Odd boy out, p.26
Odd Boy Out, page 26
I remember, too, walking back from the shops with her, along streets where women were on their hands and knees scrubbing their front doorsteps. (They always seemed to be on their knees washing their front doorsteps.) There were women, like Auntie Edith, who were teachers, and others who were nurses or shop assistants or cleaning ladies or nuns, but most women when I was growing up were housewives – and it was hard, hard work. People bathed just once a week because the water was heated by a coal or wood fire under a copper, and it took an age carrying the hot water in saucepans from the kitchen to the tub in the living room next door. (Grandpa and Auntie Edith also had a front room, kept immaculately and never used. I only went into it once: it was where Auntie Edith received people on the day of Grandpa’s funeral.)
My only horrid recollection of post-war Accrington is of the acrid smell of chamber pots. If you needed the loo in the middle of the night, you couldn’t go down to the end of the garden, so you used the potty. Up until the early 1970s, before the arrival of en-suite facilities, hotels always provided chamber pots, either kept under the bed or hidden inside a foul-smelling bedside cabinet. I remember Max Bygraves (a huge star in the 1950s and beyond) telling me how, on a family holiday once, he had given his son a beautiful white £5 note as a special present and how his son (who was exactly my age) had put it inside his bedside cabinet for safe-keeping when he went to sleep, only to discover in the morning that the precious note was floating around in a used chamber pot that the chambermaid had forgotten to empty the day before.
‘That taught him an important lesson for life,’ chuckled Max.
‘The lesson being?’ I asked.
‘Never lick your fingers when you’re counting your folding money.’
Unless you are approaching my age, you won’t have seen one of those beautiful white £5 notes – larger than normal notes and only printed on one side. They went out of circulation in 1957 – the year the first contraceptive pills were being introduced. The pill didn’t come on to the market until the 1960s – but when it did, it changed the world.
First with my friend Sheila Hancock (now in her late eighties) and then with my friend Maureen Lipman (now in her mid-seventies) I have appeared on a TV show called Celebrity Gogglebox. The idea is a simple one: you are filmed watching TV. The fun comes from the fact that you don’t get to choose what you view: you watch what you’re given, and react accordingly. It’s mostly popular mainstream stuff, but some of it had our ears popping and our eyes standing out on stalks. The use of obscene language and profanity was relentless: I think it would have killed Auntie Edith. And it was evident from the variety of dating shows we watched that many young people nowadays don’t think twice about having sex on a first date. In fact, they’re expecting it. Gogglebox was devised by a young man who used to go out with one of my daughters. He also devised a show called Naked Attraction, a dating show where the contestants get to inspect each other’s private parts before choosing the individual they fancy most. The close-ups leave nothing to the imagination, nor does the perky banter from the show’s host: ‘Now there’s a lovely bit of labia … Sam, where are you on the cock-to-balls ratio? I think you like a big one that really fills you up.’
I can’t decide if I am appalled by all this – or sorry that I missed out on it because I was born half a century too soon. How different it was, back in the day. According to the figures from the Office for National Statistics, these days only around 1,600 men and women under the age of twenty get married in Britain each year – that’s a drop of 97 per cent since 1950, when more than 60,000 young people of that age tied the knot. In those days, full sex before marriage simply wasn’t on: if you wanted to sleep with a girl you married her. Today the average age for marriages between opposite-sex couples has risen to nearly thirty-eight for men and thirty-five for women.
Of course, there was plenty of hanky-panky when I was young, but as a rule it stopped short (well short) of intercourse. Girls were encouraged to keep their hands on their ha’pennies. Whatever blokes did, they expected to have a virgin bride. A baby born out of wedlock was considered a matter of considerable shame well into the 1960s. Chastity was a virtue, and sex was something sacred to be enjoyed within marriage. (In the UK, the pill was available to married women from 1961, but not legally available to unmarried women until 1967 – and women in the USA had to wait even longer, until 1972.)
In 1963 (Larkin’s annus mirabilis), the year I turned fifteen, sex was in the air almost everywhere and, suddenly, surprisingly, sex at Bedales was in the newspapers. Overnight, Judith Earnshaw, a Bedalian sixth former, aged seventeen – a girl I knew and liked and whom I was seeing on a daily basis because she had cast me as one of the leads in her school production of Maeterlinck’s Pelléas and Mélisande (a verse drama about forbidden love) – found herself at the centre of a media storm. The cause? An article that featured in a magazine called Sixth Form Opinion under the headline: IS CHASTITY OUTMODED?
It appeared from the piece that some Bedalians – notably, my friend Judith – thought that it was. The story was picked up by the Times, Herald, Sketch, Mirror, etc., the school grounds were invaded by reporters and photographers, Judith was put into hiding, and the hapless headmaster spent forty-eight hours topping and tailing letters to parents (and prospective parents), saying he was ‘extremely sorry for the distress which parents will have suffered.’ I was even sorrier that our rehearsal schedule for Pelléas and Mélisande had been disrupted and that Judith, when she emerged from her dormitory confinement, appeared to have lost some of her creative spark.
Whenever outsiders asked about Bedales, invariably they wanted to know if we were all sleeping with one another. I used to say, ‘No – it’s the staff we’re sleeping with!’
In our dreams, perhaps. Early in 1964, when I was still fifteen, I fell for the school nurse. I used to visit her in the sanatorium and she’d give me cocoa and biscuits. One evening, after assembly, standing together in the san’s little kitchen, we kissed. According to my diary:
We were together until midnight. We were together again yesterday and all today. I know it is wrong because she is a member of staff (and she has a fiancé!) and we can get into a lot of trouble. I know it is stupid, but it’s also wonderful and I don’t want to stop and nor does she. She thinks I’m amazing and I think she is rather special too! It’s madness, of course, but how old was Romeo? (I know. Juliet wasn’t a member of staff!!!) Help.
Happily, help was at hand. Somehow, word of the dalliance got out and I was summoned to see the housemaster. He was very friendly and said, smiling, ‘A little bird tells me something that’s not quite right.’ He explained what he’d heard and asked me if it was true. I told him everything. He told me to go to the Library and get on with some work. He said that, if everyone was sensible, everything would be all right. I wanted to believe him, but I was terrified – more terrified, I think, than I had ever been before about anything.
The next day, I was sent to see the headmaster. I was so nervous, I was shaking. He was very friendly, too. He made me sit down in an armchair and gave me a cup of tea. He pulled his chair around from behind his desk and sat leaning towards me with his elbows on his knees. He asked me what had happened. When did it start? Who started it? How far did we ‘go’? Had I written to her? Had she written to me?
When I had finished, he told me not to worry. He told me that I had done nothing wrong, but that it was wrong because I was only fifteen and she was a member of staff. He said that, since it hadn’t ‘gone too far’, the best thing now was to forget all about it. I must not see her privately or ever speak to her again, or write to her. She was leaving at the end of term, anyway, to get married. He said it was much worse for her than for me. He said he didn’t think he would have to tell my parents and he was sure I had learnt a lesson. By the end of it all, we were laughing. He made it very easy and I was very grateful. He said to me, finally, ‘Don’t talk about this to anyone, ever.’ And I didn’t.
In my diary, I simply wrote: ‘IT’S ALL OVER.’
The lessons of this experience served me well thirty years later when, as an MP, I became a member of the Government Whips’ Office. The House of Commons in my time was so like an English boarding school – the same sort of numbers, the same kind of hierarchies and cliques, even the same kind of architecture – that I understood quite quickly how life in the Westminster village worked and recognised almost immediately that the way my Chief Whip (Alastair Goodlad) and his Deputy (Greg Knight) handled wayward MPs was exactly as my headmaster and housemaster had handled me – with good humour, understanding and discretion.
The myth about the Whips’ Office is that it’s all threats, thumbscrews and bullying. It’s a useful myth (the mystery surrounding the working of the Whips’ Office adds to its potency – ‘Don’t talk about this to anyone, ever’ is the rule), and sometimes we were reduced to a bit of brutality or blackmail when dealing with utterly irreconcilable headbangers who simply couldn’t be persuaded to do the decent thing and vote with the government on whose ticket they had been elected.fn1 But on the whole we found that coddling rather than confrontation achieved the best results. Every whip has a set number of MPs under his or her special charge. Mine included a gay MP who said he wasn’t (even though his local paper had evidence he was picking up young men at a gay club most weekends), three alcoholics, four philanderers (there were more, of course: these were just the ones where ‘revelations’ about them might have rocked the government), one near-bankrupt (whose debts we helped clear: a bankrupt cannot remain an MP, so this chap represented our majority of a single vote), and several more with varying degrees of mental instability. Through the good offices of the House of Commons chaplain I found a safe place for one of these fragile souls in a suburban monastery. When we needed the MP in question to vote, the monks kindly put him in a taxi and sent him across to Westminster.
At the Lycée I first heard Aesop’s fable about the competition between the North Wind and the Sun to decide which was the stronger of the two. The challenge, you will remember, was to make a passing traveller remove his cloak. The harder the North Wind blew, the tighter the traveller wrapped his cloak about himself, but when the Sun shone, warmed by it, the traveller quickly took off his cloak. At Bedales, the way in which the headmaster and the housemaster dealt with me left me beholden to them for ever. At Westminster, the same principle applied. It even worked with Ted Heath, the former Prime Minister, who, when it came to voting, could be a difficult cove. Read Ted the riot act and he’d rebel. Woo him, flatter him, go down to his house in Salisbury and tell him it was the house with the prettiest view in England (which it almost was) and he would turn up to vote when you least expected him, shoulders heaving: ‘You see, I came.’
At Bedales, Mrs King (one of the teachers) had been head girl when Mr King (the deputy head) fell for her, but they did not get married until after she had left the school. As far as I know, in my time there was only one staff–pupil relationship that went too far – and I was only in part responsible. One of the girls in my year fell in love with a young French teacher – the teacher who couldn’t make it to Switzerland for that summer holiday job and sent me instead. Because I liked them both, I helped them spend secret time together: acting as a decoy, being seen going over to his room arm in arm with the girl, apparently to do French revision, and then leaving her in his room alone while I sat keeping guard outside the door … Whatever they did, they did quite quietly, and because I wouldn’t have had the courage to ‘go all the way’ it didn’t occur to me that that’s what they were up to. Anyway, she became pregnant, he got the sack, and they got married. I believe they had more children and lived happily, if not ever after at least for a while. I am still in touch with him. He kindly invites me to his local literary festival each year. Fifty-five years on, I think she now lives with another Old Bedalian.
Even if you never go back, it’s a school that is difficult to escape.
I am suddenly thinking I should be writing a quality soap about Bedales in the 1960s. It’s got all the storylines and some great characters. Who do I remember best? Among my contemporaries, my friend Simon Cadell, of course. And Peter Harris, who was tall, thin and gangly, clever, bespectacled and kind. We planned to publish a magazine together called Tomorrow Today. We saw ourselves as super-forecasters, half a century before the idea became fashionable. Peter went up to Oxford the year before I did and read Chinese. It was wonderful going to a Chinese restaurant with him: he understood what the waiters were saying to one another and wasn’t frightened to chip in. I saw a lot of him, even after we left university, until one day we were out with a group of friends, and I said, simply as a joke, ‘Nobody knows what Peter does, but I think he’s a spy.’ I never saw or heard from him again.
Peter’s nickname at school was ‘Fumbly’. I’m not sure why. Robert Booth was known as ‘Smooth Booth’ because that’s exactly what he was. Consciously handsome, effortlessly elegant, he had wonderful black boots that covered his ankles and he ‘treated’ them with a bone before polishing them to keep them supple. He went on to King’s College, Cambridge, and met E. M. Forster there (‘You must call me Morgan’) and then left Cambridge without taking his degree to become a male model advertising a chocolate flake bar. Extraordinary. I liked Ham Arnold, too. His father was a celebrated children’s author living in the USA: Arnold Arnold. His mother was a world-famous photographer based in London: Eve Arnold. She was a small woman, who looked exactly like her son, with grey hair done up in a bun. She was very American, but I liked her because (like Simon Cadell’s mother) she treated me as an equal, like a grown-up. She gave me my first Screwdriver (iced vodka and fresh orange juice) and told heartbreaking stories about Marilyn Monroe, whom she knew well and photographed many times. Ham’s real name was Francis Arnold. He was nicknamed ‘Ham’ by fellow Bedalians because of his supposed physical resemblance to Ham the Astrochimp, the first hominid launched into outer space, in January 1961.
‘Syphilis’ Ehrlich was so called because the Nobel prize winner Paul Ehrlich (no relation) had pioneered research into the disease of syphilis in the late nineteenth century. Syph’s real name was Michael. Bedalians weren’t kind with their nicknames. There was a girl known as ‘Oz’ because of the size of her thighs – as in Shelley’s poem ‘Ozymandias’: ‘two vast and trunkless legs of stone …’ There were some people at school who called me ‘Supercilious Simpson’. Oddly, I didn’t mind, and when abbreviated to ‘Super’ I quite liked it.
Was I supercilious? I don’t think I was (well, no more than a bit), but I can see now that I sounded it. The other day on Twitter I came across a clip of me on TV in the 1960s. My fluting voice is embarrassing: a hideous conflation of Little Lord Fauntleroy, Celia Johnson in Brief Encounter and Leslie Howard as the Scarlet Pimpernel. And I used a hundred words when ten would do. I marvel I had any friends at all. I imagine the only reason a girl ever kissed me was to shut me up.
At least the teachers liked me. And I liked them. Who were my favourites? The headmaster, naturally. Tim Slack was only thirty-four when appointed, Tiggerish, keen and bouncy. I liked him for that, though others didn’t. Being an eager-beaver wasn’t the Bedales style. While the head was very young, his deputy, Cyril King, was very old. I mean very old: he had been teaching at the school since 1923. He was also delightfully dotty. He taught Latin and when he wanted you to start work he’d say, ‘Carry on with your labours!’ At first I thought he was saying, ‘Carry on with your neighbours!’ which led to some confusion. The housemaster, John Slater, round-faced, dapper, not very tall, a tad portly, taught history (quite brilliantly) and endeared himself to the boys by giving us cocoa and allowing us to watch Danger Man on his TV on a Sunday night. I assume he was gay, though that wasn’t a word that existed in that sense then. Ditto George Smith who taught French and was fat, jolly and reeked of tobacco.
Christopher Cash, who taught art, was more obviously homosexual: world-weary, tall and effete, he walked like a languid Aubrey Beardsley drawing. He was an inveterate smoker, too – in class as well as out of it. He started smoking at school, he told me. He went to Stowe, ‘a proper school’ (as opposed to Bedales), ‘where, naturally, smoking was encouraged’. He felt Bedales was full of ruffians. ‘We were more mannerly at Stowe,’ he liked to say. On school cabaret nights, he also liked to sing the music-hall song about the tattooed lady. He was very amusing. I visited him during the holidays at his flat in Onslow Square and he talked to me about his favourite artists: ‘You know, whenever Augustus John met a child, he always patted it on the head – just in case it was one of his.’
Inevitably, the teachers I am remembering, the ones who will feature in my upmarket TV soap, are the ‘characters’. The straightforward ones – like the games master – I can’t bring to mind at all. I know he wore a bright purple tracksuit, but his name has escaped me … oh no, it hasn’t. It’s just come back. But let’s forget it. Sport wasn’t my thing.
Maths wasn’t my thing, either, but I remember the maths master vividly – Anthony Gillingham. He was a character: tall, handsome, with crinkly receding black hair, he had six children (five daughters and a son), and a pale-faced, long-suffering wife who looked like a rag doll, whom he eventually left for a younger woman. I liked Mrs Gillingham. She was an Old Bedalian herself, part of the Great Bedales Heritage. Her father had been at the school right at the beginning, back in the Oscar Wilde era in the 1890s. I liked Mr Gillingham, too. He was passionate about mathematics, sex, sailing, Gilbert and Sullivan and politics. He was a communist, I think, and an active supporter of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, very much a vogue cause at Bedales at the time. He led the school contingent on the Aldermaston March every Easter, walking from the Atomic Weapons Establishment near Aldermaston in Berkshire to London’s Trafalgar Square. I have always assumed that I am a Conservative (and conservative) because I was brought up like a firstborn child – and firstborns, as we know, tend to like the world as they find it and want to keep it as it is. As I write this, I am now wondering if, in fact, I am as I am because I was a teenage rebel – and what I rebelled against were the socialist values that were part and parcel of the Bedales tradition. At school, when I won the Macdonald Essay Prize I was delighted to discover it had been given by the son of Ramsay MacDonald. Naturally, Britain’s first Labour Prime Minister sent his boy to Bedales.
