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1
-5,214 DAYS
My school had a pub, and I was pacing urgently across a cobbled courtyard toward it. It was the first day of the new term, the first day I was allowed to drink there, and I was late.
In England, the legal drinking age is eighteen; but at Eton College, you were allowed in the school bar, which was actually called Tap, at sixteen. The school circumvented the licensing laws by claiming Tap was a private social club. Technically, you were only allowed two pints of beer. In reality, you had to fall over before the locals who worked the pumps would cut you off. The beer at Tap was subsidized, so it was cheaper than at the pubs where we drank (with fake ID) during the holidays in London.
Tap was just one more unique oddity of being a student at Eton, soon to become the most famous boys' school in England when Princess Diana's sons, William and Harry, enrolled there. Some of the other, less enjoyable idiosyncracies included wearing a tailsuit to lessons every day (in mourning, more than five hundred years later, for the death of the school's founder, Henry VI, who was murdered in the Tower of London by Richard III in 1471); playing sports unknown outside the school walls (the field game, the wall game, and Eton fives); and having to learn a whole new language, where teachers were "beaks" and new boys were "tits." Fortunately, the ancient tradition of having to run errands for older boys, or "fagging," had recently been abolished. Tourists and parents considered these anachronisms quaint and charming. Three years in, I just thought they were normal.
Tap was open from 4:00 to 6:10 p.m. on Tuesdays and Thursdays and from 4:00 to 6:00 p.m. on Saturdays--when there was also "late Tap" from 8:00 to 10:15 p.m. for prefects. It was a privilege reserved for the senior boys in their final two years at Eton--"Upper School." For once, I couldn't wait to get back to Eton, although my delight was not only because I was excited to check out Tap.
I was also desperate to get away from home. Home was hell at the moment. Two years earlier--when I was fourteen--my mercurial father had abandoned my mother and his six children and run off to the south of France to become a born-again playboy. He never sent my mom any money to support his children, and as a result of all this, my mother had suffered a major nervous breakdown. Then the idyllic farmhouse in Kent, where I had grown up surrounded by nut orchards and rolling fields and which actually belonged to my grandmother, who lived there with us, had been sold to pay off my parents' debts. My mom was chronically broke and still in bed most of the time, my grandmother and various friends and relatives were paying my school fees, and home was now a rented cottage on my uncle's farm in Surrey. My older twin sisters, Plum and Lucy, had left home to go to university and drama school, respectively. Alice, who was two years older than I, had finished school and taken off to Europe on an extended vacation. My younger brother, Fred, was seven, a study in baffled melancholy; and my baby brother, Josh, who was three, had recently been hospitalized after eating handfuls of my mother's antidepressants in what I perceived to be a precocious suicide attempt.
I scratched my leg under the itchy pinstriped wool trousers as I sped toward Tap. I was relieved that Josh had recovered, but I kept wondering guiltily whether or not his death would have been enough to get my parents back together. As things stood, the Sykes family was well and truly fucked.
None of my friends at school really knew quite how desperate my home situation was. They knew about my dad leaving, of course, and that was embarrassing enough, but I hadn't made anyone familiar with the miserable updated details. Still, I was going to Tap for the first time, and the next couple of hours were going to be just fine.
I pushed through the swing doors of Tap into a scene of pandemonium. Hundreds of overprivileged sixteen-year-old boys were waving £50 notes and checkbooks at the bar staff and screaming for more and more alcohol. I pushed my way to the bar through a sea of black tailcoats.
"A pint of lager, please, Mrs. Cripps," I shouted at the barwoman. I already knew her name because in the mornings she worked in the tuck shop, which backed onto Tap, selling us bacon rolls.
I grabbed my pint off the bar and wriggled out of the crowd, looking around for my friends. They were sitting in a gang of about twenty on a leather banquette that skirted the corner of the room, and they were grinning like maniacs at their pints. I managed to sit down next to my friend William Clarke.
"Psycho! Where have you been?" he asked. William was well over six feet and built like an international rugby player, which was lucky for him.
"Harrison made me rake the bloody leaves off his lawn again," I said, swallowing beer as fast as I could and explaining why I had arrived at Tap half an hour after the opening bell. Dr. David Harrison was my housemaster, and I seemed to spend most of my free time clearing leaves off his lawn as punishment for one transgression or another. This time it was because I had started off the term badly by not unpacking all my cases properly and leaving my room in a mess.
The man was as fanatical about his garden as he was loathed by his students. These two defining facts about Dr. Death, as we called him, had come together recently when some boys in our house had crept out in the middle of the night and weed-killed a giant cock and balls on his prized half-moon lawn.
"Typical," said William. "That's so unfair. Today of all days." Then he looked around at the basic surroundings of Tap and said with all the excitement of a new initiate, "This is bloody amazing, isn't it? Is that your first pint?"
"Yep," I said. "But I've nearly finished it. I'm going to get another in a minute."
"I'm on my third," he said. "If I give you the money, can you get me one so I can line it up for when this one is finished?"
He had hardly made a dent in the drink he had, but I said, "Indeed." Indeed was my new favorite word. "Lager?"
"No. Newcastle Brown. In a jug." I stood up, trying not to let on I didn't know what he meant.
I fought my way back to the bar and ordered a Newcastle Brown for William and copied him, getting one for myself instead of a lager. "In jugs, please, Mrs. Cripps," I said hopefully. The beers were slammed on the bar in fat, handled, windowed glasses that were easy to carry through the melee.
"This is great, isn't it?" I said for about the fiftieth time as I sat down next to William again. "Can you believe how cheap it is? I can't believe we get cheap beer."
After two more pints, my head was spinning. The place looked like a cross between a tuck shop and a gin mill. The bathrooms stank of vomit. Boys in tailsuits were sitting in stupefied dazes all around the edge of the room, long hair flopping over their pale, pimpled faces. I saw my friend Gerry, who was in the year above me.
"How many pints have you had?" I shouted.
"Seven," he burped beerily. "Usually I forget how many I've had, but today I've been drawing them on my hand so that I won't." He proudly stuck out his hand, covered in inky caricatures of the squat beer glasses William had asked to be served in. Deeply impressed, I clapped him on the back. One day, I swore, I would be able to drink that much.
At 6:10 p.m., Tap closed. This was so the boys could get back to their boardinghouses in time for quiet hour, the study period that started at 6:15 every night and lasted till dinner at 7:30. Today, there wasn't going to be much work going on.
I trooped back to my boardinghouse with William and my eight other housemates. One good thing about Eton was that everyone got their own room, complete with a desk and a hinged bed that you had to strap the mattress to and fold up into the wall every morning before breakfast. You could decorate your room however you liked. My walls were covered in Pink Floyd posters and ethnic-print drapes.
I had drunk four pints, and my head was spinning, but I resisted the temptation to pull my bed down from the wall and lie on it, in case Dr. Harrison came barging in to check up on me. I didn't want to do any more leaf sweeping. I sat at the wooden desk in the corner by the window with my hands over my eyes.
Eton was a confusing place. Just six months previously I had been "rusticated" (suspended from school, as in, "sent home to the country") for five days after William and I had been caught buying vodka in Windsor, the nearest big town. Yet now I was allowed to drink. And although the school pub seemed happy enough to serve me until I fell over, I knew I would be in big trouble if I actually did fall over and Harrison discovered how drunk I was.
Getting money for drinking sessions was no problem. Although my dad never supported my mother, he was in the habit of sending me occasional but extravagant checks from his hidey-hole in the south of France. They were often accompanied by bizarre jokes or cartoons. One that I remember said, "I went to the theater the other night and the following rhyme occurred to me. 'If Federico Garcia Lorca/Had been born a pig/He would have been called Federico Garcia Porca." In another letter, a cartoon showed a smug gentleman orbiting the earth, leaning back in an armchair with a glass of port and a cigar, his slippered feet stretched out on a stool. The earth was exploding. My dad had written the caption "The End of the World Viewed in Comfort" underneath.
The one thing I could guarantee was that my dad's letters would never address the one thing that mattered. Whenever I wrote letters that demanded to know why he had left my mom, I would usually receive a short note in return, saying something like "It became impossible for your mother and I to continue living together," with a check for £500, sometimes even £1,000.
Although I tried not to, I missed my dad. Dad was an incredible storyteller and raconteur. When I was little, one of my favorite games was getting him to list his jobs. He had been an avocado farmer in East Timor and a racing driver in Australia. In the Vietnam War, he had sold blankets to the Viet Cong. He had started a nightclub in London (the Wag in Soho--it's still there), run lucrative illegal gambling operations in England and Australia, reported on the French Foreign Legion spearing babies to doorposts with bayonets in Algeria, and even smuggled weapons to support the Arabs in their insurrection against the French in North Africa. Often, he would hint darkly that he had killed a man. When we drove down the country lanes from our house to the nearest town, Sevenoaks, he would sneak up behind pheasants in the car, sound his horn, then whack into them with the windscreen, with us children screaming with excitement in the backseat. We'd pick up the dead birds on the way home, once they had stopped twitching, and my mom's old nanny, Winnie, who still worked for my granny, would pluck them and cook them for dinner. Being with Dad was thrilling.
The last time I really saw my father was on Remembrance Day, November 11, the day the country pauses for two minutes of silence at 11:00 a.m. to honor the war dead. It was 1988, and I was fourteen. Dad drove to Eton with my sister Plum for the service on the morning of Remembrance Day--he was driving her to Oxford, where she was at university.
The service sticks in my memory because it was a weekday, twenty minutes in the chapel before school--basically an assembly with prayers. Parents never came to these services. They came to the hour-long services on a Sunday instead. I kept wondering for days afterward why Dad had come to chapel at Eton in midweek.
I have seen my father many times since then, but that was the last time I saw him before everything changed. Even on that day I had a sense that things were changing. My dad looked older, fatter, different somehow. I noticed that his hair was dyed a lighter brown than usual. Plum looked older too--but in a more positive way. Plum had been shy, serious, and nervous as a teenager. Since leaving school and going to Oxford that year, she had become newly confident, and her whole presence was transformed. She was beautiful, thin, with strong features and long hair.
Because Plum was with my dad, they were seated at the front of the chapel on a dais reserved for dignitaries. I could just see the Lower Master thinking, Yes, yes, that's a fine idea! Let's seat this girl somewhere prominent, somewhere all our female-deprived boys can see a beautiful young woman! That'll be some first-class entertainment for them!
I can't remember anything of the service beyond their presence or much of the weeks that followed. But soon after, there was a four-day holiday, "Short Leave." When I got home to the farmhouse in Kent, the horrible truth emerged.
My father had sent nearly all the valuable furniture, paintings, and antiques in our house to be "restored." All his suits had gone to the "dry cleaner." I can imagine him scooping up every last two-piece out of his cupboard, saying, "Time to get everything cleaned!" and loading up all the suits into the car and driving them away. Then he packed his few remaining belongings and announced he was off to the south of France on a business trip.
The suits never returned from the dry cleaner. And although a few pieces of furniture were sent back, the paintings were gone for good too. Sometimes, when I visit him these days, I'll see one of the pictures that disappeared from my childhood hanging on his wall, and I'll remember how their removal left nothing but very neat squares of very clean paint underneath.
"You're the man of the house now," my grandmother told me, and I nodded dumbly in agreement, baffled at how quickly my world had fallen apart.
