Free Radical Page 3
Our friendship was put to its greatest test after he announced, shortly before the 1959 general election, that he was leaving Labour and joining the Communist Party. He was fed up with effete public schoolboys like Gaitskell undermining the Labour movement with social democratic treachery. There were revolutionary stirrings in the York working class, he announced, and it was time to fight the spread of false consciousness among the masses. When the general election was announced, the headmaster of Nunthorpe told us that the school would have its own. The aim, I think, was to let the upper-sixth practise their debating skills, but David put himself forward as the Communist candidate, citing me as one of his seconds. He produced dazzling posters, painted by himself, and agitated vigorously among Nunthorpe’s lumpen proletariat in the lower forms. Nationalization and class war did not have much resonance as issues with grammar-school boys in a city with no history of industrial strife. But the burgeoning Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament did, and David skilfully promoted it.
The authorities panicked and it was announced that the Communist candidate had been disqualified for unspecified irregularities. I was secretly relieved, but David was outraged at this assault on democracy and civil liberties. He called for a school strike and civil disobedience. No one joined him on the picket line, where he shouted ‘Scab’ at the strike-breakers. I arrived head-down in the middle of a peloton of cyclists to avoid his gaze. His friends, including me, slipped away, and he reappeared a week later with a sick note. I voted for the Liberal. My friendship with David was never quite the same again. After A levels he went to art school, from which he claimed he was expelled for setting fire to the buildings during an ‘industrial dispute’.
The 1959 election also proved a turning point for my mother. One day she broke down in tears and confessed to me – once I had pledged secrecy – that she had done something terrible. I thought initially that she had killed someone, but it transpired that she had defied my father’s instruction to vote Conservative. In the privacy of the ballot box, she had supported that nice Mr Jo Grimond. From then on we formed a secret Liberal cell in the Cable household and she remained a supporter until she died.
Another liberal (and Liberal) influence was the Quakers. After the Baptists, I had wandered from one religious denomination to another, not so much in pursuit of spiritual nourishment as friendship. I spent several years with the Methodist chapel at the end of the lane where services were made tolerable by lusty singing of ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers’, ‘Stand Up, Stand Up for Jesus’ and ‘There is a Green Hill Far Away’. The chapel organized Cubs, provided film shows after Sunday service, and asked little of us beyond signing a temperance pledge, breaches of which I have always associated with the fires of Hell and, perhaps for that reason, have broken only moderately and occasionally. One of my friends, however, lured me away to the Society of Friends when I was about eleven. I never warmed to the stillness of the Meeting as I did to Methodist hymns, and I never embraced pacifism, but I greatly liked the people, who were kindly, generous and compassionate, and made me welcome without testing my convictions. And while my father feared that I was being indoctrinated by liberal and left-wing ideas, he saw merit in my being involved with York’s social and intellectual elite, including the Rowntree family, and I stayed with the Friends until I left for university.
My only problem with the Quakers was that I never saw God through the goodness and I worried seriously that, despite being a regular church attendee since my childhood (a somewhat more regular attendee than my God-fearing parents), I had never encountered anything that could be remotely described as a religious experience. Nor have I since. I decided at one point to visit each of the churches in York that I had not previously attended, looking for God, and went to the Mormons, Christadelphians, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Presbyterians, Unitarians, and various shades of Anglicans. My market research suggested that the Methodists had the best hymns, the Anglicans the best churches, and the Quakers the nicest people and prettiest girls (from the Mount School). But the Almighty eluded me. I was left with a sense of the importance of the spiritual dimension of life, and I still have a yearning for Him and for whatever it is in Christianity that provides me with such comfort and inspiration. But I struggled then, and always have, to get to grips with faith, as if I was trying to grab a particularly elusive bar of soap.
Politics was easier to understand and, warming to Liberalism, I market-tested this new political allegiance on my friends. The overwhelming consensus was that Liberals were a wasted vote. Conservatives complained that ‘they let Labour in’ and socialists that ‘they let the Tories in’. Even my ill-formed political mind could grasp that while one or other proposition might be true, they could not both be true at the same time. Nineteenth-century history, taught in the O level curriculum, also led to the conclusion that Liberals were progressive and a Good Thing, while Conservatives – Disraeli excepted – were reactionary and a Bad Thing. That was broadly where I remained until midway through university.
Nineteen fifty-nine was a crucial year in other respects. It was time to choose A level subjects. I had begun to develop a certain flair in history essays thanks to an inspirational figure, ‘Jimmy’ Jewell. I was also discovering the delights of Thomas Hardy and Shakespeare and the war poets; and actually enjoyed translating Caesar’s Gallic Wars. However, my father had a deep suspicion of ‘ arty-farty’ subjects, a suspicion deepened by the fact that my mother, thanks to the adult college, now went around the house speculating about the nature of being, rather than attending to her domestic duties. In his sternly utilitarian view, there were serious choices to be made: did I intend to become an accountant, a lawyer, a teacher or a scientist? The last seemed the least of several evils and I embarked upon maths, physics and chemistry, in which I had shown competence but no great flair or passion.
As luck would have it, the choice proved less clear-cut than I had feared. Mr Jewell auditioned every two years for his Shakespeare production with the neighbouring girls’ grammar school, Mill Mount, where his wife, Joyce, was the drama teacher. The play was his pride and joy, taken immensely seriously, with theatre critics summoned from as far as Hull. That year’s play was Macbeth. I had no expectations beyond being a stagehand or spear-carrier, being shy, inarticulate and wholly untested. Moreover, I had offended Mr Jewell deeply by reproducing in a history essay some anti-Semitic diatribe I had picked up from my father, not appreciating that Mr Jewell was Jewish. He forgave that indiscretion, understanding, I think, where the nonsense had come from. He also found in my reading of the lines at the audition some dramatic quality that had escaped me and everyone else, and gave me the leading role.
A few months later I had mastered several hundred lines of blank verse, learned the rudiments of acting, and overcome my terror of speaking in public. Olivier, however, I was not, and on a disastrous first night I came on a scene early in Act Five to confront a group of baffled little boys advancing across the stage carrying branches: Birnam Wood in motion. The little boys took fright at a sixth-former with a false beard waving a sword at them and fled to the wings, and Shakespeare’s tragedy dissolved into comic melodrama. By then, however, the dramatic tension had long since gone, not least because of the catcalls from the boys in the audience who had noticed that the backlighting revealed the three Mill Mount witches to be naked underneath their diaphanous gowns. Still, things got better after that, and I was credited with capturing some of the poetic quality of Shakespeare.
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The play also introduced me to Lady Macbeth, who became my first love. Until that point I had been terrified of girls, and uncomfortable with women in general. My mother had become almost invisible after her breakdown, and the moments of tenderness I remembered from years before had been long since lost in the daily routine of a home dominated by the appetites of men and boys. My surviving grandmother, Grandma Cable, and I enjoyed a strong, mutual loathing. She had, in any event, been banished to an old folks’ home where she claimed she was being d
etained against her will, constantly insisting that she was being robbed of all her money, and sitting with her stockings and knickers round her ankles, smelling of urine.
By our mid-teens, the barriers created by gender segregation at school had begun to break down. Relationships were measured on a primitive metric: Grade 1 was holding hands; Grade 2 was full-on kissing; at Grade 3 hands got inside bras; Grade 4 was heavy petting; and Grade 5 was intercourse and beyond. Conversation, let alone love, didn’t enter into it. A few of my precocious friends had reached Grade 5 early on, or claimed to have, competing to be the school’s Casanova and generating innumerable pregnancy scares around the city. Most of us, however, were clustered at the bottom of this ladder of sexual achievements and hadn’t made Grade 1. I was generally thought to be pretty eligible, but underdeveloped, and received plenty of encouragement, including being paired off with a dark, flirtatious beauty called Carol. After two circuits of Hob Moor, where courtships occurred, I had not dared to utter a word or approached within a foot of her and she suggested I try someone else.
Audrey was a Grade 2 girl, the maximum allowed by her Methodism, and she was my first real girlfriend. Apart from a mutual interest in physics and chemistry, however, conversation was sparse. We both resorted to bringing to our dates a checklist of talking points suggested by friends, but they were exhausted after a few minutes and the hours hung heavily. Another, more suitable and articulate, boy was found for her.
Lady Macbeth, Marion, had enormous eyes and a dazzling, wide smile but no chest, which made Shakespeare’s allusions to her breast-feeding a source of considerable ribaldry among the more disrespectful juniors. Indeed, she suffered seriously from what is now called anorexia, though it was concealed beneath well-chosen, flowing garments. Our first date hit the buffers when she announced that she did not like to be touched by boys. Nonetheless, the relationship flourished and we became inseparable, talking endlessly on the streets or by phone about everything under the sun, including sex, albeit theoretically. We worked our way through the modern novel, concentrating on Lawrence. Marion saw herself as Miriam from Sons and Lovers, doomed to frigidity by a mysteriously unhappy upbringing, and urged me to find an Ursula before it was too late. Lady Chatterley’s Lover had recently escaped censorship and we endlessly deconstructed it. Unfortunately, I carelessly left the copy at home, where it was found by my father who insisted that he, and my mother, should read it ‘to find out what the fuss was all about’. To my amazement their reaction was restrained and good-humoured. While deploring the sexually explicit passages, which they obviously understood better than I, my father even ventured some perceptive comments on Lawrence’s florid style and the thinness of the plot. This episode caused me to reassess my father, whom I had come to see in a monochromatic light as a bullying neo-Nazi. He had, in fact, a generous and tolerant side, as I should have more readily appreciated since, when I was old enough to drive, he allowed me to use his new car for my trysts with Marion.
Although we were very close, the relationship became a source of concern, as well as ridicule, among our friends. We became Darby and Joan. Marion was offered counselling by her earthier classmates. She decided on drastic action and after a holiday abroad announced that she had lost her virginity to a German. She reassured me that it had been an appalling experience which I had been spared. Shortly afterwards, she invited me to her bedroom and undressed. Whether it was my shyness or my shock at her emaciated body I am not sure, but nothing happened and we retreated into talk. Another attempt, equally ignominious, failed several months later, and we settled for platonic love. Marion arranged for me to go out with her friend, Gwyneth, an altogether less emotionally complicated, more physical and affectionate girl – so much so that I panicked and, unforgivably, fled while she was sitting her A levels.
When Marion and I met as students some years later, she explained that her problem had been that she was really a lesbian but had only just felt able to ‘come out’. This seemed a plausible explanation, but its full accuracy was put into doubt when I met her mother while canvassing in the 1983 general election, who explained that Marion had emigrated to the USA, met a man half her age, and was now happily married with four children.
Somehow, amid this emotional turmoil and artistic distraction, I coped well with advanced calculus and the periodic table and was one of a small number of boys deemed by the head to be Oxbridge material. As such, I qualified for a grossly disproportionate amount of senior teachers’ time. The head, Henry Moore, was anxious to push Nunthorpe from its status as a middling grammar school into the big league occupied by the direct grant and public schools which counted their Oxbridge entrants in double figures. A place at Oxbridge, or a highly prestigious red-brick institution like Imperial College, merited a half-day celebratory holiday for the school, so I did not lack encouragement.
Added motivation came from being appointed Head Boy ahead of an altogether more focused and disciplined rival. My appointment caused nervousness among the staff because my standards of dress and punctuality fell well below acceptable norms and the Head Boy had considerable devolved authority for imposing the school rules. Reflecting, no doubt, the changing mood of the times, standards of discipline were confusingly inconsistent. Some younger teachers opposed corporal punishment, but a few of the old lags relied heavily on canes and rubber tubing, sometimes administered with medieval sadism, for petty offences. I added to the moral confusion by zealously enforcing the rules that I agreed with and ignoring others. Noise levels rose alarmingly in break times, playground fights proliferated and the paper dart industry flourished, but smokers were not tolerated. There was not, then, a scientific basis for the smoking ban, but with a zealous gang of enforcers I tracked down every illicit smoker behind the toilets and bicycle sheds and in the surrounding streets and hauled them off to be given six of the best by the deputy head. This apart, I saw my rule as one of enlightened liberalism until, quite recently, I met an old boy with an altogether different perspective, who could, aged sixty, still recite the innumerable lines I had given him for some trifling misdemeanour.
Getting from Oxbridge potential to an Oxbridge place was not, however, straightforward. The market for theatrical scientists with an interest in current affairs proved difficult to penetrate. I was turned down by innumerable Oxbridge colleges and other universities and ended up with offers of places at King’s College, London, to read chemistry and Nottingham to study social administration. Someone then suggested Fitzwilliam House, Cambridge, now a serious academic college, but at that time known, like St Peter’s at Oxford, as a college of last resort, mainly for rugger-buggers and other sporting hearties. True to stereotype, the senior tutor complimented me briefly on the quality of my physics entrance paper and then showed more interest than anyone before – or since – in my performance as first-team opening bat and wicketkeeper, occasional left-back for the soccer team, very occasional rugby player – both codes – and county trialist in school hockey. He wrote ‘Blue?’ on his notepad and I was admitted to read natural sciences.
The headmaster and Mr Jewell were delighted, though their investment in Oxbridge entrants proved unproductive because the school soon became an 11–16 mixed comprehensive and is now better known for its non-academic alumni like Steve McLaren, the former England football manager.
My father was over the moon. His investment had certainly paid off. I felt rather sorry for his colleagues at the technical college who now faced massive retaliation for two decades of humiliation by being endlessly reminded of his vicarious achievement: a son at university – and Cambridge, no less. Indeed, the family cup ran over: Dad achieved a long overdue promotion; we moved a big step up the ladder of social stratification by moving to a detached house in a quiet and respectable cul de sac in Dringhouses, near the racecourse; my brother Keith won an academic scholarship to a public school, St Peter’s. The Conservatives then won a general election on the slogan ‘You’ve Never Had It So Good’. It certainly appeared so for the
Cable family.
For my mother, however, my success brought mixed blessings. Her pride was deep and genuine, but it meant exposure to new, clever people, who might mock her accent or disparage her lack of formal education. Upward social mobility and success energized my father, but my mother shrivelled. She had overcome her inhibitions to the extent of becoming a tourist guide at York Minster. But she nonetheless carried around the fear that some educational or social indiscretion would betray her humble origins, and she would dwell for weeks on the shame of a misplaced vowel in conversation with someone important. She was happiest away from people, producing art of high quality. The new detached house, moreover, presented a whole set of problems in itself, like neighbours who cared rather more for appearances than the socially mixed crowd down New Lane. In particular, a poisonous Conservative branch chair, Stella, who dripped venom with every phrase, acted as the custodian of local standards and mores. My father’s growing expansiveness and my mother’s introversion caused growing tension. Home was not a happy place, and I was relieved to escape.
The relief of escape was tempered by the fact that I had been admitted to an unfashionable college on false pretences to read a subject I was eager to ditch. Doubts were banished, however, during an idyllic three months spent guiding mountain hikers around the Welsh Black Mountains and Brecon Beacons.
This interlude proved to be my first real immersion in an adult world beyond that of parents, teachers and fellow students. My job was to lead walks and climbs from our base at a Holiday Fellowship country house hotel. The HF had its origins in a movement developed around walking, healthy outdoor adventure and organized collective leisure, with evenings featuring Scottish country dancing, quizzes and record recitals. Meals always commenced with grace; alcohol and TV were strictly outlawed. The corrupting influence of the materialistic 1950s and the beginnings of the permissive 1960s were nonetheless becoming apparent, and the house parties I was required to lead were a combustible mixture of staid middle-aged couples and young bloods on the lookout for sex.