The Blue Touch Paper Read Online Free PDF

the twentieth century there were four hundred schools in the town at one time or another, some up for a few years, some longer. Every rambling red-brick mansion with grounds was turned into a preparatory school, and staffed by ex-military personnel whose wars had not gone entirely to plan. First I was sent off to be one of the very few boys allowed at St Francis, a hitherto all-girls’ school in West Down Road which boasted an entrance through a mock-medieval castle keep. It was known informally as Fanny’s Fortress, in honour of the headmistress, Fanny Fulford. My sister was there, much more senior, and the young Julie Christie, having been dumped by her parents in India on the south coast, was already attracting, in her teens, a certain amount of attention. But soon enough I was moved out of kindergarten and on to Pendragon, a wacky operation down Cantelupe Road, a pleasant residential avenue somewhere between the promenade and the railway station. Pendragon was run by a teacher called Alec Everett who, graffiti in my Kennedy’s Latin Primer informed me when I turned the flyleaf on my first day in the building, was known to be the owner of ‘a great fat steaming cock’.
    Mr Everett, in his thirties, in fact lived with a young American friend in the residential part of the school, in a forbidden flat into which we never saw at the end of a classroom corridor. The headmaster went out to get Smarties or jelly babies for his protégé most afternoons, some time after lunch. The blond lounged around doing nothing in canary-yellowcrew-neck pullovers, like a useless young man in a Terence Rattigan play. But because Mr Everett wore a blue blazer and flannels and spoke with an impeccably cultured accent, and because he drilled learning into the boys with ruthless efficiency, he was held to be respectable by all the parents, who, to a man and woman, admired him beyond suspicion. The best place to hide is in plain view. Mr Everett was, like most of his class and generation, a disciplinarian, insisting that every boy in school sit on his hands for a whole afternoon until an individual owned up to having left chewing gum under a seat. I learned that the only collective thing people in Bexhill admired was collective punishment. But Mr Everett also drew to him exceptional teachers, so that at the age of seven I was being taught piano by Philip Ledger, a myopic, gentle soul who tried not to wince as I played. ‘Try again,’ he would say, taking his glasses off, as if cleaning them might somehow polish up my appalling technique. ‘Try and play better.’ He had already established the connections with Benjamin Britten and with Peter Pears which would one day see him become Director of the Aldeburgh Festival.
    My mother was meanwhile gravitating to what would today be called the Scottish community, but which was then thought of as a few stubborn and strongly accented expatriates who happened to have migrated south to Bexhill, and who still wore tartan scarves and waistcoats. On Monday they all received the previous day’s copies of the Sunday Post . This Scottish newspaper celebrated the home country in sugar-overloaded tones which suited the toffee fudge, tablet and peanut brittle they all liked to eat. They would gather annually for a haggis dinner, and to recite Burns. Weekly, they would meet to dance Highland reels. My mother’s most prized records were by JimmyShand and his Band, and she had once met Kenneth McKellar, who, she told me, was a very nice man. I was dragged along to take part in the classes from an early age but unfortunately the white-haired enthusiast in charge of putting the gramophone records on suffered from Parkinson’s, which meant that a jumping needle got each dance off to an uncertain start. But if Mum’s Scottish identity remained important to her – it defined her, it made her feel she belonged somewhere – so too was her continuing interest in the