Free Life by Keith Richards, James Fox (Contributor) Page A

public school (that's what they call private schools in England). The prefects had little gold tassels on their caps; there was East House and West House. It was trying to recapture a lost world, as if the war hadn't happened, of cricket, cups and prizes, schoolboy glory. All of the masters were totally substandard, but they were still aiming for this ideal as if it were Eton or Winchester, as if it were the '20s or the '30s or even the 1890s. In the midst of this there was, in my middle years there, soon after the catastrophe, a period of anarchy that seemed to go on for a very long time--a prolonged period of chaos. Maybe it was just one term in which, for whatever reason, these mad mass bundles would go on in the playing fields. There were about three hundred of us, everybody leaping around. It is strange, thinking back, that nobody stopped us. There were probably just too many of us running about. And nobody got hurt. But it allowed a certain degree of anarchy to the point that when the head prefect did come along and try to stop us one day, he was set upon and lynched. He was one of those perennial martinets, captain of sport, head of school, the most brilliant at all things. He swung his weight around, he would be really officious to the younger kids, and we decided to give him a taste. His name was Swanton --I remember him well. And it was raining, very nasty weather, and we stripped him and then chased him until he climbed a tree. We left him with his hat with the little gold tassels, that's all he had left on. Swanton came down from the tree and rose to become a professor of medieval studies at the University of Exeter and wrote a key work called English Poetry Before Chaucer .
    Of all the schoolmasters, the one sympathetic one, who didn't bark out orders, was the religious instruction teacher, Mr. Edgington. He used to wear a powder blue suit with cum stains down the leg. Mr. Edgington, the wanker. Religious instruction, forty-five minutes, "Let's turn to Luke." And we were saying, either he's pissed himself or he's just been round the back shagging Mrs. Mountjoy, who was the art mistress.
    I had adopted a criminal mind, anything to fuck them up. We won cross-country three times but we never ran it. We'd start off, go and have a smoke for an hour or so and then chip in towards the end. And the third or fourth time, they got wise and put monitors down the whole trail, and we weren't spotted along the other seven miles. He has maintained a low standard was the six-word summary of my 1959 school report, suggesting, correctly, that I had put some effort into the enterprise.
    I was taking in a lot of music then, without really knowing it. England was often under fog, but there was a fog of words that settled between people too. One didn't show emotions. One didn't actually talk much at all. The talk was all around things, codes and euphemisms; some things couldn't be said or even alluded to. It was a residue of the Victorians and all brilliantly portrayed in those black-and-white movies of the early '60s-- Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, This Sporting Life . And life was black-and-white; the Technicolor was just around the corner, but it wasn't there yet in 1959. People really do want to touch each other, to the heart. That's why you have music. If you can't say it, sing it. Listen to the songs of the period. Heavily pointed and romantic, and trying to say things that they couldn't say in prose or even on paper. Weather's fine, 7:30 p.m., wind has died down, P.S. I love you.
    Doris was different--she was musical, like Gus. At three or four or five years old, at the end of the war, I was listening to Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Big Bill Broonzy, Louis Armstrong. It just spoke to me, it was what I listened to every day because my mum played it. My ears would have gone there anyway, but my mum trained them to go to the black side of town without her even knowing it. I didn't know whether the singers were white, black