It was with great relief that I packed my large suitcase under the seat and got in the school minibus when it stopped at the top of the street that September and this time I had something extra. My seven inch singles now had their own box, a sort of vanity box that was seven inches by seven by seven which had in it all the singles I'd want to play in school, even if they were played on other boy's record players by their permission. I got it as a birthday present earlier in the summer and it was one of was one of the more thoughtful gifts on what was an otherwise underwhelming day.
This was my fourth year of being at the school and I did not know whether it would be my last, or what I would be doing the following July. All I knew was at that point I was out of the parental house for another six weeks, and I was getting away from what was becoming a regular hothouse for domestic disagreement. The stuffy heat of the summer had not helped us all get on better, but now I was away from them, both the people and the tired arguments. The further the minibus went in the early evening light to pick up the fourth boy out of ten, who lived in a village deep in the countryside, the better I felt. And the second cousin who had gone to the school had left in the summer as well. now I could, in so far as it was required 'protect' myself when I need to, and hope that I did not need to because an intermediate I was the equal of every other boy in the school.
I also had got my smile back. For over a year I'd had different arrangements with a now missing front left tooth, I'd had a bridge what had broke/come loose, I'd had a tooth on a pin which went into where the root of the tooth used to be. This arrangement came loos three times and was twice glued back again. the last time it came out was during a lunch close to when summer term ended. I took the tooth out and put it on a side plate to finish the meal that I was enjoying, the headmaster was at the table and was surprised at my change of appearance. The more I tried to explain the more my change of appearance became apparent until he want to not know any more. At the end of the meal I slipped the tooth with it's pin into a paper serviette, and put both into my top pocket to give to one of the medical room staff for safe keeping after lunch. When Mother took me to the dentist he was disappointed that the pin/glue idea had failed and he was resigned to me having a false tooth on a plate. But it was strong and it worked, outwardly I smiled at least. It would take a lot more than good dentistry to coax a smile from the inside, from how I felt. One of the things that disappointed me was how often I was told that summer to square up my shoulders and stick my chest out, as that posture were enough in itself to make me the happy person other people waned me to appear to be.
With the new term my pocket money had gone up by five pence a week to forty pence, it meant that I was keeping pace with being on the half rate that other boys got, I was glad enough for at least not falling behind that half rate. Here, in the boarding school I feel more confident about how to spend my money than I did in the Summer win the parental household. Though even in school I still shivered a little when I remembered the look that my sister gave me when I told her about not being able to spend the money that dad wished upon me to get rid of me. She would have had the confidence to spend the money but I did not. But equally she would have recognised better than I did when to leave dad alone, she lived her all the time and would have been sensitive to that sort of thing.
I started that term as an Intermediate with the same duties as I'd had when I left in the summer. But there was the vague expectation that I and and a few others might become Seniors when the staff had their meeting to sort out the boys ranks and bedrooms, mid-term. Intermediate to Senior was going to be a smaller 'step up' than Middle School to Intermediate had been, which was only to be expected. The higher the rank we were the less the difference between the top two ranks. Whatever my rank, I achieved it due to my age much more than my confidence or material means. Equally my age, always being the wrong side of the school leaving age as it kept rising, was what kept me there. So if I became a senior it was my reward for being disallowed the right to leave. As substitute for bigger rewards went it was worth having . Not that my clothes and my choice of amusements went up a rank with it. But I tried to make up in gratitude for what I was never going to have in style.
Lessons in proper subjects remained the same, we never studied chemistry, geography or science amongst many other subjects. Our lessons in the Maths and English went nowhere. At least the art lessons went somewhere when the art we made filled the wall space near the headmaster's and secretaries offices and the large map of the county that was always there where everyone of us pointed at where where they went back to in the holidays. Oddly woodwork came up good after my being shouted at for being so soft as well. The sculpture of Henry Moore was very popular in the early 1970's. It was almost the idea of publicly acceptable art with it's curves and abstract shapes. So the woodwork teacher that autumn term had us all in the short classes that we had for woodwork making miniatures in wood about eight inches high of his curvy shaped surfaces, with holes in them, to follow the style of Moore. Mine was completed and with some small pride I presented it to my bewildered parents who would not recognise public taste in art if it got up and bit them.
There was a new teacher this term and with it a new subject in school, music appreciation which was part of some sort of wider 'media studies' programme. Really it was a good sound system such as only the school could afford being set up in a school class room and the teacher playing records, but choosing records that we would not have to try open our ears a bit. Classical music featured quite a lot, Beethoven and Dvorak among others. We had heard classical music in short doses, Mozart had even been played on Top Of The Pops. And we found the lessons strangely quietening. But we would have learned more if we were told when the composers lived and the world that they were part of. But either the staff had not got the time or they were afraid of weighing us down with too much detail. The new member of staff was a young man barely ten years older than the oldest pupil and he livened things up. He brought in 'Quadrophenia' by The Who to play us. It as the first time I'd heard The Who on a proper sound system and we probably only heard two sides of the double album but wow, what a change from trying to form impressions of distant narratives from classical music. This music was both more physical and much more cerebral, both at the same time. There was a story and characters that went through changes we could barely comprehend.
What I knew about The Who I knew via Kevin. Bowie who had covered one of the band's songs on his 'Pin Up's album. It was a tough R& B cover but with Bowie Kevin and I liked more the way he was almost freakishly oversold, when Bowie sang 'Cos Lennon's on sale again' in 'Life On Mars' we could have said 'Cos Bowie is on sale again', he was everywhere. Bowie was even played in the background underneath the continuity announcements on BBC1 television on Saturday night television. That Bowie had worked with John Lennon on his latest album 'Young Americans' and Bowie was still changing, still a fashion plate that led where others followed was something that Kevin and I were slow to absorb.
I was still a big Beatles fan, I could not help but be. Having bought most of their singles ex-jukebox I was moving into the five years worth of solo albums and singles by different band members, all at the cheap end since I had to find them second hand. My understanding of the cultural force of The Beatles was apt for my experience of small town life and my age more than it was in tune to them being the agents of change that they were said to be by many. So the eastern mysticism and dry humour on George Harrison's albums washed over me, leaving no trace. I ended up admiring the slide guitar playing where there was any. I found the effect of hearing slide guitar transforming whenever I heard it.
I had never heard words like 'counter-culture' or 'underground' as applied to music but I sort-of knew what they meant. One Lennon single I had was 'Imagine'. I was surprised when I played the 'B' side, a song called 'Working Class Hero'. With his solo albums John Lennon seemed to be different people according to the mood he was in when he recorded. This 'B' side was a depressed acoustic guitar driven dirge of a song which somehow I found it absolutely addictive. it was as if it spoke to me so directly that I did not know how to believe how it spoke. It became a song that I wanted to play again and again, but of course when I played it in any shared space it annoyed the staff and I had to play the lighter more airy and jokey side of Lennon, instead. Or better still leading singsongs of Beatles numbers on the school minibus when we were out as a class, and we did not know where we were going so we needed distracting. My triumph was knowing all the words to verses of 'Yellow Submarine' and singing them solo when the rest of the boys sang the chorus.
When I was eventually promoted to being a senior there was no real change. I had greater permission to go into town without having to have an important reason. One point about being a senior that rankled with me was how much more often the boys my rank went to their parents houses for weekends compared with how often my parents accepted me back. But that difference between me and other boys was the part of the price of me being cheaper for my parent then other boys were for their parents. Oh, I dreamt of being collected by dad and whisked along the hour long direct journey that it was back to the parental house but dreaming was as far as I was going to get. What my wanting to see my parents more meant was not just me hoping to be like other boys my age but me naively hoping against hope that we could agree with each other better than we had before.
I had difficulties enough when I went into town on my own. I did not particularly think where I got figures of speech or ideas from, particularly when they got me into conflicts. The town centre was small. It was one long street full of shops leading off the open market square, which was mostly used as a car park. There were several newsagents. In several of them Kevin and I browsed the heterosexual soft porn, looking for images of the occasional pert male member. But more generally browsing the music press section. My secret vice was in the independent record shop, where I fed my obsession with bodybuilders. The record that never sold the cover of which I browsed again and again was called 'Pumping Iron' by Alvin Lee. I did not need to hear the record, but I could quite easily go into a mild trance state near but outside the record shop, go in and by repetition find that sleeve to look at again and again. Woolworths was a more constructive territory, along with looking in the window of the expensive hi-fi shop with all the foreign names on the equipment like 'Bang and Olufsen'. Woolworths was where I bought batteries for my small portable radio and stole the occasional single sweet from the pick and mix stand. Their stock of records was quite small. I bought some of the teenybopper music there, as inspired by Top Of The Pops. But other places had more choice and were more 'grown up' in their choice of records.
The most personal encounter was with the shopkeeper who ran a small sweet shop, and his shop was one of several haunts I went to on my own. There was a craze at one point where as schoolboys if we thought something or someone was being mean to wards us we would say 'That's Jewish'. I remember being short of money for lack of pocket money and wanting to buy sweets there. Instead of taking the usual humble pie attitude that I had to accept having less I used this phrase with the shop keeper. He took me to task for using it as if I were saying the Jews cheat people. What he said made obvious sense when he explained it, and I apologised too him. Apparently I had learnt something and the shopkeeper he struck a blow against the 'hothouse' atmosphere that the school was happy to let be part of, unawares.
Since I liked being alone and walking, and my rank now permitted me this, then finding locations in the town to visit became progressively more possible. Less directly engaging than the talk from the shop keeper but equally opening out of me were the visits to the town museum with the bits of 1920's fire engines and locally found fossils, all the flotsam and jetsam of local life that had survived the last fifty years and been donated. What was best about the museum was that it was open on Sunday afternoons which was a particularly blank time in school, in fact it was a blank time everywhere. The museum was free to enter which added to the pleasure of my many visits there.
Seeing how much more I could be trusted, I was sometimes tested. Never more so than when I was asked by the staff member who was 'the banker' and kept the records of who bought what in the tuck shop to get change for the tuck box float. I was sent in to the town with £25 pounds and given a list small coinage to get in return. I got the order right and kept the list to prove it. But there were too many bags of loose change to fit into all of the pockets of my now heavy nylon parka coat. I ended up carrying one £10 bag of change with the £10 clearly visible on the outside when I should have turned the bag inside out. The staff member worried that I might have been robbed when he saw me with the money bag. But he lacked the forethought there, not me. He should have given me a strong bag to put the £10 money bag in, to disguise that I was carrying loose change. His concern was like Mother's worries, at 'what might have been' rather than what actually did happen.
One teacher must have wondered that given how I was now trusted in town on my own then how I might cope with being part of a group. He found a theatre project apiece for Kevin and I. Kevin's project was first that term. Built like a brick outhouse as he was, he appeared in full drag in the chorus of a local production of 1950 musical 'Call Me Madam' which was a apparently a satire on American politics. I never saw him in it, I probably could not afford one. My role was back room boy. I helped him learn his script by speaking the lines he had to respond for hours in his room. As a preparation for what was to come the teacher wrote several sketches for the school's Christmas celebration, after the big dinner in the sports hall. In one sketch I was in full drag, I played the wife, in a skit on a husband and his wife being funny whilst disagreeing with each other. The female staff members helped me dress and made sure that I got the make up right. Both my best friend, day boy John who studied electronics properly, and his parents were guests at the Christmas dinner and saw me in that after the meal. His parents never guessed that I did the female part. Since I was by no means a great actor by any means they must have been inattentive and easy to convince. At the time I so enjoyed it that did not think about whether or how I might tell my parents about how good it felt to act, to be the centre of people's attention because they chose to be there. I could guess how dismissive they would be if I tried.
My project proper came the following spring. It is now so many years on from me performing in the play that I don't remember it's title, but I remember the story behind me getting involved with it. A local amateur academic and teacher had somehow unearthed, intact, a previously unknown version of a play by one of the ancient Greeks. He had completed a working translation of it into English, and as a kind of inter-schools community play before they became popular he wanted to see it acted and performed. And he wanted this in a small gentle English market town in a shire county which was about as far from the atmosphere of Ancient Greece as it was possible to get. The teacher got me to join the cast of pupils from different schools because they needed a handsome youth as lead. The director took the teacher at his word, and accepted me.
I had a lot of slightly cod-dramatic lines to speak like 'Oh Heracles! how Odious', but I enjoyed being photographed in pseudo-Greek costume in the local newspaper to promote the play. I doubt my acting was of any great standard, but to simply remember the lines, say them in the right order and say them with the right sort of intonation would have been enough. It got good reviews locally as well, but then it was unusual fair for the time and place it was performed. I would like to have acted more, but no more roles came my way. I wish had understood better community plays, particularly for schools are nearly always one-offs.
No comments:
Post a Comment