On my first day I was upset at hearing my surname barked out so baldly. The rasping double consonant at the beginning of Cromer suddenly seemed tailor-made for parade-ground abuse.
Ideally I would have reformed the system, but it was more practical to gain exemption from it. I vowed I would become John in the school universally, first in class and then at roll-call. This was a strictly limited blurring of the boundaries: I wanted my name read out at roll-call in the female style, but my interest wasn’t in androgyny, only special treatment.
I exploited the physical characteristics of the Tan-Sad, and the way it shaped my encounters with others. If I spoke softly, people had to lean over it to hear me, and then the charm could flow at full pressure. I learned how to sweep even teachers off their feet with the water cannon of intimacy. By the third week every teacher except Mr Jardine was calling me John, and I became John to him by the start of the next term. Only the horrendous Mr Waller stood firm in the face of sentimental pressure. Mr Waller was immune to every strain of personality magic I could come up with. He once logged a formal complaint against me for wearing a coloured shirt. I was the only pupil whose shirts had to be specially made, but I was allowed no compensating fun. It’s not as if adhering to the letter of the uniform code would help me blend in.
Of course there was something ridiculous about my quest for Christian-name status at roll-call. For years I had been fighting to be treated as a normal boy, but the moment there was any danger of it happening I threw myself into a campaign for exceptional status.
The day I was called ‘John’ at roll-call at last, I couldn’t stop smiling. I would never be filigree Valerie, but I was no longer denounced as Cromer. I was worming my way into the heart of the place.
Burnham Grammar School gave me what I wanted in the way of education. I don’t necessarily mean that it was an educational hothouse, although I have no complaints. The hothouse doesn’t suit every plant. The great thing was that Burnham really was a school — a school and only a school. It wasn’t anything else in disguise. That was what I wanted. After so much time spent at schools that were really hospitals, or converted tennis courts, or folly-castles, it felt thrilling and holy to be going to a school that was only a school. A school disguised as a school! Glorious double-bluff. To be absorbing knowledge in a building designed, however unambitiously, for that purpose and no other.
I thought, back then, that each phase of my life would make a clean break with the last. In that respect I was like an ignorant student of history, imagining that everyone woke up Victorian one day in 1838. In fact the phases were anything but distinct, with much continuity across alleged ruptures. My ramshackle vehicle trundled across every seeming abyss.
In Hindu iconology there’s an image, called the Nataraja, of Shiva dancing in an aureole of flames. His left leg is elegantly, forcefully raised. There are two technical terms attached to this image, Lasya and Tandava. Lasya describes the gentle side of Shiva’s dancing, Tandava its savagely violent aspect. One style corresponds to creation, the other to destruction. I expect lesser gods are also involved. Hinduism has a crowded cosmology, and there’s always room for one more on the casting couch.
It stands to non-reason that creation and destruction are always converging and swapping places — that’s what makes it a dance! Dualistic thinking is hard to shake off for anyone brought up on it, but with a little practice the gates of logic come off their hinges and then at last I believe in God the Either, God the Or and God the Holy Both.
At Burnham Grammar I had everything I could possibly want, in terms of visual display. I could see something which I had been missing time out of mind. Horseplay — a sacred thing to me, almost. I couldn’t exactly take part in the rough life I watched, but I was sustained by it. Watching was my part in it. I coveted an unruliness I couldn’t muster myself, yet I didn’t feel excluded. It flowed through me as well as around me. I experienced it as a reconnection. After years in which I never made and hardly saw an action that wasn’t carefully considered, I could watch my fellows every day running riot in the spontaneity of their bodies. My eyes filled up with the sights I craved, and my ears were gloriously assaulted by the bedlam din of play.
Cantering compound beast
I was fascinated by the way the boys moved. I loved the frantic shuffle they used when they were late for a lesson but in full view of a master who would tell them off for running. I could see boys dashing along a corridor and turning a corner at full tilt, sliding and scrambling on the polished floor like unshod skaters but somehow not coming to grief — coming to joy, rather. I could watch a boy run down a corridor and leap without warning on another’s back. The other boy might stagger, might let out a shout of protest, but instead of collapsing and crying for medical help, as was his right, this victim would grasp his attacker under the thighs and turn assault into piggy-back, sometimes setting off at a canter as a compound beast in search of further collisions, charging with raucous laughter into the ranks of jeering infantry. Cautionary bellows from the staff seemed to be a necessary ingredient of the scene. The uproar would have been much more subdued without their contribution, increasing the pressure of high spirits by keeping the lid on. All this was what made normal education so special.
Mobility is wasted on the able-bodied, just as youth is wasted on the young, which is exactly the way it should be. Even at slower speeds, I saw with wonder that able-bodied boys of my age didn’t walk with the scrupulous poise they might have been taught by physios. They took orthodox posture for granted and experimented with every possible variation and perversion on it. They would stand for long minutes at a time on the outside edges of their feet. They would scuff their shoes with every step, taking revenge on their parents for buying footwear which had to renounce any claim to fashionability if it was to qualify as smart enough for school. A flapping sole or a heel entirely worn down on one side was an achievement rather than a disaster. Part of me was horrified by this abuse of shoes, part of me was thrilled.
Some boys walked without touching their heels to the ground for more than a fraction of a second, balanced always on the balls of their feet, though I had no way of knowing if this was an affected showing-off gait which they abandoned when no one was looking. It’s never a walking style you see on women, or on men over about thirty. Does that mean that gradually the period of heel contact extends, as the burdens of life increase, until one day that forward bounce congeals into a trudge like anyone else’s?
Compared to the way things were at Vulcan, the caste system at Burnham was simple. I existed at the same distance from everyone else in my year, a greater but still uniform distance from anyone above or below me in the school. It puzzled me for a while that an asthmatic boy in my year was treated as if he was made of glass, when I was used to asthmatics as the supermen of Vulcan School, but I soon got used even to that.