Noisy at the Wrong Times (5 page)

“I willa fucky killa you!” screamed my Mum as another shuddering clout hit its mark. “My son issa NOT inna fucky borstal!”

Even amid the guttural squawks of shock and the noise of the baying crowd, the emphasis was resounding. The woman had made the mistake of suggesting to my mother that Serge, rather than being in a school that required an 11–plus pass grade to get in, was, merely by dint that he slept there, in a borstal. If she had mentioned that Matteo actually
was
in a borstal, there would have been no problem. As the sickening sound of another slap resonated between the rosebuds I heard my mother snarl, “Notta dissa one anyway!”

* * *

Mum’s fight in the flats ended any lingering doubts I might have been harbouring about the purpose of Woolverstone and the value that it held for her. With an absent husband, two older children on a knife-edge between total apathy and disaster and the lingering threat of more to come, Woolverstone’s welcome embrace was something she reciprocated by clutching it in her arms with great pride; you could criticise much about her and her children if you so pleased, but Woolverstone was unimpeachable. The ruckus also meant that my friends became exquisitely polite whenever they called for me.

Politeness was always for a reason, never natural. We would
be polite to shopkeepers if we thought they might top up the bag with a few extra gobstoppers, or we would offer gracious assistance to the porter when it seemed possible he would throw us a fifty pence piece. More likely, the porter would be hurling abuse and fury at us as we scurried from the roof of his workshop. Now, however, there were two very compelling reasons to be especially polite to my mother: the hands of granite. If they hadn’t seen the fight then my friends would have heard about it, and, by dint of the estate grapevine, the story would have been vividly embroidered by the time it reached their ears. If they had ever worn ties, they would have tightened and straightened them as they knocked on our door to call for me.

“Mrs Volpe, can Mike come out to play?”

“No, fuggoff!”

“OK, Mrs Volpe, thanks Mrs Volpe”.

At about that period Serge had been at Woolverstone for a year or so. He had departed without fanfare, and we would get a phone call from him occasionally. Usually, I would hear Mum trying to reassure him and telling him not to cry with obvious homesickness, but I thought he was being a bit of a wuss and that this was no way to build me up for my (intended) impending departure. I think he and a friend even ran away once, appearing at home several hours after Mum got a warning phone call from the school. Nowadays of course, a fully-fledged police hunt and an HSE inspection would ensue, but Woolverstone had enough confidence in a boy’s ability to find the A12 not to call out the brigades. Despite Serge’s desertion, I wasn’t spending too much time worrying about joining him and I liked visiting him there, imagining the day when I could sample some of the fun he talked about having when he wasn’t despising every waking moment and hitchhiking his way back to London to escape. I thought that
leaving Fulham and replacing my estate for one seventy-four acres bigger and several shades greener would be a doddle, and I was still, at that time, getting excited whenever I saw a cow in a field.

Honesty compels me to say that I really don’t remember what I was thinking about the prospect of Woolverstone, but I don’t recall being overly worried about it. Given the rebelliousness of my nature and what was becoming an erratic emotionality, it is reasonable to expect that I should have been concerned by the school’s express desire to weed that sort of thing out of its pupils. Of course, I might have been concerned if I’d had any idea what the place was all about, which of course I didn’t. The fog of ignorance was evidently a protective veil behind which I merrily carried on regardless. I did often contemplate my impending change of circumstances, and it is possible, I suppose, that I could give a retrospective treatise on the thought processes I was going through; but I would be making it up, just projecting backwards. Applying intelligent analysis to the significantly less than bright behaviour of a boy four decades ago can never be anything but revisionist, but if I can’t now shine a positive light on what I was up to, I daren’t imagine how bad I looked in 1976.

I have struggled through the process of remembering my childhood in Fulham Court. The period from our arrival to my departure for Woolverstone is muddled and confused and my mind plays tricks with chronology. I remember the
sort
of things we did; particular highlights stand out, as do ‘trends’ such as our constant presence at Fulham Baths. Swimming was something all of us did well. I think all of us won prizes in the inter-borough championships at Lime Grove baths in Shepherds Bush. I know I did, and somewhere there is a newspaper cutting of my eldest brother with his prize. But swimming was cheap and kept us off the streets – although not necessarily out of trouble.

Fulham Baths were staggeringly beautiful. It was a classical Victorian bathhouse with three swimming pools (Ladies, Men’s and Mixed), all with a gallery around them for spectators, old iron pillars, exquisitely tiled walls and mosaic floors. There were also real baths where people could go and get clean, and a huge laundry. All that is left today is the façade, behind which a rump of the entrance hall still stands and in which a dance studio and gym have been created. The grotesque vandalism that allowed this masterpiece of municipal design to be knocked down and replaced with identikit housing just
had
to be the result of a back-hander. We always suspected corruption at every level of our lives, and we certainly knew of many incidents involving the local constabulary. However, when I was a child, Fulham baths was my church, my playground and just about my every thing. Paying a few pence for hours of fun, we would walk the huge corridor that seemed to go on forever and ever to the changing rooms, where baskets were collected, filled with our belongings and then handed back to the attendant to place on a numbered shelf. Emerging through the shallow foot cleaning pools into the main baths was like entering another world. The cacophony of noise that greeted you was thunderous, and in the mixed pool, the biggest of the three, hundreds of people, mainly kids, were busy jumping in and splashing around. Not much actual swimming went on here. My brothers, my friends and I all became familiar with the surroundings and of course, began to take advantage. We let off the big hosepipes and did all of the things the signs around the pool forbade us to do; “No running, no diving, no petting.”

Occasionally, the pool attendants became the target of our japery, and I do recall one day when the head man of the pool was thrown in by a gang of us, only to get out and reveal he had a couple of hundred quid tucked into his short pockets. He showed us the sopping wet bank notes to prove it and
barred us all for a week as punishment. They used to throw us in, too, the attendants, disobeying their own rules, and such an incident resulted in a trip to hospital for me and another pool user. Four of them had grabbed me and pitched me backwards into the pool, but as I flew into the water, a swimmer emerged beneath me and my heel connected with his tooth, which tore an inch-long gash into my foot before going through his lip.

Fulham Baths was where we all came together. It kept us out of Mum’s hair for a while, and although our own hair and eyes were burned by the hours in chlorinated water, it was probably healthy too. But it could only occupy us for some of the time and, naturally, dangers lurked around every corner. Woolverstone was thus a genuine glimpse of hope for Mum.

At this point, you might be wondering what Woolverstone actually was. Simply put, it was an experiment, and it sought to prove that if you took under-privileged boys, often from broken homes, and gave them a public school style education, you would see some remarkable results. In the fifties, the Inner London Education Authority bought a large country estate in Woolverstone, near Ipswich, employed a batch of extremely talented teachers and established a school of three hundred and sixty boys, although that number wouldn’t be reached for several years. Children from families similar to mine who had shown academic promise at primary school were put through the eleven-plus test and sent for selection. It was considered to be the leading state boarding school in the country and offered an almost unimaginable opportunity for most who attended. That is, of course, if we ever used our imagination or knew what an opportunity was.

Woolverstone was costly, controversial in its day but, ludicrously, the product of a debate that had people trying to convince everybody else that you needed wealth if you wanted brains. Somebody, somewhere saw that to be the drivel it was
and set out to prove them wrong; it was a time when you could do things like that, when the country had imagination and real courage.

The fifties presented boys of a somewhat different hue to those of us born in the sixties, and even the discipline we experienced (of which, more later) was watered down over the decades before I arrived. If the truth were told, most whose fate delivered them into Woolverstone’s embrace took the chance with both hands. I would pull mine away at the last moment and poke my tongue out. It has been said of Woolverstone that it took kids from a Labour background, put them in a Tory setting and produced anarchists, but what it actually turned out were many talented and successful young men who went on to great things. Those of us who never progressed to the first rank of writers, sportsmen, actors or academics were satisfied with our success at having made it to voting age. Whether it was enough for those who conceived the idea of Woolverstone, I don’t know, but it was nevertheless an achievement of which the school could be justly proud.

A teacher at our primary school put Serge forward for the school. Our two older brothers had attended local comprehensives and taken rather less interest in academia than was felt to be acceptable. I am not sure if there was a social reason for sending Serge, but I am sure it came as something of a relief to our mother. Life was continuing to play silly buggers with her. She had no husband, no money and four energetic, troublesome boys, all of us by sheer necessity latchkey kids. But her devotion to us remained undimmed and, if anything, took on a frenetic quality designed to counter the dangers we continued to expose ourselves to.

By my ninth birthday, the police, porters and sundry other allegedly upstanding members of the community were becoming frequent visitors to our door, reporting daily
misdemeanours. The sense of mortification Mum first felt when she realised the authorities were taking a regular interest in her children was soon replaced by a relief that the complainant was not reporting anything more sinister or catastrophic than minor theft. I suppose that’s what happens in such families, why the unalterable decline of a youngster’s behaviour establishes itself, because those who might guide him elsewhere become thankful that he is not doing something worse. For our part, we quickly got used to it and soon learned the nature of a knock at the door.

The letterbox doubled as a doorknocker and a policeman would lift it and deliberately crack it down three times; tension coursed through the house when that happened and often Matt would plead with us to say he was out. Sometimes he would fly up the stairs and out of the bedroom window onto the parapet high above the forecourt. Girls sometimes knocked for Matt, tearful at the negligence he had shown, and they would produce the same response from him. Porters flicked the knocker up twice in rapid succession, but irked neighbours flapped it repeatedly until the door was opened, often accompanying the hysterical banging with curses and shouting. The impossibly cheerful man from the Pru whistled his way around the estate so you heard him coming before his single, measured snap of the letterbox resonated through the flat. Friends would often dispense with the knocking and just shout our names through the slit in the door. But one day, there came a knocking that we had never before heard. It was a gentle tap on the small square panes of glass that made up the upper half of the door and the delicacy of this summons disguised a complaint of a viciousness we had not yet encountered. And the messengers were nuns.

With Serge and I, her two youngest, Mum made several efforts to keep us on the straight and narrow, which included sending us to Sunday school, because, despite never going to
church herself, Mum was a dutiful Catholic. God existed, the Pope was his man on planet Earth, you go to Hell if you are bad and Heaven if you are good and everyone associated with the Church was beyond reproach. Mum would not be averse to thinking God her punisher when times were hard, and I remember considering how unfair this was, that God should make life so hard for her. Some God, I thought. Eventually I just thought He was a bastard, and it wasn’t too long before I rubbished the whole idea completely. Mum’s dutiful adherence (for it was never a devotion) was expressed through cheesy images of Christ, which littered our walls or adorned ornaments, none of which, incidentally, would be thrown at us. So, even though religion was only something that existed by default in the background, Serge and I would have to get our communion at the very least.

Sunday school took place in a hall at the back of St Thomas’s, off Dawes Road, a pretty little parish church with a small, eerie graveyard next to it. All who attended disliked Sunday school, but we loathed it. The nuns who taught us seemed to believe that wearing a habit entitled them to treat children badly, and we retaliated in the only way we knew how: which was to make their bible sessions as chaotic as possible.

To my mother, nuns were one step removed from the Almighty, so having two of them cast small, bottle-shaped Holy shadows across her doormat triggered a most profound horror; policemen were one thing, but two small women in habits was quite another. As my brother and I sat at the top of the stairs, listening to them lie softly through their teeth, our own horror was turning up in large trucks. Their serene and tenderly delivered fabrication was the smiling assassin personified, as if Carlos the Jackal and Mr Ruby had come straight over from a fancy dress party. I don’t even remember what they said, but if it involved the immolation of skewered infants, the defrocking
of the priest or pissing in the Holy Water (actually, that one is true) then it featured in their evidence. Mum stood in the doorway, ashamed and contrite, and, when the testimony had ended, quietly shut the door. That’s when she began her ascent towards us, and in the mood she was in, there was a real possibility that our inevitable descent to the Pit would begin soon after she arrived. Before she reached the door of our shared bedroom, we had managed to throw every potential weapon into a cupboard and were each on our respective beds, a foot in the air. Serge was already promising to say that it was me who had fouled the Holy Water, all the while preparing for the onslaught. It occurred to me that in her fury, Mum still might throw the guinea pig’s cage at us, but there was no time to hide it. I need not have worried. This was going to be so much more personal. As Mum traversed the landing at the top of the stairs without touching the carpet and exploded through the door, something new was etched into the expression on her face. Accompanying the familiar look of exasperation now was terror; panic at what might befall the mother of not one, but two anti-Christs.