Grey Area. Уилл Селф
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his mid-fifties. He always wore a blue blazer with brass buttons – the Yorkshire County Cricket Club badge was on the breast pocket. Mr Vello combed his hair back tight over his scalp. He had been using Brylcreem for so many years that the thin slick of his hair had become Brylcreem-coloured. Mr Vello’s face was moley rather than vulpine, but when he got angry, which he did with increasing frequency, his apparently friendly, diffident wrinkles seemed to get smarmed back with his greasy hair.
With the benefit of culpable hindsight I can place myself behind Mr Vello’s metal-framed spectacles and picture class 4b as it must have appeared to him when he first swung back the big wooden door and walked in on us.
Simmo was doing his drawing-pin trick. This was a bogus bit of fakirism whereby he placed three drawing pins on top of a desk and put his fat white hand over them. He then asked another boy to stamp on the back of his hand. On this occasion Simmo got it wrong – just as Mr Vello walked into the room he screamed and held up his hand. The three drawing pins were deeply embedded.
‘What’s all this?’ said Mr Vello, setting a pile of text-books down on the teacher’s desk.
‘Please, sir,’ gurgled Simmo (blood was beginning to flow), ‘please, sir, I’ve hurt my hand.’
‘Nonsense, boy,’ said Mr Vello, ‘now sit down and shut up . . . all of you: sit down, shut up and pay attention.’
But we didn’t. We never did. We just went on: flicking rubber bands; chasing one another around the desks; bashing and shouting. The majority, that is. But really there were three distinct minorities in class 4b: the Jews, the Gentiles and the Asians. 4b was a bipartisan culture, however, and power derived solely from the antagonism between the Jews and the Gentiles. We formed two gangs and called ourselves respectively The Yids and The Yocks.
The Asian boys were different. They were all first-generation immigrants, mostly East African Asians, expelled from Uganda and Kenya, but some Punjabis and Pakistanis as well. It could have been this factor alone, or perhaps it was because Asian families have a more pronounced tradition of respect for pedagogues, but none of the Asian boys was indisciplined or cheeky. On the other hand they didn’t exactly stick together. They certainly didn’t all sit together in the classroom. It was as if they had conspired to be unobtrusively unobtrusive. I reckon Mr Vello picked up on this immediately. Because it was the Asian boys who stopped buggering about first. They all sat down at their desks and got their books out.
Mr Vello saw the rest of us, immediately, for what we were: time-servers; time-wankers; ignorantly urbane boys – full of nasty decadences. The doomed scurf on the last polluted wave of our culture. He said as much, or rather shouted it.
‘You boys are ignorant,’ he shouted, ‘ignorant of discipline.’ He walked up and down the classroom batting the backs of heads with practised swipes of his wooden ruler. We yowled and yammered like the Yahoos we were. ‘But it isn’t your fault, you live in an undisciplined society and you are subjected to a banal cultural babble. You would do well to observe these Indian boys. They at least have been subjected in the more recent past to the rigours and responsibilities of imperial rule. Isn’t that right, boy?’ Mr Vello stopped by Jayesh Rabindirath, a thick oaf who was heavily moustachioed at fourteen.
‘Err . . . yes, sir. I suppose so.’
Mr Vello tried to teach us. He tried for weeks. But he just couldn’t hack it. Adolescent boys sense weakness in a teacher and go for it like piranhas sporting in offal. I think that in a quieter school, some nice prep where the kids were better behaved, Mr Vello would have been OK. But at Creighton Comprehensive he didn’t have a chance.
I think he was overwhelmed by the militancy of our philistinism, the utter failure of our didactic urge. Naturally we played up to this – me in particular. It took only four maladministered lessons for the situation to deteriorate to such an extent that the poor man couldn’t even talk for sixty seconds without being importuned by a battery of grubby paws, stuck out straining from the shoulder, at angles of forty-five degrees. ‘Please, sir! Please, sir! Ple-ease, sir!’ we all chorused, but as soon as he paid us any mind we would come up with some absurd request (‘Please, sir, may I breathe ?’), our subservience a grotesque parody of his assumed authority. Or if, in the course of attempting to instruct us, he managed to shout out a question, we would vie with one another to produce the most facile, the most patently weak, the most irrelevant answer.
I think I managed the worst example of this fairly early on. Mr Vello was attempting to discourse on the Crimean War; back to the class, he mapped out the battlefield at Balaclava with a series of mauve chalk strokes. We had all fallen silent, the better to stand on our desks and wigglingly shimmy our contempt for him. Without bothering to turn he flung over his shoulder, ‘Why were the Russian batteries positioned here?’
I came back triumphantly (God, have I ever been funnier?), ‘Because that’s where the little diagram said they should be positioned.’
We all fell about. I got eighteen consecutive detentions. God, how we (and me in particular) loved it when he got worked up. It was so comic, there was something cartoony about the colour contrast between his blue, blue blazer and his red, bursting, humiliated face. Rebellion was in the air.
It was during the lesson after that that Mr Vello first announced the establishment of the Indian Army. ‘Now then, boy-yz!’ He thwacked his desk with his ever-handy ruler to give his words emphasis.
‘Now then, boy-yz!’ we all chorused back, thwacking our desks with our rulers. Things really had got that bad. Worse still we all managed a pretty fair imitation of Mr Vello’s idiosyncratic accent and enunciation. This was marked by a weird alternation in pitch between the swooping vowels of Yorkshire and the clipped consonants of received pronunciation. We were all pretty good at doing Mr Vello, but I was the best.
‘Now then, boy-yz!’ he came at us again. ‘I have no patience any more with your in-disci-pline. None at all. I have noticed that your Indian colleagues maintain a healthier respect for authority than the rest of you, so I am going to adopt my own Martial Races policy.’
He got all the Indian boys to stand up and then he lined them up in the aisle in order of height. Jayesh Rabindirath at the front, behind him Dhiran Vaz, behind him Krishna Patel and so on, all the way down to the minuscule Surrinyalingam (no one ever knew his first name), a tiny blackened block of a boy, who wasn’t an Indian at all but a Tamil; however, Mr Vello chose to ignore this fine distinction.
‘I commission all you Indian boyz into my Indian Army.’ He paced the next aisle, ruler on one shoulder like an officer’s swagger stick. ‘It is no longer my task, but yours, to maintain ab-so-lute order amongst this miserable, unlettered rabble – ‘
As he spoke my attention sideswiped out the window. A bus had pulled up and shook in mechanical ague by the concrete bus shelter. I could see fat old women coming out of the library across the road from the school and donning plastic rain hats. Life seemed to be proffering a teasing and perhaps crucial juxtaposition. I raised my arm. Mr Vello whirled on me. ‘Yes, Fein?’
‘Please, Sir – ‘
‘Yes, boy?’
‘Please, sir, I want to join the Indian Army.’
‘Don’t be bloody stupid, boy. Enlistment in the Indian Army is open only to boys of Indian descent. You, Fein, are of Semitic descent, you are a Levantine, not an Aryan, therefore you shall not be called to the Colours.’
‘Or the coloureds . . .’ Simmo sniggered in the corner.
‘But, sir, Mr Vello, sir,’ I kept on at him, ‘my dad says we’re Ashkenazi Jews, not Sephardim. He says we aren’t really Semites at all.’
And this was true. My father had a touch of the Mr Vellos about him as well, a fondness for the Daily Telegraph (ironed) and village cricket. A relentless autodidact, he had been much taken by Arthur Koestler’s theory that the Ashkenazi were in fact the descendants of the Scythian Khazars, Turkic tribesmen who had converted to Judaism in the seventh century. Dad discoursed on this in the garden of an evening, smoking a briar pipe (his plumed flag of utter