astronaut, or failing that, I would be a carpenter. What must have seemed flippant answers to his questions didn’t prevent me getting the nod: I was off to Woolverstone in the following September.
It was an easy afternoon, my first encounter with Paddy, an adult I felt I could immediately trust. His good nature and my self-centred approval of him aside, it was his assurance that I would be given a place at Woolverstone that meant the most. So on the warm thermals of Mum’s enormous sigh of relief we drifted out of County Hall and back to Fulham where I set about telling everybody I knew that I was going to Woolvo. I told Serge on the phone when he rang soon after; he sounded less than ecstatic, I must confess, but as with everything, I wore my achievement as a badge of honour, something to set me apart. I must have been insufferable.
It is almost impossible to articulate the scale of Woolverstone’s
otherworldliness
. I wasn’t just going to the good school up the road when everyone else was attending the shit comp around the corner. It was so much more than that. I would be ‘moving away’, I would vanish from the estate for weeks, months on end and would be entering a world that we couldn’t even imagine, save for the old films we had seen, like “Goodbye Mr Chips’. This was interplanetary, by contrast, and if you were going to such a place there was a form of celebrity to be had. It was a distinction that to my mind merely confirmed that I was something indisputably unique. At Addison Primary, my achievement was announced in assembly; the staff clapped, but the rest of the kids looked terrified, as if I had been sentenced to death. In class, the teacher would say things like, ‘For a boy who is going to Woolverstone, this handwriting is dreadful, Michael’, or in games I would be toldthat ‘Woolverstone will expect a little more effort than that young man’, and so it went on, endlessly. I became aware that great things were expected of me. It was water off a duck’s back, of course.
GETTING READY
D espite having a posse of friends in Fulham Court, I wasn’t overly bothered by the prospect of leaving town for five years, returning only during school holidays. There was certainly a feeling of pride in being chosen to go to Woolverstone, despite the sense of expectation that was mounting around me, and I was looking forward to my departure as an adventure. Probably because boarding school seemed to them a horror of unimaginable scale, or more likely because I was bragging so much that they would be pleased to see the back of me, I am not convinced that my friends were too fussed about my departure, either. We carried on playing together on the estate, but when they talked about going to secondary school, it was a conversation to which I could not contribute – or was never really allowed to. I could tell them the things I knew about Woolverstone from visiting Serge, but they were more interested in life at St Clement Dane’s or St Edmund’s or, for the brighter ones, the London Oratory. These were the schools where everyone but me would spend their formative years. However, the gentle casting out that I experienced was, in my eyes, a confirmation of superiority.
The final months before I left for Suffolk were, then, a period of time when I began to separate myself emotionally from my friends. I stayed indoors a bit more than usual and fewer mates came to call for me. On the other hand, I knew they would miss the free ice-creams I could bag for them whenmy father turned up outside the estate in his Mr Whippy van a couple of times a week.
Dad’s departure saw him decamp to Wandsworth, so he was still in the vicinity. He had become an oil lorry driver, and sometimes he’d even take one or two of us out on his rounds delivering heating oil to offices and schools. I always found such days exciting, if only for sitting high in the cab of a lorry. Dad was not very committed to his work,
It was an easy afternoon, my first encounter with Paddy, an adult I felt I could immediately trust. His good nature and my self-centred approval of him aside, it was his assurance that I would be given a place at Woolverstone that meant the most. So on the warm thermals of Mum’s enormous sigh of relief we drifted out of County Hall and back to Fulham where I set about telling everybody I knew that I was going to Woolvo. I told Serge on the phone when he rang soon after; he sounded less than ecstatic, I must confess, but as with everything, I wore my achievement as a badge of honour, something to set me apart. I must have been insufferable.
It is almost impossible to articulate the scale of Woolverstone’s
otherworldliness
. I wasn’t just going to the good school up the road when everyone else was attending the shit comp around the corner. It was so much more than that. I would be ‘moving away’, I would vanish from the estate for weeks, months on end and would be entering a world that we couldn’t even imagine, save for the old films we had seen, like “Goodbye Mr Chips’. This was interplanetary, by contrast, and if you were going to such a place there was a form of celebrity to be had. It was a distinction that to my mind merely confirmed that I was something indisputably unique. At Addison Primary, my achievement was announced in assembly; the staff clapped, but the rest of the kids looked terrified, as if I had been sentenced to death. In class, the teacher would say things like, ‘For a boy who is going to Woolverstone, this handwriting is dreadful, Michael’, or in games I would be toldthat ‘Woolverstone will expect a little more effort than that young man’, and so it went on, endlessly. I became aware that great things were expected of me. It was water off a duck’s back, of course.
GETTING READY
D espite having a posse of friends in Fulham Court, I wasn’t overly bothered by the prospect of leaving town for five years, returning only during school holidays. There was certainly a feeling of pride in being chosen to go to Woolverstone, despite the sense of expectation that was mounting around me, and I was looking forward to my departure as an adventure. Probably because boarding school seemed to them a horror of unimaginable scale, or more likely because I was bragging so much that they would be pleased to see the back of me, I am not convinced that my friends were too fussed about my departure, either. We carried on playing together on the estate, but when they talked about going to secondary school, it was a conversation to which I could not contribute – or was never really allowed to. I could tell them the things I knew about Woolverstone from visiting Serge, but they were more interested in life at St Clement Dane’s or St Edmund’s or, for the brighter ones, the London Oratory. These were the schools where everyone but me would spend their formative years. However, the gentle casting out that I experienced was, in my eyes, a confirmation of superiority.
The final months before I left for Suffolk were, then, a period of time when I began to separate myself emotionally from my friends. I stayed indoors a bit more than usual and fewer mates came to call for me. On the other hand, I knew they would miss the free ice-creams I could bag for them whenmy father turned up outside the estate in his Mr Whippy van a couple of times a week.
Dad’s departure saw him decamp to Wandsworth, so he was still in the vicinity. He had become an oil lorry driver, and sometimes he’d even take one or two of us out on his rounds delivering heating oil to offices and schools. I always found such days exciting, if only for sitting high in the cab of a lorry. Dad was not very committed to his work,
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