The Blue Touch Paper (8 page)

My housemaster was Patrick Halsey, a humane and decent man. Then in his fifties, he had been a central pillar of the school's hierarchy since before the war, when Lancing had been forced to migrate deep into the patrician country wildness of Shropshire to avoid the bombs. If Michael Phillips was the worst kind of Tory, Patrick was the best. A celibate bachelor, often come upon unexpectedly in corridors with a pipe in one hand and a glass of whisky and a copy of the
Spectator
in the other, he was married to his vocation. His quarters were immediately above his charges. He lived and slept school, leaving only occasionally between terms to visit his ageing mother in Berkhamsted. Religiously devout, he wore his love of teaching with an infectious light-heartedness which, we were told, dismayed his more pompous colleagues, especially the churchy ones, but which delighted boys. He had a weakness for practical jokes, the most obscure of which involved one night putting the whole house on alert because, he said, someone had stolen the amphetamines of a visiting monk. Since, innocents, we had no idea even what uppers were, the joke was lost on us.

Patrick was proud of having been at Eton with a fellow pupil called Lord Remnant. It seemed to him a symbolic name for a world he believed was unlikely to survive much longer. Similarly, he admired another Etonian, the future prime minister Alec Douglas-Home, for daring to admit to doing his economics with matchsticks. Patrick himself taught matchstick history. He worked within an unashamedly amateur tradition. Goaded on by a willing audience, his classes were peppered with well-loved Adolf Hitler imitations, screamed at full pitch and accompanied by elaborate foot-stamping and arm-raising. He could reel off whole speeches, often ending with his dentures becoming unfixed. The memory of them has sustained me subsequently in the darkest moments of play- and film-making. How often, in the stalls, have I muttered to myself what became in Patrick's impersonation Hitler's catchphrase, ‘
Meine Geduld ist zu Ende
.' My patience is at an end.

It was Patrick's personal kindness to which I clung during some desperate days of adjustment. The main highlight of my early time at the school was the obligation to write a weekly letter home. For me it was not a burden but an opportunity. I continued corresponding well into my thirties, partly because Mum was so conscious of the cost of the telephone that conversation with her was rushed and unsatisfactory, but more seriously because it was good for me to bring order to chaos. Writing to my mother offered a lifeline, a welcome chance to process my experiences and present them, not perhaps exactly as they had really happened, but in a way which might take some of the sting out. Everything was safer once it was set down. From pride, I never gave any intimation of the anguish or the loneliness. Enemies of literature will say that this is what professional writers do for a living. They seize hold of the complex reality of
the world and reorder it the way they might wish it to be, rather than the way it is. My letters were not particularly interesting, nor were they well written. There was no sign of any early aptitude. It would be another ten years before, for the first time in my life, I stumbled on a gift for writing dialogue. The discovery of that gift would change my whole life. But discovery it was.

My problem for now was that at Lancing I hadn't found a role. I needed a mask to hide behind. I began to find it through my cultural journeys to London in the holidays when I would stay with my aunt Peggy, who had fallen on rough times. Before her marriage to the promising young doctor had ended unhappily, they had moved from a large house in Bath to a cramped flat above the surgery in the heart of Brixton, in which Peggy was now bringing up four children alone. My mother had been deeply unsettled when she was forced to testify as a witness to the physical damage done to Peggy by domestic violence. On more than one occasion Alan had thrown her down the stairs. But although she had so little money, Peggy treated me with extraordinary hospitality, cooking up beautiful meals of roast chicken, stuffing, gravy, peas and roast potatoes – meals on occasions more lavish than anything she was offering to her own children. ‘We're having sausages.' She and they, my cousins Ann, Lindsay, Lesley and Graham, were cheerful and welcoming, a sort of second family, knocked around by ill fortune and finding good grace to survive the kind of unforeseen hardship my branch of the family had never known. Life had kicked the gentility out of them, and they seemed more robust and warmer for it.

Going warily down Landor Road after such a feast, I would catch the tube from Clapham North to the West End. I was thirteen when, alone, I saw Harold Pinter's play
The Caretaker
in its first production at the Duchess Theatre. I have a strong memory of sitting in the Upper Circle as the curtain went up and Alan Bates stood, feral, alluring, in a leather jacket, waiting to pounce, as sharp in mind as in dress. Bates was my first sighting of those dangerous young men – James Fox, David Hemmings, Terence Stamp – who by paying a British debt to Brando were, alongside their gleaming counterparts – Julie Christie, Vanessa Redgrave, Charlotte Rampling – to give the best sixties cinema its glittering edge. In the interval I looked down amazed as full afternoon tea in good china was served on trays in the stalls to patrons remaining in their seats. Had they been watching the same play as me? But at that age it made little difference what I saw. Just being in London was enough.

The mask I was reaching for, inevitably, was that of an intellectual. And I was helped in this ambition by my first real friendship with a boy from another house at school. Nigel Andrews, though from a far more confident family, spent his holidays as I did, buying cheap day returns and trailing round theatres and cinemas. Pretty quickly, we decided we might as well do it together. Often we would meet at 10 a.m. to take in an early film, then go to two plays before heading off from Victoria or Waterloo to our separate homes. If there were any spare time at all on the concourse, we would also dip into the news theatres which offered newsreels, cartoons and, best of all, Edgar Lustgarten reconstructions of famous murders, gloatingly recounted, and always ending with the resonant words, ‘And then he was hanged by the neck . . . until he was dead.' For me at least, film and theatre were never fantasy. They were welcome relief from fantasy.

Although our enthusiasm was equal, our tastes were widely divergent. Nigel's passion for the 1960 film of
The Fall of the House of Usher
with Vincent Price meant that he rushed me at the first opportunity to a morning showing of Price's
The Pit and the Pendulum
a year later, every moment of which he relished like fine wine. At fourteen, he could already discourse on the superiority of Roger Corman films to Hammer. In the evenings, he took special pleasure in watching plays with actors like Margaret Lockwood and Nigel Patrick, whose Palaeolithic creakiness held him spellbound. In between he liked to re-fuel in Wimpy Bars, where his favoured dessert was a Banana Pretty, a pastry loaded up with baby mash and synthetic cream. I, in contrast, was trying to get us, underage, into
Never on Sunday
and
La Dolce Vita
. From my standpoint, Nigel's preference for the garish over the good was perverse, but I could already feel something spontaneous and touching in his pleasure. Susan Sontag had not yet written her ‘Notes on “Camp”' – ‘No. 56: Camp is a
tender
feeling . . . No. 58: The ultimate camp statement: it's good
because
it's awful' – but if, for any reason, she had chosen to do her early research among Sussex schoolboys, Nigel, a pathfinder by genuine instinct not by imitation, would have been on hand to help. It would have been impossible for any of us to guess that Nigel's willingness to go into raptures about trash would later gain him sustained tenure as the chief film critic of the
Financial Times
. In those earnest times, how could anyone have imagined that it would one day be thought unexceptional for someone as clever as Nigel to spend their time writing hagiography on the films of Arnold Schwarzenegger? The post-modern revolution which would fashionably advantage the unknowing over the intentional lay a long way ahead. As a repentant Pauline Kael admitted at the end of her life, ‘When we championed trash culture, we had no idea it would become the only culture.'

Following Nigel, I had the equipment and a little of the knowledge to act out a part. I was the kind of boy who woke up in the morning feeling fine. But because I had resolved to be an intellectual, I knew that the first qualification was to behave as if mornings were difficult. I would stagger out of bed as though life were a burden, in what I imagined to be the approved egghead manner. If I had been allowed to wear dark glasses to the first lessons of the day, I would have done it like a shot. Other pupils started calling me a pseud, but being a pseud bothered me far less than being a nothing. Rather than be an individual idiot, I could be a generic idiot. It was progress. I was encouraged in this decision by the example of a new French teacher. In a school full of masters in grey turn-up flannels, leather patched jackets and panama hats, Harry Guest materialised, not long out of Cambridge. He had published Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes in an undergraduate magazine, and was himself a practising poet in drainpipe trousers, chic button-down shirts and slim knitted ties.

With his loping walk, Harry didn't look like his colleagues and his eloquent enthusiasm for all things continental meant that he most certainly didn't sound like them either. The names coming from his lips – Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Mallarmé – were not at that time common currency in West Sussex. Nor had Lancing ever before had a master offering to host evenings of poetry and bebop with the Inigo Kilborn Quintet. Harry was also responsible for the maintenance of an Art Film Society which allowed sixth-formers to meet in the chemistry labs four times a term for the projection of films by Buñuel and D. W. Griffith. At the end of each term, I would ask Harry for a reading list, which he would set down in his immaculate handwriting. Back at home, I would lie on my bed, working
my way through Forster, Balzac, Koestler, Wells, Camus and Ford Madox Ford, without understanding much of what I was reading, but aware that, come the new term, Harry would want to know what I thought of them. When, towards the end of my time at Lancing, Cyril Connolly published a list of the ‘100 Greatest Books of the Century' in the
Sunday Times
, I had read sixty-two. Entirely thanks to Harry.

I never felt that Harry was as keen on me as I was on him – he had favourites among boys and I was not one of them – but it never bothered me. What he was giving me was far too important for me to worry about whether my feelings were hurt in the process of getting it. A defining moment came some years on when I was in the sixth form and Harry decided with his glamorous American fiancée Lynn to give a dinner party for some pupils in his flat above a shop in Shoreham. At a certain point, Harry pulled down a book from a shelf. It was a paperback copy of
The Death of Tragedy
by George Steiner, a volume of literary criticism which was enjoying a distinct vogue. Its egregious badness seemed to consume him. ‘How can anyone take this seriously?' he kept asking. I had noticed as he opened it that Harry's copy was already ominously disfigured, both with scrawling in the margin and with thick black lines through whole paragraphs of Steiner's prose. But by the time pudding came, and perhaps a certain amount of red wine had gone down, Harry was becoming more and more agitated. ‘This book', Harry said, ‘is taken seriously. It's taken seriously. And it's full of schoolboy howlers. Referring to Shakespeare's
King Lear
, Steiner writes of the blinded Lear standing on what he believes to be the cliffs of Dover, and falling. And yet everyone knows' – Harry climaxed with tremendous emphasis – ‘everyone
knows
it was not King Lear who was blinded, it was
Gloucester. How can anyone take seriously a book which confuses King Lear with the Duke of Gloucester?' At this, Harry took the book and threw it into the wastepaper basket. At the same moment, he burst into tears.

I had seen enough to grow used to the idea that adults' passions tended to erupt unexpectedly, but never had I seen anyone driven to such lengths by a mere book. The lesson I learned that night was that, for good or ill, there were people who thought literature enormously important, as important, it seemed, as life or love. Since school I have witnessed a good few pieces of violent behaviour brought on by real or imaginary deficiencies in works of art, but I have never seen a reaction so pure and purely devoid of self-consciousness. Harry could not endure a book he thought bad.

Back at home, my parents had long realised that I had grown into a bookish adolescent, but also one who was becoming mysterious to them. I could see my father once or twice looking at me and asking himself whether I really could be his son. He was transferring to ever bigger ships, finishing up on the SS
Oriana
, which alongside the
Canberra
became the pride of the P&O fleet. But with no intimation yet of how popular cruising would become from the 1970s onwards, Dad would repeatedly tell me that aviation had destroyed the merchant navy. On no account should I consider following his trade. He had become obsessed with a full-length parody LP of
My Fair Lady
, which, with Zasu Pitts' and Reginald Gardiner's help, became
My Square Laddie
. ‘I've Grown Accustomed to Her Face' became ‘I'm Kinda Partial to Her Puss'. He played it every day he was home, Brahms now taking second place. As I became less fearful of his worldliness, so my relationship with Dad was heading for a crisis. It duly arrived one Christmas evening when we
were seated round the table finishing turkey sandwiches. Dad was giving us the details of his latest voyage, and railing against a particular passenger whom he kept describing as a ‘typical flashy Jew-boy'. He had used the word ‘Jew-boy' several times before I burst, screaming semi-audibly, ‘Do you have any idea how fucking offensive you're being?' and then running out of the room before I could see how much damage I had done. Inevitably, my mother was more upset than my father, who was simply puzzled. What on earth had he done wrong? But for me the moment was significant. When Dad's leave in the UK coincided with my being at school, he and my mother would still take me for roast lunch in the Old Ship Hotel in Brighton. He still rubbed his hands together as he ordered. ‘And a nice Bordeaux.' But something had shifted in the balance of power between us. His indifference no longer defined me.