The Blue Touch Paper (10 page)

In this mood, I had fallen upon the writings of Raymond Williams, whose last words to me in Cheltenham shortly before he died in 1988 were to be, by coincidence, ‘I can't be a father to everyone.' At Lancing, I managed, not without struggle, to fight my way through his two most acclaimed books,
Culture and Society
and
The Long Revolution
. The complications of his style were prodigious, but without always being too sure what he was saying, I nevertheless picked up a flavour which was much more strongly reinforced by anecdote. For obvious reasons, I loved Williams when he said that he refused to take lessons in
family values from a class that expelled its own boy children from the home at the age of nine. At the time when men were horrified that the invention of the pill might offer women a degree of independence, I loved him asking, ‘When they talk of the permissive society, I always want to ask who exactly is doing the permitting?' I loved the fact that when, at a university seminar, the lecturer L. C. Knights advanced the familiar argument that, because of the dehumanisation wrought by the Industrial Revolution, no modern person could possibly hope to have experienced what Shakespeare meant by the word ‘neighbour', Williams interrupted to say that he at least knew perfectly well what ‘neighbour' meant because he had been brought up in a working-class community in Wales. But most of all I loved Williams for his essay ‘Culture Is Ordinary'. In this he argues that every single person, wherever they are born, already belongs to a culture of some sort. Literature is not created by fine minds at the top of society talking one to another. Culture is not sipped from fine china. No, it is, on the contrary, the outcome of social forces coming up from below, from deep down in society itself. Culture is not an add-on. It's an expression of what society is, and, most of all, of how it is changing. ‘There are no masses to save, to capture or to direct, but rather the crowded people in the course of an extraordinarily rapid and confusing expansion of their lives . . . So when Marxists say we are living in a dying culture, and that the masses are ignorant,' he wrote, ‘I have to ask them . . . where on earth they have lived. A dying culture and ignorant masses are not what I have known and see.'

A great many schoolchildren fall headlong in love with the essays of George Orwell because their author is fair-minded and lucid. His work acts as a welcome relief from the pretension of normative literary studies, a sort of sorbet, a palate-cleanser
for people who read too much jargon. I liked Orwell too. But Williams, though never able to emulate Orwell's clear prose, had two different qualities which were of equal value. First – and important in my scale of values – Williams was witty. He was that rare intellectual who makes good jokes, which gut the heart of an issue. But second, his outlook on matters cultural was in all aspects profoundly generous. He wanted everyone to have access to everything. Orwell was an upper-class refugee who wanted things to be simple. Williams was a working-class migrant who knew things were complicated. He was one of the first academics to be engaged with television, both the programmes and the advertising, because he was especially interested in where ideas came from and how they were distributed and absorbed by people at large. He would be delighted to know he is today the subject of more Google hits than all other New Left thinkers put together. Williams hated the idea of culture as something exclusive, a door which had to be knocked on by supplicants. In his own personal experience, from which, to the disapproval of more conventional scholars, he drew so much of his understanding, culture was already out there, thriving among ordinary people. The job of those who sought to theorise about it was to look around them. They must connect the movement of society to the movement of art.

My excitement at encountering Williams's ideas turned into a practical plan. I noticed on the first page of his books that he taught at somewhere called Jesus College, Cambridge. For that reason, helped by Donald Bancroft who always admired enterprise, I immediately applied for admission, without knowing very much about where it was or what it would be like. In a rare lapse of faith from her governing beliefs, my mother had wanted me to leave school at fifteen because she had secured me
a promising position training to be an accountant in one of Bexhill's leading firms, just a few hundred yards from Pendragon. When she got her annual report from Marks and Spencer, dispatched to her by right as the owner of several hundred shares, she had noticed that almost everyone on its distinguished board had accountants' letters after their names. So it was at my own insistence I had forgone the chance one day perhaps to sit in the Marks and Spencer boardroom in Baker Street. Now at least I had a counter-proposal. I would go to Britain's coldest, wettest, flattest university and sit at the feet of a clever man.

Once I had stumbled onto a potential path, my interest in Lancing fell away. I enjoyed an eye-opening month in Paris studying an external course at the Sorbonne in preparation for my French A level. I shared a room for seven francs a night in a hotel in the Rue de Verneuil, tuning in to the very last days of a vanishing Left Bank where
ouvriers
still stood in blue uniforms, leaning on zinc bars at seven in the morning, already drinking white wine and marc. Lunches of savoury sheep's brains
meunière
, or slabs of pork with beans, were two francs fifty. I edited the school magazine without distinction. I stood as the school's Labour candidate in the 1964 mock election and was roundly defeated. This last experience proved to me for all time that standing for public office was yet another on the long list of things, including tennis, debating and carpentry, which I turned out to be useless at.

In previous years Patrick Halsey had invited us down from our dormitories on Saturday nights to sip cocoa in his sitting room in our pyjamas and slippers and to watch
That Was the Week that Was
. It was one of those unmissable shows, common to decisive shifts in public taste, which are more exciting in prospect and in commentary than they are in reality. Sketches about
open fly buttons didn't seem very radical to me. But somehow on the night of 15 October, in adjacent floral armchairs, it was only Patrick and I who stayed up late into the night to see Alec Douglas-Home, the most delicate flower of English nobility, thrown out of Downing Street. Harold Wilson, talking about the white heat of technology which significantly did arrive, but not, for most people, for another thirty years, was due to take office by a tiny majority. Labour was back in at last. While the one-time Lord Home prepared to concede defeat with aristocratic courtesy, Patrick sank deeper in his chair, endlessly reapplying fresh flame to his pipe which seemed to dampen and die as the evening went on. Patrick sipped from his whisky glass and asked me, ‘Aren't you moved by him?' – but in the tone of a man who anticipated the answer ‘No'.

4

The Mercedes Symbol

I did what was required and got myself an open scholarship to Jesus. Christopher Hampton was a year above me at Lancing but before he had left for Oxford, he had introduced me to a couple of friends in his house. In future years people would find it remarkable that Christopher, Tim Rice and I, all later known as writers for the theatre, were at school together. But the high cultural tone of the place – Peter Pears would come down with Benjamin Britten and stage concerts always with that weird screeching noise which still gives me the shivers – at least provided us with examples, if not ability. Although soft-spoken, wry and sweetly modest, Christopher had always been distinguished in my eyes with a precocious inner certainty. For all his monologues of comic misfortune, girls who said no and so on – he was as keen on Tony Hancock as I was – he was, ultimately, like a top that couldn't be knocked off its axis. Tim also looked into the future with a degree of justifiable confidence. He was already an expert theologian of the pop charts and scholar of obscurer texts in
Melody Maker
and the
New Musical Express
. He had a pop band called the Aardvarks who played at school concerts. They were strongly in debt to Cliff Richard and the Everly Brothers, who were to remain Tim's lifelong heroes. But the second close friend of Christopher's was Roger Dancey, a handsome, genial fellow with an informed love of cricket and in proud possession of what he claimed was the Sagittarian's
gift for getting on with everyone. Those born under this sign, he told me, could call themselves playboys of the universe. I told him I was Gemini. Gemini? Hmm, not so good.

One of the masters, Norman Holmes, had recently hosted the visit to England of an American couple, driving them round to Windsor and Stratford. It had been part of an exchange. Now, in reply to a speculative letter from Roger, this couple were happy to take two schoolboys at a loose end who might be willing to go out and paint their house on Manhattan Beach in Los Angeles in return for food and lodging. Since we both had a spare nine months before going to university, it sounded like an ideal way of passing the time. The only obstacle was that I had no money to get across the Atlantic. So I went along, like thousands before me, to the educational headhunters Gabbitas and Thring. My hope was that some menial posting would become available in a prep school. They had nothing. Then, out of the blue, in the New Year, just when I was about to give up, the agency rang to report that a teacher at Cranleigh School, Lance Marshall, had broken his leg. There was an unexpected vacancy for one term only, starting in just five days' time. I met the head of English, Pat Maguire. He told me that among my other jobs I would be required to teach A level. I pointed out that I would still be seventeen for another six months, and that I myself had only sat the A level the previous summer. ‘Good,' he said. ‘That means you'll be ahead of the boys.'

Cranleigh was not a great spot for someone without a car. A Victorian red-brick monstrosity, the school sat in the middle of a Surrey village, which itself seemed to sit in the middle of a fair-sized depression, with little ruffling the surface of its wealthy commuter self-satisfaction. This was Lancing without the seasoning, without the challenge. Lodging as I did with the
pleasant Mr Maguire in his family home just across from the school in Edgefield Close, I had little chance to do anything at night except drink moodily in the masters' common room, a sort of elevated Portakabin round the back of the building. I tried to play billiards with anyone as lonely as I was on the table which dominated it. Since I still looked and sounded pretty much like most of the pupils they spent all day teaching, few masters cared to oblige me with a game. Anyway, they had lives.

There was a paradox here. I had finally escaped a median English public school to set forth into the world, and yet here I was dumped down for eight weeks in another, only this time on the other side of the electric fence. Cranleigh was in the grip of a boring sort of muscular Christianity, with a rugby-playing headmaster, David Emms, whose knuckles scraped along the ground as he walked. I once heard him address the assembled school on the equal dangers of masturbation and borrowing other boys' bicycles without permission. He had me removed from teaching Divinity when he learned that my notion of how to address the subject included some rudimentary laying out of the principal arguments for and against the existence of God. For him religion was worship, not thought. The state funeral of Winston Churchill at St Paul's Cathedral, happening within a few weeks of my arrival at Cranleigh, brought the school to a stately, deferential halt. The war leader had taken ten days to die. On 30 January Mr Maguire's living room filled to capacity as everyone assuaged their grief with Twiglets and industrial quantities of gin and tonic. The spontaneous lowering of the cranes to half-mast on both sides of the Thames as Churchill's coffin sailed by remains the most indelible public image of my life. Twenty-five million of us were back in front of our black-and-white TVs, tapping for the last time into unifying notions
of service and patriotism which, after the duplicity of Suez, already sounded a touch out of date. People were moved, but moved at the passing of value, not at its ascendancy. Appeals to Churchill's memory were from that day on to ring national alarm bells of hypocrisy and manipulation when invoked by the far seedier leaders who saw Britain through to the end of the twentieth century.

I lucked into a couple of friends among the younger masters in the common room, one of whom took me to a few revealing parties, regularly enlivened by his delightful air-hostess girlfriend. And I was taken up by Edward Black, who was probably twenty-two and already a gifted linguist. He had graduated from reading French and Spanish at London University and he enjoyed showing a child-colleague the ropes. He had a Citroën 2CV, and it became our regular custom to go into Guildford at night to listen to jazz. Edward was an enthusiast, alive as only lovers of a disempowered art form can be to all the internal splits and divisions within the British history of the music. Edward's carrier of the New Orleans grail was ‘The Guvnor', Ken Colyer, who, unlike the better-known Chris Barber, Acker Bilk, Kenny Ball or Monty Sunshine, was held by purists to have resisted all the temptations of facile popularity. He alone was the real thing. When, red-faced, Colyer blew his uncompromising trumpet, he looked alarmingly as if the prominent boil on his forehead were going to burst. But of more significance to me than how he played was where. The little nightclub we heard him in was right by the bus station, opposite the larger Rikki Tik Club. It was called the Harvest Moon, and just like the Whisky-a-Go-Go which I had come upon next to the Opéra during my stay in Paris, it was full of flighty girls in tightly ribbed woollen pullovers and short skirts. Most were
called Sarah or Fiona. In real life, the Harvest Moon was soon after taken over by mods, whose preferred music was the blues. Inevitably when mods arrived, drugs became a more important part of the scene. Jazz was kicked out, as jazz always is. But nine years later, in my 1974 play
Knuckle
, the club was reincarnated in dramatic imagination as the Shadow of the Moon. It became the fictional location for a piece of work which would one day turn my whole life upside down.