Disgusting Bliss Read Online Free PDF Page A

public. He would know the most intimate details of most of the residents, their most private physical and mental concerns, often giving out general advice as much as prescriptions and being someone whom the whole village could confide in. It gave him responsibility and power in equal measure as he was implicitly trusted by so many. Chris’s work would later play on notions of authority and frequently featured the medical trade, particularly the doctor in Blue Jam whose apparent omnipotence covered disastrous flaws. At one moment he would be patronizingly ordering a female patient in and the next recoiling in horror at the sight of her daughter because he’s apparently never seen a child before and thinks she’s some kind of unnatural dwarf woman.
    Michael’s own cultural interests lay more in the classics, which he had absorbed into an encyclopaedic mind alongside his medical studies, while Rosemary had studied English before she went into medicine, and enjoyed theatre. Storytelling was a prominent feature of the boys’ upbringing. ‘You can never tell how important things are, can you?’ says Tom Morris now. ‘But certainly I can very vividly remember my dad reading us stories from when we were under ten. I can remember on one holiday being read Watership Down aloud, all of it, in nightly episodes. And I can remember being read a version of The Odyssey . And we used to love it.’
    The regular routine of family life was abruptly disrupted when the boys got to the age of ten and were sent to boarding school. Chris and Tom went to Stonyhurst College near Clitheroe in Lancashire and Ben went to Ampleforth College, a Benedictine school way up on the edge of the moors north of York. Their parents wanted them to receive a Catholic education and Stonyhurst, where Michael had been a pupil between 1944 and 1949, had an intriguingly radical past. It was founded in Europe in the late sixteenth century as a training centre for priests who were going to go undercover to support disenfranchised Catholics and foment revolution. In the late 1960s the headmaster fostered a creative ethos at the school through attracting music, English and drama teachers who were distinguished in their fields.
    ‘By the time we got there, it wasn’t at all like that,’ says Tom. ‘There was just a skeleton of this great liberal imagination that had moved on. It wasn’t a very good school – looking back on it, it was a shambles.’ It was saved by the few teachers who had stayed on from the heights of the previous years. One of the surviving elements of the old regime was a requirement that everyone had to learn an instrument for their first year. It rooted the pupils in musicality from an early age. Chris started on the double bass and later moved to the bass guitar. Tom learned the trombone.
    Chris started his Stonyhurst College school career at St Mary’s Hall, a feeder prep school in the grounds of Stonyhurst itself. His was a small class who were encouraged to think of themselves as the elite among children who were all pretty bright and driven. There were about fifteen to twenty of them in that group who formed tight friendships that lasted throughout their school careers. They received a more intensive schooling than most and were generally marked out for glory in the top sets at the main school. All prep pupils took the general entrance exam at thirteen, though St Mary’s was a special scholarship class with a £100 prize for the smartest.
    ‘There was probably a high degree of arrogance in our year. Most of us thought it would all fall into our laps,’ says Phil Godfrey, a friend of Morris and fellow St Mary’s pupil. ‘We would be merciless whenever there was a teacher who couldn’t handle us.’ Morris’s class was characterized by a lot of eccentric talent; all the pupils were trying to assert themselves, and he didn’t seem to be marked out for success more than anyone else. There were other pupils who went on to have