Life: An Exploded Diagram

I’M NOT GOING to bang on about my suffering, my brutalization, and my salvation at Newgate. Those long seven years. (Well, eight, if you count the missing year.) Lord knows, bookshop shelves already creak under the weight of Misery Memoirs and Teen Novels that might as well all be called My School Hell. I have no desire to add my small pebble to that avalanche of unhappiness. In any case, looking back at it from this distance, it seems mostly funny. Tragedy does sometimes look like comedy to the survivors. And I survived. There’s scar tissue, but after a while you stop seeing it in the mirror. Believe me. I know a thing or two about scar tissue.

You walk through the school’s wrought-iron gates. (Which are massive. And there’s a carved griffin or some such thing perched on the stone posts at either side.) The original School House, three hundred and fifty years old, autumn-yellow creeper clambering up its russet face, is, actually and truly, beautiful. Between you and it there is a huge and immaculate lawn circled by a gravel path.

Rule 7: No one, other than the headmaster and his immediate family or guests, may set foot upon the school lawn.

Rule 8: Pupils walk clockwise around the school lawn, on pain of death. Only staff and prefects are permitted to walk anticlockwise.

(It occurs to me that I could convey the nature of my school experience simply by reproducing The Newgate Rules. I kept a copy for years, but I lost it somewhere between my divorce and my emigration to America. It was a little hardbacked book with a blue cover, the first book we were issued with. We were told to learn it by heart, and we did.)

For most of its history, Newgate had been a boarding school dedicated to turning the superfluous sons of moneyed families into military officers or, failing that, into the kind of brave, loyal, and gormless chaps who were the worker ants of the British Empire.

When Goz and I arrived, slack-jawed and fearful, many of Newgate’s ancient and honorable traditions were still in place. They included ritual humiliation, physical bullying, incessant sarcasm, public undressing, violent games, caning, snobbery, ferocious patriotism, and the singing of the national anthem on the least pretext. (Such as the Duke of Kent’s birthday or the anniversary of the Battle of the Nile.) There were still boarders. They lived — for want of a better verb — on the top floor of School House, accessed by a formidable back door.

Rule 13: The rear entrance is forbidden to all boys other than boarders. (We all had a good snigger about that one.)

Most of the rest of School House was the generous living quarters of the headmaster, B. O. “Stinker” Bloxham, and his family. Since this family consisted only of the old tyrant, his fat strident wife, and his daughter (a rarely glimpsed teenager whose eyes aimed in two different directions simultaneously), they must have had little difficulty in avoiding one another. One huge room was the Head’s study. I was inside it only once, for an arse caning in 1958. Another was the Nelson Library, named after Norfolk’s best-known adulterer, which only sixth-formers were allowed to use. The real school, where actual teaching took place, was concealed behind School House: a ramshackle collection of ugly buildings surrounding the playground. “Playground” is what it was called, but the word suggests something inappropriate. Not much playing went on. Imagine it, rather, as the kind of bleak area vibrating with tribal hostility and potential violence that you see in American prison movies.

The boarders were there not on merit, like me and Goz, but because their fathers (military men, to a man) paid fees. They were generally, therefore, a bit thick.

But only sixth-form boarders could be prefects or house captains — or the Gestapo, as they were jovially called. Goz and I came up against the Gestapo on our first day, at lunch.

(Lunch. What a social litmus paper that word was! At Millfields Primary, we’d had “school dinner,” which we ate, uncritically, in the middle of the day. In the evenings, when fathers came home from work, we had “tea.” On weekends we had dinner at twelve o’clock on Saturdays and one o’clock on Sundays. We’d never heard of lunch, which was, it turned out, short for luncheon and rhymed with truncheon. We’d gone to a new school and discovered a meal we never knew existed. And we ate it in a room we’d never heard of: a refectory. There’s upward mobility for you.)

I was scooping pudding — semolina with a splot of thin red jam on it, like a clot from a nosebleed — into my mouth when Goz nudged me. I looked up and saw that a line of, well, men, blokes, was leaning against the oak-paneled wall of the refectory, looking down at us new boys. Men in school uniforms. Uniforms the same as ours, except that they all had long trousers (we wore chafing flannel shorts) and wore yellow waistcoats under their blazers. And they all carried bendy little cane walking sticks, like the one Charlie Chaplin had in the old silent movies. The one nearest us had a faint rabbit-colored mustache.

Rule 32: Fee-paying first-year boarders are “Worms.” First-year Scholarship boys are “Maggots.”

The Gestapo called Matthews studied us and sighed. “Mainly Maggots, by the smell of ’em, Shipton. Seems to be mostly Maggots, these days, worse luck.”

Matthews made another survey. Then he leaned forward, and, to my horror, placed the tip of his cane under Goz’s chin and used it to lift Goz’s face toward him.

Then Goz said something that doomed him to years of suffering and in the same moment secured my respect forever and ever, amen.

The masters at Newgate were men who’d had the Time of Their Lives (good, bad, ugly, or all three) during the Second World War, or, in some cases, the First. Several of them were homosexual. (I use the term deliberately. Back then, gay still meant “energetically happy” or “brightly colored.” Moreover, it could not have been applied, accurately, to the tweedy, closeted buggers that taught us.) While it was puzzling that it needed three masters to supervise the boys’ showers after PE, I’d like to put it on record that I never witnessed any sexual abuse. (Some of them may still be alive and in touch with their lawyers.) And, as I recall, the homosexual masters were rather more kindly than the other sort, but I may be sentimentalizing. All masters wore black academic gowns that gave them a batty appearance. They smoked incessantly, even in class.

On Wednesday afternoons, they transformed themselves into army officers, the prefects turned into sergeants, and we boys became their toy soldiers. We wore itchy uniforms that were too big for our bodies, black berets too big for our heads, and incredibly heavy black boots. The playground became the parade ground. Assembled on it, we looked like rows of thin brown mushrooms that had been dipped in ink at either end. We were marched up and down and back and forth for half an hour while the Gestapo screamed incomprehensible orders and abuse. Then we were marched, shouldering disabled First World War rifles that were longer and heavier than we were, to the school playing fields, where we attacked one another. One miniature platoon, bleating cries of bloodlust, would attack the long-jump pit while another would defend it. The masters/officers would spin wooden football rattles to simulate the sound of machine-gun fire while smoking their cigarettes or pipes.

I survived these inglorious battles, and others. In large part, I owe this to the art master, whose name was Julian Farrow. (School nickname: Jiffy.) Which is odd, really, because we never greatly liked each other and he was usually disappointed with my work. Jiffy was a small, intense Welshman whose bird-bright gaze glimmered at you from beneath tangled luxuriant eyebrows. He always wore harsh clothes in shades of murk. Bristly tweed jackets the color of cow flop. Dun flannel trousers, brutal shoes like dead dogs’ noses. He dressed that way, I now think, because at Newgate, art was seen as a mimsy, girlish subject and he was desperately determined not to look effeminate. (“Bender” Bendick, the geography master, often wore gay cravats, but that was okay, because geography was a manly subject with military implications.) Inside Jiffy’s coarse carapace dwelled a passionate heart that pumped paint. He was a lover of violent color. The gods he worshipped were Cézanne and van Gogh and a Russian painter called Chaïm Soutine. Jiffy showed us the improbable colors — purple, rose, orange — that Cézanne found in a perfectly normal French landscape. He waxed lyrical about the slathers of thick paint that van Gogh used to depict the streetlights outside some café. He relished the sickly yellow, lurid red, and bilious green flesh tones in Soutine’s distorted portraits.

I didn’t get it. My favorite artist was Frank Bellamy, who did the Dan Dare strip on the front page of the Eagle comic. Bellamy’s art was clean and bright and hard-edged and knew what it was doing.

I loved, love, the surfaces of things. What things actually look like. Or, rather, what they would look like if we were looking at them for the first time. Or if we had been suddenly cured of blindness. Back then I believed (and on my good days still do) that art explains the things that words can’t manage, merely by delighting in them. Fire flame reflected in the brown belly of a teapot. The echo of the eye in a spilled tear. Warped reflections in a car’s chrome fender. The shadow of Dan Dare’s heroic jaw as he contemplates the burning of a galactic battleship in a Venusian eclipse. The soft textures of a girl’s breast in furtive sunlight.

I fumbled and fought against Jiffy’s nurturing until the term we did Still Lifes. On Fridays he would give us the History of Art, closing the art room’s curtains and talking us through slides he slid onto the wall via an Aldis projector. We got about two minutes per image. Longer than that, and the projector’s lamp would melt the slide. In Year Four, we looked at Spanish and Dutch still-life paintings from the seventeenth century. Jiffy was sniffy about Still Life. He was all about what he called the “latent energy” of things. Objects that just sat there being themselves were not his cup of tea. (Whereas I was very interested in how difficult it was to draw a cup of tea.) So he taught Still Life in terms of composition. How the artist had used triangles, parabolas, and other geometrical devices to shape the painting. How light and shade were patterned. How these techniques might be used to paint something more worthwhile.

I sat there ravished, breathless, gazing at the treasures cast upon the wall. Hands and eyes that were now less than dust had painted things that were packed with life. The gleam in a pewter jug, the gloss on a dead bird’s wing, the mellow curve of a clay pipe, the silver glitter on the scales of a fish, the dash of pigment that became winter light on a wineglass. It was incredible. It was almost frightening.

One of the slides was a painting by a Spanish monk called Juan Sánchez Cotán. Bear with me while I describe it. Or try to describe it. My hobbling and pigeon-toed prose can’t do it justice, I know that. And, in fact, Cotán’s subject matter sounds pretty unexciting. All the same, I’ve stood in front of the painting — it’s in San Diego, California — on several occasions and spilled tears of envy every time. It’s a picture of five things: an apple, a cabbage, a melon, a pinkish slice cut from the melon, and a cucumber. They are exquisitely, almost obsessively, realistic, yet they look not merely natural but supernatural. The apple (actually, it’s a yellow quince, I later discovered) and the cabbage dangle on lengths of coarse string on the left-hand side of the painting. The cabbage is lower than the quince. The melon, the segment cut from it, and the warty cucumber sit on what looks like a stone window ledge, protruding slightly from its edge. But the window — if that’s what it is — is utterly and intensely black. Blacker than any night sky in the darkest part of the universe. Darker than death. The whole middle of the painting is a terrifying void. But the fruits and the vegetables, those humble and edible objects, have their backs to that void. They bathe in the brevity of light, casting their modest shadows onto the stone. They say, they insist, that they briefly exist.

“Here we are,” they say. “Death is the default. There’s no avoiding it. It’s the background into which we will inevitably melt. We will rot and so will you. But in the meantime, eat, see, smell, taste, listen, touch. Look how commonplace and how beautiful we are.”

I wanted to tell Jiffy all this, but I didn’t know how. Didn’t have the words. I was only fourteen, after all. And the other boys would have called me a pretentious prat, and worse. But old Brother Juan Sánchez had set me on my course. I’ve made my living these past thirty years painting and drawing things exactly and intensely as they are and letting them speak for themselves.

In time, and reluctantly, Jiffy recognized that I wasn’t going to become one of his inspired splatterers. He even praised (and, to be fair, greatly improved) my technique, even though he used the word technique as if it were a sad and regrettable impediment. He never gave me a mark higher than B. So I was just a bit pleased when I passed my O level with a grade A. My best piece of exam work was a pencil study of my grandmother’s hand resting on our table next to an orange. I was terribly proud of it. Hands are difficult. Textured globes aren’t exactly easy, either. I liked the way the surface of the orange was echoed in the skin of Win’s work-coarsened, sixty-two-year-old hand. She was a patient model. She sat for hours with her Bible in the other hand. She could have memorized the book of Job in the time it took. Perhaps she did.

I have a framed print of the Cotán painting here in my apartment. It hangs opposite the photograph of my young grandparents. I keep meaning to move it. Because when I look at it, I see Percy and Win reflected in the glass, hovering in the eternal darkness at the heart of the painting, just to the right of the apple — Sorry, quince.