Mark Glanville - The Goldberg Variations

There’s a motto shall ring in the ears of all Who e’er have spent their youth at The Hall. It’s a call to the sluggard, the dull and the wise, A call we cannot and daren’t despise. So now and for ever raise the call Hinc in altiora, up The Hall! There are overs and unders in life all through, In after life you’ll get your due. If you keep up the struggle and never stop At the last Reading Over you’ll come out top

I found this ancient piece of bombast beneath a pile of neglected sheet music. ‘Overs’ and ‘unders’ and ‘Reading Overs’ were still the yardstick by which academic success was judged forty years later. Everything we did was measured so we need be left in no doubt as to our level of achievement at any given time. Everything I enjoyed was tarnished by the incessant competition. In a school of three hundred there were 120 prizes and cups to be won. (I once sat down and counted them all just to make myself more miserable.) With such a ratio I should surely have won something. It was hard to believe Mum, Dad or any of my supporters and backers when all my best efforts failed to convince successive Hall judges and juries. Praise was mere flattery until quantified by competitive success, and Dad’s anguish and irritation at each fresh defeat seemed sharper than my own. I felt I was failing him dreadfully. Conversely, on the one occasion when I did have some success, achieving an ‘over’ in every subject and gaining a gold star, my excitement was drowned in the torrent of his delight. I began to feel that achievement was his way of defining me. I’d listen to him discussing what I’d done, as if my actions were separate from their agent, and my existence could only be checked in terms of them. Being me simply wasn’t good enough. But that was how he’d been brought up: each novel was a scalp for his mother’s belt, worn at Bar Mitzvahs, weddings and funerals. Every Sunday, after the publication of a new novel, our stomachs experienced a collective tingling in anticipation of the reviews. He judged his work by them, and I knew that no matter how much he disparaged the scornful ones, they were the ones he believed.

Football was where I felt it most acutely. Dad never stopped assuring me of my ability, and while I could bounce the ball on my foot for twenty minutes at a stretch, swerve round defenders and strike goals, it was something I preferred to do in the playground, where there were no white lines and circles to circumscribe my enjoyment and no one lost their temper if you missed an open goal or shouted if you failed to save one. Playground football was fun, and one of the boys gave it colour with versions of chants he’d picked up from the Chelsea Shed.

Over there, over there. In pink and black, A load of crap

Not one you’d have heard tumbling readily from the lips of the Fulham Road barrow boys.

Dad’s eyes were fixed on the school’s Under-11 team. When I did the trial, I was selected as substitute, which meant I had to run the line for a painful 70 minutes, chapping my thighs against the coarse, black woollen shorts.

‘Did you get on. Did you get on?’ he’d ask me every time I came home from a game, bounding down the stairs like an excited poodle.

It was the last game of the season. As I shivere in the downpour I imagined myself coming on, receiving the ball in midfield, flicking it out of the mud to swerve round the big bloke, building up pace and running between two defenders before rounding the goalkeeper to touch the ball into an empty net for the winning goal. By the time I got home fantasy had become reality; one that I knew would please Dad. I thought he was going to break into a triumphal dance. As he hugged me I wept into his bristly cheek, before running upstairs to my bedroom, hoping the pillow might suffocate me along with my shame.

Music gave me a language to cope beyond the thinking barrier. My only regret was when it had to stop with the angry utaca utaca of the stylus bumping over the edge of the vinyl onto the gap between harmony and the white noise on the label beyond. Besides listening I was also learning the clarinet. My teacher, Marjorie Dutton, was the only female staff member I had dealings with. Her gentle femininity contrasted starkly with the chalk-throwing, ear-clipping masters, but it was impossible to proceed down any path at The Hall for long before coming up against the obstacle of competition. I didn’t want to go in for the Reisenstein Woodwind Prize, but I was persuaded that if I wanted to make progress I had to do so. On the night, instead of the usual mellow sound, a series of squeaks emerged, as from a fallen fledgling. I stopped and told the audience I would start again. In the gallery round the hall, the masters stood like statues above the shields of the great public schools whose scholarships and places the pupils marched confidently towards. Once again the fledgling sounded instead of Mozart. Again I stopped, and started again. At last the instrument began to sing. A sympathetic audience applauded loudly, acknowledging courage rather than virtuosity. Of course, I won nothing.

My gold star propelled me into the scholarship form. Suddenly I was in a class of strangers who didn’t want to know me. They’d established their bonds, the strangest of which was with the form teacher himself, who used to confide the details of failed romances to his students. They took me aside and warned me that on no account should I discuss what I’d heard outside the class. Isolated, I soon slipped down the ranks, my gold star twinkling very faintly somewhere in the distance. The following term I was back among the common herd, labouring for a place at Westminster School. Prizes in singing and recitation whizzed past my nose. I started playing truant, with the collusion of my parents, at one stage staying off school for a full six weeks, and sat by Dad’s side as he rattled off his first children’s novel, Goalkeepers are Different. I tore each page from the typewriter in my eagerness to read the story, confirming to him that it had narrative drive and earning myself a dedication.

My parents began to research schools that specialised in music. The Purcell was out because it didn’t have a football pitch. Pimlico, unfortunately, had several. A brand new comprehensive opened the year before I went there, it sought to attract what it called ‘special musicians’. Unfortunately the course wasn’t ready when I arrived in the summer, the only special musician in my year of three hundred. They compensated by releasing me from Woodwork and Religious Education to practise.

My late entrance to the class, special privileges and snobby accent in a school where everyone spoke Cockney, or pretended to, wearing the smart flannel blazer Mum had bought me rather than the standard woollen one, made me a prime candidate for bullying.

‘What d’you wanna cam ’ere for? You should be at one of ’em posh places.’

Most of the boys seemed to want to fight me, and the girls to go out with me. Seemed being the operative word. Trysts arranged at the school gates were never kept. Academically the level was so far below the one I’d reached that I was simply treading water.

There was a fighting hierarchy at Pimlico; and Les and Ray were my bogeymen. Coming out of the science lab one afternoon, I was jostled and pushed as usual in the narrow corridor. A fist smacked my ear. It burned fiercely to the accompaniment of a painful, high-pitched whistle. The helplessness and humiliation hurt more.

‘Ah look, Ray. You’ve made ’im cry.’

Up in the Geography class Les received his comeuppance for consistent minor offending. The teacher decked him with a couple of right handers that left him sprawled on the floor.