The Goldberg Variations

Dad started taking me to football matches. I’d sit with him in the press-box, for the first time allowed into a world that had been exclusively his. Not that I was entirely ignorant of it. I could name every team in the country, plus dinosaurs like Wanderers, Blackburn Olympic, and The Royal Engineers. I knew all the F.A. Cup winners, year-by-year, League champions, Charity Shield opponents, but my one love was Manchester United. I don’t know why. It never occurred to me that they played a very long way from west London as I assumed that the entire universe bordered Holland Park Avenue and that if you went past North Kensington you’d fall off the edge. It didn’t matter that my first game was Chelsea v Nottingham Forest. Even now I can visualise an all-blue Osgood streaking through helpless red shirts to score the only goal of the game. A comforting, enveloping mist came off the damp wooden seats, the playing turf, from the mouths of ranked journalists, and the mugs of tea served at half-time. In those days, the players were as magical as the immortals I read about by torchlight. In my second game I saw Rodney Marsh score a hat-trick in a 4–0 QPR victory over Watford. His name echoed round Loftus Road to the accompaniment of a massive bass drum. I then started watching Dad’s own team, Chelsea Casuals, on the pitches in front of Wren’s Royal Hospital alongside the Chelsea pensioners in their magnificent red and navy uniforms and wondered how long it would be before I’d be able to play for them myself.

Sport was always the bond between me, Dad, and eventually Toby. It was one that divided the family on gender lines. One day Dad appeared in the nursery with a long, green box.

‘Okay, kid. Let’s see what you’re made of!’

His grin revealed a wolf’s crowded jaw in all its splendour.

The pine table in the nursery where we normally ate our cornflakes was about to be transformed into a ping-pong table. Dad ripped apart the cardboard and hurriedly assembled the net with the eagerness of a lynch mob erecting a gallows. I juggled the ball on my bat. Having seen off all comers at a party recently, I was feeling pretty confident.

‘Ready, kid?’

He served the ball gently and it bounced across the net, high enough for me to be able to smash it down on his side.

‘Pretty good, kid!’

It was all going as I’d expected until I began to serve. The ball flew off the end of the table and under the battered red couch by the wall.

‘The table’s not long enough.’

‘Excuses, kid.’

My game worsened with my growing frustration until, gradually, I mastered the short length of the breakfast table and Dad’s gentle returns left plenty of room for winning shots.

‘Okay, kid. How about a game? Play for service?’

Dad bounced the ball across the net and I returned it with ease, but my next shot spun off against the window.

‘My serve.’

Dad chopped at the ball and it came across the net gently enough, but, as I attempted to return it, the ball spun off viciously and hit the window.

‘1–0,’ beamed Dad.

For some reason his serves were now impossible to return. o–5 down, it was my turn to serve. I bounced the ball swiftly across the table where it clipped the end, veering beyond his reach.

‘Blast!’ cried Dad, his smile metamorphosing into a grimace. When my second serve achieved the same result, he flung the new bat down on the ground. I was concerned he’d break it. The next three serves were as fast and efficient as I could manage, but on each occasion my attempt to return resulted in the ball flying off in the opposite direction from the one I’d intended. As the score piled up against me, I simply couldn’t understand why my shots were all miscuing. The tears welled behind my eyes as Dad’s expression grew more and more triumphant.

I couldn’t be six for ever and ever, so I was sent to The Hall, a pressure-cooker preparatory school in Hampstead where pink blazers emblazoned with black iron crosses made us targets for the kids from the local secondary modern.

… he is on the whole placatory and nervous at school and not very popular. My parents attacked this dilemma with a fork – psychotherapy on one prong, martial arts on the other. At the judo club in Vauxhall I came across kids like the ones from the secondary modern and got on fine. When they discovered I could stand on my head for five minutes at a time, everyone was summoned to watch my feat. Although they may have been smiling at a freak show, from my upside down vantage point even the glum faces were smiling. I could have stayed there for hours. I also learned Tai o Toshi, which I used to defeat the school bully. Heavy wooden desks and chairs flew in the hurricane of our combat.

There’s a motto shall ring in the ears of all Who e’er have spent their youth at The Hall. It’s a call to the sluggard, the dull and the wise, A call we cannot and daren’t despise. So now and for ever raise the call Hinc in altiora, up The Hall! There are overs and unders in life all through, In after life you’ll get your due. If you keep up the struggle and never stop At the last Reading Over you’ll come out top

I found this ancient piece of bombast beneath a pile of neglected sheet music. ‘Overs’ and ‘unders’ and ‘Reading Overs’ were still the yardstick by which academic success was judged forty years later. Everything we did was measured so we need be left in no doubt as to our level of achievement at any given time. Everything I enjoyed was tarnished by the incessant competition. In a school of three hundred there were 120 prizes and cups to be won. (I once sat down and counted them all just to make myself more miserable.) With such a ratio I should surely have won something. It was hard to believe Mum, Dad or any of my supporters and backers when all my best efforts failed to convince successive Hall judges and juries. Praise was mere flattery until quantified by competitive success, and Dad’s anguish and irritation at each fresh defeat seemed sharper than my own. I felt I was failing him dreadfully. Conversely, on the one occasion when I did have some success, achieving an ‘over’ in every subject and gaining a gold star, my excitement was drowned in the torrent of his delight. I began to feel that achievement was his way of defining me. I’d listen to him discussing what I’d done, as if my actions were separate from their agent, and my existence could only be checked in terms of them. Being me simply wasn’t good enough. But that was how he’d been brought up: each novel was a scalp for his mother’s belt, worn at Bar Mitzvahs, weddings and funerals. Every Sunday, after the publication of a new novel, our stomachs experienced a collective tingling in anticipation of the reviews. He judged his work by them, and I knew that no matter how much he disparaged the scornful ones, they were the ones he believed.

Football was where I felt it most acutely. Dad never stopped assuring me of my ability, and while I could bounce the ball on my foot for twenty minutes at a stretch, swerve round defenders and strike goals, it was something I preferred to do in the playground, where there were no white lines and circles to circumscribe my enjoyment and no one lost their temper if you missed an open goal or shouted if you failed to save one. Playground football was fun, and one of the boys gave it colour with versions of chants he’d picked up from the Chelsea Shed.

Over there, over there. In pink and black, A load of crap

Not one you’d have heard tumbling readily from the lips of the Fulham Road barrow boys.

Dad’s eyes were fixed on the school’s Under-11 team. When I did the trial, I was selected as substitute, which meant I had to run the line for a painful 70 minutes, chapping my thighs against the coarse, black woollen shorts.

‘Did you get on. Did you get on?’ he’d ask me every time I came home from a game, bounding down the stairs like an excited poodle.

It was the last game of the season. As I shivere in the downpour I imagined myself coming on, receiving the ball in midfield, flicking it out of the mud to swerve round the big bloke, building up pace and running between two defenders before rounding the goalkeeper to touch the ball into an empty net for the winning goal. By the time I got home fantasy had become reality; one that I knew would please Dad. I thought he was going to break into a triumphal dance. As he hugged me I wept into his bristly cheek, before running upstairs to my bedroom, hoping the pillow might suffocate me along with my shame.

Music gave me a language to cope beyond the thinking barrier. My only regret was when it had to stop with the angry utaca utaca of the stylus bumping over the edge of the vinyl onto the gap between harmony and the white noise on the label beyond. Besides listening I was also learning the clarinet. My teacher, Marjorie Dutton, was the only female staff member I had dealings with. Her gentle femininity contrasted starkly with the chalk-throwing, ear-clipping masters, but it was impossible to proceed down any path at The Hall for long before coming up against the obstacle of competition. I didn’t want to go in for the Reisenstein Woodwind Prize, but I was persuaded that if I wanted to make progress I had to do so. On the night, instead of the usual mellow sound, a series of squeaks emerged, as from a fallen fledgling. I stopped and told the audience I would start again. In the gallery round the hall, the masters stood like statues above the shields of the great public schools whose scholarships and places the pupils marched confidently towards. Once again the fledgling sounded instead of Mozart. Again I stopped, and started again. At last the instrument began to sing. A sympathetic audience applauded loudly, acknowledging courage rather than virtuosity. Of course, I won nothing.

My gold star propelled me into the scholarship form. Suddenly I was in a class of strangers who didn’t want to know me. They’d established their bonds, the strangest of which was with the form teacher himself, who used to confide the details of failed romances to his students. They took me aside and warned me that on no account should I discuss what I’d heard outside the class. Isolated, I soon slipped down the ranks, my gold star twinkling very faintly somewhere in the distance. The following term I was back among the common herd, labouring for a place at Westminster School. Prizes in singing and recitation whizzed past my nose. I started playing truant, with the collusion of my parents, at one stage staying off school for a full six weeks, and sat by Dad’s side as he rattled off his first children’s novel, Goalkeepers are Different. I tore each page from the typewriter in my eagerness to read the story, confirming to him that it had narrative drive and earning myself a dedication.

My parents began to research schools that specialised in music. The Purcell was out because it didn’t have a football pitch. Pimlico, unfortunately, had several. A brand new comprehensive opened the year before I went there, it sought to attract what it called ‘special musicians’. Unfortunately the course wasn’t ready when I arrived in the summer, the only special musician in my year of three hundred. They compensated by releasing me from Woodwork and Religious Education to practise.

My late entrance to the class, special privileges and snobby accent in a school where everyone spoke Cockney, or pretended to, wearing the smart flannel blazer Mum had bought me rather than the standard woollen one, made me a prime candidate for bullying.

‘What d’you wanna cam ’ere for? You should be at one of ’em posh places.’

Most of the boys seemed to want to fight me, and the girls to go out with me. Seemed being the operative word. Trysts arranged at the school gates were never kept. Academically the level was so far below the one I’d reached that I was simply treading water.

There was a fighting hierarchy at Pimlico; and Les and Ray were my bogeymen. Coming out of the science lab one afternoon, I was jostled and pushed as usual in the narrow corridor. A fist smacked my ear. It burned fiercely to the accompaniment of a painful, high-pitched whistle. The helplessness and humiliation hurt more.

‘Ah look, Ray. You’ve made ’im cry.’

Up in the Geography class Les received his comeuppance for consistent minor offending. The teacher decked him with a couple of right handers that left him sprawled on the floor.

‘You was laughin’, Glanville.’

‘’Course I wasn’t.’

‘’E were, Les. ’E were laughin’ atcher.’

‘After the lesson, I’m gonna fuckin’ do yer!’

Worse than the fights themselves was the anticipation. They were rarely spontaneous. More often than not a grudge would have to be avenged hours after the offence that had given rise to it. Much of my early time at Pimlico was spent in a state of panic as to what might befall me later.

Down on the dark concourse where no teacher trod, Les exacted his revenge. I tried to avoid the blows that bounced off my head, my cheeks and my back until an uppercut caught me in the nose with a crack. It didn’t hurt much but the blood gushed over my white shirt and fell on the floor in little sticky piles as I scurried about like a frightened hen, trying to protect myself from further blows, wondering how much damage had been done.

‘Go’ ’im!’

‘Nice one, Les.’

Job done, they walked away.

I did have a group of friends. They’d meet in the toilets and form a human arch against the wall, then each take it in turns to run a gauntlet of kicks and punches. Having experienced it once, I was assured that I couldn’t leave the coven. Time and again they tried to force me back into these rituals with threats and beatings. One afternoon, waiting outside the Humanities class, two of them held me as a third laid into me with savage blows. My anger at this injustice and humiliation rose, but this time things were different. My arm cranked, and my fist flew round and into my tormentor’s jaw with a satisfying smack. As he reeled round, clutching his face, I relished the pain and astonishment in his eyes. The detention I received felt more like a reward than a punishment.

Practically everyone at Pimlico supported Chelsea: a circumstance that led me to become part of yet another minority there; though this time not of one. Chelsea had their attractions. One of the two best sides in the country at the time, they’d recently won their first F.A. Cup and their very name epitomised the stylish era we were leaving behind. Even the club song was played regularly on Top of the Pops, so it wasn’t entirely inexcusable that I should choose Stamford Bridge to make my first foray onto the terraces, in the company of a sportswriter friend of Dad’s. My parents had regaled me with horror stories about life down there among the yobs, away from the bourgeois comfort of the adjacent seated areas, so it came as a huge relief, not to mention a thrill, when I returned home unscathed after an uneventful match against Huddersfield Town.

Another opportunity to watch Chelsea from the terraces came my way when gorgeous Josie Lee asked me out on a date to see Peter Bonetti the Cat’s testimonial against Standard Liege of Belgium. Needless to say, she followed her predecessors and failed to turn up, but this was a date I fully intended to keep with or without her. I wanted to be back on the terraces, this time not at some dull outpost as in the game against Huddersfield, but in the heart of the volcano. Approaching the Shed, I watched as the perpetual motion of the mass of close-packed bodies sent waves rippling to the extremities of the terraces beyond. At its heart I was surrounded by fag-smoking Artful Dodgers, kids who’d wipe the floor with the likes of Les and Ray, school rejects, yet kings of a domain my anonymity allowed me to be part of. ‘The Liquidator’ started up, skinhead reggae, its instrumental moonstomp rhythm met by synchronised handclaps and choruses of ‘Chelsea’. Many wore the uniform of multi-eyed Doc Martens, two-tone trousers, Ben Sherman shirts, red braces and crew cuts. Lighted bangers flew through the air, exploding dangerously close to my face. As arms linked for ‘Knees up Mother Brown’ I was shoved hard in the back, fighting to keep my balance as row after dancing row cascaded down the steps, leaving vulnerable bodies prone in their wake as the waves returned to their source before starting all over again. I watched the coppers flying in, and hauling people out roughly, and relished the rawness, the danger in the faces and stances of people who spat, and spilled their steaming tea and chewed their burgers open-mouthed in a pungent haze of fried onions and beer-fuelled farts. There were no rival supporters, but even without them the atmosphere was charged with a sense of menace that left me shivering as I exited the ground, not with fear but elation. Feeling that I’d successfully completed a rite of passage, I experienced a warm tingle of acceptance, although sure no one there had even been aware of me.

My bent nose, like Cleopatra’s, changed the course of history. Les and Ray were severely reprimanded and I was swiftly transferred to another class with only a week to go before the end of term.

We spent the summer holiday in Kent, where Toby and I played football on the village green situated conveniently opposite our family cottage. I’d wait at the window until there was a quorum, then sprint across the road to join them. If there were no football in the offing, I’d freewheel my bike down the steep hill round the corner, watching the speedometer hit thirty before joining the main road through the village. Our holidays there fell into a routine: Denton for cream tea, Canterbury for the cathedral, Hythe for the beach, and as Mum struggled to keep us all above the boredom threshold, Dad, an eternal Greta Garbo to be disturbed on pain of death or worse, would closet himself away to write his annual novel, emerging only to defend his honour at ping-pong or his goal on the village green. I became increasingly obsessed by the thrill of freewheeling, seeing how far I could push the pin on the dial, how long I could sustain the speed on level ground. One afternoon, pedalling like a maniac down the pavement, trying to keep at thirty, I thudded with a halt into the body of an old woman who had been emerging from the bus-shelter. High on panic I felt strangely detached from the situation of the prone, grey-haired figure on the ground and the miscued blows aimed at my head by her distraught husband. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the gold family estate car slowing down on the other side of the road and my brother, Toby, crying. The old man was too. I burst into tears and fled, convinced I was a murderer. In the distance I could hear an ambulance siren. Mum told me the old lady wore a pacemaker and might die.

I channelled my energies towards the garden, crucifying slugs, disembowelling woodlice, mixing red and black ant nests in the hope of seeing a war. When bored with insects, I’d sit on the wall at the front of the house and hurl crab-apples at the boys cycling past. One afternoon I hit my target several times and he swerved in front of a car. The screeching brakes, the smoke from the wheels and the pungent smell of burning rubber set doors opening and nets twitching. It was the second time I’d roused the village from its habitual sloth. Amiable, freckled John lay motionless in the road but the car, thank God, had managed to avoid him. Mum and Dad reckoned it had to be down to the new school. Disturbed adolescent, delinquent and neurotic, I was packaged and labelled, ready for delivery.

Autumn saw the arrival of the first official batch of elite ‘special musicians’, thirty or so, their rounded speech marginally reducing the playground twang quotient. The once quiet corridors of the music department now resembled an orchestra pit before the overture, a hubbub of competing strings and wind. With the door closed I could just about concentrate on polishing a Weber run, refining a Mozart adagio or perfecting the riff from High Society. I was obsessed with jazz, listened to it, played it, and read about it. One of the newcomers, a trumpet player called Philip, shared my enthusiasm. We’d go down Charing Cross Road and dig out New Orleans standards, then go home and work them out, singly and together. At home it was all we played, at school all we discussed when we weren’t trying to recruit the trombone, piano, and bass we needed to form our own Red Hot Five. One morning Mr Spencer, the Head of Music, heard the first chords of the ‘Jelly Roll Blues’ strike up, sullying the nineteenth-century air that wafted past his rooms. His tie appeared at the window, the door opened and there he stood, skinny but towering, his eyes furious behind his spectacles. He glowered at the offending sheets as if they were hard-core pornography. I lived in Kensington, Philip in Stanmore, and the other prospective members of our combo, who could say? Banned from playing in school, the band had no future, so jazz became a solitary affair, a consolation if I was feeling down. Only it could help me clear the ‘Can’t play Jazz Blues’. I pictured my hero in The Benny Goodman Story sitting on the roof of his family’s New York home and doodling to himself until the pretty girl arrives, as if conjured by his playing like a genie. No such genie answered my breaks although officially I had a girlfriend, one of the special musicians, a sweet violinist called Caroline with pillowfuls of red Irish hair. I’d lie on the bed with her, wondering what to do next, even though a classmate had taught me how to come, furnishing me with the crucial bit of information I was lacking.

‘You gotta move it ap an’ down!’

Clarinet in one hand and cock in the other, I had the restorative and the nostrum.

I integrated successfully into my new form with the aid of an image change. I’d outgrown the flannel blazer, and was able to persuade Mum that the commonly worn woollen variety would be warmer. I wore the fashionable attire of the terraces; pleated Ben Sherman or Brutus shirts, blue and green two-tone tonic trousers and tassel-loafer shoes. To top it all I had a navy blue, knee-length crombie, complete with red silk handkerchief tucked into the top pocket.

‘Glanville thinks ’e’s a skin’ead!’ sneered one of the bitchier girls in the class, hitting the target with painful accuracy. Soon after a group of the genuine article surrounded me on the tube, swiped my handkerchief, and sat opposite, gloating over its quality and discussing how they’d pick the embroidered initials out of Mum’s gift.

Every penny I had I spent on jazz, generally at HMV on Oxford Street, a twenty-minute bus ride away. One afternoon, with King Oliver’s Dixieland Stompers and Jelly Roll Morton already in the bag, I headed for the cassette department. There it was, winking at me from the tidy rows, The Dutch Swing College Band, as if it knew I had no money left to buy it with. Mum, a huge jazz fan, had raved about them. I’d been trying to find one of their records for months. I glanced behind. Two shop assistants were chatting by the till. I looked left, right, in the mirror above. A short man in an old, brown mac stood next to me and began extracting and replacing cassettes aimlessly. Like me, I thought, up to no good. I felt very self-conscious and hot in the crombie as I turned the cassette round and round in my hand, peeling off the cellophane nervously before plunging it into the depths of my coat pocket. I walked through the store in a daze, my stomach tingling uncomfortably, until I was out in the dazzling autumn sunshine and someone gripped my shoulder. It was the man in the brown mac.

In the manager’s office they kept me waiting half an hour while they debated whether or not to call the police. In the end I was released. As soon as I was home I rushed into Mum’s arms and burst into tears, and, before you could say Carl Jung, I was flicking through Country Life in a Harley Street waiting room.

Sigmund Freud was one of the household gods. Handsome green volumes of his oeuvre lined the drawing-room bookcase, the works of the disciples by their sides. We were encouraged to read them almost as soon as we were out of nappies, not just the theory, but also its application in works such as Moses and Monotheism or Civilisation and its Discontents. My parents accepted his precepts unquestioningly. Theory was also put into practice. Mum was in therapy with a brilliant polymath in Reading, learning as much about zoology and Shakespeare as she did about herself. My brother and sisters all had counselling at one time or other. Only Dad didn’t. He just sent everybody else off to be cured, hoping his life would be made easier once we had been. Had he been analysed himself we might all have benefited. Freud was good enough for us, but the barbs in his beard might spike Dad’s muse.