Up north, where they were evidently more enlightened, junior-school children were allowed, indeed encouraged, to smoke in class. This was no doubt to prepare them for life down the pit, as in those days all men who lived north of the Wash worked in the coal mines. But in London, where I grew up, and in Brentford, where I went to school, you were not allowed to smoke in the classroom until after you’d passed your eleven plus and gone on to the Grammar.
So we did as all children did, and smoked in the toilets at playtime. The toilets were all equipped with fitted ashtrays next to the bog-roll holders and once a day the ashtray monitor would go around and empty them. Ashtray monitor was one of the better monitoring jobs, as you could often collect up a good number of half-smoked cigarettes, crushed out hastily when the bell rang to end playtime, but still with a few fine puffs left in them.
There were monitors for everything back then. A milk monitor; a chalk monitor; an ink monitor; a window monitor, who got to use the big pole with the hook on the end; a monitor to give out the school books and another to collect them up again. There was the car monitor who cleaned the headmistress’s Morris Minor; the shoe monitor who attended to the polishing of the teachers’ footwear; and of course the special monitor who catered to the needs of the male teachers who favoured underage sex.
I was a window monitor myself, and if I had a pound now for every pane of glass I accidentally knocked out then and every caning I received in consequence, I would have enough money to employ a special monitor of my own to lessen the misery of my declining years.
But sadly I do not.
However, what I do have is a photographic memory whose film remains unfogged and it is with the aid of this that I shall endeavour to set down an accurate record of the way things were then. Of the folk that I knew, who would later play their parts in the misshaping of history. Good folk and bad, famous and not so. And of one in particular, whose unique talents, remarkable achievements and flamboyant lifestyle are now the stuff of legend. A man who has brought joy into the lives of millions with his nonpareil nose powder.
He is known today by many appellations. The tender blender with the blinder grinder. The master blaster with the louder powder. And the geezer with the sneezer that’s a real crowd pleaser. And so on and so forth and suchlike.
Most will know him simply as the Sultan of Snuff
I speak, of course, of Mr Doveston.
Those readers old enough to remember daily newspapers will recall with fondness the ‘gutter press’. Tabloids, as were. These journals specialized in documenting the lives of the rich and famous. And during the final years of the twentieth century the name of Mr Doveston was often to be found writ in letters big and bold across their front pages.
He was both praised and demonized. His exploits were marvelled at, then damned to Hell. Saint, they said, then sinner. Guru, then Godless git. Many of the tales told about him were indeed true. He did have a passion for dynamite — the ‘Big Aaah-choo!’ as he called it. I can personally vouch for the authenticity of the infamous episode of the detonating dog. I witnessed it with my own two eyes. And I got a lot ofit on me!
But that it was he who talked the late Pope into the canonization of Diana, Princess of Wales, is incorrect. The worship of Diana, Di-anity as it is now known, did not become a major world religion until after the Great Computer Crash. By which time Mr Doveston had fallen out with the ailing pontiff after an argument over which of them possessed the larger collection of erotically decorated Chinese snuff bottles.
The task I have set myself here is to tell the real story. Give the facts and hold not back upon the guts and gore. There is love and joy and there is sorrow. There is madness, there is mayhem, there is magic, there is mystery.
There is snuff.
And where there’s snuff, there’s snot, the saying goes, and you shall have it all.
But let me explain from the outset that this is no ordinary biography. This book contains a series of personal recollections. I write only of the times that I spent with the Doveston.
I write of our childhood years together and of the meetings with his ‘uncles’. Meetings that would shape our years ahead.
I write of the now legendary Puberty Party, of Brentstock, of the days at Castle Doveston and of the Great Millennial Ball. And I write, as I alone can, of his terrible end.
I can do no more than this.
And so, with that said, and well said too, let us begin our tale. The year is 1958, the month is good old flaming June. The sunlight falls through those high classroom windows, lighting up the head of Mr Vaux who’s lighting up a fag. Outside, in the corridor, Blot looms above a startled child and sniffs and then is gone. And coming now across the quad, with shuffling gait, is a ragged lad, gum-chewing, with a whistle and a grin. His hair is tousled and nitty, and he does not wear his tie. His grubby hands are in his grubby pockets.
Can this urchin really be the boy who later, as the man, will make so great a mark upon this world of ours?
It can.
Our tale begins.
2
At bull-baiting, bear-whipping and everywhere else, the English are constantly smoking the Nicotian weed, which in America is called ‘tobaco’.
The boy Doveston shuffled across the quadrangle. It was a definite shuffle he had, as opposed to, say, a waddle or a totter. There was the hint of a slouch to his gait and more than a little of the plod. There was trudge in it too, as a matter of fact, and a smidgen of amble as well.
But let it be set clear upon the record and right from the very start, there was no trace of sidle in that walk. And had he chosen, for reasons of his own, to increase the speed of his perambulation, there would have been no swagger, strut, or goose-step.
The boy Doveston moved with the honest and unprepossessing shuffle of the poor. Because he was poor, as indeed were we all.
That our school should be called the Grange was not without irony. For although the title conjures up an image of some well-bricked seat of learning, ivy-walled and gravelly drived, this was not the case. The Grange was your bog-standard Edwardian day school, built by the burghers of Brentford to educate the sons of the poor.
Not educate them too much, of course, but just enough. Sufficient that they could spell their names and count their wages and learn to call their betters, sir.
And so it had for fifty years.
And done so rather well.
The boy Doveston had not been taught to shuffle. It came naturally to him. It was in his genes. Generations of Dovestons had shuffled on before him: few to glory and all to a pauper’s grave. And while we did not suffer the wretched privations of our Irish counterparts, who plodded barefoot to school with a clod of turf under each arm and a potato clenched between their bottom cheeks, we were poor enough.
We suffered all the usual maladies of the impoverished: rickets, ringworm, scrofiila and mange. As a typical child, the boy Doveston played host to a wide variety of vermin, from the aforementioned nits, to body lice, gut worm, trouser roach and plimsoll maggot. Blowflies feasted on the juices of his eyes and aphids dined upon his ear wax.
But this was the way of it. We knew no different. We were unconcerned and we were happy. The boy Doveston was happy. He grinned and he whistled — a popular tune of the day, breathed out in unrecognizable fragments, for it is almost impossible to grin and whistle at the same time.