I began attending King's College Junior School, the preparatory school attached to KCS Wimbledon, the public school, at which my father was a modern languages teacher, in September 1965, having sat the entrance examination a few months earlier. Within what was seen at the time to be my outstanding and precocious academic prowess, lie the roots of my downfall, my road to hell lined with good intentions, and any number of other proverbial clichés. In short, my marks were so high that the KCJS Headmaster, Mr. Peter Gibbs, approached my father and said that they thought I should be placed straight into the second year. [Less than three years later, he'd be saying to my father that I needed the services of a good psychiatrist, and that he could recommend just the fellow. But, as the narrator in G.F. Newman's The Corrupted says, there I go, getting ahead of myself. Good narrative device, Mr. Newman, please take it as a compliment.] In all fairness, I can see why my dad, a very intelligent man, must have seen this as an accolade, and delighted in his first born son being being a chip off the jolly old block. Sadly, I was a chip soaked in paraffin due to ignite shortly. The initiating tip of the fulcrum the wrong way was that, the logistics of the combination of being born in August, and the academic year starting in September, meant that I was twenty-three months younger than the eldest boys in my glass. As I'd just turned eight, that meant they'd already lived nearly a quarter of my life again. The obvious compensating factor would have been if I were any good at sport. I am not and never was. I like a jolly old politically incorrect football chant, and I have always adored Test Match Special, but I have been short-sighted since I was six and, throw a ball of any size anywhere near me, and I either duck, flinch, or both and more besides. The only minor redeeming factor was that we played association football in the first year, so I had to wait until the following year to have my ears rubbed raw in the rugby scrum, between two boys two years older, and at least two stone heavier, whilst having all the skin taken off my knees, as they rubbed on the ridges of frozen mud beneath. The only difference from Ypres was there were no shells. However, I recall no birdsong either. So there you are, I started life at KCJS as a rising star, but one on the old hiding to nothing and, akin to my career in show business, also destined to be up and down from then on, with a lot more declines than inclines.
Before I ever developed a carapace of eccentric style, I was always unusual. I think it came from my mother, who certainly was. Anyway, being unusual is the worst possible outcome for any school pupil, and even more so pre-teen ones. It wasn't long before I began to be, not so much physically bullied, but taunted, mocked, and picked on. I was singularly inept at dealing with any of this — usually I'd react by trying to draw attention to myself by taking my shoes off, throwing them at the culprit, and then throwing myself in a playground puddle or something. One lunchtime — I don't think I was being harassed, I just felt entirely alone — it all got too much, and I ran back to our empty classroom, found my desk, the old wooden ones with the inkwell in, flung the lid up, and started to howl. Then I thought of Amersham, Buckinghamshire, where we lived till I was three and a half, and the horses in the field I used to feed on the way home from nursery school. When I rubbed my eyes a few minutes later, there was that black puppy in my desk, sleeping softly. I can't tell you the date, but I can tell you that was the day a switch flicked in my life.
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Not long before starting at King's, I had been with my dad to watch a school cricket or rugby match, and my dad had introduced me to a man called Tony Hein, then in charge of the first form at KCJS. He was a young guy, about thirty, roughly contemporary to my dad, ginger haired, smiling and lively. He told me he looked forward to having me in his class. Due to my jumping that year, this was unfortunately never to be. However, Tony Hein is indeed a lovely guy, a keen rugby player, who was extremely popular with the boys. In I think my second year, he married a glamorous French girl.
Cue: Vintage Sports Car digression #1
After Tony Hein's wedding, the Assistant Head of Music, Walter Taylor, drove him in his vintage Daimler convertible in a lap of honour around the quad, while all the boys lined the perimeter and cheered. [We will come, in due course, to the issue of pederasty. How could I write a memoir of life at a boys' public school and not mention it? Anyway, suffice for now to say that said Mr. Taylor was a fully paid up member of said society.] This interlude has the happiest of endings, in that Tony Hein and his wife are both still thriving, and I recently made contact with both him and his daughter via social media.
The other happy thing that occurred in the third form was that my dear friend Jason Steger came to the school. We hit it off straight away — both inveterate readers, and Jason managed to be cool whilst still having a great big heart and never mocking me. He soon took me home to meet his parents — his father was an Austrian aristocrat and his mother an intellectual Englishwoman, with a rich county accent — in their beautiful house in Wimbledon Village. Jason's mother Joan, was very academic and also a great reader, whose one weakness, or nod to popular culture, was a liking for the soap opera Crossroads on TV. A bizarre coincidence: she herself reminded me a little of Noele Gordon who starred in it. Jason and I have never really lost contact — he has for decades been the Literary Editor on The Age in Melbourne, and we've had a couple of reunions over there. Give me three more decades, I'll tell you. Suffice for now to say that the Stegers extended to me acts of generosity in the face of adversity, that far exceeded the hand of friendship. Allow me to get ahead of myself again a touch. Next door to the Stegers lived the Tubbs family, the two sons of which, James and Jonathon, are friends of mine too, though we didn't meet till Senior School. Cue:
Vintage Sports Car Digression #2
James, the older Tubbs brother, acquired in his teens, a beautiful vintage Alvis convertible. One balmy summer's night a couple of years after 'leaving' school, when our local — the Hand-in-Hand on Wimbledon Common, opposite our school — closed, and we extinguished our jazz cigarettes, the guitar pickers packed up their instruments and headed back to someone's gaff for more drinks, music, and obviously jazz cigarettes, a rich young guy I barely knew called Roderick invited me along with James and a couple of girls back to his parents' house in St. George's Hill, Weybridge. And off we went, in James' Alvis with the top down. We lived in a lovely Victorian house in Wimbledon Park then, in a quiet tree lined street, and with a lovely garden with over a hundred rose bushes, so not too shabby, but we didn't have George Harrison for a neighbour. I think we only stayed a couple of hours, and just smoked a couple of joints, played some albums, and had some snacks. However I was about sixteen and all the others three or four years older, and it felt proper sophisticated. I don't know remember if there were any stars twinkling over the stockbroker belt, but it felt there were. There were no iced swans, nor any frolics in or around the pool, not even a cheeky line of Charlie but, when a couple of years later, I fell in love with F. Scott Fitzgerald, on reading The Great Gatsby I thought of that excursion. I also confess, en passant, that I didn't mind the film they made of it a couple of years down the line, with Mia Farrow and Robert Redford, which was generally critically dismissed.
