I can’t believe Alan is dead.
I want to write about him but I don’t know where to start. I’ve read some of Alan’s obituaries in the newspapers and they don’t even come close. Oh yes, they know when he was born, what books he wrote, what prizes he won. They’ve said some very nice things about him. But they haven’t managed to capture Alan at all and I’m frankly surprised that not one of those journalists telephoned me because I could have given them a much better idea of the sort of man he was, starting with the fact (as I told you) that he would never have killed himself. If Alan was one thing, it was a survivor. We both were. He and I were always close, even if we did disagree from time to time, and if his illness really had driven him to despair, I know he would have called me before he did anything foolish.
He did not jump off that tower. He was pushed. How can I be so sure? You need to understand where we had come from, how far we had both travelled. He would never have left me on my own, not without warning me first.
Let me go back right back to the beginning.
Alan and I were brought up in a place called Chorley Hall, just outside the Hertfordshire town of St Albans. Chorley Hall was a preparatory school for boys and our father, Elias Conway, was the headmaster. Our mother also worked at the school. She had a full-time job as the headmaster’s wife, dealing with parents and helping the matron when the children fell sick, although she often complained that she was never actually paid.
It was a horrible place. My father was a horrible man. They were well suited. He had come to the school as a maths teacher and as far as I know he had always worked in the private sector, perhaps because, back then, they weren’t too fussy about the sort of people they employed. That may sound a terrible thing to say about your own father, but it’s the truth. I’m glad I wasn’t taught there. I went to a day school for girls in St Albans – but Alan was stuck with it.
The school looked like one of those haunted houses you get in a Victorian novel, perhaps something by Wilkie Collins. Although it was only thirty minutes from St Albans it was at the end of a long, private drive, surrounded by woodland and felt as if it was in the middle of nowhere. It was a long, institutional sort of building with narrow corridors, stone floors and walls half-covered in dark-coloured tiles. Every room had huge radiators but they were never turned on because it was part of the school’s ethos that biting cold, hard beds and disgusting food are character-forming. There were a few modern additions. The science block had been added at the end of the fifties and the school had raised money to build a new gymnasium, which also doubled as a theatre and an assembly hall. Everything was brown or grey. There was hardly any colour at all. Even in the summer, the trees kept out a lot of the sunshine and the water in the school swimming pool – it was a brackish green – never rose above fifty degrees.
It was a boarding school with one hundred and sixty boys aged from eight to thirteen. They were housed in dormitories with between six and twelve beds. I used to walk through them sometimes and I can still remember that strange, musty and slightly acrid smell of so many little boys. Children were allowed to bring a rug and a teddy bear from home but otherwise they had few personal possessions. The school uniform was quite nasty: grey shorts and very dark red V-neck jerseys. Each bed had a cupboard beside it and if they didn’t hang their clothes up properly they would be taken out and caned.
Alan wasn’t in a dormitory. He and I lived with our parents in a sort of flat that was folded into the school, spread over the second and third floor. Our bedrooms were next to each other and I remember that we used to tap out coded messages to each other on the dividing wall. I always liked hearing the first knocks coming quick and slow just after mother had turned out the lights, even though I didn’t ever really know what he meant. Life was very difficult for Alan; perhaps our father wanted it to be. By day he was part of the school, treated exactly the same as the other boys. But he wasn’t exactly a boarder because at night he was at home with us. The result of this was that he never fitted into either world and, of course, being the son of the headmaster he was a target from the day he arrived. He had very few friends and as a result he became solitary and introspective. He loved reading. I can still see him, aged nine, in short trousers, sitting with a large volume of something in his lap. He was a very small boy so the books, particularly the old-fashioned ones, often looked curiously oversized. He would read whenever he could, often late into the night, using a torch hidden under the covers.
We were both afraid of our father. He was not what you would call a physically powerful man. He was old before his time with curly hair that had gone white and which had thinned out to allow his skull to show through. He wore glasses. But there was something about his manner that transformed him into something quite monstrous, at least to his children. He had the angry, almost fanatical eyes of someone who knew they were always right and when he was making a point, he had a habit of jabbing a single finger in your face as if daring you to disagree. That was something we never did. He could be viciously sarcastic, putting you in your place with a sneer and a whole tirade of insults that searched out your weaker points and hammered them home. I won’t tell you how many times he humiliated me and made me feel bad about myself. But what he did to Alan was worse.