Ramble Book Read online

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  RAMBLE

  Around this time I went through a phase of emulating the cop shows I saw on TV, but tended to play the part of the criminal rather than the cop. When my parents were out I’d go into the kitchen, lay out sheets of cling film, pour mounds of icing sugar onto them and wrap them into neat little packets. Then, using a big pointy knife, I’d cut a little hole in one of the packets, scoop out a bit of icing sugar with the knife tip and place it on my tongue before rubbing the sugar around my gums. I was eight.

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  One day, when I was beginning to worry that I’d discovered everything worth discovering in Dad’s office, I spotted the black briefcase on top of a filing cabinet. I managed to get it down but found it tightly secured by two combination locks. There was a label on the lid, on which Dad had written in caps: ‘IN THE EVENT OF MY DEATH THE CONTENTS OF THIS CASE SHOULD BE DESTROYED, UNOPENED.’

  I think Dad realised I’d been trying to open it because the next time I got into his office the case had disappeared. I wondered about the mysterious contents of that case from time to time, but when I moved out of my parents’ place I forgot all about it. Years later, when I was in my twenties, I had a drink with Uncle Dave who was still living at home. We were talking about Dad’s eccentricities and Dave said, ‘Did you ever see the black briefcase?’

  ‘Oh man, yes!’ I said, and together we chanted, ‘IN THE EVENT OF MY DEATH THE CONTENTS OF THIS CASE SHOULD BE DESTROYED, UNOPENED.’

  ‘What the hell did he have in there?’ said Dave. Our top guesses were: pornography … actually just pornography.

  And now, here was the mystery case again, though the label had gone. I stuck on a new one and wrote in Sharpie, ‘MOVE TO NORFOLK.’ A few weeks later, I finally discovered what was inside. You could flick to the end and find out what it was now, but to be honest it’s unlikely to blow your mind. Better if you get to it naturally.

  CHAPTER 2

  WILL YOU ACCEPT THE CHARGES?

  Daddy, what class are we?’

  ‘Middle class, I suppose,’ replied my dad.

  Mum looked up from her Daily Mail and corrected him: ‘We’re upper middle class.’

  ‘What does that mean?’ I said, and Dad smiled.

  ‘It means we’re not rich, but we’re comfortable.’

  In fact, in the years when my dad was the editor of the Sunday Telegraph’s travel section, my life was very comfortable. We lived in a house made up of a ground floor and basement flat in a Victorian apartment block that was part of a leafy residential square in Earl’s Court, West London. I learned to ride my bike in the communal garden that was only accessible to residents – no ‘Undesirables’, thank you. The ‘Undesirable’ community had their own communal garden called the Earl’s Court Road.

  Throughout my childhood, thanks to Dad’s job, we travelled to Greece, France, Barbados, China and all over America. At Christmas there was a good chance that whatever toy we had set our acquisitive little hearts on would turn up under the tree. What was more, our parents loved us, and I always felt safe and happy when they were around.

  So it was an unpleasant shock when, in early 1979, they sent me to boarding school.

  They broke the news to me a couple of months before I left. Mum and Dad talked it up as a grand adventure – all midnight feasts, jolly japes and super new chums – but as far as I was concerned they may as well have said, ‘We know you thought we loved you and that your cosy life would never end, but in eight weeks we’re going to shoot you in the back of the head and dump you in a field in Sussex.’

  Christmas 1978 played out with a bass note of melancholy, rising occasionally to mild panic at the thought of the looming intercision. The same questions kept going through my mind: Why are they doing this? Who does this really benefit? Could there not be a second referendum? (NOTE TO EDITOR: Re. your insistence that this is a lame, outdated, topical joke that ought to come out – I absolutely disagree. People LOVE Brexit references, they always will, and I forbid you to remove it. Get rid of this note, though, obviously.)

  On a freezing Sunday evening in January 1979, my parents drove out to Sussex to drop off their nine-year-old son at his new boarding school, a big Queen Anne-style house of imposing wood-panelled rooms and corridors that smelled of floor polish and disinfectant, behind which lay a complex of newer buildings, all surrounded by playing fields and woodland.

  Mum and Dad carried my suitcase and new tuck box as a smiling senior boy showed us the way to my dormitory, his presence encouraging me to keep it together and act as if this was a super adventure rather than an inexplicable nightmare. Whereas my parents had found it easy to coo over the posh interiors downstairs, the harshly lit dormitory with its rows of little metal bunks presented more of a challenge, and they began to look more sympathetic. Just as I was considering losing it dramatically, a woman in a light-blue nurse’s uniform appeared, who gently but firmly informed my parents that it was time for them to leave and that I would be fine. I looked at my mum as if to say, ‘I am NOT going to be fine,’ but before I could start bawling, she and Dad were gone.

  The most painful parts of that first term at boarding school came whenever I phoned home from the call box in the corridor outside the dining room. Children queueing for dinner would watch as trembling ‘Squits’ like me jammed 10p pieces into the payphone, before becoming fully distraught once Mummy or Daddy picked up. A few times when my credit ran out, the coin-slot mechanism was too stiff for me to insert my next 10p, and the call was cut off in a din of beeps and sobs, so when Mum saw me next she explained how I could make a call from a payphone without money by just calling the operator.

  ‘I have a reverse-charge call from Sussex, will you accept the charges?’ the operator would ask when someone picked up at home. When I heard Mum’s lovely voice say, ‘Yes. Hello, Adam!’ I crouched beneath the glass panels in the door so no one in the dinner queue could see me and sobbed my nine-year-old tits off. I asked Mum about those tearful phone calls recently and she said, ‘Yes, it was the most awful feeling.’ So why send me away? She paused for a little while, then said, ‘Do you know, I’ve never really thought about it.’

  My sister started at the same boarding school a year after I arrived, and a few years later my brother was sent there too, so Mum and Dad must have thought about it a little bit. I think they believed that the experience would ‘toughen us up’ (which they considered a worthwhile thing to do with a child), while also enabling us to ‘belong’ to the upper echelons of British society with access to all the privileges and protections that membership provided. I suppose they also hoped we might enjoy it.

  The school was progressive in many way: co-ed, no uniform, lots of arts and crafts, drama and cooking (I was the Lancashire hotpot and treacle tart king), and after the initial shock I ended up having fun and making some good friends there. But when I left school and started working, living and going out with people who hadn’t been privately educated, my overwhelming feeling was not one of privilege but embarrassment. Perhaps I had an advantage if I’d wanted to become a Tory politician, a QC or a Harley Street physician, but outside the old boy network I felt that a public-school education just marked me out as a Merchant Wanker.

  I didn’t mind when work colleagues teased me about my plummy accent, as long as they weren’t spitting with hatred as they did so, but it did make me self-conscious, and in my twenties I would occasionally experiment with life as a Mockney. If I got into a black cab and the driver was a chatty South Londoner who wanted to talk about football, I did my best to join in, not by pretending I knew about football, but by adopting a generic geezerish South London drawl that later became the voice I used for impersonating David Bowie. Meanwhile the cab drivers were probably thinking, ‘Why’s that posh geezer doing that weird voice?’ Either that or ‘Oh my God! I’ve got David Bowie in my cab!’

  My eagerness to lose my accent would have distressed Dad, who throughout his children’s lives never missed an opportun
ity to correct what he considered sloppy pronunciation or grammar. If any of us said a word like ‘now’ without a sufficiently full and fruity vowel sound, he launched into his Henry Higgins routine: ‘Neh-ow? Neh-ow? It’s Nah-ow. Hah-ow, Nah-ow, Brah-own Cah-ow.’

  When he got ill and moved in with us, I imagined sitting up late into the night with Dad, doing shots of whisky and morphine and recording him as I asked all the BIG QUESTIONS I’d never felt able to ask before: who his parents were, what the war was like, why things hadn’t worked out with Mum and why he’d thought it so important to send his children away to private school and have them speak with the ‘right’ accent.

  The recordings would be poignant, personal and painful (ideally there would be some crying). I would turn them into an award-winning podcast and just before he died Dad would give me a hug and tell me how brave I was and that he was proud of me. But he hated all that sort of shit, so although we did have a few heavy conversations, they were not quite what I’d had in mind. As it turned out, most of our exchanges tended to focus on noodle preparation, men’s nappies and whether or not he had taken his pills.

  For the first year or two after his death, thinking about Dad was always painful. My unanswered BIG QUESTIONS were supplanted by recollections of distressing moments from his last months that sometimes I was only able to dislodge by humming or singing to myself. (PRO-TIP: This works for all kinds of thoughts you would rather not deal with.) Over time the older, happier memories resurfaced and with them my curiosity about Dad and how he had become the posh old bloke I always thought of him as.

  His self-published memoir The Road to Fleet Street, which he completed shortly before his death, covered his school years, his service in the Royal Artillery during the Second World War, his time studying modern history at Oxford after the war, some posh old bloke name-dropping (including Reginald Bosanquet, Robert Graves and Harry Oppenheimer) and his glory days as columnist and Travel Editor at the Sunday Telegraph. However, there was nothing beyond that point, and nothing about who his parents were or the experience of starting his own family, i.e. all the stuff I was most interested in. Perhaps he felt that writing about his family was indiscreet somehow, but I suspect he simply considered it irrelevant and uninteresting. Then I remembered The Proving Ground.

  One of several self-published projects, The Proving Ground was a novel that Dad had started writing in the late 1980s when he was deep in debt and had just been laid off by the Telegraph. He finished it around 2001, a year or two after he and Mum finally separated. It’s the story of a travel journalist on a Sunday newspaper whose money problems are solved when he discovers a cache of gold during a trip to Alaska. The Proving Ground gave Dad an opportunity to cast himself as a heroic figure at a time in his life when he felt embattled, misunderstood and perhaps not completely certain that the sacrifices he had made for his family had been worth it.

  Via his protagonist, David Barclay, Dad set out his values and detailed his fantasies with a directness he would normally have avoided. The characters along with certain events from his own life were so thinly fictionalised that when he showed it to me, my brother and sister, we agreed among ourselves that it made for a strange read.

  The Proving Ground begins with David Barclay working at the Sunday Messenger (clearly meant to be the Sunday Telegraph). He has three children – Luke (clearly me), William (clearly my brother, Dave) and Sophie (clearly my sister, Clare) – who are receiving an expensive private education that is beyond their father’s means.

  Barclay is married to Margaret (clearly my mum, Valerie), a shrill woman who doesn’t understand him and doesn’t respect the passionately held principles that have led to his financial woes. I think Pa chose the name ‘Margaret’ for Mum’s character because of Princess Margaret, who he found irritating.

  The novel begins with Dad – I mean David Barclay – attending a crisis meeting at his bank, ‘Mallards’ (clearly meant to be Coutts & Co. where Dad held an account for a while). The manager at Mallards is a rude young man who tells Dad – I mean David Barclay – that sending his children to private school is financially reckless. There follow several pages of justification from Dad – I mean David Barclay – about the benefits of a boarding-school education:

  A close relation had asked me recently if I was quite sure that I was right to beggar myself, not to mention Margaret, for what many people might see as a social prejudice. A social prejudice? … I never saw William in the orchestra at Haileybury without intense satisfaction that he was in the brass section there in Old Hall, not an overcrowded London flat, watching television.

  Beggaring ourselves? My parents had striven only for their children; was I to betray mine by any inferior devotion? Sure we were right? I never picnicked on the lawns at Sophie’s prep school in Sussex on ‘Open’ or Sports Day without knowing beyond a doubt that for a child to have the benefits of that particular school’s environment for a start in life was worth whatever it might cost.

  A few pages on, still restating the case he wished he’d made at the meeting with the rude bank manager, Dad – I mean David Barclay – continues to explain why he considers a private education so important:

  To see William in Haileybury’s elegant, spacious ambience always gave me the deepest pleasure. Everything about the place, from the well-tended lawn to the 1,300 names on the War Memorial panels in the cloisters, induced an awareness of a history richly imbued with all that seemed to me best in Britishness and the nation’s imperial past, and all that seemed most admirable in English public school education and upbringing. That William now belonged here, sharing in so great an inheritance, gave me a satisfaction I hardly dared acknowledge for fear of tempting fate.

  There are still many people who feel the same way that my dad did about public schools, though in an age in which social inequality is generally considered to be something worth struggling against and working-class credentials, even fake ones, are proudly flashed at every opportunity, the pro-public-schoolers are sometimes less keen to advertise their enthusiasm.

  I’d always assumed that Dad’s fondness for the British establishment and his apparent aversion to all things working class was evidence that he himself was an old-school toff, something we played for laughs in his BaaadDad segments on The Adam and Joe Show. Then a couple of years after his death I made a long-overdue trip to visit my aunt in Wales.

  Dad had five older brothers and a younger sister, Aunty Jessica. When I was at boarding school Jessica would sometimes come and take me out on weekends and feed me cake and biscuits until I threw up. I loved Aunty Jessica. Then we didn’t see her for a long time and Aunty Jessica became another member of our extended family that we seldom heard about, though she and Dad remained in occasional contact. I emailed her to ask if I could visit and ask about their upbringing, and she sent me a warm reply saying that I’d be welcome, but I’d better be quick because she was 91.

  The following week I drove from Norfolk to Wales.

  It was good to see Aunty Jessica again. After some cake, biscuits, hardly any vomiting and a bit of catching up (‘Now, can you tell me what exactly a podcast is?’), Jessica told me about the grandparents I’d never met and the background that had primed Dad for a life dedicated to embracing the ruling classes.

  It turned out that my grandfather, Gordon Buxton (who died long before I was born), had been a servant boy, a butler and a chauffeur before becoming an estate overseer for a wealthy family in the village of Cowfold, Sussex. He was known as ‘Buckin’ or ‘Bucky’. In return for Bucky’s service his wife and family got a house to live in, for which they were grateful. This was back in Downton Abbey days when, as Jessica told it, the lower classes were well looked after by their employers and ‘knew their place’, and everything was simpler.

  When the First World War broke out my grandfather’s boss, a Lieutenant Colonel, asked Bucky if he would travel with him to France to be his war bitch (not Jessica’s phrase). Bucky was eager to oblige, despite having to leave behin
d his wife and three children (not including my dad, who was born after WWI). When the Lieutenant Colonel was killed on the first day of fighting at the Battle of Arras on 9 April 1917, Bucky carried his body off the battlefield and, upon returning to Sussex, continued to serve his widow and children. In Downton Abbey terms, it seems Bucky was more of a Bates than a Carson.

  The continued patronage of the Lieutenant Colonel’s regiment and family meant that my father was able to get on his social mobility scooter and attend the local grammar school before starting at the Imperial Service College in Windsor, a notoriously brutal and disciplinarian boarding school dedicated to preparing boys for military life. Teachers and senior boys at the ISC would regularly beat the younger ones with a cane until they bled for infractions like attending chapel with dirty shoes, failure to wear your school hat while visiting town or walking around with the collar of your overcoat turned up, unless you were a prefect or had been awarded a sports prize.

  In addition to the jolly corporal punishment larks, my father was regularly taunted for not speaking with a sufficiently posh accent (something he absolutely nailed in later life). He became so keen not to stand out that whenever it was time for his parents to pick him up, my father insisted they meet him outside the school and down the road a short way. Dad worried that, next to the Daimlers, the Bentleys and the Rolls-Royces of the other parents, the Buckymobile would look too shit and he would get more grief from the toffs. Grandfather Bucky would tell my dad, ‘The people who care don’t matter because the people who matter don’t care.’