The Blue Touch Paper by David Hare Read Free Book Online

forward and pulling the towel off some tiny boy after a shower. For this he was quickly dismissed. To call such tortured and impossibly unhappy souls paedophiles is to make them sound predatory. At the time, they just felt like landmines you must step around.
    John G____ was everything schoolboys most enjoy – wild, unpredictable and easy to imitate. His shockingly bad teeth were stained deep brown by the constant cigarettes which left strands of tobacco on his lips. He loved telling our class, presumably following Jean Brodie, that Form 2A were special, and that he expected us therefore to behave as if we knew it. He drove up each morning in a green pre-war Austin 7 with ill-fitting plastic windows, and then, thick shock of curly hair to the fore, he swept past the eager young art mistress, Yvonne Soundy, and the sweet young matron, Miss Homer, who both coloured at his very presence, before he presented himself to us in a force field of unprompted quotations from Dylan Thomas.It was therefore an astonishment to me, when, out of the blue, one of my regular French essays was returned with a single word written at the bottom next to the mark, nine out of ten. The word – in red ink, I can see it clearly – was ‘ Mignon ’. It had then been crossed out, but lightly, so that it was still visible. Since I had no idea what this judgement meant, I had to go home to consult a dictionary. I remember when I first saw the translation I thought there had been some mistake. But no, there it was. I looked several times. ‘ Mignon ’. ‘Darling’.
    I had a feeling akin to stepping into a lift shaft. I felt myself travelling to the heart of childhood. Looking at the word ‘ Mignon ’ and at the scratching-out confirmed what I had always suspected. Irrational, adults were in the grip of strong and uncontrollable feelings which, under impossible pressure, might occasionally erupt and which mere children could not hope either to foresee or to understand. Me? He thought me ‘ Mignon ’? Or was it just my French? I had been at Harewood for a couple of years, I was probably eleven. I did not mention the exercise book and nor did he. But soon after, Mr G____ was ill, with nothing more serious than bronchitis. The message came that he would like a sickbed visit. His younger brother led me up to his bedroom, in a large Victorian house in Bexhill Old Town. John was lying in pyjamas in the bed, reading the paper, and with a big circular tin of fifty Players untipped cigarettes within easy reach. He hugged me at once, drawing me to him. He hugged me harder than anyone had hugged me in my life. He told me how much it meant to him that I had come to see him. But, at some deeper level, I felt completely safe. This man needed me. He had profound emotional needs which were very important to him. But even then I felt a flood of relief when I sensed that these needs were not going to be overtly sexual.
    We began a programme of cultural education. I had already acquired a strong taste for the cinema, lapping up with delight all the mythologising films which insisted the British had fought the Second World War with unfailing grit and courage. There was a great deal of bobbing about in small boats full of actors with boot black on their faces and woollen hats pulled over their brows. The murky tanks at Shepperton were built for heroes. I identified more strongly with the impossibly glamorous Dirk Bogarde as the medical student Simon Sparrow in the Doctor . . . films, sweeping round the wards of grateful patients and getting to kiss nurses. But Mr G____ started taking me, after school, to a far more diverse programme of concerts, films and plays.
    At the time there was a repertory company permanently resident at the De La Warr Pavilion, a badly maintained modernist building designed in 1935 by Serge Chermayeff and Erich Mendelsohn, the latter a Jewish refugee from Nazism who had been taken up by the English