Mark Glanville - The Goldberg Variations

‘You was laughin’, Glanville.’

‘’Course I wasn’t.’

‘’E were, Les. ’E were laughin’ atcher.’

‘After the lesson, I’m gonna fuckin’ do yer!’

Worse than the fights themselves was the anticipation. They were rarely spontaneous. More often than not a grudge would have to be avenged hours after the offence that had given rise to it. Much of my early time at Pimlico was spent in a state of panic as to what might befall me later.

Down on the dark concourse where no teacher trod, Les exacted his revenge. I tried to avoid the blows that bounced off my head, my cheeks and my back until an uppercut caught me in the nose with a crack. It didn’t hurt much but the blood gushed over my white shirt and fell on the floor in little sticky piles as I scurried about like a frightened hen, trying to protect myself from further blows, wondering how much damage had been done.

‘Go’ ’im!’

‘Nice one, Les.’

Job done, they walked away.

I did have a group of friends. They’d meet in the toilets and form a human arch against the wall, then each take it in turns to run a gauntlet of kicks and punches. Having experienced it once, I was assured that I couldn’t leave the coven. Time and again they tried to force me back into these rituals with threats and beatings. One afternoon, waiting outside the Humanities class, two of them held me as a third laid into me with savage blows. My anger at this injustice and humiliation rose, but this time things were different. My arm cranked, and my fist flew round and into my tormentor’s jaw with a satisfying smack. As he reeled round, clutching his face, I relished the pain and astonishment in his eyes. The detention I received felt more like a reward than a punishment.

Practically everyone at Pimlico supported Chelsea: a circumstance that led me to become part of yet another minority there; though this time not of one. Chelsea had their attractions. One of the two best sides in the country at the time, they’d recently won their first F.A. Cup and their very name epitomised the stylish era we were leaving behind. Even the club song was played regularly on Top of the Pops, so it wasn’t entirely inexcusable that I should choose Stamford Bridge to make my first foray onto the terraces, in the company of a sportswriter friend of Dad’s. My parents had regaled me with horror stories about life down there among the yobs, away from the bourgeois comfort of the adjacent seated areas, so it came as a huge relief, not to mention a thrill, when I returned home unscathed after an uneventful match against Huddersfield Town.

Another opportunity to watch Chelsea from the terraces came my way when gorgeous Josie Lee asked me out on a date to see Peter Bonetti the Cat’s testimonial against Standard Liege of Belgium. Needless to say, she followed her predecessors and failed to turn up, but this was a date I fully intended to keep with or without her. I wanted to be back on the terraces, this time not at some dull outpost as in the game against Huddersfield, but in the heart of the volcano. Approaching the Shed, I watched as the perpetual motion of the mass of close-packed bodies sent waves rippling to the extremities of the terraces beyond. At its heart I was surrounded by fag-smoking Artful Dodgers, kids who’d wipe the floor with the likes of Les and Ray, school rejects, yet kings of a domain my anonymity allowed me to be part of. ‘The Liquidator’ started up, skinhead reggae, its instrumental moonstomp rhythm met by synchronised handclaps and choruses of ‘Chelsea’. Many wore the uniform of multi-eyed Doc Martens, two-tone trousers, Ben Sherman shirts, red braces and crew cuts. Lighted bangers flew through the air, exploding dangerously close to my face. As arms linked for ‘Knees up Mother Brown’ I was shoved hard in the back, fighting to keep my balance as row after dancing row cascaded down the steps, leaving vulnerable bodies prone in their wake as the waves returned to their source before starting all over again. I watched the coppers flying in, and hauling people out roughly, and relished the rawness, the danger in the faces and stances of people who spat, and spilled their steaming tea and chewed their burgers open-mouthed in a pungent haze of fried onions and beer-fuelled farts. There were no rival supporters, but even without them the atmosphere was charged with a sense of menace that left me shivering as I exited the ground, not with fear but elation. Feeling that I’d successfully completed a rite of passage, I experienced a warm tingle of acceptance, although sure no one there had even been aware of me.

My bent nose, like Cleopatra’s, changed the course of history. Les and Ray were severely reprimanded and I was swiftly transferred to another class with only a week to go before the end of term.

We spent the summer holiday in Kent, where Toby and I played football on the village green situated conveniently opposite our family cottage. I’d wait at the window until there was a quorum, then sprint across the road to join them. If there were no football in the offing, I’d freewheel my bike down the steep hill round the corner, watching the speedometer hit thirty before joining the main road through the village. Our holidays there fell into a routine: Denton for cream tea, Canterbury for the cathedral, Hythe for the beach, and as Mum struggled to keep us all above the boredom threshold, Dad, an eternal Greta Garbo to be disturbed on pain of death or worse, would closet himself away to write his annual novel, emerging only to defend his honour at ping-pong or his goal on the village green. I became increasingly obsessed by the thrill of freewheeling, seeing how far I could push the pin on the dial, how long I could sustain the speed on level ground. One afternoon, pedalling like a maniac down the pavement, trying to keep at thirty, I thudded with a halt into the body of an old woman who had been emerging from the bus-shelter. High on panic I felt strangely detached from the situation of the prone, grey-haired figure on the ground and the miscued blows aimed at my head by her distraught husband. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the gold family estate car slowing down on the other side of the road and my brother, Toby, crying. The old man was too. I burst into tears and fled, convinced I was a murderer. In the distance I could hear an ambulance siren. Mum told me the old lady wore a pacemaker and might die.

I channelled my energies towards the garden, crucifying slugs, disembowelling woodlice, mixing red and black ant nests in the hope of seeing a war. When bored with insects, I’d sit on the wall at the front of the house and hurl crab-apples at the boys cycling past. One afternoon I hit my target several times and he swerved in front of a car. The screeching brakes, the smoke from the wheels and the pungent smell of burning rubber set doors opening and nets twitching. It was the second time I’d roused the village from its habitual sloth. Amiable, freckled John lay motionless in the road but the car, thank God, had managed to avoid him. Mum and Dad reckoned it had to be down to the new school. Disturbed adolescent, delinquent and neurotic, I was packaged and labelled, ready for delivery.

Autumn saw the arrival of the first official batch of elite ‘special musicians’, thirty or so, their rounded speech marginally reducing the playground twang quotient. The once quiet corridors of the music department now resembled an orchestra pit before the overture, a hubbub of competing strings and wind. With the door closed I could just about concentrate on polishing a Weber run, refining a Mozart adagio or perfecting the riff from High Society. I was obsessed with jazz, listened to it, played it, and read about it. One of the newcomers, a trumpet player called Philip, shared my enthusiasm. We’d go down Charing Cross Road and dig out New Orleans standards, then go home and work them out, singly and together. At home it was all we played, at school all we discussed when we weren’t trying to recruit the trombone, piano, and bass we needed to form our own Red Hot Five. One morning Mr Spencer, the Head of Music, heard the first chords of the ‘Jelly Roll Blues’ strike up, sullying the nineteenth-century air that wafted past his rooms. His tie appeared at the window, the door opened and there he stood, skinny but towering, his eyes furious behind his spectacles. He glowered at the offending sheets as if they were hard-core pornography. I lived in Kensington, Philip in Stanmore, and the other prospective members of our combo, who could say? Banned from playing in school, the band had no future, so jazz became a solitary affair, a consolation if I was feeling down. Only it could help me clear the ‘Can’t play Jazz Blues’. I pictured my hero in The Benny Goodman Story sitting on the roof of his family’s New York home and doodling to himself until the pretty girl arrives, as if conjured by his playing like a genie. No such genie answered my breaks although officially I had a girlfriend, one of the special musicians, a sweet violinist called Caroline with pillowfuls of red Irish hair. I’d lie on the bed with her, wondering what to do next, even though a classmate had taught me how to come, furnishing me with the crucial bit of information I was lacking.