I fancied myself as a writer back then and I remember writing a story when I was fifteen or so, which contrasted two figures. One of them was a kind of Christian guru, a bit like Mother Teresa, to whom the famous and powerful came for spiritual guidance; the other was a greasy-haired loner who built bombs in his mouldy bedsit and threw them randomly into crowds. The point of the story was that it was the terrorist who was the truly good person, even though he had a crappy personality and everyone hated him. The guru bolstered an unjust world by making the powerful feel good, but the terrorist, by making everyone feel bad, was driving the world towards change.
The school was called Shotsford House and its main building was a former stately home, surrounded by woodland and chalky hills. It saw itself as progressive – no fagging, for instance, no cane and no cold showers, though these were all still common at that time – and it had a sort of Christian humanist ethos of a kind that was more widespread in those days than it is now.
Here, for instance, is the headmaster, standing at his podium at morning assembly. His name is Mr Frobisher. ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit,’ he booms out, ‘for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.’ He pauses for several seconds, his great head bowed over the book, wind whistling in and out of his nostrils. Christ, that man could ham it up! Then suddenly he looks up at us with fiery and accusing eyes. ‘Blessed are the poor – in – spirit,’ he repeats, and begins to speak with passionate intensity of the selfishness, greed and crass materialism of the modern world. ‘Grab what you can,’ he hisses, clawing at the air, his whole face distorted by the ugliness he wants to convey. ‘Grab what you can by whatever means you can get away with, and to hell with everyone else.’ The country is in the middle of a railway strike – large industrial strikes were pretty frequent occurrences back then – and Mr Frobisher uses this as an illustration of his point. The railwaymen, he says, are ‘opportunists of the worst kind, holding the whole community to ransom, not for the sake of some great cause, but for colour television sets and bigger cars.’ He almost spits out the words.
Now comes the pause again, the bowing of the head, the whistling wind. ‘You are very privileged,’ he concludes in a new soft voice. ‘You will have many opportunities. You could very easily use those opportunities for purely personal gain. But I beg you, I beg all of you, to make them into opportunities to serve.’
After another silence, he lifts his head, and becomes suddenly brisk and business-like as he turns to the more mundane everyday business, of which we all of us must take our share. He makes various announcements. And finally he issues one of his regular reminders that ‘decorum and courtesy’ are expected at all times when potential pupils are being shown round the school with their parents.
These people might arrive in brand new Jaguars, the tense-faced little boys in the uniforms of expensive preparatory schools, the mothers in furs, the fathers with heavy Rolexes on their wrists, but their crass materialism will never in any circumstances be pointed out.
I planned a terror attack with my best friend Jules. We’d recently seen the Lindsay Anderson film if… and it almost perfectly encapsulated our mood.
‘We could do something like that,’ said Jules.
I loved that boy. He was never still. He thought three times as quickly as anyone else, talked three times faster, laughed and raged three times as often, burning up so much nervous energy that he always looked half-starved, like some beautiful, penniless Romantic poet. He was constantly thinking of new ways in which he and I could step out of the dreary consensual world and into the forbidden brightness beyond. It was him who decided one night we should walk right round the stone cornice of the main school building, four storeys up in the dark. It was him who got hold of those two tabs of LSD, the first of many, which we took one October day on top of a hill and watched the whole red pile of Shotsford House below us reveal itself to be nothing larger or more significant than a gaudy cake, iced in vulgar pink and white, and crawling inside with maggots. And it was him now who was proposing we become terrorists.
He suggested it on a Sunday afternoon, when we’d driven down to the coast in a beaten up old car the two of us had managed to acquire for a few quid from an elderly local. We’d stopped at a pub and were sitting outside in the sun. Gulls were wheeling above us. The forbidden beer was pure ambrosia, our forbidden white Cortina a celestial chariot that would carry us between the stars.
‘We should do something like that,’ Jules said. ‘Get some guns and shoot the place up. Think of the impact! The whole rotten system would shake in its fucking boots.’
Shotsford House had a rifle range, and we knew that guns were stored in a metal cupboard in the basement corridor. Things were much more casual in those days. Nowadays an expensive boarding school like Shotsford has a whole team of uniformed security guards equipped with vehicles and radios, and each pupil has an individual room, complete with en suite shower. But we washed in communal bathrooms and slept on sagging mattresses in chilly dormitories, while the entire security of the great dark building around us was entrusted to a single elderly man from a local village who wandered round the place with a torch. His name was Eliot, and, for strategic reasons, Jules and I had made a friend of him.
So now, sitting there in the pub with seagulls wheeling above us, and our chariot waiting for our return, we made a plan. In the early hours of the last day of term, Jules would meet Eliot near the science block, some distance from the main building, and engage him in conversation long enough for me to saw through the padlock and get out the guns. Eliot was very fond of talking and didn’t see school discipline as being part of his job. On the basis of previous experience, we could be quite confident that, at the end of their conversation, he’d just tell Jules to go to bed and carry on with his rounds. Jules would then meet me in a hiding place of ours under the roof: a disused storeroom with a tiny window which we normally used for smoking out of, but from which it was possible, with a bit of effort, to squeeze out onto that high stone cornice. In the morning, when the parents came purring up the drive in their Jaguars and Rovers to pick up their darling boys, we’d be up there to greet them. Our backs against the sky, we’d fire down on them like avenging angels.
‘Are we just talking here, Jules, or are we serious?’ I asked, coming back from the bar with two more pints, and a new packet of rolling tobacco.
Jules was beautiful in my eyes, and I in his and we ached with desire for one another. We never expressed that desire in words, let alone through actual sex, and maybe I’m just repressed but I don’t think I would even have wanted that. But every touch was a delight, and when we were together, it was as if we lit up the whole world.
Jules grabbed the tobacco and ripped off the cellophane, and we each tugged out a moist bundle of treacly strands. That stuff was especially delicious when it was completely new.
‘Let’s do it,’ he said, as he exhaled his first rich cloud of smoke. ‘Come on, let’s really do it. I mean, why not? Apart from fear, what reason is there to hold back?’
Various answers do now suggest themselves to me – the desire not to kill people who had done us no harm, just to pluck a for-instance from the air – but at the time his question was rhetorical, and the moral objections carried so little weight that we didn’t even speak of them. The following week I stole a hacksaw from the metalwork room and experimented with it on various pieces of iron-mongery to see how much time I’d need and how much noise I’d make.