The Living Years (5 page)

Strange as it may seem, I never really questioned fagging. It just was the way it was and, to be honest, I was even half-looking forward to having a fag of my own. Then, just as I got to my Senior year, Charterhouse scrapped the fagging system.

Even 350-year-old public schools weren’t completely safe from the sixties and the changing mood in the country. A couple of years after I’d left, I passed Charterhouse and, incredibly, there were even boys with semi-long hair. But that was typical of the miserable hand fate dealt me at Charterhouse. The only ray of sunshine was music.

* * *

Charterhouse was a famous school for music: Ralph Vaughan Williams, one of the few classical composers I like, had been there, and it had a hymnbook that made a particular impact on me and another boy called Tony Banks. It was modern but melodic, and I thought the drama of some of the hymns’ big chords and chord sequences was fantastic.

This meant that Chapel was a double-edged sword. The music was great and it was an attractive building: stained-glass windows and very tall. The flipside was the religion: forty minutes a day and twice on a Sunday. It was murder trying to stay awake during Sunday Evensong. Many a boy could be seen still ‘praying’ with their eyes shut when everyone else had stood up.

I didn’t usually have a problem staying awake to listen to Radio Luxembourg, though. Radios were banned but somehow I’d managed to smuggle in a little transistor that I’d listen to under my pillow after lights out. I got away with it for quite a while but then one night I must have drifted off. I woke to the sound of the approaching footsteps of the music master, Geoffrey Ford.

Geoffrey was so openly gay it was accepted. There was nothing hidden and predatory about him. I was more worried by the masters who’d gone to university and come straight back to the school: I thought that was a definite sign something was wrong. Geoffrey wasn’t one of those more unreasonable types but I still didn’t want to be caught. Unfortunately, being half asleep, I turned the knob of my radio up, not off, as Geoffrey got closer. The sudden blast of volume catapulted me upright, at which point the radio fell out from under my pillow and clattered on to the floor.

It seems ironic that it was the music master who confiscated my radio but Charterhouse was like that: nothing about it made sense. The effect it had on me was to give me a lasting hatred of authority and petty bureaucracy. If I see there’s reason behind it, I can take it, but silly rules and regulations just piss me off. It’s why I never would have lasted in the Navy.

Tony Banks, Peter Gabriel and Anthony Phillips were all in a different house to me, Duckites not Lockites, and weren’t undesirable elements like I was. Ant had dangerously long hair but he was good at cricket so was forgiven. More importantly as far as I was concerned, he was great at the guitar.

The first time I saw Ant was in the basement meeting room of the ‘Rock Soc’. (Thinking about it now, the name sounds surprisingly advanced: it wasn’t until the seventies and America that I was really aware of anyone talking about ‘rock’, although of course there it was ‘rawk’.) Ant had a red Stratocaster and a Vox AC30 amplifier, which was what the pros used. It was way beyond what anyone else in the school had. He was skinny, with white-blond hair and a nose a bit like Pete Townshend’s. And his fingers looked right on the guitar. It’s funny, you can often tell if someone’s going to be any good at an instrument before they’ve even played a note.

Ant had been to see a session by the Swinging Blue Jeans (who’d had hits with ‘Good Golly Miss Molly’ and ‘Hippy Hippy Shake’) and he knew far more chords than I did. He even played a bit of lead guitar. Because he was in a different house and a year below me, our paths shouldn’t really have crossed, but he took me under his wing and taught me everything Bert Weedon hadn’t.

* * *

When I first went to Charterhouse my parents were still living 230 miles away in Cheshire – which didn’t help with the settling in process – but in my final year my father retired and my parents moved down to Farnham. My parents’ new house, Hill Cottage, was a three-bedroom, white-plastered 1940s house on a hill at the top of crossroads on the Frensham Road. It was smaller than Far Hills and while my parents were moving they gave me some of their furniture for safe-keeping. It wasn’t much – a three-piece sofa, a couple of rugs, a couple of standard lamps – but when Chare walked into my study-bedroom I heard him gasp. ‘What is THIS, Rutherford?’ He made my parents take it all away – rugs were the height of decadence as far as Chare was concerned.

After my parents moved to Farnham we’d regularly go as a family to the Officer’s Club in Aldershot and have a curry for Sunday lunch (I think Dad always felt he could be anywhere in the Empire when he ate a curry, plus at the Officer’s Club it was the only thing on the menu). He must have felt a distance opening up between us because at some point he also decided to take me sailing on Hawley Lake. Whether this was his way of bonding or of trying to steer me back towards a naval career, I’m not sure.

I arrived at the lake in full mufti gear – blazer, yachting shoes, cravat – to find that my father, even though he wasn’t in uniform, was still revered as a captain by the retired folk from the services who ran the yachting establishment. They couldn’t have been more helpful: the dinghy was present and correct, my father was given a respectful helping hand getting in and off we went. With everyone watching. Ready for a show.

I still think it was an unreasonably windy day.

Hawley Lake might sound an unthreatening kind of place but it was pretty bloody choppy that afternoon and, as I set sail, I already knew there was only one way that it was going to end. As the canvas rattled and rolled, my father did his best to help me out.

‘Hold the jib!’ he yelled.

‘I am!’ I yelled back.

I wasn’t, mainly because I hadn’t got the faintest idea what a jib was. But at least I knew how to swim. Which turned out to be useful that day.

Maybe this episode was another reason why my father didn’t object to me going into the music business eventually, but my naval career wasn’t quite dead in the water yet.

Military service was compulsory at Charterhouse: Army, Air Force or Navy.

About 80 per cent of the boys were in the Army because that was where you had to start your stint and most couldn’t be bothered to change to one of the more interesting forces later. The culmination of Charterhouse Army service was the march, which was surprisingly scenic – you went via Haslemere and the Devil’s Punchbowl – but it was also fifty miles long. When it came to my turn I finished it all right, but then I was made to do it again. I don’t know what happened – there may have been a taxi involved – but after that I left and joined the Navy.

In retrospect, this was a no-brainer. In winter we’d sit around indoors tying knots – seriously – and in the summer we’d go sailing on Frensham Ponds. (Sailing got much easier the minute my father wasn’t watching.) Best of all was the day each Cricket Quarter when the Army lot went off for a trek in full Army gear and backpack in the boiling sun. It was a day I would generally spend lying on top of the Frensham Ponds boatshed drinking cider with Ant, who’d also sussed out how best to spend his time.

Charterhouse was a different school if you were good at sport. I knew that golf was never going to be on a par with rugby or football – if you were good at those, you were in a different league popularity-wise – but I thought I could build on my golfing success at The Leas. Then Chare banned me. He thought golf was dangerously individualistic and anti-Establishment, particularly for a rebel like me.

‘Rutherford, you are banned. You must play more team sports.’

What could you do? After that, sport at Charterhouse for me was cricket – which, in Division C, Fourth Team, was a real team effort. You’d arrive at a far-off part of a far-off field, away from the masters, sit on the grass in the sun and work out together what the score should be. The funny thing was, by the end of the day you’d be so into it that you’d believe you really
had
scored those fifty runs. You’d go back to the house feeling quite heroic.

I could live without golf – after all, you had to wear some weird nerd kit in those days – but I couldn’t live without music.

And so Chare banned me from playing my guitar.

At the time I was in the upper house, a kind of recreation room, playing my guitar to
Sgt. Pepper
, which had just come out and was the most exciting thing I’d ever heard. I think Chare must have had a bad housemasters’ meeting because he stormed in, raving, and grabbed me by the collar. ‘Rutherford,’ he hissed through his teeth. ‘you are banned. You are not playing the guitar anymore, Rutherford.’ He then bent me over and caned me. It was eight o’clock at night and I was in my dressing gown. After that, obviously, there was no way I was going to stop. Not least because the biggest concert of my Charterhouse career was only a few weeks away.

The band that I’d joined were the Anon. Ant was the driving force behind them but it was their singer, Richard Macphail, who’d come up with the name. He’d originally wanted it to be ‘Anon’, like an unknown poet, but nobody could cope with not having an article.

Rich was great. He could sing, he looked the part and he had the moves: we called him Mick Phail because he could do a bit of a Jagger act. He was also terribly up, just a very positive guy. Once he left school he grew his ginger hair down to his elbows and I would often see him at gigs with no shoes on.

The rest of the line-up was Rob Tyrell on drums – God, he was good – and Rivers Job, who had been to prep school with Ant, on bass. Rivers Job – have you ever known a cooler name? He was very short and his bass guitar looked too big for his body but it seemed to work on him somehow. (Rivers left Charterhouse after O levels and I saw him next at a pub in Guildford playing with the Savoy Blues Band, who were quite a successful thing in those days. I remember looking up at him on stage and thinking: he’s actually doing it . . . !)

It was after Rivers had left the school that I picked up the bass. Ant was better than me at guitar so it was an obvious move and not at all a demotion. However, something must have annoyed me because, not long after, I threw a huff and left the band. I think the problem might have been that Ant was being selfish about something or other – his way or no way. Ant probably thought it was because I couldn’t take the discipline, which was also possible. Anyway, I do remember flouncing off slightly. The result was my new band, the Climax, who lasted two terms and whose name was the best thing about us. Ant would come into the hall where we were practising, laugh and walk straight out again.

It was during one of those two terms that the Charterhouse school magazine ran an article called ‘Why not pop?’ The Climax were described as making ‘a reasonable sound’ although we were ‘more of a shadow than a reality’ (probably a fair assessment). The Anon (minus me) got double the column inches:

Their music is of a Rhythm and Blues type, featuring numbers from The Stones, Yardbirds, John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers and The Cream, together with a very reasonable number of their own compositions . . . The group’s outlook is interesting: they deny energetically that their music interferes at all with their work . . . ‘After all, it’s us who should know whether it does or not, we’ve had a lot of trouble about that.’ Their reaction to the difficulties which they have to face as a group is one of hope for more freedom in the future; at present, feelings on the part of their parents are only lukewarm, money for new equipment is sorely needed, and the fact of their being at school makes holiday dates difficult to arrange . . . But such frustrations are, they agree, more than compensated for by the moments when the group is together and playing well.

I’m sure that my parents were ‘only lukewarm’, too, but they didn’t show it. When my mother came to collect me for the holidays I would pile my gear into the car and she wouldn’t turn a hair, even though I’d now got a couple of 4 × 12 speakers as well as a Hofner Verythin guitar, for which Jean Granny had given me the money. (‘Anything you want, just ask me,’ she’d always say when we visited her in Morris Lodge, although when I took her up on it she almost fell out of bed she got such a shock. Bed was where a lot of the people at Morris Lodge hung out during the daytime – the downstairs rooms were quite formal.)

I think Mum quite liked loud noise but, even so, I must have made a horrible racket practising. What was worse was that I was a night-time person in those days. It was only after they’d gone to bed that I would go into the dining room, light the candles in Captain Woods’s candelabras to get a bit of a vibe, and start playing. Although they never complained once, I knew my father was concerned at the direction my life seemed to be taking. My school reports would often say things like ‘He returned this Quarter to the old habit of doing no work’ (Maths) and ‘He has made no effort at all this quarter in this subject. He will inevitably fail’ (Physics). Dad also knew about the problems with Chare.

My father would never discuss things with me for the first few days after I had arrived home: he’d always give me a bit of time while he prepared and made notes. Then, when he’d had time to think about what he was going to say, he’d call me into the dining room, shut the door and say, ‘Now, tell me how it’s going.’

It’d be an official interview, not a casual chat, and he’d have his notepads and pens laid out in front of him. I could imagine him preparing in just the same way for some young sub lieutenant who’d been misbehaving.

Deep down, I respected my father’s authority – unlike the rules and regulations at Charterhouse I could see there was sense behind the things he said – but mainly I was aware that he was everything I didn’t want to be.

Until my generation, boys aspired to the same cavalry-twill trousers and brown suede shoes their dads had. Sons of my father’s generation were often told, ‘You’ll never be as fine a man as your father’. When my dad was told just that, as he wrote in his memoir, he ‘found it very dampening’.