Читать книгу Are you talking to me?: A Life Through the Movies - John Walsh - Страница 7

It was a fabulous wedding. At least they all told me it was. I hadn’t a clue. I’d never been to a wedding before.

The lady coming towards us was an apparition in rolling breakers of white shiny stuff, surmounted in her upper reaches by wavy clouds of white net that hid her face like tumbling cumuli obscuring a pale, autumnal moon. Everybody in the crammed pews had turned to look, as she drifted down the aisle on the arm of a teary-eyed old geezer with a moustache – what was he, her granddad? – processing slowly down the whole length of the church. I gazed at her too, this ghostly bride, but I was shocked by the sight of the whole congregation brazenly turning their backs on the altar and the tabernacle and the priest who stood beside me.

It seemed, to my prim, eight-year-old eyes, jolly rude to behave that way. You didn’t turn round and look behind you in church. Even if a platoon of Protestant militia were (as seemed likely, in those doctrinaire days) suddenly to burst in, blasting assault rifles in the air, you always faced the altar when the priest was on it, doing his priestly business. It was a rule of Catholic church-going, like not fidgeting during a sermon, not remaining seated when you were supposed to kneel, or not playing with your wodge of Potty Putty during the dead quarter-hour when everyone joined the queue for Communion.

I’d been an altar server for a year or two, and I knew the rules. I was a strict little Papist gauleiter, a stickler for correct form. Any junior acolyte who rang the gold three-dome shamrock of bells in the wrong place during the Mass would get a vicious ticking-off from me or from Thimont, my friend and co-adjutant in the altar-server army, just as he had once abused my stupidity when I’d been a bungling starter on the altar steps.

Now he and I stood on either side of the priest in his white-and-gold chasuble, waiting in our off-white vestments for the dame in the pristine cloud to arrive before us. As she drew level, she was joined by a sweating chap from the front pew who had got up to stand beside her, nervously pulling his fingers as if trying to make his knuckles crack, along with an identically-dressed other chap by his side, the pair of them quaking slightly.

The priest asked the bride and groom some simple questions at dictation speed and they repeated everything he said like parrots. I wasn’t impressed. They seemed so nervous. Would the priest speak harshly to the lady if she got a word out of place? Would he say, ‘No, that’s wrong, you stupid boy,’ to the man, as the Religious Education teacher at school ticked you off if you got a bit of the catechism wrong? Would they both wind up in detention?

It was a pivotal year, 1962. The Kennedy assassination, the Profumo scandal and Beatlemania were just months off. The old world of the Fifties, had I realised it, was about to change for ever. But at home in Balham, south London, life was still shrouded in Fifties gloom. It was a monochrome time. The smell of beef sausages lingered in the hallway where I drove my Dinky Toy Bentleys at reckless speed down the banisters, and constructed Airfix models of Fokker triplanes and Sherman tanks, and supervised pitched battles of tiny plastic soldiers – British Tommies and German desert rats – with their feet disablingly clamped onto tiny skateboards.

My mother read The Lady, a shiny magazine of unimpeachably correct, upper-class rectitude, which featured small-ads for nannies and cook-housekeepers in its latter pages. I was devoted to a comic called Valiant, full of the exploits of adventurous misfits in jungles, war zones and minor-league football clubs. My father came home from the surgery in Latchmere Road for his supper at 8 p.m., drank gin-and-orange cocktails that smelt of clinics and tut-tutted over pretentious arty documentaries (like Ken Russell’s film of Elgar) on a TV show called Monitor.

Sunday family outings in our Renault Dauphine took us to wasp-infested picnics in Cannizaro Gardens in Wimbledon, the suburb where my sister and I went to school during the week. We went to church twice on Saturdays, morning and evening, as well as the be-there-or-die mandatory Catholic attendance on Sunday mornings. It was a grey, craven, mind-your-manners time, with no hint of the rebellion to come.

Back in church that day, everyone seemed to be in uniform: long grey suits with graceful tailcoats, black-and-white suits with shiny lapels, ladies’ hats with farcically wide brims and fussy arrangements of flowers that could not possibly – not in a million years, I sternly and silently informed them – keep the rain off in the event of a June cloudburst.

I was impressed to see that everyone had made an effort. The uniform at Donhead, the prep school which Thimont and I attended, was a pale blue blazer and shorts with a white shirt and white socks, and the photographs of my first day there show a boy beaming, fit to burst with pride at having joined the army of normal boys at last, after spending too long in the mixed-infants hell of the girly Ursuline Convent one road away.

At the age of eight I was an unusually conservative kid, anxious to do right, keen to conform, one of nature’s milk monitors and junior prefects. I was probably insufferable, but I knew that I knew right from wrong. The son of sternly moral, right-thinking Irish Catholic parents, I was as straight as a poker and as square as a boxing ring. I served mass in the school chapel and once a year (a head-spinning privilege) I’d be called on to make the bleary-eyed, late-evening journey to Farm Street, the London headquarters of the Jesuit brotherhood, to serve with my mentor, Thimont, at the Easter Saturday vigil Mass in front of the country’s most seraphic Catholic top brass.

My eyes were fixed on the glory of service. I had no ambitions beyond being good and perhaps one day, if I kept away from bad company, graduating to the rank of Master of Ceremonies on the high altar in Westminster Cathedral.

While the choir, at the wedding, were singing the ‘Ave Maria’, and the bride and groom were signing the register somewhere out of sight, I leaned over to Thimont, my coserver, and said, ‘Teapot, who’s the bloke in the grey suit who was at the altar but wasn’t marrying the woman?’

‘He’s the best man,’ said my friend, who knew such things.

The Best Man? I’d never heard the phrase before. Gosh. Had there been a competition?

Thimont (his name was Paul, but we were very formal kids in grammar school) explained, in his worldly way, that the best man was the bridegroom’s best friend, that he was keeper of the Wedding Ring and the life and soul of the Reception festivities, and would have to make a speech in front of all the wedding guests. He and the groom had been friends with one of the teachers at Donhead, and that was why we were there at all, serving Mass at this wedding, and that was why the school choir was currently up in the music loft, singing the ‘Ave Maria’ with a terrible, grinding slowness. We’d all been hired for the day, like a job-lot of farm labourers, by a sentimental fan of our school.

As I listened to the singing, with its listless and drooping cadences, a martinet frown creased my brow. Buck up, you chaps, I thought, put some life into it. The honour of the school may be at stake here. You cannot sing so boringly in front of someone who’s been deemed a Best Man (though he was still backstage at the time, doing his register duties). I wanted him to be impressed by us. I wanted him to admire our cadet rigour, our parade-ground smartness, our polish and swagger. But in the event, it was he who subverted all our lives. Because, in gratitude for our labours that day, he bought the choir and the altar servers tickets to see Mutiny on the Bounty.

It was my first-ever movie. I was, at eight, a virgin of the picture house. Other boys in my class had been to Disney cartoons in local picture houses, or to Saturday-morning cinema club, or even to school-holiday first-run features: they could discuss the wonders of In Search of the Castaways, and its star, the wide-eyed, beautiful Hayley Mills, every eight-year-old boy’s dream companion. I knew nothing of all this. My Saturday mornings were spent in church. My parents didn’t disapprove of the cinema as a temple of sin, they simply ignored it as an irrelevance in their children’s education. Going to the movies was something grown-ups did, by themselves as a foolish bit of time-wasting, or else as a couple at the start of a long, chaste and protracted courtship.

But it was my first time, and I was tremendously excited. Not just by the prospect of seeing a movie, but a grown-up movie at that; not just an adventure film, but one lasting three hours. Not just an evening out that would go on well beyond the bedtime hour of 8 p.m., but an evening in the West End of London, where there were pubs and ritzy neon signs – the last word in glamour in 1962 – and restaurants with dressed-up couples you could see through the windows, eating steak and drinking wine, and all the rackety bustle and hum of the capital I’d only ever seen through the windows of the family Renault, when we were taken, as a colossal treat, to see the Christmas lights of Oxford Street and Piccadilly.

The day dawned. My mother insisted I take a scarf in case the evening grew cold – a needless precaution in June. My father gave me a stiff, brand-new pound note to spend on ice-cream. At school, the form teacher Mr Breen announced there would be a special class at 3 p.m. for those attending the evening screening. What could it be? A lecture on cinema etiquette? No, it was an extra lesson on maritime history. For an hour we looked at maps of eighteenth-century exploration, we heard about colonial expansion in the Americas, we learned about the importance of breadfruit as the staple diet of South Pacific tribes and how it used to be imported to feed the slaves in the British sugar plantations of the West Indies …

Rigid with disappointment, we suddenly realised that this whole, supposedly exciting movie venture was a con. We had hoped for pirates and grog and swordfights. We’d have settled for sailing ships and people shouting ‘Splice the main-brace’ and maybe a shark attack. But instead we were going to get a dramatisation of the historical significance of breadfruit. Three hours of it. Some of us wondered aloud if it was worth the bother of going. But, we conceded, a trip to the West End en charabanc with your mates was still a better prospect than staying in, doing your homework and (in my case) saying the rosary before going to bed. So we set off with mixed feelings. We sang little songs in the coach, and pulled faces at passing motorists, the hard cases in the choir swigging bottles of Corona Cherryade and belching exuberantly.

In Leicester Square, the trees were full of chattering jackdaws, flying in and departing on black wings against the still-bright, school-uniform-blue sky. Huddled together by our coach, we suddenly became aware, for all our bravado, that this was grown-up land – a territory of strange, obscurely alarming, adult to-and-froing. It was not a place to get lost. We milled about Mr Breen, fourteen anxious acolytes around this trustworthy figure with his slicked-down, Brylcreemed hair (how his name suited him) and his youthful, big-brotherly authority.

Accompanying him on the trip was Miss Stacey, class mistress of the fourth form. She was a handsome, meringue-haired, statuesque termagant with a bosom like a sack of concrete, and a face liberally basted with orange foundation. She stood no nonsense. Her sharp blue eyes sought out tiny displays of rebellion like a searchlight. My friend Palmer swore he’d once found her and Mr Breen locked in a passionate kiss on a piano stool in the Music Room; but there were some things in life that were completely beyond comprehension or likelihood, and the idea of Miss Stacey kissing anyone was right up there with Abominable Snowmen and the Holy Trinity.

The Odeon loomed above us like an enormous temple. It took up as much space as our local church and seemed to bulge with light, eclipsing all the other buildings on one side of the square. We walked towards it in a hushed gaggle, impressed beyond words, and stopped to consider its immense beauty. Up the wall, above the huge ODEON sign, the film’s title shouted across the square in a blaze of million-watt illuminations: MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY. Each of the letters was about two feet high. Presumably they’d been manipulated into place earlier that day by a master sign-writer with superior spelling skills. He must (I reasoned) have a box containing the whole alphabet in red, light-up signs, but since the title contained two Os, two Ys, two Us, and – blimey – three Ts and three Ns, it occurred to me he’d need two or three different boxes to rummage in. And were there any films which had three Xs or Ys or Qs …?

I broke off this absorbing line of enquiry to register that we were standing in a great big cave that was the Odeon’s lobby. Everything about it was plush – the carpets felt four inches thick, the white walls featured a thick anaglypta, frieze-like wedding-cake-decoration motif and even the staircase in the distance seemed to lie back luxuriantly on soft pillows. It was like the soft furnishings department of Arding & Hobbs, grown to colossal size but with no merchandise in sight. Instead there was a manager in a formal tuxedo and bow-tie, and two ladies in strict red-and-white stripey uniforms selling things. One had a tray that hung around her neck on long ribbons, full of tubs of ice-cream.

‘No ice-creams until the interval,’ Mr Breen sternly informed us. ‘And everyone must spend a penny before we go in.’

The other lady sold big, glossy magazines with pictures of actors on the front. ‘Don’t bother with the programmes,’ Mr Breen warned us. ‘They’re a waste of money. You can’t be too careful in these places.’ Instinctively he had become our intrepid native scout guiding us through the jungle of the modern commercial cinema. The foyer of the Odeon didn’t look much like a jungle, though. It was more like a big sofa. The atmosphere was almost creepily tactile, like velvet or suede, something you could run your finger along, something you could almost fondle.

We shuffled upstairs, marvelling at the airy splendour of this secular cathedral, were dispatched to the Gents, were reassembled like a lost platoon, ticked off for talking and shoving, then, in a fourteen-strong group, went through the door into a profound darkness.

It was like going over the top in a war. I could see nothing but a massive sheet of screen on our left, on which a giant young woman in a gingham frock was accepting a light for her cigarette from a laughing man about Mr Breen’s age. They were enjoying a picnic beside a river. I kept my eyes on the girl, who was pretty and seemed very easily amused, and, moving forward blindly, I crashed into Armfield, who’d stopped in front of me.

‘For Christ’s sake, Walsh …’ he said crossly.

‘Sh!’ whispered Mr Breen, as our troop of choirboys and servers milled awkwardly around the Dress Circle. A grown-up woman flashed a torch at an empty patch in the third row and we filed into it like automatons.

‘Consulate,’ intoned an adenoidal voice from the screen in seductive tones. ‘Cool as a mountain stream …’

While the others took their seats around me, I stood looking at the gigantic plaque of light, transfixed, turned to stone by my first encounter with the big screen, oblivious to my co-scholars and the rest of the audience, gazing at the bright cloudless day in front of me, feeling a strange longing to get up on-stage and walk straight into it.

‘Sit down, will you?’ asked a stroppy voice from behind.

Beside me, Armfield yanked the sleeve of my school blazer. I subsided, and sat on a surface approximately one foot wide. It was amazingly uncomfortable. How, I thought, can I sit on this for three hours? Without undue fuss, Armfield reached behind my back and pushed, so that I flew forward as my first-ever tip-up seat subsided beneath me with a bump.

It had a strong spring, this seat. It was far from certain that my puny weight would keep the thing down under me. Could it, I wondered, tip right back up again, folding me in half and leaving me helplessly mewling with only my legs and school socks showing? This was a whole new territory of alarm – the total darkness, the usherette’s stabbing light, the fearsome jaws of the seat I was perched on, the huge, brightly-lit, wall-sized rectangle I’d never encountered before – that screen that drew your eye, whatever was on it, and made you forget everything else. It was fantastically exciting, all of it, better than any funfair ride. Best of all it was in colour, whereas our tiny Rediffusion TV back home showed things only in monochrome greys. I felt simultaneously lost, elated and completely at home with the enormous new world unfolding in front of me.

The words ‘Preview of Forthcoming Attractions’ appeared on the screen. They meant nothing to me, but I watched like an urchin with his nose pressed against a sweet-shop window as the faces of Leslie Caron and Tom Bell appeared – emoting, argumentative, flushed, agonised, rapturous – in a series of bleak domestic scenes and dismal black-and-white views of London parks. It was the first trailer I’d ever seen (advertising The L-Shaped Room), and although the story looked fantastically depressing, the voice-over dramatically promised that it was shocking and challenging and ‘a film for today’, so that you felt duty-bound to see it as soon as possible, despite being eight years too young (it carried an X certificate) to do any such thing.

The preview ended. Two mile-high curtains swished shut. The lights came on. Was that the end? Had we come to the wrong cinema? I could see the bright auditorium at last, and looked around. We sat, all fourteen of us plus two teachers, line-abreast across a whole row, chattering and gazing at the Odeon’s mile-high ceiling, the complicated sculptures on the facing walls, the great proscenium arch. I wondered if people – real people – came out and acted on this massive stage in front of the film while it was showing. If not, it seemed a shocking waste of the dramatic expanse before us – it was a sort of epic altar, far bigger than the stage on which I’d witnessed Puss in Boots at the Wimbledon Theatre’s panto season the previous Christmas.

Then the lights went out again, and the great curtains swished back to reveal a snarling lion. The unseen speakers took the snarl and fed it through some abysmal sonic filter so that it reverberated until the sound went down underneath where you were sitting, and made your seat vibrate. A pause, and the lion slothfully disgorged a second, basso profundo growl that was like the post-lunchtime belch with which my friend Grzedzicki could thrill his classmates, but magnified 4,000 times.

Then the title came on screen and remained there for ages, while an overture of orchestral savagery thundered behind it. Kettledrums bonged, cellos sawed like neighing horses, violins ran about shrieking ‘ding-didaling-didaling’, brass trumpets went ‘dum-da-dah!’ and, in an abrupt mood-swing, breathy woodwinds came quietly into the mix, conjuring up a moody Tahitian sunset before we were returned to rolling waves of splashy brass and chaotic surges of strings. It was tremendously exciting.

The film began. A botanical expert from Kew was strolling along the quay at Portsmouth in a tricorn hat, with a cylinder under his arm and what seemed a pitifully small sack of clothing for a long sea voyage. (My mother would never have let me bundle up my shirts and trousers in a horrible sack like that.) He encountered a gaggle of sailors, some with elaborate beards, some with rolling eyes, all destined for the HMS Bounty. They laughingly upbraided him for calling a ship a ‘boat’ and talked in unfriendly, joshing tones about the ordeal that lay ahead. The man from Kew Gardens was earnest and slightly lost, a nice guy fallen among rough, know-it-all companions. As he signed on for the voyage, leaning on a slanting desk, something about the opening scenes began to strike a chord – but I didn’t yet know what it was. The rough-diamond sailors pulled the cylinder from under his armpit.

‘Careful with that,’ he said. ‘Those are scientific documents.’

But they were merely pictures of breadfruit, which he laid out on a convenient barrel and used as part of a lecture about West Indian eating habits, not unlike the lesson we’d endured two hours earlier.

We’d been right. This was going to be an educational bore after all. Then Captain Bligh, played by Trevor Howard, appeared. He had a lined, rather cruel face and small piggy eyes, and something about his old-maidish mouth suggested he was always chewing something nasty without ever spitting it out. Dressed in white stockings, a dark blue uniform and a Duke of Wellington hat, he cut a comical but faintly sinister figure. He instantly reminded me of Mr King the sports master, whose appearance on the rugby pitch in his navy blue tracksuit was always the prelude to random acts of violence.

Fletcher Christian wafted on board. I had heard about Marlon Brando, the American actor with the cissy name. He was a real hero, my friends said, a brilliant actor, an exotic figure who probably lived in New York and knew other famous actors, and went round to the houses of famous people all the time and, you know, had lunch with them. It was important that he was American because we were in love with American things – the cars with the sharky fins, the Western guns, the tough-guy fist-fights, the space suits, the fact that, according to 77 Sunset Strip, American policemen chewed gum all the time and actually got to shoot people. Most of all we liked their accents, and sometimes tried to imitate them. They sounded like English accents on a slide, a drawling, don’t-care voice, far more appealing than the stuck-up, sit-up-and-beg accents of British people who read the news and appeared in quiz shows.

But was this really Brando, the famous actor-hero of whom I’d heard so much from my clued-up, movie-going friends? He wore a light-blue fancy-dress outfit, a comical hat and a red cloak like Superman’s, and my first reaction was of distaste: he seemed a bit of a garçon de Nancy as we called cissy actors on television. His hair was pulled back off his forehead and worn in a greasy ponytail, and his face was pulled back with it, so that his eyes were oddly slitty and Chinese – and he talked in a weird, affected, fastidious neigh of British distaste, as if he could hardy bear to say anything at all through his clenched teeth. He seemed about as heroic as the adjustable mannequin that posed in the window of Arding & Hobbs. He came aboard flanked by two ladies of fashion, one English, one French, who flapped and dimpled like flamingoes among the creaking sheets and elderly timbers of the merchantman, until they were shooed ashore by the captain.

He and Captain Bligh were soon having a row about why Brando had bothered going into the Navy.

‘The Army didn’t seem quite right,’ he told the captain, ‘and affairs of state are rather a bore …’

Ratha a bawww …

Captain Bligh pursed his skinny mouth with distaste. Well, I thought, this is going to be fun: one nasty, face-chewing man in long white socks, and one Chinky-faced, oily-haired clot with a foolish accent and a cloak, who was happier with silly women in ringlets and picture hats than with daggers and swords and stuff.

But once Mr Fryer, the dependable first mate, said, ‘Set topsails and headsails,’ we were away on a voyage and I was happily away too. There was an unstoppable swing to the voyage, and the narrative on which we’d embarked, a feeling of being swept up in it all as if you’d been press-ganged aboard and you wouldn’t be able to get off, even if you wanted to. It was like being on a ride at Battersea funfair – a place I haunted for weeks every summer – when you’d ridden the long train to the top of the Water Splash and were turning into the long slide down to where the water lurked, and there was nothing you could do but sit there amid a lot of screaming strangers, and scream along with them.

The Bounty hit the open sea, to the strains of ‘Rule Britannia’. The sailors swarmed up the rigging, spread themselves out on the crossbars like slivers of marmalade along a thin slice of toast, dropped the sails and watched them fill with wind. There was surge. There was heft and swell. There were creaking timbers and sailors doing baffling things with ropes. But things soon took a turn for the worse at deck level.

Seaman Mills, played by Robert Harris, the devil-may-care Irish troublemaker among the roistering matelots, was accused of stealing some ship’s cheeses.

Fletcher Christian listened to the complainant with a superior smile and dismissed the whinger condescendingly. ‘Was there something further you wished to discuss? Early Renaissance sketching, perhaps?’

Below stairs, surrounded by his mates, Mills blamed the captain, who, he said, had asked him take the cheeses to his home. Suddenly we were involved in a hurricane-lamp-lit subversion, as Harris recklessly urged his fellow rank-and-file scum to believe their captain guilty of pilfering. Unluckily, Bligh chose just that moment to descend the gangway, where he stopped to listen to Mills’s accusations. The thuggish sailors fell silent, but Mills was unstoppable: ‘It was the captain helping himself to the ship’s stores,’ he shouted into a mortified silence. ‘The captain’s the thief, not me!’

Behind him, Bligh and Mr Christian took stock of what had been said. For us schoolboys, it was a terribly familiar scene, familiar from a dozen classroom encounters when we’d performed a hilarious impersonation of the Maths master while the Maths master watched unnoticed, from the doorway.

A nasty smile twitched across Bligh’s razor mouth.

Christian recommended cancelling the mouthy Irishman’s grog for a month.

‘Two dozen of the lash will teach him better still,’ grated Trevor Howard. ‘All hands on deck to witness punishment, Mr Christian, if you please.’

Along the row of seats, Mr Breen leaned forward, looked to right and left, and said, ‘Boys? This man is going to be flogged. It may get rather nasty. If any boy wants to sit on my lap, now is the time …’

Film and reality suddenly merged. We were all, choir and altar servers and teachers and actors alike, suddenly complicit in an act of collective sadism. We schoolboys were suddenly hands on deck, forced to gaze at a punishment ritual, whether we liked it or not. Nobody took Mr Breen up on his kind offer, for fear of seeming a wimp. We sat there, entranced by our first exposure to the delights of sadomasochistic teasing.

For minutes that were like hours, the hapless Mills was filmed sitting on a bunk, wondering how savage his punishment was going to be. We were obliged to look very closely at Richard Harris’s handsome, sunburnt face. He appeared half in love with his distress, while a dangling rope behind him suggested a death that might soon overwhelm him. One of the sailors offered him a cup of grog, but he waved it away. All his brave buddies fell silent. And then Quintal, the second mate, dragged something out of a storage cupboard and brought it down to the floor, there to ferret out, from its rummagy depths, a long red crimson sock with a draw-string neck. We watched its retrieval with collective foreboding, as if we were all, individually, the miscreant sailor looking at the thing that was about to lacerate his flesh.

But of course, we knew all about this stuff already. In the early Sixties, it was a matter of no great consequence that schoolboys could be flogged with a ferule, a short rod made from a whalebone encased in leather. If you forgot your sports kit twice in a row, or were caught fighting in class or throwing paper darts or cheeking the bovine Geography master, you might be sentenced to four or six ferulas, or (if you were really evil) nine or (for unimaginable depravity) twelve. At 4 p.m., when the lessons were over, you presented yourself outside the headmaster’s study, where pipe tobacco smells mingled with the sweat from your fear. You joined the queue of chastened youths, who all, in those days, simply accepted that they were about to be whacked and brutalised as a normal part of the school routine.

When it was your turn, you knocked on the door and, at the words ‘Come in!’, turned the handle. Inside the room, everything looked posh and stately, the living room of a successful gentleman-scholar, with a humidor smelling of cigars on the antique desk and a gramophone softly playing some sobbing Italian operatic tenor.

You had to say, ‘Six ferulas, please, sir,’ in a polite, Oliver-Twist-asking-for-more voice that was the second-worst thing about the experience.

The head would write something in a little book (‘Walsh – 22 May 1961 – running in crrdr – 6f’) and stand before you, with one hand behind his back. He would beckon with his fingers for you to extend your arm, palm upwards, and from its hiding place the whalebone would suddenly appear, soaring up then crashing down on your innocent flesh in a vivid trajectory of blurred malevolence, and a noise like ‘Whop!’ that didn’t seem to suit the astounding, metallic pain that shot up your arm. You would put the bruised limb somewhere behind you and extend the other arm, with a kind of stunned fatalism, and that hand would be whopped in turn. Then the first hand again, rising from the depths of wherever it had sunk, like an animal returning to a vicious master out of some sad, vestigial loyalty, then the second, the first, the second …

The headmaster never, ever, looked at you. He stood with eyes cast down at the glum brown carpet, waiting for you to say, ‘Thank you, sir,’ like a good little victim and take yourself off to the lavatories where you anointed your stinging hands with soap and running water.

The worst bit, though, was the waiting. From sentence to execution, hours would pass when nothing entered your mind but the prospect of what was to come. Bluebirds could circle the playing fields, grocer’s boys could whistle on their bicycles in a sonic emblem of the freedom beyond the school gates, but none of it would alleviate the pain of your imminent tryst with The Lash in the headmaster’s study.

So we watched with lively professional interest as Mills, stripped to the waist, was tied to a trellis and Quintal hissed in his ear, ‘Now just remember this, mate, it ain’t me that’s whipping yer.’ I’ve never forgotten those words. The crimson sock from the teak chest yielded up its baleful cargo of a cat-o’-nine-tails, Quintal shook it out and, before the ship’s crew’s incurious gaze, proceeded to lash Mills’s remarkably white flesh.

Counting off the lashes, we took in with our young eyes the blooding and flaying of Mills’s back, the wincing of the more sensitive crew-members, the gloating interventions of Captain Bligh (‘You’re going too soft, Quintal – lay on with a will or you’ll take his place’ – a classic piece of schoolmasterly brinkmanship) and the gradual sinking down of the victim.

Bligh’s mouth twisted in a smile. God I hated him. He reminded me so much of Mr King, the sports master, who always had me in his sadistic sights. Once, when I had weedily underperformed at some football practice, he actually picked me up by the ears and held me dangling in agony. But you didn’t fight back or argue with Mr King. You accepted that he had every right to do horrible things to you, because you were a nasty little boy who was probably in the wrong. All you would say was ‘Flippin’ heck, sir,’ like a Cockney droll, and take your punishment in good heart and not complain. You weren’t allowed to make a fuss, even to answer back, when you were eight, in Wimbledon, in 1962.

When Quintal had delivered the final lash and his shipmates had thrown a bucket of water over the flayed and knackered Mills, we breathed a collective sigh, we innocent choirboys and altar servers – half relief that it was all over and half a perverse satisfaction in cruelty that would live in our impressionable hearts for years. But something more important happened in those five moments, something that was to change us all. It was the first time we’d been confronted en masse by the grotesque unfairness of corporal punishment, a system that had changed little since the days of Tom Brown and Dr Arnold. At school, we sympathised with the boys who were on their way to the punishment room, and afterwards noted their tears, the weals on their flayed hands. But we’d never all witnessed it taking place in front of us before, never watched it as a hostile, wounded, grumbling, collective unit. You could almost hear a mutinous sigh from the fourteen schoolboys in the cinema stalls. We’d all experienced it as individuals. Seeing it portrayed on screen as an example of capricious revenge by an autocratic authority figure was something new.

It was shocking. No, it was outrageous. Why was Mills being subjected to such treatment? Because the Captain said so. Whose rules allowed the Captain to say so? Some naval statute, thousands of miles away in London. For the first time, we considered the possibility that the rules might be wrong – that it shouldn’t be possible to flog someone half to death because of some gubernatorial whim. And that it shouldn’t be possible to find oneself beaten in a book-lined study because some ancient ruling dictated that it should be so, because you had forgotten to bring your sports kit on a particular day. A shock-wave of rebellion passed through us. Mr Breen looked down the line of boys, checking to see that we had all come through the trauma of the flogging scene and nobody was weeping with distress. We weren’t. We were thinking how we’d all put up with it for so long. And how we might change the system so that we wouldn’t have to go through it any more. But where did you start?

In the captain’s cabin that evening, Bligh and Christian discussed punishment. Christian advocated leniency and charm to win over a crew and make them sail a happy ship. Bligh rejected such piffling liberalism. He was an advocate of ‘cruelty with purpose’, the efficiency brought about by pain. When a sailor has to be ordered aloft in freezing weather, Bligh maintained, it was better that he feared the retribution of his captain for being a bad sailor more than he feared death itself. ‘When a man has seen his mate’s backbone laid bare, he’ll remember the white ribs staring at him, he’ll see the flesh jump and hear the whistle of the lash for the rest of his life.’ Against which, all Christian had to say, with a glass of port in his hand, was, ‘I’d steer clear of this cheese, sir – I think it’s a bit tainted.’

I’d never heard the like of it before. Christian was subtly alluding to the cheese-stealing incident, criticising the captain in his own study and getting away with it. This would have been described by our parents as cheek. It was a smart remark on the lips of an inferior, directed at a figure of authority, its implied condemnation of the man and his attitudes sleekly concealed behind a veil of polite warning. It was cool. I was beginning to like Fletcher Christian.

There was another significant row, when Bligh announced his intention of sailing round Cape Horn. Rather than declare him an outright madman for steering them into a Force 12 inferno of crashing waves, 200 m.p.h. tempests and certain death, Christian said, ‘Well, we shall have ourselves quite a little adventure … Of course, Admiral Anson did it, but not in a 91-foot chamberpot.’

Bligh lost his temper at last and told Christian that he possessed only one emotion, namely contempt.

And Marlon Brando said this marvellous thing. He didn’t deny the accusation, but replied: ‘I assure you, sir, the execution of my duties is in no way affected by my private opinion of you.’ And he left the captain silent and fuming, unable to out-sleek his hated rival, glaring uselessly at the sea with his lower lip petulantly stuck out like a drawer in a Regency dresser.

You have by now, I’m sure, realised what was going on, though we hardly knew it ourselves, in the Odeon, Leicester Square, in 1962. We were watching the world about to collapse. We were watching a film about school, in which the whole system of masters and students, bound together in ancient protocols of supposedly common ideals, was about to founder. It was the moment with the crimson sock that did it – that collective shudder about a punishment we couldn’t evade – that made us realise the Bounty was a huge floating metaphor of school. Everything on board had its counterpart in the inky purlieus of Wimbledon College.

Captain Bligh was a classic headmaster – Mr Quelch from the Bunter books, Jimmy Edwards from the Whacko! television series, and Father Egan from our prep school. The sailors on the quay were second-year rude boys, joshingly welcoming the new bug, Wilson; they’d even watched him sign on for the voyage at a stained and pock-marked old desk. They’d told him to beware of the head’s frightful temper. The uniformed midshipmen were prefects, boys you couldn’t be friends with because of their little tin badges of authority and their direct line to the caning room. The three miscreant sailors, played by Richard Harris, Chips Rafferty and Gordon Jackson, were the anarchic naughty boys in class, always getting into trouble with the beaks as if they longed for punishment

And there, right there on screen, was a blueprint about how you could deal with the beaks, if you had the nerve. You could be cool. You could be sleek and inscrutable. You could fight back with words which couldn’t get you into trouble, either because they seemed to be about something else (like saying the cheese was tainted) or because they were simply too polite. We suddenly learned, at eight years old, the vital weapon of irony.

The rest of the film passed in a blur. I came out of the cinema with my head full of sea water, Pacific sunsets, rolling barrels, Tahiti dances, half-naked native girls holding nets in the sea, and disjointed images of the mutiny itself. After three hours of sadism, storms, death, topless women, breadfruit, romance, attempted escape and the final drama of the Bounty in flames, I was overwhelmed by sensation, jaded by extreme emotions, exhausted by proxy passion, and ready for bed. But all the action stuff was superfluous to the two crucial events, the flogging and the shipboard spats between Bligh and Christian. We had all, I think, learned collective outrage, although the actual chances of organising a decent mutiny at school seemed desperately slim.^* More important was the personal lesson I’d learned – about the power of words to help you stand up for yourself.

A week later, at Saturday morning rugby practice, Mr King, the sadistic sports master, stopped our listless passing and tackling and delivered a pep-talk about our lack of energy and attack. We’d heard it all before. We knew he’d pick on someone to hurt, as he always did. He called out Paul Gorham, a small fat boy upon whose prodigious folds of warm flesh we used innocently to rub our freezing hands when nothing much was happening at our end of the pitch.

‘Gorham,’ he said, ‘you’re useless. Why are you not trying harder? Mmm? Mmmmmm?’

‘I don’t know, sir.’

‘So it’s just ignorance, is it, Gorham, rather than just indolence, mmmm?’

‘No, sir. I’m a defender, sir. I thought I’d better wait at this end, sir, in case they tried to break through, sir. And,’ he concluded pathetically, ‘it’s very boring, sir.’

‘Well,’ said Mr King nastily, ‘we must try and make life more exciting for you, mustn’t we?’ And, as he’d done a dozen times to a dozen other boys, he ran his hands over poor Gorham’s face, circled them around the boy’s cold-reddened ears and began to hoist him up off the ground.

‘Aaargh,’ said Gorham. His portly frame dangled agonisingly, four stone of small fat boy held up in the air by two straining lumps of cartilage and flesh.

‘Don’t do that, sir,’ I said, out of nowhere. ‘You’ll hurt his ears, sir.’

Mr King put Gorham down and ambled over to me.

‘What did you say, Walsh?’

‘You’ll hurt his ears, sir, picking him up like that. My father’s a doctor and he says it damages the ear-drums.’ It all came out as a rush. It must have sounded a little too prepared, but I’d been thinking about Mr King’s casual savagery, and I was fed up with it.

‘Do not tell me what to do, boy,’ said Mr King. He sounded momentarily puzzled. Had the parents, urged on by my father, been talking about him? ‘This team is a disgrace to the rugby pitch, and you, Walsh, are one of the worst offenders.’

‘Yes sir,’ I said.

‘You run about aimlessly, you can’t tackle for toffee, you’re positively lily-livered in the scrum. You don’t even try to play rugby. And to cap it all – to cap it all – you are cheeky to my face. I don’t like your attitude, Walsh.’

I looked into his eyes. They were a milky shade of blue. I’d never looked him in the eyes before. You didn’t look a teacher in the eyes. You looked at the ground. You muttered ‘Flippin’ heck, sir’ while he punched you in the stomach or hoisted you aloft by your ears. But for the first time, I looked straight into his blue eyes.

The words came into my head, unbidden, perfect: ‘I assure you, sir, that the execution of my duties on the pitch is in no way affected by my private opinion of you.’

Did I say it? Of course I didn’t. What was I, asking for trouble? But my cheeks burned with the unsaid rejoinder and I knew, for the first time, that such words were there at my disposal. Had I the balls, the cheek, I could have said it, and taken the consequences. He might have slapped me across the face. He might have recoiled, as if stung. As it was, twenty seconds passed like an eon between us. In the distance a dog barked in the peculiar silence.

‘You will come and see me after the game,’ he said at last, loudly enough for the others to hear. ‘I’ll deal with you then.’ And he blew his pathetic whistle and we all ran off towards the second half of the afternoon’s cold misery.

But after the game he wasn’t waiting for me outside the changing rooms, even though my sporting pals confidently predicted that a terrible fate lay in store for me. I hung around for half an hour, waiting to be summoned, desperately trying to think of other useful Fletcher Christian lines I might (but probably wouldn’t) say, and finding none that would stop a furious sports master baying for blood. But he’d gone, and I snuck off home at 3.30 wondering if I’d got away with it.

In the next rugby class, and the next, he ignored me completely. But I noticed that, although his verbal assaults grew, if anything, more contemptuous, he didn’t do the ear-yanking routine on boys again.

It wasn’t much of a victory. But in its mild, unspoken way, it was a giant leap forward, into the Technicolor dawn of the Sixties.

* When Lindsay Anderson’s If … came out, six years later, its satiric portrait of a public school peopled by mad masters and machine-gun-smuggling Upper Fifth desperadoes was welcomed as a subversive metaphor for the Establishment under threat. ‘It’s something like the Writing on the Wall,’ Anderson told the press. I dare say he was right, but some of us felt we had been there already, watching a film in 1962 about a floating school whose headmaster simply had to go.