Up For It

If life was The Lion in Winter and I was Henry II, this novel would be my Prince John. Everyone else sees only the pustules and the oafishness and the childish behaviour; I see the next king of England. He is my last-born son and I love him the most, possibly because of the peculiar circumstances of his birth, but mostly because he has more of me in him than anything else I’ve written.

Here’s the blurb:

“I’m just not the kind of guy the kind of girls I like, like.”

Oxford in the seventies, when the flares flapped, the cheesecloth itched, and a hairstyle was a contradiction in terms.

Roger Blake is the world’s most misunderstood romantic. But with the soul of a poet and the body of a wardrobe, it doesn’t help that his best mate is the most potent sexual hooligan in the university with a girlfriend who makes everyone else’s look two-dimensional.

Now at the start of his second year, Roger has decided to turn things around. He’s going to become a star on the stage, lose his virginity, and start being happy… though not necessarily in that order. Unfortunately, it turns out the world has its own ideas about whose dreams get to come true, and who ends up getting the girl of their dreams.

A knowing, affectionate satire about a simpler, scruffier age, hilarious and heart-breaking by turns, Up For It is a revisionist romcom about the real agonies and rare ecstasies of growing up, growing wise, and finally growing a pair.

(Interestingly, authors seem to be encouraged to write their own blurb these days, which sounds to me like a bad idea. In my view, the publisher should take on this chore as part of their duties. The author may think their book is about one thing, but an outside agency might see it is really about something completely different. A disinterested blurb might turn out to be a useful check and balance, in the long run.)

Be that as it may, the creation story was a small drama in itself; completely irrelevant to the quality or otherwise of the work, of course, but memorable as an object lesson in how to conduct yourself if nothing else.

After two years at Oxford, I was having a dull time of it in Germany. I was meant to be there to improve my speaking skills, get a bit of academic reading done, and help out as an Englischer Sprachenassistent (is that right? It was nearly fifty years ago) at the Theodor-Heuss-Gymnasium in Göttingen. The town was charming, the children and staff delightful, and my duties were light. But I was shy as a fawn and lonely as a cockroach. Instead of stretching myself by engaging with the locals, as I was supposed to be doing, I was spending most of my time in the cinema rewatching dubbed versions of films I was already familiar with in English – a good enough way of learning new idioms perhaps, but not so good for my barely-there social skills. (Not that they always made a good enough job of the translations, in my view. For instance, at the end of Jaws – called in German Der weiße Hai, and you’ll never guess what that means – Brody’s brilliant line just before he [spoilers] blows up the shark is “Smile, you son of a bitch.” In the German version he says “Fahr zu Hölle, du Bestie” which means, literally, ‘Go to hell, you beast’. Pathetic. I would have indignantly taken it up with someone German if I’d known anyone German to indignantly take it up with.)

I was also reading voraciously – anything but the curriculum; Pinter and Chandler mostly, for some odd reason – and writing non-stop to fill the days. By Christmas I had finished three one-act plays, a couple of short stories, several sketches, and umpteen free-verse poems that no other human being will ever get to read. These last were mostly about my sixth formers. I was barely four years older than them, but the legal, ethical, and moral impossibility of getting any closer to their tremulous loveliness was a daily agony that no amount of reading, writing or going to the cinema could assuage. So come March 1977 I was in no fit state for a long late-night soul-bearing conversation about the meaning of life with another student teacher at the school. It was all right for him, he had a fabulously tender and attentive wife bringing us snacks and helping him get through the bottle of wine. I didn’t even drink, so, stone-cold sober, over-cocky in my painfully acquired new idiomatic German (though I didn’t mention Jaws) and fully aware of what I was doing yet unable to stop myself, I proceeded to overshare, thereby making a total, monumental, English arse of myself.

The precise details of everything I must have said are now, thank God, lost in the mists of mortification, but after one particularly long and embarrassed silence from them, I finally made my way home and tried to get some sleep. After an hour of suicidal shame, I got up again, sat down at my little table in the middle of the threadbare room and started writing. It was completely unplanned, I had no idea what I was doing, but I just knew I needed to be doing something to try and silence the jeering demons in my mind and crowd out the memory of the utterly inappropriate nonsense I had been spouting all evening. I suppose I wrote about ten pages of A4 narrow feint. The next day I felt no better so carried on with the scene I had started. Shortly after that I decided I might as well make this, whatever it was, my next project, so I looked at the characters, looked at my life, and there and then mapped out a 90k-word social comedy, split into three sections like a university year, each section comprising eight chapters like an academic term.

It took about three months to complete, writing and revising in longhand every day, and I spent the next several decades picking at it. (Strangely enough, that first scene I wrote, the first chapter in the book, is about the only bit that has stayed more or less intact throughout every subsequent revision. I have no idea what that might mean.)

It took me a while to settle on a name for my hero. Names come with all sorts of baggage and allusions and you need to get them right. He actually started out as a Brian and for a good few years he was a Gareth, but only until I met real people with those handles, and then I had to think again. In the end I went with Roger Blake – Blake because it sounds like ‘bloke’ and ‘bleak’, both of which he rather is, and because I was in Blake’s House at junior school (some kind of 17th-century navy man, I understand). And Roger is an echo of the series of Willard Price Adventure novels from Parson Street library I used to read and reread as a youngster. I also rather liked the irony of my central character being saddled with a name that is one of the many euphemisms for the sexual congress he has been fruitlessly pursuing for so long.

Titles are also vital. The first that occurred to me stuck to the thing like an albatross for so long that I used it as an excuse for not being able to get it published. After toying with the humdrum Something of a Comedown for a while, and then the rather suave Gentlemen and Players, it was only in the last couple of years that I finally stumbled upon the title by which it is now known, and I rather think it was worth the wait. It’s brief, appropriate, allusive, ambiguous, in your face, and slightly vulgar.

If nothing else, Up For It now encapsulates the spirit of my time at university and, for all its youthful faults, I’m glad and proud to have written it. In job interviews, in response to the question “What is your proudest achievement?” I would always reply, “I completed a novel which I think came out rather well,” fondly of the opinion this spoke volumes about my dedication to the task in hand, determination to see a big job through to the end, and my artistic flair. No bugger cared.

Finally, FWIW, my hero is not me – not entirely, I had it even worse than him – but he is nicer than me, and better than me at the things I aspired to be good at. Certainly some of these things happened, though not necessarily in the same order or in quite the way they happen in the book, and some of the people I once knew might do a double take, as in a distorting mirror, if they were ever to come across their fictional representation within its pages. But if I have been less than kind to the ghosts of some of my acquaintances, I have always been sure to save my harshest criticism for my own fictional counterpart. While my hero’s struggles may be largely fiction, they were also, largely, based on my own, and so, like him, I must own them… yet I would also like to think we both survived our travails sadder, wiser, and better men.

On 1st January 1980 I started keeping a daily journal, a practice I have kept up religiously ever since, thereby obviating the need to ever write a book like this again. But I’m glad I took the opportunity when I did. This little work stands as an aide-memoire to a vanished era that will always mean a lot to me, and taught me more than I knew at the time. 

I hope you enjoy these first four chapters of Up For It. If you would like to see more, please let me know. I would be as astonished as I would be delighted to hear from you.