The Paperchase (5 page)

MY IMMEDIATE FAMILY
were reverse migrants – Americans who left the New World for the Old, and promptly became a kind of parody of Englishness. Americans like them created the idea of shopping-mall Europe: the belief that the continent is actually a collection of themed boutiques where you go to buy old furniture and stinky cheeses, and pick up an order of culture on the side.

I don’t know how they chose our names. The family joke is that Damien March sounds like a private detective and Vivian March sounds like a hairdresser.

Dad became a born-again Englishman. He worked in London for a large corporate law firm, had shirts made at Savile Row, sent my brother and me to a boarding school, and drove a second-hand Bentley. At the same time, neither of
my parents let go of America completely. My mother, a midwesterner who grew up on a farm, was never completely happy in England, but my father had more complex reasons for remaining attached to his homeland.

In a way, Dad could only be properly English in America, because in England, his kind of Englishness barely existed. Perhaps there is somewhere in the British Isles where people have afternoon tea, bag grouse and talk in Lord Haw-Haw accents, but it wasn’t in Wandsworth, SW18. Undoubtedly, my father wouldn’t have been welcome in such a place; but this did not stop him from searching. Some weekends, he would take train journeys to destinations on the strength of the placename alone: Virginia Water and Strawberry Hill were two that seemed to promise the idyll he was after. But he never found it, and neither did his small group of expatriate friends who came over occasionally to smoke pipes and brag about their kids’ schools.

America offered my father a kind of consolation. There, he was free to play cricket on the spiky grass of the house we rented near Provincetown each year; he could serve afternoon tea with cinnamon toast; and go up and down Scorton Creek in a punt he had had made in Maine and which he laboriously put in storage at the end of every summer. He was free to do these things without fear of ridicule. One of our neighbours on the Cape once said my father was ‘as English as an English muffin’. This captures him exactly: so-called English muffins, as my father liked to point out, are unknown in England.

So, each summer for about fifteen years, we would all go back to America for six weeks. My father would take an enormous suitcase of work, which he would do in the mornings. Vivian and I would squabble, read, drink Hershey’s chocolate milk and try to avoid the local children, who thought we were affected and stuck-up. Well, we were.

We didn’t really fit in, and we weren’t good at making friends, and it seemed more sensible to make a virtue out of
our idiosyncrasies than to try to go against them. We had crew cuts (wiffles, they called them) when all the other boys had outgrown Tudor bowl cuts like Henry V’s. They played Pong at Pucci Pizza; we went on mapping expeditions in the sand dunes at Truro, camping there for up to a week. I insisted on military discipline from Vivian, who was the only rank-and-file soldier in our army of two. By the end of seven days, we had sand in our food, our toothpaste, and our underwear; peeling sunburns; and a map that was redundant as soon as the ink had dried on it. The wind and the weather remould those sand dunes constantly.

My father encouraged this kind of behaviour. He took pride in our bizarre achievements. My brother learned the Latin names for all the local birds. Aged eleven, I lugged law textbooks to the family clambakes and told them I was going to be a barrister. I think our relatives thought all English people were like us.

Of course, all Vivian and I really wanted was cable television like everyone else had, and to be taken to the go-carts and the trampolines, but my father frowned on all that sort of thing, so we did too. We mocked our cousins behind their backs for their orthodontic braces, their annual fads, their Cabbage Patch dolls and baseball cards. And secretly we craved most of the vulgar things we turned up our noses at.

It was an odd life. On holiday in America we clung to our Englishness, and pretended to be upset when we visited Ionia and Uncle Patrick made fun of the Queen and said that all Englishmen carried handbags. In England, we boasted about America, and how many kinds of cereal there were and how many different television channels – even though we could get none of them on the black-and-white television at the rental house that had no outside aerial. But in neither country did we feel at home. It always makes me think of Aesop’s fable about the war between the animals and the birds, in which the bat tried to pass himself off as a friend to each side, and ended up shunned by both.

My fondest memories of all those years are the few connected with my uncle. Patrick, the Frisbee incident aside, was a kind man and free of the self-lacerating regimes that Dad imposed on himself. He ate ice cream, abhorred long walks, watched television in bed in the afternoon, and put away heroic quantities of fried dough at the Barnstable County Fair each year. At least, that’s how I remembered him. Of course he had a darker side, but he never showed it to us. For me and Vivian, he was the quintessential eccentric uncle: funny, prone to strange enthusiasms, childless, childish. And he had the capacity to bring out similar qualities in my father, who was two years younger: the same age difference as between myself and Vivian.

My mother died of ovarian cancer when I was six and a half, an event which brought down the portcullis on my childhood. She had been a healthy brake on my father’s rampant Anglophilia. Perhaps if she had lived I would have been an American. She was less enthusiastic than my father about living in Britain; she often complained about the weather, and the rudeness of Londoners. She considered English plumbing to be barely out of the age when the streets had open sewers and the rich carried pomanders to protect their nostrils. When my father reluctantly agreed to build her a house on a new development in Sussex so we could leave London on the weekends, Mum insisted on having an American architect design it, and even imported tile grout from America, because, she said, it was more hard-wearing than the stuff English builders used.

There was barely a month between the diagnosis and her death. I remember being taken to see her for the last time when she was gravely ill in hospital. I sat on the side of her bed and she said, ‘Damien, your father is a very silly man. Remember that, and love him anyway.’

My other vivid memory of her is of seeing her crying one day by the kitchen window. When I asked her why, she said, ‘There are some things little boys shouldn’t know about.’ I’m still trying to figure out what she might have meant by that.

My father sold the house in Sussex soon after she died. He couldn’t bear to stay there and be reminded of her. Anyway, I think a stately pile was more his cup of tea than a Sussex bungalow.

After Mum died, home became school and friends, and secondarily the detached house on the south London street where I grew up. But the visits to the States continued, and were a glimpse, every summer, into a glamorous parallel universe. We stepped off the plane in London at the end of each summer deaf from flying, and the accents of the immigration officials and cabbies grated, and going back to boarding school felt like beginning a stretch in Wandsworth Prison, which stood forbiddingly at the end of the Common and overlooked the garden centre and haunted my dreams. All the same, London was home.

There was little misery and no privation in our house. Perhaps there was a chilliness; perhaps Vivian and I suffered from the want of a mother. Well, we obviously did. But I can’t say I noticed it then. Dad was a remote and rather austere figure – more so after my mother died – but he had enough money to pay for a succession of au pairs, whom we terrorised, and then to send us away to a school where we boarded even though it was barely five miles from home. Boarding school, with its unrelieved maleness, its emphasis on competition, and its intolerance of difference and sensitivity, was just an extension of my family life. I got teased about my father, who arrived for a parents’ evening wearing plus-fours at a time when I was too small and insecure to laugh it off. But I toughened up, made friends and generally developed the false consciousness of adolescence that’s quite as bad as the one your family foists on you.

A couple of teachers stand out from my schooldays. Herbert Chinn, who taught Classics, reportedly believed electricity was a fluid and put tape over the sockets each night, like that woman in the Thurber story, to prevent it leaking on to the carpet. Mr Hepplewhite, the physics master, announced to each class before he began the syllabus that he did not believe
in molecules. He once spent an entire lesson showing us the correct way to fold a jacket. He wore silver sleeve holders and was obsessively tidy, but the backs of his shirts were full of holes. I stayed behind after one lesson and said: ‘Mr Hepplewhite, if you don’t believe in molecules, how do you explain everything?’ He looked at me and said, ‘Ah, March!’ and then carried on with whatever he was doing. I wish I could say this bubble of benign madness protected him well into old age, but shockingly he was killed by a rent boy about five years after I left the 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 from
the 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 – even a pauper’s grave is somehow full of pathos and terror. But I always had the impression that when middle-class people die, someone just slides us into a filing cabinet, and our silly bodies stink and decay and finally defeat a lifetime’s attempts at hygiene.

But, let’s face it, the human heart comes in a standard size. No one has a monopoly on misery. Obvious to you, perhaps; but the chief disaster of my life has been my inability to recognise when I was unhappy.

At some point, Dad really started to enjoy studying Latin. He was a much better student than I was. I wanted to be in a band, and get stoned and chase girls around west London. Dad was assiduous. He worked his way through the set texts, read up on Roman culture, and took Mr Sandford on a week’s holiday to Pompeii, which I only avoided by deliberately giving myself food poisoning with a plateful of raw haddock.

My scholastic zeal waned in proportion as my father’s waxed. And the upshot of all this was that, thanks to the intervention of Mr Sandford, Dad and I took Latin O-level together, in the gymnasium of my school; with Dad sitting at the desk in front of me: March,
pater,
and March,
filius.