At school, Jack always hung out with the losers stunting their growth with stubby little fags in hidden, smelly corners- the bogs, the CCF wood, behind the cricket pavilion – with weirdo Reid, who was obsessed with Bowie and 2001 and called his dad the Claw, Theodoulou, whose dad had no legs but who cultivated his athlete’s foot just to scratch it and Hiscock, the disturbed scion of a sergeant major, who asked - why don’t they teach us how to learn?
The teachers were all male cartoon figures of fun demobbed from National Service - Fruitbat, Chippy, Tug, Og and Wiggy - English, Woodwork, Art, Maths and Latin.
Then a new English teacher Ms. Bakewell appeared like a dark angel from another planet. Actually she came from Cheltenham lady’s college, where, tired of dealing with spoilt, over-bearing blue stockings, she’d fancied roughing it a bit up North with the lads for a change and spreading the word of her cantankerous guru Frank Looseleaf, under whose zealous influence she had fallen as an undergrad at Bristol, where he was visiting professor.
She was Chanel thin with long, straight, shiny black hair parted in the middle to reveal a long, pale, acne scarred face, retroussé nose and deep red lipstick. She wore high leather boots, green tights and slim fitting roll neck jerseys, smoked Dunhill Kingsize with a gold band and spoke with an imperious, cutglass voice.
Jack was intimidated at first but she seemed to take a shine to him and encouraged him to vent his inherited maternal spleen in fiercely critical essays on writers she didn’t like – which meant most of them. Jack found this escape valve for his adolescent outsider ennui therapeutic and to his and everyone else’s surprise, began to moderate his rebellious northern brogue with southern inflections and became her pet.
Once hooked, she coddled and groomed him away from his loser friends and family toward Looseleaf illusions of enlightenment and choice culture down the local pub on first-name terms over beer and Dunhills and then announced that he should apply for a place at Cambridge (where her brother Chris happened to be an active fellow Looseleafer) to the dismay of the rest of the school, which had branded Jack as an also-ran. This was his mother’s dream and Jack had often fixed on the board in the neo-gothic Assembly Hall (which he avoided attending as much as possible by arriving on the late bus in the morning) that listed the illustrious Oxbridge entrants in hand painted gold signwriting. Now he’d show em. So he stayed for an extra term at school, where he now came and went as he pleased, sat his entrance exams, failed his driving test, dressed dandily in fairisle and tweed and went to work as a teaboy at the local newspaper office where sub-eds Gus and Brian were the resident wits. Gus dubbed him (Nigel) Dempster and mocked him warmly. Tea was brewed every hour or so and at ten-thirty he would go down through the hot metal typesetting room and past the presses into the street to Anne’s Pantry (which Gus and Brian dubbed Anne’s panties) to order delicious homemade steak and kidney pies and sausage and bacon sandwiches with brown sauce for breakfast, which he would then distribute in the office in brown paper bags to accompany the freshly brewed tea to everyone’s delight.
He brought them fags too – 20 Benson’s for Gus and 40 senior service untipped for Brian - to get them through the long day’s travails. While he waited for the order, he would often pop into the nearby Oxfam shop to look for natty threads at knockdown prices. One day there was an orange striped Penguin copy of Lady Chatterly’s Lover displayed prominently in the window. He bought it for a song, to the consternation of the scandalized biddies in the shop, who obviously saw him as underage.
There were two other elderly tea wallahs, so Jacks’ job wasn’t too arduous and he even found himself getting a little bored sometimes. The journos’ watering hole was the cellar bar at the oh so boho Bistro French in the Victorian Miller Arcade – a steel structured New York style tribute to the Burlington Arcade in Piccadilly, originally built as a Turkish bath house by an inspired dentist. It was quite an anomaly for Preston, where the only concession to exotic food and fun was the Bombay curry house, where one generally went after ten pints of Boddingtons apparently.
The French had over a hundred liqueurs lined up on the shelves, so Gus and Brian organized a sponsored marathon to drink a shot of each in one session and, to Jack’s surprise, lived to tell the tale. On Fridays they would take him there for drinks after work – you coming for a drink Dempster? and here he had his first romance with the gorgeous green-eyed Pam, the daughter of the women’s page editor Muriel Kelt. He first saw her in the office when she dropped in to visit her mum one day. She was cheerful and confident and Jack was taken with her blond bob, green eyes, and golden-tanned shoulders revealed by a low-cut sleeveless white tee shirt. Pam was a year or so older than Jack and was in her first year at Manchester Uni studying philosophy or something. The romance blossomed sitting on the chest freezer downstairs at the Bistro, where everyone seemed to approve of it and at closing time she would drive him back to her mum’s cottage in the lower Pennines in her green, convertible Morris, where they would spend the weekend in bed mostly. Life was his fin de clair. Then he got the casual call from Chris telling him he’d been accepted. Weheey! They hadn’t even interviewed him. His parents were delighted – this was something to boast about down the Hoppers (the rugby club where his dad was an oft-ridiculed zealot) at last.
Perhaps out of modesty or hubris, he didn’t tell Pam but she soon found out and warmly congratulated him, although she was hurt he hadn’t told her and could see the relationship was over as Jack rehearsed his on-the-road Grand Tour gap yah with his new tent in the front garden.