Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins Read online

  I always crouched on the floor out of the wind, and would spy on the faces of my family framed by the towering white sail against the sky, sitting up straight in the wind, chatting, laughing. Uncle David, a dutiful son in the old tradition, was a huge handsome man with jet-black hair and thick eyebrows; his relationship with my grandfather was almost military. He was not particularly encouraged as a young man, and neither was my Aunt Katherine, who was very shy. Never to be married. And my mother, Spikey, was the bully of the family. The sisters had been vaguely educated by nuns at Les Oiseaux convent somewhere in the North of England. Both girls converted to Catholicism and addressed one another as “my child.”

  Our destination was often Bird Island, a wildlife sanctuary that you could walk to at low tide. We would have our picnic there, huddled away from the wind in the dunes; the children would drink hot Bovril and play with shrimping nets, and the grown-ups would talk about mysterious incomprehensible things like Churchill and devaluation.

  But what I liked more than sailing, which actually at the time I dreaded, was to have permission to stay at home with Nanny and Miss Cottrell and Mrs. Ransom, the housekeeper. After the sailing party clattered out, a kind of tension evaporated like a huge sigh and the house was quiet. On these days I had the run of the place. I particularly loved sitting in the attics where old trunks full of my grandfather’s naval regalia were piled up next to thousands of magazines from the forties and fifties. I would dress up and spend hours leafing through Country Life and The Field with their pictures of sexless debutantes and their antique houses for sale. The Christmas decorations were also kept in a box in the attic, stored in old newspaper; I would carefully unwrap them and stare for hours at my distorted reflection in the round silver and pink balls.

  I had been born in a big grey room at the end of the house that looked out over the drive. It had a huge old Victorian wardrobe, and I would get inside it and play there for hours on end. I loved silence. Sitting there in the darkness of the half-closed cupboard, listening to the noises of the house. A far-off loo flushing; bathwater gushing down the old copper drains; the wood pigeons in the trees outside; my grandmother’s car crunching across the gravel. It felt magical. Watching the world through the crack in the wardrobe door, everything was beautiful, even the dust that floated through the shafts of sunlight from the windows.

  At teatime the family would return, banging around and running baths. From the snippets of conversation I could gather what kind of a day they’d had and soon Mummy or Nanny would call. I would tingle with pleasure at the sound of their voices. “Roo? Where are you?” But I wouldn’t move. Then I’d hear them coming. They knew all my haunts and so they would go from one hiding place to another, a tide of footsteps and voices coming and going and then coming again, until finally the door of the room where I was born would open. I would shrink to the back of the wardrobe and hold my breath, but soon that door would open too, Nanny’s familiar arms would reach in and pull me out from behind one of my grandmother’s mothballed ballgowns, and we would go down together to the drawing room for tea.

  CHAPTER 4

  Virgin Queen

  One day my mother and I went up to London to a shop called Gorringes where she bought me grey clothes: shorts, sweaters, shirts, socks—all grey, four pairs of each. I can’t remember having any particular reaction, mild curiosity perhaps. I gambolled around as we bought a trunk and a little overnight case that I still have, but I was totally unaware that during the next few days the first significant part of my life would die and nothing would ever be the same.

  During those last evenings of freedom my mum sewed labels into my new outfits and piled them up together in the spare room along with sheets, towels, a dressing gown and slippers. The labels had my name on them, followed by a number.

  I was going away to school. Strangely enough, I was totally unfazed by this information. The night before we left, I packed and repacked my overnight case in a boisterous fever of excitement. My parents and brother were gathered around. Apparently I could not take the red tweed skirt. I thought that was a bit odd, but I let it pass in the general exuberance I was feeling at being an adult.

  “You’re being very grown-up about this, I must say,” remarked my mother.

  “Well, I am seven,” I replied proudly.

  But my brother watched through his tortoiseshell glasses with the cynical eyes of one informed by the past.

  The next morning we got into the car to make the five-hour drive to Basingstoke in Hampshire. Again, not a twinge; I said goodbye to Susan. She knew but I didn’t. She gazed at me soulfully as I dollied past on my way to the luggage-crammed Hillman.

  During the drive the others became quieter and quieter. Finally after several hours we turned a corner and my brother said, “We’re here.” We drove down a long avenue lined with huge ancient trees full of rooks’ nests and my heart began to beat with an unknown drug: adrenaline. Suddenly we were in a row of cars also laden down with trunks and bikes. Glum, malicious boys stared out from within. We got to the entrance: huge stone columns straddled by heraldic lions and thick black wrought-iron gates, beckoning one into hell. My heart jumped into my mouth and sheer terror surged through my body as a grey-flint stately home rose up before us at the end of a sweeping drive.

  We hit a sort of traffic jam of upper-class couples driving back to London. Why were some of the women crying? We parked the car and got out. Instinct told me to stay close to my mother. I could hardly breathe, I was asphyxiated by panic. There were boys everywhere, all shapes and sizes, running in and out of the school in gangs, shouting and screaming. The unfamiliar smell of floor polish and school loos hung in the air. A continuous stream of cars came and went, cracking across the gravel. Boys buried themselves in their mothers’ coats. Others stood defiantly apart, little heads bowed. Teachers, most of them retired army officers and well-to-do spinsters, mingled through the crowd as if it were a village fête. I was mesmerised. This could not be. My mother would never leave me in a place like this.

  We were met by a shuffling man with a pipe—the headmaster, Mr. Trappes-Lomax. He was shrouded in a wispy microclimate of foul-smelling smoke, and his wife Mary (Mrs. Trappes-Lomax to us) was dressed for the Second World War. They introduced us to Matron Walters, a little old hunchbacked hag who, dragging herself one banister at a time, took us upstairs to see the dormitories. More unruly boys roamed the upstairs passages of this once gracious home, pulling their trunks and lunch-boxes across the old wooden floors past rooms filled with rows of black wrought-iron cots covered with bare mattresses. My dormitory was St. Anthony’s. My mother put my little night case on my bed, and before I could open my mouth Mr. Trappes-Lomax suggested that my brother took me down to the school dining room for tea while he escorted my parents to “the drawing room” for a glass of sherry. My grasp on my mother’s hand turned into a sweaty vice-like grip.

  “Darling,” she said, as she unprised my hand from hers, her voice carefully casual, “we’ll probably go while you’re having tea so I’ll kiss you goodbye now.”

  And then all the energy that had been building up exploded in torrents of the deepest pain I have ever experienced. Tears flash-flooded down my face, drenching my little grey shirt. I begged and begged not to be left, or at least for my parents to wait till after tea. Finally, she agreed. My brother took me down into the bowels of the evil-smelling prison, through endless passages crowded with boys—me blinded by my tears, him grim, weary and silent.

  Inside the huge refectory, the din and energy were terrifying. Separated from my brother (he was at the ten-year-olds’ table), I was given a little cake with white icing and sat in abject grief until finally the meal ended and we raced through the school, trying to find my mother and father.

  We caught them outside the front door near the Hillman. My dad patted me on the back and said, “Good luck,” as he got into the car, but my mother stood there, guilty, uncertain and tear-stained in her Jackie O. hat. “Don’t cry or I’ll cry
too,” she said, as she hugged me for the last time. My mind was racing. There must be something I could say to bring an end to this madness.

  But all I could think of was: “What will Susan say?”

  “She’ll understand. I’ll tell her you’ll be back any minute now at half-term.”

  “It isn’t any minute now,” I said with a tide of fresh tears.

  “Come on!” said the major.

  She stumbled into the car and shut the door. I looked down at the tears splashing on to my shoes: new sandals from Startrite. Last week I had loved them, but now they were just another part of the plot against me. I couldn’t look up. I didn’t want to see the betrayal in my mother’s eyes. My brother took my hand and nudged me as my mother unwound the window and waved.

  “What are you looking at, darling?” She was crying and her mascara had run.

  “My shoes,” I said. And I looked up, but the car had already moved off.

  We watched the Hillman glide down the long avenue towards the gates, my mother looking back at us and waving, my father’s face firmly fixed on the road ahead. Still holding hands—frozen between one world and the next—my brother and I stared at the tail lights with a terrible intensity as they disappeared around the corner. Maybe they would wink a sudden reprieve, the whole image would dissolve and we would be back at home at the end of a nasty dream. As long as we could see them we were still in some kind of contact. But with their last glimmer died all hope and we were left to make our own way through the rest of our lives in the tradition of our Empire-ruling forebears.

  But where was the fucking Empire?

  What was it about the English upper classes of that era that drove them to procreate and then abandon their children to the tempestuous dangers of boarding school? In the days of Empire, the British ruling class had to make sure that all colonial officials were hard cases. Thus boarding schools were born. A child with a soft vulnerable heart soon had it calcified by abandonment, bullying, beatings and buggery: the rigours of prep and public school. He was soon conditioned, so that by the time he became a faceless gnome in the “diplomatic” he was without feelings of the normal sort and could be utterly ruthless in the service of his or her Britannic Majesty.

  But why us? The Empire was over. There was no need for us to be boiled alive, but our parents were paranoid Conservatives. Their Moses was Enoch Powell and my early years were full of catchphrases like “Rivers of blood”; “We didn’t fight a war for this”; “It was much better when . . .” Actually it was not. It was much more fun with Twiggy and the Beatles, whooping it up in a miniskirt and an afghan coat. But not for the Everetts. We were as conventional as they came. And so there I was, one chilly April evening in 1967, a “new boy” at Farleigh House School, Farleigh Wallop, Basingstoke, Hants.

  That first night the lights were turned off at six-thirty although it wasn’t dark outside. A wood pigeon cooed dreamily from a nearby tree as all the little boys sobbed in their beds. We were heartbroken but soon most of us passed out from exhaustion. Only a boy called Wilson wailed all night. The next morning we woke and remembered where we were with a deep shudder and the sobs began with renewed anguish as Matron Walters herded us down to breakfast. Now we were on our own in a vicious, jeering jungle of boys.

  In those far-off days there was definitely a St. Trinian’s feel to the English prep school. To start with, teachers were not subjected to particularly rigorous training or investigation. The war had left an abundance of army officers who took to the blackboard, and Farleigh House was a school run by a motley crew of washed-up Empire rulers. The school had been the seat of the Wallop family, whose circumstances were reduced after the war (even though they quickly became rich again by developing half of Basingstoke), and was pioneered by a Captain Trappes-Lomax, a man without the faintest hint of a qualification. He started the school in the late fifties and died of a heart attack in 1965, while he was having a bath. His brother, the pipe-smoking Mr. Steven Trappes-Lomax, stepped valiantly into his sibling’s shoes. Mr. Stevens, as he was known, was a terrifying figure to the boys. He had a moustache like Hitler and soft googly eyes that blinked a lot. He wore a musty, tobacco-smoked tweed jacket and was prone to make spot checks on the dormitories at night. His tall, slightly hunched silhouette stalked the dark night-time corridors with his torch. If there was “fooling in dorm” the suspects would be rounded up and told to come down to “the drawing room” in fifteen minutes, where one’s punishment would be administered, carried out with full country-house decorum. First offenders were congenially shown the ropes: “If you’d be so good as to bend over that chair, I’m afraid I’m going to give you six.”

  It was always two, four or six. The “gymmie” was one of old Mr. Trappes-Lomax’s faded lace-up plimsolls and was kept in a bottom drawer next to the chair. Six of the best was agony through your pyjamas, and it was therefore preferable to be summoned after breakfast the next morning. Then at least a bit of blotting paper between butt cheek and pants could soften the blow.

  Our mornings began at seven-twenty. Matron Walters’ Edwardian walking shoes could be heard clunking around in the passage, getting ready for a ludicrous daily procedure known as “temperatures.” She would storm into the freezing dormitory and open the curtains. Bleary-eyed boys shuffled out to the thermometers. Each boy had his own, marked with name and number, and we would stand in line, half asleep in our dressing gowns, for the two allotted minutes before she would take them out of our mouths, squint at the mercury, shake the thermometer and send us off. No sooner had we learnt the ropes than elaborate plans would be hatched to give ourselves temperatures and thus a morning in the sick room. We used to put our thermometers in hot water and groan, but unfortunately Bilgo, as she was called, was blind as a bat and we would be sent on our way anyhow.

  Down to the chapel for prayers or, if it was a holiday of obligation, mass, and then breakfast, after which Mr. Stevens would read out a list of those he wanted to see in the drawing room for a session with the gymmie. We were obliged to take a shit after breakfast and then sign something called the tick board. A tick if one had shat, a cross if one had not. So there was mayhem every morning in the main hallway between boys lining up for the few loos, other boys lining up outside the drawing room waiting for punishment, and others running around pretending to be aeroplanes etc. It was a three-course meal of prayer followed by defecation and punishment, but all this ended as “the clanger”—a kind of town crier’s bell—was rung by some smug prefect and classes would begin. If you had, against all the odds, managed to get a morning in the sick room, which would absolve you from the downstairs rituals, you could achieve a feeling of intense peace as the bell clanged and echoed through the vast house and the constant din of children suddenly evaporated. Footsteps everywhere. Doors slammed and then silence. If the sick room was empty, you could secretly unfold your Beano comics and settle down in the clean sheets to wait for Matron and a Haliborange vitamin pill.

  My name was Everett Two. My brother was Everett One. Our first names were sacred to the memories of our mothers and were never used until they called us by them as the school train squealed to a halt at Waterloo. CJ, my form master, was very dapper. He’d been a priest or was about to become one, I can’t remember which, but he had a black cigarette holder, black thick dandruffy hair and a miniature black poodle whose name escapes me. He was mostly a gentle man, though a couple of terms later, when he became headmaster, he was subject to fits of rage and gymmie-happy mornings in the drawing room.

  MAJ was an exhausted old gentleman who taught English. He had caught malaria in the tropics when he was young and as a result moved very slowly. Between classes, there was always an explosion of play in the form room until someone would hiss, “He’s coming!” and we would all scamper back to our little desks and be quiet. MAJ entered a room with languid dramatic flair. He always travelled with an acolyte from his last class who carried a large woman’s wicker basket for him, in which MAJ kept his books, an apple a
nd the morning paper. In the sudden hush we could hear the drinks-party banter between him and his little pilot fish.

  “My sister saw your grandmother last week in Burnham Market.”

  “Oh really, sir? How is your sister?”

  “In terribly good form. Now where are we?”

  And then in he’d sweep. The acolyte would put the basket on the table and be discharged, and class would begin. MAJ was a kind man. When I left Farleigh under a slight cloud and was miserable in some crammer on the south coast, he wrote me one of the sweetest letters I have ever received. He was a real character, extremely eccentric, but he could get nasty. Once, during English composition, I had written a sentence in my exercise book which ended with “. . . And off they went.” The only problem was that I’d written “of” instead of “off.”

  MAJ went ballistic. “What have you written, Everett Two?” his shrill and menacing voice screamed into my ear.

  “’And off they went,’ sir.” I replied, followed by an enormous whack across the head with a ruler.

  “No, you haven’t, you silly boy. What have you written?”

  I looked at the page and couldn’t think what my mistake had been, so I repeated, “’And off they went,’ sir.” Bang went the ruler again.

  And so this dialogue continued, gathering a violent momentum with each question and erroneous answer. MAJ could really go for it. He grabbed me by the hair, slapped me over the back of the head and almost rubbed my nose in my book. It was terrifying. “What have you written?” He was red and screaming now, frothing at the mouth. I remember looking at the page in my exercise book, unable to think, not daring to speak, waiting for the next blow. When someone was getting it, the atmosphere became electric; the class would be quiet and tense; no one moved a muscle for fear that the storm would divert itself onto someone else before it blew out. Luckily for us, MAJ was quite frail and his blood was thin from the malaria so that after a bit he would have to sit down. He would clutch his basket and take a quinine pill, and things would slowly go back to normal.