Noisy at the Wrong Times (6 page)

“Mum! Mum! They were lying!” Serge protested with desperate vehemence.

“Nuns donta fucky tella lie you devil bastardo!” she screamed. And with a bloodcurdling “
Il dio lo perdona
!” the hands of granite turned into a blur as she went from Serge to me and back to him again, his outrageous slur against Carlos and Jack bringing added reproof. Every blow was an offering to the Almighty, and the harder she smacked, the further from the Inferno she would drag herself. She may well have been reciting the Lord’s Prayer too, but I couldn’t hear over the sound of howling.

I have mistrusted nuns ever since. We had committed sufficient crimes to warrant an honest complaint so the
embellishments were malicious and unnecessary. The lesson from that day was not that I should avoid a beating from Mum by behaving well in Sunday school, but that people, no matter what their apparent status or principles, will always lie. Everyone does it for malignant and benign reasons. They do it to get what they want, they do it to get someone else into trouble, and, of course, they do it in order to avoid getting caught for crimes or misdemeanours. I always knew that I told fibs, but that incident shattered the notion that responsible adults are intrinsically trustworthy. Until then, adults had told the truth as far as I was concerned; it was we little buggers who had to do the fibbing, but now I knew differently. For the world at large, that revelation was a bit of a disaster. It tends to shape much of what I do now, too, which is a good thing, I think, because nothing surprises me about anybody.

I learned another lesson that day, too; lying couldn’t possibly be a sin if two of the Lord’s most staunch disciples were so accomplished at it. And if it was, there was always confession to fall back on, although facts rarely broke cover in there either. After Sunday school had ended, we were made to line up in the polished pews of the church to which our classroom was attached, and, one by one, we filed into the confessional. As young children, we never fully understood the point of coughing to everything we had done that week, but this was a step beyond even that, since you were supposed to tell a disembodied voice about all those bad thoughts you’d been having about Danielle Pike in the playground. Naturally allergic to the truth, we therefore found confession a difficult proposition. The nuns had spent so much time threatening us with Hell and Damnation, we were sure our misdemeanours would guarantee a ticket to Everlasting Torment. But we weren’t impressed by the nun’s threat that God would know
if we lied because after their visit to our house we had evidence of their duplicity, proving He could be tricked. And if He couldn’t be tricked, then those nuns would be bashing anvils and eating babies alongside us in the Infernal Pit of Anguish. We hadn’t yet begun to question the existence of a vengeful deity, and he could obviously be a bit of a spiteful git, but we did doubt his ability to be in several places at once so questions remained. No chances could therefore be taken and we chose not to lie at all. Instead, we simply declared only the mundane.

Taking a seat in the confessional always felt a little threatening, even without Mother Superior’s vituperative instruction. It was dark, smelled of old wood and incense and had a grave- sounding male voice emanating from a mesh in the wall, so it was no wonder we felt a sense of foreboding about spilling our beans. But in driving home their threats of Everlasting Wretchedness, the nuns had found no time to explain the whole point of confession, its secrecy and confidentiality, nor the reason we were seeking to confess in the first place. It’s no surprise that we subverted the whole purpose of it. The perverse desire to avoid exculpation in a confessional meant the week’s adventures were reduced to the completely anodyne and inconsequential. Theft, arson, sadistic torment and getting spontaneous erections during games of kiss-chase were out of the question.

“Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned”.

“Yes, my son, what is it?”

“Errrm... I told George Williams to fuck off in the playground.”

“Is that it?”

“Isn’t that bad, then?”

“No, no. Have you done anything else, I mean?”

“Umm. I looked up Danielle Pike’s skirt?”

I really did look up Danielle’s skirt. We were something of an item at Addison Gardens Primary School, but I was still a little sheepish about displaying any affection for her. We would all play kiss-chase in the playground and Danielle would lead a posse of her friends in pursuit of me. When they cornered me – and some of them were quite aggressive about it – I would fall to the floor and curl up in a ball to protect myself from the kisses that would rain in. Whilst on the floor, though, I could sneak a peek up the skirts of the chasers, and Danielle’s was always a treat because she was the one I loved. And her knickers were always pure white, not grey and rumpled like some of the other girls’. I was heartbroken when she was taken to live in the country somewhere and left me stranded, to be chased by the remnants of her posse, none of whom I peeked up the skirt with as much relish as I did with Danielle. I knew looking up a girl’s skirt was bad, naughty, and probably sinful, but I was unworried by the price I might have to pay for it in the everlasting, so I offered it in the confessional.

I never said the Hail Marys I was frequently ordered to recite. Our inability to grasp the tenets of the religion was almost exclusively down to the zealous way in which the nuns sought to inculcate us with the principles of Holiness, Goodness, Righteousness Or Else. As with all fundamentalists, they had neither the wit nor the will to present the benign face of their religion for fear it would lack impact. Controlling and turning us into mini-zealots, afraid of our own shadows was their over-riding aim. Given the opportunity to be washed of all sin for another week, we were more prepared to allow it to build up ceaselessly and hope we could cut a deal with Him when the time came. I would hate you to think me ‘anti-religion’; I’m not really, but whenever I hear a serious debate on one issue or another, the introduction of a religious
viewpoint has the effect of reducing the matter to silliness, like farting at a funeral. Apparently sane individuals, with obvious intellect, will apply the teachings of Jesus to the travails of single mothers. It leaves me wondering why they even bothered with an education. Anyway, there you are.

Our seemingly endless capacity for misbehaviour, and the resultant trials and worries, distressed Mum. It just wore her down, and there were evenings when it all got too much and she would march out of the house, vowing never to return. It would take my brothers several minutes to convince me that she had only gone next door to the neighbour to cry and get a break. I’d be crying too, convinced she had left us.

Woolverstone must have arrived like a beacon of light, a lifeboat in the storm, a big, whopping helping hand. As boys at risk of taking several unseemly paths in life, Serge and I certainly needed it – but Mum needed it more. For two years after Serge went away to school, she had the relative luxury of just my two older brothers and me to worry about. One of those – Matt – was providing plenty of anxiety on his own and would continue to do so for decades, but the thought that her two youngest would soon be established, safe and sound, at one of the best schools in the country must have been a balm for her over-worked, on-the-edge life. Of course, I had to actually get into the school and I sat the eleven-plus to that end. I wasn’t aware I was sitting the test, nor that it was being used to judge my suitability for Woolverstone, but I did well enough to be invited to meet the headmaster in a room at County Hall. I wasn’t daunted by the interview, but I was always wary of being called into offices where stern men would speak to me. Paddy wasn’t stern at all, and I liked him immediately. The narrow office had a window that looked out onto the Thames and when I wasn’t gazing over his
shoulder at the Houses of Parliament, I was telling him I wanted to be an astronaut, or failing that, I would be a carpenter. What must have seemed flippant answers to his questions didn’t prevent me getting the nod: I was off to Woolverstone in the following September.

It was an easy afternoon, my first encounter with Paddy, an adult I felt I could immediately trust. His good nature and my self-centred approval of him aside, it was his assurance that I would be given a place at Woolverstone that meant the most. So on the warm thermals of Mum’s enormous sigh of relief we drifted out of County Hall and back to Fulham where I set about telling everybody I knew that I was going to Woolvo. I told Serge on the phone when he rang soon after; he sounded less than ecstatic, I must confess, but as with everything, I wore my achievement as a badge of honour, something to set me apart. I must have been insufferable.

It is almost impossible to articulate the scale of Woolverstone’s
otherworldliness
. I wasn’t just going to the good school up the road when everyone else was attending the shit comp around the corner. It was so much more than that. I would be ‘moving away’, I would vanish from the estate for weeks, months on end and would be entering a world that we couldn’t even imagine, save for the old films we had seen, like “Goodbye Mr Chips’. This was interplanetary, by contrast, and if you were going to such a place there was a form of celebrity to be had. It was a distinction that to my mind merely confirmed that I was something indisputably unique. At Addison Primary, my achievement was announced in assembly; the staff clapped, but the rest of the kids looked terrified, as if I had been sentenced to death. In class, the teacher would say things like, ‘For a boy who is going to Woolverstone, this handwriting is dreadful, Michael’, or in games I would be told
that ‘Woolverstone will expect a little more effort than that young man’, and so it went on, endlessly. I became aware that great things were expected of me. It was water off a duck’s back, of course.

GETTING READY

D
espite having a posse of friends in Fulham Court, I wasn’t overly bothered by the prospect of leaving town for five years, returning only during school holidays. There was certainly a feeling of pride in being chosen to go to Woolverstone, despite the sense of expectation that was mounting around me, and I was looking forward to my departure as an adventure. Probably because boarding school seemed to them a horror of unimaginable scale, or more likely because I was bragging so much that they would be pleased to see the back of me, I am not convinced that my friends were too fussed about my departure, either. We carried on playing together on the estate, but when they talked about going to secondary school, it was a conversation to which I could not contribute – or was never really allowed to. I could tell them the things I knew about Woolverstone from visiting Serge, but they were more interested in life at St Clement Dane’s or St Edmund’s or, for the brighter ones, the London Oratory. These were the schools where everyone but me would spend their formative years. However, the gentle casting out that I experienced was, in my eyes, a confirmation of superiority.

The final months before I left for Suffolk were, then, a period of time when I began to separate myself emotionally from my friends. I stayed indoors a bit more than usual and fewer mates came to call for me. On the other hand, I knew they would miss the free ice-creams I could bag for them when
my father turned up outside the estate in his Mr Whippy van a couple of times a week.

Dad’s departure saw him decamp to Wandsworth, so he was still in the vicinity. He had become an oil lorry driver, and sometimes he’d even take one or two of us out on his rounds delivering heating oil to offices and schools. I always found such days exciting, if only for sitting high in the cab of a lorry. Dad was not very committed to his work, but he did the minimum he had to, and, of course, taking us in the cab of his truck was not particularly legal. The daily drudge was never going to exert much control over him for long; only the odds at Ladbrokes and his overwhelming aversion to responsibility could do that (not to mention the contents of his trousers), so he decided to do something that required less work and, more importantly, did not impose on him a boss to whom he had to defer. However, this repugnance towards any kind of work was in direct and knotty conflict with his love of gambling, so, using an admirably entrepreneurial logic, he bought himself an ice cream van.

Ice cream had universal appeal. It was cheap to produce (he just bought vats of a ready mixed liquid that he poured into the top of a machine), and the demand for a little luxury on the council estates was high. He would only have to work for a few hours a day and could still earn enough in cash to spend a few hours throwing it away again in the betting shop.

The predictability of coming from an Italian family with an ice-cream man for a father was obvious even to me. For a civilisation of the richest history imaginable, Italy does have some unspeakably naff cultural icons. I blame the Cornetto ads for much of that. My Uncle Matteo, who also now lived in London, spent a great deal of time and evangelical zeal trumpeting the delights of Italian art, music, fashion and architecture, and I merely repeated to my friends everything
he said. This was when I first began to hear opera and Italian music; my uncle would preach to me about Mario Lanza and play his records. A strange Welsh chap who lived next door to him used to come into the flat and drink whisky; like many Welshmen, he thought he could sing and wailed along to the records in a creaky tenor voice. Mantovani got an airing too, but curiously, so did Bob Marley, who my uncle was very fond of (what the neighbours made of the musical cocktail emanating from his front-room window I dread to think.) Frankly, the leap from the reverberated strings of
The Greatest Gift is Love
to
Kinky Reggae
is one no man should reasonably attempt to make. Marley and Lanza I thought were cool; Mantovani I placed alongside Cornettos, the circus owner in
Pinocchio
and arse pinchers in Rome – all of them made me cringe. I continued to regale everybody with outlandish stories of summers in Montecorvino and to advocate the wonders of Da Vinci
a la Zio Matteo
, but the advertising industry was busy dismantling the reputation I was working so very hard to establish for Italian cultural superiority. It was a rearguard action on my part – one I think may have eventually succeeded – but since Michelangelo, Caravaggio or Verdi rarely drifted through the collective consciousness of Fulham Court’s youth,
gelato
would have to suffice as a cultural reference. Simply put, my personal status came before that of the Motherland.