A Curious Boy Read online

  I should have stopped there, but I was too pleased with myself. The particular talent of ethyl isocyanide is its volatility. If its receptacle was uncorked for a few seconds the smell could fill, and then empty a room. I took the little bottle, concealed in a briefcase, for a walk around Ealing to try it out. The ABC Tearoom was one target, but I lacked the courage to hang around long enough to see the effects. The Central Line at Ealing Broadway station was more the mark. Here at its terminus the train sat at the station with its doors open for some time, while passengers sauntered on to take their seats and await departure. I walked in one door and out another uncorking at the right moment, then sat on a bench to observe the effect. Muffled cries of surprise and disgust were followed by mass evacuation of the carriage. All from a second or two of exposure to the Prince of Pongs. It was very naughty. I made an exit from the station feeling an impossible combination of thrill and guilt. I was screwing up the courage to take my phial of fetid fabrication into Ealing Grammar School for Boys. Our form classroom had big, old-fashioned radiators and high ceilings. About thirty wooden desks accommodated the boys and their books. It took only two drops of isocyanide on a radiator to convince the French master to evacuate the room. We pushed and shoved to get into the corridor. ‘Sauve qui peut!’ said the boy who was top of the class. Schoolboys are always on the lookout for a diversion and here was a big one, so the most was made of dramatic cries of ‘Quelle pong, Monsieur!’, ‘Ou est le mouchoir de ma tante?’ and ‘That was one of Smithers’ worst!’ I could have been caught red-handed, but nobody thought that the culprit might be in the class. Fortunately, the chemistry laboratory was on the floor above the classroom, and Monsieur Marney assumed that the disgraceful miasma that had driven us from our lesson must have originated from above. It somehow had seeped down into our own atmosphere. He stormed off to have a word with the senior chemistry master. But I never again risked trying out my triumph of synthetic chemistry on school premises.

  * * *

  Ealing Grammar School for Boys was an early twentieth-century building on one side of The Green, which lay at the centre of the oldest part of our suburb. It was next door to Walpole Park, where my father collected Daphnia for sale at Tooke’s. On the other side lay Ealing Studios, a large site that produced a string of comedy classics after the war. The Ladykillers of 1955 was my favourite film. It not only brought fame to Alec Guinness, but also established the careers of his fellow character actors, who would go on to appear in a dozen films over the following decade. Long-running television shows were produced in Ealing and one of our minor schoolboy amusements was to name the actors who scuttled across The Green from the studio to the pub. The first Doctor Who, William Hartnell, was one of them, as tetchy in real life as he was on screen. It was not exactly Hollywood, but Ealing remains a working studio, and claims to be the longest running in the world. This is more than can be said for Ealing Grammar School for Boys.

  Every day I walked to the school from Ainsdale Road, a distance of more than a mile. School uniform was compulsory, and shoes had to be polished every morning. We were, after all, the boys who had passed the 11-plus, part of the elite, with a shining future ahead of us. I usually had to buff up my toecaps in turn on the back of my socks to polish off the scuffs I had acquired along the way. It was a pleasant enough stroll except on cold winter days, but in 1962 a great smog turned it into an adventure, even an ordeal. This was the revenge imposed on London for two centuries of burning coal. I recognised the sharp tang of sulphur that made the yellow smog so unbearable. The news described it almost cheerily as a ‘pea souper’, easily countered by a resuscitation of the Dunkirk spirit, but asthmatics were dying all over the city in a dreadful choking blanket that hovered motionless until the wind freshened. Visibility was so reduced I fumbled and groped my way back from school in the dark, progressing from street light to street light, fuzzy in their thick misty envelopes. I stumbled gratefully back through the front gate of 40 Ainsdale Road like an Arctic explorer escaping a blizzard. This was chemistry all gone wrong. Legislation did finally abolish all the coal fires that stoked the smog. The air became much cleaner. Many years later I hosted a Russian academic who had been brought up on Soviet propaganda and the novels of Charles Dickens. ‘Where’, she demanded, ‘is your fog?’ I explained that London had become a cleaner city altogether thanks to enlightened democracy. She looked sceptical. ‘In that case, what has happened to your boy chimney sweeps?’

  Ealing Grammar School was a bit like Arthur Mee made pedagogical. Self-improvement through knowledge was the very essence: to the deserving the rewards. If it was unashamedly elitist – Miss Jean Brodie might have recognised some aspects – it was also not snobbish. Although the majority of the pupils were from the middle classes there were a number of working-class children who were not made to feel outsiders. They, too, had passed the test. School uniform did genuinely rub out differences in background, and there were none of the expensive gadgets asserting subtle differences in status that were to become part of a competitive race much later. I felt quite comfortable there, and regret for the City of London School soon faded. There was homework – compulsory – that had to be handed in on time. I resented it at first, but now I see it as a preparation for life, for the duty to respect deadlines regardless of how you might feel. The lesson applies whether you work for the New York Review of Books or Allied Cogs & Screws, or set out to write 500 words a day. We grammar school boys did not often refer to the institution that educated those who had failed to pass the 11-plus; this was the local secondary modern school at Drayton Manor. We were, as we were told quite often, ‘the cream’ floating atop a much larger volume of ordinary milk. This was long before milk became homogenised and the metaphor worthless.

  The presiding spirit – even designer – of Ealing Grammar School for Boys was the headmaster, A. Sainsbury-Hicks. He always referred to it as ‘my school’ as if it were a ship, and he was the captain. More disgruntled pupils might have replaced this with prison – and governor. He was a small man, and my father would have described him as ‘cocky’. He marched around his school with a proprietary swagger. With his crinkled hair, neat moustache and pinstripe suit he looked as if he might have been in the army, an impression he did nothing to discourage. Most of us boys were scared of him. To those who suggested his bark was worse than his bite I countered that his bark was so bad that a bite was hardly necessary. Unruly boys sent out of the classroom to stand in the corridor ran the risk of the headmaster taking a perambulation around his school, and the sinner becoming the subject of interrogation. He was not inclined to let worms off the hook. How such miscreants longed for the bell that marked the end of the lesson, when worms could crawl away to gym or German! Sainsbury-Hicks was also sole wielder of the cane as the ultimate deterrent – this was a thin whippy affair applied to an outstretched hand. Corporal punishment was not dispensed with Dickensian abandon, but it was always there somewhere in the back of the mind. Chastised and chastened victims who had committed a serious infraction would arrive back in class all red-faced with hints of dabbed-at tears upon the cheeks. Any hubbub in the classroom would momentarily subside.

  A. Sainsbury-Hicks clearly modelled his fiefdom on the template of the British public (i.e. private) school. Teachers were addressed as ‘sir’ and pupils were addressed by their surnames. ‘Fortey’ attracted some feeble jokes: ‘Didn’t I teach your older brother Fortissimo?’ was one of them. There was an elite within the elite. Prefects were recruited from the ranks of the sixth-formers, and like a pallid imitation of the Etonian ‘Pop’ they had a special room in which to play games and amuse themselves. Prefects also had the right to discipline younger boys for crimes like fighting in the playground and being remiss with the school cap. In a day school it was hardly possible to maintain an iron grip, but an attempt was made to extend school rule as far as the front door. The cap was a kind of portable symbol of authority, and had to be worn at all times. It was a crime to take off the cap even in the
safety of the 65 bus home. Prefects were out there checking up. When the rock ’n’ roll era began caps were perched precariously behind a quiff, so that they forever teetered in danger of falling off and being spotted by a spy. These were dangerous times.

  As in many aspiring schools the Sainsbury-Hicks measure of success was rather simple. The number of boys that went on to Oxford and Cambridge was a metric that could not be gainsaid, and the more places the better. In the late 1950s and early 1960s Ealing could vie with Manchester Grammar School as the most successful state school sending boys to the leading universities. I arrived as rather an average student, but once I got the idea of work I began to rise through the class like a lazy trout towards a fly. Each year there had to be somebody who was top of the class by virtue of the sum of all his examination marks, and then the list went all the way down to the bottom, one by one. After a year or two I began to feel I belonged in the top three or four. However, when I received a summons from A. Sainsbury-Hicks I was still apprehensive and fearful. What could I have done? His study lay to one side of a corridor leading to the staff room, from which billowed smoke and chatter. I tapped nervously on the door marked Headmaster. ‘Enter!’ he barked. I was surprised to find an unusually benevolent figure, smiling, almost avuncular, rising from his desk. He told me that he had his eye on me to be one of his Oxbridge boys. ‘Yes, sir,’ I nodded gratefully. He then admonished me that this would require serious dedication in a world full of distraction and temptation. ‘Yes, sir,’ I agreed, wholeheartedly. I backed out of the room as soon as I could. ‘Thank you, sir.’ At that moment I became an intellectual (at least for a while). I was probably fourteen years old.

  In one respect Ealing Grammar School for Boys was identical to the City of London. Every morning there was assembly for the whole school. Everyone stood to attention, youngest at the front, until A. Sainsbury-Hicks and the masters paraded on to the platform to gaze solemnly at their charges. The headmaster eyed the state of the toecaps of the junior boys as he marched past, like a drill sergeant inspecting the turnout of his squad. If a toecap was defective in the polish department the unfortunate boy was sent out. Sporting achievements were listed with approval. If something bad had happened, like a theft, the headmaster’s face empurpled with fury, and he promised that the offender ‘would go, and wouldn’t come back’: expulsion to Drayton Manor would blight his whole future. Everybody held their breath, hoping that the culprit might be revealed by a stifled sob. I am sure that had I been discovered as the perpetrator of the mighty stink I would have been turfed out of the school, regardless of any potential. The ritual part of assembly was thoroughly Church of England, with a reading from the King James Bible, often by a prefect, followed by a hymn, which we always hoped would be ‘Jerusalem’ but was more often ‘Lead kindly light amid th’encircling gloom’.

  I loved the language of the King James Bible, and many of its grander phrases are still lodged in my memory, but my sister and I had become sceptical about the existence of the Almighty well before going on to high school. While we were still very young we were packed off to Sunday school at St Peter’s Church, a big Victorian Gothic edifice in the older part of Ealing. Nice ladies told us Bible stories at first, which we found quite pleasant, as we didn’t then know enough about conception to worry about the Christmas narrative. However, when it came to the approach to Easter we began to have serious doubts. We had received little stickers for Septuagesima and Quinquagesima, and followed the story of Our Lord quite carefully. Rising from the dead just seemed against nature. The Holy Spirit seemed unfathomable. We began to suspect that our parents, who never expressed any religious convictions, simply wanted us out of the way for a couple of hours. I am now convinced that the reason was what the newspapers of the time always termed ‘intimacy’. With two businesses to run, Sunday was the day for recreation. We children eventually rebelled in harmony. We hid under the family bed and clung on to the webbing as our parents became cross and grabbed hold of our legs. St Peter’s or else! When we expressed our doubts to the Sunday-school teachers they looked genuinely distressed, but after a short phase of half-hearted attempts at persuasion, our visits to St Peter’s became a thing of the past. I somehow managed to square my lack of belief with singing hymns with gusto, and enjoying the different music of the Jacobean Bible. I came to appreciate the religious inspiration behind J. S. Bach’s compositions, and the paintings of the Renaissance. I just could not bring myself to believe in salvation or its agent.

  If I had believed in the power of prayer I would have used it to get off games. Every week the class had to board a train from Ealing Broadway station – not the Tube, but the main line – and travel on the old Great Western Railway for a few miles to Greenford and the school playing fields. They must have been a remnant of farmland that did not get covered with houses as London spread westwards. We were shepherded across the Great West Road clutching our games kit. For some boys it was the highlight of the week, a chance to score runs and goals, and points off one another. I rather dreaded the whole business. In the winter it was horribly cold, and since I was as thin as a lath I shivered pathetically. The football teacher had no mercy, suggesting pointedly that if I ran after the ball it might well improve my circulation. This resulted in my haring manically towards the nearest boy with the ball, but for some reason by the time I arrived the ball had somehow always moved elsewhere. It was quite discouraging. On one occasion I did find myself in possession of the ball right in front of the goal. It must have reached me by a series of implausible ricochets. A fearsome paralysis gripped my legs, made worse by cries of ‘Fortey! Shoot!’ from my team (it could have been ‘shoot Fortey’). With a colossal effort of will, I forced my leg stiffly backwards and then forwards like a creaky pendulum and the ball skittered off sideways towards the corner. There was a communal groan. We had a form First Eleven and Second Eleven and I failed to be selected for either, so I joined a few other weeds in the corner of the field pretending to run about. The summer was cricket and at least it was warm. My inability to catch a ball was remarkable. I could run towards the slowest lob into the air that would tumble out of the sky asking to be grasped by cupped hands only to have the ball fall to the ground a couple of feet away. If I was batting, the ball came towards me at an impossible speed and I waved the bat vaguely in its direction as it whizzed past. If the ball hit me, it hurt. The only place I was content was fielding at long stop, or maybe it was extra long stop, far out on the pitch where the ball rarely came, and where I could identify wildflowers and take an interest in passing insects. I thought of the old photographs of my father in the First Eleven of everything at Worcester Royal Grammar School. I recently obtained a copy of the Worcesterian, the school magazine, for 1919, and read how Fortey’s goals assured wins for the home side in match after match. I wondered where my own ineptitude had come from, and was grateful that my father was never seated behind the goal to see my feebleness for himself. He might have been reminded of tangled fishing lines.

  The Art Room came to my rescue. I enrolled to get an extra O level in art, and was allowed to spend sports afternoons free of dribbling badly and missing goals. I suspect such evasion of football and cricket would not be allowed under present rules. Mr Bland was a happy exchange for the games teacher, as he spent a lot of time saying how talented we were. My friend Robert Gibbs was, if such a thing were possible, an even worse footballer than I, and now together we sketched compositions from life, usually a few everyday objects and items of fruit. We learned new words like ‘chiaroscuro’, ‘collage’ and ‘bas relief’. We had to study nineteenth-century English painting for a written examination, and so became familiar with the works of Turner and Constable and the Norfolk watercolourists. Trips to the Tate Gallery were planned at the weekends. ‘Modern art’ was still controversial, so when we espoused the genius of Francis Bacon or Pablo Picasso we could feel a little like enfants terribles ourselves. This artistic savoir faire beat knowing how to do a header or bowl a googly
by a mile. Mr Bland kept a large book by Salvador Dalí called My Secret Life hidden in a cupboard, and when he was away from the room we took it out and marvelled at its lascivious detail and egomaniacal excess. We even became quite competent at drawing. Although he was always encouraging, Mr Bland told us of a previous student who was so talented that he got 100% in the test; his examiner commented that he could find no flaw in his work. He was Allen Jones, who went on to be a leading figure in the ‘pop art’ movement and an enfant terrible in his own right. The Art Room was a haven, a club where we could be intellectuals, where we could believe we had talent just below that of Allen Jones. We liked it so much we both went on with art as an A level subject, and not just to escape the playing fields of Greenford. Robert Gibbs continued all the way to the Courtauld Institute to become a proper scholar and art historian. I felt there was no contradiction between knowing about chemistry and knowing about art. After all, intellectuals should know about absolutely everything.