Coasting Read Free

Public School system in person, the Dunkirk Spirit in person, Manliness, Discipline, Duty, Self-sacrifice and all the rest. His threadbare cassock clothed the whole galaxy of terrible abstractions.
    Seeing him now through different eyes, I find myself watching a sorrowful lean and angular young man, hopelessly lost for words. He coughs. He reaches for a brass ashtray made from the base of an old artillery shell and knocks out his dottle in it. He makes a busy show of burying my school report under a bill from the gas company and an overdraft notice from Lloyds Bank. He searches the face of his child for a clue as to how to go on, and finds there only a vacant, resentful, supercilious gaze—a mask more impenetrable than the mask he presents to his son.
    The child is blind to all this. He’s putting the finishing touches to his Bored Aristocrat face. His eyeballs are rolled so high that he can’t see anything much except his own eyelashes. He is levitating. Inch by inch he rises Above This World, leaving his father down at the breakfast table with the smashed eggs. He is afloat over England. Airborne.
    The young man pretends to study the columns of advertisements on the front page of
The Times
. Eventually he says: “D’you think—old boy—that there’s any way we can do something about this business of—Geography?”
    The astral child replies (in a fine and withering phrase that he’s filched from the lips of his housemaster, Major MacTurk): “I don’t know and I couldn’t care less.”
    This was very barefaced stuff. I cared. Had I seen any way of worming my way into my father’s exacting version of England, I’d have leaped at it. Give me only the legs for the job and I’d score the winning try in the house match and bring home the family bacon. I’d furnish the parsonage with prizes—the Latin prize, the Greek prize, the Colonel’s Efficiency Shield and the leather-bound set of Macaulay awarded annually for Outstanding Contribution To The Life Of The School.
    Every morning in chapel I stood singing manly hymns:
    “I bind unto myself today the strong name of the Trin-i-tee—”
    Overhead were the richly scrolled and varnished pine boards emblazoned with the names of boys from the school who had attained the ultimate in English citizenship. D ULCE ET D ECORUM E ST PRO P ATRIA M ORI . There were hundreds of them, every name picked out in scarlet edged with gold, with their houses and the dates at which they’d attended the school. In the 1914–18 war, the Old Boys had done the school proud, dying in whole dormitoryfuls; in 1939–45 there were enough to man a platoon-and-a-bit or put on a Shakespeare play.
    For a would-be Englishman, there was clearly some sort of opening here. Some of these certificated heroes had probably been as dim as I was, yet they had still managed to go over the top, buy it, or meet a bullet with their name on it—expressions which, in 1955, didn’t yet sound dated in the least. But did L AYCOCK , R. W. P. (S CHOOL H OUSE 1938–1943) have asthma, hay fever and flat feet too? I bet he didn’t. The chances were that the Army wouldn’t want my services at all—and if it did, I’d probably land up as a lance-corporal in the Pioneer Corps, digging latrines in Wales.
    So I looked at my father with his campaign ribbons, his priestly vocation, his pipe, his English reticence, and knew I’d never make the grade. Maybe there was some run-down South American republic where I might have passed myself off as an averagely respectable type, but it wouldn’t wash in England—at least, not in the dutiful, constrained, genteel 1950s England that I knew. The schoolmasters were unarguably right when they dismissed me as a hopeless coaster.
    The dictionary does the word proud. To coast is to proceed without great effort, to move by momentum or force of gravity, to march on the flank of, to skirt, to sail from port to port of the same country, to explore or scour, to bicycle downhill without