Semi-Detached (16 page)

Every
three months I got another morning off school and paid another visit to the
tooth factory, and out would come a selection of ingenious miniature pliers and
spanners. The dentists would tighten up their diabolical machinery, and I would
fail to sleep for a few nights, groaning under the relentless stretching of my
gums. Finally, even this was not enough, and a scold’s bridle was constructed
from black garter elastic and wire. It had two loops on projecting prongs at
the front. I had to wear it at night. The loops went over two minute hooks
attached permanently to my upper teeth, the elastic went around the back of my
head and all night long it pulled agonizingly hard. Sorry for me yet? I was a
boy, so I had no particular vanity, but apart from Nichols I seemed to be the
only one in my year put through this torture. Every American kid in every TV
series or Hollywood film appeared to be similarly afflicted so I didn’t have to
explain to anyone why I had a mouth like the inside of a clock, but my school
mates all grew up buck-toothed and proud of it. Nichols, despite wearing short
trousers and polishing his shoes, took his plate out and stuck it in his pocket
as soon as he got to school. He eventually resorted to accidentally treading on
it. His treatment was abandoned — a hopeless dental recidivist — but I was an
obedient child. When it came to professional medical advice I had to be. There
were too many adults prepared to gang up on me, including Mr Harris.

After
eighteen months the consultant returned. He fiddled with my plaster casts,
peered into my mouth and told the assembled experts that the problem was
hereditary. Tenderly chucking me beneath my prognathous hamster cheeks, he
explained that they’ had been wasting their time. The only recourse was
surgery. He offered to cut out a section of my jawbone on either side of my
mouth and set the whole thing back a couple of inches. This way I would have a
perfect bite. I would also look like a selectively inbred Hapsburg with an Adam’s
apple bigger than my chin. He added, idly, that the operation was tricky (a lot
of
nerves and blood vessels to negotiate) but I would boast a standard
chomp, so the dentally critical would be satisfied.

I was
relieved that they didn’t take advantage of me there and then with their
miniature buzz saws. This was before
All New Cosmetic Surgery Live
became
a mid-evening television favourite. People are made of sterner stuff now Then,
it seemed a bit radical, and I backed off down the corridor clutching my mummy’s
hand and making her promise that I wouldn’t have to have it done.

She
would have taken me to Gamages as a treat. Somewhere in High Holborn, not far
from the bright-red castellated Flemish fortress that belonged to Prudential
Insurance, was a department store with a similar rambling, gothic provenance.
It was a country-house emporium, with echoing back staircases and hidden
annexes up in the attics, which is where I went, to the make-up department. I
don’t know how I fond it. Perhaps my mother took me there to look at toys. I
think it was just beyond and behind the toy department, but it sold proper,
Leichner, theatrical make-up. I developed a fascination with the stuff which
would have frightened Michael MacLiammoir. I still have some of the sticks of
greasepaint I bought then because as far as I can tell you can never use up a
stick of carmine.

I can
remember the long, slimy bars of colour, like lipstick, wrapped in gold paper
with black printing. I must have had an instruction book too, because I knew
that you had to smear the lot over the face, then paint wrinkles, moles and shadows
to mould a new you — dab a tiny dot inside the corner of the eye, to make the
whites shine brightly, add a half black line under the eyelashes for a bloke, a
full line for a woman and finally add loads of powder to ‘hold’ everything in
place. When did I do this? What for? Who did I show? I must have gone
downstairs eliciting approval, and I think the intention was to create something
ghoulish rather than camp. I bought long pigtails of crêpe hair and glue. I had
both grey and black woven into ropes. I pulled out a lump for use, but I never
steamed it to get it straight. So I bought some complete false moustaches
instead. At one stage, I had a stick of nose putty which required endless
kneading to make pliable and I made myself a false nose, added pirate whiskers,
blackened my teeth and stuck some convincing warts on my still protruding chin.
But the biggest hit was the packet of blood capsules. These were lozenges made
of clear plastic which contained some sort of red sherbet and when chewed
frothed and bubbled with a convincing approximation of a tubercular
haemorrhage, particularly effective in the middle of Brentwood High. Street on
a dull Wednesday afternoon. At some point I got hold of a convincing severed
thumb as well, but I’m not sure if that came from Gamages. It was just normal,
healthy, attention-seeking exhibitionism. I was quite convinced I would become
an actor.

As soon
as I arrived at senior school, I decided I wanted to be in plays. Mr Baron was
in charge. He organized his ‘Winter Theatricals’ on a model seemingly derived
from mid-period Tyrone Guthrie, with a bit of Donald Wolfit thrown in on the
side. He had no truck with modish ‘ideas’. Only Shakespeare was ever performed
— in period costume, with sets derived from page six of his Penguin copy.
Executed by Mr Featherstone, the head of the school art department and a
fencing-champion enthusiast for heraldry, but not, thank goodness, for modish
ideas, they consisted of painted flats depicting battlements, towers and gothic
entrances of a flexible, not to say wobbly, nature.

Mr
Baron jealously guarded his dominance of school theatricals. In my second year,
for example, almost every boy who could stand up was dragooned into the junior
school play: Christopher Fry’s The
Boy with the Cart.
It was an excruciating
Christian parable, delivered in blank verse with uplifting songs (‘Boy with the
Cart, where are you going to, Boy with the Cart, where have you come
from?’).
Even we tiny ones sensed that the sophisticated French master (who wore a
bowler hat like Jeremy Thorpe and could sometimes be spotted sneaking into
school from the direction of the station, looking a little rough, at one minute
to nine) was a
director rather given to modish ideas. He wanted energy (‘lots
of energy, boys!’). He wanted light (‘more light!’), and he wanted big white
blocks as a set. ‘Spud’ Baron was not impressed. He called it ‘Boy with the
Fart’.

For
Spud, it was acting that
was paramount — his acting, mainly. He never
indulged in such frippery as improvisation, he simply showed us how to do it.
The rehearsal was an opportunity for him to perform the entire play himself. In
order to demonstrate how Ariel might attend on Prospero, Mr Baron would kick
off his shoes and pirouette on points across the Memorial Hall stage. We
sniggered at his claims that he had ‘trained as an actor, my dear’ but he was
quite shameless, delivering speeches in floods of tears, or charging across the
stage with startling shouts, or draping his jacket over his head and mincing
about as Miranda. Given that
he was so small and so round and so bald
and so potentially foolish, what he really taught us was fearlessness.

Once
the production was up, once the huge wicker baskets of period costumes had
arrived from Bermans, and been plundered by us, he was everywhere: in the
classroom, dressing rooms, skittishly arranging a veil, or bellowing about
jock straps from the back of the hall, or supervising make-up, which he applied
freely, with outlandish streaks of carmine greasepaint. During an electrical
blackout, he sat in the dark at the piano and tried to calm us all by playing Rachmaninov.

As for
me, I started as one of the little boys playing women. My first role was Ceres,
goddess of plenty. I had to emerge from a back-lit cardboard cavern dressed in
diaphanous robes, hung about with plastic autumnal leaves and sporting a full
length wig. I got a big laugh. This was not what was expected, but I liked it.
One of the older boys stood in front of me while I applied my slap, looked me
up and down and pronounced, ‘God, Rhys Jones, you make a very ugly woman.’

And
then the next year I was third witch. It was a
serious demotion, after
I had originally been asked to give my Lady Macbeth and I took it badly but
probably had a better time. Fischl, Gotley and I danced and hooted, cackling
and gurning, around a proper black witch’s cauldron (a typical Baron literal
prop this) with a hidden electric kettle steaming inside it.

Gotley
was a close friend and a
bad influence. He never seemed to take what he
did entirely seriously. He and Fischl whispered obscenities under their breath
during anybody else’s lines.

By the
fifth form, too ugly for women altogether, I had become part of the crowd in
Julius
Caesar,
shouting ‘Aye, aye’ at Douglas Adams, the future author of
The
Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,
as he strutted about with a double
bedsheet over his shoulder and his huge conk in the air. I was Rosencrantz in
Hamlet
and in my last year managed no better than the pitiful Aumerle in
Richard
II.

Backstage
visitors, even as a boy, could be difficult, though.

The
plays were one of the few occasions when the hierarchies of the school broke
down.

In one
junior production we fell under the spell of Skinner. He was crop-headed and
foul-mouthed and a year older than us. He was probably playing a fairy too. He
already had collections of
IT
and
Private Eye
and could tell an
endless succession of filthy jokes. So we worshipped him. Then on the last
night, the Saturday. my parents came to see the play. And, foolishly. they
wandered back to the classrooms to pick me up. Why did they do that? They were
just being parents, thinking they could go anywhere, barge into any room. Why
the hell couldn’t they wait in the car, or somewhere in the dark outside, like
a sensible relative?

My
father was wearing a flat cap and his buttoned-up mac, my mother was fussing
behind him. I was up at the back of the room, getting make-up off, standing by
Skinner. He began shaking and tears appeared in his eyes. He raised a quivering
digit, pointed and collapsed in howls of laughter. Look at that
!
What
the hell were they? How did they get loose? And all the others laughed too.
They held each other up. They gasped for breath. They sniggered and guffawed.
And then my father spotted me. ‘Griffith!’ he called.

‘Griffith!’
This was too much for Skinner. He was poleaxed. He brought his cream-covered
face right up to mine, almost unable to speak. ‘They … they … they’re your
parents!’

I
nodded helplessly.

‘Har
har har har har.’

Skinner
collapsed on the floor and crawled away under the desks. And I was left alone
to greet my mummy and daddy (at least I hadn’t called them that
in
public). To their puzzlement, I hurried them out of the room, foully betrayed,
hating them and hating Skinner and hating myself for not knowing what to do or
who to blame.

7.
The Three Three Nine

I rather fancied taking
the 339 bus from Brentwood back to Epping. Half my adolescent life had been
lost lurching around upstairs in that double-decker bus. And I was astounded to
discover that
,
after forty years, the thing still ran. It followed the
same route. It still went all the way from Brentwood to Harlow, passing through
Epping — just as it had when it wallowed me homewards every afternoon.
Disappointingly it had changed its number. It was now the 501. Worse, it didn’t
come from Warley any more. It began its trans-Essex marathon from some other
meaningless suburban outpost. These were small changes, perhaps, but of arcane
regret. The number 39 and the name of the village of Warley had had a cabalistic
significance when I was twelve.

We were
initiated into all this at the beginning of our first English lesson by a bald,
fervently twitchy house master known as Daddy Brooks. He swept in, threw his
gown into his seat, flung his books on the desk with a frightening bang and
told us that he had some serious matters to establish. He leaned forward and
spoke emphatically. First, there were to be no sniggers at the mention of the
number thirty-nine. Any foolishness of this kind would be
severely
punished.
Nobody was to stroke his chin, thus, or mention Warley. Nobody was to say ‘aww
ginn’, or speak of Percy. ‘Now, I will never mention this again. Open your
Ridout on page seven.

Crikey.
What was he talking about? We found out quickly enough. The name Warley and the
number thirty-nine were both associated with one master: ‘Bilge’, otherwise
known as Mr Gilbert, otherwise identified by the number thirty-nine in the ‘Blue
Book’.

Mr
Gilbert was a
master of staggeringly sadistical demeanour, who taught
science with astonishing incompetence. He was what only a schoolteacher can be
— at
once terrifying and ludicrous.

‘Bilge’
had a length of pink rubber Bunsen-burner piping in his pocket. With no
apparent irony. he called it ‘Percy’. If not close enough to hit a boy with the
palm of his hand around the ear, or tear the hair upwards on the temple, he
would happily beat him with Percy. Or he would wait, smelly, blubbering spittle
over you, leaning against your desk and rubbing himself against it, so close
that you could smell his beery breath and see the underpants sticking up beyond
his waistband with his shirt stuffed inside them. After three weeks he would
come in and begin the first lesson all over again. It was a brave pupil who
raised his hand and said, ‘Sir, I think we’ve done this already.’