Every boy longs to see his school burn down and for me the dream came true twice. In February 1977, I was walking to Sunday Mass when I spotted a cluster of teachers at the school gates. The old Victorian hall had caught fire overnight and collapsed. I couldn’t believe it. This was my personal Towering Inferno and I’d missed the whole thing. In my mind’s eye I could see it all: the leaping flames, the burning joists, the black columns of ash rising over south London, and the thunderous roar as the roof crashed to the ground.
Nothing was left but a few pathetic wisps of smoke rising from a pile of charred beams. The teachers were standing around looking shocked and miserable – as if mourning the death of a pet rabbit. Why so glum? The school had to close for a few days while the governors worked out how to run the place without an assembly hall or a dining area.
The funereal posturings of the staff convinced me that teachers were a tribe of alien control-freaks who took no delight in ordinary human pleasures. But I kept my rancour to myself. Officially, I was a model pupil. I liked sitting in class and reading about Greek mythology and the structure of molecules and the demise of the Holy Roman Empire. I enjoyed the intellectual puzzles set for us by the priests and their colleagues. But privately I resented the school and regarded it as a prison. I was forced to show up there each day by the adults whose authority I lacked the means to defy. Any assault on the fabric of the school brought me closer to freedom.
There was no rush to replace the hall. This was the 1970s and most people in -Britain expected to be atomised by nuclear missiles at any moment so it seemed eccentric to rebuild a school in the middle of a Soviet target zone. But the authorities eventually commissioned an architect who specialised in cheap materials, banal colour schemes and ugly orthopaedic angles.
He lacked any aesthetic sense. Perhaps he lacked eyesight too. The squat red-brick structure he created, with its oblong windows and grey metal roof, looked like a safety deposit box. The building work dragged on for nearly two years and the debris of the old hall lay undisturbed beside the main entrance. The rotting timbers reeked like smoked herring and the stench worked its way into the classrooms. It enveloped your clothes and shoved its fingers down your throat. Everyone smelled like an old fish shop.
On the last day of term in 1980, I was idling in the sixth-form library when a new fire broke out. A set of four classrooms beside the gym went up in flames. I raced down the stairs and joined a throng of boys surging out of the playground to watch the drama. The blaze was magnificent and unstoppably powerful. A spiralling sheet of flame swept across the doomed structures. The timbers howled as they burned. I could feel the dangerous heat on my cheeks. No work of art could ever match the raging beauty of the destructive monster. This was nature. This was the universal force asserting itself over the pipsqueak schemes of man. And it was pure entertainment without any physical risk or moral component.
Every boy longs to see his school burn down and for me the dream came true twice
The young arsonist had struck at lunchtime when the classrooms stood empty and no lives were in jeopardy. The head prefect arrived with his minions and started bossing everyone around. ‘Get back,’ he yelled. ‘All of you. Move away from the fire.’ His orders were ignored. He called on me to support his sad attempt to deprive the younger boys of their fun. And I obeyed, in a way. I moved among the crowd and called out helpfully: ‘Please don’t stare at the burning classrooms. Wimbledon College is on fire. But gloating and celebrations are forbidden. Avert your gaze from this distressing sight and return to your harmless pleasures in the playground.’
When the fire engines arrived, the uniformed men in their bulky tunics shooed us all away. The arsonist had scored a notable triumph. Four classrooms and 200 desks and chairs had been reduced to cold grey ashes. I saw the fire as a personal vindication. The gulag had risen up against the regime and shown that we too had a measure of power. The identity of the arsonist, known to everyone in the school, never reached the authorities. That made me proud.
Later that autumn, the new hall was unveiled. By this time I was in the upper-sixth and I’d joined the school magazine’s editorial team. A front cover was needed. I suggested a night-time shoot featuring all the co-editors emptying jerry cans of petrol over the horrible new hall. My plan was to ask Felipe, the Portuguese janitor, to pose centre-stage with a lighted taper.
The editors liked this mischievous idea. The authorities didn’t. They asked for an alternative. So we set up a stunt at Wimbledon station and photographed a pair of homeless buskers (played by Vince Brooks and me) being hauled off the concourse by a uniformed inspector. It was lame compared with my original plan. So I lost. And the nasty hall is still there. For now.
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