Flying Free (3 page)

Absurdity, indeed, was the ultimate rebellious celebration of that freedom.
The Goons
were seditious. Fools had as much right to speak, albeit amidst mockery, as Fellows of All Souls. After all, as we were assured, ‘they all laughed at Christopher Columbus when he said the world was round' and so on, and ‘the fool who persists in his folly becomes wise'.

It was for no one man, no one class and no one age to decide with certainty who was the fool.

Now, however, the talk was of ‘D' Notices – edicts prohibiting the publication of news. Soon the earnest anoraks were telling us of opinions, ‘You can't say that.'

Soon after that, the anoraks, by dint of their earnestness, were in power.

Laws were made prohibiting historical debate, personal opinion – even scientific findings – if they ran counter to the views of the urban minority or risked causing ‘offence'. As ever, the circumscription of liberties was justified in the cause of our own welfare.

Freedom of speech no longer extended – no longer extends – to those deemed fools.

Of course, when the fool can freely speak even his small portion of a mind, he is challenged, derided, corrected. He may even learn.

When he is forbidden to speak, he learns nothing. On the contrary, he harbours and husbands his delusions and rightly resents their suppression. He privily seeks out those who share them. They argue that fear, not reason or justice, motivates the censors. They come to despise the law and all authority. They are marginalised.

Freedom of speech and belief is not subject to approval by a transitory authority. It is absolute or it is nothing.

Such was and remains my conviction.

And oh, it has got me into some delicious trouble.

There were times when we were not allowed to see dad. This was further evidence of my mother's iniquity (well, how the hell was I to know? I only knew the laws of cricket and had a child's highly
developed sense of fairness). Would James Bond be banned from seeing his own children?

In fact, Guy Farage did at last prove a hero worthy of my mum and even of my illusions. In 1971, at the age of just thirty-six, he knocked the booze and started afresh.

He had, I later discovered, lost his position at the Stock Exchange (No. They do not punch a hole in your bowler and break your brolly
à la Mary Poppins,
but it must have hurt none the less) and attempted to eke out a more meagre and solitary existence by buying and selling antiques.

In 1972, the Queen opened the Stock Exchange Tower on Threadneedle Street. Sponsored by old friends who knew of his ability, a scrubbed and newly sober dad was ushered back onto the trading-floor where he belonged. He is still a stockbroker to this day.

As for mum, she too found her level and attained her deserts. We had all been conned – dad no less than the rest of us – by that glamorous, seductive, rakish, old-fashioned image. After years of having to be the sensible and stoical one at home, never knowing when or if her husband would return and, if he did, in what condition, she found love with a local businessman sober, sensible and sound enough to allow her to be the impulsive, creative, fey partner. She married Richard Tubb in 1971.

In her sixties, she discovered that she had a gift for public speaking and is now much sought after on the halls – town and village, that is – lecturing on local and natural history, Darwin and the like.

The greatest effect of the impending divorce on me (or so I thought at the time; the Freudian
Why's Wally
ers may dissent and may even be right) was that it blighted my first years at school.

I was sent at the age of four and a half to Greenhayes School for Boys on Corkscrew Hill in West Wickham. Today it seems incredible, but there was not one other child in my year who came from what was then known as a ‘broken' home.

Divorced people had been admitted to the Royal Enclosure at Ascot since 1955 (though still debarred from the Queen's Lawn), but the Farages were not in that fast set. In my world, divorce was shameful and squalid,
and the fact that my parents were indulging in it made me the object of unwanted and intrusive sympathy from adults and of the sort of awed and disapproving curiosity from other boys which would have been afforded to a murderer's or lunatic's child. It was as if the taint might rub off on them.

And I, of course, being argumentative, filled with a sense of injustice and accustomed to being heeded, shot my mouth off. I was as good as – no, better than – they. Divorce was normal – maybe even obligatory – amongst us er… top, very clever… er… top people.

This was no more the right approach for a bright little squit turning up at a traditional English prep-school than was the casual avian equivalent of ‘Hi, guys. How's it hanging?' with which dodos greeted humans.

Neither dodos nor I had encountered unpleasantness before. We were both to encounter plenty.

English prep-school education at the time was a daunting gamut whose effectiveness depended in large measure on the teachers. You learned your social skills by trial and often painful error and the bulk of your academic skills by rote. I attended two. They did much the same things very differently. For some things – the learning of dates from the arrival of St Augustine via Magna Carta, Bosworth Field and so on to the outbreak of World War II, the list of British monarchs from ‘Willy, Willy, Harry, Stee…' down to ‘Four Georges, William and Victoria', the inevitable recitations of times-tables, declensions and conjugations, I have had cause always to be grateful. They furnished the matrix in which further knowledge and experience readily lodged.

When it came, however, to recalcitrance or inability – the birthrights of most boys – teaching methods were often less efficient. Board-rubbers flew with an accuracy and slippers were wielded with a vim which testified to the teachers' proficiency on the playing-field rather than in academe.

There was a deal of bellowing which served only further to confuse the confused. Our wrists grew strong through the writing of lines, which did nothing to inhibit their use in more natural – though no more productive – activities as we reached puberty.

Cromwell plainly encouraged his reputation as an occasional whimsical consumer of Irish children. No doubt my teachers too emulated and parodied their Dickensian and Hughesian archetypes. Unfortunately, some
of them forgot that it was parody and found that it answered deeper needs and insecurities.

The experience with the teachers at that first school was alarming, but I was resilient and bright. The experience with the other boys initially gave my confidence a serious blow. ‘Not before time,' some might say – and yes, I am sure that I must have been a cocky little sod, sorely in need of challenging, but this was an unanswerable challenge born of ignorance and prejudice. It taught me to bob and weave, how to appease (which did not come naturally) and when to attack (which did).

I remained at Greenhayes for just two years. I was then removed because of a rumour about the headmaster's extra-curricular activities. They said with knowing nods that it was ‘the usual thing'. It seemed strange to me to be spurned for anything so usual.

I moved to Eden Park, an academy run by the fearsome Mrs Mallick, a war widow who, amongst her other impressive skills, killed wasps with her bare hands. The education here, however, which included meticulous attention to elocution, was really very good and the teachers imaginative and encouraging. I started to breeze.

Talents and passions tend to be governed by the law of supply and demand, so a boy or girl who is persuaded of the rarity of a facility in playing the flute, say, or in chess, in consequence nurtures and develops it and eventually allows that ability to ordain the course of his or her life. I have met many people destined, in the world's terms, to be failures because their parents or teachers have expressed unwarranted awe at a minor talent.

On the other hand, I have known others who never cultivated considerable natural gifts because they were never made aware of their rarity and value.

I found most things easy.

I could see the ball clearly in cricket, knew the classic shots from my television-watching and reading of Sir Don Bradman's book, rehearsed them, thrilled to the experience of playing a well-timed off-drive or
square-cut
and seeing the bobbing ball cleaving a green path through the dew on its way to the boundary.

I thought, ‘OK, that was great. What's next?'

At eight, I took up golf. That, of course, would never be consistently easy. Had I the time, I would still be regularly engaged in that eternal quest for an illusory perfection, but again I could readily strike the ball true and could readily take on board the instructor's advice and adapt my swing as necessary. My mother's new husband was my first such instructor. He played off a handicap of seven and gave me a great deal of patient encouragement.  

Academically, I proved quick and slick rather than brilliant – a superior jack and sometimes minor master of all trades – save maths which defied, taunted and tormented me.

I flirted with a hundred subjects and pastimes but fell in love with none of them. None became an overwhelming preoccupation, nor was I concerned to excel at them. They were merely amusing features of the curriculum or of daily life, and I rummaged through them and collected information and skills just as, in the holidays, I rummaged through the dust-heaps and collected stray artefacts.  

Gradually, my academic facility, my impertinent blitheness and, above all, my sporting prowess sent me bobbing uncomfortably to the surface. After three or four years of being overawed and hesitant, I became a social animal. I was on top again.  

I sat Common Entrance a year early. My maths was still weak, but my mother was told that I made up for this with an exceptional essay entitled ‘What I Did Last Weekend'. There was enthralling adventure and action in there – my brother and I had been staying with an aunt and uncle in Hampshire and had waded into mud so deep that we had had to abandon our embedded wellies and leap for the verge in stockinged feet – but the examiners were most impressed by my account of the table which my relatives kept – the fine wines and fabulous food. I may have gone a little overboard with the larks' tongues and sweetmeats from farthest Araby, but I definitely conveyed the fact that they laid on one hell of a spread.  

So I squeaked in by merit of my ability with words and love for food, wished Eden Park farewell and entered Dulwich College at the age of ten. My parents were delighted. There were Dulwich connections on both sides of the family.  

My premature arrival was also, I think, characteristic. Others with my
acumen might, with a little work, have won brilliant scholarships. I did things very easily and proficiently but was in far too much of a hurry to worry about your actual excellence. Had I stayed on for an extra year at West Wickham, I would simply have grown restless. I doubt that I would have improved my Common Entrance results by a single percentage point.

I just mastered something and wanted to get on at once with the next project.

I was in a hurry not because I had any more idea than a rushing river where I was bound, but just because I had exhausted the possibilities of the previous place.

Eddying was tedious, stagnation death. Moving on, babbling and sometimes sparkling, was just what I did.

Dulwich, alma mater of Raymond Chandler, P. G. Wodehouse and, most impressively to me, cricketer and commentator Trevor Bailey, was not terrifying at all, but I was properly terrified.

It was not terrifying because it was well-accustomed to tending and nurturing every sort of boy yet invented, and young Farage was perhaps not quite as exceptional as he believed.

I was terrified because it was enormous and teeming with huge and very active boys and young men. There were countless buildings in which to get lost, countless traditions to absorb, countless terms to be learned.

Most public schools are isolated like Ampleforth or, at the least, like Eton or Marlborough, self-contained villages in their own right, attached to towns which need not be visited by pupils from one year’s end to the next. Dulwich is almost unique in that, for all its extensive grounds, it is very much a part of south London life.

There are many day-boys, like me, who commute from other parts of London and the Home Counties and so must negotiate the Tube and bus systems and the more or less mean streets on their way to and from school.

There is a very high proportion of pupils on bursaries or scholarships, often from deprived or ethnic minority backgrounds. I hazard that, in the early seventies, there were few state schools outside the major cities with
so broad a cross-section of cultural and racial backgrounds represented amongst the pupils.

We were linked by excellence – or, in my case, proficiency. Our homogeneity was elective, not inherited or enforced. I learned from my Ghanaian and Indian friends and they, I suppose and hope, from me. There was no childish assertion of cultural autonomy as in so many minorities today.

Dulwich may have been different in these ways from the majority of English public schools at the time, but it was no less exacting – it has always been in the top 2 per cent academically – and it tolerated fools no more gladly than others. ‘
Amo, amas, amat
, that’s all you lot are good for,’ physics master ‘Sniff’ Hart told us when we were being more than usually obtuse. ‘To be at Dulwich College, you have to be in the most intelligent 2 per cent in this nation. Well, if you’re the cream of England, God help the milk.’

A Brixton boy who had won a scholarship to Dulwich and who on his death left a large sum of money so that others might have the same opportunities, Hart never foresaw that the milk and the cream might be homogenised by edict.

Dulwich also retained the eccentricity of many English public schools. After my first ever assembly, at which I regarded the gowned, moustachioed masters with the trepidation with which the limping faun no doubt regards carrion crows, I set off for my first class. It happened to be PE.

PE was the province of Regimental Sergeant Major T. E. Day, familiarly known to all as ‘Ted’. Ted wore a pencil moustache which looked like two printed ticks upside down and a baggy, polo-necked blue tracksuit in which his puffed-out chest showed to impressive effect. He also carried on a lanyard an impressive bunch of keys with which he threatened to cosh us.

Off-duty, however, he was transformed.

He lived in Dorking. Every morning, he dressed in a dark suit, a spotless white shirt, a regimental tie and highly polished brogues. A bowler hat covered thin hair which gleamed like wet dolphin skin. He marched to the station, flourishing his umbrella like a swagger-stick, boarded a train to Victoria, hailed a taxi out to Dulwich and, once arrived, hung his Dorking personality on two hangers and donned the track suit.

Every evening, he went through the same process in reverse. We conjectured, of course, as to his other correct uniforms – the striped Victorian bathing-suit for the bath, the mess tunic and black tie for bangers and mash in the kitchen, colour-coded French letters for Mrs Ted…

On that first day, Ted took us for a run around playing-fields, along bright pavements and back around the muddy fields again. I had never been a runner and was one of the youngest in today’s field. Although I started amongst the leaders, I soon dropped back and was forced to study the asterisks of other boys’ arses as they drew further and further away. I finished in the last five, with only fat boys for company in humiliation.

We were not only humiliated. We were also scared. Of non-existent frogs.

We had heard what Ted did to slackers. He led them, it was asserted, to a deep, steep, mud-streaked trench close at hand. ‘Right!’ he would bawl. ‘Seeing as you gentlemen ’ave not seen fit to exert yourselves to the uttermost, you will now crawl up and down this ’ere ditch until you ’ave found a frog, whereupon you will be permitted to return to the school and an ’ot and soothing shah. Trouble is, unless I am much mistaken, there ain’t no frog!’

At a later PE lesson, when asked to project myself at the vaulting-horse, I grew windy and kept nipping back in the line. In my defence, I was tiny and the horse seemed a veritable Clydesdale. Ted spotted my backsliding and asked me what my problem was. ‘I can’t do it, sir!’ I gulped.

‘Do you know who the last person was who said to me, “I can’t do it, sir?”’ demanded Ted.

‘N-no, sir.’

‘It was ’Edley Verity,’ he said (Hedley Verity was a famously unflappable Yorkshire and England left-arm spinner who had been killed during the Allied invasion of Sicily). ‘“I can’t do it, sir! I can’t do it, sir!”’e said. And I said, “You will do it, Verity.” And ’e did. And ’e broke ’is leg. Now, off you go!’

This was just the start. Almost all the teachers at Dulwich when I arrived were veterans of World War II, tough, opinionated, cavalier, articulate, outspoken and very good at their jobs. That is, they amused and inspired. They made their lessons memorable.

They knew the value of red herrings and, so far from resisting our attempts to distract them, encouraged ventures into byways because they provided context for highways. Their terms of reference were not restricted to their own subjects. English lessons were enriched by references to French and history, say, and maths enlivened by reference to horseracing odds. They expressed personal opinions, which meant that we came right back at them with our own. Debate was encouraged.

Of course, I subsequently learned that such broadcast teaching is efficient only for us fertile sods, if you see what I mean, and not for stonier soils, but Dulwich, as I say, did not tolerate fools gladly or slow its pace to match that of the sluggard. Like ‘Ted’ Day, it simply encouraged you to catch up with the leaders and gave you the means to do so.

Occasionally we had supply teachers, fresh from university, who relied upon endless Xeroxed notes. We scorned them, yawned through their classes and did badly in the exams for which they were meant to be preparing us. It was noticeable, however, that those habitually at the bottom of the class fared far better when imagination was curbed.

Today, the pendulum has swung entirely towards the college-trained spoon-feeders to the detriment of those who prefer to hunt and to forage for themselves. Personality and personal experience are no longer considered assets in the teaching profession nor originality in exam candidates.
Target-led
, production-line education is the norm.

Again, diversity is reduced and the world, for all the levelness of its playing-fields, thereby diminished.

Anyhow, the system suited me down to the ground. I was recently invited back to Dulwich as a guest-speaker and was delighted to encounter a new breed of teacher who corresponded to neither of these models yet possessed the best attributes of both. It is still a very fortunate school.

A week after I arrived there, the Master, David Lloyd, addressed the school. ‘There are those,’ he warned, ‘who do not realise how fortunate they are nor how seldom if ever they will again have such an opportunity to feast on knowledge and experience as during these few short years. They drift through their years at Dulwich and only afterwards realise that they have wasted a great gift. Do not drift through your days at the whim of the breezes…’

I remember thinking, ‘Dear God! He’s right! I’ve been here ages and have achieved nothing. I’ve been drifting. Never again…’

Only later did I realise that my overwhelming guilt was a little premature, being occasioned by just five days during which I had learned, amongst other things, the geography of the school, the whereabouts of my classrooms, the names of my contemporaries, prefects and teachers and much more.

Nonetheless, I resolved to make up for lost time. I had been busy since I was a toddler. Now I had cause to be busy day in and day out. I was up before daybreak, spent twenty minutes on the train reading Ian Wooldridge and catching up on homework, then walked to school from West Dulwich Station. Aside from lessons, snatched meals, daily games and Corps, I doubt that there was a single school club which I did not visit and from which I did not derive something.

Theatre, art, music, debating, model-railways, numismatics, philately, film and oh so many others briefly commanded my attention. Characteristically, I joined nothing. Only the Combined Cadet Force (CCF), in which I was an ardent member of the army section, cricket and golf, in both of which I grew ever more proficient and soon represented the school, occupied me throughout my school career.

I attended every lecture on politics, philosophy and current affairs given by visiting speakers and was prominent when questions were invited from the floor. Red Ken Livingstone addressed us and was assailed by a fervent Farage. Enoch Powell visited in 1982, a day before his seventieth birthday, and dazzled me for once into awestruck silence. I helped to found the Investment Society where we pooled modest sums and traded, through my father’s agency, on the stock market.

I was convinced that all this feverish activity constituted the sort of progress which Mr Lloyd had exhorted. It was to be many years before I realised that I had merely been drifting after all, albeit with random trips in the jolly-boat to a thousand atolls.

Others found islands to their liking and built and farmed on them. I just visited them. I enjoyed the scenery and the natives then set off again. I was still rummaging, sightseeing, acquiring acquaintances, knowledge and mementos.

Others had vocations. I had vacations.

And all the while I was reading with a similar want of discrimination or direction. Some called reading work. I just did it whenever I wasn’t in company, and didn’t much care what it was, just so long as I was visiting someone else’s world or acquiring his or her understanding or skill.

One day, all this would prove phenomenally valuable. I love people. Canvassing and campaigning are not just means to an end but ends in themselves. And I derive no satisfaction from just pressing the flesh and passing on. However briefly, I like to engage with those whom I meet in my wanderings and to learn from each of them. The quickest way to achieve this is through their passions.

Dog-racing? Pheasant-breeding? Led Zeppelin? Christian Science? The Marx Brothers? Flat Earth Societies? Bring ’em on. I have been there. I have shared your enthusiasm.

There was another benefit from this amateurish Grand Tour. The gauche, argumentative infant soon became thoroughly clubbable. I got on well with my seniors and was cultivated by them as a no doubt amusing and provocative clown or precocious performing and yapping terrier.

The yapping – and occasional growling – occurred when anyone tried to deny me knowledge or to put one over on me or others.

Whenever I encountered interventionist authority, I was at the forefront of the dissidents. Whenever I encountered unthinking acceptance of doctrine, whether about the news or history, I challenged it fiercely. Whatever my own views. I would champion any neglected damsel in distress amongst ideas against the dragons of prejudice. I fought fiercely for anarchy, CND doves and warmongering hawks, Christianity, atheists, the pro-and anti-abortion (NOT pro-choice and pro-life) factions, feminism, chauvinism…

This was not mere puppy play-fighting. I had discovered in myself a passionate loathing for received opinion. The era of doctrinaire liberalism was dawning, and I despised views acquired free with chart records or designer jeans and sloppily dribbled or spewed forth without fear of challenge. I required terms defined and postures defended against dialectic and invective as ferocious as I could muster.

Above all, perhaps, I despised the conflation of trite aesthetics and ethics. The fact that something was distasteful or offensive did not make it unacceptable. Sex, birth and death – anything other than the status quo – are distasteful and offensive to the burgeoning, alienated middle classes. The easiest way to their approval was to fulminate against these without thought. I could not manage it. I must temper every view in the furnace of argument.

Aesthetics, after all, are the slaves of mere fashion. Sentimental squeamishness has in its time justified racism, the condemnation of homosexuality, the censorship of all good journalism, the sequestration of the old and the disabled, the routine cruelty of the battery farm because no one wants to acknowledge that meat comes from living creatures, the hanging of the innocent brunette and the sparing of the wide-eyed blonde though guilty as sin, the assumption that the Comanche was a savage and the man in the white hat a hero…

Yes, Farage was ‘off on one’ again, to the glee of my schoolfellows and the embarrassment of my teachers.

Today, such childish amoral ‘morality’ has primacy. Wring the neck of a free-range bird for the pot or use a four-pound hammer and a
razor-sharp
knife on your pig and you are a wicked brute. Buy a plastic-wrapped pink thing which lived its entire life eating shit in darkness and your conscience can remain untroubled. The supermarkets demand and receive huge benefits from the EU and a government which presumes to ban the ritualistic bio-control of hunting. Senility and death are nasty, so confining our old people in homes is nice. Go figure.

Of course, the facile assumed that such passion indicated that I was in favour of everything for which I argued. I was pro-hunting, smoking, abortion, the needless splattering of the brains of helmetless motorcyclists and no doubt suicide in my time. In fact, I was at the time agnostic about pretty much everything. I only knew that no one was going to cheat me by daubing a vexed and important subject with sticky pink frosting and declining to discuss the alternative because it was not considered ‘nice’.