Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins Page 4

  But actually Farleigh House was a lovely school and I was very happy there. At some point during my first winter term it began to snow. I remember being stunned. It fell past the high arched windows of form two, and fluttered silently across the park in front of the house. It didn’t let up for days. The country came to a standstill and to make matters worse, or better for the boys, the power cuts began. At four o’clock our whole school was plunged into darkness, and candles and oil lamps would be lit while outside the silent storm swirled into glorious drifts for us to play in the next day at break. It was just like the Beano Christmas Annual. Boys huddled around candles telling ghost stories. The huge stately home with its corridors, back staircases and high ceilings became the set for a horror film, full of dark cavernous shadows where the bullies of the school would lurk and pounce out on us weeds as we scuttled from one candlelit pool to another.

  The chapel was mesmerising after sunset. Candles blazed in their silver sconces on the altar and when our bushy-browed priest raised the monstrance containing the host and held it above his head to bless us, a huge medieval shadow leapt up the wall behind him like Satan about to lunge at us and we all gasped as one. It was Catholicism at its very best: a converted dining room, donated family silver, an Irish priest in red satin; wide-eyed boys with the names of the counties their families owned; and, strangely enough, God. In the quartz sky and the crystal ground; in the breathtaking madness of upper-class Catholic ritual; in Mr. Wilson’s power cuts. But most of all, God was still in us boys, in our wide-eyed wonder at everything we were seeing. We forgot our miseries and ambitions, the cruel abandonments, and just lived in blissful excitement.

  It was during this time that I went to confession and, choosing my words very carefully, revealed to the Father behind the grille that I had been “vulgar.” I could see him smiling to himself in the shadows of the sacristy. I suppose he thought I’d said something rude but the vulgarity I was talking about was of a very different nature. There seemed little point in correcting the misunderstanding and so I was absolved with a penance of only three Hail Marys. Absolution was never far away. Confession, like defecation, was regimented at Farleigh House.

  Our music teacher was another ex-soldier, but this time from the ranks, Mr. Paul Issitt. He had been a regimental bandleader and could play every instrument and he had a kind of barrack-room familiarity that we loved. I was fascinated and followed him as though he were Jesus. He was bald with a huge beaky nose and sometimes when he opened his mouth one could glimpse the most elaborate silver scaffolding supporting the roof of his mouth. His sidekick, or girlfriend, was the divine Miss Jellyman. She was a beautiful woman with short auburn hair but she was confined by polio to a wheelchair and had little lifeless legs like sausages. She worked in the school office as a secretary in the mornings and then taught the clarinet in the afternoons before being wheeled up the avenue by Mr. Issitt to the estate cottage they shared with MAJ.

  They arrived at Farleigh at the same time as me. Soon Mr. Issitt had formed an orchestra and we were putting on The Mikado. Strangely enough I had no urge to play Yum Yum or Pitti Sing and was blissfully happy next to Miss Jellyman in my role as second clarinet. I did have a sort of pang when Miss J produced some greasepaint on the day of the dress rehearsal and Mr. Issitt showed the boys how to put on their make-up. The smell of it was intoxicating. The show was a triumph. My best friend Noel Two sang “Tit Willow” and I accompanied him on the clarinet.

  The music room became my headquarters, and quite soon I had the job of pushing Miss Jellyman to lunch every day from the main house to the prefab dining room in the old kitchen gardens. I was terribly proud of this great responsibility—I adored Miss Jellyman—and received a packet of supplementary fruit gums every week. Mr. Issitt taught me piano and I learnt fast. In no time I was playing the organ at mass on Sundays and benediction on Fridays. My favourite part was communion when everyone shuffled up to the altar to receive the sacrament and I had to play something quiet and moody. “Where is Love?” from Oliver was my favourite but show tunes raised some eyebrows from the more fundamentalist staff members. Mr. Stevens finally drew the line one morning after I had played an artful medley on the theme of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” as the sacrament was taken from the tabernacle.

  The holidays were heralded by the trunks coming down from the attics and hysteria fell upon the school. Nobody could sleep. Boys talked all night about their dreams for the hols. Our teachers and their rules relaxed. Stories were read instead of lessons being taught, until finally the morning arrived when two huge coaches crackled down the drive. We all piled in while Mr. Stevens smoked his pipe benignly at the front door, Mrs. Stevens by his side. They waved as we rumbled off through those huge grey gates of hell, down the avenue towards Basingstoke station. Mr. Issitt and Miss Jellyman waved from their cottage gate, MAJ from his, and suddenly it was over.

  It was April 1967 when I started at Farleigh House. My eighth birthday was on 29 May and my mother sent me a large multicoloured cake. It became infested with ants, but I ate it anyway. I sliced it with care, and ants scuttled out carrying huge crumbs on their heads. Nobody minded. We weren’t going to sacrifice good cake for a few ants! I shared it with my new friends and made it last for weeks.

  I stayed at Farleigh House until I was twelve. Terms and holidays came and went. Our little hearts hardened with each beat. We cried less and grew fast. Like jellies we began to set in the moulds of class, religion and nation, and if life before boarding school had been timeless, then the clock began to tick with the school years and time played its usual tricks. Holidays rushed by and term time dragged along. The groundwork for a life of anxiety was being laid. The joy of returning home would be fringed with subconscious panic as one counted off the days left until the beginning of the next term.

  During those first years at Farleigh I became extremely religious and spent hours praying for a visitation from Our Lady. I wanted to be a saint with my own basilica. In the holidays I vainly knelt for hours underneath an apple tree in the orchard at home. I was waiting for Mary to come floating down and tell me terrible secrets concerning the fate of humankind that I would then have to impart to the pope himself, thereby, of course, avoiding school. Obviously, nothing happened except that during my last year, when I was twelve, I failed all the exams that were meant to get me into my next school—public school—and was removed from Farleigh House in the dead of night and sent to a crammer at Seaford in Sussex. I was miserable and so were my parents. Something was wrong but who knew what? I lasted six weeks.

  Then I was sent to a school called Milton Abbey in Dorset where I was even more miserable. I managed to scream my way out of that after a couple of months and was removed in the middle of the term and allowed to come home while my parents regrouped. Finally, at the end of the summer they managed to get me a place in the Catholic monastery, Ampleforth College, in Yorkshire. I was thirteen. My brother was already there and had run away twice. It did not seem very promising.

  CHAPTER 5

  Stage Beauty

  Ampleforth Abbey was a drizzly Dickensian village nestled against the steep wooded banks of a huge and beautiful valley on the Yorkshire moors. The Abbey church itself dominated its surroundings. It had been built in the twenties or thirties and was like a child’s drawing of an old gothic cathedral. The original school was older, made of honey-coloured stone with towers, steep slate roofs and huge latticed windows. The oldest part, St. Oswald’s House, was sliding down the valley and had to be held up by huge wooden buttresses. Wind wailed around the school, rooks cawed in the woods, and the low heavy boom of the Abbey bells could be heard far away on the moor. If Farleigh House had coaxed and conditioned us into the religious prison, then Ampleforth College was there to throw away the key.

  Inside was a labyrinth of vaulted passageways and classrooms, dorms and washrooms, noticeboards and lockers. The place was in turns either totally deserted or bursting with rush-hour traffic. All roads lead to Rome a
nd our school was a delta of meandering tributaries, leading inevitably towards the monastery itself where no boy could set foot without initiation. An invisible line divided the worldly and the other-worldly. The noise and bustle of the school fell sharply away as the silent monastery stretched out before one, where monks in their black habits could be glimpsed gliding through the gloomy cloisters as if on wheels.

  Needless to say, I was in the choir, and we were the only boys allowed to set foot inside the hallowed ground. On Sunday mornings before high mass we marched from the music school in our red cassocks and virgin-white surplices as the loudest of the Abbey bells throbbed through the air, shaking the windows. We were led by Mr. Bowman, the music teacher (who, to the horror of some of the parents, had sideboards and, worse, wore high-heeled suede boots under his cassock), to a door in the side of the monastery where the shrouded monks waited for us in long blood-curdling lines, a black Ku Klux Klan. Ampleforth was Catholic ritual on a grand scale. On a cue from the Abbot we were led into the vast church by acolytes swinging silver bowls on chains billowing with incense. The hooded monks appeared out of a scented mist as the organ took off and nine hundred boys stood as one and launched into a rousing rendition of “Jerusalem” or some other piece of propaganda.

  It was all very clever. You felt as if you belonged to something big; your spine tingled with an Arthurian sense of destiny; and the plan was that you left Ampleforth a raunchy eighteen-year-old boy bursting with testosterone, a fully formed Empire builder with the added twist of a Catholic agenda. After ten years of prep and public school you were part of the gang; and if you weren’t, then you were a freak or a fairy. Luckily for me, I was both.

  But Ampleforth was effective. I learnt who I was. Or at least who I wasn’t. I was not going to be part of that gang. I was probably going to be homosexual and that meant I was going to have to learn how to act.

  The theatre was another Victorian pile built into the side of the hill. It had a musty sexy smell and underneath the stage was the green room, the domain of Algy Haughton, the theatre teacher. He had long white hair, a handlebar moustache and lived in a caravan with his wife Rosemary and their hundreds of children. He was a hippie, I suppose, because when he left a few terms later, he moved to a commune called Lothlorien. He presided over the green room like a latter-day actor-manager behind a huge theatrical desk covered with scripts and papers. The drop-outs and freaks of the school gathered around him, sitting on the weird furniture that had been clumsily constructed for various bygone productions. A mock throne stood next to an enormous chaise longue under Mrs. Haughton’s ingenious velvet drapes. It was freezing in the green room and there was only a double-pronged electric fire to warm Fagin’s gang but this didn’t make any difference. There was a kettle, a huge tin of Nescafé and, if you were lucky, a sticky jar of powdered milk. Games and classes could be safely skipped by hiding in the green room; smoking, drinking and sex could take place without the risk of discovery. If anyone was coming you could first hear a faraway boom as the enormous oak door of the theatre foyer slammed shut, followed by distant echoing footsteps, closer and closer, until finally an awkward shuffle down the narrow stairs that led to the green-room door. And if that wasn’t enough, one could lock the door from inside and bolt through another door onto the rugby fields below.

  The first play I was in was Julius Caesar. I played Cinna the poet. It was a small part, involving only being beaten up by the rabble and running screaming from the theatre. It was an easy role and the only male one I was to play during my entire Ampleforth career. The leading lady was a boy called Wadham. He was one year older than me and exuded an icy professionalism. He played Calphurnia, Caesar’s wife. Everyone seemed to shrink in his presence. I looked at him and I knew: this was a great actress. I had to make him my friend.

  I went unremarked as Cinna the poet but next term the exhibition play—the one that was to be performed for the parents at the end of the summer term—was to be A Midsummer Night’s Dream and I landed the role of Titania, Queen of the Fairies.

  Rehearsals took place after house supper, which was at about six-thirty in the evening. I would race down the hill from my house to the theatre with my heart in my mouth. Never would show business be more exciting. I literally lived and breathed the play. Wadham was making a rare appearance as a male and gave us his Puck. We quickly became friends and forged what was to become a legendary team: the Lunts of the Ampleforth Theatre. The strange thing was I couldn’t act at all. Algy Haughton was worried, I could see. He told me where to move and how to say my lines and I followed his instructions religiously but there was no life in my performance whatsoever.

  The week of the production arrived and still I had made no progress. Rosemary, Algy’s wife, made the costumes. Mine was a lovely apple-green acrylic bodystocking and matching skirt, an ingenious crown woven out of coat hangers topped with large emerald sequins, a gauze train (which got jammed in the green-room door on the first night and never made it onto the stage) and a very fetching peach-blond wig. During my last fitting she tried to cajole me into a performance.

  “This is Algy’s last show, Everett. You must try and give your best. We need to feel more energy. We need to see the fairy in you.”

  “All right,” I replied glumly.

  “Show them you’re a queen.”

  “Okay.”

  I was on the verge of tears. I loved the Haughtons and I wanted to make them proud but I was so self-conscious that as soon as I got on stage, I totally lost all sense of myself.

  “I can do it when I’m on my own, Mrs. H. It’s just . . .” I trailed off, my chin a-quiver.

  “Don’t worry. Just do your best.”

  The noise of an audience entering a theatre on the first night of a production produces one of the most extreme sensations I have ever felt. Drugs, sex, punishment and love all pale by comparison. Maybe waiting for the result of an HIV test is similar. The rest of your life just falls away. Your heart bangs in your chest as if it is about to explode. You can hardly speak. When the lights go down, an expectant hush descends on the house and you stand in the wings, taut and breathless. You are totally alone but at the same time you’re completely merged into the whole human machine of the event. The stagehands, the actors, the dressers: everyone watches the stage intently as it plunges into darkness and you can feel the breeze against your face as the heavy velvet curtain flies out. There is an electricity of concentration that makes one believe in weird things like the power of prayer. It is quite extraordinary. And so was what happened next.

  Stripped of most of my costume, I was literally bundled up the stairs and into the wings while desperately trying to dislodge my train from the fucking green-room door. That train was my performance and I wasn’t going anywhere without it, but the others had their way and naked but for the bodystocking I found myself tumbling onto the stage. I froze. An uncomfortable silence followed. I could feel a sort of collective gasp backstage. What next? I just gaped at the audience. I had reached rock bottom. All I could think of was Mrs. Haughton. Her words echoed through my frazzled brain: “Show them you’re a fairy. They want to see a queen. Fairy. Queen. Queen. Fairy.”

  And then suddenly from out of the static emptiness inside my head came a terrifying high-pitched giggle. It flew out of my mouth—God knows where it came from—and then it stopped. I looked at the audience, aghast. There was a split second of silence and then the strangest thing happened. The house broke into rapturous applause. Well, maybe not rapturous applause, but I got a laugh. Its energy nearly knocked me over. There was no looking back. I literally took off. Possessed, I gallivanted around the stage, ignoring all of Algy’s carefully plotted moves and intonations, and cackled up a frenetic vaudeville performance, the like of which no one had ever seen before and hopefully never will again. My fellow actors looked appalled. Wadham stared icily down from his perch on our forest tree but I didn’t give a fuck. The audience loved it: I was under their control and they were under mine and
that’s how it should be. Never did a Titania get so many laughs. I had the house in stitches, and I couldn’t get enough of it.

  The interval came. I was lying in my bower on top of Barnes who played Bottom, probably at this point waving at the audience. When the curtain came down, Algy and Rosemary rushed onto the stage as if in some Hollywood movie starring Bette Davis. They couldn’t believe their eyes. They were ecstatic. I had transformed in the bat of an eye from an awkward child into a stage monster. Wadham came down from his tree and grudgingly admitted that I was “super.” Maybe I wasn’t a traditional Titania, but at least I was something. I think the review in the next term’s Ampleforth Journal pretty much summed it up. The critic agreed that I had been good, but he said that my performance “left one with the distinct impression that what Titania really needed was a good spanking.”

  The writer of that review was called Ian Davie, a legendary English teacher whose nickname was Dirty Davie. He was a portly gentleman of sixty-odd years, who walked on tiptoe as if he were trying to see into the neighbour’s garden. He adored gossip, and was truly fascinated by the boys and their jumpy, erratic progression through puberty towards manhood. He had informants in every dormitory and knew exactly who was doing what and where and to whom. He hated games and loved the theatre. His laughter ranged from a drag falsetto to deep bass and back again in sweeping arpeggios. It was completely infectious. In fact everything about him was catching. He was the single biggest influence of my school days. He would hold forth in his little room of an evening, over coffee and biscuits, with a lofty Wildean turn of phrase that thrilled and inspired his chosen disciples. He was, quite possibly, the kind of teacher who would be struck off today, but he educated in the literal sense of the word. He led you out. He knew what I was about and nudged and cajoled me to become myself.