Georgian Bath was built within a century, and a lot of it disappeared inside a decade – the 1960s – when I was born. Calton Road and many rows of listed buildings were still coming down when I was learning to walk, and the Ballance Street flats going up, but the Brussellisation of the city was something I grew to love, something I associate with the freedom to roam I enjoyed as a kid. Bath always had a violent side, but my parents weren’t overprotective. I walked to Beechen Cliff comp every day with my friend Rachid, and the route took us through all the architectural ages of man – the Corn Market, the Roman baths, the abbey, Southgate shopping centre (demolished 20 years ago) and, in the shadow of the cliff itself, the “hencoop” houses of Holloway, which architectural historians sneered at, but where other friends lived happily.
The city and the school were a hodgepodge of styles, classes, backgrounds, accents and goings-on. Beechen Cliff was very big when I joined it in 1978. The Wells Road site was the old secondary modern, a combination of railway sheds unfit for habitation and imposing Victorian buildings with parquet floors. And a proper toolshop – I was weirdly good at metalwork. The Alexandra Park site, where I could look out of the window while reading Persuasion and imagine Anne Elliot going for a walk, occupied the grounds of the former City of Bath Boys’ school.
I found school quite frightening, because I was small and my voice, infuriatingly, refused to break. But I could be funny, and when the nightly genital inspection revealed my first pube I knew I was going to be all right. Sixth form made me. Rachid and I shared a wonderful French teacher, Jenny Wheals, who introduced us to Chabrol and Buñuel, and also to Rimbaud and Zola. She taught us to read aloud so that we could hear the language behind the sense, the animal sound (the emotion) that drives it. We wrote sketches, knock-off versions of Ionesco’s The Bald Prima Donna and The Lesson, and Rachid was a good foil because he was a natural linguist and I had to listen and learn. The same was true of music and acting: I played the piano indifferently, badly even, but I could write tunes and do voices. I’m not a born novelist, or actor, or musician. What I have is an ear.
One of the things I picked up on while I was still in Bath was the way artistic tolerance and open-mindedness could exist alongside ordinary prejudice. The gravestone ads on the telly during the Aids pandemic, the way Boy George was simultaneously hailed and reviled, schooled me in the risks you ran if you came out. I was a coward and stayed in. Austen’s comedies of manners, especially her way with letters, in which a gossipy run-on style proves inadvertently revealing, appealed to me as studies of imperfect disguise.
But my good angel in the mid-1980s was Monty Python’s Graham Chapman, who wrote the brilliantly candid A Liar’s Autobiography: Volume VI, which felt like a lifeline to the future. That book gave me an idea of how to exaggerate for the sake of truth, and ultimately how to be gay and male at the same time. Perhaps I got that from the city, too. Walcot Street was home to car mechanics and bohemian poets. I fancied a bit of both.
• Murmur by Will Eaves (Canongate) won this year’s Wellcome prize. To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
