The Blue Touch Paper (7 page)

So there it was. Providence.

There were two immediate effects of my being sent away thirty miles along the coast to somewhere I had no intention of
going. First, it aroused in me a feeling of sustained excitement at being out in the world. This has stayed with me for the rest of my life. Although I have spent much of my time depressed, i.e. dissatisfied with myself, I have almost never been bored, i.e. dissatisfied with the world. I have never lost the feeling that my surroundings are exciting and interesting because they are part of a long journey from Bexhill's cold pebbled shore. A psychologist may feel that I went on to become a writer of fiction because my resentment of my father's absence had so strong an influence on my growing up. To me, it's likelier that my imagination was wildly overstimulated by the exceptional dullness of my early environment. In a classic provincial childhood, the writer dreams because he or she has to. There was nothing to do in Bexhill except fantasise about getting away. While I was growing up, I spent so much time longing for a place, any place, which was not where I was. But second, I was also, to my sorrow, at the age of thirteen, exiled from a life principally shaped by women. I moved out of the life I was used to, sharing everything with my mother, my sister and our Siamese cat, Susie, and into a life with 420 other boys.

For my preference for putting women's lives at the centre of my writing, I would later receive an amount of attention which often embarrassed me – attention, after all, for doing what came naturally. My first full-length play had an all-female cast, and most of the best-known leading roles I have written have been for women. For years, my name has been deployed, particularly by actresses, as a stick with which to beat other male playwrights. But in writing as I did I was merely reflecting my own temperament and upbringing. Women have remained far more present to me than men throughout my life. They shaped me. But I was also well aware, right from the 1970s, that the
moment was long overdue to begin to correct a ridiculous imbalance. From the beginning I wanted to give women the play or film's point of view and not simply to imprison them as objects of manly love. How could a dramatist not want to give half their stage time to half the human race? The regular testosterone-fuelled stage revolutions of the last fifty years have left me indifferent.

I would eventually take part in a number of appropriate and timely political movements – against the American presence in Vietnam, for universal nuclear disarmament, and against the allied invasion of Iraq – even if, to my shame, I failed in the mid-1980s to recognise the historic importance of the miners' strike against the Thatcher government. With Howard Brenton, writing our newspaper satire
Pravda
in 1985, I was able to add to the gaiety of nations by warning just how completely British public life would be soiled by the lethal nihilism of Rupert Murdoch, some twenty-five years before such a view became conventional wisdom. And yet wherever I turned, I was aware that many of contemporary history's most important changes were being wrought by feminism. From the start, that feminism would inform my writing. How will we remember the late twentieth century? As a time when the role of women in the developed world, at home and at work, changed decisively. Not to reflect that would have been unthinkable.

3

Lear on the Cliff

No military plan survives first contact with the enemy. I was dropped off by my parents at Lancing in the expectation that a change in my fortunes would also bring about a change in my personality. How wrong can you be? The reason that Simon Sparrow had made such a deep impression on me in
Doctor in the House
was that he was always busy. Yes, he was humorously busy, the victim of all sorts of stumbles and mishaps. But did he ever stop to think how lucky he was to live a life which offered a steady stream of events?

At that level, things were indeed livelier at Lancing. There was more to do. A religious school was succumbing to the infection of humanism. Harold Macmillan had woken up, looked around and responded to the moral authority of independence movements in large parts of a world hitherto coloured pink. As a result, all institutions which had been founded for one purpose – the manning of the empire – were beginning to creak and groan as they adapted to a mission much less clearly defined. Christianity in England had allowed itself to be used as the ethical clothing for imperialism – we weren't abroad to conquer, oh no, we were there to convert – and it had disgraced itself by providing moral gloss to justify the slaughter of the First World War. The Second World War had postponed the crisis but not averted it.

Now, as harder questions were being asked about the character and purpose of the British Establishment, ‘Service to
the Community' was replacing ‘Service to the Empire' as the ingratiating banner under which the public school sought to march. Anglicanism was paying the price. Culture, which had long been seen by public schools as only a tributary of religion, was, for an increasing number of boys and staff alike, coming to represent value in its own right. People of ideas were beginning to prevail over people of beliefs. The resident clergy were appropriately threatened. Although the school still had all the
Tom Brown
trappings – beatings, bullying, fagging and prefects, all the stuff of empire/religion – the newer teachers, fresh from post-war universities, were no longer recruited from the shires or the deeper recesses of
Debrett's
. So struggles of adaptation made Lancing interesting in a way that my bull-headed preparatory school had never been. The school debating society would take on subjects which were much more far-reaching than anything in today's insipid discourse. ‘Should advertising be banned?', ‘Should private schools be abolished?' and ‘Should the church be disestablished?' were all argued with a passion that suggested that, were the motions carried, there might be a sporting chance of action. Everything, rightly or wrongly, felt as though things were in play. But unfortunately I was not, on contact with a far more stimulating prospect, turned at once into the popular chap that I had hoped. Nurture was to be no more successful at making me easy-going than nature had been.

The school was approached from a rickety toll bridge over the charmless River Adur and up a long drive. Behind lay the mud-flats of Shoreham with its perspective of massive brown-brick power stations. The flat fields were criss-crossed with freezing ditches into which you had to plunge when doing three- and five-mile runs. Looking west, the landscape was thrown out of proportion by the scale of Lancing Chapel. The
Centre Point of the South Downs, it had been flung up to a ridiculous height in fourteenth-century Gothic style by the Victorian founder, Nathaniel Woodard, who had created both school and chapel to do something about what he saw as ‘the ignorance and ungodliness of the middle classes'. He made sure from the off that even if the building were incomplete in his lifetime no sensible compromise would ever be possible. The chapel was going up and no one could take it down. Howard Roark could scarcely have done better. The chapel is still three million pounds short of being finished a hundred years later, the subject of endless reconsecrations, financial appeals and changes of architectural plan. Even in its present state, without the projected 325-foot tower at its end, it is the largest school chapel in the world. Attendance for all pupils was compulsory: a service every evening at six, and on Sundays a full Sung Eucharist in the morning, followed by Evensong at night. A lone Jewish pupil was excused kneeling and praying, and allowed to sit at the back, but never excused one minute of the endless offices.

The first thing that struck you about British public schools in the 1960s was how cold and dirty they were. Nowadays education has become a commodity like any other, a place you flog rather than a place where you're flogged. Lavish brochures are mailed to prosperous addresses at home and overseas to suggest to ambitious Russians and Chinese the Sheraton-like luxury in which your child may acquire the practical knowledge to smooth his or her path to future advancement. Websites gleam with images of happy harmony. Like everything else, education is offered as a consumer deal, idealised through advertising. Come here, do well, move on. But fifty years ago schooling was neither utilitarian nor comfortable. Lancing's conditions were as austere as its purpose. A wartime ethic, both of economy and
of dedication, prevailed. Detachable collars were the school's crafty way of ensuring they didn't have the expense of washing our shirts too often. There was a thick ring of grime on the fold as we threw them, three times a week, into the basket. Electric waxing machines embedded filth into the extensive parquet but rarely removed it. Any kind of snivel, wart, growth or adolescent eruption was treated by matrons with their stinking cure-all: the sloshy application of a purple antiseptic called ‘gentian violet'. The overall impression was of dirty fingernails and dirty laundry. Little wonder that many of the boys were, in that evocative Australian phrase, ‘on the nose'.

Lancing had its share of famous old boys and the best known was Evelyn Waugh, a devastating English stylist, who had arrived in 1917, discontent not to be somewhere more elevated. He noted that ‘wind, rain and darkness possessed the place'. Waugh also observed that ‘the food in Hall would have provoked mutiny in a mid-Victorian poor-house'. By 1960, little had changed. Most offensive, a sock was used nightly as a kind of primitive teabag and lowered, full of leaves, into a steaming urn. We ate a great many curried eggs, slimy fish roes, soggy toast with margarine, cold sardines and twisted slabs of rank haddock. Everything came with a crust, a skin. The weather was as filthy as the food. In particular, towards the end of 1962, a brutal winter took hold. The snow never left the ground for eight weeks. Your face ached, rigid in the icy wind, as you braced yourself turning a cloister corner. Wrapped in scarves, gloves and extra pullovers you rushed back at break to your house – mine was called Field's – in order to clamber as best you could onto the hissing radiators, or to hold white sliced bread on a toasting fork against the dimpled white elements of the communal gas fire. An industrial tin of Nescafe stood close.
To this day I can judge twenty minutes perfectly in my head to within a few seconds, thanks to the memory of that daily break.

In his letters, Graham Greene has fun with the convention that whenever he wants to make a character in one of his books dishonest or unpleasant, he makes him a graduate of Lancing College. For Greene it was a private joke, a piece of mischievous biography intended to amuse his best friend Waugh. There was, Greene claimed, a particular sort of aspiring public school which produced a young man full of facile sociability and doubtful morals. He loved stressing the word ‘minor' in that resonant term ‘minor public school'. Certainly at Lancing there was a definite sense of pretence, a feeling that we were in some way being asked to ape an unseen original. We had all been cast as walk-ons in a seaside repertory version of
Goodbye Mr Chips
. The bigger, more famous schools all had their eccentricities. It was therefore essential that we must have ours, including special names and conventions which made no sense outside the walls. Teachers had to be known as Tiger, Monkey or Dozy. Fags were known as underschools and lavatories were groves. Everything was in code, and the code had to be learnt. Some of the rules seemed to defy explanation. Maybe that was the point.

For me, the place was a challenge from the start. Inside the classroom, I was fine. In lessons, even with the more self-consciously eccentric teachers – teachers who loved playing up to the quirky characters long service had assigned them – there was a sort of order, a world I understood and in which I had always prospered. But outside the classroom, in the big farty dormitories of ranked beds and wanked-in handkerchiefs, I was lost. The other boys, a lot of them from Surrey, seemed to have a social ease, a basic understanding of how the world worked
which I entirely lacked. The children of clergy who made up a third of the school's intake may have lagged behind in material prosperity, but they all had a sense of belonging which I could only envy. They gave the impression, false of course, that they had arrived at the school knowing each other already.

Within the first term, after a certain amount of half-arsed ridicule, I adjusted my accent. Tones which had been regarded as highfalutin in Bexhill were mocked as plebeian when aired at Lancing. My first few weeks were rough, as I struggled to smooth my own corners rather than to have them knocked off by others. I knew enough never to mention that my family lived in a semi-detached, but I also knew that the reasons for my disorientation were more than social. I didn't know what attitude to take. Did I like this place or didn't I? Harewood had been easy to deal with – a brutal and stupid school against which all self-respecting pupils rebelled. It was that simple. But Lancing was not simple.

Halfway through my first term, I realised that I would be less unhappy if I had the right friends. My motive was not snobbery but understanding. I needed sympathetic companions who might help me get some insight into how this foreign culture – part Stanley Matthews, part Benjamin Britten – worked, and where I might fit in it. The problem was, I had no idea how to acquire friends, and failing made me unhappier still. I couldn't get in with the right people, because, self-ignorant, I had no idea who the right people for me might be. This feeling persisted throughout my adolescence. In the 1980s, I would feel a strong identification with the work of John Hughes. Films like
The Breakfast Club
and
Pretty in Pink
, released for teen enjoyment, fascinated me because they detailed the agonies of social exclusion. The films were usually about girls, but my own dilemmas
resonated closely enough with those of Molly Ringwald or Ally Sheedy. Everywhere at Lancing were enviable cliques of cheerful and self-confident young men, laddish in grey flannels and herringbone jackets, hands in pockets, ties casual at half-mast. I would see them lounging together, laughing in the school tuck shop, eating Flat Harrys and drinking Coke. They didn't even bother to look up before dismissing the idea of my anguished and unconvincing company out of hand. My first friend, inevitably, was the lone Jewish boy, Peter Konig, because he too was contemplating Lancing in bewilderment. At least in Konig's case there was a simple explanation – religious upbringing. In mine, what? Rank stupidity?