Semi-Detached (18 page)

And
beyond that there were some corrugated iron huts, weren’t there, edging down
the side of the lawn in front of Otway under the beech trees?

The
junior library was over that way too, in one of the corrugated huts where we
flipped though
Amateur Photographer
and sometimes, amongst the studies
of birch trees on a hillside and northern streetscapes with big shadows, we
found a gloomily lit nude. One little spiv, a dealer in smut and poker dice and
American comics, who often managed to find dirty books or pornographic playing
cards (he must have had older brothers), once proudly showed us a
hugely
blown-up photograph of a
crotch — I assume from one of these
Amateur
Photographers.
It was utterly unfathomable — a few darker smudges on a dark
smudge. Even after his lurid explanations, there was almost nothing to
decipher, but we were happy to peer and to speculate.

But
that’s what boys did. They offered up things in the playground: a
card
trick, or a
joke, or a
look at some magazine, or a pair of shoes
with a
compass in the heel and the tracks of various animals in the
sole. It was a way of doing business. We had little else to offer each other
but we were shamelessly open. We wanted to play.

Walking
on into Brentwood High Street in 2005 I passed a
poster advertising the
return of
‘Allo ‘Allo.
The town was struggling to adapt to the
twenty-first century as much I was. And when the bus finally came I was
disappointed. The top deck had gone. We school kids used to push up the
Routemaster spiral staircase to get to the six good seats: two at the back,
immediately behind the top of the stairs, and slightly raised up, and four
across the front with the winders on the windows and the extra leg room.
Housewives and OAPs wisely stayed below.

Now, I
got as high as I could by sitting on the seat above the wheel arch. There weren’t
any children going home today, but the bus followed the same pattern, nosing
its way painfully slowly along the A128, out of the town, past a sign for ‘Heritage
of Brentwood’ (it was a
used-car lot) and on through retail pun country:
‘Crafty Arty’ and ‘Rosie’s Posies’ and ‘Time 4 Pets’ and, just like the 4.15 I
used to take, the bus virtually emptied before it reached Bentley and the
beginning of the countryside.

Jimpson
and I and a couple of others were the only ones who stayed the distance,
probably doing our homework by the time we reached Blackmore.
(‘
What
is
this supposed to be?’ ‘Sorry sir, I wrote the essay on the bus.’) Or I would
have to listen to Jimpson recite the entire First Division league tables and
the name of each player on every team from memory. He made me test him. God, I
hated football, and we were a
football school. I had never played
football properly before I arrived at Brentwood and my mother, stunned by the
cost of the plastic-studded slinky black plimsolls that I craved in the school
shop, provided me instead with my father’s old rugby boots, and huge lengths of
laces that had to go right around the back and twice under the instep. The
boots curved upwards, like canal-fished boots, and had great bulbous toe caps.
Once we had all got over the initial worry of abandoning our pants under our
shorts (something the gym masters seemed obsessively concerned about) I was
singled out as a
collective object of derision thanks to my bloody
boots. My rounded toe caps were routinely blamed for sky-ing the ball. Jimpson
called them my Dixie Deans, after some pre-war ‘centre forward. Dean became my
nickname until Stub or Stub-man or Stubbers or the Stub or the Stub Person or
other variations on the theme of my supposed resemblance to the end of a
pencil
took over.

In 2005
the countryside was still surprisingly undeveloped this close to London, with
long vistas across undulating autumn-jaundiced fields. A series of huge brown
signs ironically advertised the location of a secret nuclear bunker. They annoyed
me with their pointless intrusion (at least the bunker had been purposefully
hidden) but otherwise I felt calm, perfectly content to be jolting through this
unconsidered Essex countryside. It was a
sentimental journey, and, as
such, quietly joyous.

It was a
lasting friendship with Jimpson. We were bracketed together for most of
the middle school, sat opposite each other at lunch and got picked out to be
servers at
the master’s table. I went to visit his house sometimes in
the holidays, which showed a dangerous intimacy in boy’s school terms. He wore
glasses held together with Sellotape and adopted an air of geekish defeatism,
wearily accepting his painful lot as the butt of imagined tragic occurrences,
but it stood us in little stead in the sandpit up behind his house when we met
two Ongar boys who wanted to play fighting. We didn’t want to play. As we
inwardly predicted, they really wanted to fight properly. Graham was suddenly
thrashing around in the sand, beating off this bloke, while the other one held
me back. They drew blood, smashed his glasses and taunted us. But we were
grammar school boys. All the fighting in our playgrounds was mock wrestling
matches, ‘no fists’. The only injuries were to the precious school suits and
someone’s pride. The groping, grappling, gouging earnestness of Graham Jimpson’s
struggle with a
complete stranger, who wanted a
proper fight for
fun, was scary. We didn’t have the guts to try to hurt someone by any means
other than verbal assault, even then, at the age of twelve.

Early
school itself was a bit like a
bus ride. We moved further up the deck,
played games, and worked as it rattled along but I don’t think we ever looked
up to examine the scenery or think where it was going. We hardly marked off
years except as a progression of term beginnings and endings. There were
occasional bus stops: like birthdays, or the fifth of November, which rose out
of a
flat
landscape, but were themselves utterly routine, even if
invested with a
manic anticipation.

I kept
my fireworks in a
box in the cupboard in the back cloakroom. Somewhere
around the middle of October I used to go to the newsagent at the far end of
Epping High Street. It had the biggest selection in town, in a glass-fronted
counter; down a
couple of steps, as I remember. Up one end of the
vitrine were the hat-box sized mines of serpents, or triple roman candles on
wooden spatulas, linked by gunpowder tubes and sealed together with
different-coloured tape. They were generally far beyond my means; I sometimes
pooled everything, or badgered my mother, and got one, just one, and it became
the star of the collection, to be minutely examined on a
nightly basis.
I collected nothing else quite as mysteriously fragile as fireworks. The best
ones rattled. The really big rockets had a
tube and then a bulging bit.
They were straight where it ran alongside the squared-off stick, but they
jutted out and widened towards the top. You could even see where they had been
glued together. Sometimes the cone was stuck on slightly wonkily. It added to
their individual character. I quite liked just the sticks themselves. As soon
as I got in from school I would get down the box and pore over the reds and
blues of the wrappers, covered with magic signs of stars or Romany zig-zags,
the instructions that promised a
rain of fire or a
golden
fountain of flames and the indigo blue slightly transparent touch paper which
emerged so delicately from the tubular cover. Even today I would happily paper a
room with some of the Brock’s glamorous firework paper designs. The smell
of the cordite was the essence, like something powerful, strong and heady. I
would arrange them in ranks, imagining their power, sniffing each one and
organizing them around a
particularly potent long, thin candle with the
little cardboard indent at the bottom and the twist at the top. It would have
blown a
Freudian analyst’s head off.

It was
hardly surprising that the actual day was always a bit of a
let-down. My
father took control. People were burned, maimed and disfigured for life by
playing with fireworks. They were not toys! As soon as it was dark enough we
would get him outside, usually in company with friends who had brought their
boxes too, and the dads would wobble to and fro in the dark, lining them up and
setting them off on the walls of the rose beds while we huddled by the kitchen
door and I tried to identify which disappointing squib corresponded to which
luridly packaged fetish object from my collection. ‘Was that the Cracker Pot?’
That one piff and fizz can’t have been the huge one with the special red
plastic spike in which I had invested so much hope. I spent more time peering
in the box trying to orchestrate the display than I did watching them go off. I
always saved the biggest for a finale, like the really huge Catherine Wheel,
arranged like three bombs on a wooden hub cap, with its own six-inch nail
Sellotaped across the centre. It usually failed to go. My father would scurry
away. There was a
tiny glow worm in the dark. ‘It’s gone out.’

‘No,
just wait.’ And then, after waiting for ever, he would take a
lot of
persuading to go back, shine the torch on it and try again, until when it finally
did cough out a lot of sparks he sometimes broke all his own rules and bravely
stuck his hand in to give it a push. Usually it shot off for a disappointing
thirty seconds of whizzing light. But the aggrandisement of the collection was
the main thing. Even ponderously setting them off one by one my mighty box
burned up in half an hour flat.

The
following day we would search around in the wet, collecting the flaky, charred
remains, the stubs of cardboard and sodden rocket sticks, as if trying to
rescue some of the their former true magnificence. But they only made our
fingers black.

Jimpson
used to slump off the bus in Ongar. I would watch him trail off across the
road, lugging a
briefcase full of books, his head bowed, a
finger
habitually poking at the bridge of his glasses while he blinked myopically at
the pavement. He was the last of the school commuters to alight, just opposite
the tube station, except for me. By then I was only half-way home and had the
top deck to myself.

The
adult me was happy to be on the bus again, but I would have been nervous to
breach the school itself. For years I had avoided all the ‘Old Brentwoodian’
stuff and finally only gone back in the early nineties to give out some prizes.

I was
greeted in the headmaster’s sitting room. I had only ever been there once
before, for a reading of Tennessee Williams, so I was unprepared for the shock.
They walked me across to the new sports hall where I was going to pretend to be
a retired colonel, and as we banged through the swing doors, I tottered. ‘Stop.
Stop,’ I said.

It was
uncanny. I had expected the classrooms to be vaguely the same, but they were
precisely the same. There was the tiling half-way up the walls. There were the
boards, the parquet floor, the room divider in Upper Four through which we used
to listen to the Remove baiting ‘Zip’, the physics master. The desks must have
been replacements, but they were battered just like ours. But there was more
than that. It was the smell. I had completely erased the stench of floor polish
mixed with sweat, and now it hit me like a
chloroform gas attack. The
teachers, the new teachers, stood looking bemused. They wanted to hurry me on.
But I wanted to just sit there, in the classrooms, even though the entire
junior school and their parents were already rustling their order papers
somewhere in some distant hall. This was like a youth drug. It was acutely,
painfully evanescent, because it was nothing more tangible than an atmosphere,
and I wanted to absorb it before it evaporated.

Everything
else about school life has proved almost too fragile to retrieve. You can
easily contact old friends, but standing under the oak trees by the science
block listening to Gotley tell a
dirty joke, or shouting above the noise
of the dining hall, or sheltering in the junior library reading old
Punches
when
it rained was a small proportion of school life. Most of the time was spent in a
one-way relationship with a series of adult males; men like Mr Gilbert, Mr
Baron, Mr Cluer and Mr Best. Nothing can get that back, certainly not meeting
them ‘in real life’. As they stood there, wittering on, to thirty or so boys
for a year at a
time, did they have any appreciation of the effect they
had on us? Mr Ricketts, for example, was an intelligent teacher. We admired him.
We were impressed that he went off to some American school for some reputedly
huge salary, but what I remember most about him is that his trouser zip never
did up at the top. We knew the three hairs on the mole on Mr Cluer’s face far
better than we knew the declension of any transitive verb. In the sixth form,
we even encountered our teachers as independent adults. We were cloistered with
them for longer and we assumed we got to understand them as men. But I wonder.
Did we really just meet their theatrical, public selves?

Mr
Baron we cruelly took to be absurdly childish, with his boasting of supposed
wealth from his ‘connections to the Pilkington family’, his sudden absences ‘to
visit the headmaster’ when he was probably popping out for a
fag, even
his claims to have worked for British Intelligence. But we also encountered an
inspired teacher: hanging from the blackboard, waving with one hand to imitate
the wind, bellowing lines to illustrate onomatopoeia: now … as the loud …
winds howl … in my ear …’ or teaching us to unpick a poem’s internal
structure with forensic glee. I learned more about the nature of practical
criticism from Baron than my university lecturers, principally because it
seemed to matter so fiercely to him. And if he was ineffably silly, then that
meant we developed an attitude, perhaps even the strongest of affections. He
became a surrogate daft uncle: unshameable, quite as happy to warn us against
sitting on the radiators — ‘because you’ll get piles’ — as he was to read
Chaucer ‘with the original Middle English pronunciation’. At the beginning of
the sixth form he played us his ‘readings’ of
Paradise Lost.
He set up a
little reel-to-reel tape recorder and announced that he had originally
performed them for the Third Programme. Cruel observers pointed out that these
broadcast recordings had coughs and rustlings in the background. But I still
found that, after one playing, I could recite most of the opening of Book Six
from memory.