The Goldberg Variations
MARK GLANVILLE

COPYRIGHT

Fourth Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

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London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Published by Flamingo 2004

Previously published in Great Britain in hardback by Flamingo 2003

Copyright © Mark Glanville 2003

Mark Glanville asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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Source ISBN: 9780007118427

Ebook Edition © JANUARY 2013 ISBN 9780007383306

Version: 2016-03-17

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PRAISE

‘Like C4’s ‘Faking It’ makeovers, The Goldberg Variations opposes two purposes seemingly too different for one person to undertake successfully. Glanville’s ongoing battle between football and music fascinates. One facilitates the other – his first trip to OldTrafford was a reward for passing Grade 5 clarinet. One impinges on the other – concerned about protecting his opera voice, Glanville lowers it an octave on the terraces. The emerging dialectic evolves alongside traditional rites-of-passage (first solo trip abroad, first love, etc) and against a backdrop of troubled sexuality – teenage frustrations kindled by his sisters and an inability to climax with girlfriends. Glanville’s openness is seductive and his memoir is disarming.’

Time Out

‘A richly enjoyable and moving memoir.’

Tribune

‘A chilling account of life on the terraces and of the loyalty it engenders. It is also a fascinating description of the long process of having your voice professionally trained for the opera stage.’

Irish Examiner

‘A readable, funny and intelligent story of a man’s struggle to find himself among a confusion of different lives.’

Cork Evening Echo

DEDICATION

For Joshua and Arabella

Were the wind to blow even slightly against them My eyes would refuse to close HITTAAN BIN AL-MU’ALLAA

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Praise

Dedication

ARIA

VARIATION ONE: The Football Hooligan

VARIATION TWO: The Oxford Classicist

VARIATION THREE: The Opera Singer

VARIATION FOUR: The Jew

ARIA DA CAPO: The Vedl

Acknowledgements

About the Author

About the Publisher

I must own that I could have assured any questioner that Combray did include other scenes and did exist at other hours than these. But since the facts which I should then have recalled would have been prompted by voluntary memory, the memory of the intellect, and since the pictures which that kind of memory shows us preserve nothing of the past itself, I should never have had any wish to ponder over this residue of Combray.

Swann’s Way, Marcel Proust

ARIA

What makes me myself rather than anyone else is the very fact that I am poised between two countries, two or three languages and several cultural traditions. It is preciscly this that defines my identity.

Les Identites Meurtrieres, Amin Maalouf

Happy the man who can celebrate his diversity. I wonder how long, if at all, it took the author of the above to reconcile the disparate elements of his own personality, to recognise that they could live in harmony, and that his identity was a compound of them. For a large part of my own life the contradictory elements of my identity have been at war, and have fragmented rather than fused me. Despairing of any reconciliation, I’ve often wished or plotted for the destruction of all but one of them (which depended on my changing mood), so that I and it might live in peace thereafter. What follows is an account of that campaign.

‘So Abey goes into a mensvear shop …’

Sometimes we’d go into ourselves, his captive audience perpetually on hand to applaud a nightly stand-up that ran until we’d all left home.

‘I vont to buy a suit!’

With a shift of the jaw his face would fall comfortably into a parody of a ghetto Jew’s cheek-straining smile.

‘I think I can help you, sir,’ the shop assistant would reply with the bright, clipped elocution of the forties public-school-boy Dad had been.

There were certain jokes that bore umpteen retellings. Mum was usually the first to laugh, with a hearty whoop to convince you she’d never heard it before, then we’d come in, each a different note on the xylophone counterpointing the melody of his speech.

‘Here we are. If you don’t mind … slipping it on … that’s right …’

By now he’d be treading the amtico tiles that formed his stage, miming the appropriate movements of his dramatis personae.

‘But look! It’s coming up here,’ he’d cry as the Jew, hunching his right shoulder in a gesture ludicrous enough to silence the percussion of our dining.

‘Er, do excuse me, sir, but if you don’t mind my saying, that’s because you’re not standing properly. Now if you were to … that’s it. Splendid!’

‘But now it’s coming out here!’

The sight of Dad’s head between his shoulders, jacket hunched, a Jewish tortoise, snapped our last resistance and earned him the laughter he yearned for. At such times we were a team, playing catch with smiles round the table, listening for each other’s laughter with an unspoken sense of belonging engendered by the joke and its teller.

‘Sir, you’re still not standing properly. Now if you … That’s it … Excellent!’

‘Vunderful! A perfect fit!’

Bending his doppelgänger double, he’d exit his imaginary shop as a Yiddisher Quasimodo.

‘So he’s walking down the street like this, when he bumps into his old friend Morrie.

“‘Keneine hora! Abey, vot happened to you?”’

We didn’t know what the Yiddish meant, but it was a meal in itself. You could bite into the boiled chicken and smell the pickled cucumber.

“‘I’ve just been to see my tailor.”’

By now he’d be really milking it, Abey growing ever more grotesque as Dad hobbled up and down the kitchen.

“To see your tailor. I should go to see your tailor. Vot a vunderful tailor he must be! Vy, if he can fit a cripple like you he can fit anyvun!’”

And as Abey, Morrie, the tailor and the narrator left the stage, five suns formed a spotlight he could bask in, Dad’s ‘Thank you, thank you,’ reflecting our joy back at us with a nod and a bow.

Family life was played out around a circular kitchen table. The court of King Brian and his fair queen Pamela was a boisterous one at which each bite of food gained was a soundbite lost. We’d peck away incessantly at meat and conversation, all fighting to be heard and fed, picking up the debris left behind in the wake of Dad’s voracious appetite and machine-gun verbal barrage. He had a favourite image of someone eating as if Cossacks were about to swoop down and steal all his food; and speaking as if they were going to cut out the tongue that ate it, he might have added. We children developed habits of our own to survive, one of which was speed-eating. Liz, twin to Toby, extended this to speech, cramming extraordinary quantities of words into the millisecond gaps that occurred when Dad caught his breath or swallowed a chicken thigh, while I’d try speaking louder in the hope of engaging at least one other person in conversation, but woe betide any dialogue that threatened to drown the monologue.

‘Keep it down to a dull roar could you! Heard a good one the other day. Why do they have dustbins at Polish weddings? To keep the flies off the bride.’

‘Your Dad’s being very naughty.’

‘Fucking Poles!’

‘Brian!’

‘Sorry, mutteler, those damned Poles,’ he’d correct himself in pre-war officer tones before returning to those of the public school that he always joked had cost his parents a fortune.

‘Worse than the Germans. They couldn’t wait to get at us.’

‘Brian, can we stop this?’

‘Three million killed in Poland alone,’ he’d sigh, energy draining from his face. ‘And they let so many of them over here along with those bloody Ukros.’

It was ironic that, wracked daily with the torments of the Holocaust, we should be living two doors away from the Ukrainian Cultural Institute of Great Britain, which was founded and frequented by men who were reputed to be former members of the Waffen SS.

‘Brian, you’re so filled with hatred. You have to learn to forgive. At least you didn’t lose anyone. Never a week goes by when I don’t think of poor Theo. One has to carry on. I don’t understand why you’re like this.’

He’d cast me an ally’s wink. This was a scene that played at least once a month.

Jokes blessed us. They bottled an essence of something that belonged to children denied the ordinary trappings of identity portrayed on the labels of religion and suits. After all, we didn’t even own our name. Around 1880 my Lithuanian great-grandfather, a quack dentist, arrived in Ireland. B the turn of the century his sons were all qualified and practising in Dublin. After moving to London and marrying an East End Jewish girl, my grandfather opened a telephone directory at random and out popped the Anglo-house of Glanville whose scions would doubtless have had e time for him and his kind as they passed through the Rhineland en route for Jerusalem. Thus poor Goldberg, having survived a thousand years of persecution, assumed the name of one of his tormentors. After Dad was sent to where he could acquire the mannerisms to complement the new name, the deception became complete.

Mum hadn’t heard such jokes before she met Dad. Her father had been brought up in Prussian Breslau, now Polish Wroclaw, one of those middle-European cities of uncertain identity where Jews flourished, in which people weaned on wienerschnitzel and sauerkraut would have winced at the odour of lokshen soup, even if they might have eaten the carrot on the head of the gefilte fish. Deluded German Jews, Yekkes, revelling in the fruits of an emancipation not enjoyed by their kindred to the east, began calling their children Siegfried, after the hero of Wagner’s myth of Teutonic superiority, oblivious to the fact that it was his enemy Alberich, the ugly, covetous dwarf whom the composer envisaged as the prototype Jew. Meanwhile in their synagogues the plangent wail of the cantor was drowned beneath the organ-accompanied congregational wash flowing in from the church across the road.

There was nothing obviously Jewish about Mum. Her delicate, Reform nose captured the more refined scents that wafted past Dad’s Orthodox schnoz, and she laughed in hearty major keys. Another Morrie, who worked in another menswear shop, this one up the road from us in Notting Hill Gate, once described her to a colleague as ‘the tall woman with the jovial manner’, and it was a description Dad never let her forget. It was how she often seemed, but though she laughed in jolly, perfect intervals, it was really in response to the vibrations of a plaintive instrument, one she and Dad both owned, and which we, their children, had inherited. It was hard to imagine her as anything other than English, and impossible to believe that she, who always sounded so aristocratic, should have arrived in England barely able to speak the language. Despite her tolerant, forgiving approach to the Holocaust in which members of her family had been murdered, and the little attention she paid her Jewishness, it was she rather than Dad who never felt comfortable or at home in England. Dad’s Jewishness was far more belligerent, but, born and bred here, he’d assimilated, while Mum was a true foreigner, as German as she was Jewish. Like so many Yekkes she maintained a pride in German culture that overrode the ghastliness the country of its origin had visited on her people. My own feelings of alienation had more in common with Mum’s sense of non-belonging than with Dad’s soapbox stances.

After the fashion of ‘better’ Germans, Mum’s father had been sent to be educated in England. There he met his gentile wife, ‘the Ethiopian in the fuel supply’ as Dad called her, quoting WC Fields; according to Orthodox Jewish laws of matrilineal descent, she, our only non-Jewish grandparent, was the only one whose status mattered when it came to determining which side of the gentile/Jewish divide we fell. After waiting for him while he was interned on the Isle of Man during the First World War as an enemy alien, my grandmother followed him to Holland, the place of his repatriation, giving birth to my mother in Amsterdam whence they returned to Berlin. They remained there until 1933 when he was granted a visa allowing him to emigrate to England, his reward for the indignity of having to train up a young Nazi journalist on the Berliner Tageblatt. By the time she was twelve, Mum had already worn more suits than Dad would have to wear in his entire life.

While we washed up and dried the dishes, Dad would sing. Like an old-time music-hall performer, he could do a bit of everything.

‘Brian, are you just going to sit there all evening singing songs, or can we have some help?’

‘Sit here, just here all evening singing songs …’

There wasn’t a word, a phrase, a situation that didn’t remind him of some ghastly old number he’d immediately begin to croon.

‘Oh Brian, shut up!’

‘Shut up, that’s how I am without you. Shut up, alone and blue …’

Pavlov’s dog had learned many commands, but his howl was melodious.

‘Where on earth do you get all those dreadful old songs?’

‘I’m a philistinc, mutteler, but a lovable one.’

In the contrast between Mum’s polite, old-fashioned soprano and Dad’s earthy baritone, one heard the difference between the environments that had nurtured them. Snatches of lieder, the German songs Mum had heard as a girl, came to her intermittently, like her reminiscences of 1920s Berlin. Dad’s world was as clear as a photograph, but Mum’s was more like a jigsaw whose pieces she sometimes threw us but which we were never able to complete. There were parts of it we weren’t allowed to see, so the lieder became important, capturing something of the essence of Mum’s background, as songs and jokes did Dad’s. It was practically the only time we heard her use German, a language she claimed, somewhat strangely, she no longer spoke. Mum’s rendition of Schubert’s ‘Heidenroslein’ was my first acquaintance with a composer whose music was always able to take over for me at the point where words could no longer describe feelings. Schubert’s setting matches Goethe’s simple moral tale of a boy who sees, plucks, and is pricked by a beautiful rose, with an even simpler accompaniment, but the painful thorns which so often accompany beauty, wound a vocal line the cheerful accompaniment can never quite heal. It captured the essence of my mother.

For her the kitchen in the basement was less a domain than a prison where three meals had to be prepared each day and served on a table at which the places were always neatly laid – once the washing-up was finished it was usually time to start cooking again. She was never quite alone down there, even when we’d all gone to bed and Dad was off at a football match or upstairs watching Kojak. Something was incarcerated with her that would sometimes vent its frustration by hurling things around and occasionally make an unwelcome appearance; a small child she sometimes mistook for one of us, that only she had ever seen. In time Mum’s poltergeist became Dad’s scapegoat when no one else could be blamed for the not infrequent disappearance of his personal possessions, as if he subconsciously perceived it as the agent of her ill will.

‘There’s no other explanation. It’s been polted,’ he’d complain, though it struck me that the confusion of competing files, bags and newspapers in his study, where items as large as footballs could remain hidden for weeks, was a far more likely explanation. The poltergeist’s unhappy presence somehow reflected her own predicament, tied below stairs. It frightened a couple of au-pairs; one ran up the stairs screaming after a mirror was lifted off its hook and thrown to the floor with a crash. But though we were told it drew on our childish energy, we only saw the effects of its actions once, when a loaf of bread mysteriously rose from the work surface and hovered in mid-air before falling to the floor. Even Dad was upstaged that evening.

I was envious of Mum’s relationship with the poltergeist. It meant she was capable of inhabiting worlds denied the rest of us. I knew Mum had special gifts. She understood the healing qualities of music, when our imaginations had been over-stimulated by tales of entities such as the poltergeist in the basement. Once or twice it appeared in the hall, though that was as far as it went. Something was tying it down, preventing release into the realms she and it would have preferred to inhabit. I guess it came to remind her of that fact, as much as to sympathise with her sense of captivity. Confronted with such a reflection of her own dilemma, no wonder she felt afraid.

VARIATION ONE – The Football Hooligan

There’s no need to be afraid in the hall. You just have to pretend to be the ghost who might meet you there

(from The Ego and its Mechanisms of Defence by Anna Freud)

‘The main trouble is that he has never really accepted the arrival of the twin brother and sister, who were born when he was two years old. Their birth threw him into turmoil which manifested itself in many obvious and wretched ways. He became and has remained heavily dependent on and involved with me. There is a predilection for sadomasochistic situations and the beginnings of a pleasure in the idea of whipping. Also he shows a potential for pervert tendencies such as a compulsion to look at and to feel girls’ pants. While he tends to be bullying and aggressive at home he is on the whole placatory and nervous at school, and not very popular. In his actual work he is doing well, showing a special interest in History and English.’

Pamela Glanville to Dr Winnicott, letter, 1967.

Early history is the bastard child of personal recollection and other people’s anecdotes. Its objects, like the ghosts and monsters that flit in and out of view in old penny arcade machines, are glimpsed fleetingly. Some, including my own family, employ psychotherapists to bust these machines and compel their images to stay in view long enough to be assessed and analysed. I was sent off to track mine down at eight, when Mum wrote her letter to Dr Winnicott, but I can’t say I came away with a more focused picture of childhood than those who never had the benefits of therapy. To me childhood is still a lost play of which scant tangible evidence remains; fragments quoted by others, discovered on papyrus, inscribed on stone.

An early talkie is probably the oldest piece in my archive. Stripey-uniformed nanny Jeanette buckles my harness abruptly with jolts and bumps and hauls me behind her as she pushes a pram containing my new twin brother and sister towards Kensington Gardens.

‘You’re not walking properly!’

Whack! Her hand comes down across the side of my face like a whip: it stings. My check goes warm, almost comfortingly so. I still can’t keep up.

‘You’re not walking properly!’

Whack! This one catches me across the side of my head and makes me think about what I’m doing with my feet. Although I try to correct them, I find myself stumbling and tripping. Again and again her hand comes down. Much fainter is the reel of her shoving me against a stone step and smashing my tooth. The incident where she hurled me across the kitchen with such force that I hit the wall, landing half-conscious on the floor is someone else’s first-hand testimony. The cleaning lady witnessed it, but she didn’t want to cause any bother so she didn’t tell Mum. When I told Mum about the regular beatings, nanny Jeanette denied it vehemently and she believed her.

Five years later Mum felt compelled to write a letter that should have led to me being watched by Special Branch for the rest of my useful life.

… a compulsion to look at and to feel girls’ pants – another ghost 1 can freeze-frame. The moment the girls lined up to have their arithmetic books marked was always the highlight of an otherwise dull day. When they were all in position I’d crawl forward on my hands and knees, looking up their skirts for the statutory grey knickers. Or else, I’d deliberately misbehave and have myself thrown out of Scripture, partly because I wasn’t very good at drawing sheaths of corn, but chiefly because I knew the older girls would be doing gym then. I’d roam the corridors of the school, until I reached the hall through whose windows I could enjoy visions of pretty girls vaulting over horses and running about in their underwear.

After five, the images linger long enough for me to examine them without the crutch of hearsay. We had a succession of au pairs: Sylvia, Maria, Gerda, Brigitte, Ulrike. I remember Mum crying in the kitchen and holding her in the familiar squidgy embrace, feeling her tears roll down my cheeks and the shock of emotional reversal.

‘Your father’s always been the same, I was even warned about him, dancing off with other girls at parties.’

She’d tell me of the time she caught him ‘smooching with some silly girl’, and how she put on a Highland fling, grabbed a man at random and reeled past, bumping into him as hard as she could. She laughed at the memory and I guessed he’d seen the funny side too.

‘Always the same type. He won’t change. Once a womaniser …’

A word that acquired heroic status in my mind. Other boys could be engine-drivers or firemen, I wanted to be a womaniser.

I worshipped Dad. He was always around, as he worked at home. Page upon page emerged like the product of a twenty-six legged centipede dipped in ink. So long as I was quiet he’d allow me to sit with him, overlooked by a John Bratby painting in chunky, thumb-nail deep oil that years of indoor football eventually chipped away. Around the time I was able to translate its abstract shapes into men playing billiards, there’s enough primary evidence and eyewitness testimony for my history proper to begin.

Now that I’m six I’m as clever as clever And I wish I could be six now for ever and ever

sang Christopher Robin, and I believed him. All year I’d been reciting those lines as a mantra that promised to see off the ills of infancy. I’d crossed the first threshold and I could see rewards beyond it. Good things happened in autumn. Boots and hats and coats and gloves and scarves smothered me against the foggy foggy dew Dad often sang of. The trees painted their multi-coloured pictures and every footstep was an adventure in which you might crackle, crunch or slide. Each week Mum and I walked to the Kensington children’s library. Our jaunts recalled the golden days when I had no sisters, no brother Toby, a time before I was wrenched from Mum’s lap and hurled into the world of the nanny beyond. Our twenty-minute walk was the magic of the annual journey to Santa’s grotto repeated every week, and the books Mum and I chose, tales of witches, ghosts and other creatures living in fantastic realms, comforted me until the next visit. At night I kept my world alive even when the lights went out, continuing my reading with a torch under the sheets.

Dad started taking me to football matches. I’d sit with him in the press-box, for the first time allowed into a world that had been exclusively his. Not that I was entirely ignorant of it. I could name every team in the country, plus dinosaurs like Wanderers, Blackburn Olympic, and The Royal Engineers. I knew all the F.A. Cup winners, year-by-year, League champions, Charity Shield opponents, but my one love was Manchester United. I don’t know why. It never occurred to me that they played a very long way from west London as I assumed that the entire universe bordered Holland Park Avenue and that if you went past North Kensington you’d fall off the edge. It didn’t matter that my first game was Chelsea v Nottingham Forest. Even now I can visualise an all-blue Osgood streaking through helpless red shirts to score the only goal of the game. A comforting, enveloping mist came off the damp wooden seats, the playing turf, from the mouths of ranked journalists, and the mugs of tea served at half-time. In those days, the players were as magical as the immortals I read about by torchlight. In my second game I saw Rodney Marsh score a hat-trick in a 4–0 QPR victory over Watford. His name echoed round Loftus Road to the accompaniment of a massive bass drum. I then started watching Dad’s own team, Chelsea Casuals, on the pitches in front of Wren’s Royal Hospital alongside the Chelsea pensioners in their magnificent red and navy uniforms and wondered how long it would be before I’d be able to play for them myself.

Sport was always the bond between me, Dad, and eventually Toby. It was one that divided the family on gender lines. One day Dad appeared in the nursery with a long, green box.

‘Okay, kid. Let’s see what you’re made of!’

His grin revealed a wolf’s crowded jaw in all its splendour.

The pine table in the nursery where we normally ate our cornflakes was about to be transformed into a ping-pong table. Dad ripped apart the cardboard and hurriedly assembled the net with the eagerness of a lynch mob erecting a gallows. I juggled the ball on my bat. Having seen off all comers at a party recently, I was feeling pretty confident.

‘Ready, kid?’

He served the ball gently and it bounced across the net, high enough for me to be able to smash it down on his side.

‘Pretty good, kid!’

It was all going as I’d expected until I began to serve. The ball flew off the end of the table and under the battered red couch by the wall.

‘The table’s not long enough.’

‘Excuses, kid.’

My game worsened with my growing frustration until, gradually, I mastered the short length of the breakfast table and Dad’s gentle returns left plenty of room for winning shots.

‘Okay, kid. How about a game? Play for service?’

Dad bounced the ball across the net and I returned it with ease, but my next shot spun off against the window.

‘My serve.’

Dad chopped at the ball and it came across the net gently enough, but, as I attempted to return it, the ball spun off viciously and hit the window.

‘1–0,’ beamed Dad.

For some reason his serves were now impossible to return. o–5 down, it was my turn to serve. I bounced the ball swiftly across the table where it clipped the end, veering beyond his reach.

‘Blast!’ cried Dad, his smile metamorphosing into a grimace. When my second serve achieved the same result, he flung the new bat down on the ground. I was concerned he’d break it. The next three serves were as fast and efficient as I could manage, but on each occasion my attempt to return resulted in the ball flying off in the opposite direction from the one I’d intended. As the score piled up against me, I simply couldn’t understand why my shots were all miscuing. The tears welled behind my eyes as Dad’s expression grew more and more triumphant.

I couldn’t be six for ever and ever, so I was sent to The Hall, a pressure-cooker preparatory school in Hampstead where pink blazers emblazoned with black iron crosses made us targets for the kids from the local secondary modern.

… he is on the whole placatory and nervous at school and not very popular. My parents attacked this dilemma with a fork – psychotherapy on one prong, martial arts on the other. At the judo club in Vauxhall I came across kids like the ones from the secondary modern and got on fine. When they discovered I could stand on my head for five minutes at a time, everyone was summoned to watch my feat. Although they may have been smiling at a freak show, from my upside down vantage point even the glum faces were smiling. I could have stayed there for hours. I also learned Tai o Toshi, which I used to defeat the school bully. Heavy wooden desks and chairs flew in the hurricane of our combat.

There’s a motto shall ring in the ears of all Who e’er have spent their youth at The Hall. It’s a call to the sluggard, the dull and the wise, A call we cannot and daren’t despise. So now and for ever raise the call Hinc in altiora, up The Hall! There are overs and unders in life all through, In after life you’ll get your due. If you keep up the struggle and never stop At the last Reading Over you’ll come out top

I found this ancient piece of bombast beneath a pile of neglected sheet music. ‘Overs’ and ‘unders’ and ‘Reading Overs’ were still the yardstick by which academic success was judged forty years later. Everything we did was measured so we need be left in no doubt as to our level of achievement at any given time. Everything I enjoyed was tarnished by the incessant competition. In a school of three hundred there were 120 prizes and cups to be won. (I once sat down and counted them all just to make myself more miserable.) With such a ratio I should surely have won something. It was hard to believe Mum, Dad or any of my supporters and backers when all my best efforts failed to convince successive Hall judges and juries. Praise was mere flattery until quantified by competitive success, and Dad’s anguish and irritation at each fresh defeat seemed sharper than my own. I felt I was failing him dreadfully. Conversely, on the one occasion when I did have some success, achieving an ‘over’ in every subject and gaining a gold star, my excitement was drowned in the torrent of his delight. I began to feel that achievement was his way of defining me. I’d listen to him discussing what I’d done, as if my actions were separate from their agent, and my existence could only be checked in terms of them. Being me simply wasn’t good enough. But that was how he’d been brought up: each novel was a scalp for his mother’s belt, worn at Bar Mitzvahs, weddings and funerals. Every Sunday, after the publication of a new novel, our stomachs experienced a collective tingling in anticipation of the reviews. He judged his work by them, and I knew that no matter how much he disparaged the scornful ones, they were the ones he believed.

Football was where I felt it most acutely. Dad never stopped assuring me of my ability, and while I could bounce the ball on my foot for twenty minutes at a stretch, swerve round defenders and strike goals, it was something I preferred to do in the playground, where there were no white lines and circles to circumscribe my enjoyment and no one lost their temper if you missed an open goal or shouted if you failed to save one. Playground football was fun, and one of the boys gave it colour with versions of chants he’d picked up from the Chelsea Shed.

Over there, over there. In pink and black, A load of crap

Not one you’d have heard tumbling readily from the lips of the Fulham Road barrow boys.

Dad’s eyes were fixed on the school’s Under-11 team. When I did the trial, I was selected as substitute, which meant I had to run the line for a painful 70 minutes, chapping my thighs against the coarse, black woollen shorts.

‘Did you get on. Did you get on?’ he’d ask me every time I came home from a game, bounding down the stairs like an excited poodle.

It was the last game of the season. As I shivere in the downpour I imagined myself coming on, receiving the ball in midfield, flicking it out of the mud to swerve round the big bloke, building up pace and running between two defenders before rounding the goalkeeper to touch the ball into an empty net for the winning goal. By the time I got home fantasy had become reality; one that I knew would please Dad. I thought he was going to break into a triumphal dance. As he hugged me I wept into his bristly cheek, before running upstairs to my bedroom, hoping the pillow might suffocate me along with my shame.

Music gave me a language to cope beyond the thinking barrier. My only regret was when it had to stop with the angry utaca utaca of the stylus bumping over the edge of the vinyl onto the gap between harmony and the white noise on the label beyond. Besides listening I was also learning the clarinet. My teacher, Marjorie Dutton, was the only female staff member I had dealings with. Her gentle femininity contrasted starkly with the chalk-throwing, ear-clipping masters, but it was impossible to proceed down any path at The Hall for long before coming up against the obstacle of competition. I didn’t want to go in for the Reisenstein Woodwind Prize, but I was persuaded that if I wanted to make progress I had to do so. On the night, instead of the usual mellow sound, a series of squeaks emerged, as from a fallen fledgling. I stopped and told the audience I would start again. In the gallery round the hall, the masters stood like statues above the shields of the great public schools whose scholarships and places the pupils marched confidently towards. Once again the fledgling sounded instead of Mozart. Again I stopped, and started again. At last the instrument began to sing. A sympathetic audience applauded loudly, acknowledging courage rather than virtuosity. Of course, I won nothing.

My gold star propelled me into the scholarship form. Suddenly I was in a class of strangers who didn’t want to know me. They’d established their bonds, the strangest of which was with the form teacher himself, who used to confide the details of failed romances to his students. They took me aside and warned me that on no account should I discuss what I’d heard outside the class. Isolated, I soon slipped down the ranks, my gold star twinkling very faintly somewhere in the distance. The following term I was back among the common herd, labouring for a place at Westminster School. Prizes in singing and recitation whizzed past my nose. I started playing truant, with the collusion of my parents, at one stage staying off school for a full six weeks, and sat by Dad’s side as he rattled off his first children’s novel, Goalkeepers are Different. I tore each page from the typewriter in my eagerness to read the story, confirming to him that it had narrative drive and earning myself a dedication.

My parents began to research schools that specialised in music. The Purcell was out because it didn’t have a football pitch. Pimlico, unfortunately, had several. A brand new comprehensive opened the year before I went there, it sought to attract what it called ‘special musicians’. Unfortunately the course wasn’t ready when I arrived in the summer, the only special musician in my year of three hundred. They compensated by releasing me from Woodwork and Religious Education to practise.

My late entrance to the class, special privileges and snobby accent in a school where everyone spoke Cockney, or pretended to, wearing the smart flannel blazer Mum had bought me rather than the standard woollen one, made me a prime candidate for bullying.

‘What d’you wanna cam ’ere for? You should be at one of ’em posh places.’

Most of the boys seemed to want to fight me, and the girls to go out with me. Seemed being the operative word. Trysts arranged at the school gates were never kept. Academically the level was so far below the one I’d reached that I was simply treading water.

There was a fighting hierarchy at Pimlico; and Les and Ray were my bogeymen. Coming out of the science lab one afternoon, I was jostled and pushed as usual in the narrow corridor. A fist smacked my ear. It burned fiercely to the accompaniment of a painful, high-pitched whistle. The helplessness and humiliation hurt more.

‘Ah look, Ray. You’ve made ’im cry.’

Up in the Geography class Les received his comeuppance for consistent minor offending. The teacher decked him with a couple of right handers that left him sprawled on the floor.

‘You was laughin’, Glanville.’

‘’Course I wasn’t.’

‘’E were, Les. ’E were laughin’ atcher.’

‘After the lesson, I’m gonna fuckin’ do yer!’

Worse than the fights themselves was the anticipation. They were rarely spontaneous. More often than not a grudge would have to be avenged hours after the offence that had given rise to it. Much of my early time at Pimlico was spent in a state of panic as to what might befall me later.

Down on the dark concourse where no teacher trod, Les exacted his revenge. I tried to avoid the blows that bounced off my head, my cheeks and my back until an uppercut caught me in the nose with a crack. It didn’t hurt much but the blood gushed over my white shirt and fell on the floor in little sticky piles as I scurried about like a frightened hen, trying to protect myself from further blows, wondering how much damage had been done.

‘Go’ ’im!’

‘Nice one, Les.’

Job done, they walked away.

I did have a group of friends. They’d meet in the toilets and form a human arch against the wall, then each take it in turns to run a gauntlet of kicks and punches. Having experienced it once, I was assured that I couldn’t leave the coven. Time and again they tried to force me back into these rituals with threats and beatings. One afternoon, waiting outside the Humanities class, two of them held me as a third laid into me with savage blows. My anger at this injustice and humiliation rose, but this time things were different. My arm cranked, and my fist flew round and into my tormentor’s jaw with a satisfying smack. As he reeled round, clutching his face, I relished the pain and astonishment in his eyes. The detention I received felt more like a reward than a punishment.

Practically everyone at Pimlico supported Chelsea: a circumstance that led me to become part of yet another minority there; though this time not of one. Chelsea had their attractions. One of the two best sides in the country at the time, they’d recently won their first F.A. Cup and their very name epitomised the stylish era we were leaving behind. Even the club song was played regularly on Top of the Pops, so it wasn’t entirely inexcusable that I should choose Stamford Bridge to make my first foray onto the terraces, in the company of a sportswriter friend of Dad’s. My parents had regaled me with horror stories about life down there among the yobs, away from the bourgeois comfort of the adjacent seated areas, so it came as a huge relief, not to mention a thrill, when I returned home unscathed after an uneventful match against Huddersfield Town.

Another opportunity to watch Chelsea from the terraces came my way when gorgeous Josie Lee asked me out on a date to see Peter Bonetti the Cat’s testimonial against Standard Liege of Belgium. Needless to say, she followed her predecessors and failed to turn up, but this was a date I fully intended to keep with or without her. I wanted to be back on the terraces, this time not at some dull outpost as in the game against Huddersfield, but in the heart of the volcano. Approaching the Shed, I watched as the perpetual motion of the mass of close-packed bodies sent waves rippling to the extremities of the terraces beyond. At its heart I was surrounded by fag-smoking Artful Dodgers, kids who’d wipe the floor with the likes of Les and Ray, school rejects, yet kings of a domain my anonymity allowed me to be part of. ‘The Liquidator’ started up, skinhead reggae, its instrumental moonstomp rhythm met by synchronised handclaps and choruses of ‘Chelsea’. Many wore the uniform of multi-eyed Doc Martens, two-tone trousers, Ben Sherman shirts, red braces and crew cuts. Lighted bangers flew through the air, exploding dangerously close to my face. As arms linked for ‘Knees up Mother Brown’ I was shoved hard in the back, fighting to keep my balance as row after dancing row cascaded down the steps, leaving vulnerable bodies prone in their wake as the waves returned to their source before starting all over again. I watched the coppers flying in, and hauling people out roughly, and relished the rawness, the danger in the faces and stances of people who spat, and spilled their steaming tea and chewed their burgers open-mouthed in a pungent haze of fried onions and beer-fuelled farts. There were no rival supporters, but even without them the atmosphere was charged with a sense of menace that left me shivering as I exited the ground, not with fear but elation. Feeling that I’d successfully completed a rite of passage, I experienced a warm tingle of acceptance, although sure no one there had even been aware of me.

My bent nose, like Cleopatra’s, changed the course of history. Les and Ray were severely reprimanded and I was swiftly transferred to another class with only a week to go before the end of term.

We spent the summer holiday in Kent, where Toby and I played football on the village green situated conveniently opposite our family cottage. I’d wait at the window until there was a quorum, then sprint across the road to join them. If there were no football in the offing, I’d freewheel my bike down the steep hill round the corner, watching the speedometer hit thirty before joining the main road through the village. Our holidays there fell into a routine: Denton for cream tea, Canterbury for the cathedral, Hythe for the beach, and as Mum struggled to keep us all above the boredom threshold, Dad, an eternal Greta Garbo to be disturbed on pain of death or worse, would closet himself away to write his annual novel, emerging only to defend his honour at ping-pong or his goal on the village green. I became increasingly obsessed by the thrill of freewheeling, seeing how far I could push the pin on the dial, how long I could sustain the speed on level ground. One afternoon, pedalling like a maniac down the pavement, trying to keep at thirty, I thudded with a halt into the body of an old woman who had been emerging from the bus-shelter. High on panic I felt strangely detached from the situation of the prone, grey-haired figure on the ground and the miscued blows aimed at my head by her distraught husband. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the gold family estate car slowing down on the other side of the road and my brother, Toby, crying. The old man was too. I burst into tears and fled, convinced I was a murderer. In the distance I could hear an ambulance siren. Mum told me the old lady wore a pacemaker and might die.

I channelled my energies towards the garden, crucifying slugs, disembowelling woodlice, mixing red and black ant nests in the hope of seeing a war. When bored with insects, I’d sit on the wall at the front of the house and hurl crab-apples at the boys cycling past. One afternoon I hit my target several times and he swerved in front of a car. The screeching brakes, the smoke from the wheels and the pungent smell of burning rubber set doors opening and nets twitching. It was the second time I’d roused the village from its habitual sloth. Amiable, freckled John lay motionless in the road but the car, thank God, had managed to avoid him. Mum and Dad reckoned it had to be down to the new school. Disturbed adolescent, delinquent and neurotic, I was packaged and labelled, ready for delivery.

Autumn saw the arrival of the first official batch of elite ‘special musicians’, thirty or so, their rounded speech marginally reducing the playground twang quotient. The once quiet corridors of the music department now resembled an orchestra pit before the overture, a hubbub of competing strings and wind. With the door closed I could just about concentrate on polishing a Weber run, refining a Mozart adagio or perfecting the riff from High Society. I was obsessed with jazz, listened to it, played it, and read about it. One of the newcomers, a trumpet player called Philip, shared my enthusiasm. We’d go down Charing Cross Road and dig out New Orleans standards, then go home and work them out, singly and together. At home it was all we played, at school all we discussed when we weren’t trying to recruit the trombone, piano, and bass we needed to form our own Red Hot Five. One morning Mr Spencer, the Head of Music, heard the first chords of the ‘Jelly Roll Blues’ strike up, sullying the nineteenth-century air that wafted past his rooms. His tie appeared at the window, the door opened and there he stood, skinny but towering, his eyes furious behind his spectacles. He glowered at the offending sheets as if they were hard-core pornography. I lived in Kensington, Philip in Stanmore, and the other prospective members of our combo, who could say? Banned from playing in school, the band had no future, so jazz became a solitary affair, a consolation if I was feeling down. Only it could help me clear the ‘Can’t play Jazz Blues’. I pictured my hero in The Benny Goodman Story sitting on the roof of his family’s New York home and doodling to himself until the pretty girl arrives, as if conjured by his playing like a genie. No such genie answered my breaks although officially I had a girlfriend, one of the special musicians, a sweet violinist called Caroline with pillowfuls of red Irish hair. I’d lie on the bed with her, wondering what to do next, even though a classmate had taught me how to come, furnishing me with the crucial bit of information I was lacking.

‘You gotta move it ap an’ down!’

Clarinet in one hand and cock in the other, I had the restorative and the nostrum.

I integrated successfully into my new form with the aid of an image change. I’d outgrown the flannel blazer, and was able to persuade Mum that the commonly worn woollen variety would be warmer. I wore the fashionable attire of the terraces; pleated Ben Sherman or Brutus shirts, blue and green two-tone tonic trousers and tassel-loafer shoes. To top it all I had a navy blue, knee-length crombie, complete with red silk handkerchief tucked into the top pocket.

‘Glanville thinks ’e’s a skin’ead!’ sneered one of the bitchier girls in the class, hitting the target with painful accuracy. Soon after a group of the genuine article surrounded me on the tube, swiped my handkerchief, and sat opposite, gloating over its quality and discussing how they’d pick the embroidered initials out of Mum’s gift.

Every penny I had I spent on jazz, generally at HMV on Oxford Street, a twenty-minute bus ride away. One afternoon, with King Oliver’s Dixieland Stompers and Jelly Roll Morton already in the bag, I headed for the cassette department. There it was, winking at me from the tidy rows, The Dutch Swing College Band, as if it knew I had no money left to buy it with. Mum, a huge jazz fan, had raved about them. I’d been trying to find one of their records for months. I glanced behind. Two shop assistants were chatting by the till. I looked left, right, in the mirror above. A short man in an old, brown mac stood next to me and began extracting and replacing cassettes aimlessly. Like me, I thought, up to no good. I felt very self-conscious and hot in the crombie as I turned the cassette round and round in my hand, peeling off the cellophane nervously before plunging it into the depths of my coat pocket. I walked through the store in a daze, my stomach tingling uncomfortably, until I was out in the dazzling autumn sunshine and someone gripped my shoulder. It was the man in the brown mac.

In the manager’s office they kept me waiting half an hour while they debated whether or not to call the police. In the end I was released. As soon as I was home I rushed into Mum’s arms and burst into tears, and, before you could say Carl Jung, I was flicking through Country Life in a Harley Street waiting room.

Sigmund Freud was one of the household gods. Handsome green volumes of his oeuvre lined the drawing-room bookcase, the works of the disciples by their sides. We were encouraged to read them almost as soon as we were out of nappies, not just the theory, but also its application in works such as Moses and Monotheism or Civilisation and its Discontents. My parents accepted his precepts unquestioningly. Theory was also put into practice. Mum was in therapy with a brilliant polymath in Reading, learning as much about zoology and Shakespeare as she did about herself. My brother and sisters all had counselling at one time or other. Only Dad didn’t. He just sent everybody else off to be cured, hoping his life would be made easier once we had been. Had he been analysed himself we might all have benefited. Freud was good enough for us, but the barbs in his beard might spike Dad’s muse.

My own analyst, Dr Woodhead, was a proper Freudian, old enough to have known the great man and grown up with the passion of a new faith. I’d lie on the couch while she sat behind me, white-haired and elegant in county tweeds, stopwatch ticking for fifty minutes, both happy with silence, and content to bounce questions back at me with a sure forehand. Our sessions were twice a week. I was ferried from school and then home by Douglas ‘Buzz’ Wells, an ex-racing driver, golfer and boxer with a toothbrush moustache who referred to her as Timbernut. The expensive navel-searching must have seemed indulgent to a man who’d resolved his own frustrations in the ring or on the racetrack. Our laddish conversations lifted the damp, analytical gloom my sessions left me wrapped in. A couple of visits a week to his place in Norland Square, just round the corner from my parents, might have benefited me more.

To the left and to the right of Sigmund Freud stood Groucho Marx and Lenny Bruce. Together they comprised a Jewish atheist’s trinity. A diet of the sayings of these three topped up with a daily Holocaust catechism constituted our religious education. Hatred of our enemies defined my Jewishness as we weren’t kosher, and didn’t observe any of the holidays or festivals. In fact adherence to the central part of the Trinity deprived me of the sacred B’rith, the covenant of circumcision that binds all Jewish men to God. My Freudian parents thought it would lead to a castration complex. Dad certainly had one. He regularly informed me that Jewish women were domineering shrews to be avoided at all costs. He could get away with saying this as Mum was only half Jewish.

A central event in family lore was the Kossoff trial. The broadcaster, David Kossoff, had accused Dad of writing anti-Semitic handbooks, a slander that deeply upset both my parents. Mum’s tears drove Dad to a court action which he won, conducting his own defence. It was a case that made the front page of the Evening Standard. Kossoff’s main target, The Bankrupts, was in fact an unremittingly scathing and negative account of the idolatrous, philistine suburban Jewish world of ritual without religion that public school had allowed Dad to escape. ‘Who likes the Yiden? The goyim hate the Yiden, the Yiden hate the Yiden. Nobody likes the Yiden,’ my great-grandmother apparently used to say.

The only Jews I knew were Dad’s friends from the literary and intellectual world like Frederic Raphael and Isaac Bashevis Singer, fascinating, charismatic people I could listen to for hours who would have shared his view of the environment he’d had to escape in order to define himself. Jewishness seemed synonymous with non-religious values and aspirations (embodied by these people) which I cherished and admired. We saw little of Dad’s family. His beloved father had died when I was a baby and his mother lived in Hove with her second husband Bobby, known to us as Uncle Booby, and there, as far as Dad was concerned, they could stay.

There had been plenty of Jewish kids at The Hall. At Pimlico I couldn’t name one, which might explain why the words Jew and Hymie were bandied about so readily, demonising the absent race, substituting the Jew of anti-Semitic gentile folklore for the reality.

‘’Ere, Froggy! Gi’s back that twenty pence wot I borrowed yer!’

‘Ain’t go’ it, Dave?’

‘Nah. Course you ain’t, ’cos yer a fackin’ Jew, incher?’

‘Don’t call him a Jew.’

Alan and Froggy stared at me, bemused.

‘Why? ’O says ’e ain’t?’

‘If you want to say someone’s mean, say so, but don’t say they’re a Jew.’

A smile stole across Alan’s podgy, red face.

‘Alright, Hymie!’

‘Can we have silence over there, please?’ yelled the teacher.

‘Hymie, Hymie Goldberg.’

The silly, and basically harmless refrain spread across the row behind me, but I’d made them conscious of a usage that came too trippingly off their tongues. Now I’d got it out in the open there was more chance of being able to tackle it. It amused me they’d actually hit on my real name. I turned round.

‘Just don’t call someone a Jew if you want to say they’re stingy.’

Again the refrain.

‘Oy, Hymie!’ Alan smiled. ‘Comin’ out to play football?’

As the pips went for the end of break and the drudgery of geography beckoned, I heard someone call out ‘Nice goal, Hymie!’

It was Klewer. Twice the size of anyone else in the class, well liked for his friendly, open nature, but considered to be one of the best fighters in the school.

‘Shame you ’ave to be so Jewish with the ball, though.’

I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt, so I grinned but he didn’t smile back.

‘What’s the matter, Hymie?’

The rage began to fill my chest. Before me stood the embodiment of the abuse and savagery inflicted on my people for two thousand years, that I heard recounted daily, that had led to Mum’s cousin Theo being gassed at Auschwitz. I spat full in Klewer’s face. I’d never seen him look angry before. He lurched towards me, a big brown bear.

‘Fight! Fight!’

Other boys alerted the ones who hadn’t made it back to the classrooms and I was aware of figures scurrying towards us. My only chance against this giant was to do a Muhammad Ali, so I moved in fast, through his cumbersome blows, and hung over his shoulder, not giving him the chance to swing, reducing his punches to pats and paws. If Klewer broke free I’d be in hospital.

‘Come on, Klewer. Smack ’im!’

‘Belt ’im!’

‘Cam on, ’e’s a wanker!’

I wondered how long I’d be able to hang on before the crowd’s incitement mixed with his anger would cause the explosion to free him, but the blows began to peter out and eventually we separated. Klewer gave me a cold, unforgiving look.

‘You’re lucky!’

‘Klewer could’ve killed yer!’

‘Yeah! Knock sixteen colours o’ shit aht o’ yer!’

‘Finish it later!’

My passion was spent. I looked at Klewer. He just seemed fed up.

I couldn’t wait to tell Dad how I’d fought a bigger opponent in defence of my Jewishness.

‘Filthy anti-Semitic bastard!’

‘He’s not. He’s just ignorant.’

‘Is he a Polack?’

‘No idea.’

‘With a name like Klewer?’

‘Could be anything.’

I didn’t need to forgive Klewer. I could have embraced the boy who’d allowed me to focus my sense of being Jewish so keenly.

Conversation at the court of King Brian flowed as normal that evening.

‘You know what my friend the Irish watchmaker says, “Oi’ve always worked on the principal that every Goy is an anti-Semite, and d’you know what, Brian, Oi’ve never, never been proved wrong.”’

‘Oh, Brian,’ Mum sighed. ‘You’re so filled with negativity.’

‘Have you heard what happened to Mark today?’ he answered, as if in explanation.

‘Yes,’ Mum sighed.

‘It’s always there, ready to rear its ugly head. I just thank God for the blacks and the Asians. They’ve taken the heat off us.’

‘Visible targets,’ I chimed in.

‘That’s right. As long as I don’t show my profile,’ Dad chuckled through his chicken. ‘You know what your godfather says? “Er, nobody knows I’m Jewish, er, until they see me.”’

We did, but we laughed anyway.

‘At least you don’t have that to contend with.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, you don’t look Jewish.’

‘Of course I do.’

‘Darling, you don’t.’ Mum’s sweet tone heightened the provocation.

‘You should be grateful for that,’ Dad continued.

‘For what? I’m not going to hide. They can all know I’m Jewish as far as I’m concerned.’

‘But, my dear, you’re not Jewish.’

‘What do you mean? Of course I am.’

‘By Jewish law you’re not. Your grandmother was the Ethiopian in the fuel supply.’

Mum chortled.

‘Seventy-five per cent of my blood is Jewish. It’s what I am.’

‘The wrong seventy-five per cent, schmendrick!’

‘And why are you, who never goes near a synagogue, so keen on upholding Jewish law? Only when it suits you, so you can have a go at me, undermine me, take the things I care about away from me.’

Dad simply sat there laughing, his poultry-filled belly heaving. It was always the same when he was cornered, his last defence. I pushed my chair over and kicked it aside, slamming the glass-panelled door behind me as hard as I could in hope it might break.

Upstairs I lay on my bed, watched from above by my own Holy Trinity of Best, Law and Charlton, centrepiece of a shrine dedicated to the saints and apostles of Manchester United. Silk and woollen football scarves pinned to the picture-rail framed the altar. Although this wasn’t a great time to be supporting United, that only intensified the passion. To me being a United fan meant suffering, assuming the stigmata of the martyrs who’d died at Munich. I’d been too young to fully appreciate the glorious sixties that culminated in the European Cup triumph of 1968: my most cherished memory was of their winning the National Five-a-Side championship in 1970. Ever since dubious refereeing had disallowed a perfectly good Denis Law goal that would have sent us into the 1969 European Cup Final, the club had been in decline. Watching them on their trips to London was a joyless experience; regularly drubbed at Spurs and Arsenal, usually beaten by Chelsea and QPR, sometimes squeezing a draw at West Ham. Worst of all was the 5–0 thrashing at the hands of co-relegation strugglers Crystal Palace that left me weeping bitterly into my hand-knitted scarf. Ironically, we stayed up while they went down that year, but it felt as if it wouldn’t be long before the bottom of the First Division opened and we were received into the maw of the Second.

At that time United fans were regarded as the most violent in the country. In reality they were no worse than many others, but there were so many of them. Ten thousand regularly travelled when the club played away, swamping rival supporters’ ends. It was an environment considered too dangerous by my parents, so I’d watch them from the stands, part of me terrified by the red-and-white-clad northern hordes, a lot of me yearning to be in there with them.

Twenty minutes’ walk from home we had one of the best sides in the country. The years since I watched Rodney Marsh score his hat-trick against Watford had seen QPR’s fortunes wax as much as United’s had waned. Stan Bowles was a worthy heir to Rodney, and the club had a plethora of fine players to carry on the good work of the late sixties. My parents thought (wrongly) that QPR’s terraces met their safety standards. It wasn’t the Shed, it wasn’t the Stretford End, but I soon got to know the hundred or so regular faces that made up the Loft. I didn’t really support them – love for United brooked no rival – but I was becoming hooked on the thrill of being accepted by clubs that wouldn’t have me as a member, and on the adrenaline that flowed from fear and aggression.

‘You’ll never take the Lo-oft!’ was one of the emptiest chants ever heard at a football ground. Chelsea, United, Arsenal and West Ham regularly did. Spurs were the most fun. There were so many of them we never had a chance, but we had a go anyway, holding the citadel just above the entrance while they repeatedly charged, trying to overwhelm the blue-helmeted line that separated us. Inevitably the dam would burst, sending wave upon wave of Doc-Martencd skinheads pouring over us, boots and fists flailing indiscriminately. The big thing was not to go down. We’d retreat, leaving a sinister no-man’s land while the coppers formed a new line and the Spurs fans filled the vacuum. Then we’d regroup and charge back at them, knowing it was futile, but the sheer exhilaration of racing across the terraces, not knowing quite what to expect, made it worthwhile. Eventually we’d merge into the crowd, little pockets of rebels for the Spurs fans to seek and destroy, and the game would continue to the accompaniment of the sporadic explosions that followed whenever they found us.

If the opposition were less well supported we might go hunting ourselves, though it normally ended in farce, as in the home Cup tie against Orient.

‘The only way we’re going to get the Labour Party back into power is by hanging onto our pipes,’ announced one of our main faces, pipe between his teeth, in an imitation of Harold Wilson worthy of Mike Yarwood, but we were supposed to be looking for the opposition firm at the time. A small mob suddenly appeared on the other side of White City Way. They charged into us and a few seconds of the usual indiscriminate kicking and punching ensued until we realised it was Paul O’Reilly’s firm and we were fighting our own side. Occasionally we’d run into individual fans who seemed up for it, but a code of fairness operated and it normally ended up one on one, even if our one tended to be the top boy.

Music was the catalyst for my first trip to Old Trafford. United v Spurs was my reward from Dad for gaining a distinction in my Grade Five clarinet exam. I practically had to run to match his pace as he headed for Holland Park station like an Olympic walker in training.

‘Come on, panther!’

Just as I’d learned to eat and talk fast, so I’d been forced into an unnatural stride.

‘But Dad, the train doesn’t go for an hour and a half!’

I was speaking to my accompanying breeze.

By the time I turned into the station he was standing by the lift gate, green cardboard tickets in his hand, blue 1964 Olympics bag over his shoulder crammed with pink Italian sports papers and our packed lunch. As the lift operator pulled the heavy gates apart we heard the vacuum-cleaner sound of a train leaving the platform. And Dad was away, like a sprinter off his blocks.

‘Dad! The train’s gone!’

I was left, talking to a backpacker. There was no sign of Dad. As I reached the platform he was scurrying awkwardly towards the far end in anticipation of the change at Oxford Circus.

‘Come on!’

He turned round anxiously as another train clattered into the station and I was forced to sprint the final yards. Shuffling along the edge of the platform as the train came to a halt, he secured a position by the opening doors and long-jumped on ahead of the opposition to reserve a couple of seats. A copy of The Times was thrust into my hands. It was several stops before I’d managed to restore it to its original, pre-breakfast form, and I’d barely established that Bobby Charlton was fit when we were at Oxford Circus, leaping like TV detectives through the opening doors into the crime scene.

As the escalator at Euston finally brought us back into the light 1 noticed groups of lads scattered about the concourse, most not wearing scarves, a few sporting tiny badges on which I could just about make out the United ship motif. Scars and earrings complemented the donkey jackets, bovver boots and drainpipe jeans they wore; one or two had United tattoos etched onto the sides of their heads and necks. Amidst them stood a group in dark grey jackets, and creased brown pin-stripes, looking, for all the world, like accountants, but as the mobs dispersed to a far-off platform, they fell into line with them.

‘C-O-C-K-N-E-Y, Cockney Reds will never die!’

The war cry rang round the station.

‘Like something to eat, dear?’

We’d scarcely sat down when out came lumps of food wrapped in silver foil, and a couple of cans of lager. Dad’s wolf-like teeth tore at a chicken breast. He wrenched the metal ring from one of the cans with the sound of a piston firing, and a fine Heineken mist descended over my hair and face.

‘Lovely grub!’ he enthused.

The succulent pink flesh seemed to invite a ferocious response and, as I bit through the bone into the marrow, the shards splintered into the roof of my mouth. I was about to open my beer can politely in the direction of the window-when I noticed a silver-haired man in suit and tie glaring at Dad, so, in filial solidarity, I turned it towards him and released it, to my disappointment, not with a whoosh but an unnoticed phip.

‘Looking forward to it, dear?’

Such a tame phrase could never adequately describe my feelings. I was heading for the seat of my religion.

After Stoke the weather changed. Sheets of pine-needle rain frapped against the window.

‘Here we go!’

Dad stuffed the silver foil and newspaper detritus back into his satchel and began heading up the train, bumping past scruffy, long-haired locals as the terminus came into view. I jumped off the moving locomotive onto a wet platform, the impetus carrying me into a sprint towards the ticket barrier. For once I was ahead of him.

As we made for the bus stop, rivulets of grime ran down the dilapidated brickwork of abandoned buildings. But to me, everything was transformed by association with United. Even the orange and white of the double-decker, so different from the plain red of the London variety, seemed as exotic as the singsong local accent that Dad seemed to hate so much. The bleak urban landscape and scattered housing estates glimpsed from motorway bridges looked like futuristic relatives of the Emerald City.

People began to leave their seats. I looked in vain for floodlights and wondered how long it would be before I saw Old Trafford. It seemed hours before the police let us cross Chester Road, and suddenly, there it was. The headlights embedded in the roof of the stand helped to conceal the stadium’s glory until the last possible moment, the glistening red brick radiant against its sullen surroundings as the clicking turnstiles filtered off the ocean filling the vast forecourt.

‘I’ll see you after the game, darling.’

He gave me one of his my-little-son smiles, and I moved away abruptly in an effort to separate myself from him and the ill-ease it engendered. Once inside the ground with the programme in my hand, I felt I’d arrived. I examined its cover, the figures shaking hands, the number, the date, the fixture, just to make sure it really was happening, then ran up the steps of the stand, unable to wait any longer for my first view of the ground I’d seen so often on television. I was shocked by how much the sight of what was, after all, only a football pitch moved me, as I visualised the heroes and their exploits on the turf. It didn’t matter that most had gone or that those who remained could never repeat their great deeds, that just lent the occasion poignancy, but as the teams ran onto the pitch and chants of ‘U-NI-TED’ rang round the ground, the football itself didn’t seem to matter at all. I felt I belonged here as never before, as I joined in the singing, knowing I was as passionate about this club as anyone there. The state of the art electronic scoreboard read Manchester United o Tottenham Hotspur o. I hoped that would change soon. It did. When Martin Peters put Spurs one up, looking round, I noticed that Mecca had been infiltrated as about one hundred Spurs fans celebrated. A handful of United promptly steamed into them from the back of the Scoreboard End terrace, whacking a few before being arrested. Then Peters scored again, reducing the usually deafening Stretford End to the level of a village church congregation. I joined in the chants of ‘You’re gonna get your fuckin’ ’eads kicked in’, just to give myself a bit of a lift. By the time the referee blew his whistle, Peters had added two more. I had the compensation of seeing the great Bobby Charlton score, but this current team were just men. No mist swept round their feet as they left the pitch with their heads hanging after what turned out to be the worst home defeat of the season.

As Dad phoned his report through, the name Peters was polluting the press box air.

‘Your team were lousy!’

He saw how dejected I was.

‘Sorry about that,’ he smiled sympathetically. ‘Not much of a present.’

I felt bad. I remembered why I was there, and the pleasure it had given Dad to bring me to Old Trafford, but there was no way a fanatical United supporter could have enjoyed it. It was impossible to dissemble. I shrugged my shoulders.

In the pressroom I was introduced, with mutual disinterest, to several of his colleagues. Then a handsome, dark-haired man turned and gave Dad the warmest smile he’d yet received, and all the joy knocked out of me returned. Pat Crerand, one of the gods who looked down on me as I lay asleep at night, had stepped down from his picture. The pain when he squeezed my hand confirmed he was real.

‘They could have done with you today, Paddy.’

‘There’s a lot happening here, Brian.’

‘Do you think we’ll stay up?’

I was surprised to hear myself speak.

‘Of course, son. Just going through a bad patch.’

His words reassured me for a moment, but I’d seen enough to realise that the situation was dire.

Outside the ground the streets were dark and empty, strewn with bottles, cans, half-eaten burgers and torn-up programmes cast aside in disgust, but I felt good, bonded with Dad in a way I hadn’t been for a long time, part of his world. Although we discussed the game as equals, he felt more like a father than ever. On the journey home he reminded me of how alike we were. It was said with affection, inspired by the feelings that had been kindled in us both that day, but, like the smile he’d given me before I entered the ground, it seemed to imply ownership. I felt ambivalent about the prospect of turning into another version of him; on the one hand I was filled with admiration for a man apparently so successful professionally, financially and with women, on the other afraid that I might never achieve that success, and that if I did, I might, in that last respect, grow up to hurt someone as much as I felt he had my mother.

Beta was from Berlin; more confident and mature than most of our other au pairs, her English already very good. She’d been working as personal assistant to one of the editors in a German publishing house and now she would be cleaning ours. Where others faded at the court of King Brian, Beta flourished. Poking fun at Dad and quick enough to return fire in the nightly shoot-outs, she slipped into our family like a long-lost older sister.

One evening she failed to come down for dinner. Liz offered to look for her. Ten minutes later she was back.

‘Beta’s in floods of tears. She’s really upset.’

‘Did she tell you what’s wrong?’

Mum looked anxious.

‘She won’t say.’

‘You’re very quiet, Brian. Anything the matter?’

‘Nothing, mutteler. Okay kids, I’m going up to watch Kojak. Coming anybody?’

‘Be nice if you stayed and helped with the washing-up for a change.’

‘Why, dearest daughter, when I have four wonderful children?’

He picked several newspapers off a pile by his seat, and left.

‘I’m going to see how Beta is.’

Liz followed Mum upstairs. By the time Mum returned I was alone, finishing the drying.

‘Don’t you want to see Kojak?’

She was scowling.

‘Where’s Liz?’

‘Upstairs talking to Beta.’

She picked up a tea-towel and began drying the plates vigorously, as if she were wiping the nose of a petulant child.

‘God, he makes me sick!’

‘Who?’

My question was faux naif.

‘The poor girl’s in a dreadful state up there. Your lather tried to seduce her. He just can’t control himself. Even shits on his own door-step.’

‘He’s done it before?’

Mum wrinkled her forehead. I knew the answer. My question had been prompted by a prurient fascination with the minutiae of Dad’s indiscretions.

‘Sylvia: I caught them snogging on the sofa. Fat lump of Swiss lard!’

I remembered Sylvia, bad-tempered and unfriendly with long black hair. I used to lift her skirt to see her knickers, which really irritated her. Now I was glad I’d humiliated her, but annoyed that while I was indulging in horseplay it appeared that Dad had been getting the real thing.

‘What did you do?’

‘I was furious with him.’

‘What about her?’

‘Oh, that silly tart! She didn’t have long to go with us.’

‘So you let her stay.’

‘I needed help, Mark.’

‘How could you after that?’

‘I told Brian that if it ever happened again he’d be out.’

‘So what’s going to happen now?’

‘I don’t know.’

Mum began to sob uncontrollably and I gave her a big hug. I found it easier to cope when she was angry, but when she started to cry, I felt useless and angry at myself for not being able to be angry with Dad, but I so wanted her to stop. I stroked her back as she hugged me more tightly. There was a crack on the stairs. I didn’t know what to say if Dad should catch us. But it was Liz, irate yet in control.

‘He’s a bastard.’

Mum broke out of our embrace.

‘How’s Beta?’

‘She’s very upset. The stupid fucker. Christ! He’s so fucking immature. He just can’t control himself. It’s got nothing to do with you, Mum.’

‘Of course it has!’

‘It hasn’t. He just has this constant need to prove that he’s still attractive, but he loves you very much.’

‘How can he?’

‘Oh Mum, of course he does. You know that.’

For the next few weeks Dad’s behaviour was as well groomed as his appearance. His stubble was only ever shaved when there was an attractive young woman in the house, but now he also seemed to have discovered a previously unsuspected flair for kitchen chores.

Any lingering family tensions evaporated in the warm sea air of the Adriatic. My parents had rented an isolated villa fifteen minutes from the resort of Fano, approached via a winding, mile-long mud track. I was sharing a room with Liz – and Beta who would parade round it in the morning, naked but for utilitarian white cotton pants. I’d heard that the doctors in our local surgery admired Beta’s large nipples and now I could see why, although her breasts were as boyish as her underwear. I’d always be sure to remain in bed until she’d dressed, and watch her pull on her tantalisingly tight jeans.

Down on the beach the temptations were, if anything, greater. Firm bronzed flesh beckoned and winked. It was torture. The trouble was, at sixteen plus they were all a couple of years older than me, which didn’t prevent the girls inviting me to the disco, but did disincline my parents from letting me go.

‘They’re interested in older boys. You’ll only end up wretched.’

Each day the offer would be renewed. Each day I was forced to refuse, and while they discoed the dusk away I’d be lying in bed nursing a painful erection, Beta almost naked beneath the sheets in the bed opposite, my imagination rampant with visions of voluptuous Italian girls engaging in every conceivable form of sexual act with me.

To make matters worse, every day a sports car would negotiate the track beneath our house, veering off to a secluded, abandoned building in the abutting woodland with its booty. The female passenger was different each time, the driver the same. Our car making regular journeys was rendering the track almost impassable. Two would eventually lead to us having to be towed out by oxen – or so Dad reasoned. Next time the local Lothario’s glinting silver car appeared, the males of the Glanville family marched on the intruder. Dad thumped on the only internal door long enough for trousers to be pulled up and skirts adjusted. A bearded man appeared, smiling amiably, and proffered his hand to be shaken in turn by all three of us.

‘Buon giorno. Sono il proprietario!’ (Good morning. I’m the owner.)

Looking at the decayed plaster, broken floorboards, exposed brickwork and glassless windows, the only response could be pity. Dad warned him he was rendering the road impassable and that the next time he saw him he would call the carabinieri, all in fluent Italian. We never saw him again. Toby and I went back later and booted a gaping hole in the door to his harem.

The region also fostered nobler forms of love. At Gradara castle we saw the room where Gianciotto Malatesta had supposedly murdered his brother and wife, Paolo and Francesca da Rimini, whose eyes and lips had met for the first and last time only an instant before the descending knife sent them to an endless embrace in the second circle of Hell. Dante was so moved by Francesca’s account of their plight, an echo of his own unsatisfied love for Beatrice, that he fainted with grief and consigned the wronged assassin to Caina, the lowest circle of all. I bought a postcard of Rossetti’s representation of the unhappy pair, their pre-Raphaelite hair flowing in an eternal, ethereal embrace, and promptly found my own Francesca on the beach. Pale amid the dark Italian girls, she was an Austrian with hair that twisted and tumbled down her back like Francesca’s in the picture. An earthy naturalness made communication with the other girls easy, with or without language, but I felt that my heroine floated on a higher plane, and I could only watch from below, in love and awe, suffering an unrequited passion she knew nothing of. Zeffirelli’s film of Romeo and Juliet had affected me the same way months previously. Devastated by the grief and suicide of Olivia Hussey’s beautiful Juliet, I’d gone to the bottom of the garden in tears and made a rather half-hearted attempt to hang myself from the swing on a triangular piece of metal.

When frustration had turned to pain I stopped going to the beach, and fell back on my favourite pastime of combat with insects. By day I fought a colony of red ants that infested a crumbling, lime-painted wall; by night I’d chase the gigantic moths that batted against the polystyrene-tiled ceiling in the bathroom and frightened my sisters. It was whilst chasing one such creature with an oar that I first noticed the little walled town in the distance, across the sloping fields at the back of our villa. To my overwrought fourteen-year-old mind it gradually acquired almost magical properties; it was a place of tranquillity and happiness immured against the woes of the world I was currently living in. One afternoon I persuaded Mum to stay behind while everyone else went to the beach, and walk there with me, cross-country, through the yellow wheat-fields to the enchanted city. After a while the sea appeared to our right, and the carbuncle coastal towns seemed safely distant. Reaching the town was the realisation of a fantasy, and knowing its name, to hold a powerful talisman. Novilara. It was only later I discovered that it was the town to which Gianciotto Malatesta had retreated after Paolo and Francesca’s murder. Men in caps and waistcoats playing boules on a freshly concreted surface, spoke what sounded like a Spanish-riddled dialect, older and different from the language ten miles away on the coast. Drinking coffee here I could smell the beans as if for the first time, my senses heightened and sharpened, finally, above the fog that had recently clouded every thought and image.

The remaining days of the holiday were spent in Dorset, where the sober climate and landscape of south-west England soon washed away the blood and grime of the Marche. Lighted cigarettes pushed through the letterbox of our cottage in Kent had combined with the threat of a housing development on the village green to make us briefly second-home-less, but by selling the film rights to his novel A Roman Marriage, Dad bought a thatched cottage in Piddlehinton, whose Victorian and Jacobean buildings merged to give the impression of a cottage loaf. We soon discovered new favourite locations for walks and tea to replace the ones in Kent, but most of our activities now centred around the house itself, specifically the drawing room. During the mornings we’d read there in silence; in the afternoons perform short homemade plays (the curtains over the French windows formed an ideal backstage area); and after supper we’d sit in front of the log fire whose perspex guard threw back other-worldly reflections that were the perfect accompaniment to the ghost stories we read by the light of its flame, sipping martinis. Not that we needed the judges and knights that haunted the pages of Bram Stoker and Sheridan Le Fanu when we had our very own nun. Just as the poltergeist at home in London seemed to have been roused by the activity of small children, so the unfortunate novice might have been disturbed by the energy of frustrated adolescents. Each night Mum was roused from slumber by banging and thumping on the bedroom ceiling, above which lay a sleeping Toby. Concerned that he’d be woken, not to say petrified, by the racket, she visualised a cross and then burned it into the ceiling, so putting a stop to these antics. Toby slept blissfully through the ritual haunting and exorcism, as did everyone else. It was only a year or so later that we discovered why the house never appeared to have been touched by the cleaner during our long absences. ‘It’s ’arnted! I feel funny in there alone,’ Mrs Rose informed us, sounding uncannily like one of the retainers that populated our fireside tales of the supernatural. ‘Oh ye-eah! It’s well known in the village. Nun used to live there, got pregnant. ’Anged ’erself up the-ere,’ she explained, widening her eyes appropriately whilst indicating Toby’s attic room.

No one seemed more disturbed by these events than Beta who was also the one that frightened most easily when the ghoul emerged from the wardrobe at the climax of a fireside reading. To Liz and Jo she was still the welcome older sister who took a share in these activities, but my attraction was growing with greater familiarity, and the slight swell of her breasts under a tight black polo-neck or the curve of her firm thigh in faded blue jeans distracted me even more than the sight of her nakedness had in Fano.

I began to wonder how far I could take things. Each evening she’d allow me to kiss her goodnight while she lay beneath the sheets, naked but for the white cotton pants I’d seen so much of in Italy, and let me run my hands under the bedclothes, right down her back, to her buttocks and thighs, her lips parting involuntarily as I did so. In my mind I allowed the action to develop, taking her tongue in my mouth, slipping my hand down her pants, sliding beneath the bedclothes and making love to her. She must have been aware that as I left her room each night my cock was straining against my pyjamas.

After one such foray I was standing in the bathroom, vainly attempting to pee whilst waiting for my alter ego to descend. Matters weren’t helped by the proximity of the loo to the airing cupboard where I knew Beta’s underwear was drying. There it stood, hovering in no man’s land when Mum pushed the door open and walked in.

‘Goodness! What an enormous genital!’

Not even being caught crucifying slugs or aroused in charge of pornographic magazines had prepared me for such a humiliation.

Next morning she took me aside.

‘Can I have a word? Beta’s been complaining. She says you keep groping her.’

My forehead felt on fire with embarrassment.

‘What a bitch!’

‘Well, is it true?’

‘I suppose. She doesn’t exactly offer any resistance.’

‘I gather she was very provocative in Italy.’

‘Really?’

‘Liz says she spent the entire time parading round the bedroom half-naked. I’d call that provocative. You know, Mark, what you need is a damn good poke!’

I shouldn’t have been shocked. While the nation was throwing up its hands in horror at the appearance of The Little Red School Book and its permissive morality and disregard for authority, Mum was out buying us all a copy – though she rather spoilt the gesture by adding her own editorial. In my annotated edition, the first sentence ‘All parents arc paper tigers’ now read ‘Some parents are paper tigers.’ It sat on my bookshelf alongside The Communist Manifesto, Das Kapital and a host of other tracts and pamphlets the Soviet regime’s heavy subsidy afforded to my pocket money. The Guardian published my letters extolling the virtues of the egalitarian comprehensive school system I was part of over the iniquitous, class-perpetuating private one I’d left, and I started producing The Marksist, a socialist monthly distributed round the family which included a news section with headlines like ‘Dustmen’s pay to rise above that of solicitors’ in order to irritate my grandmother. I joined the Young Communist League, the youth wing of the Communist Party and the even more hardline International Marxist Group, but this was spiked when a representative turned up at Holland Park Avenue wishing to speak to Comrade Mark Glanville. Peering round the staircase, intrigued to see who had called so late I heard Dad inform my fellow traveller ‘he’s our son and he’s in bed.’ I forgave him not long after when it was discovered that the IMG had helped the IRA to set up a bomb factory in Kilburn. In Man: A Critical Analysis, a book whose title was as modest as its ambition, I attempted nothing less than an explanation of the origins of culture, religion and civilisation using sources as diverse as Schopenhauer, Freud, Marx, Wittgenstein, Melanie Klein, the Koran, Nietzsche and A.J. Ayer. Unable to live and play out in the world as I would like to have done, I internalised it, picked at it and analysed it with the blunted tools of ill-formed ideas.

‘What’s ’at you got in yer bag?’ asked a classmate one day as I surreptitiously slipped a copy of Korstner’s Kant into my briefcase during a science lesson.

‘Kant.’

‘Wor, Cunt! Let’s ’ave a look!’

It was probably exactly what I should have been reading instead.

On my first outing with the Cockney Reds I was caught in no man’s land. Struggling to lever myself out of the quagmire of pseudo-accademia, I turned up in a very unstreetwise brown velvet jacket, perfect for browsing in antiquarian bookshops, inappropriate on a train carrying one of the country’s most feared crews of violent football hooligans. Their recent trip to Cardiff, with the most vicious fighting seen at a football match in years, had alerted the media, and the platform at Liverpool Street looked like a film set as the full armoury of BBC outside broadcasting descended.

Norwich was an all-ticket affair, and we didn’t have the numbers to justify a special train, instead making do with four reserved carriages. Farmers and gentry quivered or bristled as chants of ‘We have fits of mental violence’ and ‘Psycho aggro’ rent the air. At last I was among the tribe of scarred, tattooed faces that had so long fascinated me. Finding a space, I was joined by two skinheads and their greasy-haired, pockmarked companion who clambered into the empty seats around me, pushing aside my legs as they did so. I smiled at the one with the hair. He glared back.

‘You Uni’ed?’

‘’Course.’

‘’Cos this is a Uni’ed carriage.’

He looked at me in disgust, the way other passengers had been looking at them.

‘Wha’s that you go’ in yer bag?’

‘Sandwiches.’

‘Gi’ ’s one!’

I hauled my plastic bag onto the table, but before I could open it they’d grabbed it and were delving in, pulling out Mum’s carefully-wrapped packed lunch, and attacking the contents in a way that made Dad look like a finishing-school graduate.

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