NE I L POWELL Rewards of Failure

The cartoonist Mel Calman used to draw, with very few lines, a recurrent character: a melancholic yet resigned fellow, typically to be seen sitting at his desk and thinking (in the bubble caption) some wryly incontrovertible truth. One of these read: ‘Being a failure isn’t as easy as it looks.’ This seems neatly to suggest why unsuccessful people are on the whole more interesting and agreeable than successful ones; for success can come altogether too easily, while failure is usually hard work. Since the 1970s, success and failure have been defined almost exclusively in terms of wealth and possessions, but those of us who grew up a little earlier – children of rationing and shortages – may take a rather different view. We greatly resent having occasionally to spend money on replacing worn-out machines with new ones which seem both unnecessarily complex and mysteriously inferior; we actually like making do. Appalled and slightly baffled by the recent sight of looters making off with boxes of pointless electronic gadgets from shops and warehouses, I found myself reflecting that I’ve never possessed a freezer or a microwave, a digital or flat-screen television, a mobile phone or an iPod, and I’ve had my blue-humbug-shaped iMac for a decade now. That, however, is a stripling. My hi-fi system is over forty years old, the Rogers valve amplifier and the Celestion speakers as good as new, although the Garrard turntable’s got a bit rusty from living in damp houses: these old things endure, while the twenty-year-old CD player already seems doddery. To many younger people – and here the heartless winners of the late capitalist world would be in complete accord with the desperate losers – this must all seem laughable and pathetic. And there may be little point in trying to describe to them the incomparable pleasures of failure: the weird notion that there might be greater, and cheaper, delights to be found in a second-hand bookshop, a junk shop or a village hall sale than in even the glitziest shopping mall.

I don’t for a moment think there’s anything especially virtuous in my position: it simply goes with a certain habit of mind, which in turn has much to do with a particular time and place. In truth, I began my apprenticeship in failure at the earliest possible moment, by apparently not much wanting to be born: the forceps left marks visible to this day. My reluctant arrival took place in East Sheen, but my parents soon decided to move out of London to a shoebox cottage in rural Surrey. There was no mains drainage or electricity: we had a petrol-driven generator in the garage which my father liked to say went chuggy-chuggychug-chug, although quite often it didn’t, which is why I learnt to read by the pure light of an opal glass shaded Aladdin paraffin lamp. Hot water came, of course, from an Ascot, and we also had a cubeshaped Ascot gas fridge. In the back garden lurked a concrete cesspool which had usually acquired a perceptible degree of ponginess by the time a dull green tanker from Dorking & Horley Rural District Council came to empty it. Once my father had left for work, driving to the station in his pre-war Rover, we were pretty much stranded – my mother and I, Bruce the labrador and Simon the tabby – until he arrived home in the evening. But most things came to Deanoak Lane: milk from the dairy in Charlwood, bread from the village baker in Leigh, groceries from the Norwood Hill Stores. Once a week, my mother would put on her special telephoning voice – ‘This is Mrs Powell, from Rowbarns Cottage, phoning through the order’ – and a man in a beige overall would duly appear with a box, to be unpacked (and the items ticked off on a list while he waited) on the little red formica-topped kitchen table, next to the mangle. On Saturday mornings, we’d make a grand expedition in the car to Reigate. There we divided, my mother going off to incomprehensible places such as butchers and fishmongers while my father and I together undertook more enjoyable forays: Westminster Wine and the tobacconist’s for him, La Trobe’s model railways and Mrs Lee’s sweetshop for me. We’d eat cones of Forte’s ice cream in the car or take jam doughnuts home for elevenses.

Life in Deanoak Lane taught me about improvisation and self-sufficiency – not bad formative skills for a writer – before I even went to school. I’d vanish for hours on end, across meadows and bluebell woods on foot with the dog, or along lanes and farmtracks on wheels: at first three, then two. The little glade at the bottom of the garden became an imaginary court; a pair of old garage doors were recycled into a makeshift den with rather surprising diamond-paned windows. In time, the den was replaced by a big timber shed ingeniously constructed by my father and furnished with serviceable oddments, in the spirit of The Borrowers, a book I loved. These came to include a tiny ‘Bijou’ typewriter, ancient but surprisingly sturdy, and a maroon, suitcase-shaped wind-up HMV gramophone; at weekends, I’d cycle off to jumble sales in neighbouring villages in search of 78s to play on it. Nothing plugged in because there was nowhere to plug it. I don’t remember ever being bored.

But the habits I’d acquired, though they might be dignified by words such as resourcefulness and independence, wholly unfitted me for school. My first one was a kindergarten called High Trees (it now seems to be an old people’s home, so perhaps I should return there for my second childhood) where everyone struck me as mad: I just couldn’t connect with their shiny-gold-star view of things. My father or a neighbour would drop me off there on his way to work, but I had to catch the bus back on my own: that was the best bit of the day. Mother, dog and tricycle would meet me at the end of Deanoak Lane until I was old enough to leave my bike there, hidden beside a farm entrance, to retrieve on the way home. I’m not sure I learnt anything at High Trees: it certainly didn’t prepare me for what came next, which was St Mary’s in Reigate. This was a peculiar day prep school, adjacent to the grim barracks of Reigate Grammar School, of which it had once been part: the general idea was that if you went there you’d have a decent chance of going on to the ‘grammar’ at eleven, though that didn’t take account of my increasing expertise in failure. I greatly disliked being middling, from which it seemed to follow that if I couldn’t be excellent at something (and the field for this was limited) I should instead be spectacularly bad at it and, moreover, treat it with obvious contempt. Sometimes this didn’t matter too much. I remember the day a bunch of us were herded off for a Cycling Proficiency Test, in some unholy place such as Merstham: by then, we’d moved to a house on the side of Colley Hill, outside Reigate, and there was nowhere within range I hadn’t cycled – the only constraint usually being a parental hint that if I fulfilled some grand ambition I wouldn’t be back for lunch or dinner or the start of next week – so going to Merstham to get a silly certificate shouldn’t have been a bother. When I got there, it wasn’t about cycling at all but about slowly navigating a line of traffic cones: not being much good at that, I decided to knock over as many of them as I could instead and was sent home, a failure, in disgrace. ‘Never mind, dear,’ said my

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PN Review 202