Semi-Detached (24 page)

This
was meant, no doubt, as a warning, but only reassured us that the authorities
knew nothing. They could only lash out in ignorance. Clever boys fielded
threats.

But not
me; I was perfectly content to bend either way. While Morris, Gotley, Jimpson
and Tompsett looked a shower in their new Corps uniforms, I turned out quite
smartly.

Mine
fitted. I secretly enjoyed shooting at targets and marched quite briskly. When
the time came, I was happy to become a
praeposter and then a school
praeposter and then a
head of house, happy to join the debating society
and the film club and the history society, edit the
Brentwoodian
and
direct the cars on Speech Day. I was happy to keep my feet in all camps and my
options open, and be enthusiastic for any old rot, as long as I didn’t have to
commit.

By the
sixth form we were no longer expected to turn out in the sports fields.
Brentwood was a football school. Even today when I meet beefy blokes in blazers
at city dinners they speak in hushed tones. ‘Yes, we used to play Brentwood.
They were quite a
good team, weren’t they?’ Who knows? I sort of recall
the headmaster announcing successes against his rivals at assemblies. My house,
East, provided a lot of the stars, but I never knew them. They were an arrogant
presence at house meetings. But their prowess directly affected my sporting
life. In the autumn term the whole school played football. Naturally, these
talents came to the fore and led the house to victories. For people like me, it
meant playing football in the third team, every Wednesday and Saturday
afternoon, out on the furthest reaches of the school fields with the fat boys
and the geeks, where the pitches had severe slopes down one end, and the junior
master, wearing the house scarf around his neck, only finally appeared to shout
at us at the very end of the afternoon.

Then,
in the spring term, the goal posts were removed, the rugger ‘Hs’ stuck up
instead, and the ‘rugby term’ began. In East House, however, the properly
athletic stepped to one side and bowed out of taking part altogether. Half of
the stars were still playing football. The school wanted to have it both ways
and to pretend to be a public school for a term, but the pampered race horses
of the school football squad had no intention of flopping about in the mud, so
the house master excused his prima donna footballers and assembled a
scratch
rugby team out of the weedy stragglers remaining. That included me.

‘Well,
Rhys Jones, with a
name like that, you’ll be ideal for the rugby team.’

‘Yes,
sir. You said that about the choir, and look what happened there.’

‘Never
mind that. You know how to play, don’t you?’

I didn’t,
but foolishly assumed that blood would out.

The
rugby term became a miserable catalogue of defeat and injury. In retrospect,
the sloping, rubbish football pitches were havens. The first-fifteen rugby
pitches became plains of mud to rival the Somme.

Fielding
a
couple of fat boys from the fifth form, a
weedy praeposter or
two (not given to sporting prowess but gormlessly keeping the house spirit
up), a
few wets who had been winkled out of their usual bolt hole in the
library and an extremely keen captain of rugby (who had failed to make the grade
in football and now intended to lick his unit into shape by being cross with
them and shouting a
lot), we stumbled out, shivering and disorganized,
to do battle with serious opposition.

I had
probably been the youngest player in the entire first division, apart
from
Smith, one of those boys who shot to a
height of six foot and a
width
of four foot at the first tickling of the hormones. Smith was in South. South
had a
team comprised of oafish giants, and a house master with a
small
moustache, who took rugby very seriously indeed. We seemed to be there to
provide them with practice at
throwing human beings head first into
frozen swamps while they waited to get to grips with their real rivals, North.

When it
was our turn to get to grips with North, naturally enough North decided to
take their defeat at
the hands, knees and fists of South out on us.
Every week the footballing jerks would lounge on the windowsills and smirk at
the sorry results we carried back to the house meeting.

It was
almost a relief to get to the summer term, when I was sent back to the sloping
pitches to play cricket for the third eleven. I hate and abhor cricket. I
loathe cricket. I abominate cricket. There is only one thing more boring than
the abysmal English habit of watching a
game of cricket and that is an
afternoon playing the wretched game. It is sport for the indolently paralysed.
Only three people out of twenty-two are engaged in any proper activity. The
rest simply sit and wait their turn.

The
excruciating tedium of ‘fielding’ — standing about, like a man in a queue with
nothing to read, in case a
sequence of repetitive events, ponderously
unfolding in front of you, should suddenly require your direct intervention (at
which point every other listless ‘player’ suddenly, aggressively, demands
your instant involvement in their pathetic ritual —’catch it!’) — is only
matched by the absurdity of allowing the rest of the ‘players’ to lounge about
doing nothing at all, until it is their turn to ‘play’. Play! The skill is all
opportunism. Cricket requires hours of pointless ‘service’ instead of direct
involvement. It seems to have been inspired to advance the values of sentry
duty and directly favours ‘star players’ above team involvement.

At my
school nobody even bothered to teach you how to play the sodding game. Our
first afternoon in the summer we were taken off to the nets, and a
red-faced,
fat
and wheezy ex-county player who taught Latin badly, drank too much
and was alleged to be addicted to rent boys bowled three balls at us. I had
never picked up a cricket bat before, coming from a
state school, and
hit none of them. As a
result, I had to spend five years of school
summer afternoons hanging around, waiting. Waiting for a
ball to come my
way as ‘long stop’ when the wicket keeper failed to get the badly bowled ball
first time, waiting to be asked to bowl, which I seldom was, because I couldn’t,
and nobody showed me how, and then waiting and waiting and waiting for the rest
of our team to get bowled out so that we could go home.

Most of
my team mates
wanted to go home too. We desperately longed to be bowled
out as quickly as possible, but the standard of bowling was so abysmal that
even holding the bat above your head and standing to one side of the wicket
seldom resulted in a
clean hit on the stumps.

Horribly,
some time during ‘the match’, the urge to win the dreadful contest would
overtake the third-eleven captain. After an interminable ‘game’, which meant we
had all already missed our bus home, we would seem to be close to winning. Just
another few runs and victory was ours. So, as ninth or tenth main in (that’s
me), I could save the game.

‘But,
Captain, the trouble is that I only get to practise this farrago called batting
for three minutes twice a
week. So naturally I am a
sitting
target.’

After
three wide balls and two no-balls I could usually get out for a
duck.

These
days, I sometimes get invited to take part in celebrity cricket matches. (It’s
my own fault. I have organized two myself.) Once I turned up at Fenners in
Cambridge, on the strict understanding that I would sign autographs, pull the
raffle, dance the dance of the seven veils, but not play. Naturally, when I
swanned in, several unhealthy-looking men of limited imagination and unlimited
lack of sensitivity surrounded me and bullied me into going out to the stump. (‘You
can’t come
all
this way and not go out there …’) I went through the
familiar horror of strapping on pads and fitting protection. I pulled on the
crippling gloves and the silly hat and walked out to the middle of the enormous
lawn. ‘Now, don’t worry,’ said the captain, a man who, astoundingly, made a
living playing cricket, ‘we’ve arranged for you to be bowled an easy lob on the
first ball.’ The bowler threw the ball, I missed it and it hit the middle wicket.

‘Oh
dear, out for a duck,’ said the commentator, over the tannoy (so that everybody
in Cambridgeshire could hear it). I turned and headed back to the hut. As I
reached the edge of the grass, the tannoy barked again. ‘I say … that’s a bit
unfair. He’s come all this way. Let’s give him another go.’

Unable
to communicate my own reaction to this sporting gesture, I paused for a
second
or two, turned and walked back to the wicket. The cricketers smirked at me.
Then I was bowled out for a duck, the second time.

Football
is a
game. Tiddly-winks is a game. A sack race involves energy and fun.
Cricket is like a cucumber sandwich: indulged in for reasons of tradition,
despite being totally eclipsed by every other alternative on offer.

By the
sixth form, we had drifted out of these obligations. There must have come a
moment
when it was felt too humiliating to make us play sport at all, so we bunked
off. We still went to the school changing rooms on a Saturday, though. While
eleven-year-olds got into their blue flannel shorts and striped football
shirts, we pulled off our blazers and flannels and pulled on our weekend hippy
outfits.

I want
this bit to appear in small writing. Perhaps as one of those extensive
footnotes that runs discreetly over the page. Almost nothing I did in my youth
— even the abrupt abandonment of trusting young women — fills me full of such
cold, sweaty embarrassment as my off-duty clothes.

I can’t
blame Tompsett or Gotley. Now that I think about it, they went to some lengths
to look as if they had stolen their gear from a
peasant farmer while on
the ruin from a
prisoner-of-war camp. Gotley had a
sort of dirty
whitish pullover and a stinking pair of black trousers that could have stood up
and walked down the high street on their own. Tompsett could be a little more
flamboyant and had a
frightening yellow shirt. But I looked as if I was
about to follow Roy Wood of Wizzard into a battle of the bands.

I had a
pair of poisonous green needlecord flares that would have attracted insects
in the jungle. They weren’t just bright green or lime green, they were radioactive-sludge-that-ate-Leytonstone
green. Only a
painter in the secure wing in Broadmoor would have been
crazy enough to combine them with a
purple tie-dye grandfather’s vest
and a red scarf. I did. And he would have drawn the line at the Indian belt
made of mirrored glass, and the grey astrakhan fur coat on top. I didn’t. Did I
wear this all the time? It was enough that I wore it once.

I
emerged from the tube at Chalk Farm for a
Quintessence concert one
Sunday lunchtime and the others wouldn’t stand in the queue with me. I probably
modified it after that. Perhaps I restricted myself to the canary-yellow jumper
and the bright-blue t-shirt with the Mickey Mouse motif.

Having
back-combed our hair, squeezed into our leggings, primped some flowing neck
wear and donned our baseball boots, we stuffed our blazers into duffel bags and
strutted away down Brentwood High Street.

‘I was
walking with you once,’ my mother recalled, ‘and you suddenly disappeared. I
couldn’t work out what had happened to you. And then we met the headmaster
coming the other way.’

It was
decent of my mother to walk with me at all.

It was,
I submit, a
flamboyant era. We none of us had any money. People would
take desperate measures: inserting bright-red satin patches into the bottom of
old jeans to make flares, wearing spotted handkerchiefs with gipsy rings around
their necks, tie-dyeing elderly relatives’ underwear.

Personally
I loved flower-power from the very beginning. I thought I looked pretty good in
my first flower-power shirt, which had a
dotty, splodgy, very small,
very bright petal pattern, as if a
horse had been sick in a
meadow.
It came with a
matching square-bottomed tie made of identical material
and looked fantastic with a pair of black crushed-velvet hipster trousers with
patch pockets and a four-inch-wide plastic belt. Not bad for a
thirteen-year-old.

By 1970
Mary Quaint had been overthrown in favour of ersatz personal invention. The
Beatles, quite probably the richest self-made twenty-somethings in the world,
took to wearing what looked suspiciously like second-hand clothes.
Double-breasted jackets smelling vaguely of urine, which frightened mothers and
outraged fathers, could be sourced in Oxfam shops. Collarless shirts with acres
of material dangling somewhere around the ankles were found in jumble sales.
Muslin shirts with round collars had to be bought in Mr Byrite. Rather better,
I thought, though few seemed to agree with me, if hand-dyed a
lurid
pink.

The small
ads in the
Melody Maker,
and a few pages at the back in the
Exchange
and Mart,
began to set new standards. They advertised trousers with
increasingly huge flared bottoms. ‘Twenty-six-inch flares!’ the ad boasted, and
showed pictures of just the trousers, in ghostly isolation, stick-like to the
knees and then ballooning to impossible fantasies of flariness. (A flare war
might have broken out. ‘Twenty-eight-inch flares!’ ‘Have we reached the
forty-inch flare?’ ‘Is Britain ready for the wigwam bell bottom?’ I would have
happily stepped forward as a
guinea pig.) Obscure small ads seemed to be
the best way to get a
cheap navy reefer jacket too, or what became vital
to every alternative gentleman’s casual wardrobe, the army-surplus winter-warm
great coat.