Life's Lottery (7 page)

Your parents – you can see it – give up on you and put their hopes in James. Your brother easily passes his Eleven Plus, but spends only a year at Marling’s before comprehensive education comes in. Most teachers realise there’s something not quite right about your mediocrity but are too busy with real problem cases like the uncontrollable Tony Bennett or the suicidal Marie-Laure Quilter to give you much thought.

Hemphill is understaffed and overworked. If Dr Marling’s is intended to turn out Sedgwater’s estate agents and local government inspectors and the Girls’ Grammar to furnish them with wives, Hemphill Secondary Modern’s job is to grind out leave-school-at-sixteen drones. Hemphill boys who live in town will work at the British Synthetics plant. If they’re from outlying villages, they’ll work on a farm. The girls work in shops or the jam factory and get married as soon as they can. Many of your schoolmates will have kids of their own before they are twenty.

You still hang around with Barry Mitcham, Paul Mysliwiec and Vanda Pritchard, preserving the remains of your infants’ school circle into your teens. With Shane and Mary at grammar schools, you’re nudged into the leadership of your gang, though you find it boring always having to think up things to keep your friends amused. The laziness you affect becomes all too real. Vanda becomes something of a nag and Barry makes the odd joke about ‘old married couples’, which disturbs you. Though you’ve played kissing games, you aren’t Vanda’s boyfriend. She develops a serious plague of spots.

One lunch break, Marie-Laure Quilter, who hasn’t really tried to kill herself, whatever they say, is hanging around with you for no real reason. Paul, athletic enough to make the junior football side, has brought a couple of his soccer mates, Vince Tunney and Dickie Kell. There’s an irritating barking in the air, the constant yapping of a dog that belongs to a pensioner whose garden backs on to the school grounds. Marie-Laure claims it’s trying to chew through the fence to get her. You pelt the dog with small stones and are hauled up
en masse
before Mr Taylor, the Head. Marie-Laure and Vanda get the slipper, and the rest of you the belt.

The ‘slipper’, the ‘belt’. None of you – and, more significantly, none of your parents – questions the propriety of corporal punishment in school, administered with instruments as fetishist and symbolic as the top hat or old boot in Monopoly. The Bash Street Kids in the
Beano
usually wind up with throbbing cartoon bums and the frequently televised
Bottoms Up!
features a gowned Jimmy Edwards shouting ‘Whacko!’ as he humorously thrashes recalcitrants. You’ve learned from James that it’s not true that pupils at Dr Marling’s can be beaten by sadistic prefects, but the cane is still used there as an instrument of chastisement. If and when any of you has a twelve-year-old, the idea of ritual child abuse as disciplinary tool will seem as obsolete as public executions or ducking witches. You’ll wonder if ‘the belt’ – three mild lashes administered by the tweedy and unenthusiastic Mr Taylor – could possibly have hurt as much as you remember. Even a hardnut like Dickie Kell is reduced to helpless tears almost before the first lash.

The shared punishment makes you a proper gang. Before, you all drifted around the playground as free agents. Marie-Laure, who has an alcoholic mother, introduces you to smoking. Tension develops between Marie-Laure and Vanda, much like that Mary and Vanda. Mary got her way through violence, terror and cunning, but Marie-Laure prevails by being dependent, clinging and desperate. Vince’s great obsession is American comics and he encourages your own budding interest. You hunt around newsagents’ together for stray issues of
Batman, Doctor Strange
and
The Streak
, and build collections through swapping and delving.

* * *

By 1973, Hemphill is falling apart. After next year, it won’t even exist. Rumours go round about which of the staff will get the boot. Vanda frightens you all by claiming that at the new school you’ll have to do the difficult work her brother Norman does at Marling’s. Again, it’s repeated that grammar-school kids have five hours’ homework every night. You remember the panic spasm that made you botch your Eleven Plus. James does under an hour of homework an evening, but the prospect of giving up television and loitering-and-smoking-in-Denbeigh-Gardens is frighteningly real.

Increasingly, you feel you have no control over your life. You used to have choices. Now, you have a trap. It is slowly closing.

Read 18, go to 23.

I
n the first form at Dr Marling’s, you put on a spurt of growth, shooting up six inches. Your parents spend a fortune on new school clothes. Then have to do it again, twice, as your trouser-cuffs rise above your socks. They threaten to put you back in shorts. You say you’ll go on hunger strike if they send you to school dressed like an infant. The uniform is okay, except for the blood-red cap, which makes Marling’s boys look from a distance as if they’ve been freshly scalped.

Your long legs make you a runner. The school tries to get you to play fly-half in rugby, but you don’t like the idea of twelve larger boys running after you, jumping on top of you. For you, games means track events: sprints, the half-mile, hurdles. Not very athletic at your last school, you discover that if all else fails you can run.

Also, you take to the work. After a week struggling with base eight in mathematics and the lowest slopes of Latin and French, pennies drop. You find that schoolwork, like running, is something you can do, a resource. At the end of the first term, your year takes achievement tests in all subjects; you score in the top five in everything but religious instruction and music. You usually do your homework in under an hour and are in front of the television for
Top of the Pops
or
Softly, Softly: Task Force
. Your parents are delighted by your end-of-term report.

You wonder if you were held back in primary school. Maybe having girls in the class hampered you. You don’t see any of the girls from Ash Grove, or any of your friends who failed the Eleven Plus and went to Hemphill. You have a new life.

Suddenly, you are a leader. In the second term, Mr Waller, your form master, makes you form captain. Shane Bush, struggling to keep up in most subjects, is a hanger-on. You are wary of Michael Dixon and his friends, as clever as you but unpredictable, but become closer to Stephen Adlard, whom you barely knew at Ash Grove. Stephen is the neatest boy in the form, tie immaculately tied, homework meticulous. Without a ruler or compass, Stephen can draw perfect straight edges and geometric figures.

In the first year, from 1971 to 1972, cliques and factions coalesce. Kids you knew at Ash Grove you think of by their first names; kids who came from other schools are known to you, as to the masters at Marling’s, by their surnames. You, Stephen and Roger Cunningham are the Brainboxes, with Shane as your attendant thicko. Michael Dixon, Amphlett, Martin, Skelly and Yeo are the Forum, clever but useless at games. Trickett, Holmes and Ferguson are the Rugby Hulks. Beale, Pritchard (Vanda’s twin brother) and Fewsham are the Trouble-Causers.

In the second year, from 1972 to 1973, you are in a form with Stephen, Cunningham and Michael – you all continue Latin, which two-thirds of your year drop – but Shane is relegated to a thicko stream. You still hang around together at break. Shane brings along Gully Eastment, a new friend from his form. Eastment isn’t really a thicko, but mad moments hold him back: if dared, he’ll try anything from climbing the outside of the school to setting light to all the magnesium in the chemistry lab. He’s the only boy you know well who has been caned, bum striped scarlet by the head, ‘Chimp’ Quinlan.

You feel yourself draw ahead of the pack, as you usually do towards the end of the half-mile, getting a third wind, finding new strength, new speed. Wally Berry, the games master, calls you ‘Streak’ and cautions you about pacing yourself. As you run, you always sense others at your heels, gaining fast. Even when you’ve sprinted well ahead of your closest rival, you sense the shadows of pursuers flickering at your heels.

You run fast because you think you are being chased. You don’t like to think about who or what might be chasing you. You just know they are there, relentlessly pounding the gravel, matching your strides.

At the beginning of the third year, in 1973, which you hear will be the last year Marling’s exists as a separate school, you draw up a life schedule, carefully writing it out on a sheet of exercise paper. In your future, you’ll have two years at Ash Grove Comprehensive, where you will take O Level courses, then two years at Sedgwater College, where you will take A Levels. Then you will read modern languages at Oxford or Cambridge, graduating with a First in 1981. After education, you will get a professional job. Something with a starting salary higher than that your father earns after twenty years with the bank. By 1987, when you are twenty-five, you will be ready to get married, buy a house, and father two children, a boy and a girl, Jonathan and Jennifer. Your wife will also be a professional. You will both have cars. You will continue to run, continue to draw ahead of the shadowmen at your heels. The track ahead of you stretches towards the twenty-first century. At the turn of the century, you’ll be forty. You write an essay in English about your fortieth birthday, spent on a day trip to Mars.

Throughout your third and last year at Marling’s, you put on speed. Competitors fall exhausted by the side of the track. Even the masters find it a strain to keep up with you.

Sean Rye, Laraine’s boyfriend, asks you one evening why you have to keep running.

You don’t know, but you just
do
.

‘You could always stop,’ Sean says, ‘take a rest, slow down. You’re missing a lot.’

When you ask him to give examples of things you’re missing, Sean can’t come up with a decent list. But you still wonder if he doesn’t have a point.

In your dreams, you run, enveloped by a pack of shadows, losing your footing. You wake up as if you’d really been running, heart pumping, drenched by panic sweat. Often when this happens, you have an itchy erection, sometimes with shameful discharge.

You have known about sex since primary school, when you were given pamphlets explaining the biology. You wonder if Sean and Laraine have slept together, but doubt it. You think your parents have grown out of sex, and Laraine has become a miniature Mum, always perfect and poised, dressed up as if for a party. It’s impossible to imagine her putting her tongue in Sean’s mouth. Sean works in your father’s bank; after his A Levels, he didn’t go to university. Mum and Dad like Sean. James says Sean is a pillock and teases Laraine in a disrespectful manner you would never countenance.

Why should you pay attention to what a bank clerk says? Sean is one of your father’s slavey young men, with his diamond-shaped ties and wide lapels. How would he know what you’re missing?

The whispers of ‘Slow down’ persist. You think they come from the shadows. They are a trick, a trap. If you slow, you will stumble and fall under the others. Feet will trample over you, imprinting dap-sole patterns on your back, forcing your face into the dirt.

At night, in bed, you take hold of your penis and pump fast, faster, faster. Gully has told you how to toss off. You think of yourself running. Towards your future, your wife, your life. You get faster and faster. You leave the shadows behind.

You have no shame about running.

Each orgasm is a victory. For you, victories come fast and often.

Sean envies you your future. You’ll leave him behind. That’s why he wants you to slow down: envy. Laraine breaks up with him and goes out with Graham Foulk, an ancient soul of twenty-two who plays the guitar with his own pop group. Mum and Dad like Graham less than Sean. He has long hair and a fuzz of beard and they’ve heard he is a bad lot, but Laraine says he’s sweet really. She starts dressing less like a Sindy doll, more like a flower child. You’re sure Laraine has slept with Graham, and is on the pill. He is one of a loose knot of aimless young adults who work sporadically, some on farms in the ring of villages outlying Sedgwater, and are known, even in the mid-1970s, as hippies.

Graham makes you as uncomfortable as he does your parents. Since leaving school, he’s done nothing except practise with his group, who have never played anywhere for money, though they do appear at birthday parties and school discos. The summit of his ambition is to have his group, which goes through names the way you go through biros, play at the Glastonbury Festival. Sean, still at the bank, is scornful (perhaps understandably) of Graham and his bunch of wasters, which prompts Graham (quite amusingly) to name his group Graham and the Wasters for a few weeks.

If you slow down, you might become like Graham. As soon as the tiniest fluff sprouts on your chin, you scratch yourself bloody with your father’s razor. You shave every day, scraping off dead skin and thin lather. You’ll never grow a beard, you vow.

Stephen and Roger look forward to the new school. They are obsessed with the idea of girls. Gully Eastment has already decided to have sex with as many as possible. He claims that though Girls’ Grammar girls are tight, Hemphill slags will do anything.

You keep quiet. Girls can wait. You have running to do. The pack are catching up. You have to avoid stitches, wrenched knees, pulled muscles. You notch up more victories.

You read ahead in all your textbooks, getting to lessons before the masters, completing exercises as yet unset. Your parents are called into school and aren’t sure whether to be pleased with or worried about you. Mr Quinlan tells your father that if Marling’s were not being amalgamated into Ash Grove, he’d have you on an accelerated programme, with a view to preparing you in advance to take Oxford entrance exams in four years’ time. But, he shrugs, he is leaving when the school amalgamates, and they’ll have to watch you carefully so that you aren’t dragged down by the changes. Chimp Quinlan thinks comprehensive education is the work of the Devil.

Your parents wonder about taking you out of Marling’s and sending you to a public school. They decide that, quite apart from the money, it’s too late. You’d never settle in another school. You ignore all this argument. Whatever the school, you must still run.