IN THE AUTUMN of 1951, the beginning of my second year in the sixth form at St Joseph’s, I was standing outside St Mary Magdalen’s church one Sunday morning in the throng that had just emerged from mass, chatting to a couple of friends, when a tall, smartly dressed youth came up and invited them to a birthday party he was having that evening at his home. I scarcely knew this boy, who was a year or two older than me, and whose parents were reputed to be well-off. He had once been a member of the youth club, but had evidently outgrown its simple pleasures. He emphasised that he was hosting the party himself without parental interference and promised it would be fun. I got the impression that he had decided to have a party at the last moment and was urgently rounding up guests for it. He looked at me, and said: ‘Would you like to come?’ I said I would. I’m not sure that before my holiday in Heidelberg I would have accepted the invitation so readily – or perhaps at all.
I remember nothing of the house except the room where the party took place: a large room with a wooden floor from which the carpets had been rolled up for dancing to a gramophone, and a number of chairs, some easy, some upright, pushed back against the wall. There was a table with sandwiches and cakes, and drinks, including a fruit punch which had alcohol of some kind in it. The host organised games designed to create a party mood, including musical chairs in which the boys sat on the chairs and the girls paraded round and sat on the boys’ knees when the music stopped. The last couple left had to kiss. The game was played several times. Afterwards I continued talking to a girl who had perched on my knee in a friendly, unembarrassed and unembarrassing way. She belonged to the parish, but was not a member of the youth club, and I had never met her before. Her name was Peggy, and I found her very easy to talk to. She had fair hair, a pretty elfin face, a nice smile, expressive eyes and a very pleasant voice, which was not ‘posh’ but had no trace of the south London vowels and glottal stops that accented the speech of me and most of my friends to some degree. When amused, she gave an unusual and attractive low-pitched chuckle. Above all she seemed as keen to make a favourable impression as I was. As the evening went on it became evident that boys and girls were pairing off, curled up together in armchairs or sitting on upright chairs with the girls on the boys’ knees, and kissing, or in the current idiom, ‘necking’. I suggested to Peggy that we should sit down while there was still a spare chair, and she sat on my knee. Affecting a nonchalance I was far from feeling, I said something like, ‘Perhaps we should do what everybody else seems to be doing,’ and she smiled and replied in the same tone of light-hearted dalliance, ‘Perhaps we should.’ And so I kissed a girl, properly, for the first time. It was a delicious sensation. How could one have guessed how incredibly soft a girl’s lips were? I saw Peggy home after the party, arranged to meet again, gave her a last kiss in the porch of her terraced house and walked back to my own, blissfully rejoicing in my good fortune. It seemed that she had no other steady boyfriend. I had found a girlfriend at last, superior to anyone I had met at the youth club.
Peggy was a year older than me, had left school, and worked as a telephone switchboard operator for a big company that manufactured lifts. I would phone her there to arrange dates (not that we used that transatlantic term) because she didn’t have a phone at home, and if one of the other operators answered I’d ask them to transfer me to Peggy. Her family background was always something of a mystery to me. During the year that we went out together I often entertained her at home in Millmark Grove, but I never got beyond her own front door. Sometimes this would be opened by her mother, who would give me an unsmiling, slightly sardonic greeting before summoning her daughter. There seemed to be no father in residence, but I never discovered anything about her family life and personal history, nor did she volunteer any information. If I touched on the subject she replied evasively, and I did not feel I had the right to press her for details. I felt very lucky to have met her at this juncture in my life. She was too short and stocky to be called beautiful, but she was attractive, dressed with good taste, and, unlike the girls I met at the youth club, she had some high-cultural interests and enthusiasms, through which I sensed that she was trying to make up for having left school at sixteen because of her family circumstances. Perhaps she thought I would help her in this project, but initially she was my tutor. She took me to my first classical concert, at the Albert Hall, to hear her favourite piece, Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1, and she introduced me to the gallery of the Old Vic, only half an hour’s journey from Brockley, where, sitting on a bench seat, you could see great productions of Shakespeare for a shilling. She joined the youth club, and we went on their organised rambles and other excursions together, and she came to Sunday afternoon football matches and cheered me from the touchline. The house she lived in, probably with shared occupancy, was a terraced town house with steps down to a basement area and another flight up from the pavement, at the top of which was a recessed porch where we necked for a while when I saw her home at the end of an evening. We never did anything more than kiss and cuddle. If the hall light was illuminating the porch through the frosted glass in the front door, Peggy would quietly slip inside and switch it off before returning to my embrace, but the situation was still too public to attempt anything more intimate. In any case, I was inhibited by moral scruples and a temperamental cautiousness. I sometimes meditated feeling her breasts through her clothing but resisted the temptation, reasoning that if she took offence I would be mortified and if she didn’t it would be an invitation to go further – and where would that lead? To mortal sin, certainly, and all kinds of other possible complications. Perhaps the temptation was lessened by the fact that her breasts were not very prominent. So I contented myself with necking in the porch, leaving me with an erection like a small crowbar in my trouser pocket which gradually subsided as I walked home. I was only sixteen and a half when we met, and did not pretend to her or myself that I was in love with Peggy. I liked her a lot and enjoyed being with her and I was proud to have her as a girlfriend. When I had occasion to introduce her to my classmates, they were impressed. But I had other things on my mind besides sex, like experimenting with writing and getting to university.
There were about fifteen of us in the second-year sixth form, divided roughly equally between Arts and Sciences. Although there had been a few pupils at St Joseph’s in the past who had gone on to Oxford, we beneficiaries of the 1944 Education Act were the first sixth-formers in the school’s history nearly all of who applied for university entrance. Dad had needed some persuading that this was a good idea for me. I still nourished vague ambitions to be a journalist (though not specialising in sport) and he had questioned someone he knew who worked in newspapers about the best way to enter that profession. The answer had been: leave school, get a job as a cub reporter on a local paper, and work your way up the ladder. This was perfectly sensible advice in those days, before newspapers started recruiting graduates as a matter of course, and Dad, who knew nothing about universities, thought I should take it. But Mum was uncertain, and went to see the headmaster, Brother Fabian, who convinced her that I had the potential to go to university and should be encouraged to do so.
We had little help at St Joseph’s in applying. I don’t recall anyone telling me there were universities in England other than Oxford, Cambridge and London, and I didn’t presume to apply to Oxbridge, which I associated chiefly with the annual Boat Race and thought of as far too posh for the likes of me. Probably, in spite of the confidence-building experience of going to Germany on my own, I was also reluctant to leave the protection and comforts of home. So I applied to two colleges of the University of London, University College and Queen Mary College. I don’t remember why I applied to only two – perhaps it was a London University rule at the time. I made Queen Mary my second choice rather than the more prestigious King’s College because I thought Queen Mary was more likely to accept me if I failed to get into UCL, but I was rejected by Queen Mary without being interviewed. Everything therefore depended on the interview to which I was summoned at UCL. Their application form had contained a blank page on which you were asked to write a brief essay explaining why you wanted to do a degree course in English Language and Literature, and I suspect my offering must have impressed or intrigued them because I was closely questioned about it by my two interviewers, Professors A.H. Smith and James Sutherland. They were the only full professors in the Department at the time, and Smith was head of it. I must have given a good account of myself because to my great joy I was offered a place. All I had to do now was pass in my three A-level subjects, English, Latin and History. No specific grades were required, for another curious feature of the new examination system, as well as the minimum age for taking O levels, and also perhaps prompted by egalitarian ideology in the Department of Education, was that the pass/credit/distinction categories of the old School Certificate had been abolished. No marks for O and A levels were published, and they were supposed to be confidential, though schools were informed of them and would often pass them on to pupils unofficially. This took a lot of the anxiety out of getting to university if you were lucky enough to be offered a place. Tuition was free, and maintenance grants were available, means-tested against parental income. There were two kinds of grant: a State Scholarship, awarded to a limited number of candidates who excelled in a special S-level examination in their chosen subject, with no set syllabus; and a less valuable Major County Award, given by the candidate’s local education authority. I was entered for the S-level exam in English and was advised to apply for a Major County Award as well. Accordingly I went one day to London’s imposing County Hall on the south bank of the Thames to be interviewed once more, this time by a committee of four people. (If it seems surprising that so much bureaucratic time was expended on this exercise, remember that in the early 1950s university entrance was not the mass operation it has since become: places were available for only about five per cent of the relevant age group in the population.) This interview gave me the idea for my first published short story.
Around this time my life was made more interesting not just by Peggy, but by the reappearance in London of an old friend, Daniel Moynihan, whom I knew as ‘Dan’ and would later learn to call ‘Danny’. He and his younger brother Michael were the sons of one of my mother’s convent school friends, and I used to play with them in their tall, rather shabby town house beside the tramlines at New Cross Gate until the family moved to Hastings when I was about twelve, and as a teenager I visited them occasionally at weekends or during school holidays. Dan was a year or two older than me, and nearly a foot taller, but we always enjoyed each other’s company, going for long walks along the Hastings seafront, sometimes in darkness and rain, talking of our hopes and anxieties and aspirations. Dan had not had an academic education, had left school at sixteen and was an apprentice cabinetmaker, but he was restive in this occupation and dreamed of becoming an actor, an ambition inspired mainly by cinema-going. It seemed to me pure fantasy when he talked of it on those walks in Hastings, but one day when I thought he was doing his National Service in the RAF Dan turned up at our house in Millmark Grove and announced that he had been given a medical discharge, and had come to London in a make-or-break effort to become an actor. He was lodging with his gran, who lived just ten minutes away from us, and he had taken an office job in London to support himself, while attending evening classes in drama at Morley College in Southwark, that splendid institution of adult education which has helped and inspired so many generations of students. I thought this was an exciting and impressive move, though his parents were not pleased, and my own were sceptical of his chances of success. Dan was good-looking in a lean, athletic way (he had been a competitive hurdler at county level as a teenager), carried himself well, and had a good speaking voice – all valuable attributes for an actor. Most importantly he had the vital spark of desire to act. But he was culturally undernourished and diffident about preparing for some of the exercises in his course which involved finding a monologue from a play to perform, or writing one yourself. I was very willing to help him with such tasks, especially the latter, and with rehearsing his performances. These were my earliest experiments in dramatic writing. Before long Dan won a scholarship to the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art, and I used to go to the end-of-term shows in which the students performed extracts from classic plays, enhancing my knowledge of the history of drama in the process.
I admired Dan’s determination to fulfil his ambition, and combined it with my experience of being interviewed at County Hall to write a short story about a young man who applies for a grant to go to drama school. At the interview he pretends to be the Devil, and succeeds so well in frightening the committee that when he reveals the impersonation they award him the grant. ‘Major County Award’ was published in Signum Fidei in my last term at St Joseph’s, over the name ‘D.S. Lodge’. (My second name is John, but I didn’t see proofs.) A former pupil who had a senior position in the London County Council came to give out prizes at the end of the school year and made a speech in the course of which he said that the headmaster had privately remarked to him that there were no geniuses at St Joseph’s, but he had been given a copy of the latest school magazine in which there was a story which suggested to him that Brother Fabian might be wrong (or words to that effect). Perhaps the visitor had been tickled to come across a story set in his own workplace. Needless to say, I was immensely chuffed by this very public compliment.
By now I definitely harboured ambitions to be a writer. For a combined Christmas and birthday present I requested and received a portable typewriter, an expensive gift, to which I think my aunt Eileen contributed. It was an Oliver, a British make perhaps hoping to be associated or confused with the more famous firm of Olivetti. It served me well for many years. What pocket money I had, I spent mostly on books. My best friend at school was not in my class, but in the Lower Sixth. He was called John Hodgson, a good-looking youth with a head of blond hair worn rather long, who shared my enthusiasm for literature and scorn for the ‘school spirit’ St Joseph’s aimed to instil. In our lunch break we regularly sauntered down to Blackheath Village – arm in arm, I recall, something that would no doubt attract homophobic catcalls from schoolboys today – to browse in a bookshop that sold second-hand Penguins. There I acquired some bargains which I still possess – Aldous Huxley’s Antic Hay, for instance, old numbers of John Lehmann’s book-format magazine New Writing, and several volumes of plays by Shaw, with his prefaces. The moment in Huxley’s novel when a boy comes into a classroom and asks the teacher for ‘the Key to the Absolute’, and the man hands over an ordinary Yale key, has lodged in my mind ever since (it is the key to a cupboard in the chemistry lab where absolute alcohol is kept); so has the moment when Shearwater calls on Coleman and from the doorway glimpses the pink and naked Rosie on a rumpled bed. When I re-read the novel decades later I was surprised to discover some much more erotic passages, but that one made the deepest impression, perhaps because it encapsulated my own sense of exclusion from such experience. This was the era when Penguin dominated quality paperback publishing, and I sometimes lashed out on new copies of books like E.V. Rieu’s translation of The Odyssey in the Penguin Classics series, and the Penguin Book of Contemporary Verse, edited by Kenneth Allott. It was an indication of how much I valued these two books that I converted them into hardbacks with the aid of a special kit you could buy from Penguin, including a little wafer of gold leaf with which to stencil the titles on the spines. I still have them: the covers have not prevented the pages from turning yellow, and the binding on the spines is coming away from the boards where the gum has dried. I’m glad I didn’t persist with this practice. What, after all, could compete with the elegant sans serif lettering and bold colour-coding (orange for literary fiction, green for crime and detection, purple for classics) of the Penguin covers of that era?
I left St Joseph’s that summer without any regrets or subsequent fits of nostalgia. I had never felt really comfortable in its hearty Catholic ethos, and if Malachy Carroll hadn’t come to the school at just the right moment I don’t think I would have learned much that was inspiring for my future development. The school improved considerably in the decade following my departure, sending increasing numbers of boys to university; and it acquired a reputation for rugby and other athletic prowess under the aegis of an ex-military PE teacher known as ‘Chiefie’, a short, assertive, energetic man who arrived in my last years as a pupil, and whom many found charismatic, though not I. His speciality was something called ‘log-work’, which entailed teams of boys in singlets and shorts hurling a long, stripped and varnished tree trunk up in the air and catching it while performing marching manoeuvres. Perhaps my relationship with the school might have been different and more positive if it had been a soccer school instead of a rugby school. It inspired a loyalty and affection in some old boys that I never felt, but I understood their dismay at its later history.
When grammar schools were abolished in London in the 1970s St Joseph’s, which had drawn pupils from all over south-east London and parts of Kent, became a boys’ comprehensive with a local catchment area consisting mainly of Lewisham, one of the most socially deprived and troubled London boroughs. As the proportion of disadvantaged and delinquent boys entering St Joseph’s increased, the level of academic achievement went down and the school developed a bad reputation locally. The bright green blazers became the livery of unacceptable behaviour on the streets and public transport, and Signum Fidei on their breast pockets a badge of dishonour. Middle-class parents ceased to send their children to the school and withdrew those who were there. The school came under ‘special measures’, but in spite of strenuous efforts these failed to make it viable. Early in the present century it was decided to close and demolish the existing school and to build a new co-educational Catholic comprehensive called St Matthew Academy; an academy in the new sense of a school independent of local authority control and supported partly by private enterprise, offering specialised teaching in selected subject areas. Apparently St Matthew was chosen as the patron saint of the new school because he was a tax gatherer before he became an apostle, and the special emphasis of the new Academy’s curriculum was to be ‘Business and Enterprise’. The absence of an apostrophe ‘s’ after his name was never explained to me. The new school is reported to be working well, but the demise of the old one is a sadly familiar story of unintended consequences in the implementation of an educational policy that claimed to be progressive.
In July 1952 I was informed by mail that I had passed in all three A-level subjects, but naturally I wanted to know how well I had performed, so went back to the school to find out. The headmaster, having cautioned me that he was not supposed to divulge the marks, wrote down some words and figures on a piece of paper and passed it to me, holding out his hand for its return when I had perused it. The marks ranged from 62 to 66. I was slightly disappointed as I had expected to do better, especially in English, which was the 66. I had not been awarded a State Scholarship, but I had done well enough in the exam to be put on a waiting list in case scholarships offered to other candidates were not taken up, and not long afterwards I received a letter to say that I had obtained one in this way, replacing the less prestigious Major County Award which I had been given provisionally. The news greatly cheered me and I hastened to share it with Peggy, who congratulated me warmly. With this encouragement I was ready and eager to start my BA course at University College, but the beginning of the academic year was still a couple of months away. I looked in the small ads of the Evening Standard for a job with which to earn some pocket money in the interval. The first one I found, which seemed like good pay for easy work, was advertised by a photographer in Brixton requiring teenage boys as models, but Dad quickly vetoed that. Eventually I took a job with the W.H. Smith bookstall on Waterloo station. It was poorly paid, even by the meagre standards of those days – £3 10s. for a six-day week. I joined a team of two permanent employees, slightly younger than me, whose job it was to push specially designed wooden barrows around the station from platform to platform, selling magazines and newspapers to passengers who had not supplied themselves from the main bookstall. Many years later I wrote a short story called ‘My First Job’, narrated by a sociologist recalling a similar experience when he was between grammar school and university:
I did not dislike the work. Railway stations are places of considerable sociological interest. The subtle gradations of the English class-system are displayed there with unparalleled richness and range of illustration. You see every human type, and may eavesdrop on some of the most deeply emotional moments in people’s lives.
I reacted similarly to the work at first, but after a while it grew monotonous and I tried to inject interest into it by competing with my two colleagues to achieve the highest takings at the end of the week. They were two scruffy cockneys who had left school at fifteen, with whom I had nothing in common, and there was an edginess to our relationship, especially after the senior one tricked me into asking the pleasant young woman who issued us with our stock for some copies of the Wanker’s Times. (I was not familiar with the word ‘wank’, less common then than it is today, or with its colloquial application to the naturist magazine Health and Efficiency.) There was no financial incentive for us to increase our takings – no commission on sales or bonuses for effort. It was competition for its own sake, but the other two boys were drawn into it, and the results naturally delighted the bookstall manager. In the story, a somewhat heightened version of these events, the narrator, now a successful academic of leftist views, recalls how he was victorious, breaking all previous records for sales from a barrow before he went off to university, but he is guiltily haunted by the faces of his two co-workers
as I last saw them, with the realisation slowly sinking in that they were committed to maintaining that punishing tempo of work, that extraordinary volume of sales, indefinitely, and to no personal advantage, or else be subjected to constant complaint and abuse.