for 45 seconds until we walked past a builders’ van, stuck in the traffic, its side door open to reveal four or five men, covered in paint and plaster dust, drinking cans of lager and in general exuding the exhausted high spirits of people who have just knocked off work. They spotted us in our hats. They sensed our self-consciousness. There is piss to be taken here, they intuited.
They thought we looked like cowboys. That’s what I inferred from their cries of ‘Yee-hah!’ I think they may have mimed shooting guns in the air. Even in the humiliation of the moment, I was irritated that they’d mistaken trilbies for cowboy hats. And we were also wearing long overcoats. Their instinct for mockery may have been bang on but they were pretty ignorant when it came to costume.
Maybe it was this thought that prevented me from acknowledging them with a friendly, self-mocking smile or wave and defusing the moment. Or maybe I just thought we’d have walked past them in a couple of seconds so we might as well ignore them. Tom’s instinct, it appears, was the same as mine. We did get a short distance ahead of the van and out of mockery range, but then the traffic shunted slightly forwards and they drove past us by a few yards. This was a disaster, as it meant we’d have to walk through their raking broadside of disdain once again. And it was definitely too late for the good-humoured acknowledgement this time. All we could do was pull the brims of our hats down further over our eyes.
When we got past them for the second time, the traffic moved again. It’s not a long walk from the end of my road to Kilburn Tube station – it takes perhaps four minutes. But I can tell you, if you’re ever in a situation of only having minutes to live, get a gang of cockney builders to enthusiastically rip the piss out of you and it’ll feel like aeons. When we finally reached the Tube station, old men by then, we took off our hats and kept them off until we were in the National Gallery waiting to pass on some fake microfilm. We didn’t stand out there; there are loads of twats in the National Gallery.
But this wasn’t my worst experience with that black trilby. Aged seventeen, on the brink of leaving Abingdon School, I gazed into that hat in a moment of utter defeat. Just stared into its silky lining, reading the words ‘Dunn and Co’ again and again – feeling the contrast of a pleasing sight made ridiculous by failure. It was the Christmas holidays and I’d just come home from a shopping trip to be greeted by a letter from Merton College, Oxford saying they were not going to offer me a place to read Modern History.
I’d bought the hat a few months earlier. I thought it was quite stylish. I knew I could never be properly trendy but I’d begun to affect a slightly more flamboyant, if young-fogeyish, taste. I’d started to wear brown brogues instead of trainers and was one of the boys at school who’d taken to waistcoats. Awful, I know – but no worse than most teenagers’ fashion crimes, just slightly more Wodehousean.
How absurd it suddenly was, this hat, in the light of my Merton failure. This affectation of adulthood by a boy. It had cost me quite a lot of pocket money – not that that mattered, I had precious little else to spend it on – but what had been the point? To look quirky, mature, artistic, intelligent? Well, I wasn’t intelligent – I just used to be. All those years of being a swot, all those exam triumphs at prep school, had just been a waste of time because, on the first occasion that such aptitudes might have achieved something concrete, something which would have materially affected my life, they’d let me down. It had all slipped away at the eleventh hour. I’d been reduced to a fogeyish, hat-buying teenager who was okay at debating and liked amateur dramatics. So what.
I hope you’ll excuse the lapse in my sense of proportion that occurred at that moment. Going to Oxford University isn’t the be-all and end-all of life but it felt like it at the time. The pill of failure was further embittered by the fact that Leo, Ed and Daniel had all got into Oxford. Harry hadn’t applied. I felt like the