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An Unexpected Journey

It wasn’t just the senior boys who kicked you around. You could be legally beaten up by teachers. Corporal punishment was common. It ranged from slippers across the backside by individual teachers to more formal floggings with a cane or birch. Opinions varied about the efficacy of a beating. The event was usually administered during the evening, with the unfortunate recipient in his pyjamas, after lights out. This was to ensure maximum psychological anxiety and maximum physical discomfort, as six strokes through cotton pyjamas was almost certain to draw blood. The now thankfully meaningless expression ‘books down the trousers’ was intended to convey a situation where, in anticipation of physical sanction, a geography notebook might shield the buttocks from damage.

There was general agreement that fives or squash players were the most devastating floggers on account of their fearsome backhand. Golfers came a close second. A great deal of discussion in dorm rooms revolved around angles, velocity and acceleration. After a beating, the victim usually stood on top of a chest of drawers and dropped his pants to invite comments by flashlight.

‘Not bad grouping.’

‘Ooh, stroke number four a bit low.’

‘He doesn’t like you much, does he?’

My housemaster had a variety of implements, ranging in length, flexibility and thickness according to the severity of the transgression. Four to six strokes were delivered, and his favourite armchair became the flogging stool, with the cushion removed and the boy exhorted to bend over and touch the bottom of the chair. There was a fetishistic streak to all this. Many of his beatings were administered while he was dressed in his rowing kit.

There are possibly people who still regard this sort of thing as character building. I am not one of them.

I began to think of school as a prison camp, and my duty was to disrupt, subvert and/or escape. But, of course, there was no escape. I felt I should make some kind of statement. I decided to deliver two tons of horseshit to my housemaster. Just one of those spur-of-the-moment ideas that comes with no logic in tow, but a great deal of emotional momentum.

I was wandering through town, considering the colour scheme for my squadron of Hannibal war elephants, which required painting before being blooded during the wargames society Roman stand-off. Pottering past the post office, I saw a postcard in the window, which read fatefully: ‘Manure delivered to your door.’

I went to the phone box and dialled.

‘Hello, do you deliver? Excellent. I’d like two tons, please … Yes, drop it in front of my house … The address? Sidney House, Oundle School. Thank you so much.’

That evening, the house gathered for supper. The housemaster stood up, sucking air through his teeth in lieu of the pipe he perennially puffed away at.

‘This afternoon,’ he said, ‘some wag thought it amusing to deliver two tons of shit onto my front doorstep. Unless the person owns up there will be no electricity for kettles or stereos in the house.’

Standard tactics for a low-grade despot. The stereo was an essential part of student existence. There were no CDs, and cassette recorders were in their infancy. Chronic audiophiles with rich daddies had reel-to-reel studio recorders and busily spliced tapes together to make compilations from their vinyl collections. It was only in your third year at Oundle that you were allocated to a study, a room not quite of your own but which you shared with one or two others. Decoration was possible and, inevitably, a music system was essential. By strolling past open study doors on a Sunday afternoon it was possible to sample most of the premier rock bands of the sixties and seventies. To cut off this lifeline to sanity and escape from the Oundlian Alcatraz, if only in spirit, was a dark and cruel punishment.

After supper, I knocked on the housemaster’s door.

‘Come!’

Seldom was the word ‘in’ ever used. I entered. He looked around from where he was seated at his desk, yellow pipe clenched in his teeth.

‘Ah, Dickinson. I thought it might be you.’

Actually, I was quite pleased. ‘Very amusing,’ he said. An unexpected compliment. He looked down. ‘Of course, I’ll thrash you for it.’ I heard the clack of his teeth on the pipe stem. Was he salivating? He looked up, startled. I just continued to stare. He dismissed me with an imperious wave.

On the dot at 9 p.m. I heard the squeak, squeak, squeak of rubber soles, and then the knock at the door.

‘I’ll see you now,’ the housemaster said.

He had changed into his rowing kit: shorts, chunky V-neck sweater and tennis shoes. His legs were ridiculously skinny and covered with a childlike coating of thin red hair. With every step I respected him less. He was using an extra-long cane, so he needed space for a good swing, and he was an amateur golfer, which did not bode well for the next 30 seconds or so. Really, these people should have been locked up.

Thankfully, among these sadistic floggers and the failed Oxbridge dons existed a small core of decent eccentrics. In this perverse society of dystopian hypocrisy, with its own internal politics and rigid hierarchy, the brown, smoky common room inhabited by the staff had a secret cabal of visionaries who made our lives worth living, and gave us hope. As well as Mr Campbell and Mr Worsley, we had an art teacher who somehow managed to promote rock concerts in Oundle’s Great Hall.

It’s probably time to come clean about music and how I ended up singing. Music, not singing, came first, and it is one of the peculiar schizophrenic traits of my academic boot camp that it introduced me to rock ’n’ roll more close-up than you could possibly imagine.

The first band I ever saw was called Wild Turkey. Then Van der Graaf Generator and, in similar prog-rock vein, we had String Driven Thing and a prog-folk band, Comus. Queen almost played, but they cancelled when they became massive overnight in America. The big story was that Genesis had played, the year before I arrived, complete with Peter Gabriel wearing a box on his head.

Wild Turkey had ex-Jethro Tull bass player Glenn Cornick in their lineup, and their first album, Battle Hymn, stands the test of time to this very day. Out of my mind on Fanta and Mars bars, raging with hormones, I was on a high for days. Every square inch of me was drenched in sweat as I staggered back to my dormitory across the forbidding lawns topped with dark shadows from academic spires. My heart was thumping, my ears were ringing and it seemed like my head was full of bells, with a madman tugging at ropes to ring the changes and pulling at the back of my eyeballs as if to say, ‘Listen to this feeling and never forget.’ Wild Turkey actually name-checked the gig in an interview as ‘one of the craziest reactions we’ve ever had’. That was me, with my head stuffed in the bass bin.

Afterwards, a long succession of prog bands took over; all very cerebral, but with the exception of Peter Hammill and Van der Graaf, not nearly so visceral. Nevertheless, when wandering the corridors with music drifting out from the individual studies in Sidney House, I was stopped in my tracks. What the fuck was that? I knocked tentatively. The senior boy looked at me scathingly: ‘What do you want?’

‘Er, what is that track?’

‘Oh, that. Deep Purple, “Speed King”, Deep Purple in Rock.’ He rolled his eyes and shut the door. My insides continued to churn. I wanted music.

My first record was a sampler called Fill Your Head with Rock, comprising mainly West Coast American CBS Records acts, and although I played it to death, it was barely satisfactory. I wanted a straight shot of adrenalin. A second-hand Deep Purple in Rock, scratched to bits, cost 50 pence in an auction of albums because someone needed to pay their tuck-shop bill. Now, my friends, we were cooking on gas.

A family trip to Jersey – that’s the Channel Islands, not New Jersey, folks – netted brand-new gatefold editions of Van der Graaf Generator classics H to He and Pawn Hearts. (The latter was such a manically depressive record that you could actually empty a room with it after a couple of minutes. On the other hand, I could listen to it for hours on end in solitary confinement, probably because I am not a manic depressive.) I took the two albums out of their brown paper bag. The gatefolds had some rather splendid surrealistic artwork by Paul Whitehead. I showed it to my father, who was an amateur oil painter.

‘What do you think?’ I offered.

‘Degenerate,’ he replied scathingly. We spent the rest of the day in silence. I decided that given a choice between being beaten at waterboarding school or being looked at as if I had two heads, I would take my chances back at school. I was determined to spend as much time as possible away from home, and set about signing up for school trips, army placements and whatever I could lay my hands on.

During summer holidays I moped around town, hanging around record shops and pressing my nose up against the glass of guitar and amplifier stores, lusting after speaker cabinets and hardware. My exposure to bands, albums and the stage had grown into a fantastic dream world. I had a transistor radio with a small earplug, and I would listen to pirate station Radio Caroline, the scratchy sound fading in and out, under the bed sheets at night.

I had memorised Deep Purple’s Made in Japan note for note. Every drumbeat, every thud of Ian Paice’s bass-drum beater, I had tried to replicate. Ditto the first Black Sabbath album, Aqualung by Jethro Tull, plus my eccentric collection of Van der Graaf Generator albums and treasured copy of Wild Turkey’s first offering.

Back home in Sheffield, I still had some friends from prep school. Seeing as we’d all been packed off to boarding schools, holidays were the only time we ever met up. Paul Bray was one of them. Paul had a drum kit in his garage, a real one: actual cymbals, the whole shebang. He was in a band and his guitarist came to visit. I sat in awe as he rattled off ‘Layla’ and half-a-dozen Cream standards. He may well have ended up as a chartered accountant. Paul is actually quite a successful solicitor these days. Life’s like that.

Back then I was spotty, wore an anorak, had flared blue jeans with ‘Purple’ and ‘Sabbath’ biro-engraved on the thighs, and rode an ear-splittingly uncool moped. Oh yes, and I wanted to be a drummer. My parents would have been horrified. It was my guilty secret. I had a pair of drumsticks, which I kept hidden, and a practice pad. Their intention was that I should be a doctor, vet, accountant, solicitor or some other ‘professional’ occupation.

I returned to school and set about forming a band. When deprived of something essential, the human mind is capable of surprising and often perverse adaptability. The Marquis de Sade, denied paper and sexual contact, solved both problems by writing down his increasingly feverish fantasies on toilet paper, recently retranslated by an academic at the university where I would shortly end up, but now we really are overreaching ourselves. So let’s presently deal with the past.

The bands I listened to were not the bands I would ever see in their heyday, stuck as I was in boarding school at the time, so my imagination filled the gaps. I overlaid their on-stage antics in my mind’s eye with some operatic stage setting, plus the energy from the improv drama I had engaged in. It was all very fevered, very intense, and I wanted to recreate it as a drummer. It was simply a question of activity, and drumming was frenzied. It was the thrashing around at the front of the stage; it was the sweat and the focus, but also the possibility of being a Keith Moon, an eccentric, a showman. The drummer, it seemed to me, was in the driving seat.

However, I possessed neither a driving seat nor a drum kit. Amusingly, a drummer’s chair or stool is technically termed a ‘throne’, and while I admired the sentiment, the delusion of grandeur was of no practical help. I conscripted several volumes of The Cambridge Medieval History. My drumsticks were strips of plywood, and I arranged the leather-bound volumes like tom-toms around my small rickety desk in my study. With the speaker close to my ear, I battered them in hopeful symphony. Eventually, I snuck into the music room and purloined a pair of bongos.

There were kids at boarding school in possession of real drum kits, amplifiers and electric guitars. They rehearsed in commandeered classrooms on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon. I gatecrashed one of their rehearsals. It was disorganised and it was all about how cool they looked. It was about fashion, about posing – about nothing. I was disgusted, though slightly jealous about their equipment. I was searching for the holy grail of innocence and experience. My vision was cloudy, but my purpose was crystal clear. Entertainment, yes, but truth above all things.

Four of us formed a band, at least for five minutes. The bass player, an Australian called Mike Jordan, had made his own bass in the woodwork and electric workshops. He was also my partner in crime when it came to running the school wargames society. He had failed to evade the curse of the school choir and had a classically trained bass voice. Two acoustic guitars completed the ensemble, and we attempted to play one Saturday afternoon. The only song we could agree on was ‘Let It Be’ by the Beatles, so we gave it a go. Hideously out of time, and with my hands beaten raw on the bongos, we staggered towards the chorus, at which point Mike realised that classical bass voices did not really suit extended Liverpudlian baritones.

‘Let it be …’ dissolved into a strangled yelp, while I carried on beating the song into submission on the two available skins.

We stopped. I was disappointed, as my enthusiasm was overcoming any pretence of accuracy. Mike could not handle the vocal high notes. He cleared his throat and, sounding terribly grown up, said, ‘Perhaps we might change the key?’

I didn’t know what he was talking about, but I chimed in with: ‘How does it go?’

I opened my mouth and let rip, and the guitarists carried on to the end of the song. My head was spinning with the vibrations from the resonance of my voice. There was a surprised silence when we ran out of talent at the end.

‘You can put those fucking bongos away.’

Mike, our bass player admitted defeat: ‘I think you are our vocalist, dear boy.’

Our future in the music business thus secured, we broke for tea, margarine, jam and toast. It was 6 p.m., after all.

My acting endeavours had continued to flourish, and I had started writing and even directing, after a fashion. The Dark Tower was a radio play by Louis MacNeice, which I adapted for the stage, playing the oily butler myself as well as directing and producing it, all with the encouragement of my mentor, Mr Campbell.

My fencing classes had turned into a full-time ‘official’ school sport. Having won the school fencing championship, I was declared ‘school captain of fencing’, and I had my picture taken looking pompous with prominent sideburns.

Bullying was no more. I began to resemble the institution that I had resented. I was being assimilated, absorbed into the fabric, as if the beatings and hypocrisy were simply a test, something every chap has to go through before he changes from a caterpillar to the right sort of social butterfly.

My status, I suppose, was best described as slightly eccentric but acceptable. All that was to change on a dark November evening in 1975.

The week leading up to my exit was unremarkable. I spent spare afternoons in the study of my guitar-playing friend Chris Bertram. An unlikely duo, we pillaged the B.B. King songbook, murdering the blues, and I discovered that I could scream like a banshee and rather overdid it, but then, that’s what adolescence is for, isn’t it?

By now I was in the sixth form, only months from taking English, history and economics at A level. There was no element of coursework; it was sudden death, three hours of essay writing, and if you kept your wits about you, you might do okay.

A couple of evenings before my demise there was a comical but depressingly despotic event that took place at a lecture on Machu Picchu and the archaeology of the Incas. It was delivered by an academic explorer who also happened to be a personal friend of the headmaster, the automotively initialled B.M.W. Trapnell. Trapnell was a cosmologist by trade, and had an emollient effect on parents and also, one imagines, school governors. Five minutes into the lecture, the plug was pulled on the slide projector, and in the chaos the slides were cruelly rearranged in what was clearly a very cleverly executed hit.

The aftermath descended into a Nazi-style persecution. Names were taken and the order from the top was clear. Punishment beatings were in order; pride was at stake. A birch was used to personally beat those deemed to be the ringleaders, and it was administered by Mr Cosmology himself, a big man and, sadly for their bottoms, a very good fives player.

After the event there was tension in the air. The school was in an angry mood, but no one would storm the Bastille. Most inappropriately, therefore, two days later there was to be a celebration in Sidney House. The joyful construction of a new dwelling for our illustrious housemaster would be commemorated by the convocation of the entire authority structure of the school.

The flogging cosmologist, the deputy flogging cosmologist, plus the flogging rowing-kit fetishist and all the school prefects assembled at one dinner table. The food was to be cooked by the more minor prefects in the house.

There was an atmosphere of quiet anarchy. I sat in a study with Neil Ashford, who was 16 and pretty bright, to be honest. We had a one-ring electric hob and a bottle of cheap sherry under the desk. We were just chatting, minding our own business and slightly tiddly when there was a knock at the door. The sherry was hurriedly stowed, and a prefect stuck his nose round the door, holding a block of frozen runner beans.

‘I say, I couldn’t borrow your hob, could I? We’ve run out of cooking rings,’ he said.

We nodded assent and consigned them to the saucepan. We watched the beans defrost, then start to bubble and boil. Around this time, we both felt the urge to urinate. Through careful coordination and impressive bladder control, we relieved ourselves into an empty bottle. I did have a flashback to being one of the three witches in Macbeth. As I poured our mixed consommé into the bubbling pan I found myself recalling ‘Eye of newt and toe of frog, wool of bat and tongue of dog … add thereto, a quarter bottle of piss’. A classical education is a wonderful thing.

The mixture bubbled away, and 15 minutes later the prefect appeared and pulled out a tasty morsel. ‘Perfect,’ he pronounced. We realised that the house was devoid of authority. All were busy fawning, bowing and scraping to the jailers and floggers, in search of self-promotion, I assumed.

So we tiptoed to other studies and, like a pair of Pied Pipers, managed to obtain the keys to the house bar in the attic, and then locked ourselves in with several barrels of beer. Down below, Neil and I could see the silhouettes and shadows of The Last Supper. Not for them, but for me, as it turned out.

We slowly sipped our pints of Marston’s Pedigree and started to giggle. The rest of the bar, half-a-dozen errant souls, wanted to know what was so funny. Being daft, we told them. By break time, 11 a.m. the next day, the whole school knew. I realised that I was some kind of breathless hero, until lunchtime when one of our house prefects declared me depraved, disgusting and an abomination. After lunch, the abomination was summoned to the housemaster.

‘There’s nothing I can do to save you,’ he told me. This was a surprise to me. I never thought of him as the messiah, and I certainly didn’t now.

I was called to see the headmaster: the cosmologist, the wielder of the birch, the flogger of the minor transgressors – the king rat. I put on my overcoat and took a contemplative slow walk through the dark November fog. I would be out, but I would not be broken. After all the bullying, the fencing, the drama, the music, this was it – the showdown. Admitted to the warm head-magisterial study, I sat down in front of Mr B.M.W. His feet were crossed over – very big feet, I thought fleetingly. He spoke, almost absentmindedly: ‘This is not the kind of behaviour we tolerate in a civilised establishment. Therefore I must ask you to leave the school.’

Therefore? You have to be kidding me. In what century, from what misanthropic ivory tower, did this creature originate? The hypocrisy, the twisted regime, the cover-ups, the maintenance of good order over all principles of humanity – therefore fuck you. But I didn’t say any of that. I smiled and looked him in the eye and thought, You have eaten my piss.

‘Any preference as to when you would like me to go? Next week? End of term?’ I said.

‘Tomorrow morning,’ he shot back.

‘Oh, that’s clear. Is that it?’

‘You may go.’

I closed the door gently, with a satisfying click. The cold, damp air felt good. I was out. I was on my own. I had taken a pot-shot at the system and, by God, I think I winged the blighter.