knit a smartphone-cosy or simply take a nap.
I was sacked from school because I had received permission from my housemaster to go to London for a meeting of the Sherlock Holmes Society of London, of which I was, at the time, the youngest member. I was to deliver a paper on T. S. Eliot’s metrification of Sherlock Holmes’s description to Doctor Watson of the life, appearance and habits of Professor Moriarty, who, in Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats , becomes Macavity the Mystery Cat. The idea was to do the evening, which was on a Saturday, be free in London for Sunday and the following Monday, which was a public holiday to celebrate the Queen and Prince Philip’s silver wedding, and return by the last train that day. As it is, I (and my friend Jo Wood, who was not so natural a law-breaker, but loyally attended me) were suddenly gripped by cinemania. We saw Fritz the Cat , A Clockwork Orange , Cabaret , The Godfather , all of them, time after time after time, as they ran and ran repeatedly on all-day programmes in the major West End cinemas. By the time we woke up from our binge it was Wednesday.
Sheepishly we returned and wolfishly we were devoured. Jo, having no form, was rusticated until the end of the term. I was shown the full red card.
My parents tried another seat of learning, the Paston School, a local direct-grant grammar with the distinction of having educated the young Horatio Nelson. Its allure was lost on me, and I developed the habit of hopping off the bus that took me there in the small town of Aylsham, halfway between my house and the school in North Walsham, and spending all day and all the spare money I had managed to find in my mother’s handbag on pinball, cigarettes and Fanta. Before long the Paston had had enough of me too. For one thing they had wanted to put me on a course of O levels. I indignantly (and I daresay defiantly and arrogantly) declared that I had a very good set of O levels already and had been expelled from Uppingham while in the sixth form half a term into an A level course. Why should I have to sink down to the fourth form again? ‘Because we do things by age here,’ was the unsatisfactory reply. Or possibly they sensed that I was all show and no substance. At any rate I was slowly turning into one of those sneering, ‘I’ve had it up to here with edu-bloody-cation’ teenagers. Pinball and smoking were my highest ambitions.
To pursue even these minor pastimes I needed money, however, and when the Paston had hurled me out on my ear, my parents sent me as a last resort to NORCAT, the Norfolk College of Arts and Technology in King’s Lynn. Here I developed the even more expensive habit of gambling. A set of us would smoke and drink beer in a pub called the Woolpack, playing three-card brag for hours on end. I happily fell in with a group of highly literate and fascinating young eccentrics from the town. We met together to talk Baron Corvo, contribute to a strange magazine called the Failure Press (‘failure’ was deliberately misspelled in some way), devise a unique alphabet and arrange Paradox Parties, parties to which you could not be admitted unless you submitted an original paradox. Pretentious, you might think, but to find such a group in King’s Lynn was thrilling for me. It was like finding not water in the desert, but a flask of quince, starfruit and lychee juice. Original. Strange. Testing. Provocative. And, as we would say of almost everything we liked, highly conducive.
At least NORCAT let me take A levels. But what with falling for a very lovely and smart girl from that group (yes, I have that 10 or so per cent of me that is entirely capable of being attracted to girls), feeling wholly uninspired by the academic side of life and still burning inside with that desperate first love that had made such a mess of me at Uppingham, I was becoming a less stable, predictable or hopeful entity.
It is a terrible thing to look back and realize that one grew
I was sacked from school because I had received permission from my housemaster to go to London for a meeting of the Sherlock Holmes Society of London, of which I was, at the time, the youngest member. I was to deliver a paper on T. S. Eliot’s metrification of Sherlock Holmes’s description to Doctor Watson of the life, appearance and habits of Professor Moriarty, who, in Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats , becomes Macavity the Mystery Cat. The idea was to do the evening, which was on a Saturday, be free in London for Sunday and the following Monday, which was a public holiday to celebrate the Queen and Prince Philip’s silver wedding, and return by the last train that day. As it is, I (and my friend Jo Wood, who was not so natural a law-breaker, but loyally attended me) were suddenly gripped by cinemania. We saw Fritz the Cat , A Clockwork Orange , Cabaret , The Godfather , all of them, time after time after time, as they ran and ran repeatedly on all-day programmes in the major West End cinemas. By the time we woke up from our binge it was Wednesday.
Sheepishly we returned and wolfishly we were devoured. Jo, having no form, was rusticated until the end of the term. I was shown the full red card.
My parents tried another seat of learning, the Paston School, a local direct-grant grammar with the distinction of having educated the young Horatio Nelson. Its allure was lost on me, and I developed the habit of hopping off the bus that took me there in the small town of Aylsham, halfway between my house and the school in North Walsham, and spending all day and all the spare money I had managed to find in my mother’s handbag on pinball, cigarettes and Fanta. Before long the Paston had had enough of me too. For one thing they had wanted to put me on a course of O levels. I indignantly (and I daresay defiantly and arrogantly) declared that I had a very good set of O levels already and had been expelled from Uppingham while in the sixth form half a term into an A level course. Why should I have to sink down to the fourth form again? ‘Because we do things by age here,’ was the unsatisfactory reply. Or possibly they sensed that I was all show and no substance. At any rate I was slowly turning into one of those sneering, ‘I’ve had it up to here with edu-bloody-cation’ teenagers. Pinball and smoking were my highest ambitions.
To pursue even these minor pastimes I needed money, however, and when the Paston had hurled me out on my ear, my parents sent me as a last resort to NORCAT, the Norfolk College of Arts and Technology in King’s Lynn. Here I developed the even more expensive habit of gambling. A set of us would smoke and drink beer in a pub called the Woolpack, playing three-card brag for hours on end. I happily fell in with a group of highly literate and fascinating young eccentrics from the town. We met together to talk Baron Corvo, contribute to a strange magazine called the Failure Press (‘failure’ was deliberately misspelled in some way), devise a unique alphabet and arrange Paradox Parties, parties to which you could not be admitted unless you submitted an original paradox. Pretentious, you might think, but to find such a group in King’s Lynn was thrilling for me. It was like finding not water in the desert, but a flask of quince, starfruit and lychee juice. Original. Strange. Testing. Provocative. And, as we would say of almost everything we liked, highly conducive.
At least NORCAT let me take A levels. But what with falling for a very lovely and smart girl from that group (yes, I have that 10 or so per cent of me that is entirely capable of being attracted to girls), feeling wholly uninspired by the academic side of life and still burning inside with that desperate first love that had made such a mess of me at Uppingham, I was becoming a less stable, predictable or hopeful entity.
It is a terrible thing to look back and realize that one grew
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