Joseph Anton Read online

  A pink stone set into the Doctor’s Wall, named for the legendary headmaster Dr. Arnold and overlooking the storied playing fields of the Close, bore an inscription that purported to celebrate an act of revolutionary iconoclasm. “This is to commemorate the exploit of William Webb Ellis,” it read, “who, with a fine disregard for the rules of football as played in his time, first picked up the ball and ran with it, thus originating the distinctive feature of the rugby game.” But the Webb Ellis story was apocryphal, and the school was anything but iconoclastic. The sons of stockbrokers and solicitors were being educated here and “a fine disregard for the rules” was not on the curriculum. Putting both your hands in your pockets was against the rules. So was “running in the corridors.” However, fagging—acting as an older boy’s unpaid servant—and beating were still permitted. Corporal punishment could be administered by the housemaster or even by the boy named as Head of House. In his first term the Head of House was a certain R.A.C. Williamson who kept his cane hanging in full view over the door of his study. There were notches in it, one for each thrashing Williamson had handed out.

  He was never beaten. He was a “nice, quiet boy.” He learned the rules and observed them scrupulously. He learned the school slang, dics for bedtime prayers in the dormitories (from the Latin dicere, to speak), topos for the toilets (from the Greek word for “place”), and, rudely, oiks for non–Rugby School inhabitants of the town, a place best known for the manufacture of cement. Though the Three Mistakes were never forgiven, he did his best to fit in. In the sixth form he won the Queen’s Medal for a history essay about Napoléon’s foreign minister, the clubfooted, cynical, amoral libertine Talleyrand, whom he vigorously defended. He became secretary of the school’s debating society and spoke eloquently in favor of fagging, which was abolished not long after his school days ended. He came from a conservative Indian family and was in no sense a radical. But racism was something he quickly understood. When he returned to his little study, he more than once found an essay he had written torn to pieces, which were scattered on the seat of his red armchair. Once somebody wrote the words WOGS GO HOME on his wall. He gritted his teeth, swallowed the insults, and did his work. He did not tell his parents what school had been like until after he left it (and when he did tell them they were horrified that he had kept so much pain to himself). His mother was suffering because of his absence, his father was paying a fortune for him to be there, and it would not be right, he told himself, to complain. So in his letters home he created his first fictions, about idyllic school days of sunshine and cricket. In fact he was no good at cricket and Rugby in winter was bitterly cold, doubly so for a boy from the tropics who had never slept under heavy blankets and found it hard to go to sleep when so weighed down. But if he cast them off, then he shivered. He had to get used to this weight also, and he did. At night in the dormitories, after lights-out, the metal-frame beds began to shake as the boys relieved their adolescent urges, and the banging of the beds against the heating pipes running around the walls filled the large dark rooms with the night music of inexpressible desire. In this matter, as in all else, he strove to be like the others, and join in. Again: He was not, by nature, rebellious. In those early days, he preferred the Rolling Stones to the Beatles, and, after one of his friendlier housemates, a serious, cherubic boy named Richard Shearer, made him sit down and listen to The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, he became an enthusiastic Dylan worshipper; but he was, at heart, a conformist.

  Still: Almost as soon as he came to Rugby he did rebel. The school insisted that all boys should enroll in the CCF, or Combined Cadet Force, and then climb into full military khaki on Wednesday afternoons to play war games in the mud. He was not the sort of boy who thought that might be fun—indeed, it struck him as a kind of torture—and in the first week of his school career he went to see his housemaster, Dr. George Dazeley, a mild-natured mad-scientist type with a glittering, mirthless smile, to explain to him that he did not wish to join. Dr. Dazeley stiffened, glittered, and pointed out, just a little icily, that boys did not have the right to opt out. The boy from Bombay, suddenly possessed by an unaccustomed stubbornness, drew himself up straight. “Sir,” he said, “my parents’ generation have only recently fought a war of liberation against the British Empire, and therefore I cannot possibly agree to join its armed forces.” This unexpected burst of postcolonial passion stymied Dr. Dazeley, who limply gave in and said, “Oh, very well, then you’d better stay in your study and read instead.” As the young conscientious objector left his office Dazeley pointed to a picture on the wall. “That is Major William Hodson,” he said. “Hodson of Hodson’s Horse. He was a Bradley boy.” William Hodson was the British cavalry officer who, after the suppression of the Indian Uprising of 1857 (at Rugby it was called the Indian Mutiny), captured the last Mughal emperor, the poet Bahadur Shah Zafar, and murdered his three sons, stripping them naked, shooting them dead, taking their jewelry, and throwing their bodies down in the dirt at one of the gates of Delhi, which was thereafter known as the Khooni Darvaza, the gate of blood. That Hodson was a former Bradley House resident made the young Indian rebel even prouder of having refused to join the army in which the executioner of the Mughal princes had served. Dr. Dazeley added, vaguely, and perhaps incorrectly, that he believed Hodson had been one of the models for the character of Flashman, the school bully in Thomas Hughes’s novel of Rugby, Tom Brown’s Schooldays. There was a statue of Hughes on the lawn outside the school library, but here at Bradley House the presiding old-timer was the alleged real-life original version of the most famous bully in English literature. That seemed just about right.

  The lessons one learns at school are not always the ones the school thinks it’s teaching.

  For the next four years he spent Wednesday afternoons reading yellow-jacketed science fiction novels borrowed from the town library, while eating egg salad sandwiches and potato chips, drinking Coca-Cola and listening to Two-Way Family Favourites on the transistor radio. He became an expert on the so-called golden age of science fiction, devouring such masterworks as Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot, wherein the Three Laws of Robotics were enshrined, Philip K. Dick’s The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Zenna Henderson’s Pilgrimage novels, the wild fantasies of L. Sprague de Camp, and, above all, Arthur C. Clarke’s haunting short story “The Nine Billion Names of God,” about the world quietly coming to an end once its secret purpose, the listing of all God’s names, had been fulfilled by a bunch of Buddhist monks with a supercomputer. (Like his father, he was fascinated by God, even if religion held little appeal.) It might not have been the greatest revolution in history, this four-and-a-half-year fall toward the fantastic fueled by tuckshop snack foods, but every time he saw his schoolfellows come lurching in from their war games, exhausted, muddy and bruised, he was reminded that standing up for oneself could sometimes be well worth it.

  In the matter of God: The last traces of belief were erased from his mind by his powerful dislike of the architecture of Rugby Chapel. Many years later, when by chance he passed through the town, he was shocked to find that Herbert Butterfield’s neo-Gothic building was in fact extremely beautiful. As a schoolboy he thought it hideous, deciding, in that science-fiction-heavy time of his life, that it resembled nothing so much as a brick rocket ship ready for takeoff; and one day when he was staring at it through the window of a classroom in the New Big School during a Latin lesson, a question occurred. “What kind of God,” he wondered, “would live in a house as ugly as that?” An instant later the answer presented itself: Obviously no self-respecting God would live there—in fact, obviously, there was no God, not even a God with bad taste in architecture. By the end of the Latin lesson he was a hard-line atheist, and to prove it, he marched determinedly into the school tuckshop during break and bought himself a ham sandwich. The flesh of the swine passed his lips for the first time that day, and the failure of the Almighty to strike him dead with a thunderbolt proved to him what he had long suspected: that there was nobody up ther
e with thunderbolts to hurl.

  Inside Rugby Chapel he joined the rest of the school, one term, in rehearsing and singing the “Hallelujah Chorus” as part of a performance of the full Messiah with professional soloists. He took part in compulsory matins and evensong—having attended the Cathedral School in Bombay, he had no leg to stand on if he wanted to make an argument that would excuse him from mumbling his way through Christian prayers—and he couldn’t deny that he liked the hymns, whose music lifted his heart. Not all the hymns; he didn’t, for example, need to survey the wondrous cross / on which the prince of glory died; but a lonely boy could not help but be touched when he was asked to sing The night is dark and I am far from home / Lead Thou me on. He liked singing “O Come, All Ye Faithful” in Latin, which somehow took the religious sting out of it: venite, venite in Bethlehem. He liked “Abide with Me” because it was sung by the whole 100,000-strong crowd at Wembley Stadium before the FA Cup Final, and what he thought of as the “geography hymn,” “The Day Thou Gavest, Lord, Is Ended,” made him sweetly homesick: The sun that bids us rest is waking / our brethren ’neath the western [here he would substitute “eastern”] sky. The language of unbelief was distinctly poorer than that of belief. But at least the music of unbelief was becoming fully the equal of the songs of the faithful, and as he moved through his teenage years and the golden age of rock music filled his ears with its pet sounds, its I-can’t-get-no and hard rain and try-to-see-it-my-way and da doo ron ron, even the hymns lost some of their power to move him. But there were still things in Rugby Chapel to touch a bookish unbeliever’s heart: the memorials to Matthew Arnold and his ignorant armies clashing by night, and Rupert Brooke, killed by a mosquito bite while fighting just such an army, lying in some corner of a foreign field that was forever England; and, above all, the stone in memory of Lewis Carroll, with its Tenniel silhouettes dancing around the edges in black-and-white marble in a—why, a kind of—yes!—quadrille. “Would not, could not, would not, could not, would not join the dance,” he sang softly to himself. “Would not, could not, would not, could not, could not join the dance.” It was his private hymn to himself.

  Before he left Rugby he did a terrible thing. All school leavers were allowed to hold a “study sale,” which allowed them to pass on their old desks, lamps and other bric-a-brac to younger boys in return for small amounts of cash. He posted an auction sheet on the inside of his study door, stipulated modest starting prices for his redundant possessions, and waited. Most study sale items were heavily worn; he, however, had his red armchair, which had been new when his father bought it for him. An armchair with only one user was a high-quality, sought-after rarity in the study sales and the red chair attracted some serious bidding. In the end there were two energetic bidders: one of his fags, a certain P.A.F. Reed-Herbert, known as “Weed Herbert,” a small, bespectacled little worm of a fellow who hero-worshipped him a little, and an older boy named John Tallon, whose home was on Bishop’s Avenue, the millionaires’ row of north London, and who could presumably afford to bid high.

  When the bidding slowed down—the top bid was Reed-Herbert’s offer of around five pounds—he had his terrible idea. He secretly asked John Tallon to post a seriously high bid, something like eight pounds, and promised him that he would not hold him to it if that ended up as the highest offer. Then, at dics, he told Weed Herbert solemnly that he knew for a fact that his wealthy rival, Tallon, was prepared to go even higher, perhaps even as high as twelve whole pounds. He saw Weed Herbert’s face fall, noted his crushed expression, and went in for the kill. “Now, if you were to offer me, say, ten quid right away, I could close the auction and declare the chair sold.” Weed Herbert looked nervous. “That’s a lot of money, Rushdie,” he said. “Think about it,” said Rushdie magnanimously, “while you say your prayers.”

  When dics were over, Weed Herbert took the bait. The Machiavellian Rushdie smiled reassuringly. “Excellent decision, Reed-Herbert.” He had cold-bloodedly persuaded the boy to bid against himself, doubling his own top bid. The red armchair had a new owner. Such was the power of prayer.

  This happened in the spring of 1965. Nine and a half years later, during the British general election campaign of October 1974, he turned on his television set and saw the end of a speech by the candidate for the far-right, racist, fascist, vehemently anti-immigrant British National Front. The candidate’s name was titled on the screen. Anthony Reed-Herbert. “Weed Herbert!” he cried aloud in horror. “My god, I’ve invented a Nazi!” It all instantly became plain. Weed Herbert, tricked into spending too much of his own money by a conniving, godless wog, had nursed his bitter rage through wormy childhood into wormier adulthood and had become a racist politician so that he could be revenged upon all wogs, with or without overpriced red armchairs to sell. (But was it the same Weed Herbert? Could there possibly have been two of them? No, he thought, it had to be little P.A.F., little no more.) In the 1977 election Weed Herbert received 6 percent of the vote in the Leicester East constituency, 2,967 votes in all. In August 1977 he ran again, in the Birmingham Ladywood by-election, and came in third, ahead of the Liberal candidate. Mercifully that was his last significant appearance on the national scene.

  Mea culpa, thought the vendor of the red armchair. Mea maxima culpa. In the true story of his schooldays there would always be much loneliness and some sadness. But there would also be this stain on his character; this unrecorded, unexpiated crime.

  On his second day at Cambridge he went to a gathering of freshmen in King’s College Hall and gazed for the first time upon the great Brunelleschian dome of Noel Annan’s head. Lord Annan, provost of King’s, the sonorous cathedral of a man whose dome that was, stood before him in all his cold-eyed, plump-lipped glory. “You are here,” Annan told the assembled freshmen, “for three reasons: Intellect! Intellect! Intellect!” One, two, three fingers stabbed the air as he counted off the three reasons. Later in his speech he surpassed even that aperçu. “The most important part of your education here will not take place in the lecture rooms or libraries or supervisions,” he intoned. “It will happen when you sit in one another’s rooms, late at night, fertilizing one another.”

  He had left home in the middle of a war, the pointless India-Pakistan conflict of September 1965. The eternal bone of contention, Kashmir, had triggered a five-week war in which almost seven thousand soldiers died, and at the end of which India had acquired an extra seven hundred square miles of Pakistani territory, while Pakistan had seized two hundred square miles of Indian land, and nothing, less than nothing, had been achieved. (In Midnight’s Children, this would be the war in which most of Saleem’s family is killed by falling bombs.) For some days he had stayed with distant relatives in London in a room without a window. It was impossible to get through to his family on the telephone, and telegrams from home, he was told, were taking three weeks to get through. He had no way of knowing how everyone was. All he could do was to catch the train to Cambridge, and hope. He arrived at King’s College’s Market Hostel in bad shape, exacerbated by his fear that the university years ahead would be a repeat of the largely wretched Rugby years. He had pleaded with his father not to send him to Cambridge, even though he had already won his place. He didn’t want to go back to England, he said, to spend more years of his life among all those cold unfriendly fish. Couldn’t he stay home and go to college among warmer-blooded creatures? But Anis, an old Kingsman himself, persuaded him to go. And then told him he had to change his subject of study. History was a useless thing to waste three years on. He had to tell the college he wanted to switch to economics. There was even a threat: If he didn’t do that, Anis would not pay his fees.

  Burdened by three fears—of unfriendly English youth, of economics, and of war—he found, on his first day “up” at King’s, that he couldn’t get out of bed. His body felt heavier than usual, as if gravity itself were trying to hold him back. More down than up, he ignored several knocks on the door of his somewhat Scandinavian-modern room. (It was the year of t
he Beatles’ Rubber Soul, and he spent a good deal of it humming “Norwegian Wood.”) But in the early evening a particularly insistent pounding forced him out of bed. At the door wearing a huge Old Etonian grin and Rupert Brooke’s wavy blond hair was the tall, relentlessly friendly figure of “Jan Pilkington-Miksa—I’m half-Polish, you know,” the welcoming angel at the gateway to the future, who brought him forth on a tide of loud bonhomie into his new life.