious to them. I could see my father once or twice looking at me and asking himself whether I really could be his son. He was transferring to ever bigger ships, finishing up on the SS Oriana, which alongside the Canberra became the pride of the P&O fleet. But with no intimation yet of how popular cruising would become from the 1970s onwards, Dad would repeatedly tell me that aviation had destroyed the merchant navy. On no account should I consider following his trade. He had become obsessed with a full-length parody LP of My Fair Lady, which, with Zasu Pitts’ and Reginald Gardiner’s help, became My Square Laddie. ‘I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face’ became ‘I’m Kinda Partial to Her Puss’. He played it every day he was home, Brahms now taking second place. As I became less fearful of his worldliness, so my relationship with Dad was heading for a crisis. It duly arrived one Christmas evening when we were seated round the table finishing turkey sandwiches. Dad was giving us the details of his latest voyage, and railing against a particular passenger whom he kept describing as a ‘typical flashy Jew-boy’. He had used the word ‘Jew-boy’ several times before I burst, screaming semi-audibly, ‘Do you have any idea how fucking offensive you’re being?’ and then running out of the room before I could see how much damage I had done. Inevitably, my mother was more upset than my father, who was simply puzzled. What on earth had he done wrong? But for me the moment was significant. When Dad’s leave in the UK coincided with my being at school, he and my mother would still take me for roast lunch in the Old Ship Hotel in Brighton. He still rubbed his hands together as he ordered. ‘And a nice Bordeaux.’ But something had shifted in the balance of power between us. His indifference no longer defined me.