Like endlessly pointing the cracks in a large patio, the school has to fill in the small gaps which appear in the timetable to stop the boys thinking for themselves. To this end they develop the idea of ‘clubs’. In 1969 those of us at the younger end of the school are offered forty minutes of ‘clubs’ in that tricky gap between the end of school and teatime, and the boys in the first and second forms of senior school, like me, are allowed another forty minutes of ‘clubs’ in the gap between homework and bath.
This basically means Model Making Club or Glee Club.
Being behind by a year, not only in grammar but also in friendship groups, is a difficult gap to close. I try to do this by joining the Glee Club.
Glee Clubs were originally formed in Britain in the eighteenth century. They concentrated on songs arranged for male voices only. This is why we have one at our all boys school – though to be honest there are still a lot of sopranos in the first and second forms.
The concept is taken up in America and transformed in a way only the Americans know how, so that by 2010 there’s a famous TV show called Glee which runs for 120 episodes. Set in a fictional ordinary high school it’s nevertheless full of extraordinarily talented and good-looking singers of both sexes – it’s very glossy, with high production values, and their recordings regularly hit the top ten.
Our Glee Club is not like that. Our Glee Club is set in a real secondary school with real boys who smell and are covered in spots. It takes place in a dusty room above the assembly hall; we sit on broken chairs, none of us have any gloss, few have any value, and we will never trouble the top ten. There are about two dozen of us and we murder several songs, the standout being ‘Ol’ Man River’, the song made famous by Paul Robeson in the musical Show Boat.
It stands out not because we sing it so brilliantly but because it’s such a peculiar thing. Our sheet music is from the original show staged in 1927, and the lyric is written in the dialect of an impoverished black stevedore working on the Mississippi in the late nineteenth century. It’s written phonetically, so we sing Ole Man Ribber and about being skeered o’ dyin’. And we sing the N-word. Twice.
People try to excuse these things by saying it was of its time or we didn’t know back then, but even in 1969 this is an aberration. There can be no excuse for not being aware of how incongruous it is for a bunch of privileged white kids to be affecting the accent of a black man who was little more than a slave. Even when Frank Sinatra released it in 1945 he dumped the patois, sang river not ribber, and changed N*****s all work to here we all work. Even Robeson had been on a journey with the word, changing N*****s to darkies then to colored folk and then finally to here we all.
If these people knew it was dubious, demeaning or wrong more than twenty-five years before we sing it, how come our Glee Club leader doesn’t know?
It’s not the only thing that puts me off Glee Club. The other people turn out to be unlikely friend-material, and I can’t read music. The rest of them can. I have to guess at how much higher or lower one note is after the other until I’ve learned it by heart. I give up.
Luckily there is another club. On Thursday evenings, for the forty minutes after homework, and after much petitioning by the boys, we have Disco Club.
Disco Club! Disco Club is not a real disco. Disco Club is like this: the desks in one of the classrooms are pushed loosely to the side leaving an open space in the middle, the Dansette school record player is produced – maximum volume 0.5 watts – and the boys, there are only boys, let their short hair down, and dance with each other.
And this is the thing that seems strangest of all, thinking back on this first year at boarding school. We don’t just dance with everyone else at the same time – you know, a free-for-all, some kind of melee in the middle – we actually dance, one on one, with another boy. Everyone does this.
Twelve is an odd age. We’re on the cusp between being children and being teenagers. Puberty is slowly wrapping itself around us like ivy colonizing a tree. We don’t know who we are or what’s happening to our bodies, and we have absolutely no one to help us. Some of us, myself included, are still somewhat in the dark about how humans reproduce. I’ve read a page in ‘that’ book that another boy directed me to in the library, but it seems too fantastical to be true. And rather messy.
I remember very distinctly dancing to ‘Sugar Sugar’ by The Archies, a song that was top of the charts for eight weeks in a row, with a boy called Martin.
So what is this dance?
My memory of it is vivid. It feels very primitive. It’s very intense, and physical – we gyrate a lot. It involves a lot of eye contact. We don’t touch – we’re doing the kind of dancing we’ve seen Pan’s People do on Top of the Pops. But we’re doing it at each other. You couldn’t do this on your own. And it feels like we’re breaking the rules.
It’s as if we’re practising for some time in the future when we might do something similar to what’s written in that book in the library. It isn’t about sexual orientation, it’s about the whole idea of sex. Of being with someone else. It’s just electrifying. In our small world where normal emotional responses are being systematically beaten back there’s this sudden release which defines itself in movement and real connection with another human being. I’m no longer looking back towards my family, I’m looking forward to a life with other possibilities, and other people, some of them possibly girls, that I haven’t met yet.
As we get older we’re put in different boarding houses, and I haven’t seen or heard of Martin since leaving school in 1975. But I’ve looked him up (marvellous thing, the internet), and I see he’s now a captain of industry. I remember in the last years of school – while I was captain of daydreaming about being a roadie for a rock band – he was pretty much captain of everything else. And I remember that dance with him at the age of twelve, because it’s a real moment of change. It’s the first proper dance I ever have with anyone. And it signals that my childhood is coming to an end.