The Blue Touch Paper Read Online Free PDF Page B

stage. Mum soon found herself helping out, teaching Scottish accents, sometimes to professionals, at the Thalia School of Drama, a parking spot for tots and aspirants in London Road, ruled over by the formidable Christine Porch, and by Isobel Overton, a markedly intellectual young woman in billowing skirts and gold glasses, who would later publish a book of letters entitled A Canadian in Love , and after whom the theatre on the campus of the University of Toronto is now named. Mum went on to appear as a footman, dressed in what looked like a pair of red velvet curtains, saggy round the knee, in amateur Molière. She held one side of the double doors open for Julie Christie to burst through as the soubrette.
    I was two years at Pendragon before Mr Everett left. He fled town in the manner of schoolmasters at that time, without notice and for no given reason. My mother did not take to the new owner of the premises, a diminutive man with a thin moustache. She told me there was something ‘not right’ about him. In that at least, she was correct. There is today a lively internet thread dedicated to his abuses from fifty years ago. And so the decision was made, probably at the Yearwoods’ suggestion, to send me instead to what was said to be a more reputable institution on the smarter side of town. Its most famous old boy was Reginald Maudling, a gruesome sort of Conservative arche-type,who was to fail as Chancellor of the Exchequer – it was he who left his Labour successor a note about the economy reading ‘Good luck old cock, sorry to leave it in such a mess’ – before being bought off by the fraudster John Poulson and dying of alcoholic poisoning in 1979.
    Harewood was also, by chance, the school which had originally spawned Pendragon. In the early 1950s the Reverend Woodruff had been dismissed as headmaster of Harewood for gross indecency. In the wake of the scandal, Mr Everett had left his teaching job at Harewood in order to tempt angry parents to put their boys in a completely new school, Pendragon. Now, in a backward twist of fortune, I was to return to the mother ship.

2
    Mignon
    Harewood was set in fabulous grounds in Collington Avenue with its own cricket and football pitches, and only shamed by its immediate proximity to Normandale, an even better endowed building whose bronzed headmaster, Mr Palmer, spent most of the day and a good part of his nights, pipe clamped between teeth, driving his state-of-the-art petrol lawn mower over his velvet turf. His Christmas card portrayed him on his machine. By contrast, our own red-haired head, Michael Phillips, spent his day in a torment of self-feeding ill temper, clawing compulsively at his crotch and driven mad, it seemed, by his pupils, his staff, his wife, his children, the workers, General Gamal Abdel Nasser, and the general state of disrespect towards entrepreneurs and educators like himself. I remember him standing in the school corridor, dealing with some ungovernable itch deep inside his trousers, while at the same time brandishing a Beaverbrook newspaper and fulminating to a sympathetic Mr Mulvihill and Mr Morgan about how Frank Cousins and the trade unions ran the country unopposed. Fifty years later, he was to send me for my professional advice his film script drawing an analogy between the EU bureaucrats in Brussels who had de-manned our native isle and the conquest of Britain by William and the Normans in 1066. Would I be willing, he asked, to help him get it made?
    My new school, it turned out, was savage, a place whereteacher-on-pupil violence was as common as pupil-on-pupil. From the perspective of the twenty-first century, Harewood, with masters twisting ears and whacking skulls, feels far closer to Dickens than to how we live now. Most of us were day boys, but the ethic, like the luridly striped green and red blazer, was that of a traditional boarding school. After tea, as we returned to our classrooms, there was an ominous