The Stars’ Tennis Balls Read Online Free Page A

It’s about the
ache.
    Look, some males grow up with a feeling that they’re in the wrong body, don’t they? A woman trapped inside a man.
    Isn’t it possible then that some people might grow up, as it were patricians imprisoned within plebeian bodies? Knowing,
just knowing
that they have been born into the wrong class?
    But it isn’t
about
class. It’s about the
hunger.
    Oh but Ashley, you poor sap, can you actually believe that you’re supposed to be of their world? Don’t you know that it’s a world you can only be born into?
    But that’s so
unfair.
If he wanted, a man can become American. He can become Jewish. He can, like Leslie Howard, make himself not just English but a symbol of all that England ever stood for. He can become a Londoner, a Muslim, a woman, a man or a Russian. But he can’t become a
…
a
…
nearly said
gentleman
there, didn’t you, but what is the word? An aristo, a nob, a public school toff… a
one of them.
You can’t become one of them, even if you feel yourself to be one of them in the deepest pit of you, even if you know in your innermost knowing self that it is your right, your destiny, your need and your duty.
Even if you know that you could do it better.
And that’s the truth. You would carry it off with so much more style. Carry off the ease that belies any sense of anything at all
having
to be carried off, if that isn’t too baroque. Carry off that natural, effortless taking-it-all-for-granted air. But the opportunity has been denied you because of the terrible mistake of your birth.
     
    The Move North, that was another nail in the coffin. Another element of the Terrible Mistake. Your dad died and Mum got a job teaching at a deaf school in Manchester. Dad had been an officer. In the RAF, it grieves you to admit, not in a smart army regiment. He never flew, so there was no romance to him. But at least he had been an officer. Be honest now, he was compelled to enter the service as a humble Aircraftsman. He wasn’t ever officer class. He had to work his way up through the ranks and Lord that burns you up, doesn’t it? Then he died of complications from diabetes, a rather bourgeois, not to say proletarian disease, and you, your mum and your sister Carina moved north. (Carina! Carina, for God’s sake! What kind of name is
that?
All very well to say that the Duke of Norfolk has a daughter called Carina. There’s a world of difference between saying, ‘Have you met the Lady Carina Fitzalan-Howard?’ and ‘This is Carina Garland.’) You moved away from Old Harrow and the proximity of them, their tail-coats, top-hats, blazers and boaters. You were twelve years old. Slowly you have become infected by a northern accent. Not obvious, just a trace, but to your sensitive, highly attuned ears as glaring as a cleft palate. You began to pronounce ‘One’ and ‘None’ to rhyme with ‘Shone’ and ‘Gone’ instead of ‘Shun’ and ‘Gun’, you gently sounded the g’s in ‘Ringing’ and
    ‘Singing’. At school you even rhyme ‘Mud’ with ‘Good’ and ‘Grass’ with ‘Lass’. Fair enough, you would be beaten up as a southern poof otherwise, but you have trailed some of that linguistic mud into the house with you. Not that your mum noticed.
    And then this afternoon happened.
    She brought some of her deaf kids home for tea this afternoon. After they had gone you said that good God, they even
signed
in a Mancunian accent. You thought it a good joke. Mum bridled and called you a snob. That was the first time the word was ever said openly. It hung in the air like a fart in a teashop. I pretended not to hear, but we knew that something deep was up because we both blushed and swallowed. I made a fuss of doing up my shoe-laces, she became fascinated by the teapot lid.
    And I came up and started to write this and… ah. I’ve gone into the first person. I have said ‘I’.
    Never mind, all this will be past history soon. Watch out, I am about to join them. I am on my way