school.
I was a mediocre student, although my father cherished the belief that both Vivian and I were highly talented. He had great hopes of our following him into the Law, which he managed to capitalise just by the way he said it. One of his fondest fantasies was to pretend that we had in fact already qualified as lawyers. It was flattering and touching, and I colluded in it when he discussed his business with us. ‘I’d like to pick your legal brain on something, Damien,’ he would say, and proceed to mystify me with juridical terminology, as though I were a forty-year-old lawyer, instead of a fourteen-year-old schoolboy struggling to achieve average marks in any of my subjects. ‘I sure could use your mother’s help on this one,’ he would add sadly, although her understanding of corporate law had probably been only slightly more sophisticated than mine.
Looking back now, I think he was probably lonely, and thinking out loud, and trying to involve us in the only part of his life where he felt he had any competence. But that interpretation was beyond me then, and I felt ashamed of my father and almost protective towards him.
As a result, I had a secret life of vice which he was unaware of, involving cigarettes, drinking and futile excursions to West London to buy spliff. It all came painfully out into the open some time before my fifteenth birthday. One weekend, I was picked up by the police, drunk, at midnight, in Earl’s Court station. The friend I was with had panicked and left me, passed out, on the platform. My father had to collect me fromthe police station in the middle of the night. I vaguely remember the dials of the dashboard doubling and quadrupling before my eyes.
The next day was one of the longest of my life. I was consumed with remorse, and even my tears had an alcoholic tang to them. My father didn’t speak to me for two weeks. I don’t think he had the first idea what to do, poor man.
Dad’s solution to my waywardness was, even by his standards, spectacularly bad. He decided that he hadn’t been setting enough of an example to me – that I needed to learn that hard work would bring results in my world as they did in his.
One weekend, I came home to find that Dad had started studying Latin with a tutor called Mr Sandford, an old boy of my school who can only have been about twenty-three and had a tiny blond moustache that looked like it should have been attached to a gerbil’s arse. He insisted on addressing Vivian and me in Latin. If we bumped into him in the hall he would say: ‘Salvete, pueri .’And Vivian and I would always reply: ‘All right, Mr Sandford,’ like a pair of barrow boys.
I can only guess that Dad thought that the sight of him conjugating semi-deponent verbs would encourage me to work harder. He couldn’t have been wronger. Around this time, I had to go back to the police station to receive a bollocking from one of the officers, who talked about ‘boys with your opportunities’ and the anxiety I was causing my father. He even brought up my mother’s death; a manipulation that no one had been ruthless enough to try on me before. He made me feel that being middle class meant I had no right to be unhappy, so I assumed I wasn’t.
In my opinion, this is a common fallacy. Middle-class people have paid for the relative safety of their lives by forfeiting the idea that their vicissitudes qualify as suffering. We are not supposed to be a wounded people. We are not cast in tragedies. We are cast in comedies and farces; we are found on running tracks with our silly blond wigs fluffed up by the wind beside us. There is no Hamlet, Chartered Surveyor of Denmark, no Mr Lear. A middle-class ‘tragedy’ is being run over wearing dirty underwear.
Real, raw life always seems to be somewhere else: in palaces or shanty towns, not among the clipped hedges of SW18. You can weep your heart out at the sight of the young princess’s coffin being wheeled by on a gun carriage –
I was a mediocre student, although my father cherished the belief that both Vivian and I were highly talented. He had great hopes of our following him into the Law, which he managed to capitalise just by the way he said it. One of his fondest fantasies was to pretend that we had in fact already qualified as lawyers. It was flattering and touching, and I colluded in it when he discussed his business with us. ‘I’d like to pick your legal brain on something, Damien,’ he would say, and proceed to mystify me with juridical terminology, as though I were a forty-year-old lawyer, instead of a fourteen-year-old schoolboy struggling to achieve average marks in any of my subjects. ‘I sure could use your mother’s help on this one,’ he would add sadly, although her understanding of corporate law had probably been only slightly more sophisticated than mine.
Looking back now, I think he was probably lonely, and thinking out loud, and trying to involve us in the only part of his life where he felt he had any competence. But that interpretation was beyond me then, and I felt ashamed of my father and almost protective towards him.
As a result, I had a secret life of vice which he was unaware of, involving cigarettes, drinking and futile excursions to West London to buy spliff. It all came painfully out into the open some time before my fifteenth birthday. One weekend, I was picked up by the police, drunk, at midnight, in Earl’s Court station. The friend I was with had panicked and left me, passed out, on the platform. My father had to collect me fromthe police station in the middle of the night. I vaguely remember the dials of the dashboard doubling and quadrupling before my eyes.
The next day was one of the longest of my life. I was consumed with remorse, and even my tears had an alcoholic tang to them. My father didn’t speak to me for two weeks. I don’t think he had the first idea what to do, poor man.
Dad’s solution to my waywardness was, even by his standards, spectacularly bad. He decided that he hadn’t been setting enough of an example to me – that I needed to learn that hard work would bring results in my world as they did in his.
One weekend, I came home to find that Dad had started studying Latin with a tutor called Mr Sandford, an old boy of my school who can only have been about twenty-three and had a tiny blond moustache that looked like it should have been attached to a gerbil’s arse. He insisted on addressing Vivian and me in Latin. If we bumped into him in the hall he would say: ‘Salvete, pueri .’And Vivian and I would always reply: ‘All right, Mr Sandford,’ like a pair of barrow boys.
I can only guess that Dad thought that the sight of him conjugating semi-deponent verbs would encourage me to work harder. He couldn’t have been wronger. Around this time, I had to go back to the police station to receive a bollocking from one of the officers, who talked about ‘boys with your opportunities’ and the anxiety I was causing my father. He even brought up my mother’s death; a manipulation that no one had been ruthless enough to try on me before. He made me feel that being middle class meant I had no right to be unhappy, so I assumed I wasn’t.
In my opinion, this is a common fallacy. Middle-class people have paid for the relative safety of their lives by forfeiting the idea that their vicissitudes qualify as suffering. We are not supposed to be a wounded people. We are not cast in tragedies. We are cast in comedies and farces; we are found on running tracks with our silly blond wigs fluffed up by the wind beside us. There is no Hamlet, Chartered Surveyor of Denmark, no Mr Lear. A middle-class ‘tragedy’ is being run over wearing dirty underwear.
Real, raw life always seems to be somewhere else: in palaces or shanty towns, not among the clipped hedges of SW18. You can weep your heart out at the sight of the young princess’s coffin being wheeled by on a gun carriage –
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