Being Boycie, page 4
I came alarmingly close to suffering some harsh ridicule myself when one of my contemporaries found out I’d been into hospital during the holidays to have my testicles nudged on their downward journey into their natural adult resting place. I had to use all my wit and ingenuity in explaining that the same operation had to be done sometimes to horses and bulls who went on to become champion sires, which seemed to nip any potential taunting in the bud.
One of my stranger school contemporaries was John Romer, who later became well known as a television presenter of ancient archaeology. A powerful man with a great interest in the infamous Satanist, Aleister Crowley, he was also an outstanding draughtsman and had gone on from Ottershaw to the Royal College of Art, where he developed his interest in drawing the ancient monuments of Egypt, which led him into archaeology.
Also as a result of the school’s policy of making boys do more of what they were manifestly not good at, I suffered for my swimming. I was a rotten swimmer then, and always have been; I’ve never even learned the crawl, and can only manage a few metres in the ‘Drowning Cow’ style of breaststroke. Seeing my inadequacy in aquatic sports, the sports master appointed me swimming pool lifesaving attendant, which meant patrolling on a pontoon that jutted several yards out over the water. I had to stroll back and forth, looking out for boys who had got into difficulties, ready to extend to them the long bamboo pole with which I’d been issued. The idea was that they would grab the end of the pole and I would pull them into the side where they could rescue themselves.
Inevitably, almost the first time I was on duty, I had to proffer the pole to a flailing, distressed eleven year old, who grabbed it, panicked, fell back into the water and pulled me in with him. It became a case of the blind leading the blind as we thrashed about both trying to reach the edge, and dry land...
On the whole, I kept out of trouble, but there was a quick reprise of the smoking episode that had led to the whacking at Belmont. We were smoking real cigarettes this time, albeit tiny spindly little things called Woodbines, unfiltered and loosely packed – five good draws could get the flame to your fingertips.
We had carefully selected a secluded cluster of rhododendrons to hide ourselves while we ‘experimented’. We stood beneath the canopy of dark brittle leaves, certain that no one could see in. But we’d overlooked all the escaping smoke which five illicit young smokers could produce finding its way up through gaps in the leaves into a kind of funnel and streaming out of the top like smoke from a tepee.
The smoke was spotted, we were flushed out, and subjected to punishment. But instead of a short sharp burst of pain (physical chastisement being banned at Ottershaw), we were allotted endless dreary duties doing things around the grounds – weeding, repairing fences, or cleaning the stairs in the main buildings. I would rather have had the thrashing (I say now).
Despite my ineptness at swimming, the testicle trouble and my lack of progress with some of the academic stuff, I didn’t suffer from too much teasing; I had a fairly broad range of friends, both in my house (North House) and elsewhere in the school. With one in particular, a jovial little fellow named Michael Bywaters, I shared my enthusiasm for the Goon Show, broadcast on the BBC Home Service.
In fact, I’d first listened to the wonderfully surreal Goons with my father, who, despite the moroseness that clouded much of his life, had started out with a great sense of humour. When I was young, he made me laugh lot, and he enjoyed extracting the humour from any situation. If two people were hammering away in some passionate debate, he would interject, ‘That’s all very fine and large... if true,’ or, from Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop, ‘Up to a point, Lord Copper’ – meaning ‘No’.
He introduced me to the Marx Brothers, and Jaques Tati’s Monsieur Hulot. He also loved the pioneering humorous radio shows of the ’50s, like Take it from Here (with the Glums) and Beyond Our Ken. He and I would sit at home in Cherry Cottage, both of us listening to the Goons, falling about and crying with laughter while my mother didn’t get it at all and looked on with faint disdain. I very quickly cracked the whacky voices created by Spike Milligan, Harry Secombe, Peter Sellers and Michael Bentine for Eccles, Neddy Seagoon, Moriarty and Bloodnok – a pleasure which I shared with Bywaters at school.
Strangely, when I was older and making noises about my ambition to go on the stage and use my skills in mimicry and timing – both of which had to a large extent been triggered, or at least encouraged by the funny films my father took me to and the radio shows we loved – he gave me absolutely no encouragement, and even when it was a something we regularly shared, he never suggested I might follow suit.
His default demeanour was critical, and grew more so as I grew older, and perhaps as he became more embittered about the life he led and the work he did. Most of our communication seemed to centre around criticism and instruction, so that I became very accustomed to his sharp censures.
‘What are you doing?’ or ‘Don’t do that!’
One evening, when I was about twelve, I thought he and my mother had gone out. Fancying a piece of fruit, as I often did, I wandered into the dining room where there was always a bowl of fresh oranges and bananas, and helped myself to a big juicy Jaffa. I’d just stuck my fingernails in to start peeling it, when he appeared from behind the door, ashen faced and furious.
‘I knew you’d been stealing fruit!’ he declared triumphantly. ‘And now I’ve caught you red-handed. You do not steal – not from us, not from anyone. When you want fruit, you ask for it – understand!’
I could scarcely believe that he’d actually been lying in wait to catch me, and put up no fight when he announced that I was to be chastised and he laid into me with a slipper.
I was easily led into trouble at school, too. Once, finding myself with two friends on the fringes of the school grounds while we performed some tedious chore, one of my companions suggested that we slip through the perimeter fence and catch a bus into Woking to see the new Hammer House of Horror production of Dracula, with the inimitable Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing.
At the cinema, I bought our tickets to overcome the ‘X’ rating (I was just fifteen, nudging six feet tall), I insisted that as I wouldn’t be scared like the others, I wanted to sit on my own. Within ten minutes, I’d found my friends, and stuck by them for the rest of the film. When we were caught getting back late and owning up to what we’d done, we were punished not with a caning but by having a few privileges withdrawn, while our parents were sent letters containing the damning information that we’d been to see a film, and an X film at that.
The next time I saw Christopher Lee, fifteen years later, he was leaning over my shoulder in a West End club, breathily demanding a Bloody Mary. Was it my imagination, or were those canine teeth just a little too long?
Above all, though, the great benefit of Ottershaw School for me was the number of opportunities to act that it provided.
I enjoyed French classes, and ‘Tubby’ White who taught me also produced the school plays, and cast me in all of them. Before my voice broke, it was inevitable that I should be cast in female roles and, though I say it myself, I made a dashed fine-looking woman. My first experience of this was as Alizon Eliot, the daughter of the house in The Lady’s Not for Burning. I did notice that after that I seemed to have quite a few more friends among the older boys, although, thank God, there were no physical approaches. I also noted that the interest waned as soon as my voice broke. Before that happened, though, I had played Anna, Tobit’s wife in Tobias and the Angel which, in hindsight, must have been a tricky part for a boy to play, while my first part as a man was Sir Benjamin Backbite in Sheridan’s School for Scandal. Acting when I was a child and teenager seemed the most natural thing in the world to me, and the stage was where I felt most at home. When I wasn’t acting, I was always pulling voices out of my repertoire – real people, surreal fantasy folk like the Goons, children’s voices, animals, birds, ghosts, railway trains, car crashes – anything that a human voice could reproduce.
I’d always been encouraged to act by my mother, too, who had appeared in several am-dram productions for the Tadworth Players, where soon after I left school I joined her as Feste, the clown in Twelfth Night.
While I was developing a taste for theatre, I was also getting into rock’n’roll, which was emerging then as a distinct new form of popular music and replacing the boring older crooners and balladeers like Guy Mitchell and Johnny Ray (although, incredibly, teenage girls in the mid-1950s had screamed and wept at the sight of their tone-deaf, Brylcreemed idol).
One or two of the boys had Dansette gramophones, and these machines were in constant demand for playing the new records that we’d go off to buy in Chertsey and Woking. The transition from the clumsy 78rpm records to the altogether sexier 45s happened while I was at Ottershaw. I was thrilled by my first 45, with the words printed on the label: ‘1957 Super Rhythm Style Series’. Who wouldn’t want some of that?
Regrettably, the playing of rock’n’roll records at school was strictly banned on the grounds that at the time anyone over thirty thought the music was utterly subversive and sexually arousing in a dangerous way. We were caught listening to the latest records by our housemaster, Mr Oettinger, who – like the Camp Kommandant in St Brevin-les-Pins – seriously chastised me for listening to ‘dangerous’ music. Before doling out whatever punishment he deemed appropriate, he couldn’t resist peering over his glasses at me with an eyebrow raised and asking, ‘Well, Challis; are you getting the message?’ – a musical buzz phrase of the moment.
My passion had been sparked originally by local and home-grown skiffle bands that started to appear in Britain in the mid-’50s, like Wally Whyton’s Vipers, whose rhythm section used a washboard and a tea-chest bass – purer skiffle, I thought, than Lonnie Donegan (who had a drummer). After that, through the growing reach of Radio Luxemburg, I discovered the truly thrilling sounds of the new black American rock’n’rollers – Little Richard, Fats Domino, Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley – as well as white bands like the Champs (remember Tequila?) and Johnny and the Hurricanes, whose great Red River Rock was a hit on both sides of the Atlantic.
When I told my mother I wanted to play rock’n’roll, she didn’t tell my father, but she bought me my first cheap, orange-box guitar. As soon as I’d learned my E, A and B7 chords, I traded in the instrument for a better one, and recruited three more enthusiasts from school into my own new group, Johnny and the Bandits. With a bass made from a tea-chest, piano wire and a broomstick, plus washboard percussion, my friend David Coxall could play a few recognisable riffs as lead guitar while I played rhythm. We used to practise in the games changing rooms – a kind of underground tunnel with great echoing acoustics that could only make the cacophony sound better.
The school music master, excited by the chance to get boys playing instruments without having to bully them into it, taught us more chords and suggested new things to play. What made him think the old Delta blues song, The House of the Rising Sun, was suitable, I can’t imagine, especially when he arranged for us to perform it at a concert in front of the parents, and ‘Six Inches’, the headmaster. Of course, we had no idea the song was about a New Orleans whorehouse, but Six Inches did, and he leaped up on to the stage to stop me singing before I’d even got to ‘that ball and chain’.
What to do? The end of the ’50s
To my father’s obvious disgust, I left school without going on to do A levels, having pursued what could only be called an undistinguished academic career. I’d had promise, some of my teachers averred, but I’d never applied myself – not to the subjects I professed to like, nor to the sports I’d enjoyed. The only thing I’d really thrown myself into with a naturalness that didn’t feel like effort was acting.
Arthur Foot was candid. ‘We all want to be actors,’ he said with a flick of his hand to emphasise the flippancy of such an aspiration, ‘but what you need is a safe steady job, gaining practical experience while passing exams to get the qualifications you’ll need for a longterm career.’ This was a view with which my father entirely concurred, and was the basis of several heated debates about my future.
By that time we had moved from Tadworth to a bigger, detached house at 8, Sunnybank, Epsom. I was living there, still dependent on my parents for survival, and I let myself be pushed into a compromise. My mother’s father, Wallace Wyndham Harden, was an auctioneer’s clerk in Bath, and very good at his job. He had a reputation for being a whizz with money, and was a tireless dabbler in company shares and local property.
My parents sought his advice and he came up with the name of a contact who was a partner in Osenton & Lamden, Chartered Auctioneers and Estate Agents in Leatherhead. Only vaguely aware of how an estate agent went about the business of selling houses, I ambled along to an interview, in which I felt afterwards I had not excelled. Evidently, however, I did well enough for them to offer me the most junior post available in their Ashtead office.
Although I soon passed my driving test, I only occasionally had access to my parents’ car, and each morning after donning my grey flannel suit, I took the short bus journey from Epsom to Ashtead. My duties at the office consisted of making tea, running off Roneoed copies of property details, and occasionally going out to look at houses and preparing their descriptions – good modern bathrooms always had ‘H&C Running Water and Low-level Flush PedestalToilet’; a pocket handkerchief sized garden with a flower bed and an apple tree were described as ‘Extensive Gardens laid to Lawn, Herbaceous Border and Fruit Trees’. A house described as ‘imposing’ was usually an ugly great beast of a place whose only hope for the future was as a Borstal or a mental institution. I quite enjoyed this creative side of the business, heavily prescribed though it was, but I was just getting bored with the job when it was announced that staff cuts were to be made. I had, as it happened, recently met a man who worked for Douglas’s, another firm of estate agents in Leatherhead, who’d told me about a job vacancy there. Although Douglas’s were more Red Brick Semi than Gent’s Res compared with where I was, the pay was double, and I jumped ship at Ashtead before I was pushed.
The job at Leatherhead wasn’t much better, and I still found it hard to focus. I knew that at heart I was just not driven enough to make much of it. However, life at home was at least tolerable as long as I stuck it out, and I was beginning to make a little headway with some of the girls I’d met at the Epsom tennis club, just down the road.
Like most suburban tennis clubs in the ‘50s, it was the social centre for young things of vaguely middle-class or mercantile backgrounds. I was good at tennis – indeed a master at Ottershaw had told me I might have become a professional, if only I’d learned to focus – and I could see no harm in watching fit, slender teenage girls running around the court in tantalisingly short white skirts. It was inevitable that I started a bit of a relationship with one of them, a girl called Christine Boyt, the daughter of a local butcher. Her father gave me a few driving lessons, and once took me to see his abattoir.
When my Sheffield Grandad Challis came to stay, I told him about it. He was impressed.
‘By goom!’ he said. ‘You’re a looky young booger, and no mistake! A loovely lass, and free meat! Who could ask for more?’
Shortly after that, I’d left home and I thought I’d never see Christine again. But those teenage tennis romances stay with you forever. I was delighted when, fifty years later, she turned up to see me in a play.
As well as Grandad Challis, my mother’s parents came to Epsom from time to time, and we often stayed with them in Bath. I loved my mother’s mother very much; she was a sprightly little silver-haired woman, who never said an unpleasant thing about anyone, and probably never had an unpleasant thought, either. She was one of the most life-affirming people I’ve ever met. For reasons lost in the mist of early childhood, I used to call her ‘Khaki’, which was my own special name for her. I spent many happy hours playing games and cards with her, when, through some kind of telepathy, she often seemed to know what I had in my hand, and there was always a great empathy between us.
One day, coming home from work in Leatherhead, I walked back from the bus stop, up Sunnybank and was a few houses from home when I spotted her – small, sparrow-like and silver haired – in the front garden of our house. I called a greeting, which she returned with a big smile and a wave before disappearing through the side door to the back garden. I hadn’t known she was coming, and guessed my mother had simply forgotten to tell me.
In the house, my mother greeted me tearfully. ‘I’m afraid I’ve got some sad news about Grandma.’
‘Grandma?’ I asked. ‘She looked fine to me.’
My mother looked puzzled. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘I’ve just seen her, in the front garden. She saw me and gave me a wave, then went through to the back.’
‘Don’t talk nonsense, Johnny; you can’t have done. She died at home in Bath, at eleven o’clock this morning.’
I was utterly astounded. I’d seen her, a few minutes before, without any question. Bizarre as it may seem, I still believe that she appeared to me then so that she could say a final goodbye. It was exactly the kind of thing she would have wanted to do.
Despite the intensity of emotion I experienced with Christine Boyt, I was still pretty innocent in my late teens, and none of my first relationships ever got beyond the kissing to medium-petting stage, so I had a terrible shock when I first came across an incidence of illicit leg-over in the Ashtead office of Osenton & Lamden. I’d left to go home one evening, but before I reached the bus stop, I remembered I’d left something back at the office. Having my own key, I went back and let myself in. As soon as I was inside, I heard a terrific scuffling going on in the senior partner’s room just above the front door. When some embarrassed female squeaking was added to the scuffling, I guessed what must have been happening. Sure enough, a dishevelled senior partner soon emerged from the front room, still adjusting his dress and harrumphing awkwardly. Up until then I hadn’t been absolutely sure that people really ‘did’ it. And frankly, the sight of this ‘old’ man (probably about twenty years younger than I am now) looking so uncomfortable about it didn’t encourage me to try ‘it’ out myself too soon.
