Life's Lottery (11 page)

Dickie Kell and Paul Mysliewic work Saturday mornings at the jam factory, hefting boxes. They seem fabulously wealthy, with £10 a week cigarette money. Two more years, they chant, and they can work full time (‘go down the Synth’), have money coming in, buy mopeds, move out of their parents’ houses – their homes are much smaller than yours, and they have to share rooms – and get on with their lives. They make the last two years of school seem like the remainder of a prison sentence.

Your parents won’t let you work at the jam factory, though they don’t mind Laraine doing Saturdays as a waitress at Brink’s Café. You decide not to speak to them for a month. They don’t seem to notice, which shocks you. Somehow, you’ve become the invisible middle kid. James studies Latin at Ash Grove – on the site which used to be Hemphill – while you’re encouraged to take woodwork. Laraine is wondering which university to go to.

You think seriously about British Synthetics. Do you want to work in a factory? Go down the Synth?

At Ash Grove, Shane Bush rejoins your gang. He’s struggling with O Levels. He joins Dickie and Paul, counting off the days to release, and is the only one among you with an ambition, to learn to drive and gain command of a delivery van. Three years apart have changed your relationship. Shane is still loud and domineering, but Marling’s has convinced him he’s thicker than he is. He calls you ‘Mental’ in public, but asks for advice (even help with schoolwork) when you’re alone. You’ve grown past the age when Shane can get his way with a few cheerful cuffs around the head. You realise you can order him around, a position you sometimes (remembering infants’ school) can’t resist abusing.

Shane tries to get off with Marie-Laure but she isn’t interested. You realise Shane defers to you and Marie-Laure because your parents are, by his standards, rich, which makes you uncomfortable. Vanda’s spots clear up and she keeps proposing kissing games, though you’ve long grown out of them. Marie-Laure kisses with her tongue, which means Vanda has to let boys feel her growing breasts. You all go along with this weird competition between the girls, but Marie-Laure calls a halt when Barry slips a hand into her knickers, and becomes for all practical purposes a nun.

Though three school populations are amalgamated, there’s little mixing. You’re in lessons with Hemphill kids and hang around with them at breaks. Some kids (Michael Dixon, Mary Yatman) you were at infants’ school, even kindergarten, with are around. You don’t talk to them unless you have to.

You had expected armed combat with the Marling’s boys, but it rarely comes to that. Hemphill lads think grammar schoolies are posh and soft and brainy. Some of them, like Michael, are. As Shane solicits homework help from you, you worry that deep down you’re posh and soft and brainy too. More and more, you think about your Eleven Plus. How might things have been if you hadn’t failed it? Is the worst thing in the world to be posh and soft and thick? You actually make an effort in some of your classes (English, French) but it’s a struggle. It’s not the work you have to overcome, it’s the sluggishness of your classmates and even the teachers.

You get fed up with Shane, Dickie, Barry, Paul and Vanda. They’re so impatient to get out of school and ‘on with it’ that they keep getting into trouble. You get dragged in with them too often. Dickie has a maniac streak (he threw the first stone at that bloody dog, you remember) and commits an escalating series of acts of vandalism. The prefab classrooms are flimsy and Dickie discovers that he can head-butt cracks in the pasteboard walls, even punch right through them.

It makes sense to distance yourself from your long-time friends, and you spend more time with Vince Tunney and, oddly, Marie-Laure. The three of you are all-round out-of-its, too clever for CSEs, not clever enough for O Levels. You admit to Vince that you find the prospect of life after school terrifying. You don’t want to go down the Synth, you’ve decided. But you don’t want to work in a bank or an estate agent’s either. You don’t want to drag things out by going to college or university. You think of joining the merchant marine and joke about running away to become a pirate.

Vince would like to be a comic-book artist but isn’t very good. In the art room, he sees superhero panels drawn by Mickey Yeo, one of the O Level stream, and is forced to recognise how inadequate his own work is. He can never get hands right. Marie-Laure is torn between staying at home – her rich parents are screwed up enough to support her without a second thought – and travelling to India. She’s the first person you know who tries marijuana. You and Vince sometimes go to her house in Achelzoy, a village outside town, and loll around her bookless room, getting stoned. Her mum and dad are never home at the same time.

You want time to stop, now. Then you wouldn’t have to think about the future, the imminent after-school. Without noticing it, you’ve become a grown-up. You’re sixteen. The fun is over. Vanda and Shane announce their engagement. Paul, Barry and Dickie bunk off school most of the time. Marie-Laure’s hands won’t stop shaking. Vince endlessly catalogues and rearranges his comics. Ahead of you, a shadowy void gapes. You are sure there are cobwebs stretched invisibly across the path, waiting for you.

* * *

At the end of your first year at Ash Grove, your fourth year in secondary school, you have interviews with your class teacher and a careers officer. You worry that the only ambitions you’ve ever had, to be a pirate or an astronaut, won’t impress them.

Mr Bird, your class teacher – you don’t have him for any lessons, just for a ten-minute get-together in the morning – looks over your report and asks if you want to shift from maths and French CSE to O Level courses. He thinks you’ve got a chance of passing.

‘You should seriously think about it,’ he says.

You don’t know. Can you keep up with the more demanding work? And will two O Levels to go with six CSEs mean anything in a year’s time, when you pass out into the void?

If you transfer to the O Level stream in two subjects, go to 25. If you stay on the CSE courses, go to 27.

I
n September 1974, you start going to Ash Grove. It’s less structured than Marling’s, more relaxing, easier to cope with. You study for O Levels now, which means thinking harder. But you enjoy that. You need goals to stretch for. It’s the same in cricket, where you constantly try to improve yourself. As an all-rounder, you’re distinguished as neither a bowler nor a batsman – though you have a knack for catches when you field – but become captain. Because you see the whole picture, you can best deploy the strengths of your team-mates, compensate for their weaknesses.

The big change is girls. Michael’s stutter gets exponentially worse at Ash Grove: it takes him months to get a coherent sentence out in the presence of a girl. Gully and Mickey turn into major leches and obsess over any girl they happen to be in a class with, though they can only actually get off with girls a year or two younger than they are.

You find you like girls, not just in the obvious way. You see how stale your thinking was getting at Marling’s, which was all about jumping through hoops and ticking off boxes, and are forced to question all that. You start going out with Victoria Conyer, who is the Girls’ Grammar answer to you – smart and on course but with an independent streak. Perhaps you’re too similar, because you don’t last three months. You see in her a wildness you find a touch frightening. She reminds you of Scary Mary Yatman, who is still around and apparently a reformed personality.

In 1976, you pass eight O Levels, four at grade A. You go on to Sedgwater College to take a two-year A Level course. There, you become president of the Students’ Union, with Michael as your deputy. He becomes a small-town impresario, and stages a series of parties and ‘entertainments’, breaking away from the umbrella of the college to evade censorship.

You go out with Rowena Douglass, also a language specialist. You put off sleeping together for months but both find your parents less disapproving than you’d have thought. Rowena is allowed to stay over at weekends. You are sensible about contraception.

You get your A Levels and go to Manchester University. Ro wants to retake German and opts to put off further education for a year, but comes north to live with you. You get a flat together and feel very grown-up, almost married. She never does go to university, but tops up her qualifications with practical courses at Manchester Poly – secretarial, business, computer-programming.

You get a First Class degree but decline offers of postgrad places. It’s 1981 and you want to get out of education into the real world.

You and Ro move down to London and get a bigger flat – part financed by your parents, but you’ll pay them back – in Chelsea. She works as a bilingual secretary and you take a temporary job as an international courier and translator. You get to go to every continent, including Antarctica, and discover a knack for setting up and organising business negotiations between many parties. It’s like putting together a jigsaw.

Several times, in different foreign cities, you have brief affairs with business contacts. Always, you feel guilty but you don’t regret the experience. The women are mostly older, studied in glamour and sexual enthusiasm. They convince you that you’re really in love with Ro, rather than just drifting along because you’ve been together since school.

Dad dies in 1982. The next year, once your mum is out of mourning, you announce you will get married. Without planning it, Ro gets pregnant. Mum, herself engaged, is appalled and delighted that she’ll be a granny. Ro blossoms and blooms as she swells. Your sex life has never been better than in the months of her pregnancy.

At the same time, you get capital together to found your own business. You’ve expedited so much for so many, while going from job to job, that you have more contacts than any of your bosses, and a better reputation in the field. You’ve picked up some Japanese and are in the forefront of Anglo-Japanese trade links. You’ve even done a lot of work for the government, though you’ve never voted for them.

You have a 1984 wedding. Ro gives up work and has twins, Jeremy and Jessica.

You buy your Chelsea flat but start looking for a house out of London. Not in the commuter belt, a real retreat. You have an office in the city and a full staff there, but do most of your work in the field, out of the country. Your wardrobe includes gear appropriate to every climate and social occasion. You own tropical suits and alpaca parkas, and have multiples of dinner jackets in white and black. Ro teases you about dressing like James Bond, and asks if you can have an ejector seat fitted in the BMW.

Finally, you buy a house in Sutton Mallet, near Sedgwater. You return almost as a conquering hero. Your old teachers all want to take credit for you.

You have friends and contacts all over the world but stay in touch with a surprising number of people from Ash Grove. Mark Amphlett founds
The Shape
, a magazine, and becomes a ‘style guru’. Michael Dixon is a comedian, TV personality and novelist. Victoria Conyer emerges shrieking from punk and survives as a singer-songwriter. Gully Eastment is another kind of guru, leader of a nomadic tribe of travellers; he goes to jail for his part in a poll-tax riot and is the subject of several television documentaries.

Laraine, a lecturer in history at East Anglia, marries Fred, her university boyfriend. James comes out of the army and starts a security firm. You employ him to run security at conferences whenever there is a possibility of terrorist attack. Councillor Robert Hackwill, your old school bully, is always leaving messages on your answerphone, wheedling support for local schemes.

When the kids start school, Ro comes into the firm. She turns out to have a flair for design, and handles your PR. Victoria poaches her to run her indie record label, which is a surprise but works out amazingly well.

The 1980s are good to you. It’s hard not to feel guilty about that. You work closely with a great many business people you feel are no better than crooks but manage to keep your own integrity. You won’t work in South Africa, Chile, Indonesia or the Philippines (until Marcos goes). With Michael and Mark, you get involved around the fringes of Live Aid and keep up your charitable work, donating a great deal of free time and expertise to discreet fund-raising and environmental lobbying.

It’s possible that you make a difference.

* * *

But, as the ’80s draw to a close, and you turn thirty, you start thinking.

Isn’t everything all just a bit too easy?

The point of a jigsaw is the putting together. Once it’s done, you don’t frame and admire the picture. You feel you’ve finished this puzzle. There’s a nagging urge to break up the picture into a million pieces and put it back in its box. Then start again.

That’s silly.

In many ways, you’ve only just started. There are the kids. New puzzles, constantly exciting and interesting. You’ve no real idea what pictures they’ll make yet. Work is still stimulating. You and Ro aren’t bored with each other.

If the next word in this train of thought is ‘But…’ go to 169. If the next word is ‘And…’ go to 274.

Y
ou call it Year the Second-and-Fifth (of Ash Grove and Hemphill), after James the First (of England) and Sixth (of Scotland). For the first two terms, from September 1975 to Easter 1976, you work hard on your new courses and achieve a middling placing in classes of clever kids.

Your parents are mad keen on the O Level lark. Laraine, who will go to university at the end of the month, is ordered to tell you what a wonderful time she had at Sedgwater College. Previously, toiling in the lower depths of the CSE stream, you were lost. Now, there’s the possibility of salvation.

Marie-Laure is jumped to the O Level stream in art and scripture (‘religious studies’, they call it at Ash Grove). Vince Tunney joins you in maths, which gives you an ally but perhaps holds you back a bit. Reversing the pattern, Shane Bush is only doing English O Level, dropping all his other subjects to CSE.

Now you’re all world-weary sixteen-year-olds, former grammar-school kids don’t persecute former Hemphill kids. Rowena Douglass, who is with you in French, even makes something of a pet of you, ostentatiously helping you in class. You feel a little patronised but also realise you’re out of your depth. You keep up on paper but don’t have the confidence to speak in class and have to be painfully drawn out.