chills of April before they could move truly to spring, let alone nearer to summer.
‘What exactly is a “loving spoonful”, I’ve always wondered,’ mused Nigel. ‘I think it might be a type of cake. Or a wedding spoon like those Welsh love spoons. Or perhaps a feed-the-poor charity?’
‘Stop philosophising and step on it, will you,’ Arlo said. ‘We’ll miss last lunch at this rate.’
‘My hunger is for Jenn,’ Nigel growled lustily.
‘You prick,’ Arlo laughed. ‘Come on, I’m starving.’
They drove along, commenting on the Radio 2 playlist, humming and occasionally singing out loud. Nigel started some lengthy anecdote about a previous girlfriend and a curry when suddenly Arlo wasn’t listening at all because “Among the Flowers” was playing on the radio. The lyrics more chantingly familiar to him than the words to the Lord’s Prayer. The melody the theme tune to his life.
‘Do you remember this one?’ said Nigel, turning up the volume and tra-la-ing to the closing bars. ‘Awesome song.’
‘I wrote it,’ Arlo said quietly.
Nigel laughed. ‘And I wrote “Jumping Jack Flash”.’
Arlo didn’t respond. What was the point? The song, so much a part of his life, was nevertheless part of a past life so different and distant to that which he currently led.
Now “Mr Tambourine Man” was playing.
‘And I wrote this one, too,’ Nigel said, singing along dreadfully. ‘Hang on, this isn’t Bob Dylan.’
‘It’s the Byrds,’ Arlo said patiently. ‘Dylan wrote it. The Byrds adapted the lyrics and added a twelve-string guitar lead and I did write the one before.’
‘“The One Before”?’
‘No – the previous song. “Among the Flowers”.’
‘Sure you did,’ said Nigel, busy zooming up the school’s majestic driveway, whacking over the speed ramps, hurtling into the car park with a lively skid along the meticulously raked gravel. He switched off the engine.
‘I did,’ said Arlo.
‘You need to get out more, Savidge,’ said Nigel, ‘you really do.’
Arlo’s Year Eight thought pretty much the same thing that afternoon. But they weren’t complaining. He hadn’t said a thing to them all lesson, just looked at them queerly, while Beethoven filled the room. The 5th piano concerto. “The Emperor”. And however much Arlo loved the music, just then he couldn’t hear a note. And however much he loved his job, though he stood in front of his desk with his eyes trained on the twenty-two boys before him, he didn’t much notice them at all. He was somewhere else entirely and, for a few moments, he didn’t want to be there at all – horribly ensconced in five years ago. So he flung himself back further still. And was charmed to arrive back at half his lifetime ago, when he was seventeen and in the Lower Sixth at school and had written the song he still considers his best.
“Among the Flowers”. In terms of subject matter, the seventeen-year-old Arlo had risked derision by his schoolmates but the melody he had created was so sublime that it immediately excused the unmitigated romance of the lyric. He wasn’t really aware of the starting point. Usually, the songs he wrote for his band were inspired by his fiery teenage response to political injustice worldwide and his middle-class upbringing. But “Among the Flowers” was utterly at odds with “Soweto Sweat” and “Not Quiet on the Western Front” and “Life under Cardboard” – all of which had swiftly become veritable anthems at Milton College. Perhaps studying Tess of the D’Urbervilles for A level English had been a subliminal source. He’d fallen a little bit in love with Tess, had seen her through Angel’s eyes, when she walks through the juicy grass and floating pollen of the garden at Talbothays, drawn by Angel’s harp but conscious of neither time nor space, her skirts gathering cuckoo-spittle as she meanders through the dazzling polychrome of flowering weeds. But ultimately, Arlo’s Flower Girl was wholly mythical. She embodied the woman he was aspiring to hold as his own one day. He thought that if he could create his ideal, set his wish list to the six strings of his guitar, perhaps he could lure her to him, perhaps he’d give her life.
His then girlfriend was lovely enough but she didn’t inspire him to write. He’d lost his virginity to the girlfriend before that one and she’d made him horny as hell but love hadn’t come into it. Love was out there, of that he was sure, but even at seventeen Arlo trusted the logic of time and, for the time being, he embraced (rather physically) the fact that schoolgirls were to be very nice stepping stones towards the real thing. Arlo assumed, quite sensibly, that his teenage years should be about amorous fumblings and sticky sex. He had a feeling that university would probably provide more adventurous fornication and a serious relationship or two. And he imagined that his walk through the flowers to the love of his lifetime would probably be taken in his late twenties.
What he was not expecting, at the age of seventeen and on the day his band had been invited to play a lunch-time set at the nearby private girls’ school, was to come across his flower girl in bud. He had no idea that a fifteenyear-old girl would so completely embody the fantasy he eulogized in “Among the Flowers”. But having sung about Soweto to a sea of bouncing schoolgirls, having had them clap their hands above their heads to “Nuclear No” and chant the chorus of “Set Them Free”, he launched into the melodious and ethereal “Among the Flowers”. And there, from the sway and the smiles of one hundred and fifty pubescent schoolgirls, on that first Wednesday in March seventeen years ago, Arlo Savidge had caught sight of Petra Flint and realized in an instant that he’d written the song solely for her.
Arlo quite liked evening prep. More than seeming an after-hours affliction cutting into his evening, it was a quiet and useful hour and a half when none of the boys pestered him, concentrating their energies instead on finishing their homework so they could make the most of their free time before bed. Usually, Arlo used prep to do his marking or planning, or he’d write to his mother, perhaps check his bank statements; sometimes he just read a book, other times he simply sat and thought of nothing, occasionally he sat and thought about quite a lot. Tonight was one of those times.
‘What is it, Troy? No, you don’t – you can borrow my pen instead.’
Hearing “Among the Flowers” on the radio at lunch-time had sounded odder to Arlo than when Rox had first released it five years previously. It seemed so totally out of context that he should be listening to it, on Radio 2, in the middle of North Yorkshire, as he returned to his teaching job having just had a haircut. He didn’t blame Nigel for not believing him. It wouldn’t cross Nigel’s mind that he was telling the truth. Why should it? Who has songs published and played on national radio, yet teaches music at a boys’ private boarding school in North Yorkshire? For Nigel it had just been typical banter; they were at it all the time after all, the staff. A little like grown-up schoolboys themselves; mercilessly teasing each other, taking the piss, saying daft things, catching each other out.
‘Artemas – give Nathan back his calculator, please. Come on, guys.’
Was it self-indulgent, Arlo wondered, to have one’s own song on one’s mind? Was it an insult to Bob Dylan – for Arlo, the greatest songwriter of all time – that all afternoon he had so easily forsaken “Mr Tambourine Man” to mentally play his own ditty, penned at seventeen years of age, over and over again instead? Similarly, that he’d utterly blanked Beethoven? The version of “Among the Flowers” on a loop in his head was most certainly his own, not the version covered by Rox. He didn’t mind their interpretation – and it brought welcome royalties each year. He didn’t much care for Rox’s subjugation of the acoustic emphasis he’d intended in favour of soft sentimental rock, but he could see why their record label would have encouraged it. Much more Top of the Pops