Outtake

Autobiography (2000)

The descendant of sailors, priests and servants of Empire, I was born in Tunbridge Wells, England, in 1956. English blood, a bit of Welsh, a trickle of French, and who knows what else? The month of my birth was November. I am a Scorpio, with Scorpio ascendant. Actually, the only Zodiac I believe in is a club on the Cowley Road - but such sceptical nonsense is typical of Scorpios.

Arnold Christian Pears, centre back, (1811-1891, paternal great great grandfather, Inspector of Schools, Madras Presidency.)

My father was an Anglican priest. My sisters and I grew up in the industrial grime of Crewe, its steel foundries and stockyards at the centre of British Railways. We played football in the street and went to the cinema on a Saturday morning. Taras Bulba, The Vikings, Cheyenne Autumn, Helen of Troy: these epics inspired in my unformed soul a lifelong love of Hollywood movies, which thankfully I soon grew out of.

When I was eight or nine, and, I now realise, past my prime, the family moved at our mother's request to bucolic Devon, down in the south-west peninsula of England. The freedom of the city streets was replaced by the freedom of the woods and the fields, which seemed at the time like a fair swap, and even more so in retrospect. England won the World Cup. The Sixties blossomed far away. Our Dad preached intellectual sermons to a deaf congregation. He introduced marijuana to his prayer group, tried to set up a commune, became a school teacher and a driving instructor in his spare time, as well as a full-time priest.

When I was twelve (one sister older, the other younger) our mother ran off with a local farm labourer. He and his wife rented rooms at the end of our large nineteenth-century rectory. Having made her small yet worthwhile contribution to the dismantling of barriers in this class-ridden country, our mother left us to be looked after by our father. He cheerfully called the four of us his little Soviet, and having fought in the Second World War alongside Tito's Yugoslav Communist partisans he knew what he was talking about. At the end of the war, while being debriefed by British Military Intelligence, my father found himself alone in an office and, perusing files, found one on himself. In it he was denounced as an unreliable, unpatriotic Fellow Traveller, to be viewed with extreme suspicion. So he put the file in his bag and took it home.

(Many years later he would teach a course in Communism for the sixth form of Exeter's most upstanding grammar school for girls, but that's another story.)

By this time I was trundling through school, eleven years of stultifying boredom, which I spent dreaming of growing up and having children myself so that I could send them to school. How the hell would they like it? At sixteen I left, with no qualifications, expertise or talent, to my father's despair. Unfortunately, having given each of his children sovereignty over their lives as they attained the age of reason, it was too late to take it back. Still, he kept open the door of his study and I proceeded to read his extensive collection of nineteenth century Russian novels.

Grandfather Mervyn, 79, (ex Bishop of Worcester) and stepsister Clare, 14, (future winner of Bridport short story prize 2005) 1982.

I soon discovered that the boredom of school is as nothing compared to the drudgery of unskilled labour, but this time I resolved not to throw in the towel after a mere eleven years but to stick at it. I worked at thirty or forty different things. Building labourer, nurse in a mental hospital, pianist's bodyguard, painter and decorator, video maker, college night porter, art gallery manager, etc etc. One of the best was an early one, 1974, while still in Devon, aged seventeen, working in a public library that was closing down but kept a couple of sections open to the public. Someone had to be on the front desk for the two or three borrowers who came in each day. The basement was stacked full of fiction. I'd choose a different author for the week, and read one of their books a day. Nabokov, Steinbeck, Faulkner, Conrad, Borges. A plum bunk-off job for young people of a sort that seem to be in short supply these tougher days. It was a golden era, one now realises, for scroungers, idlers and dilettantes.

On the other hand, winter's the worst for working outside. Unclogging blocked drains with your hands deep in icy filth. Glazing a new house with fingers not quite numb, unworkable, nicking them so you have to go back afterwards and wipe the blood off the glass panes. I was writing poetry all the time, such bad poetry I can't believe anyone published it. Come to think of it, nobody did. They weren't so stupid, those magazine editors. Except that none of their magazines ever lasted for long. They were too busy sending bums like me rejection slips. With which I once covered an entire wall in the cottage in Wales I was then living in: they reminded me what a dunce I was, and also kept out the draughts.

In 1979 I moved to Walton Street, Oxford and Mrs Thatcher moved to Downing Street, London. She's gone now, of course, and I'm still here in the same street, but that means nothing. She and her ilk beat down my generation, because we spent her tenure dreaming of the end of ideology, and when the dark days were over it wasn't values that had taken ideology's place, but bureaucracy. Better management. Groovier image.

I stuck at writing with even greater persistence than at dead-end jobs, and had a novel published after only twenty years. Three years later another one, and enough money to pay the bills for the moment. I was almost happy, so in 1998 I married a dancer, and now I really am. Each day I get out of bed in the mornings and half an hour later sit at a desk in the room next door and do whatever I want there. What more can one possibly ask for, apart from the occasional illicit stimulation and a more just society?

I finished a third novel. The next day my wife gave birth to our first baby. Now he's fat and cuddly, and the book's ready to be published. My wife says she may be expecting again. I expect nothing, but hope for everything.

It's a Devon saying: Walk in hope or you walk backwards.

Tim Pears, Spring 2000

Picture: Author's family, first day of term, September 2006

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