Noisy at the Wrong Times (28 page)

How effortlessly the memories tumble from the past. I can so much more easily recall a day from over thirty years ago than I can a moment from last week. Such is the nature of memory. Do these reminiscences serve anybody but myself? Who’ll learn anything from my errant childishness, my profanity, misbehaviour and negligence? I have retraced my life at Woolverstone and evoked my inglorious adolescent self, in love with its reflection. I’m not Stanley “Tookie” Williams, who turned many gunslingers from crime and was the saviour of countless LA gang members whilst languishing on Death Row. Williams pumped out confession after confession, but that didn’t stop Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger from pumping him full of lethal chemicals. Confessions that seek redress or look for brownie points tend to fall on deaf ears these days, and this whole exercise has not been an effort to change my ways, either. I haven’t the slightest hope of an epiphany; I’ll always swear and cuss and continue to tell people that they are idiots. My way is set. But the confessions I do make have never been to seek absolution, for none can ever give that to me. If you recall, I wasn’t even prepared to take that risk with the Almighty himself.

But Woolverstone
hadn’t
failed. It is not so much that it would return to weave its spell but rather that the magic itself was woven through me. It planted little pictures in my mind that offered alternatives whenever I was contemplating my future. It gave me (often ignored) options.

This book began as a record of a school through the eyes of one pupil, but it became clear that if the reader is to understand the miracles Woolverstone performed, he must also understand the material with which it had to work. Travelling through my early childhood has not always been a fun exercise, and I had never before held up for examination the two parts of my existence (pre- and post-Woolverstone); I still know that boy from Fulham Court, he is still in there and appears regularly, but the stage upon which he performs is the thing that surprises. Neither is this a self-help book on how to become a millionaire, and I expect the reader to find few answers to the inadequacies or dissatisfactions of their own lives. I never became a millionaire, and I haven’t always made the right decisions in my life. I think I can be content that I did a hell of a lot better than I might have done. I am convinced that the contrast between my worst potential life option and where I am now, is far, far greater than the disparity between the present-day me and a wealthy stockbroker.

I know, too, that whatever happens with this memoir, no matter how many read it, it will not, on any one of its pages, contain a Wildean phrase, a nugget of Freudian insight, not one epic Sewellian paragraph, filled to the edges with instruction, knowledge and balletic prose. Most depressingly, neither will it have a phrase that is “polished until it catches the sun,” as Clive James once described his style. Actually, I say “depressingly”, but I don’t suppose I mean that because I am aware that a genius with words is as inbuilt and natural as a talent with numbers. I don’t scold myself for having neither. I
tend to suppress more than express anyway, and I am sure I can do
something
better than all of those I mention. Furthermore, I am as convinced as I can be that this is probably the best I could ever have done, which is commendable, since giving my best to anything is not an event that frequently punctuates the story of my life. What distinguishes great writers is not only what they say on a page but the pool of knowledge and learning from which they choose the appropriate words that eventually get turned into ink. They will travel along the rank and file of their minds, of thought and knowledge and influence, picking judiciously those that suit the purpose. More is left behind than is brought forward for us to share. I, on the other hand, round up everything I have, do my best to tidy it up before throwing it out into the world.

That’s the difference you see, I never, ever, allowed myself to absorb enough of what was thrown
at
me; I never had the sense to examine closely enough the things that I deemed uninteresting so that they might actually become so. To me, everything had to have a point, even though I was too youthful or just plain stupid to know what was, and what wasn’t, pointless. Everything I considered unimportant had the door slammed in its face.

I know better now. I know that everything academic or cultural – especially cultural – in its way, has a part to play in our journey. Variety is most certainly the spice of life in this respect; I feel the juddering impact of opera in the same way that I luxuriate in the vocal wonder of Bobby Womack; I can be irritated by the tone of a book but appreciate the author’s idea, and I remain able to enjoy the blissfully exquisite lilt found in both Grieg’s “Varen” and John Martyn’s “Solid Air”. That’s a privilege, for sure, to have the capacity for both and all things in between. I thank my lucky stars for the all-consuming passion I have had for music since I was knee-high
to a small Italian opera composer. My response to music is essentially an emotional, visceral one; at a push, when colleagues in the office, taught in college that continental reactions to music must be treated with the sharpest of suspicion, I am able to hold my own in opposition. But more often than not, I will merely suggest they are talking bollocks. I suppose I was, and am, the antithesis of what E M Forster called the ‘underdeveloped heart’ when referring to the public schoolboys of England. Contrary to his thesis, I was, am, all heart; my mind and body were the things that struggled. And I am Italian am I not, a race whose well honed positives are as well documented as their weaknesses? I am an unquenchably emotional and anxious individual, there is no ‘off’ switch – just a dial that turns it up or down. I’m melodramatic, too, and Woolverstone never managed to curb that side of me at all. Did my life make me like that? Did I learn my anxieties from my mother? A psychotherapist once told me that I had, and I don’t know for sure if he is right, but I choke and weep at films and operas and almost everything in between. I am, however, keen that few should ever notice.

So whatever, wherever or whoever I am, I am probably just a product of all the things that formed the corridor of my life’s journey up to this point; nothing particularly exceptional there then. When I walked out of Woolverstone for the last time, I was certain, convinced, absolutely bloody sure that I knew precisely where I was going and what I would do. I’d flunked my exams deliberately, so I had to believe that, didn’t I? I was still a Fulham boy on the surface of it, and that’s where I wanted to go. The big wide world was to be my domain.

Rugby still held me in thrall and, quite quickly after leaving, I received phone calls from people working for the (still amateur) clubs in London and who knew masters at the school. I didn’t do anything about it for several months, but
eventually I was invited to a training session with Rosslyn Park Colts one Thursday evening. The pitch was waterlogged so the session didn’t involve any playing but would be a fitness workout, and they asked if I would go back in a couple of weeks. In the meantime, another player from Epsom and Ewell RC asked if I would go and play for them and agreed to pick me up in Fulham for training sessions and matches. I was pretty puffed up about the fact that clubs seemed to be after me, so I took the opportunity offered by E&E and at the first training session, faced with a group of behemoths, I said my favoured position was wing forward because there was no way I was going into a front row with that lot. It wasn’t improbable either since I loved to tackle, was quick across the ground and very aggressive in both. They started me off in the fourths or fifths, I can’t recall, but I do remember scoring quite a few tries in each game and twice being promoted to the next team up.

At around the same time, I remember going back to Woolverstone for what was a regular Old Boys’ reunion and meeting Steve Halliday and Adrian Thompson, two fantastic players who were playing first class rugby at Harlequins and my team-mates against the First VX, when I was invited to play hooker for the Old Boys. Outside the Butt and Oyster, both asked me if I was still playing, and Adrian Thompson, almost certainly unaware of the dangers, said to the gathered throng that I would be England hooker one day! With such a commendation ringing in my ears I returned to Epsom and Ewell ready to prove him correct. However, my neck, twice badly injured during my school career, was playing havoc, and I went to see a specialist. His verdict was unequivocal: “Well, Michael, you can either walk, or play rugby, the choice is yours”. It was devastating to have a burgeoning sports career curtailed at 18 years old, and to this day it still smarts.

Ludicrously, I worked in a trendy hairdresser for a few months before I’d had enough of blue rinse Chelseaites and the piss artist ex-newsreader who came in everyday. I began to hack at my friends’ hair whilst at school; I don’t know why, but it was probably because I just thought I was good at everything. Some of us had done holiday work washing hair in Scissors, the single trendiest hairdresser in London at the time, so it may have come from that and I thought it was worth a try when I left. So, I became a junior at Annie Russell’s salon in the King’s Road. I did have a talent for it, apparently, but the whole thing didn’t suit me at all. Some of the women clients were foul-tempered, rude and whined about having sensitive scalps or bad necks, and their perfume was of the expensive type that weirdly, always had a note of sweaty body about it. It wasn’t long before I had worked out a system of scalding them accidentally at the washbasins or being a little vigorous in my scrubbing. The final straw came when I was asked to make a cup of coffee for Reginald Bosanquet, who was as drunk as a lord as usual and who, because he lived in the flats above the shop, was in almost everyday. On this day he was in Bloody Mary Mood and abused my coffee-making abilities. Time to leave, I thought. He died a couple of years later, which came as no surprise to me whatsoever. Despite the apparently wasted 6 months Annie Russell’s represented, it was my first experience of wealthy clientele, and the conversations in the break-room among the gay staff were instructional in many ways. Everybody was impossibly trendy, and after a while I didn’t feel like a fish out of water, but goodness me, I felt like slapping some of the staff. I had never really seen an adult tantrum until I’d worked there. (An interesting footnote: I still know how to cut hair and even have my prized pair of Solingen scissors, purchased at great expense and which are still in mint condition, never having needed sharpening in over thirty years.)

I left Annie Russell’s, chuckling to myself at the thought that I had ever imagined hairdressing offered me a path to fame and fortune. I’ll go for something more my cup of tea, I thought, and ended up at a builder’s merchants in the sales office, where I would take large telephone orders from building firms. This was more my style, I decided: doing deals, using my wits and outsmarting people. I enjoyed it because I got the chance to barter and argue over prices, and one afternoon, I negotiated a huge order with one of the biggest builders in the country. I put the phone down with a flourish, punching the air in triumph. Dave, the dour sales manager of Polish extraction, congratulated me until he took a look at the sales sheet. He wanted to stab me when it became clear that my lavish brokerage had clinched a deal that committed the firm to selling a mammoth order of plastic guttering at less than cost. Soon after, they moved me into the yard, where I was taught to drive a forklift and got very fit lifting and carrying bags of sand and cement. I rose to the giddy heights of timber foreman in a matter of weeks, but it was manual labour. I had already taken a step backwards.

In south London, where I worked, there were plenty of people in the yard who were ready to mock my ‘public’ school past. I never denied it or ran shy of it since I always wanted to appear different from them, but the contrast between us in that yard was not as marked as it had been during our respective educations. I was kidding nobody but me. How could I tell myself I was different from them when I was sitting in the same hut, drinking the same tea, trudging through the same mud and enjoying the same bawdy, wilfully offensive humour? I beg you not to misunderstand me because these were not people I looked down my nose at. They were straightforward, working class individuals, honest and lacking in pretension and from precisely the same background as me, but they had not been offered the
chances I had been. And there were things in my head, experiences, put there by Woolverstone, that I could neither ignore, nor shake. I liked theatre and classical music, I had sung in choirs, I had studied books none of my workmates had ever heard of, I was a bag of contradictions, and I could sometimes spy on the faces of my fellow labourers a look that asked “why are you here?” George, a lecherous old soldier who supervised the yard, stung me one afternoon with a comment he may or may not have intended to have much impact, but it struck home like a sniper’s bullet. As I trudged back into the hut, soaked and tired from stacking ten tons of sandbags onto pallets (twenty five bags to a pallet, ten pallets), he snorted in derisory fashion, his feet by the paraffin fire, a cup of tea in his hand.

“I bet you never thought you’d end up doing this.”

I looked at him, not sure how to respond, but I brooded on his remark for the next twenty minutes. Eventually, the lights went on. That hut, perched under a railway arch near Clapham Junction, was the scene of my revelation and I do mean a revelation. Bells rang, horns sounded, shame and regret and embarrassment consumed me.
I’m better than this.

So I found some words for George. I’d like to think that the glint in his eye as I said them was because he saw himself as a mentor, that he had given me the awareness to take my opportunity, but to be honest, it was probably because the eye was a glass replacement for the one he’d lost in Aden.

‘You know what, George? I
am
better than this. I didn’t go to that school so I could be told what to do by an old git like you or to stack bags in the pissing rain.”