The Fry Chronicles Page 4

  I still had no need to shave, and the flop of straight hair that to this day I can do nothing about continued to contradict my desire to project maturity. Looking more pantywaist than professorial and more milquetoast than macho, I puffed benignly about the school as happy as I had ever been in all my young life.

  Having said which, the first week had been hell. It had never occurred to me that teaching could be so tiring. My duties, as a valet would say, were extensive: not just teaching and keeping order in the form-room but preparing lessons, correcting and marking written work, giving extra tuition, covering for other masters and being on call for everything and everyone from the morning bell before breakfast to lights-out at night. Since I lived in the school and had no ties of marriage outside it, the headmaster and other senior staff were able to make as much use of me as they wished. I had ostensibly been hired as the replacement for a sweet, gentle old fellow called Noel Kemp-Welch, who had slipped on the ice and fractured his pelvic girdle at the beginning of term. The kernel of my work therefore was to take his Latin, Greek and French lessons, but I very soon found myself standing in for the headmaster and other members of staff giving classes in history, maths, geography and science. On my third day I was told to go and teach biology to the Upper Fifth.

  'What are they covering at the moment?' I asked. My knowledge of the subject was sketchy.

  'Human reproduction.'

  I learnt a great deal that morning both about teaching and, as it happens, about human reproduction too.

  'So,' I had said to the class. 'Tell me what you know ...'

  I made it sound as if I was testing them, and nodded importantly as they replied; in fact, of course, I was temporizing wildly. I listened fascinated, repelled and disbelieving as they outlined the details of pipes and glands and flaps and protuberances of which I had heard but with whose forms, features and functions I was entirely unfamiliar. The vas deferens, the Fallopian tubes, the epididymis, the clitoris and the frenulum ... it was engrossingly gross. I left the science room most impressed by the depth and range of the Upper Fifth's knowledge.

  When there were no lessons the Cundall Manor timetable was devoted to manly pursuits. Without the slightest familiarity with the rules of either game I found myself running around rugby and soccer fields with a whistle between my teeth. I discovered that if I blew it, dug my heel randomly into the mud, pointed goalward and announced a scrum-down or indirect free kick every five or ten minutes or so I seemed to be able to get by.

  'But, sir! What was the offence?'

  'Don't think I didn't see, Heydon-Jones.'

  'Surely it should be a direct free kick, sir?'

  'If it was a direct free kick I would have awarded a direct free kick, wouldn't I?'

  If it was a great joke that I, a sports-hating, disruptive, anti-social, rebellious triple-expulsee probationary criminal should now be dishing out punishments, blowing referee's whistles and calling for silence at morning prayers, then it was not a joke that I ever much stopped to examine or smile over. So far as I was concerned my reinvention was complete, and the sly, furtive Stephen who had slunk about on the outside of the healthy decent world was dead and wholly unconnected to the amiable young fogey who made puns in Latin and threatened to flog the Fourth Form to within an inch of their miserable lives if they couldn't keep quiet for a second, damn it all to Hades and back - and face the front, Halliday, or I shall whip you with scorpions, by the bowels of Christ I shall.

  Such threats were comic hyperbole, of course, but corporal punishment did still exist in those days and at that school. Did I ever raise my hand in violence to a child in the name of discipline and good order? Yes, I confess that I did. I had been beaten myself at school and had never questioned the role of the cane, ruler or slipper in school life. Before you wring your hands or make to wring my neck, let me explain.

  It came about like this ...

  I am on duty one evening about a month into my first term. This means that I have to settle the boys down for the night, put out the lights and remain on call for any emergencies and unexpected crises. The dormitories at Cundall are named after seabirds: Avocet, Guillemot, Oystercatcher, that sort of thing. At my own prep school they had been named after trees - Beech, Elm, Oak and Sycamore. I suppose in the twenty-first century's more sophisticated, child-friendly establishments school sleeping quarters are now called Ferrari, Aston Martin, Porsche and Lamborghini or Chardonnay, Merlot, Pinot Noir and Shiraz, or even Beyonce, Britney, Jay-Z and Gaga, but in my era, the era of Peter Scott, Gerald Durrell and the Tufty Club, nature and woodland creatures were considered the most meet and seemly sources for boyhood inspiration.

  I switch out the lights in Tern and Puffin and walk along the top landing towards Cormorant, from which dormitory issues an inordinate amount of noise.

  'All right, settle down in here! Why is it always Cormorant?'

  'Sir, sir, my pillow's broken.'

  'Sir, there's a terrible draught in here.'

  'Sir, I'm sure I saw a ghost.'

  'We're scared, sir.'

  'Look. Enough. I'm turning the lights out. Not a squeak. Not. A. Squeak. And yes, Philips, that does include you.'

  Downstairs I go and into the staffroom. A fire is blazing, and I sit down with a pile of exercise books for marking. Before I begin the business of correcting I fish the pipe from the pocket of my tweed jacket. I bring out with it a Smoker's Friend - combination pen-knife, reamer, tamper and bradawl. I fiddle and scrape and poke for a while, banging out the dottle from my previous pipeful into an ashtray and puffing down the stem like a horn player warming up his trumpet. Next I prise open a tin of Player's Whisky Flake and peel back a single layer of firm, slightly moist tobacco. The sweet woody smell laced with something that may or may not be the whisky that the brand name promises rises up to greet me like a holy balm. I lay the wedge in my left hand and with the tips of the fingers of my right I begin to massage it into the palm with a firm circular motion. Most pipe smokers prefer a pouch of ready-rubbed, but for me the ritual of loosening and shredding a pressed wafer of tobacco is almost as important as the inhalation of smoke itself.

  There is an excellent line in Ian Fleming's last Bond novel, The Man with the Golden Gun: 'The best drink in the day,' he observes, 'is just before the first one.' So it is with my habit. The best smoke for me is the one I have in my head while I am priming the pipe and preparing to puff.

  Just as I am about to pack the bowl and fire up I hear above me the thudding of bare feet on floorboards.

  Cormorant.

  With an exasperated sigh, I lay down the pipe and next to it the tangle of freshly rubbed tobacco. As I ascend the stairs I hear stifled giggles and slaps, snaps and whispers. I stride in and switch on the lights. A ritualized fight is in progress, now frozen in the sudden illumination. School ties are being cracked and flicked like whips. I remember these fights from my own dormitory days.

  'Silence! Back into bed all of you. Right this minute!'

  A scramble as they leap into their beds and instantly pretend to be asleep.

  I switch out the lights. 'One more sound from this dormitory and whoever is responsible will be for the whack. Do you understand? For the whack. I mean it.'

  Back in the study I note with disappointment that the two or three minutes that the ball of tobacco has spent on my desk has been enough to dry its loosened shreds a little. I fill the bowl and press the tobacco down with my thumb. Still moist enough to pack well. Firm, with a hint of springiness.

  Now comes the moment my brain and lungs have been aching for.

  Only Swan Vestas will do at this point, no other incendiary device is quite up to the mark: not specialized pipe-smoker's lighters, however cunning and elaborate, not Bryant and May matches, not a Bic, Clipper, Zippo, Ronson, Calibri, Dupont or Dunhill, excellent in their own ways as they all may be. Swan Vestas are real matches, which is to say you can scrape their magenta heads against any rough surface, not just the shiny brown strips to whic
h the safety match is restricted. You can use a brick in the wall or, like a cowboy, the heel of your boot. The sandpaper provided on the yellow Swan Vesta box is golden, and nothing else scratches like it. I pull the match towards me. I know that one is supposed to strike away in case fragments of burning match-head fly into the face, but I prefer the scooping inwards motion, the way one finishes by bringing the flaring match up before one's eyes.

  The sulphurous incense tingles in my nostrils as I tip the lit match at an angle over the bowl and then slowly flatten it out. Each inhalation sucks the flame downwards over the prepared tobacco which fizzes and bubbles in welcome, its moist freshness imparting a thick sweetness to the smoke. Finally, when the whole surface area is lit and just before my fingers burn, three flicks of the wrist extinguish the match. It tinkles as it hits the glass of the ashtray. Matches charred almost to the end have always been a revealing clue for Columbos and Sherlocks. 'A pipe smoker did this deed, Watson, you mark my words ...'

  I am puffing now. One, two, three, four, five draws on the pipe, smacking the lips at the side of the mouth. Each hard suck stokes up the boiler so that, on the sixth or seventh pull, I can breathe in a whole lungful. The hot smoke instantly penetrates the bronchioles and alveoli of the lungs, sending its gift of nicotine rushing through the blood to the brain. So powerful a hit can cause giddiness and sweating in even the most hardened pipe smoker. But the bang deep inside, the grateful surge of encephalins and endorphins, the thudding kick to the system followed by the sweet electric buzz and hum as the body's benign pharmacopoeia is released in a single torrent - what are coughs, nausea, burns to the tongue and mouth, bitter tar in the spittle and the slow degradation of pulmonary capacity compared to that spinning, pulsing burst of love, that shuddering explosion of joy?

  That first dose is really what the experience is all about. From then on the trick is to keep the pipe alight with gentle, infrequent tuts and puffs on the stem; smaller cigarette-sized inhalations of smoke will follow until the remaining plug, which has acted as a filter for the tobacco above it, is so fouled and contaminated with tar and toxins that the pipe may be declared dead and ready for the cleaning, scraping and reaming routine to be undertaken all over again.

  I am at the steady puffing stage now, as content as any human on the planet - a self-fulfilling contentment that only a pipe can provide: pipe smokers look content, they know themselves to be a symbol of old-fashioned contentment and therefore they are content - when a loud skittering above my head jerks me up from the exercise book I am marking.

  Damn it to hell.

  It was just one little noise, like a mouse in the wainscotting. I can ignore it.

  But no, another sound, that unmistakable thud made by bare feet on floorboards.

  A wrathful tide engulfs me. I am now precisely as irate as I was content. Had I been less placidly, pipe-smokingly serene, I would not now be streaking up the stairs with such fury.

  'Philips! Of course. Who else? Right. Well. What did I say? I said the next culprit was going to be for the whack and I meant it. Dressing-gown and slippers, outside the staffroom. Now!'

  As I make my way downstairs ahead of him I realize the magnitude of what is about to happen. I threatened the whack, which at Cundall meant not the cane, or a ruler, or a slipper, but a plimsoll. I go into the staffroom. Pipe smoke hangs in rooms in a quite different manner to cigarette smoke. Heavy layers of it are wafted into corrugated waves by the draught of my entrance. I close the door. In a cupboard under the master's pigeonholes I find the official small black gym shoe which I pick up and flex, bending it back on itself and letting it spring back.

  What have I done? If I fail to go through with the threatened beating then such authority as I have will be undermined and I will never be able to control the boys again. But how hard does one beat? Suppose I make him cry? Oh good lord.

  I pace up and down, slapping the sole of the gym shoe on to my palm hard, then harder and harder until it stings fiercely.

  A timid knock at the door.

  I clear my throat. 'Enter.'

  Philips shuffles in. His face is set and serious. He is frightened. It is known that I have never administered the whack before, and I must suppose he cannot be certain that I will not be brutal. He seems to know the form better than I do, for he removes his dressing-gown and hangs it on a hook at the back of the door in a manner that suggests he has done this many times before.

  'I told you that whoever I caught mobbing about next was for the whack, didn't I, Philips?'

  'Yes, sir.'

  Why doesn't he beg for mercy? Then at least I might be in a position to relent. Instead he stands there, fearful but maddeningly resolute, leaving me very few options.

  'Right. Well. Let's get it over with then.'

  I have absolutely no idea how things should proceed at this point, but once again Philips leads the way. He approaches the leather armchair in front of the fire and bends over its arm, presenting his posterior in the approved fashion.

  Oh God. Oh hell.

  I swing my arm upwards and bring the gym shoe down.

  It connects.

  There is a silence.

  'There. Right. Well.'

  Philips twists his head round and shoots a look up at me. It is a look of complete shock. He is astounded.

  'Is that ... is that it, sir?'

  'And let that be a lesson! When I say no messing around, I mean no messing around. Go on then, back to bed with you.'

  'Sir.'

  Barely concealing his smirk, Philips straightens, collects his dressing-gown and departs.

  The force with which the rubber sole of the gym shoe connected with his bottom would not have bruised a mosquito. If, instead of striking down, I had dropped the shoe on to him it would have hurt more. It might as well have been a tissue as a plimsoll. It had been not a whack but a feeble tap.

  I drop into the armchair, shaking all over. Never again. Never again would I threaten corporal punishment.

  And never again did I.

  *

  The tall, mostly humorous pipe-smoking oddity who taught all manner of subjects, refereed junior matches and made himself useful to staff and boys as much as he could enjoyed himself at Cundall. And Cundall seemed to like him, for when he said goodbye at the end of the summer term the headmaster asked if he might be able to come back for the next term.

  'But that's when I start at Cambridge.'

  'Michaelmas term at Cambridge doesn't begin till October. Our term starts a month earlier.'

  And so for the next two years I came back to Cundall and taught either side of the short Cambridge terms. In the summer I drove the tractor that pulled the gang-mower around the cricket square and I umpired cricket matches. In the winter months I took the boys for walks and on rainy Sundays I compiled quizzes and competitions to keep them occupied.

  There was no question in my mind that teaching would be my career. It was my true calling and one that sounded in my head as loud as any school bell. Whether I would teach in a place like Cundall, at university level or somewhere in between only my time at Cambridge would decide. If I had the intellectual heft to make it as an academic then perhaps I would make scholarship my life. I imagined that Shakespearean studies would be my metier and tweed and briar my constant accoutrements.

  It was a pleasant enough prospect. I was over that terrible sugar addiction and the madness and disruption it had caused. It had been replaced by a woody, tweedy, old-fashioned masculine dependency which, so long as the supply was there, did not modify mood or behaviour and which also served to remind me that I was now a mature, sober, rational adult. I made no allowance for love, sex or the body of course. I was fire and air - in other words, smoke: my other elements, like Cleopatra, I gave to baser life ...

  Ten years later, in 1988, I met one of Britain's greatest smokers. He was at the time a premier drinker too.

  'I come,' he told Rik Mayall, John Gordon Sinclair, John Sessions, Sarah Berger, Paul Mooney and me as
we gathered for the first rehearsal of his play The Common Pursuit, 'from the booze and fags generation.' He slumped his shoulders down ruefully to emphasize that this was an ineluctable fact in whose remorseless face he was powerless.

  Simon Gray was then, I realize with a slight shudder, exactly the age I am as I write this now. He had, like his favourite actor Alan Bates, a full flop of black hair, but his physique was less solid. Years of drinking had bulged his tummy into a gentle pot while simultaneously wasting his lower half, so that he was spindle-shanked and all but arseless. I almost never saw him without a cigarette in one hand and a drinking receptacle in the other. In the mornings he gulped down champagne, which in his eyes barely counted as alcohol. From lunchtime onwards he sipped at endless coffee mugs or plastic cups of Glenfiddich whisky. It was the first time I had been at close quarters with an authentic alcoholic. Some of my generation drank more than was good for them and would go on to develop into the real thing, but for the moment youth was on their side.

  Unusually for the professional theatre, rehearsals for The Common Pursuit would begin after lunch. We all decided early on that this was because Simon, who was directing the production, was not able to function before that time. In fact, as I found out, it was because he spent the mornings at his desk. No matter how much he drank, he always seemed able to put in plenty of daily writing hours as a playwright and diarist. Just occasionally I caught sight of him early in the morning, before his first champagne. It was a ghastly sight. His face sagged, his eyes were dull, rheumy and bleared, his voice creaked huskily, and his whole being looked defeated and incapable of thought, action or purpose. One sip of an alcoholic drink, however, and he revived like a desert flower in the rain. He seemed to grow inches taller in front of you, a light and sparkle appeared in his eyes, his complexion smoothed and brightened, and his voice strengthened and cleared. Simon Gray, I decided when I first witnessed this frog into prince transformation, did not have a drinking problem. He had a drinking solution.