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, not withstanding a certain swagger I felt I had earned on the poorly attended alternative-comedy circuit,I would succumb in secret, behind the well-buffed 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 ill-prepared 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: “Whereis 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 upon 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 home-work 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 chauffeur-driven car for his birthday (double figures, after all). The problem was that the chauffeur, like me, did what he was told, and was being instructed to stop at an “untold number of patisseries” en route to school. The boy was getting fat, apparently. My job — not tutoring, per se, but clearly I had a fairly low threshold for paid work at this time — was simply to sit shotgun, and be fairly firm in terms of not pulling over before the school gates. I didn’t get the job.
I should confess I liked all the tutees in the end. In fact, it was hard not to feel in some way
part of this world, if only briefly, and I certainly believed — as part of the role play of not at that time having a personality or career; the infinite possibility inherent in being nothing — that one day I would join it. I’d eye up a three-storey townhouse in Kensington, for example, and adjudge the kitchen a little pokey, the sitting room over-done, and in the evening I would eat a tin of beans with a £2.50 bottle of wine. I drifted a few feet above reality. I felt — how ridiculous and alien and delightful it now seems — that the fruit of life was an open buffet.
It was difficult advocating for myself during this period, as you must when you return home to visit parents. They’d ask what I was doing, and would emphasise this word “doing”, as though reading and tutoring and waiting for my life to begin were not verbs. What am I doing? I am performing comedy in forgotten pubs. I am spending a week writing radio sketches for which I am paid £16.50 in total. I am aping Martin Amis prose in stories that make no literal sense. What do you expect me to be doing? Their alarm would be apparent in kind but lengthy silences and polite but desperate smiles, which I would feel in my chest for weeks thereafter.
Returning from one such visit, I rushed straight to a client who lived in a mews house as close to Harrods as it is possible to live. The mother had popped out and Ambrosia (say), who required help with her GCSE English and of course her respect for visiting academics, was resisting my fraying tutelage in favour of reading The Code of the Woosters by PG Wodehouse, which she did quite brazenly before me.
I remembered a tip from an induction session at one of the agencies: if a student has poor concentration, or potential ADHD, go full Dead Poets Society: get outside for a walk, shake it up: inspire.
Minutes later I found myself feeding nuts to squirrels in Hyde Park with Ambrosia’s arm unexpectedly looped in mine and going on rides at a temporary fairground I hadn’t realised was underway there, trying to drill her on what alliteration meant but more specifically trying to persuade myself I wasn’t on a date with a pupil. She clung to me on the rollercoaster. She yelped with glee on the Wheel of Fortune ferris wheel. She had no idea what a simile was.
Meanwhile, her mother had returned home and was calling my mobile in horror, which of course I had left at home, so fortunately my mother answered. Whereupon a woman with a voice like a tuba demanded to speak to a Mr Jonny Sweet. “Because he has abducted my 16-year-old daughter.”
I lost that gig. But when I got home to my beans and wine, I happened to find The Code of the Woosters in my coat pocket and started reading. I had read a lot of Wodehouse, but this was the first time I wondered if Jeeves experiences class anger. How are we meant to feel about him, a man of great intelligence and capacity, pacing patiently after this hooting idiot, cleaning up his meaningless messes, squandering his own brilliance upon expensive vacuities in country houses built, presumably, on historical crimes? What do we feel? We feel bliss, we feel the sun-basking heavenliness of prose and plot. Normally I did. Normally I do. And yet at this moment I choked on angry throbs.
Finally I had lost sight of my endless horizons. My employers appeared to me as they had always really been. A door that had been quite absurdly ajar was finally shut, and in being shut, whatever finger of light had emanated from it upon my life had darkened, made reality duller, and also clearer to see. I suppose I grew up.
My first novel, The Kellerby Code, written over 10 years later, is about Edward Jevons, a homicidal Jeeves figure and, until his identity resolves at any rate, a tutor of awful children. This, at least, seemed possible.
Jonny Sweet’s debut novel, The Kellerby Code, is out on 21 March (Faber), and the film Wicked Little Letters, for which he wrote the screenplay, is currently in cinemas. This piece appears in the Spring 2024 issue of Esquire, out now
