One Train Later: A Memoir (3 page)

Through the bright and shadowed years of childhood the pop songs of the time-"Twenty Tiny Fingers (Twenty Tiny Toes)," "You're a Pink Tooth Brush, I'm a Blue Tooth Brush," or "How Much Is That Doggie in the Window"-fill my head like a tinny pink-colored soundtrack: the optimism of a world now under the shadow of the bomb. As if in some premonitory act, I lie in bed giving imaginary solo concerts by making twanging guitar sounds with my mouth, although I have never seen a real guitar. Even tually my mother insists that I take piano lessons, and a small upright is purchased for the front room, where she sits at my side each night making sure that I go through my scales and five-finger exercises.

Every Thursday evening around five I walk down the avenue to the house of Mrs. Thorne, the local piano teacher, who is supposed to be good if a little eccentric. "Practice, Andrew-practice," my mum says, and I drag myself to the lesson, filled with a deep desire to take off into the woods at the end of the street and chuck my spear at something. Mrs. Thorne-a throwback to Victorian England--wears small wire-rimmed glasses and has her hair cut like an English schoolgirl with a clip in it; and to round it off, she wears long pink bloomers whose edges always poke out beneath the hemline of her skirts. She has a permanent cold-or so it appears-because she is forever sniffing and extracting a white hankie from her bloomers, blowing into it, and then stuffing it back into place. This act always faintly disgusts meI imagine a line of transparent snot like a snail trail up her leg.

I play children's exercises and an odd assortment of simple pieces. The highlight, and usually the grand finale of the lesson, comes when we play a duet on the song "Wonderful Wonderful Copenhagen." I actually love this tune and don't mind playing it with the old dear because I've seen the film, which stars Danny Kaye, and adore it. So I go at it with considerable gusto and not much finesse because it is on this one song that I feel I can actually play the piano; knowing this, she always saves it for the end of the lesson so that I can go home feeling less dour about the whole thing.

The room we play in reeks of mothballs and is filled with overstuffed armchairs and pictures of dogs; on the piano is a framed color photo of the queen. There is a rumor on the street that Mrs. Thorne has actually composed music for the coronation. This is impressive, and we all vaguely wonder what she's doing in our part of the world, seeing as how she has written music for royalty.

Mrs. Thorne's husband, who is a conductor for the Hants and Dorset bus line, skulks about in the background. He is a short, stubby man with dark greasy hair, a unibrow, and very thick glasses that look like the ends of a couple of beer bottles.

One lovely summer evening as I am shutting the front door after the lesson and about to walk home, Mr. Thorne appears on the path beside me. At first I think it is the garden gnome come to life but then realize it is the bus conductor. He smiles at me through stained English teeth and says, "Come with me, I want to show you something." Innocent as the first day of spring, I skip down the path behind him in the direction of the potting shed at the bottom of the garden.

The shed, with its pots, tools, bags of fertilizer, and smell of earth, is typical of the English garden. Dark and claustrophobic, it is the perfect spot for an Agatha Christie murder. Maybe Mr. Thorne will show me some comics or a train set, I think, but after a little preamble of showing me the serrated edge of a hacksaw, he produces a large leather belt and asks me to whip him. "Whip You?" I say, my cornflower eyes wide and innocent as Bambi's. "Why?" He stares at me through his beer-bottle lenses and grunts something about deserving it and come on, be a good boy. I notice that his face is flushed, I don't understand it, but I also can't see anything wrong with it if that's what he wants. Mr. Thorne bends over the bench and asks me again with a small sob in his voice to give it to him. So with a puzzled idea in my head and a momentary glimpse of Lash LaRue, I let him have it. He tells me to do it harder, so I oblige, giving him a good half a dozen strokes, feeling like Captain Bluebeard in the process. Then he thanks me and I trot off home, dragging my hand through the hedges at the side of the road and whistling the Danny Kaye song and looking forward to beans on toast. The event recedes like a summer tide; I don't say anything to my parents or consider that I might put a man away for life but continue happily on thumping away at "Wonderful Wonderful Copenhagen."

BRIOGEHAMPTON, AUGUST 18, 1983

I pull on a pair of shorts and head down to the kitchen. The house is still quiet; I realize that for some odd reason I am up before everyone else. The kitchen in the mansion is a vast, complicated affair with massive refrigerators and freezers unlike anything you would see in an English house, and I wonder if it is going to be possible to make coffee. But miraculously some gentle Maria has prepared the way and there in a gleaming new coffeepot is the lifesaving Java, ready to kickstart the flesh robot.

I pour out a large mug and then search around for a spoon to stir the milk. Spoon-spoon, where are you hiding? I grunt and tug open a recalcitrant drawer to see if there is any sign of the implement in this labyrinth of kitchenware-surely it's somewhere. I see that beneath the gleaming silver cutlery the drawer is lined with a red-andwhite-checked material, like my mum had, and I see a small boy walking into his mother's kitchen wearing a gas mask and asking for bread and butter and his mother with her copper hair in a bun wiping the suds from her arms. Ignoring the beastly visage and staring out the high window at the mass of clouds piling up over the green fields, she replies, "You know where it is, dear ..."

I wake up from my reverie and take a large gulp of coffee. I'm hungry, but everything is behind cupboard doors and it's too early yet for the professional help. I cross the kitchen and start opening doors in the quest for food. Finding a large tin, I pull the lid off. It is packed with Danish pastries, all individually wrapped in plastic. Perfect. I fancy a sugar rush. I take one over to the table and begin taking off the plastic. There is a picture of the Little Mermaid on the front and an inscription that reads, "Anderson, the Best of Denmark," and as I bite into the soft dough a melody like a siren call floats into my brain: "Wonderful Wonderful Copenhagen."

Nursing my coffee and feeling like an extra from The Night of the Living Dead, I wall: into the lounge. The owner keeps a small baby grand in this room, and we all plunk away on it at different times. I stick my coffee mug on a piece of sheet music on top of the piano and twiddle at a few high notes. I play fragments of "Take Five" by Dave Brubeck and then try to turn it into "Straight, No Chaser" by Monk and then into a series of descending thirteenth chords from Duke Ellington. Anytime I play this progression it takes me back to the dusty and noisy assembly hall at Summerbee, when I was eleven years old.

One day we are all gathered in the school hall for something or other and Mr. Furneaux, our music teacher, is idly playing a beautiful sequence of harmonies on the piano unlike anything I've ever heard him play before. It hits me right in the solar plexus and wakes me as if from a dream, and like a moth to the flame I go over to ask what it is that he is playing. "'Sophisticated Lady' by Duke Ellington," he answers without lifting his fingers from the keyboard. Neither name means much to me, but the chord progression creates a strange new excitement in my gut. I don't understand it-but whatever it is, I am hooked and want more.

Mr. Furneaux is a short, bald-headed man who wears tweed jackets and always has a pipe sticking up out of his breast pocket like a flag waving a truce at the oncoming horde. Classes with him are scenes of madness as he tries desperately to get us-a mob of rowdy little shits-to sing songs like "English Country Garden" or some other piece of Victoriana like "Nymphs and Shepherds," on which we are supposed to sing descant parts but which the whole class deliberately sings off-key so that it sounds like a roomful of rabid dogs. I actually feel some pain for Mr. Furneaux during this mayhem because somehow, in a way I can't articulate, I want to make music.

At age eleven I begin listening to the AFN radio station, which plays American jazz. One day Mr. Furneaux-who now regards me somewhat differently, maybe as an island in a sea of lunacy-asks me to stand up in class and talk about my interest in jazz as an example to the other miscreants (at least when it comes to music). I actually like this, and drop the names of Django Reinhardt, Radio Luxembourg, and Ellington with a bigheaded teacher's-pet smugness. After I sit down, Mr. Furneaux makes a couple of remarks to the class that maybe some of them could take a leaf from my book and take a genuine interest in music. I feel rather pleased with myself but also slightly apprehensive, knowing that I will probably get a kicking from the heavies after class. My best bet to avoid the pain is to be first out the door and piss off down the corridor before they get their hands on me, and surreptitiously I slide over a couple of desks.

Though the spiritual side of life slowly fills with music, the words of the Holy Bible fall on stony ground. Classes in religious instruction are anarchy beyond even the twisted behavior of the music class. Our teacher is Miss Jones, a minute Welsh lady with periwinkle blue eyes and hair tied up in a bun. Her entering the classroom is the signal for the ructions that start with a loud simulated fart, followed by a long period of people gasping for breath, choking, opening and shutting windows, lying on the floor and asking for first aid, etc. During this profane moment poor Miss Jones stands very still and fixes her eyes on some distant horizon as if seeing the fabled green hill itself; remarkably, after a while the very weirdness of her trancelike presence stills us. She then asks us in a very quiet voice to open our books to a Bible story, and once again the class erupts into hooligan antics and loud boos with off-color remarks about Jesus stabbing at the air. At this delinquent point Miss Jones goes down on her knees in the center of the classroom and begins to pray, but this doesn't help; in fact, if anything, it increases the violence in the classroom. The poor woman now rushes out of the room and to the headmaster's office and returns with him to a classroom that now is as quiet as a church, with the students' heads bent in diligent reverence over their books.

Once a year a physical fitness display is organized for the parents, to show the progenitors of the mob that when the fruit of their loins aren't actually in the bogs smoking or having a punch-up, they are being kept in good enough condition to go on to a life of meaningless labor in England's green and pleasant land. This display involves testicle-threatening handsprings over wooden horses and rapid climbing of ropes, which always causes an erection to rise cheerfully in one's skimpy shorts.

And then there are the dreaded boxing matches. Being an innate coward, I normally avoid anything to do with punching, but one year to my horror I am chosen to fight not one but two other kids, Smith and Evans. Smith is actually smaller and runtier than I am, so I breathe a sigh of relief when I hear his name; but Evans is a mean little Welsh boy who already has a reputation on the playground for a vicious fighting style, and at the thought of it I'm ready to crap in my pants.

On the night of the fight I go into the ring against Smith first, and it's like slapping a baby. I just slug the poor little sod senseless and then feel really terrible about it as he thanks me for the fight with his nose spurting blood and his eye closing up, and I mumble something about better luck next time. Evans is next, and now buoyed by the death blows I have just dealt, I feel confident that I can take the Welsh boy. Wrong-dead wrong.

Evans shoots out from his corner like a dog with its tail on fire and smacks me straight in the mouth. I reel back, my eyes filling with salt and my face stinging. I stagger after him as he nimbly bounces away, bobbing and weaving in front of me with a taunting look on his face. Bastard, I have to hit him; in fact, I want to kill him. But I can't get near him as he twirls past me like a marionette and slugs my right ear, which explodes like a meteor shower. My arms flail like a windmill in empty space, and I sob in frustration-he simply isn't there. Punches rain down on me like winter hailstones, pain and humiliation flood my soul, jeering laughter fills my head. It's endless, and I have wild thoughts of the priesthood-anything, anywhere, that is peaceful and away from this incessant hellish pounding.

A bell rings off in some distant place and I think it might be a nice old church bell or something, but it is the chime that signifies Evans's smirking and beastly triumph over me. I crawl from the ring like a whipped dog and a strong sense of the audience's schadenfreude. After the beating I limp home with some friends. Do I perceive hints of pity? Do I see faint smiles? We talk casually about giving Evans a collective hashing, but in the end we do nothing about it, probably because we think he could take the lot of us.

As members of the academic stream, we are privileged to receive a somewhat different style of teaching than the moron scum in the forms below us. English literature, for example, in its relaxed and conversational style, is run like a club for insiders. Our teacher, Miss James-an oasis of sanity and reason in a school that seems to be filled with psychotic, deranged, and sexually perverse teachers-is about seventy years old, dresses in tweed suits, covers her hair with a net, and speaks to us in the plummy tones of the aristocracy. I find her considerable enthusiasm for literature and the English language contagious, and whatever assignments she sets us are a pleasure rather than dull homework. A real teacher like Miss James is an accomplice as you discover parts of yourself at an early age, and although I am already a committed reader, this dear old lady stokes the fire.

We voyage through the plots of Jude the Obscure, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Far from the Madding Crowd, and Tess of the D'Urbervilles, all of which have a resonance since they are written by Thomas Hardy, who might be termed a local. The pessimism of these books doesn't put me off. Enthralled by characters like Jude, Michael Henchard, and Sue Bridehead, and by the fragility of their relationships, I begin waking up to what appears to me a view of the world that is real. My mother also loves Hardy and has read all the novels, and suddenly we are able to talk about something that seems light-years from childhood. A few miles away the green hills of Dorset-the setting for Hardy's stories-take on a new significance. We study other literature with Miss James, but it is the tragedy of Jude, the travails of Michael Henchard, the adventures of Tess and Sergeant Troy that get me, come in like a dark knot and never leave.