This is the longest document I will ever write. It is the length of a short book. It contains nearly everything that I can remember of the first sixteen years of my life that lent itself to being shaped into a continuous narrative. The origins for this document started in my regular blog, here where the reader will find many entries on many subjects, including where I filed shorter pieces about the paradoxical life that my family offered me. It was a life that by quietly focusing on the very personal and day to day life it barred all wider and more forward looking logical sense being made of it.
In these single paragraphs small scenes from that life finally made some sense to me in themselves even as the medium and longer term logic of that life remained opaque. But as each scene/paragraph was was published the larger logic became clearer. So far they come to 76 blog entries, all filed under the label 'more notes towards a biography that will never be written'. Here is where to find those entries. If you click where it says 'more notes towards a biography that will never be written' then those 76 entries will come up.
What follows is the bigger story. It was a work of slow and cumulative progress. I started writing it in December 2016 and, exhausted, finished a first full length draft of it in August 2017. A third draft, as free of typos, overlong sentences, and deficient English grammar as I could get it, was finished by March 2018. In that document I sought to explain who my old self was to the person I was as I wrote. I feared that what I'd written might read like a misery memoir, the genre in which childhood is remembered as place of sheer terror to escape from, in which the binary reading was escape or terror. My childhood had its fears, and moments of outright terror, but it was not the material for a misery memoir.
I sequenced as much as I remembered in a logical order to work out who I was through what I know I did. I have mild dyslexia. This partially accounts for the time it has taken to get the story into it's present shape, and why future work on it at after the third draft is occasional. As of June-August 2019 a further overhaul of the memoir was done. Much detail, previously misfiled in my memory, was added with less heed as to whether it made the narrative feel more sad or more angry.
My mother had a special gift for mangling a story in the telling of it. When she told a story she disguised both the bad and the good in her narrative before burying what would have been the climax. Many times in my life with Mother, and in the writing of this memoir, life seemed to be a long and oddly told joke. As I lived out the missed opportunities and bleak humour on offer to me I often thought that some events and processes would never end. But end they did, usually when the processes had gone on too long to reverse any damage I had sustained in enduring it. You will find people's first names here, but no sir names and no place names. Given some of the most personal detail I prefer the locations I grew up in to remain hazy. These places, and people I know in them, still exist. I have relatives who still anxiously misremember me, along with official records of my life buried in secret government files, and the occasional bit of old newsprint, along with some long lost bits of film from old television programmes with me in them.
As the phrase goes 'you can't go through the same river twice'. The following is the flotsam and jetsam from the river of my youth. It was more than symbolic that I learnt to swim at over thirty years of age. At the time of my youth life felt less like swimming, nearer half-drowning and not knowing how to calmly control my breath. I was surrounded by plastic and sewage whilst waving at nobody in particular for help. Others may disagree, and discern a clearer assurance than I felt at the time.
If anyone senses a direction in the writing then that direction is due to the writing, more than the life.
The Author.
P.s. It is still technically a work in progress. It is as well edited an account of my life as I can create by myself. Many books are like their authors, unfinished works who have escaped into society full of further incomplete works and lives.
Chapter 1 Family life is always irregular in some way - life means work much more than it means play - a quiet interlude - goals are reset and money repurposed - a house is bought and a marriage starts - the life of being engaged is better than the reality of marriage - the next door neighbours - I arrive as a small trouble - the storytelling starts - my sister arrives and is bigger trouble - I am ill prepared for starting school.
Chapter 2 Infant school - routine helps Mother hide her moods and forgetfulness - the mechanical family life - I will 'slip off the lead' sometimes, to varying effect - when my being helpful to others does not help me - my first horrible Christmas - secret, private, and public - there is no recovery from some mistakes - dad buys a television and starts his take over of the house - patterns of presence and absence.
Chapter 3 Dad's family - meeting Gran in town - how work worked in the 1960's - strained day trips away - the happy times of going on holiday to Gran and Granddads, even with my sister - where are my toys going? - a change of bedroom whilst I am away - how much might was I meant to enjoy being in a store room that resists being personalised ?
Chapter 4 How dad's family are different to us - going to the pub with dad - feeling scared - awaydays - our first pet - Mother's first allotment - our second pet - how different animals saw us differently.
Chapter 5 Dad buys new furniture for the house - how dad's family are separate from us - I shrink compared with the new furniture - hierarchies of anger - how anger sticks in the mouth - the limits of action and language.
Chapter 6 I start primary school - competition without support - chips in my confidence - briefly going to church - how the allotment become Mother's refuge - growing vegetables to balance the family finances.
Chapter 7 Unpaid work - green fingers - Grandma's chair - doing means not teaching - primitive dentistry - old dystopias renew themselves via the buying of school uniforms.
Chapter 8 The over sized factory - dad works away - primitive preparations for his departure - the three of us open out - Mother decorates at her parent's house - my first time hitching a lift - variable school results - nervous breakdown arriving.
Chapter 9 Dad arrives back permanently - another domestic 'scene' - shutdown - going missing from school and from myself - television is my comforter.
Chapter 10 Which hand to write with? - the anti-depressants kick in - physically present but mentally absent in school - my friend the radiogramme - on prescription drugs - which school next? - I fail my 11+ exam by a country mile - the 'wrong' result - social services intervene.
Chapter 11 Coming off the drugs - a new social worker - looking at a new school far away - dad ignores my choices - Mother prepares for me to go to the school anyway.
Chapter 12 How television killed the art of receiving guests - Gran and Granddad visit when we are poorly prepared - when dad is forced to be with us his bad escapism is his only retreat from us - we have no retreat from him.
Chapter 13 Reveal or don't reveal? The continuous question - I start at the boarding school - we were the chaos the staff were there to keep in order - room for play for the newbies.
Chapter 14 The food was good - bright new routines - what is the collective point of the new routines? - small amounts of nonsense pass the time better - overdrawing my small pocket money allowance- Mother on the phone.
Chapter 15 Food vs learning - a definition of 'maladjusted' - our near-criminality and the other place we might be - early lessons - memorable lessons - my first television appearance - the official school bad sex lesson.
Chapter 16 The school hierarchies - being bad at keeping rules - how the place understood us - too long on medication - the mystery of sex appears to me.
Chapter 17 Moving dormitories - sex is a mystery that was not going to remain so for long - feeling horribly confused and unable to disguise how I felt - secrecy rules where shame holds sway.
Chapter 18 The wrong dormitory - the horrors of life after shower time - genuine relief - my first buddy in the school.
Chapter 19 A new room with one tempter and one friend - bad nerves and television - bad nerves and friends - my first brief approved of affectionate relationship.
Chapter 20 More watching television and being unobservant of each other - a very odd sexual encounter - Mother goes into hospital - we think we do alright in the house but we don't - Mother and the radio- back to to school.
Chapter 21 More school rules mysteries - the hierarchy likes me - the pseudo - intellectual pleasures of music and - joining the public library - meeting relatives in school- free time where I din't have to explain myself away - amateur electronics are the gateway interest of the future.
Chapter 22 Comparing myself with the headmaster - being an honest klutz in sport - some actual mentoring in sport- the Christmas dinner speech.
Chapter 23 Visiting relatives and their dogs - suspect voluntarism - immunity from other peoples crises - the red top press press on my pressure points.
Chapter 24 Hostile phrases - colour television arrives - my first hair shirt - the school buildings - my first 'gay' friend - looking back - difficulties with abstract thinking.
Chapter 25 Feeling frustrated about being kept - new neighbours - dad's new job - school open days - Mother gets a job and new friends to shop for - the evidence was in the photo.
Chapter 26 Why can't I see my parents at w/ends as often as other boys - unease over money - wandering around town on my own - loose change - watching electronics work - real theatre.
Chapter 27 School seems positively familiar - weekend hosteling - the Lake District holiday - bravery through canoeing - staying for more distractions.
Chapter 28 The small mercy - money tightens - schooling gets more pointless - 'work experience' - the teenage language ceiling - don't answer back.
Chapter 29 Reluctant departures - pointless careers advice - electronics by accident - dad seriously ill - the old routines and tightness renewed and revived.
Afterword, where I have ended up A summary of what I went through to reach the age of sixteen with links to the next memoir..
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