Noisy at the Wrong Times (19 page)

We had found an enormous mound of pig dung in the woods behind the marina hard. It was blended with straw, and it was hot and steamy from the composting process. Startled by the location, we nevertheless considered it of huge potential. I think it was Rob’s idea, but we decided to build a pig shit igloo. Then someone suggested building a tunnel to another igloo. Then another. We ordered ourselves into teams, relaying the movement of dung, passing it to other teams who were to build the walls or the tunnels. Soldier ants would have envied our precision and industriousness. Soon, there was a complex of pig shit igloos in the clearing covering many square metres. We reduced the huge pile to nothing as we developed our new compound. And then we would sit in them and smoke rollups. It was a terrifically creative enterprise that lasted days until one of the igloos collapsed, engulfing several boys in manure. Not being familiar with structural engineering, we failed to build supports, thinking the curvature of the walls would work along the lines of real igloos or the vaulted ceiling of the Duomo in Florence. However, pig shit has different properties to that of ice and fired brick, and the inevitable happened when the moisture had mostly evaporated from the sticky goo of the building material. When we had dug our friends out, we
decided to find something else to occupy ourselves. All good things come to an end, even ones made of pig shit.

Our summer passed from craze to craze. We would lock intensely into a particular activity and exhaust its entertainment value completely within a few days. Diving into the bamboos that surrounded the biology pond took care of a few days, but too many of us got stabbed by ground level stumps for it to continue for too long. Climbing down into the voids inside huge unhealthy trees occupied our attention for a while, until someone fell off a branch and injured himself and another got stuck in the hole in the trunk. Our biology master had told us that there were lots of rabbits afflicted with myxomatosis in the area; deaf and blind with bulging eyes, they were pitiful. We were instructed that if we came across one, it should be killed humanely and put out of its misery. Killing it humanely did not, I suspect, involve creeping up behind it and booting it ten feet into the air. Nor did it require us to tie the carcass to the crossbar of a goal and throw homemade bamboo spears at it. We spent hours hunting and humanely slaughtering rabbits in this way, but it ended when Rob took a large stick and whacked a dead rabbit that was strung up. Its head flew off and the corpse spun around the bar like a bloody Catherine wheel, spraying all of us with innards and brown stuff that looked suspiciously like runny rabbit shit. Our culling days came to an abrupt halt for there is a world of difference between fermenting pig poo and the intestinal discharge of a dead, diseased rabbit. Good God, how awful we sound.

The summer of 1977 was a glorious adventure that held the potential, at all times, for calamity. It was when we found a freedom that was more than just a lack of parental supervision; it was the kind of autonomy of spirit that open spaces, endless time and a shared experience affords. I couldn’t imagine finding the equivalent happiness in Fulham. The opportunities
offered by the green, smelly,
epic
space of Suffolk came with caveats and rules that tapped us constantly on the shoulder, but this was the price of Woolverstone’s system, and it brought a reward beyond measure; it was one hell of a
quid pro quo
. My development as an individual was enormous, and it was when the school’s ethos paid spectacular dividends. I know that there may be many reading this whose childhood summers were like this always, that endless days in the country, exploring and challenging the environment were as common and as familiar as cornflakes for breakfast, but it wasn’t for us, you see. It just wasn’t.

School sports day came and went, and being a track monitor (which meant sitting at the side of the track, moving hurdles, holding tapes, carrying bags etc), I saw at first hand the wondrous feats of athletes the school had nurtured. Sam O’Garro running the 100 metres on grass in 10.4 seconds is burned permanently in my consciousness, and the close rivalry he had with Neil Rice, both of them in Halls, was special indeed. These were two sprinters of international class for their age and I don’t think either of them gave it a second thought. O’Garro ran exactly like the legendary American 400 metre runner Michael Johnson: straight of back, effortless.

As a track monitor, one would expect me to find little of threat, sitting quietly beside the track, moving hurdles or picking up bits of clothing, yet that wouldn’t be like me at all. I found half an old aluminium arrow shaft and sat idly sticking it into the ground. Pushing too hard, it snapped, and as the back of my hand descended past the embedded shaft, the jagged end took out an inch-long chunk of my flesh. I felt nothing at first, but noticed the shiny, speckled filling of the shaft and thought how curious it was, since I always imagined they were hollow. They were: my flesh, decorated with nerve endings, was the filling I saw, and I soon noticed the pumping
eruption of blood from my hand, too. Off to sickbay I went, with a wound too wide to be stitched, and one that would take the whole summer to heal because I refused to stop swimming.

In the following year I think I won the throwing the cricket ball and javelin competitions and eventually, I competed in shot putt and javelin in the county championships where, in the javelin I came about third, but thinking the shot putt in the bag, I managed to lose to a scrawny waif whose technique was flawless. I strolled into the circle having seen the competition grunt its way to nothing more than measly distances. Flinging the shot several metres further than the nearest previous distance, I noted that only one thrower was left, and he looked incapable of picking up the shot, let alone pitching it any sort of length. Indeed, he seemed to struggle when lifting it and staggered into the circle, but when he held it to his chin, he spun like a whip across the concrete throwing area and sent the bloody thing soaring into the air. All of us, including the judges, watched with mouths open as the shot sailed three metres beyond my throw. I resolved never to underestimate anybody based on appearances.

With Neil Pearson dressed in a cassock and looking for all the world like a clean-shaven Jesus, the school play, ‘A man for all seasons’, was a hit that went further over my head than the winning shot putt. More my level, I played the back end of a cow in a puppet show. I insisted on authenticity and invented a rudimentary urinating device, which allowed me to squirt yellow liquid through a hole in the suit. It knocked them dead. Showing off onstage was to be a strong feature of life at Woolverstone.

And so the academic year was drawing to a close. It had seemed so short, full of incident and drama. Rugby was already in our blood, and we were getting used to being winners, something that became evident as we arrogantly sauntered
around London in the holidays. Woolverstone demanded we consider ourselves to be the best, and we needed very little encouragement to go along with the idea. The long ten-week summer holiday felt like a reward for making it through that first year’s tribulations and as I returned to Fulham I was changed. I know I was. Climbing roofs and pissing off the porters just seemed so terribly mundane after running dares to the Woolverstone marina in the dead of night to steal the sign from the chandlery. And how could a kickabout in the flats compare with a full-blooded slaying of fifteen posh kids from Norwich? In that first summer, my primary school friends and mates from the estate began to melt from my mind as I spent my entire time walking the streets of London with various friends I had made at Woolverstone. We were special. We knew we were. Woolverstone had told us.

The relating of stories in these pages may give the impression that it was all sweetness and light at the school. Memory plays tricks, doesn’t it? It is not an exaggeration to say that, on balance, we did not truly relish being there, not when we stopped to think about it anyway. Despite our surprising compliance, some things just could not be accepted easily: the rules, the hierarchy, the control and the traditions. Maybe it was impossible for kids like us to be parachuted into a vast playground of unbounded potential and be expected to get our heads down over a textbook at the same time. My report book was acceptable, if not spectacular, and there was clear evidence that masters were onto me. It was too early to be concerned, anyway, so I got back to London with a sense of pride and contentment.

Then, as with every preceding school break, people looked at me differently, as though they expected to find horns had sprouted or hooves grown. Friends on the estate, before I drifted away from them, were full of questions, and their
mouths dropped at the stories of punishments, adventures and day-to-day life of a boarding school. These truly were tales from another world. All of them agreed that they would retaliate if a teacher tried to slipper them, and none would accept being told what to do by another boy, even an older one. To them, Woolverstone might well have been a borstal. But none of them had the guts to say that within earshot of my mother.

The remarkable accomplishment that Woolvo could rightly claim as that first academic year drew to a close was the change in all of us. Fulham Court, Eelbrook Common, North End Road market, those things that in my world had always sat proudly at the point where the sky met the land became small, unimportant and insignificant. I felt like an explorer who had travelled beyond the frontier of our domain and had seen things, wonderful things. I felt, in reality, like a stranger. No doubt some were thinking that I had been robbed of my loyalty to my community and the very neighbourhood that had created, nurtured and provided my childhood. But that is not how I felt. I sensed an incipient desire to break for that border again and again, for freedom. I glimpsed the limitations of what just ten months before I had believed to be limitless because the inner city had been able to trick me – and those like me – into the belief that its shackles were, in fact, wings. At Woolverstone I took flight in the summer of ’77, but the restraints still chaffed at my ankles when I returned home. I suppose that the battle for my future began then, wings beating furiously, trying to pull me from the anchors, but it would be many years before the inner city, for want of a better phrase, would release its son. I sometimes wonder if, in truth, its ties and binds have ever been fully ruptured, but having even the ability to consider it at all must say something.

I had turned twelve in the May of ’77, and my interest was firmly shifting towards the opposite sex. We had parties all
through the summer with girls from our respective parts of London. I had started doing holiday work in a sweet shop in Fulham, and there I met Alison, the much younger sister of the man who managed the shop. I worked behind the counter with Alison, and my brothers and friends would come into the shop to clean it out. Stock control was cursory since the manager was busy zooming about London in his Porsche and so sweets, cigarettes and sundry other items were on tap in our shop, whose position opposite the police station meant frequent custom from the boys in blue.

Alison had lots of friends, and so I made sure all my pals were frequently around, although with a collective libido the size of a supertanker, they needed little encouragement. We would all snuffle and jostle at the threshold of whichever house hosted the latest party, scanning the darkness for signs of female life: frankly, it was like being at the heart of a pack of dogs stalking bitches in heat, able to locate a fresh, sweet teenage girl at one hundred paces. We were blessed with the
desire
to be urbane, but that’s where it ended, since as young boys ourselves, sophisticates we most certainly were not. However, as many of the girls we hung around with would remark, we were definitely
different
. It was during that first summer that I had my first proper girlfriend, Samantha. She was more a fully–formed sixteen year old than the thirteen that she actually was. but I was eager to put all the things I had been boasting about at school into practice. She had sisters who called me Voluptuous Volps, which I thought was a compliment at the time. It was a terrific summer holiday, but the looming return to Woolverstone was a nuisance. Still, Samantha would write to me “every day”, which would win me a few credibility points, although several of my Woolvo coterie were busy galavanting with Samantha’s friends, and so I would have competition.

SHOCK AND AWE

S
amantha had nice big curly handwriting that took up space, meaning long letters on thick pages of pink writing paper, which were then crammed into thicker pink envelopes that landed on the table with a thud. Morris would give out the post at breakfast, and we always waited eagerly for the arrival of anything from girls we knew or were involved with. Samantha’s letters were a treat, and she wrote frequently, soaking her letters in Anäis Anäis perfume and ensuring the outside was decorated with anagrams like S.W.A.L.K. Being mocked by those at table for the soppiness of such letters never struck too hard since it was easy to discern jealousy.

Samantha’s letters were in themselves barely entertaining. It was the receiving of them that mattered. I was very fond of her in that intense, new-experience, obsessive kind of way that young men get, but I was never overly interested in the mundane day-to-day reportage of her writings. I scanned the letters quickly to find examples of her love for me, how she felt about me, what she thought of me. Having found them, I would read them out to the hungry audience, busy chomping on cornflakes or chasing fried eggs around the grease in their plates. After a few weeks of gushing over me, she sent a letter, which, on examination, contained frequent mention of someone called Mark, her friend. The next letter she sent made such recurrent mention of the git (who was going to be a pro golfer, incidentally) that she talked herself into dumping me by the end of the second page. Mark
this
, Mark
that
. Apparently,
the distance and long periods of not seeing me were taking their toll on our relationship and well, Mark
was
going to be a professional golfer after all. She was sure I would understand and that we could go on being friends and so on and so forth. I’ve hated golfers ever since.