FULL NOVELXO Gotta Get Theroux This: Chapter 2
If ever in my life there was a lapsarian moment of loss of innocence it was in 1978, when I was eight, and my parents moved us to a fee-paying prep school called Tower House.
I’d been excited about the change. As befitted its name, its premises were a house with a small turret in a quiet suburban street in south-west London. The children all wore uniforms and did homework. They studied French and Latin. After the relaxed all-must-have-prizes attitude of my primary, it seemed exotic.
The excitement wore off pretty fast.
It was as though I’d time-travelled back into some earlier, more narrow-minded era. All boys. Surnames only – the children even used them for each other. The teachers were almost all men. You had to stand up when they came into the room, and several were subject to strange rages, lashing out, demented with anger. ‘If you can’t remember it now, how are you going to remember it in three years when you take your Common Entrance?’ Corporal punishment was common: a whack on the hand with a ruler or plimsoll or a visit to the headmaster’s office for a taste of ‘The Sword’. The ex-headmaster, and school founder, a half-fossilized Edwardian leftover called Mr Martin-Hurst, garaged his Jaguar at the back of the playground. When he wanted to take it out, all the children had to stand aside as he drove past, like spectators at a Lord Mayor’s procession. It was said that only one boy had ever been expelled from Tower House, and that was for selling copies of the Socialist Workers Party newspaper in his school uniform.
My brother had swanned through the school, beloved by all. I thought I would do the same, but it didn’t work out that way. Notwithstanding my dedication to my studies and the fact that I generally did well in tests and homework, I had absorbed from my dad a certain iconoclasm and swaggering attitude. I thought being cheeky made me lovable. The teachers of Tower House disagreed. Our English teacher, Mr Townsend, was an effeminate Irishman who lived with his mum and modelled his personality on Noel Coward. He carried a cigarette holder and wore a cravat, telling stories, almost certainly fictional, about a fiancée who died in a tragic accident. Pausing on one long anecdotal ramble, he said, ‘To cut a long story short.’ ‘It’s a bit late for that,’ I interjected, thinking he might appreciate a well-crafted zinger, but almost immediately realized I’d made a mistake as I saw him pause and look momentarily as though he’d been slapped.
At the same time as I was making enemies of the teachers, I was also, slightly paradoxically, becoming increasingly fixated on work. Without really being conscious of it, I tried to control my anxiety through study: an obsessive dedication to making my homework neat, headings all underlined twice. A single crossing-out meant I had to start again.
In a way, this was akin to doubling down. If work wasn’t going well, I felt even more distraught. In family lore, one legendary night, aged ten or eleven and preparing for a geography exam, I became fixated on not knowing enough about the Fulani people of Nigeria. My mum did her best to assuage my concerns but I was way beyond reach, in the emotional equivalent of deep space, weeping, raging, hyperventilating. She called my dad, who was away, travelling, maybe even in Nigeria, and through the phone he tried his best to talk me down but, not knowing much about that herding people who count their wealth in heads of cattle and seasonally traverse the Sahel, he was ill equipped to help. For years afterwards the phrase, said hoarse-voiced, ‘Fulani people of Nigeria!’ became a byword for a kind of extreme stress and emotional exhaustion.
As the culture of Tower House rubbed off on us, my dad noticed we were turning into little twerps. ‘I was worried you were becoming too English,’ is how he put it later on. He wrote a short story, ‘Children’, based on overhearing our conversations with friends, full of mild bigotry and boasts about skiing holidays – it’s in his collection The London Embassy. ‘We went to Trinidad on a yacht my father chartered!’ says one. ‘American schools are rubbish!’ He must have had ambivalent feelings about our education. There was a side of him that liked the idea of us learning Latin and showing off to his American family – a side that, in a way similar to the Fulani people, measured his wealth in heads of privately educated children. But he was still enough the Medford-raised boy to also think we were pampered ninnies, nincompoops who would be better off pinging tin cans with an airgun and learning how to tie sailors’ knots, as he had done as a boy.
In Tower House school uniform (the hat was my dad’s).
Our summers on Cape Cod became a chance to toughen us up and connect us to the homeland. He’d bought a house on the north shore, East Sandwich, and for six weeks a year we’d go there while our mum stayed and worked in London. But we had few friends and, though we sometimes saw our extended family for ‘cook-outs’ and trips to the beach, it was more often the case that my brother and I were left alone while our dad wrote in his study in an annex. We’d grow demented with boredom, torment one another – one morning Marcel drove me into a frenzy by repeating the meaningless phrase ‘Bonjouro, Monsieuro Duro’ purely for the pleasure of seeing my rage; we would hack paths through brambles and sumac trees with machetes, or go camping and build fires in the woods, or if it was raining we’d peer into the electronic blizzard of a small portable TV, trying to make out images of distant stations.
Marcel and I were objects of some curiosity to our American relatives. With our English accents, we were aware we came across as exotic and quaint. We played up to it, conjugating verbs in Latin to impress them – video, vides, videt – speaking with exaggerated courtesy, like royals visiting a savage colony. ‘I like to read. Tolkien is my favourite. I only wear corduroy trousers.’
At the end of the summer we’d fly back to London and our other lives, saddled with a sense of doom.
Aged twelve, learning how to brood.
In 1983, after four years of Tower House, I took my Common Entrance, and got a place at Westminster School. My brother had started two years earlier – I assume my parents had picked out Westminster because it had a reputation for academic excellence and also for catering to the children of the London media and arts crowd, unlike its rival St Pauls, which, supposedly, was all bankers’ and stockbrokers’ children.
After Tower House, Westminster was a definite improvement – we’d joined the second half of the twentieth century – and the only odd thing looking back is that our parents should have sent us off to board, instead of enrolling us as day boys, when we lived only a half-hour cycle ride away. I suppose the arrangement allowed them to focus more on their work – and anyway we came home at weekends – but it’s also true that my brother and I had had a brief and embarrassing love affair, one summer on the Cape, with a series of Enid Blyton books called St Clare’s about a fictional girls boarding school, full of midnight feasts and pranks played on wacky French teachers. I can’t say for certain but I tend to think it was these books, at least partly, that made my brother want to board.
Situated in the heart of London, Westminster was founded by Elizabeth I, in fifteen something – or maybe refounded – you can google it if you’re interested. The playwright Ben Jonson went there, the poet John Dryden, and also Shane MacGowan of The Pogues. Its buildings, several of them designed by Sir Christopher Wren, clustered around a cobblestone yard and connected to Westminster Abbey via a network of cloisters. The school charged huge fees, though its proximity to the West End meant its atmosphere was arguably a little less fusty than some other public schools. Those students so minded could study their Cicero, then race up to the Slots o’ Fun on Leicester Square to play video games called Rolling Thunder and Out Run.
Still, it had its share of ridiculous traditions such as the annual tossing of the ‘Greaze’, a huge inedible pancake that was thrown, each Shrove Tuesday, ‘Up school’, amidst a melee of pupils who fought to see who could retrieve the largest portion. ‘Up school’ was Westminsterese for ‘in the assembly hall’, where the walls were emblazoned with coats of arms with horses, all of them weirdly sporting erections. Another strange bit of terminology was calling normal non-uniform clothing ‘shag’. ‘Good Lord, Theroux, why are you in shag?’ ‘My school trousers were giving me a rash, sir. I have a chit from Matron.’
Assemblies – ‘Up school’ – started with a recitation of the Lord’s Prayer in Latin, pronounced in a special Westminster style, and it was said that the dining tables in College Hall, a separate roof-beamed building, the other side of the cloisters, where the boarders ate breakfast and supper, had been hewn from the wreckage of the Spanish Armada. At that time, Westminster also had a system known as fagging. This involved the new boys acting as servants to the older boys, waking them up, delivering newspapers, making toast on boxy industrial machines with conveyor belts. Among those I aroused was the future deputy prime minister of the United Kingdom, Nick Clegg. He was a deep sleeper and needed a lot of pushing and humping. Years later, when I mentioned this fact in an interview, Nick issued a statement: ‘I have no recollection of Louis Theroux waking me up in the morning.’ I didn’t mind, though it makes me wonder if I was humping him hard enough.
The school uniform was a black suit. The children tended to be bespectacled and hunched over and pale. They’d stalk around the yard like a phalanx of miniaturized undertakers, hands thrust into pockets, coughs wracking their etiolated limbs, or lean against the Wren-designed buildings, heads too big for their tiny necks.
It was in some ways perfect for me, inasmuch as it was founded on the two lodestars of my life: withering repartee and academic work.
My geekiness, already in evidence, was about to be turbo-charged. In those days, Westminster ran a programme of ‘accelerating’ the top two classes of each fresh intake, moving them up a year so they took their exams early. This had the effect of isolating them from the rest of their older peers, making them even more freakish and socially disadvantaged, which was probably the idea behind it – to make them likely to work harder. I was among those accelerated and – a late developer anyway, hairless and high-voiced until I was nearly sixteen – I became even more socially maladapted: aged fifteen, I knew twenty different sexual positions by name and the effects of most illegal drugs but I had never touched a girl’s breast or smoked a joint.
For most of that O level year of 1985, I kept a diary, which I can’t now put my hand to but can probably summarize without too much difficulty: I don’t have any friends. When will my life start? Why don’t I have any pubic hair? These sentiments interleaved with Big Thoughts About Life, the death of God, Crime and Punishment, which I had recently read, a paisley shirt I’d bought at the Great Gear Market on the King’s Road and was excited about, meditations on whether I might be a Nietzschean Übermensch, and a sense of doom at my prospects of ever getting a girlfriend or in fact even speaking to a girl or standing near one at a bus stop.
In the sixth form, when we were joined by an intake of female students, I must have made a strange apparition, piccolo-voiced androgyne that I was, rubbing shoulders with classmates some of whom were already shaving and starting to go bald. My efforts at seduction put me in mind of those pictures they used to run in the National Enquirer of tiny yappy dogs that have managed to mate with Great Danes.
By now I’d at least found some friends, a small gang of arty types who, like me, were a little bit pretentious, over-interested in music and comedy, and scared of girls. Two of them, Adam Buxton and Joe Cornish, went on to success in TV, radio and film, and it’s striking how fully formed they were as young teenagers. Joe, aged fifteen, was tall and angular, with a dry sense of humour and an occasionally haughty attitude that didn’t win him friends among the clique of sporty brooding boys who were nicknamed The Lads. He’d already set his sights on being a director and written four or five screenplays, making posters for them, which he put up in his bedroom. Adam, cuddly and ingratiating, was an obsessive diarist, a Bowie fan, and maker of ‘compies’ – compilation tapes of music – for friends. He was also an early adopter of video technology. On shoebox-sized cameras he and Joe would film improvised skits in which I occasionally appeared. Parodies of adverts. A spoof French art film called L’Homme Avec La Tête. Our version of an American TV show we’d seen called Danger Freaks. We filmed a friend called Daniel Jeffries as he squirted lighter fluid on his sleeves and set them on fire. ‘This is called the Danger Freaks double hander!’ he shouted as he whooped and cavorted under the low wooden ceilings of the highly flammable Westminster buildings.
Under Joe’s influence, our weekends revolved around a regimen of movie-going, of whatever happened to be on at the Cannon Oxford Street – often horror, sometimes comedy, occasionally art house, many of them films that posterity has done the favour of consigning to oblivion: The Stuff, The Incredible Shrinking Man, American Ninja 2, Remo: Unarmed and Dangerous. Others I still remember fondly, like Reanimator, The Burbs, the first Nightmare on Elm Street. Another friend, Zac Sandler, introduced me to the world of comics – The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers by Gilbert Sheldon; Viz – and in history class we’d compose strips, doing alternate panels, under the noses of our teachers. For the first time I began to feel that I had a little team of likeminded compadres, that I wasn’t quite so alone.
In the first term of sixth form, Adam and Joe, with another friend, Ben Walden, put on a production of an American play called Pvt Wars, in which the three public school adolescents took roles as grizzled Vietnam vets with PTSD in a mental hospital. It was all oddly predictive of the Wes Anderson film, Rushmore. Joe and Adam had announced they were now co-proprietors of their own media corporation called Joe/Adz and they approached the production with a seriousness and ambition that verged on the comical, but the scariest part may have been how skilled they all were – the years of immersion in American movies and television meant their accents were pitch-perfect, better than those you might hear on the professional stages of the West End. Later, feeling jealous, I announced I was founding my own corporation with Zac, called Lou/Zac. ‘It sounds like a toilet cleaner,’ Joe said.
Also with Zac I took a role in a production of Ritual for Dolls, an allegorical play about repressed Victorian society written in 1970, featuring children’s toys. Zac was in the role of ‘Golliwog’, which was questionable even then, while I played the Wooden Soldier. For my climactic speech, I had to confess my forbidden love for my sister, the doll, and declaim the line, ‘I spill my seed on the sheets of my fever-soaked bed.’ It was supposed to be dramatic but caused a school colleague, recognizable even in the dark as Reed Smith, to snort involuntarily with laughter.
Towards the end of the year, when Joe and Adam made plans for an ambitious staging of the children’s musical Bugsy Malone, I was cast as Dandy Dan, which led to several weeks of anxiety on my part as I thought about going back on stage. After my first rehearsal, feeling self-conscious about my performance, I went off and brooded, then finally sought out Joe and told him, ‘I’m so sorry, I don’t think I can do it, I’m just no good.’ He was understanding. ‘I’m sure we could have sorted it out, Lou,’ he said. But he accepted my resignation and gave me a couple of tiny walk-on roles. When the show finally went on – preceded by a massive promotional blitz masterminded by Joe/Adz and based on the publicity campaign for Ghostbusters – it was a triumph. My performance as Looney Bergonzi would be the last time I ever attempted to act, unless you count a role in a porn film for Weird Weekends many years later.
When we weren’t watching movies in the West End we’d sometimes spend the evening at Ben’s flat in Kentish Town – he lived with his mum who was often away – and we’d smoke cigarettes and drink gin there until morning. There still exists some video of these evenings shot by Adam. If Vladimir Putin is ever minded to blackmail me, I’d suggest he take a look at them. There’s no peeing, but there are definite homoerotic undertones. I come across as a squealing drunken ninny, giggling and prancing around like someone auditioning for a comedy update of the Merchant Ivory film Maurice. Sometimes we’d watch fifteen minutes of whatever film Joe had brought on video before conking out on Ben’s mum’s double bed.
When, around 1988, Joe made me a compilation tape that introduced me to Eric B and Rakim’s ‘Paid in Full’ (the Coldcut remix), I felt I’d found some kind of missing piece: a popular art form that was infectious and vital but which – I told myself with more than a touch of self-importance – was also socially significant, an authentic expression of the streets. It was swaggering and confident, occasionally angry, unapologetically masculine, with hints of criminality – in short, everything that I was not and secretly aspired to be.
At the beginning of my last year at Westminster I sat what was called ‘Fourth Term’ – an entrance paper to study at Oxford. Weeks of memorization of history essays followed. A month or two after I sat the exams I was summoned for an interview. Thanks to being accelerated, I was only just sixteen years old. My voice had recently broken. I borrowed a suit of my brother’s, but I’d grown so fast I had to wear the trousers prison-style round my bum so the cuffs could reach my ankles.
It would be hard to imagine someone in whom book learning and emotional maturity were more out of balance. I was like something created in a laboratory, a freakish man-child in culottes, offering opinions about the Valois kings of France in a voice that went up and down like a broken radio.
I took the train up the night before, then spent the best part of a day waiting for my fifteen-minute slot, strolling around the Magdalen grounds, its gracious configuration of quads and cloisters, and its deer park. Steeped in the atmosphere of its centuries of history, the chiming of the bell tower, heavy oaken doors and lawns and rose gardens, I felt overawed but also oddly as though I was enacting a drama of myself as a candidate self-consciously thinking big thoughts about ‘the death of the Middle Ages’ and ‘baronial power’. When the time came, I climbed a narrow stone staircase that led up from a cloister, to find three professors, all male, who ushered me into a seat so yielding that it felt a little like falling through a trap door.
The dons seemed kindly. One looked old enough for me to be concerned about his ability to live out the duration of the interview. Another, a little younger, in tweeds, smiled and, after some throat-clearing remarks, said, ‘You quote a comment of Vaughan’s describing Philippe de Commynes as having been “a mendacious charlatan”. Why do you suppose “charlatan”?’
Nerves had made my voice little more than a whisper.
‘Because he wasn’t who he claimed to be?’
There were nods. I imagine, looking back, they were registering my evident anxiety and wondering whether, if pushed too hard, I might burst into flames or just short-circuit, emit a ‘bzzzzt’ sound and a ribbon of smoke waft out of my ears.
When the acceptance message came, I read it with a weird blank feeling of inevitability. Well, of course. They also sent a letter to the school, which my head of house was kind enough to read out to me. It made reference to ‘this remarkable young man’, and I remember thinking how odd it was that they called me a ‘man’.