Paperboy (22 page)

21

Hard House

THE MOVE TO
Cyril Villa had coincided with me sitting the eleven-plus, an examination which took place in the gymnasium at school and featured what I considered to be a series of totally irrelevant problems.

A train with nine carriages takes 75 seconds to pass through a station at 40 mph. How long is the station platform?

Who knew? How on earth could I be expected to know about the design of the station from the mechanical efficiency of its rolling stock? And what about the people who were waiting to get on the train – would they now all be late for work?

What is a levee?

Something you waited on, surely? Didn’t the Black and White Minstrels sing about this? Could be a trick
question.
It was the geography section, after all, not musical comedy.

What have been the reasons for the United Kingdom’s balance-of-payments difficulties on both current and capital accounts over the last ten years?

Hang on, I was eleven years old, not the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and besides, wasn’t that a bit politically loaded? Talk about giving ammunition to the Shadow Cabinet. Pass on that one.

Who do you think was the ‘Dark Lady’ of William Shakespeare’s sonnets?

Now I knew it was all a wind-up. Scholars had been arguing about this for centuries and now they expected some spotty schoolboy to figure it out for them? A bunch of examiners were having a laugh somewhere. Better wing this by making up some fantastical travesty of my own.

A particle travels 2 × 10
⁸
centimetres per second in a straight line for 7 × 10
^–6
seconds. How many centimetres has it travelled?

I’m sorry, I felt like writing, your call did not go through. Kindly replace the handset and dial again. The question appears to be broken, or you are speaking in French, or are quite possibly mad.

I put down my pen before anyone else. Was that a good thing or a bad thing?

Good, it transpired, because somehow, by some mysterious process, I appeared to have sailed through the
exam.
I could only think that there were bonus points awarded for surrealist answers.

My score qualified me to go to Colfe’s Grammar School, the Royal Leathersellers College, one of London’s oldest guild schools. There would be posh boys there. Parents with money would be dropping off their darlings in Rollers – the cars, not the hair-care equipment. In fact, there was a very good chance that I would be the poorest pupil in the entire school. When everyone else went off on the school skiing trip I’d be the one left at home. A whole new world of humiliation was about to open up before me.

I was reading
Gormenghast
at the time, and living in it, too. In my mind, the towering edifice in Peake’s book became synonymous with Cyril Villa. The vast crumbling castle sinking under the weight of its history and traditions, a gloomy labyrinth of corridors and chambers so knuckle-scrapingly real that I felt trapped inside them, was a fractured mirror of England, frozen in time and smothered by centuries of conservatism, suffocating in meaningless rituals, doomed to disappear from the moment the youthful kitchen underling Steerpike climbed from a window to view his home from the outside. Death stalked those pages: the death of tradition and the end of all things, as well as human destruction. I carried the book everywhere I went, because it deserved to be revered, its heart-rending language and images remembered as long as there were books left to treasure. Plus, reading was more interesting than staring at the dark, damp-patched walls of our TV-less lounge, listening to my dad’s rivet gun.

The house did have beautiful Edwardian mirrors over marble fireplaces with twisted pilasters and golden statues of chariot racers, but Bill ripped all of these out and replaced them with iridescent metallic log-flame-effect
gas
fireplaces, which he got cheap from his Elephant and Castle gas showroom.

Cyril Villa also had a view, down Knee Hill (why did we have to live in a part of the body? Why couldn’t we have moved to a place with a normal address?) and out on to the misted grey marshlands that lay between the Woolwich armoury and Erith, where London’s last wild horses had cantered. Bill would jingle the change in his pockets while he watched brown-sailed barges heading up and down the Thames. ‘I should think that’s probably carrying jute to Southend,’ he would announce knowledgeably, as if anyone was going to argue with him.

But times were changing. Work had nearly finished on a new estate which the local paper held a competition to name. It was christened Thamesmead, and was going to be a cross between Metropolis and Shangri-La, but for the first decade of its life it became a watchword for shoddy British workmanship. Bill reckoned that some of the houses were starting to sink into the marshes because the land had not been properly drained, but the final nail in the coffin came when
A Clockwork Orange
was filmed on one completed section of the estate. Nobody wanted to live there after that, my father told me, not even displaced gypsies.

I found the film version of Anthony Burgess’s novel too close for comfort, because when I walked home past gangs of kids behaving like Droogs, it felt as though fiction had crossed over into fact. Strewn with chip paper and fag cartons, Abbey Wood was designed for insolent loitering, the gateway to teen delinquency. The neighbourhood kids were neurotic, doped-up, walking scar tissue, groomed for early failure. Hanging out with them was not an option, so I stayed at home.

The house was getting my mother down. Friendless
once
more, and resigned to a loveless marriage, she spent her days fighting the dirt that sifted like creeping death into the house from the surrounding woods. After Bill became disenchanted with the Dobermann’s Quisling
¹
-like ability to change sides in a crisis, he got rid of it and bought an Alsatian, an albino with pink eyes, strange-smelling breath and a permanently moulting dry coat – not the kind of dog you wanted with deep-green carpets – and Kath found she had a new enemy to oppose. Whenever anyone went near the beast it bared its teeth, even when it was being friendly.

It seemed impossible to imagine that my parents had ever found anything in common at all, but the thought that they might get a divorce seemed as likely to occur to them as the idea that
Homo sapiens
had evolved from wheelbarrows. In Bill’s book, no divorcee should ever be allowed to walk around with her head held high, not unless the word SLUT was branded across it in poker-work.

Kath tried to make Cyril Villa more cheerful. She bought a rickety telephone table for the dingy hall, even though we had no telephone. She had paid for it with coupons collected from her packets of fags. Presumably it had not crossed her mind that having to smoke that much to get a telephone table would quite possibly prevent her from speaking in anything above a croak when she did finally get a telephone. After all, the lady who lived down the hill had chain-smoked Kensitas all through her pregnancy because she was collecting cigarette coupons for a pram.

After Kath’s pale, ethereal mother had evaporated entirely beyond the mortal coil, her sweet existence reduced to a faded sepia photograph on the beside table, my mother realized she was truly alone. She began to look permanently tired, as if she was preparing to go next. At least I had started my new school and was out from under her feet, so she could concentrate on looking after Steven and keeping the rising tide of drifting dog hair at bay.

I had unintentionally become the keeper of my mother’s secrets. I was the only person to whom she could really talk. It was a burden I hadn’t wished for, and one which Kath had not meant to bestow on me. Sometimes, when she sought me out for a talk, I hastily made myself invisible, heading off for a long walk without a destination in mind. I got just one chance to explore the area on my new bicycle before it was stolen, but it was obvious that there was nothing much to see. I did, however, discover Plumstead Public Library, which had a lending record section and a peculiar museum above it, which contained dusty cases of coins dug from the Thames, a length of hair from a medieval dog, and bits of grey wood from two-thousand-year-old boats. But age alone did not make the exhibits interesting, so the curator had extemporized unlikely handwritten stories for each find, carefully using phrases like ‘this was thought to belong to …’ and ‘might well have been of the type used …’ I could tell that the good people of Plumstead weren’t too interested in local history, because whenever I visited the museum the curator had to come and turn the lights on.

The record section’s most recent acquisition was an album by the Rolling Stones, purchased as a sop to those who complained that the library did not stock modern music. However, they did possess a complete set of Sir Malcolm Sargent’s Gilbert & Sullivan LPs, which came
with
notes explaining the topsy-turvy world created by their composers.

I fell in love with their concept of paradox, which in
The Pirates of Penzance
dictated that because Frederic was born on 29 February in a leap year, he only had a birthday every four years and would therefore not be indentured as a pirate until he was in his eighties, on his twenty-first birthday. Similar rules explained why Nanki-Poo could marry Yum-Yum for one month on condition that he would then be beheaded in
The Mikado
, or why
Iolanthe
’s member of parliament Strephon was a fairy down to the waist and a human below that. Wherever Gilbert set his verse, he was always writing about the absurdity of England. He must have got right up Queen Victoria’s nose.

The library was guarded by an eagle-eyed matron who held every LP up to the light and compared it to a chart, marking each new scratch. Every time she spotted some damage, she added two shillings to the bill that I knew I would never be able to pay. When I eventually peered over her shoulder and saw that I owed over seven pounds, I was forced to admit that I was broke.

‘Don’t worry about it,’ said the collection’s guardian with a conspiratorial smile. ‘These record-ledgers are so complicated and confusing that no one in the Council will ever be able to work them out.’

‘Then why do you put them down at all?’ I asked.

‘The by-laws only state that the fines have to be noted,’ she explained. ‘No one ever got around to setting a date for their collection, so I marked it down as a leap year.’

It was an explanation worthy of W. S. Gilbert himself.

1
Norwegian fascist whose surname became an eponym for ‘traitor’. Not to be confused with Kipling, who became the butt of a seaside postcard joke. ‘Do you like Kipling, Miss?’ ‘I don’t know, I’ve never Kippled.’

22

Bad Influence

THE SCHOOL HAD
been bombed during the War, and was still housed temporarily in a series of asbestos-riddled bungalows on a piece of waste ground in Lewisham while a new modern building was being constructed. I was eleven, a new boy in a class of hostile, suspicious pupils. I wanted to have a black friend because I only knew white kids, but the only black boy in the entire school was a geek called Jeremy who longed to be a Young Conservative. English children of the period knew no one other than those like themselves. It would have been exciting to make friends with kids from different cultures, just to vary the stultifying predictability of daily suburban life, but in Greenwich there was as much chance of sighting a Martian. From what we learned in books and films, dark-skinned races seemed less emotionally guarded than we were, less arrogantly convinced that they were born to govern the world, plus they ate exotic food, dishes that came seasoned with spices instead of being smothered in rubbery gravy. Mrs Harper, the woman in the fish shop, said she knew a Caribbean lady, but this friendship was
so
jealously guarded that no one ever got to meet her. We finally decided that Mrs Harper had invented her to sound more interesting.

On my first day, I was seated next to Simon, a pasty-faced boy with freckles, an insolently knotted tie and a silly haircut. The teacher warned me to stay away from Simon during break as he had an attitude problem, which in those days merely meant impertinence, whereas today it usually means carrying small firearms. When I looked in his eyes I could see something untameable and mad. It was the start of a lifelong friendship for both of us.