16

AS IF JANE AND MAX HAD NOT PUNISHED me sufficiently, the next day my bank card was taken by the machine in the wall, because my account is overdrawn. I couldn’t face asking Uncle Karl for money, and I have to pay back the money I borrowed from Philip Zealy, so that afternoon I bought the Evening Standard and responded to an advertisement for telesales operators. They wanted me there the next morning, in Hatfield.

Without knowing it, I had chosen a car magazine; their glass tower was near the station. There was a group of us waiting at reception, where we were met by a middle-aged man who called himself Rob. He was a big fellow, with short, load-bearing legs. He pulled his jacket tight, creating a masculine bustle as the jacket’s single flap stuck out in a prim salute over his backside. Rob explained that we were to phone people who had advertised the sale of a car in another magazine or newspaper, ask them if they had had any success, and, if not, persuade them to re-advertise in his magazine.

He led us upstairs to the selling room, a huge windowless pasture full of nodding humans—nodding, because all of them were on the phone, and all of them talking and moving up and down as they spoke. There was the universal proud blandness of all office noise, and as I heard that awful continuity I thanked my stars that I have for so many years avoided this form of drudgery—for so long I have been what Psalm 81 calls “delivered from the pots.” Well, we were shown to bare plastic desks, handed sheets of telephone numbers attached to names and models of cars, and told to “get on with it.” At each successful sale, or “take,” we should raise our hand. Every minute or so a hand went up in the room, at which fat Rob rose from his chair at the front and walked with short, Japanese steps to a blackboard, where he adjusted a running total—of advertisements sold that day, I presumed.

I made £27 in two hours, which wasn’t bad, but quite apart from the humiliation of the work, I suffered an attack of nerves while having to walk through the room to the lavatory, and this attack was far, far worse than even the job itself. Simply put, I found that my legs were beginning to seize up as I tried to make my way to the bathroom. The desks were all facing me, I had to walk against the visual tide, as it were, and I felt that all eyes were turned my way, even though reason told me that no one in the room had the slightest interest in my passage.

In a second, the horrors of adolescence returned. I vividly remember the moment, in my fourteenth year, at which I became self-conscious. I was late for school assembly, and had to walk into the hall while several hundred boys and girls watched me. I realized that for the first time I felt very awkward being watched, and my legs began to freeze, and I barely made it in one piece to my seat. Should I try to look as if I was not being watched, or try to look as if I knew I was being watched?

I can laugh about it now, but how terrible was that hurtle into self-consciousness; it was like a second birth. After that morning, whenever I went into assembly I became sure that everyone was looking at me; I imagined they could even hear me swallowing, and so I tried to control my flow of saliva. A terrible dryness and pressure would build in my throat, and then the only way to swallow without being heard was to give a little cough (the forerunner of the later “artificial” cough). For several months I seemed to have no personality at all, except the one I daily built. Writing this, I am reminded of that grand line from one of the Psalms: “Except the Lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it.” But as soon as I write this down, I am also reminded, less happily, of what Jesus says to Nicodemus: “Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.” Well, this agony was my second birth. I became anxious about speaking in public; when asked to read aloud from a schoolbook by one of my teachers, I bit into my pen and flooded my mouth with ink, and then ran from the classroom, as if to clean my mouth. My nose seemed to be getting larger than the rest of my face; or rather, my nose seemed to be becoming adult faster than my mouth or chin. In fact this was just the familiar way that adolescent faces, whose parts are enlarging at unequal speeds, sometimes resemble parodies of stretched heads by Picasso. But I was horrified, and for a while at nighttime, once I had said goodnight to my parents, I would strap up my nose with tape and elastic bands, to try to arrest its growth.

I became the victim of involuntary erections. Surely everyone could see the bulge in my trousers blooming like a flower in time-lapse photography. Now, as an adult, when I remember those erections, I think of one of my schoolteachers, Mr. Conners, showing our class photographic slides of ancient statues. When the fertility god appeared, with its penis crudely extended, Mr. Conners dealt with the subject forthrightly, took a breath, and said: “Note the engorged phallus.” He had clearly prepared the phrase; of course it failed, there were the usual laughs in the darkness. After I had mentioned it to her once, Mr. Conners’s phrase became a happy refrain between Jane and me. On those mornings when the usual male helplessness was stiffly facing her, Jane would sometimes look at my springing penis, and say, “Note the engorged phallus!”

Desperate, I wrote away to an American company that was advertising in one of my mother’s magazines. They sent me a self-hypnosis cassette, which promised “Self-Confidence.” My parents teased me for this extravagance, which cost all my pocket money. You were supposed to fall asleep to the sound of a man’s soothing words. At night (my nose taped up), I put on plush headphones, rested my head against the pillow, and drifted off on waves of Californian generosity. The man’s voice sounded bearded, somehow. Very gentle and bearded and muffled. He told me that I was a “valuable person,” that I should think well of myself, and could be brought into a new life if only I filled myself with self-esteem. It is hard to say if these words did me any good, because I was always asleep within two minutes. For all I know, the tape ended after two minutes, or suddenly turned into a vicious attack: “You are selfish, self-absorbed, utterly nugatory. You think that listening to this pathetic American tape will help. Think again, you little nonentity …” and so on!

A second birth, a second birth. The Greeks should have said: “Call no man happy who is born again.” And I’m not just talking about very shy and obviously damaged people, like Samuel Spedding, Muriel Spedding’s son who still lives in Sundershall, even though he is over fifty. Poor Sam Spedding, whom Max and I used to tease when we were boys. He was so shy that when you phoned him and asked, “Is that Sam Spedding?” he answered, in a very quiet voice, “It is, actually,” as if slightly amazed that he existed at all.