#wanstead

I have no right to be writing this. Or at least that is how it feels.

I have just learned that Laurence (Larry) Marden died a couple of months back. That delay does not surprise me. Apart from one occasion in the mid-seventies and another a few years later, I have not seen Laurence since our schooldays back in the sixties. I cannot say we were ever friends but, though he probably never knew it, or would have welcomed it, I became an admirer and in the intervening time I have often found him in my head.

What do you need to know about him? Physically, he was, like me, unnaturally tall for his age and the times. And his face had a puggish quality, due to a somewhat snub nose. Unlike me, however, who, under the loving but baleful influence of my mother, was always impeccably turned out. Laurence always gave the impression of dishevelled indifference, which lent a degree of kudos to his persona.

I do not believe I was alone in admiring him. Though his demeanour was always diffident he acquired , but I think never sought, a more than passing respect as we, some more than others, became the generation that thought it was rejecting the establishment, as it was then represented by our rather staid and dated grammar school, with its prefects and cadet corps and black-gowned teachers. Think “If” minus the machine guns.

But he was bright; quietly, intelligently, creatively bright. If you weren’t paying attention, as many of the teachers weren’t, you could be forgiven for missing it, under that disguise of sullen non-engagement. But when you glimpsed it, it was a thing of joy, like an open-throated birdsong.

Wanstead was a rugby-playing, sports worshipping school back in the sixties. Of course it was. If you weren’t good at sport, you were side-lined. I wasn’t good at sport. I suspect Laurence could have been, if he had given a toss. But he didn’t.

Eventually, the games staff gave up on us as cannon fodder for the forward line and consigned us to a newly formed hockey team. Having to participate in a game that featured sticks and a ball like a rock didn’t really appeal to me. It seemed like a punishment. But Laurence had a plan. When we had, in a two-fingered response to authority, chosen Laurence to be our captain, he laid out his strategy. Once one of us had the ball, instead of pushing forward into the teeth of the opposition, he was to play it back to the defence where it would remain, surrounded by the team, being gently passed to and fro, safe from the opposition, until the time ran out.

It was a peaceful protest at a time when peaceful protest was just making a name for itself and we took to it with thinly disguised glee. The games teacher didn’t quite see it that way, however, and I do not recall that the hockey team lasted long.

Amongst us kids it was a different matter. We had our anti-hero. And that led to the next adventure.

For the first few years at the school, our headmaster was Dr Gardener. At heart he was good, kind and well-intentioned but he was also imbued with the belief that he had to have, and be seen to have “authority”. But, as Dylan was teaching us at the time, “the times they were a’ changin’”. Things came to a head (no pun intended) when Dr Gardener stood up before the whole school to condemn an incident (involving a live rifle round) and claimed to know the culprits. He didn’t and we knew he didn’t. The bluff was called and his authority was gone. And within weeks Dr Gardener himself was gone.

His replacement was new wave, all progressive values and happy-clappy informality. You could almost hear us licking our lips.

Dr Mackay announced that he would set up a “sixth form council” to represent the students (I am surprised now that he did not call us “customers”) and that from now on, the Head Boy and Head Girl would be elected by the student body. I am sure that in his head he expected us to rise to the challenge and behave responsibly, affirming his cute little progressive principles. Huh! Like that was ever going to happen!

We, of course, nominated Laurence to be the Head Boy, knowing full well that this would be an affront to the establishment, and, sure enough, he was overwhelmingly elected. Dr Mackay tried to conceal his disgust and the experiment was shelved. Between that and calling in the police when some wag depositied a foil wrapped OXO cube in a discoverable place, he did not last much longer.

On a personal level, while this was going on, Laurence and I were brought into close encounter in another way. I had, for some time, been pestering a stunningly beautiful girl in the name of teenage love-lorn infatuation. She had bravely put up with my attention for some time but as I proved incapable of anything better than long morose silences in her presence, she, not unnaturally, started to look elsewhere for comfort. And to my surprise, if to no-one else’s, she chose Laurence.

In keeping with adolescence the world over, I had been writing poems of maudlin despair since my infatuation took hold but I was completely unprepared for what I read when the girl showed me Laurence’s work. It was profound and coherent and affecting. At least I had the sense to know I could not compete with this.

Laurence and Caroline remained together his whole life. And I did my best not to feel resentful.

I said at the beginning that I only saw Laurence twice more. In the mid-seventies we met for a school re-union. In an effort to be conversational (it always was an effort for me, then) I asked Laurence what he was doing. He said he was “working in computers”. Carelessly, I asked him if he was enjoying it. He looked at me with undisguised contempt and said, tersely, “Of course not.” That ended the exchange.

The last time was in the late seventies. It happened on a Central Line train one day when I was travelling back from London after a day’s work. I was reading, as I did to blot out the unpleasantness of the journey, when I suddenly became aware of being stared at. I looked up and across the carriage, in the tunnelled reflection of the window, saw someone I half recognised. It took a moment for me to realise that it was Laurence. His nose gave him away. We did not nod or speak. The expression on his face said that he would not welcome it and I went back to trying to read.

In the years that followed I became aware that Laurence had quite a reputation in the world of chess. It did not surprise me. That brilliant mind had to find an outlet somewhere in a world that mostly seemed not to appreciate him.

Can so superficial a relationship really justify my admiration and my awareness that I will miss him. Yes, it can. I needed then a hero like him to break the stultifying bonds of conformity that had been bred into me. And I now need to know that, in a world that still demands compliance, there was at least one man whose approach to it said, resolutely, “Non serviam - I will not serve”.