The Blue Touch Paper Read Online Free PDF Page A

It was not a particularly Masonic town, and it had no dominant institutions. The churches and the golf club did not seem powerful, nor did the Rotarians and Past Rotarians hold the town in an iron grip. You couldn’t even say there was a strong social hier­archy or clique, a group of favoured names who held sway. If there were aristocrats, we never met them. But nevertheless somehow everyone in the town of twenty- four thousand white people and one black knew full well by messages which came only through the air that you might be damned if you broke the rules. Worse, you might be doubly damned because you never knew the rules in the first place.
    So much, clearly, was to do with sex. How could it not be? The popular injunction ‘Be Yourself’ which was to take hold so completely in the next fifty years would have been meaningless to a majority of the British population in the 1950s. Be what exactly? On the other side of our semi-detached, 32 Newlands Avenue beside our 34, lived the Yearwood family, Tim, Sheila and their son Michael, almost my sister’s age, who in their impeccable integration into the morals and manners of the town seemed to offer some sort of implicit rebuke to all around, and to us in particular. Sheila, younger than Mum, had been her petty officer in the WRNS, and it was Sheila who had alerted the Hares to the vacancy next door. Tim was a snifty solicitor, at the heart of the town’s life, a Freemason and a member of what in another age was called the Quality. Barbados-born, Tim had fenced for his university and landed in France with the Royal Artillery just after D-Day. His well-creased cavalry twills and weekly game off the back tee with other professionalworthies – ‘Straight down the middle, Tim!’ – suggested a level of acceptability to which we could only aspire. Sheila, pearls in place round her cashmere sweater, was the daughter of cockneys, and, like my own parents, in a marriage which had only happened because of the war. Sheila ran family life so that the breakfast table was set immediately after the evening meal, in order that everything might be there, waiting, when the family woke punctually at seven. The marmalade, even, had its own lacy cloth with beads, a sort of yarmulke of gentility. Michael himself, pale-skinned and geeky, was for the next fifteen years presented to me and my sister as the exemplar of all we failed to be: studious, hard-working, polite and serious in his dedication to scholarship and discreet advancement. Sheila unfailingly took to her bed every afternoon for a few hours in order to recover from goodness knows what.
    Two sides of a semi-detached invite comparison – both sides are hyper-conscious of the other – and it would be fair to say that for many years the Hares defined ourselves by our proximity to the Yearwoods. They became the standard, and we became the satirical failures. Try as we might, we could not live in the orderly manner of our neighbours. Though to their face my mother showed nothing but friendship and respect, though in her heart she craved for nothing but to be accepted by Tim and Sheila, it was to her credit that, when confiding in Margaret and me, she seemed to take a certain kind of raffish pleasure in our supposed social shortcomings. We were not as posh as the Yearwoods – you could tell that as much from our rickety furniture and from our kitsch oriental paintings as from our naked marmalade tops – and that was fine. But we were clearly posher than the Richfords who lived two doors down in – horror! – a bungalow.
    The gradations of class grip early and they grip absolutely. You could not exist in this order without knowing your place in it. I was best friends with Michael Richford – it was he who was with me when together we encountered our first paedophile – but the details of our schooling were different. Private education was Bexhill’s principal industry. In