Work
you never want to be on the back foot with a 10-year-old. But on a nightly basis between the years of 2007 and 2009, notwithstanding a certain swagger I felt I had earned on the poorly attended alternative-comedy circuit, I would succumb in secret, behind the wellbuffed front doors of Notting Hill, Kensington and Mayfair, to the whims of awful children. “If you don’t like me I’ll have you sacked.” This from a boy of around eight, whose face of seraphic innocence, adorned by well-kept blond curls, was but a distraction from a frankly indomitable sense of self.
It was a time of provisional identities, when ambition and fantasy were close neighbours: two years after leaving university, it was still unclear whether I would be a comedian, auteur, national treasure, novelist or merely a roving thinker, a shaper of the collective perspective, a puncturer of received and tired hypocrisies.
But on those evenings, for those arid and illprepared 45 minutes, it was certain: I was a private tutor.
It was a role I inexplicably enjoyed. I would march in leaky trainers from Lansdowne Road, following the wet map I’d drawn on the back of a Westminster 11-plus past paper, and arrive in Chelsea doing my Head Boy voice: “Where is the young man, then? Hiding from me, no doubt!”
I was of course lucky these were people to whom money was meaningless, who thought an entirely untrained teacher who clearly had his sights set on an alternative career (poet? tragedian? all doable?) might improve their child’s chances of getting into St Paul’s, Eton or Westminster. But more money had not made them more sane. One mother, for example, whose wealth appeared to stagger even her, self-funded a slew of country-music recording sessions (six albums to date). Wherever I went in her infinite Knightsbridge mansion, I was ambushed by gargantuan, self-commissioned photo portraits of her brandishing a guitar with a cowboy boot up on a hay bale, or (bafflingly) an ice-cream cone melting down her head.
Once I was helping a seven-year-old girl, whom we might call Athena, with some homework about the slave trade. I asked her how she felt about slavery and was surprised to hear, based on everything I had learned about her personality to date, that she was passionately anti. But when I followed up for an explanation, she said straightforwardly, “I hate slaves. We have so many slaves, like you, and I hate all of them.”
Athena certainly had a lot of staff. Quite aside from the housekeeper, the gardener and the cook, when I arrived I would nod at the leaving art tutor and her brother’s departing guitar teacher, only the lifelessness of their stares betraying what awaited me: soldiers going to and from the lines.
I remember going for one memorable job: a 10-year-old had been given a chauffeurdriven car for his birthday (double figures, after all). The proble
