The Sad Tale of Rydon Hall by Ben Gardener
So then I thought ‘Sod it, I’m going to be a teacher.’ After seven unsuccessful (and, I can see in retrospect, unpublishable) novels, in 2008 I went for the job of Head of Classics at a charming boys’ prep school in south-west London. My first thought, as I lowered myself onto a saggy armchair in the staff-room was: Thank fuck for that. No more humiliating pleas to (and apologies from) agents, no more illiterate refusal notes from publishers, in the days when they bothered to write back. I can dedicate myself to being a good-ish prep school Latin master, and literature – at least, my attempts to write a good novel – be damned.
My new colleagues included an Art teacher straight out of a Spandau Ballet tribute band, a Geography teacher whose resting state was benevolent disappointment and a Maths teacher who hardly spoke – and was both feared and revered by all the boys. As for the parents, the mummies were yummy, and the daddies mostly worked in the City. As more characters revealed themselves, I realised I had made a fateful discovery: it had befallen me to write a successor to Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall. And so I wrote it, with even the homophonic title of Rydon Hall and a few pages of bungled sex between consenting heterosexual adults that would surely carry off the Literary Review’s Bad Sex Award.
The book took me six years to write, and by the end, I was pretty sure I had written the finest comic novel to emerge from these shores since, what, Lucky Jim - not my favourite but better than most. Almost every page still makes me smile somewhere. But, of course, the professionals in the publishing industry didn’t react to it like mere readers. My then agent made it clear that he wanted me to write non-fiction. The others fell into a dispiritingly predictable pattern. ‘It’s just not quite right for me…’ Or ‘You write beautifully but I don’t think I can sell this.’ One even wrote: ‘I’m the only person I know who doesn’t like Lucky Jim.’
So what did I do? Reader, I published. Independently, through the auspices of the estimable Katharine Smith and her Heddon Publishing imprint. I am happy to refer to her by name, because she did a pretty good job on it, in a very short time. By the summer of 2014 I had decided to leave the lovely prep school where I had begun to teach. The Headmaster plugged the book on Speech Day, and parents (and staff) were coming up to me in the playground to buy it. And, what the hell, I’d decided to write it under my own name. At the time I had thought: what harm could it do? And why keep secret an identity that was about to become so illustrious? Within a few months, though it had impinged so lightly on the Sales charts that I omitted it from my CV. Indies – nil; Mainstream publishers – one. That was the lesson I drew from that experience.
Skip forward a few more years, and I am just about holding down a place as - guess what – a Classics teacher in another very prestigious boys’ prep school in – as it happens – south-west London. Basically, I was frustrated in the job and devastated that my novel had not, as they say, troubled the scorer. But some way into my fourth term in that benighted establishment, the sword, precariously balanced over my head, did indeed fall. I walked into a classroom one day and a Year 7 boy brandished My Novel in my face. ‘Sir, did you write this?’ he asked, the entitled little sod. I instructed him to put it away. I briefly mentioned it to a staff-member at mid-morning break, but it was decided to say nothing. I had no idea what was happening. In fact, I was Sean Connery at the end of The Man Who Would Be King, singing his head off as the rope-bridge upon which he stood was being hacked down. Yes, it was just like that, apart from being mistaken for a living God.
A week later, the Headmistress summoned me to a meeting. I could see a copy of my beloved novel on her desk. It was studded with slitty Post-it notes, like a paper version of the martyrdom of St Sebastian. The conversation went as follows:
Her You wrote this book?
Me Yes.
Her Is it a novel?
Me Yes.
Her But is it fiction?
Me Is it… It’s a novel.
Her But is it made up?
Big question, eh. What should I do: advise her to read A la Recherche and get back to me? Even then, I wisely decided not to venture down Sarcasm Alley. But what sort of response did her question deserve? She was a Maths teacher, after all. ‘Couldn’t you have used a pen-name?’ she asked, as if trying to explain quadratic equations to a rather dim Year 7 child.
A nervous week went by. Senior members of staff avoided my gaze. In my mind I began to sing Reginald Heber's The Son of God Goes Forth to War as they continued to hack at the rope. Then I was invited to a second meeting with the Head. The (loathsome, humourless) Head of HR was there too. The Head picked up an official-looking letter and began to read my last rites. I didn’t speak, having been advised by my (powerless) union to keep shtum. There was no way out for me except, of course, to head for the door that said Way Out. I rang my wife and told her to meet me at Hammersmith Bridge. I haven’t been back since. From October 2017 to May 2018, I sold thirteen copies. As I used to joke, with a bittersweet smile, you just can’t buy publicity like that.
During the months of unemployment that followed, I began to ask myself: Would I want a version of one of my children’s teachers to appear, naked, in print? A year later I got another job in a similarly absurd prep school. I lasted twelve calendar months before the Head had me in her office. Turned out I hadn’t got a reference from my previous school. ‘Why?’ she wanted to know. So off I go about Rydon Hall. ‘Did you know that?’ I asked when I’d finished. ‘Not until now,’ she said. A week later, with Christmas just a week away, I got the black bin-bag treatment, for a second time.
I still love Rydon Hall: am blind to its (doubtless numerous) flaws. But, in career terms, having been sacked twice over the same novel, I don’t recommend writing farcical prose, no matter how far removed from reality, before completing one’s probationary period – unless you’ve already won the Booker.
Since then, I have had the time – and a lot less money – to review (and rue) many of my decisions. I told Kath Smith, a few months after Rydon Hall flopped onto the market like a lifeless cod, to change my printed name to Ben Gardener. Speculation is rife within me that this might have saved my career if done earlier, although I think I was heading for some sort of crash anyhow. But I decidedly do not miss the classroom. In truth, the thought of twenty or thirty neo-teenagers slouching to their feet as I enter the room fills me with horror.
I suppose one should either have the confidence to use one’s real name or get used to living the binary life. Ben Gardener is not my real name. (But, damn it, I wish it were.) If I were a Waugh descendant, would I feel compelled by my editor – or urged by my agent – to retain the kudos-propping moniker? Or could I strike out on my own? I have another novel which I think would test the waters of Taste and Decency like a torpedo smashing into a rubber dinghy. Is the world ready for it? Or, to put it another way: do I ever want to teach in a school ever again?
In the end, although I will always hate those parents whose humourless antics cut me off from a really rather attractive income, I can’t blame them for not getting the joke. If anything, I wish they had made more of a fuss. Why did they not petition the school, or stand outside the gates holding placards, or plaguing the local paper’s news desk? The publicity that generated could really have kicked the sales upwards, just when I needed them most.
So much for imagining that one’s prose had been sent to conquer the planet. All together now:
The Son of God goes forth to war, A kingly crown to gain;
His blood-red banner streams afar: Who follows in His train..?’
And so on.
