It would be quite wrong to imagine that I played these two fascinating young men against each other. I wouldn’t have known how.
I was used to being thought of as clever, but I cheerfully passed the brainy laurels over to Jimmy, as long as he let me talk to him, which he seemed happy to do. His accent took a little getting used to. It was some time before I realised that it was genteel Boston trying to sound Southern. Jimmy wanted to be an actor, and it didn’t seem an impossible dream, compared to many on the premises. He jigged in rhythm while he spoke. The tremors in his hands could be built into dramatic gestures. It didn’t seem out of the question that he might act a part in a play without breaking character.
On stage he might be able to gain a greater mastery of his physical instrument, as long as he didn’t get too tired. He was confident of success, saying that actors didn’t need to use their own energy. That was what the audience was there for — as an energy source. It was only rehearsals that he would need to worry about, in terms of draining his batteries. Performance would replenish them.
Somehow he made it possible to imagine him appearing in a play which required him to come down a grand staircase in evening dress, carrying a brimming glass, and not spilling a drop.
Jimmy Kettle had one absolute obsession, deserving the solemn label of monomania. He wanted to do everything like Ten. Everything came back to that. He wanted to drink like Ten, he wanted to smoke like Ten, he wanted to make love like Ten. He mentioned Ten not ten times a day but ten times a minute. He worshipped Ten.
Ten was Tennessee Williams. Hence the over-lay of Southern accent. Ten, rather than Tenn, because that was how highly he scored with Jimmy. In fact he wrote it down in numeral form, as 10. Ten out of ten.
There were no obstacles in the way of his drinking and smoking like 10, since his mobility and his funds were both more or less unlimited. The grounds of Vulcan were large, and it wasn’t as if a posse was despatched every time he missed a class. He was allowed to go his own way. If anyone objected to his conscientious programme of dissolution, they would be likely to find the co-principals’ hearing, normally so sharp, blocked with earmuffs paid for by Mrs Kettle’s very welcome cheques.
The cutest scrunched-up face
Making love like 10 wasn’t quite so straightforward a prospect as the drinking and smoking. Jimmy’s own tastes were conventional, though hardly late-blooming. He offered to take me to Paris, and to let me have a turn with his favourite companion. ‘Her name is Minouche,’ he said, ‘and she’s got the cutest scrunched-up face. And don’t worry, you won’t have to pay. It’ll be my treat.’
When I said I didn’t care for girls in that way he seemed delighted, saying, ‘I’ll take you where the queers go if you like. You’ve no idea what goes on in the Place Pigalle.’ In fact he regarded his own sexual conformity as the greatest obstacle in the path of what he most wanted, close friendship with 10 himself.
Though one hundred per cent heterosexual, he would make an exception for Tennessee Williams, and wouldn’t make a fuss about it. ‘If 10 wanted to sleep with me, I’d do it like a shot. It would be the least I could do,’ Genius had its privileges, after all, and so does charm, which was just a part of what Jimmy had.
He kept issuing invitations to Paris, saying, ‘Ma Kettle would be sure to make you welcome.’ It pleased him to refer to his glamorous mother invariably as ‘Ma Kettle’, as if she was a hillbilly chewing black-eyed peas on a porch somewhere, her quid of chewing tobacco parked during the interruption of the meal in the lap of a dress that had once been a potato sack.
After learning that I wasn’t a potential customer for Minouche, Jimmy lent me a book of stories by 10 called Three Players of a Summer Game, which he said was far ‘fruitier’ than anything 10 could get away with on stage in our retarded little country (no offence). The Darling Buds of May was already quite a step up for me, and I struggled with 10’s book, though I could dimly see that there was a vitality in it not altogether different from what H. E. Bates admired in his Larkins, though turned to different ends — less likely to produce a family of six. Jimmy took pity on me and would drop quotations from 10 into our conversations. He set out to shape my mind, in a way that no teacher had really bothered to do.
Jimmy read to me from his favourite stories in the book I was so slow to read. He conducted the reading with broad hand gestures which somehow damped down the involuntary movements in his arms. I remember in particular him declaiming, ‘He is a drinker who has not yet completely fallen beneath the savage axe blows of his liquor,’ and, with an almost Shakespearean grandeur, ‘the dark and wondering stuff beneath the dome of calcium …’
We wept together over ‘One Arm’ — Jimmy’s tears the more surprising since he knew the story so well. In another story, a man and a woman take to going to depraved bars together — although they’re both interested in men. It’s just that they’re both more likely to be successful if they work as a team. The man calls what they’re looking for ‘the lyric quarry’.
Later, on a cross-country holiday, they make a detour to a place called Corpus Christi ‘to investigate the fact or fancy of those legendary seven connecting glory-holes in a certain tea-room there’ (it turned out to be fancy or could not be located). Jimmy explained that a tea-room was a public lavatory, and a glory-hole was a hole made in a cubicle through which a man might push his parts if he so cared, leaving the rest of himself unseen.
I was amazed. I rocked back on my heels. I’d never heard of anything so sporting in my entire life! Such an arrangement would have made it so straightforward for me to satisfy my curiosity about the male equipment, quite without embarrassment since I couldn’t be seen. After all this time, I had glimpsed one set of parts briefly in a shower, and touched two others very fleetingly — Julian’s in flicker-book fragments, and Luke’s when he had pressed my hand to his over-heated groin. On that second occasion I had been naïve enough to concentrate my attention on thermal output rather than anatomical glory. It’s true that Luke’s groin seemed to generate heat in the same way that Jim Shaeffer’s luminous watch radiated light before its re-painting.
‘But Jimmy,’ I said, ‘this is an unbelievably filthy book. Where did you buy it? Who would publish such a thing?’
Jimmy thought for a moment. ‘I bought it in a London bookstore — near Soho, now you mention it. Called Hatchards.’ He riffled through the early pages of the book. ‘And it’s published by a smutty crew who go by “Secker & Warburg”, of 7 John Street, WC1. Soho again, I guess.’
I had heard of Secker & Warburg and had considered them respectable. It seemed most likely that there had been no one in the office to tell them the meaning of ‘tea-room’ or the real source of the glory in a glory-hole.
We wanted to set up a croquet lawn at Vulcan in 10’s honour (croquet being the ‘summer game’ of his title). The authorities weren’t convinced. I don’t know how seriously the co-principals considered our suggestion. The grounds of the school were extensive, but level terrain was at a premium. The co-principals may have decided that suave control of a mallet was beyond all but a handful of the boys, or they may have spotted right away that this was closer to a literary allusion than a real plea for sporting facilities.