Metroland (5 page)

He paused. An empty school playground flitted by; a metal merry-go-round draped with washing; the flash of a windscreen.

‘They never built the Outer Circle either.’

He was an elegiac old fugger, that was for sure. He told me about workmen’s fares, and electrification, and Lord’s Station, which was closed when war broke out. About someone called Sir Edward Watkin, who had some plans or other; some ambitious old turd, no doubt, who couldn’t tell Tissot from Titian.

‘It wasn’t just ambition, you see. There was confidence as well. Confidence
in
ambition … Nowadays …’ He spotted the reflex glaze-over which my face always gave when I heard that last word. ‘Don’t sneer at the Victorians, my lad,’ he said sharply. Suddenly he sounded as if he was turning nasty again; maybe he was a rapist; maybe he realised how I’d outwitted him. ‘Look at the things they did instead.’

What, me, sneer at the Victorians? I didn’t have enough sneer-room left. By the time I’d finished sneering at dummos, prefects, masters, parents, my brother and sister, Third
Division (North) football, Molière, God, the bourgeoisie and normal people, I didn’t have any strength left for more than a twisted pout at history. I looked at the old fugger and had a go at an expression of moral outrage; but it wasn’t one my face was much good at.

‘You see, it wasn’t just the people who built the railway and ran it. It was everyone else as well. You probably aren’t interested,’ (Christ, he did go on, didn’t he?) ‘but when the first through train from Baker Street to Farringdon Street arrived, the passengers cleaned out the restaurant buffet at Farringdon Street in ten minutes flat,’ (maybe they were hungry because they were scared) ‘ten minutes flat. Like a plague of locusts.’ He was almost talking to himself now, but I thought it wise to slot in another question, just to be on the safe side.

‘Is that when they called it Metroland?’ I asked, not really sure when I was talking about, but taking care not to sneer.

‘Metroland? That nonsense.’ He turned his attention to me again. ‘That was the beginning of the end. No, that was much later, some time during the war before Hitler’s. That was all to please the estate agents. Make it sound cosy. Cosy homes for cosy heroes. Twenty-five minutes from Baker Street and a pension at the end of the line,’ he said unexpectedly. ‘Made it what it is now, a bourgeois dormitory.’

It was as if someone had dropped a bag of cutlery inside my head. Hey. Christ. You can’t say that. It’s not allowed. Look at yourself.
I
can call
you
bourgeois; well, I think I can anyway. You can’t call yourself it. It’s just not … on. I mean, it’s against all the known rules. It’s like a master admitting he knows his own nickname. It … well, I suppose it can only be answered by a non-conventional response.

‘Aren’t you a bourgeois, then?’ I inventoried to myself his clothes, voice, briefcase.

‘Ha. Of course I am,’ he said lightly, almost gently. His tone reassured me; but his words remained a puzzle.

6 • Scorched Earth

Toni and I worked hard at deconditioning. After a thoughtful session of Bruckner (‘Lowering of pulse; vague tugging inside chest; occas. shoulder-jerks; foot-twitching. Go out and beat up a queer? Bruckner 4/Philh./Columbia/Klemperer), or when we were too tired to go out for a mild épat, we’d often come back to the same theme.

‘One thing about parents. They fug you up.’

‘Do you think they mean to?’

‘They may not. But they do, don’t they?’

‘Yeah, but it’s not really their fault, is it?’

‘You mean like in Zola – because they were fugged up in their turn by their parents.’

‘Good point. But you’ve got to blame them a bit, haven’t you? I mean, for not realising they were being fugged up, and going on and doing it to us as well?’

‘Oh, sure, I’m not suggesting we shouldn’t go on punishing them.’

‘You had me worried for a bit.’

Every morning, at breakfast, I would gaze disbelievingly at my family. They were all still there, for a start – that was the first surprise. Why hadn’t some of them run off in the night, wounded beyond endurance by the emptiness I divined in their lives? Why were they all still sitting where they’d sat the morning before, and looking as if they’d be perfectly content to be back there again in another twenty-four hours?

Across the table, my elder brother Nigel gazed over the top
of his Weetabix at a science fiction mag. (Maybe this was how he controlled his existential discontent: by escaping into
New Galaxies
and
New Worlds
and
Astounding Realities
. Not that I’d ever asked him if he suffered from existential discontent; if anything, I rather hoped he didn’t – these things can get too popular.) Next to him, my sister Mary was also staring over the top of her breakfast, reading the pepper and salt. It wasn’t because she hadn’t yet woken up properly: at dinner she read the knives and forks. One day she might graduate to the backs of cornflake packets. She was thirteen and didn’t talk much. I thought she looked more like Nigel than me: they both had bland, soft-featured, unresentful faces.

On my right, my father had
The Times
folded back at the stock-exchange prices and was murmuring his way down them. He didn’t look like me either. For a start, he was bald. I suppose the cast of his jaw was a bit like mine, but he certainly didn’t have my profound, questing eyes. From time to time he would toss my mother a dutiful question about the garden. She sat on my left, brought the food, answered any questions, and chivvied us gently through the largely silent meal. I didn’t look like her either. Some people said I had her eyes; but even if I did, I didn’t have anything else.

Could it be that I was really related to all of them? And how could I bear not to point out the obvious differences?

‘Mum, am I illegitimate?’ (Normal conversational pitch)

I heard a slight rustle to my left. Both my siblings carried on with their reading.

‘No, dear. Got your sandwiches?’

‘Yeah. You sure there isn’t a chance I’m illegitimate?’ I waved an explicatory hand towards Nigel and Mary. My father cleared his throat quietly.

‘School, Christopher.’

Well, they could be lying.

Parenthood, for Toni and me, was a crime of strict liability. There didn’t need to be any
mens rea
, just the
actus reus
of birth. The sentence we doled out, after giving due consideration to all the circumstances of the case and the social background of
the offenders, was one of perpetual probation. And as for ourselves, the victims, the
mal-aimés
, we realised that independent existence could only be achieved by strict deconditioning. Camus had left everyone else on the grid with his
‘Aujourd’hui Maman est morte. Ou peut-être hier.’
Deconning, as we called it, savouring the pun, was the duty of every self-respecting adolescent.

But it was harder than we reckoned. There were, we worked out, two distinct stages. First came Scorched Earth – systematic rejection, wilful contradiction, a wide-ranging, anarchic slate-wipe. After all, we were part of the Anger generation.

‘Do you realise,’ I said to Toni one lunchtime, as we were loafing rather unconstructively on the sixth-form balcony, ‘that we’re part of the Anger generation?’

‘Yeah, I’m really cross about it.’ His familiar squint-grin.

‘And that when we’re old and have … nephews and nieces, they’re going to ask us what we did in the Great Anger?’

‘Well, we’re in there, aren’t we, being Angry?’

‘Isn’t it a bit off, though, that we’re reading Osborne at school with old Runcaster? I mean, don’t you think some sort of institutionalisation might be going on?’

‘What d’you mean?’

‘Well, heading off the revolt of the intelligentsia by trying to absorb it into the body politic’

‘So?’

‘So, I just thought, maybe the real action’s in Complacency.’

‘Scholasticism,’ Toni sneered comfortingly. ‘Pinhead-dancer.’

The trouble was, he had a much cushier time being Angry than I did. Toni’s parents (partly, we guessed, because of their ghetto experiences) were (a) religious, (b) disciplinarian, (c) possessively loving, and (d) poor. All he had to be was an idle, agnostic, independent spendthrift, and there he was – Angry. Only the previous year he had broken a door handle at home, and his father had stopped his pocket money for three weeks. That sort of gesture was really helpful. Whereas when I was
destructive, petulant or obstinate, my parents, shamefully well-heeled in tolerance, would merely identify my condition for me (‘It’s always a tricky time, Christopher, growing up’). That identification was the nearest I could get them to come towards reproach. I’d be in there, jabbing away; I’d throw a feint, then sink one right in up to the wrist – and what would my mother do? Get out the iodine and lint for my knuckles.

Scorched Earth didn’t go the whole way, of course. With a perspicacity beyond our years, we appreciated that merely rejecting or reversing the outlook and morality of one’s parents was scarcely more than a coarse reflex response. Just as blasphemy implies religion, we argued, so a blanket expungement of childhood impositions indicates some endorsement of them. And we couldn’t have that. So, without in any way compromising our principles, we agreed to carry on living at home.

Scorched Earth was part one; part two was Reconstruction. This was on the schedule, anyway; though there were many good reasons, and good metaphors, to back up our reluctance to look at that part of things too closely.

‘What about Reconstruction?’

‘What about it?’

‘Do you think we ought to plan for it a bit?’

‘That’s what we’re doing now – that’s what SE’s about.’

‘Mmmnnn.’

‘I mean, I don’t think we should commit ourselves too strongly at this stage to any particular line. We are only sixteen after all.’

That was true enough. Life didn’t really get under way until you left school; we were mature enough to acknowledge this point. When you did get out there, you started

‘… making Moral Decisions …’

‘… and Having Relationships …’

‘… and Becoming Famous …’

‘… and Choosing Your Own Clothes …’

For the moment, though, all you could do in these areas was
judge your parents, associate with the confidants of your hates, try to become well-known to smaller boys without actually talking to them, and decide between a single and a double Windsor. It didn’t add up to much.

7 • Mendacity Curves

Sunday was the day for which Metroland was created. On Sunday mornings, as I lay in bed wondering how to kill the day, two sounds rang out across the silent, contented suburb: the church bells and the train. The bells nagged you awake, persisted with irritating stamina, and finally gave up with a defeated half-clunk. The trains clattered more loudly than usual into Eastwick station, as if celebrating their lack of passengers. It wasn’t until the afternoon – by some tacit but undisputed agreement – that a third noise started up: the patterned roar of motor mowers, accelerating, braking, turning, accelerating, braking, turning. When they fell silent, you might catch the quiet chomp of shears; and finally – a sound absorbed rather than heard – the gentle squeak of chamois on boot and bonnet.

It was the day of garden hoses (we all paid extra on the rates for an outside tap); of yahoo kids shouting dementedly from several gardens away; of beachballs rising above the level of the fence; of learner drivers panicking on three-point turns in the road outside; of young men taking the family car up to The Stile for a drink before lunch, and dropping their blue salt papers through the slats of the teak gardenware. Sundays, it seemed, were always peaceful, and always sunny.

I loathed them, with all the rage of one continuously disappointed to discover that he is not self-sufficient. I loathed the Sunday papers, which tried to fill your dozing brain with thoughts you didn’t want; I loathed the Sunday radio, spilling
over with arid critics; I loathed the Sunday television, all Brains Trust and serious plays about grown-ups and emotional crises and nuclear war and that sort of stuff. I loathed staying in, while the sun crept furtively round the room and suddenly hit you smack in the eyes; and sitting out, when the same sun liquefied your brain and sent it slopping round your skull. I loathed Sunday’s tasks – swabbing down the car, with soapy water running upwards (how did it do that?) into your armpit; emptying the grass-cuttings and scraping your nails on the bottom of the metal barrow. I loathed working, and not working; going for walks over the golf course and meeting other people going for walks over the golf course; and doing what you did most, which was wait for Monday.

The only break in the routine of Sundays came when my mother announced,

‘We’re going to see Uncle Arthur this afternoon.’

‘Why?’ The ritual objection was always worth registering. It never got anywhere, and I didn’t mind that it didn’t; I just felt that Nigel and Mary might benefit from the example of independent thinking.

‘Because he’s your uncle.’

‘He’ll still be my uncle next weekend; and the weekend after that.’

‘That’s not the point. We haven’t been over for eight weeks or so.’

‘How do you know he wants to see us?’

‘Of course he wants to see us – we haven’t been over for two months.’

‘Did he ring up and ask to see us?’

‘Of course he didn’t; you know he never does.’ (Too mean)

‘Then how do you know he wants to see us?’

‘Because he always wants to see us after this sort of time. Now don’t be aggravating, Christopher.’

‘But he might be reading a book or doing something interesting.’

‘Well, I’d drop a book to see a relation I hadn’t seen for two months.’

‘I wouldn’t.’

‘Well, that’s hardly the point, Christopher.’

‘What is the point?’ (Nigel yawning ostentatiously by this time)

‘The point is we’re going over there this afternoon. Now go and wash for lunch.’

‘Can I take a book?’