Moab Is My Washpot

  I don’t know what it was that possessed us. It was as if we were gripped by some uncontrollable force. We simply could not move away from those films. I think we took in Fritz the Cat four or five times as well, but it was that trio that slammed us amidships like three gigantic icebergs. We could hardly have chosen better, I will say that for ourselves.

  I don’t know if our respective parents thought the other child was to blame, or constituted a Bad Influence on the other (I’m not sure my parents ever quite got the point of Jo) but I think we would both agree that it was a simple case of compulsion. If either had left to go back to school, the other would probably have stayed. We were completely mesmerised by an utterly new world and all its possibilities. Art had gripped me, poetry, music, comedy, cricket and love had gripped me and have me in their grip still, but cinema. Films have a peculiar power all their own. Maybe we had found a rock and roll for ourselves, something that was neither solipsistic, tragic and sublime like music, nor egocentrically bullying like comedy. I can’t explain. Until that moment, I had been content and perfectly delighted to watch The Guns of Navarone and You Only Live Twice; now films suddenly seemed to have reached a puberty like mine and were the Real Thing. It was me, of course, not films that had really changed, though there is no doubt that it was a good crop and that there was something new about their style and their treatment of subject matter. As every scene of The Godfather unwound in front of my disbelieving eyes, from the wedding to the final famous closing of the door and the shot of the leather chair, Uppingham School looked smaller and smaller and smaller.

  I think I even forgot about Matthew.

  I remember feeling the desire to see the films with him, the need to show them to him, but while I was watching them, neck up, front row, over and over and over again, I forgot everything except the world of each film.

  When we returned to Uppingham, still blinking at the light and at the dawning realisation of our madness, all was up. In my case the camel’s back had been snapped completely in two by this final straw and I was instantly expelled, not even given the chance to say goodbye to a single friend.

  In Jo’s case, punishment came in the form of rustication until the end of term.

  I shall never forget my father’s only words in the car as he, yet again, drove his infuriating, ungrateful, monstrous middle child home.

  “We will discuss this sorry business later.”

  We did discuss it later, this sorry business, of course we did. One aspect, however, that we never discussed, oddly enough, was the films. To my father, and I can see why, this was disobedience, rebellion, wildness, attention seeking … all kinds of things. He saw the urge to self-destruct, but he did not choose to examine the weapon I had selected. I think that is a fair and a reasonable thing for anyone, but it is strange that we never spoke about the films.

  One could argue that there was something in each of them that spoke directly to me.

  In Cabaret there was homosexuality in the form both of divine decadence and of guilty, smothered English shame; there was guilty, smothered Jewish shame too; there was the tension and love between a stuffy Englishman unable to scream or express himself and the fantasising, romantic Sally Bowles, each equally doomed and equally in pain, each one half of me.

  In A Clockwork Orange there was the bad, uncontrollable, rebellious, intolerable and intolerant adolescent, with his mad romping love of Beethoven (even Rossini got a look in too) and society’s need to constrain and emasculate him, to drive away both his devils and his angels and stop him from being himself.

  In The Godfather there was … hell, this is pointless, there is everything in The Godfather.

  Didn’t Woody Allen say that all literature was a footnote to Faust? Perhaps all adolescence is a dialogue between Faust and Christ. We tremble on the brink of selling that part of ourselves that is real, unique, angry, defiant and whole for the rewards of attainment, achievement, success and the golden prizes of integration and acceptance; but we also, in our great creating imagination, rehearse the sacrifice we will make: the pain and terror we will take from others’ shoulders; our penetration into the lives and souls of our fellows; our submission and willingness to be rejected and despised for the sake of truth and love and, in the wilderness, our angry rebuttals of the hypocrisy, deception and compromise of a world which we see to be so false.

  There is nothing so self-righteous nor so right as an adolescent imagination.

  BREAKING OUT

  I

  The replacement for Uppingham that my parents chose was the Paston School in the Norfolk market town of North Walsham. A direct-grant grammar school (there had been some point to that Eleven Plus after all, it seemed), its greatest claim to fame was its old boy, the “Norfolk Hero” as he is known around these parts, Horatio Nelson.

  Having been expelled from Uppingham (“asked to leave” is the proper expression) in November 1972 I naturally had to start at Paston in the spring term of 1973. The school, which was not accustomed to fifteen-year-olds in the sixth form, suggested that I retake all my O levels in the summer of 1974, when I would be sixteen, only then might it be appropriate to think about A levels.

  Well I mean, what? The blow to my pride was immense; never had a pride been that so deserved a great blow, but that was not how I looked at it. On hearing this news, I instantly, before I had so much as crossed its threshold, detested and despised all things Pastonian.

  By this time I think my parents were beginning to worry about any influence I might have on my sister, Jo. She turned eight years old about the time of my expulsion and had remained entirely devoted to me. Being a girl, it was not considered so necessary, according to the curious logic of these things, for her to board, so she attended Norwich High School for Girls, a private school which involved the snazziest green uniform you can imagine. Now that I was starting at the Paston, a day school too, Jo and I would breakfast together and spend evenings together every single day. My bus went from Cawston to North Walsham, Jo was enmeshed in a complex network of school runs with the parents of other girls around the Booton area, but essentially we were in the same boat now. Roger naturally stayed at Fircroft, where he was to go on to become a house polly and then school polly and captain of house and I would see him only in the holidays.

  Paston School lived up to all my prejudices, as things always will to the prejudiced. I did not take to the place one bit. I can remember barely anything about it, except that it was there that I started to smoke and there that I learned to play pinball: not within the school grounds, but within the town of North Walsham. For within a very short space of time I started to cut the school dead. I would get on the Cawston bus and dismount at either Aylsham or North Walsham and then head straight for a café and spend the day pinballing, listening to records by Slade, the Sweet, Wizzard and Suzi Quatro and smoking interminable Carlton Premiums, Number Sixes and Embassy Regals.

  The Paston took this insolence for about a term and a half before suggesting to my parents that maybe I might be happier somewhere else.

  I wish I could write more about the place, but I simply do not remember a thing. I drive through North Walsham sometimes, on my way to visit friends in the old wool town of Worsted, and I see the school but I wouldn’t be able to tell you what any of the buildings were used for. I suppose there were assembly halls, sports fields and all the rest of it, but the entire establishment is a vacuum in my mind. My whole being was concentrating entirely on Matthew Osborne and nothing else in the world existed.

  I thought of writing to him, but could not begin to express my thoughts, or if I did, I did not dare to communicate them. So I did the next best thing and wrote poetry.

  Once the Paston had dislodged me, my ever patient parents thought that perhaps what I needed was the more mature atmosphere of a Sixth Form College, a place where pupils were called students, lessons were called lectures, where smoking was not against the rules, where independence of mind and eccentricity were tolerated. The place ava
ilable to me, which could take me on as a weekly boarder, was the Norfolk College of Arts and Technology in King’s Lynn, known as Norcat. I remember visiting the vice principal, and my mother enquiring about Oxbridge entrance. The VP gave a kind of derisive snort and said that, looking at my record he really didn’t think that this was an option we need consider. I shall never forget the indignant flush that suffused my mother’s face, the closest to fury I had seen her come for a very long time.

  I had the summer of 1973 to fill then, before starting on a two-year A-level course of English, French and History of Art. I took a job at the Cawston Winery, a little plant that produced kits for home brewing and home wine making. My job involved making cardboard boxes, millions of the bastards. The rest of the time, however, was spent writing poems and starting novels. Always the same subject. The subject of most of The Liar and the subject of this book.

  There was always a Me and there was always a Matthew. If I were to quote now extensively from any of these (I have just spent a very bloody seven hours going through them) it would hurt you, dear reader, and me, too much.

  Most of the shorter poems have angry, pompous teenage titles like “Song of Dissonance and Expedience” and “Open Order: A Redress,” a punning title this, which will only make sense if you’ve ever drilled in the CCF or armed services.

  This was too the summer in which I wrote these words.

  To Myself:

  Not to Be Read Until I Am Twenty-five

  I know what you will think when you read this. You will be embarrassed. You will scoff and sneer. Well I tell you now that everything I feel now, everything I am now is truer and better than anything I shall ever be. Ever. This is me now, the real me. Every day that I grow away from the me that is writing this now is a betrayal and a defeat. I expect you will screw this up into a ball with sophisticated disgust, or at best with tolerant amusement but deep down you will know, you will know that you are smothering what you really, really were. This is the age when I truly am. From now on my life will be behind me. I will tell you now, THIS IS TRUE—truer than anything else I will ever write, feel or know. WHAT I AM NOW IS ME, WHAT I WILL BE IS A LIE.

  I can dimly, just dimly, recall writing it. A whole condition of mind swims back into me every time I look at it, and swam back all the more strongly when I typed it out for you just now. I won’t go so far as to call it a Proustian petite madeleine, one of those epiphanic memory revivifiers, for the memory has always been there, but it still has the power to create a feeling like hot lead leaking into my stomach, a feel-good pain that was both the dreaded demon and the welcome companion of my adolescence. It was a strange piece of writing to happen upon as I did recently, going through all my old papers, writings, poems and scrapbooks, and it’s a strange thing to look at now. What would you think if you read such a message to yourself?

  The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there. The Go-Between, the novel whose celebrated opening words those are, has long been a favourite of mine. Actually, they were filming Harold Pinter’s adaptation of it in Norfolk round about the time I wrote that letter to myself. I had read the book and bicycled off to Melton Constable to see if they needed extras. They didn’t, of course.

  I knew that the past was a foreign country, and knew too that it followed logically that the future must be abroad; in other words I knew that it was my destiny to become a foreigner, a stranger to myself. I was passionately patriotic about my own age, a fierce believer in the rightness and justness of adolescence, the clarity of its vision, the unfathomable depths and insurmountable heights of its despair and its joy. The colours that shone and vibrated so strongly through its eyes were the true colours of life, this I knew. Because I had read a great deal I knew as well that one day I would see things in different colours, take up citizenship in a different country, the country of the adult, and I hated my future self because of it. I wanted to stay behind in adolescence and fight for its rights and I knew that the moment I left it I would care only for the rights of my new age, my adulthood with all its falsities and failures.

  In those days loyalty to youth usually meant loyalty to ideas, political ideas chiefly. Ageing was seen as compromise and hypocrisy because it seemed inevitably to entail a selling out of ideals, environmental ideals now, but political then. For me, however, all this meant nothing. I was not even remotely interested in politics, the environment, the bomb or the poverty of the Third World. Only one thing counted for me then, Matthew, Matthew, Matthew, and I suspected, quite rightly, that one day love would count for less. I did not suspect, however, that one further, finer day far, far forward, love would come round to counting for everything again. A lot of salt water was to flow down the bridge, the bent bridge of my nose, before that day would come.

  I had fully determined, you see, to Do My Best at Norcat, and I believed that this would involve a number of fundamental alterations to my nature. I believed it meant I must subdue my sexuality and become heterosexual. I believed it meant I must bury all thoughts of Matthew and convince myself they were part of “a phase,” one of those “intense schoolboy friendships” that you “grow out of” and I believed it meant that I would get my head down and work.

  My writings then, were an attempt at expulsion, catharsis, exorcism, call it what you will. They were a farewell. I knew, or thought I knew, that I was about to betray my former self and plunge into a world of good behaviour, of diligently completed homework, punctual attendance and female dating. A tangle of briar might as well persuade itself that tomorrow it will become a neat line of tulips, but I had thought it was my destiny. At the same time I knew, absolutely knew, that there was some quality in me, foul, ungovernable, unmanageable and unendurable as I was, that was right. The perception of nature, the depth of emotion, the brightness and intensity of every moment, I knew these faded with age and I hated myself in advance for that. I wanted to live on the same quick Keatsian pulse for all time. Perhaps Pope was right to suggest that a little learning is a dangerous thing, for it may be that I had read much, but I had not read all: I had read enough to connect my experience with that of others, but I had not read enough to trust the experience of others. So when, for example, Robin Maugham in his autobiography Escape from the Shadows wrote of his schoolboy loves and passions and his hatred for his father and his relationship with his famous uncle and his desperation to find a role for himself in an alien world, I connected with that, but when Maugham reached his twenties, became a writer of sorts, fought in tanks in the desert war, and then looked back at the “shadows” from which he had gratefully escaped, I thought him a traitor. He should have stayed and fought, not just in England, but in the republic of adolescence. He should not have committed the crime of growing up. I prefigured in my mind my future self being just so treacherous and it appalled me and angered me.

  The only “work,” and I use the word ill-advisedly, which I can give you a few lines from is an epic poem I began that summer, an epic in which I grandly decided to ape the structure and ironic style of Byron’s masterpiece Don Juan, which involved grappling with the complexities of ottava rima which, as you shall see, is a verse form which I did not do any justice at all. It suited Byron well, but then Byron was Byron; Auden excelled at it, but then Auden mastered all verse forms. I … well, I floundered.

  The Untitled Epic (that, I grieve to confess, is its title) which I have just reread completely for the first time since writing it, much to my great embarrassment, seems to be much more directly autobiographical than I had remembered it to be. The scene I will inflict on you is the poetic version I attempted of that redheaded Derwent’s ravishing of me. I call him Richard Jones in this instance and make him house captain. As Isherwood was to do in Christopher and His Kind I refer to myself in this epic as “Fry,” “Stephen” and occasionally, like Byron, “our hero.”

  We are at verse fifty-something by now, I had planned twelve cantos, each of a hundred verses. Richard Jones has sent Fry down to his study ostensibly to pu
nish him for being in bed late. Fry waits outside the door in his dressing gown and pyjamas, hoping he isn’t going to be beaten too badly. I apologise for the completely show-offy and senseless semi-quotations from everything from Antony and Cleopatra to The Burial of Sir John Moore at Corunna. The painful polysyllabalism of some line endings was in deference to Byron’s much more successful comic use of hudibrastic rhyming. I was fifteen, it’s my only excuse.

  He stood outside the Captain’s study door,

  And prayed to God to toughen his backside

  Against the strokes of Jones’s rod of war.

  For hours he waited, rubbing that soft hide

  In fear. He kicked the wainscot and tapped the floor,

  Examined the plaster on the wall, eyed

  The ants that weaved around the broken flags

  And cursed the day that God invented fags.

  At last, as he began to think that Jones,

  Would never come, he heard the crack of steel-

  Capped heels around the corner. He froze

  And felt within his veins the blood congeal

  To ice. The boots were sparking on the stones,

  So in the darkening passage the only real

  Sound, rang in deaf’ning pentametric beat

  In flashes from the pounding leathered feet.

  The Captain halted and threw wide the door:

  Inside his study glared the gleaming trophies

  The rackets, balls and instruments of war,

  Sops to culture—some unread Brigid Brophies

  And Heinrich Bolls. All these our hero saw,

  And Deco posters for Colmans and Hovis.

  But above the window, sleekly like a ship,

  Lay harboured there a deadly raw-hide whip.

  But Richard Jones, it appears, is not going to inflict punishment. He tells our hero to calm down. This is going to be a brotherly chat.