The Good Little Boy

It has taken me some years to become the suave, sophisticated know-it-all you see before you today. At school I was as meek as a mouse and believed that if I could do something well, it could only be because it must be easy for everyone, while those people who were good at things I didn’t have a clue about – like physics or social skills – must be impossibly gifted. (My views on this have since changed.) The way I saw it, you went to school to learn whatever the hell it was they wanted to teach you, so I always did my best to hold up my end of the bargain. Surely all those highly trained and dedicated professionals didn’t turn up every day just to stand there and preside over a load of farting about and talking back?

Fear was at the bottom of it, of course. Fear of exposure, fear of failure, fear of physical violence. Elsewhere in these pages I speak openly of my cowardice in the face of others’ thuggery; my horror, for instance, at the Saturday morning kids’ shows down the Rex cinema. The noise. The flying popcorn. The risk of getting caught up in that carnage and being punished for something I did not do. Cowardice, seen another way, may simply be an excess of caution, a sensible exercise in self-preservation with no moral overtones at all. He who balks and walks away lives to cram another day. Or at least, that’s the way us cowards see it.

Looking back on those murine days of my youth, the fact I wasn’t beaten black and blue merely indicates I must have been such a dullard that any potential bully considered me beneath contempt and not worth the bother. It wasn’t even that I ever needed to disarm them with my charm or win them over with my wit. (What charm? What wit?) I was simply so boring that the only offensive thing about me was my grotesque banality. The single possible instance I can recall was when someone once left a banana skin in the pocket of my coat hanging up in the cloakroom, and even then I can’t be certain I was the specific target. It could simply have been put in there by mistake: “Are you eating fruit in there, boy?” “No, sir.” [Culprit hastily stuffs evidence into nearest coat pocket.]

It was probably my friend Croc who christened me ‘the good little boy’, and I don’t think he meant it in a kind way either. I must have done something particularly wussy over the weekend – written an essay on Gulliver’s Travels or something. Anyway, no one else had bothered because the teacher was so reliably forgetful that he would not have remembered setting any homework in the first place, so it was completely academic (as it were) whether we applied ourselves or not. But I plunged in because I was interested to discover why the central character was depicted on the cover wearing such weird old clothes. Oh! Because it was written in the early 18th century was it? It wasn’t just some comic book yarn about this giant among pigmies, it was a satire on the politics of its day? In that case, to the library, as Nelson Muntz might say.

So I had written the essay, nobody else had, and because of that I was dubbed by my cohort the good little boy. Too scared not to in case the teacher got struck by lightning and suddenly remembered he’d set us some work for once; too cowardly even to take that remote and minuscule risk. That’s what good little boys did. And I embraced it. Considering what a freak I must have appeared, they could have called me a lot worse.

But while I may have loved school, I did not love everything about it. Rugby could fuck off for a start. I was a beanpole but even I somehow got dragooned into playing on the wing for the school team. I had demonstrated my speed by how quickly I could run away from the ball. They obviously interpreted this as misapplied zeal. All they needed to do was point me in the right direction and I would become an asset.

I hated it from the first day when the coach was laying out his plans to turn his latest bunch of quivering misfits into a dynamic fighting force. “I’m going to run you ragged,” he promised in that man-to-man tone he misguidedly assumed would put lead in our pencils but which succeeded merely in putting horror in our hearts. “For the first week you’ll be good for nothing. By the second week you’ll be good for rugby.” What a bastard, I remember thinking, daringly, at a time when rude words were no more a part of my vocabulary than moderation is now. All the time he was wrecking us, how were we meant to concentrate on our studies? Who was going to write our essays if we got a dislocated finger? I for one did not relish the prospect of leaving blood or broken teeth behind on the rugby pitch just because it was all part of the curriculum. I was prepared to try my hardest at anything within reason, even physics, but if there was any possibility of a knee in the face or a boot in the goolies, you could me out. I had other fish to fry, and if that wasn’t good enough for them, they could all fuck right off after the rugby.

But there was no way out of it, if you were picked you played, so I spent several useless years of occasional Saturday mornings pretending to give a crap about which way the ball bounced. On one delirious occasion it was only my quick thinking which prevented me from misguidedly scoring a try. If I had done so, there was no way I wouldn’t have been flung into the fray the following week. (My deliberate failure did not go unnoticed. I’d been running forward towards a loose ball five yards from the enemy lines and bent to grab it but alas it eluded me and dribbled into touch. “Why didn’t you kick it, you moron?” my muddy teammates chorused. I allowed myself a secret smile. ‘Moron.’ Obviously no one had informed them that I was pretty hot stuff off the pitch, and knew not only which cases all the German prepositions took, but I could also spell words like accommodation and reconnoitre.)

But if rugby was a bust, I earnestly buckled down and did my best in every other area of school life even, as I say, physics. For some reason it was just one thing I could never get my head around. The first time I took the O level I got 39% – six points short of a pass. At the retake, following a year of extra work and dutiful, if uninspired application, I got… 33%. At which point I did the sensible thing and gave up. “You tried your best and you failed miserably,” as Homer Simpson might say. “The lesson is, never try.” Like the rugby, it wasn’t something I ever intended to have in my life after school, so why knock myself out (or risk some other bleeder knocking out me or any of my teeth)?

(Rugby had the last laugh though, I didn’t get through completely unscathed. One afternoon some witless thug passed me the ball and I caught it perpendicularly on the end of my little finger. I was not to know pain like it until – well, just the other evening in fact, when I inadvertently kicked a bed leg with my unsocked little toe. The finger, like the toe, ballooned to twice its size and even today, over fifty years later, it is still two ring sizes fatter than its twin on my left hand. If it had been one of the ones I use to play my guitar, I might have been quite miffed.)

A swot, then? Sure. Timid? To a fault. But humble? Hell no. Not now and never then. After it was announced from the assembly hall stage that three of us had got into Oxbridge – this was no means a common achievement for the school – I went into the tuck shop and the fourth former serving me looked at me with confusion: “How the bloody hell did you manage that?” he demanded. “It wasn’t easy,” is what I wish I had replied, instead of the self-serving, immodest guff about “a lot of bloody hard work” I actually came up with. But then that’s what being a good little boy is all about isn’t it? Feeling superior.

And fear. Don’t forget the fear. Certainly, in my day, corporal punishment was still a thing. One English teacher had a huge size twelve slipper he would occasionally smack boys’ backsides with. I don’t think there was anything overtly kinky about it, he just thought it was funny. So did we, especially when he used to draw a target on the sole with chalk and after he’d whacked you the impression was left there on the seat of your school trousers. And I do mean your, it was certainly never mine. He called me Weevil. Because it rhymed with my actual surname, d’you see? The inventfulness with this one was terrific. But I would have done anything, up to and including every little bit of homework he ever set, to avoid the humiliation, pain and disgrace of being paddled with this bloody stupid thing in front of the entire bloody stupid class.

And then there came that time I booted the ball into a neighbouring garden during the lunchtime kickabout. Everyone was very nice about it and they even pulled aside the netting so I could climb over the wall and get it back. But the headmaster had recently made a pronouncement during assembly to say the next boy found trespassing in a neighbour’s garden to retrieve a ball would be for the high jump. So I didn’t go. I just walked away, and everyone instantly saw my true colours, painted in a bright streak a mile wide down my back.

And yes, it was cowardly. On the other hand, there were a lot more of them than there was of me and they all could pack a harder punch. But for the same reason I was so disdainful of rugby, because of the completely unnecessary physical harm it could cause, I had no intention of getting expelled, or suspended, or even given a stiff talking to over anything so trivial as keeping in good with the lads. So I walked away. Someone told me later that the boy who did go in to retrieve the ball had got caught, but I think he was only trying to make me feel guilty, and I didn’t like either of them anyway so I remained unmoved. My cowardice was strategic. I told myself I was instinctively playing the long game. I needed it to get to where I was going. The kid who got caught probably received no more than a detention, and it can’t have affected his life in any significant way. In fact, I bet he’s forgotten all about it and I’m sure he can no longer remember the incident any more than I can now recall his name. All I remember is that I walked away.

In the end, of course, I didn’t really get away with anything. In the dark nights of my soul, when all the horrible, stupid, callous and unkind things you’ve done in your life come swarming rowdily back to haunt you, this is one of those that looms largest with me – that day I kicked the ball over the fence and walked away.

Not all heroes wear capes. On the other hand, no hero can understand the lifelong suffering that can afflict all the good little boys of this world as they think back sometimes and try to convince themselves that what they did on the day was the right thing to do. Or at least, the wrong thing albeit done for the right reasons. It’s not that heroes are without fear; the difference is, they refuse to let fear govern their actions. We good little boys, by contrast, are governed by nothing else. Sure, our bodies may be unscarred by boot studs and all our teeth are intact, but some of us bear deeper scars than that, the kind that never heal.

Once you walk away there’s no going back. So you may as well keep walking.